Updating the Abortion News

Heat and work wore me out. But this is important stuff. So you're getting blurbs. If anyone reads this stuff....

A friend sent me an email and gave me permission to post it here. He catches my own opinion with the exception I put at the end.

Note: I believe all life is sacred, so choose contraception if you don't want or can't handle another child. However, I also believe that everyone is entitled a choice as to how to live their life, and that I don't have the right to subject them to my beliefs, ideologies, morals, etc.

What I am waiting for: Hopefully Justice Roberts will point out that, overall, this is a religious choice; and that at least the First, Fourth, and Ninth amendments eliminates the possibility of the government legislating religion. Whether we like it or not WE also have the choice of no religion.

I am not responsible for someone else's soul due to their choices.

I would add that I think abortion should be rarer in a society where its citizens are thoroughly educated about contraceptives and where contraceptives are readily available. If Roe goes, contraceptives could go next. 

From The Bulwark - The Two-Word Question That Could Decisively Shape Abortion Politics:

To be fair, pro-life messages do pretty well in polls. Forty percent of Americans identify themselves as pro-life. Forty-two percent of voters support “promoting the idea that abortion ends a human life.” Forty-six percent agree, at least somewhat, that “abortion is the same as murdering a child.”

But none of these statements gets anywhere near the overwhelming resonance of the idea that abortion decisions should be left to women and families.

 From The Guardian - Pro-choice states rush to pledge legal shield for out-of-state abortions:

Only 38% of women of reproductive age live in states that have shown support for abortion rights, according to the research organization Guttmacher Institute. In contrast, 58% live in states that have demonstrated hostility towards abortion rights. Only 4% of women live in middle-ground states.

Last month, the New York state senator Liz Krueger introduced a bill that would shield New York doctors who offer abortion services to out-of-state patients by prohibiting law enforcement from cooperating with out-of-state investigations on abortion provisions.

I got a problem here. The majority of women affected by these new state laws live in anti-abortion states? So why are they not organized politically? Why do the Republicans in those states not fear a political backlash?

This article seems to fit with Robert Reich's The second American civil war is already happening, also from The Guardian. Now, I think is a pretty smart fellow,  and so well worth listening to, but I am not so sure I like his conclusion:

Where will all this end? Not with two separate nations. What America is going through is analogous to Brexit – a lumbering, mutual decision to go separate ways on most things but remain connected on a few big things (such as national defense, monetary policy and civil and political rights).

Thing is there is another document other than the Constitution uniting America, and that is the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration's language is incorporated into almost every state's Bill of Rights. What becomes of America when one set of states say that inalienable rights do not apply to all its residents or have a different meaning than in another set of states. Welcome to 1859?

The Hill reports on what might happen to the pro-choice states next year - Democrats seize on prospect of national abortion ban:

The strategy is tied to November but also reflects fears that a GOP trifecta could try to enact a federal ban or new restrictions on abortion. Those concerns were ramped up after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in remarks over the weekend that it is “possible” a GOP-controlled Congress could try to legislate on abortion.

Federal law trumps state law. The federal Republicans could follow the lead of Louisiana Republicans and make abortion a federal crime of homicide.

My own views on what to do politically, including a constitutional amendment, can be found here. What I did not add to my proposed constitutional amendment but has been on my mind, too, was this: that along with codifying Roe there will be language supporting maternal care, maternal leave, and the means to raise a child without descending into poverty.

sch 5/11/22

Abortion History/Abortion Future

I doubt anyone reading this will take much interest in what I write in this post. I write this to make a record. I hope it will be read, that it will inform, but none of it relieves me of the obligation to say what is on my mind.

Long ago I looked at the notes for abortion in West's Indiana Digest. All the cases seemed to have a dead woman.

Reading Policing Abortion validates my memory:

Scholar Leslie J. Reagan explores how Chicago authorities enforced these criminal codes over the next seven decades. “The state prosecuted chiefly abortionists, most often after a woman had died, and prosecutors relied for evidence on dying declarations collected from women near death due to their illegal abortions,” Reagan notes.

 And maybe a taste of what is to come:

Most of the women who had abortions were married, but the state concentrated its enforcement on “unwed women and their partners.” That is, male partners could be arrested and jailed for getting women pregnant in the first place and/or assisting in an abortion—it was common for these men to be held in jail before coroner’s inquests.

This is the country to which we want to return? Really?

Read the full article, please.

sch 7/14/22

An update:

With a Supreme Court claiming justification by history reading The Guardian's ‘Thank the lord, I have been relieved’: the truth about the history of abortion in America is a necessary antidote to Justice Alito's perverse imitation of a historian.

In the 1700s and early 1800s, conception was considered a disturbance of a woman’s natural balance. Methods of “removing a blockage” or “restoring the menses” were sometimes necessary to reestablish the body’s balance, even if they induced a miscarriage. Abortions that occurred before quickening, which was understood as the time when a pregnant woman could feel the foetus move (usually around the fourth month), were legally and morally acceptable....

Criminalization came as a means of consolidating power, economic and political, not morality:

Punishment for terminating a pregnancy at any stage would come only decades later. In 1857, the recently established American Medical Association (AMA) initiated a campaign, led by Dr Horatio R Storer, to end abortion. The organisation’s reasons were many, but women’s health was not chief among them. Reagan writes that the AMA and its members were attempting to “win professional power, control medical practice, and restrict their competitors, particularly homeopaths and midwives”.

***

Class, racial and gender anxieties were factored into the doctors’ fear of losing power. As immigrants poured into the US, the birthrate for white, Protestant, middle-class married women plummeted to historic lows that couldn’t be attributed to miscarriage, celibacy or barrenness. Improved contraception was part of the reason, but so was an increase in the abortion rate. Storer and his peers became preoccupied with the latter – and for reasons that had less to do with protecting the right to life than with maintaining the prevailing social hierarchy. As Reagan writes, “Anti-abortion activists pointed out that immigrant families, many of them Catholic, were larger and would soon outpopulate native-born white Yankees and threaten their political power.”

 Sch 7/16/22

Updated 7/23 from The Guardian's Body politics: the secret history of the US anti-abortion movement:

But there is yet another, less well-known cause for all this in civil-war era America. Although most people today assume that anti-abortion laws were motivated by moral or religious beliefs about a foetus’s right to life, that is far from the whole story. In fact, the first wave of anti-abortion laws were entangled in arguments about nativism, eugenics and white supremacism, as they dovetailed with a cultural panic that swept the US in the late 19th and early 20th century as a result of the vast changes in American society wrought by the conflict. This panic was referred to at the time in shorthand as “race suicide”.

So much for morality. 

Just More of This Sunday - Crazy People and Esoterica

 Siesta time is over. I want warm weather. Of course, it is Indiana and the weather does its own thing.

After listening to Crap from the Past this morning, I checked out another KFAI show, Pardon My Dust.

Want to expand your vocabulary? Check out Lapham Quarterly's Glossary: Freedom.

News from London, The Times. You have the world at your fingertips. And for you MAGA types, it is a Murdoch paper. You can see the headlines for free. 

Lapham's also connected me with Slate's Our Victorian Supreme Court. I saw Chris Sununu on today's Meet the Press, saying that the Republicans need to stop talking about abortion and let the people of the states do as they will. Frankly, I do not believe a single Republican on either issue - abortion or states rights. They have practices mendacity and sophistry for so long they cannot admit it was their catering to the most frenzied on this topic that got us to Trump and an insurrection staffed by fascists. Sununu could be what everyone thinks DeSantis is, without being an overt fascist and whiner.

The kicker, though, was the 5^th Circuit’s deployment of the Comstock Act, the 19^th-century anti-vice law that has quickly become a centerpiece of anti-abortion attacks. While the court didn’t reach a definitive conclusion, it hinted that the Comstock Act makes it a crime to mail every drug or device intended or adapted for abortion.

The mifepristone case will reveal the true commitments of the conservative Supreme Court justices who reversed Roe in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Services. In that decision, the conservative justices claimed to be returning the abortion issue to the people, but was their talk of democracy just an excuse for supporting abortion bans? Will they now go further than Dobbs’ cherry-picked history by reviving Victorian laws that women had no voice in enacting in order to continue restricting abortion access?

Last summer in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Services, the court claimed that overturning Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey would “heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.” But before the mifepristone litigation began, we already knew that Dobbs’ claimed commitment to democracy was merely a fig leaf barely concealing this court’s hostility to abortion.

Democracy requires more than voting. As the court’s conservatives explain in cases involving armed self-defense, religious liberty, and speech, constitutional democracies must protect the basic rights of those who participate in public debate in order to ensure that voting is free and fair. Few Americans would call a majority vote “democratic” if the government excluded disfavored groups of citizens from voting, imposed restrictions on speech, or denied citizens an equal opportunity to participate. Keeping this in mind, we can see that Roe and cases protecting liberties of intimate and family life are “democracy-reinforcing”: These constitutional rights supported the democratic participation of groups long excluded from public life by the traditional organization of the family.

In overturning Roe in the name of “democracy,” the Dobbs court was applying a constitutional double standard: reasoning about women’s rights as it would never reason about the rights that conservatives prefer. Dobbs’ commitment to democracy is thin at best—to take just one example, the Dobbs court talked about returning “abortion to the people’s elected representatives” without mention of women’s continuing underrepresentation in legislatures or the nation’s traditions of resistance to mothers and pregnant people serving as political leaders.

 While in prison, I did a lot of reading upon the Commerce Clause. A side effect of this research was to find the federal government does not repeal its statutes like a state does, but lets them linger on like the undead. Well, the Comstock Act is one of those laws.

That, for the anti-abortion movement, is the beauty of the Comstock Act: No one has to pass anything. Voters don’t need to agree. All that is needed is a group of federal judges willing to revive the interpretation of Comstock that prevailed during the era before women were granted the vote and constitutional rights of equal citizenship. All that is needed, in other words, is for them to ignore equality under the law and the will of Americans today.

Welcome to 1873.

Which is really what the conservatives have wanted, a return to the 19th Century.

Now it is The Sonic Bloom playing. 

The Paris Review opened its Philip Roth interview (1984) to the public. I will probably do that as a separate post for a later date.

The past few months I have been getting blog posts from UConn's  Long River Review, a student run affair, which has some often enough interesting material. I finally got around to the last epistle, A New Favorite: The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr. by Pascale Joachim. The review is enthusiastic approaching the heavy-breathing, but really caught my eye was the student used the audiobook version. I guess that is the modern age. I will let Pascale have the last word:

The Prophets left me speechless. Very few other novels so easily sucked me in and I doubt I’ll encounter anything like it in the near future. Robert Jones Jr. has made himself undeniable as an author worthy of inclusion in the Black Literary Canon and, in the process, gained a devoted admirer

Serendipity keeps finding ways to show me up.

While I have been hunting for a publisher among the lit mags, I have signed up for newsletters. Not all, but some. The Momentist is an Irish publication. I finally got a newsletter, and the stories are kind of whacked.

Well, I picked on Riot in the highlands to read. What I noticed was the writer, Megan Wildhood, was doing what I did with one of my "Dead and Dying" stories - tell two stories at the time. It is nice to know there is nothing new under the sun, it is a little less fun to see I was not as imaginative as I thought, and a whole less fun to read a better story. It uses the second-person in a spooky way.

***

The police cut down the body. It doesn’t end its ending. The officer who catches it grunts like it weighs something. But it is made of gauze.

***

The brusque tick of an old-timey movie projector on the pistoning crimson above the stomach made us twitch. Amanda, eight, rifles through boxes our parents labeled “storage.” No food in the boxes. Amanda tosses their contents onto the living room floor and cries too loudly not to get in trouble. Our arms and hands and stomach and butt tensed up as we struggled to stack them, hoping to avoid punishment ourself. Neither parent comes. We find a purple and gold photo album, blue and pink and yellow flowers drawn on it with chalk, maybe; A Girl and Her Vacations calligraphed across the top of the cover. The back half of the book is empty; the front half has us with Amanda, Mom, Dad and, at the very beginning, Beauty, our beloved black boxer. Cyan came with us to the beach that day. Hannelore finally got into a tent with us. Lisa captured it. Hannelore’s eyes were so green it’s a wonder everything she looked at wasn’t the same color. How we got a copy of that photo isn’t documented anywhere, internal or external. Several shots of the four of us at various ages, outside under a trellised lamentation of clouds. A shot of Amanda’s hand connected to Dad’s hand connected to Mom’s shoulders connected to strong arms connected to our left hand, which the juvenile RA had already started to colonize. The edges of the photos, of the album, of the room, are all beginning to melt like wax.

 ***

Six inches from our nose, stomach fibers twisted and tightened. There was no memory of this. “Don’t worry, many memories are stored in the brain, too,” the nurse said, hovering above us in immaculate heels that could aerate a crop field. “We can search there, too, when we get there.” Her voice was too gelatinous for her stringy body. Her three-point hat cast a chilling shadow of a human with an insufficient head.

Bloody brilliant, in my opinion.

Enough here. Two hours and a bit more since I resurrected myself. Onto Roth and then the work that was supposed to be done by now.

 

Esoterica just played a Velvet Underground song that I had forgotten about; should have put in the morning post. Here it is:

 

sch 4:31

 

Summer Reading Lists!

 I have been getting lost in Indiana's Constitution these past few weeks. I have books started and not finished. It is to the point that I decided last night to take off two days. In the old days, I took on too much work and would then get buried under the obsession of getting it done and then the despondency started taking over. I like to think I have learned to change my behaviors, to be wary of myself, and this is proof of the effects of my education.

But that does not mean you should not be reading - get rid of the smart phone, your apps, your email, and start reading.

Summer reading: 50 of the best new books to dive into

Your holiday reading list: chosen by Zadie Smith, David Nicholls and more (lots of Irish writers!)

10 Banned Literary Classics You Might Not Know

Gabriel García Márquez on the Magic of Juan Rulfo

On the contrary: I felt I still had many novels in me, but I couldn’t conceive of a convincing and poetic way of writing them. That is where I was when Álvaro Mutis climbed with great strides the seven storeys up to my apartment with a bundle of books, extracted from this mountain the smallest and shortest, and said as he laughed himself to death:

“Read this shit and learn!”

The book was Pedro Páramo.

That night I couldn’t sleep until I had read it twice. Not since the awesome night I read Kafka’s Metamorphosis in a down-at-the-heels student boarding house in Bogotá – almost ten years earlier – had I been so overcome. The next day I read The Plain in Flames, and my astonishment remained intact. Much later, in a doctor’s waiting room, I came across a medical journal with another of Rulfo’s scattered masterpieces: The Legacy of Matilde Arcángel’. The rest of that year I couldn’t read a single other author, because they all seemed inferior.

***

I wanted to write all this to say that my profound exploration of Juan Rulfo’s work was what finally showed me the way to continue with my writing, and for that reason it would be impossible for me to write about him without it seeming that I’m writing about myself. I also want to say that I read it all again before writing these brief reminiscences, and that once again I am the helpless victim of the same astonishment that struck me the first time around. They number scarcely more than three hundred pages, but they are as great – and, I believe, as enduring – as those of Sophocles.

Byron and Borgia: A Meditation on an Impossible Encounter 

War, disastrous sex and a lot of lawsuits: the chaotic aftermath of Motown’s peak years

Power and choice in the 1930s novel  by Julia Cooke:

The book’s world, of women engaging deeply with ambition and pregnancy with no specter of religious moralizing, thrilled me. I soon learned other novels and stories from the era evoked that world, too. A lot of them. “At the rate [abortion] is occurring as an item of the heroine’s experience in current novels,” wrote one Bookman critic in a 1933 review of a Sinclair Lewis novel, it “is likely to be looked upon as an initiation rite of our period by sociologists of the future.”

This, needless to say, did not happen. Instead, the literary community and the political right today appear to have agreed on something like an abortion-plot amnesia, forgetting that these narratives ever exerted so much power over the American imagination at all.

Religious, anti-choice conservatives insist that legal restrictions on abortion and widespread moral consensus successfully kept women from daring to have them. All the while, according to a crop of recent essays that draw attention to abortion narratives in literature and film, before Roe v. Wade no one dared speak of the abortions they did have, or certainly not in interesting ways. Abortion happened, of course, but quietly; this is why the years between the 1860s, when a wave of legislation criminalizing abortion hit the books, and the ascendance of the American women’s rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s are known as the “century of silence.” In these essays, on the many reading lists assembled after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, among the book clubs that read abortion-themed novels, the oldest title mentioned is usually Alice Walker’s 1976 novel Meridian.

Even as historians have begun to challenge the idea that silence reigned in this era, books like Hahn’s Affair, or Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed or Margery Latimer’s This Is My Body, are still rarely mentioned. Were they simply not good enough, not profound enough, not numerous enough to constitute a collective? None of this, as it turns out, is right.

***

The abortion narratives of the late 1920s and 1930s responded to their own recent historical currents: the nineteenth-century movement to restrict the legality of abortion, for one. Before then, people and institutions alike—the Catholic church among them—agreed that human life did not begin before “quickening,” a subjective time frame that relied upon when a fetus could be felt in a childbearing body, and which proved hard to shake: even into the twentieth century, consensus and state court systems often considered pre-quickening abortion an obviously lesser offense. The leaders of the anti-abortion movement openly admitted that their goal was to keep women tied up at home. “The true wife” does not seek “undue power in public life … [or] privileges not justly her own,” wrote Dr. Horatio R. Storer, the leader of the medical campaign against abortion. Enough people knew, by the 1920s, what bunk Storer sold. They’d just lived through the First World War, and the fight for women’s suffrage, and Prohibition, which cracked open, with its lawless speakeasies, women’s public social lives.

Examining climate change

George Sand: True Genius, True Woman review – a pleasure and an education (I read Sand's Indiana while in prison and enjoyed the novel without going nuts over it; I liked Impromptu, and wonder if we are all more interested in Sand than her work. That is if her life was not her art.)

Another review of  War by Louis-Ferdinand Céline review – disturbing, compelling, incomplete. Now this is the mark of a great writer, to be a nut like Céline and not have a completed novel and to have this said about your work:

War was to have been the second volume of a trilogy of novels provisionally entitled Childhood-War-London. It is an extraordinary work, hysterical in tone and demented in content. Had it been completed, it might have been a masterpiece; as it stands, or staggers, it is deeply disturbing and horribly compelling.

What I write is not compelling. 

The Los Angeles Review of Books

Southern Humanities Review

The Kenyon Review‘s 2024 Summer Reading Recommendations

Summer books 2024: Twenty-five TLS writers share their summer reading

Cool Beans Lit Issue 4 - Summer 2024

Enjoy!

sch 

Legislative Blowback

 Being no longer concerned about upsetting clients, I signed some petitions. I posted Greg Pence's response. Let me share the rest.

From State Representative Sue Errington:

Thank you for writing me in support of keeping abortion safe and legal in Indiana. I agree with you and will do all in my power to defend reproductive rights at the Statehouse.  Like other medical decisions, abortion is a deeply personal and complex decision. It’s a decision best made by a woman and her doctor, not the Indiana General Assembly.

Outlawing abortion won’t stop abortion – it will only make it less safe. I have advocated for increased access to contraceptives and requiring medically accurate, age-appropriate sexual education at the Statehouse. But the Republican legislators who want to ban abortion have not taken a single step to advance those policies, which we know have the power to reduce abortion rates the most.

Again, thank you for writing to me. I welcome your opinion on this or other issues important to you.

Sincerely,

Sue

From U S. Senator Young:

 Thank you for contacting me regarding the Supreme Court case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.  I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.

          In 2018, the Mississippi Legislature passed a law that prohibits abortions after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, except in the case of a medical emergency or severe fetal abnormality.  Jackson Women’s Health Organization, an abortion clinic in Jackson, Mississippi, challenged the law in a federal district court on the grounds that it violates the viability standard established via Supreme Court precedent.  The district court granted the clinic’s motion for summary judgment and blocked Mississippi from enforcing the law, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit subsequently agreed with its decision.

 In June 2020, the State of Mississippi petitioned the Supreme Court to hear the case, and in May 2021, the Court agreed to consider a single question regarding whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.  I joined over 200 of my colleagues in Congress in filing an amicus brief supporting the State of Mississippi in the case and urging the Court to uphold the state’s law.  After hearing oral arguments on the case on December 1, the Court officially decided to uphold the Mississippi law on June 24, 2022, and, in doing so, overturned the ruling made in Roe v. Wade in 1973.

  For nearly half a century, Roe wrested the power to determine how best to protect innocent life away from the American people and gave it to a body of unelected and unaccountable officials.  By overturning the precedent set by this case, the Court has corrected a historic injustice. Rather than ban abortion nationwide, the ruling rendered in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization restored to the American people the opportunity to decide their own laws when it comes to protecting life and protecting women through their own state elected officials.

 Again, thank you for contacting me.  It is an honor to represent you in the United States Senate.

Sincerely,

Okay, I am still not buying how the Roe court was "a body of unelected and unaccountable officials" but not the Dobbs court. Could the difference be Senator Young prefers the cutting off rights to the establishing of rights?

Figure out which one you would get your vote.

I have not read the cases. I work too much, am too tired, have other things to do. My understanding of the abortion & handgun & greenhouse gas cases is that they are poorly reasoned justifications for imposing a political ideology. We are back to the court that FDR wanted to pack.

sch 6/30/22

The New Dred Scott?

 I heard a MSNBC announcer say the Supreme Court's abortion decision had done something never before done. Er, Dred Scott v. Sandford comes to mind.

(1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the Court held that the United States Constitution was not meant to include American citizenship for people of African descent, regardless of whether they were enslaved or free, and so the rights and privileges that the Constitution confers upon American citizens could not apply to them....

 I heard an MSNBC guest say the Democrats need to take back the Senate and pack the Supreme Court. This is an idiotic solution. It worsens the current problem of the politicized Supreme Court. It worsens the problem of the Supreme Court Justices as creators of our federal rights instead of interpretors of those rights. The reactionaries are correct in saying privacy and its related rights are not in the Constitution. They are not to be trusted to find them in the Ninth Amendment. A filibuster proof Democrat means the ability to amend the Constitution. Anything else continues the death spiral of our constitutional rights.

Speaking of MSNBC, Senator Warren seems to be going in my direction 

Mother Jones has a wide range of articles.

Here are some headlines this morning: 

Indiana poised to limit abortion access after Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade

The only questions appear to be whether they will allow for exceptions for rape, incest or health of the pregnant person. 

The majority of Republican legislators penned a letter to Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb ahead of the ruling, asking for him to call a special session if Roe v. Wade was overturned instead of waiting until January. 

These are the states where abortion rights are still protected after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade 

Here’s Google’s letter saying employees can relocate to states with abortion rights

And what of the poor or those others who cannot otherwise relocate?

The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade

In a concurring opinion (which begins on page 117 of the full ruling), Justice Thomas argues the ruling’s narrow interpretation of the US constitution’s due process clause should also be applied to overturn previous Supreme Court rulings that established a right to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965), enacted nationwide same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015), or overturned laws banning sodomy (Lawrence v. Texas in 2003).

‘A revolutionary ruling – and not just for abortion’: A Supreme Court scholar explains the impact of Dobbs 

The ruling signals a massive change in how we read the Constitution, from a living reading to an original reading. The court has firmly rejected the theory of the living Constitution, which argues that the meaning of the document’s language changes as the beliefs and values of Americans change.

***

Originalism, which is the approach taken by the justices who overruled Roe, rejects the living Constitution. In the originalist view, the Constitution is static until officially altered by amendment. It does not evolve on its own without public approval. The role of the justices is to determine the original public meaning of the text, but to leave other decisions to democratic representation through elections.

Welcome to 1789, you who thought this might be a good idea. Substantive due process covers a wide area - practically all your federal rights.

State courts from Oregon to Georgia will now decide who – if anyone – can get an abortion under 50 different state constitutions 

What the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion means for women’s health and well-being: 4 essential reads

sch

More About Indiana's Abortion Law

I did not know until tonight Indiana's new abortion not only criminalizes the procedure but also makes prison mandatory. This I learned from Punishing abortion doctors in new law.

But Indiana legislators stepped in and said you “shall” receive a sentence of three years in prison.

That’s kind of what lawmakers did in a small section of the newly-enacted abortion ban – mandating the revocation of a doctor’s license who performs an unlawful abortion. No letter of reprimand or probation or short-term suspension. That doctor loses their livelihood.

Talk about a chilling effect. If a doctor thinks a woman’s health or life is in danger and performs an abortion but others later disagree, will the physician chance it?

 Holcomb defends abortion ban signing, rebuffs talent attraction fears:

Asked if he believed Senate Enrolled Act 1 matched up with what the majority of Hoosiers want, Holcomb acknowledged deep divisions within the state.

“I believe it was progress. Some people believe it was the opposite of progress. Some people believe that it was not enough progress,” Holcomb said. “And I respect that honestly. But I would just encourage folks to be very respectful.”

So speaks our Governor. How will the voters speak?

sch 8/19/22

Updating the Abortion Issue

 I wrote Abortion: All Hell Breaks Loose about the leak of the Alito draft opinion trashing Roe v. Wade.  Now some follow up.

Roe v Wade v Sanity 

Charlie Stross wrote:

Wider point: if Alito's leaked ruling represents current USSC opinion, then it appears that the USSC is intent on turning back the clock all the way to the 19th century.

Another point: it is unwise to underestimate the degree to which extreme white supremacism in the USA is enmeshed with a panic about "white" people being "out-bred" by other races: this also meshes in with extreme authoritarian patriarchal values, the weird folk religion that names itself "Christianity" and takes pride in its guns and hatred of others, homophobia, transphobia, an unhealthy obsession with eugenics (and a low-key desire to eliminate the disabled which plays into COVID19 denialism, anti-vaxx, and anti-mask sentiment), misogyny, incel culture, QAnon, classic anti-semitic Blood Libel, and Christian Dominionism (which latter holds that the USA is a Christian nation—and by Christian they mean that aforementioned weird folk religion derived from protestantism I mentioned earlier—and their religious beliefs must be enshrined in law).

Why Roe v. Wade Was Just the Beginning of a Long Fight 

Lauren Rankin provides a history of abortion rights after Roe. I have never understood the willingness of the pro-lifers to kill people. Rankin writes what I think needs to be considered by the pro-choicers:

How do we get out of this?

There’s no magic potion or silver bullet that will save abortion rights. There never really was. Roe v. Wade was a significant step, but while many abortion rights supporters assumed it was the end, it was really just the beginning of a much longer fight. There isn’t a simple law that Congress can pass that will make it all go away. The crisis in abortion access is multilayered, integrated with racism, poverty, and deep, abiding misogyny. We have to do the very taxing and messy work of really looking at how we’ve ended up here, and what we can do differently now.

‘Enforced childbirth is slavery’: Margaret Atwood on the right to abortion

The title says ever douch.

CNN poll: The Supreme Court's draft opinion on Roe v. Wade hasn't shaken the midterm landscape 

I think it too early to know for sure but maybe this is good news:

But comparing the results of the new poll to one conducted immediately before the revelation of the draft opinion, the impact on the political landscape heading into the 2022 midterms appears fairly muted.

If the Democrats want to win in November, they can afford no complacency. They need to work for their votes rather than rely on moral outrage.

sch 5/7/22 

Cranky Monday Morning & Abortion Talk

I forgot the alarm clock. I overslept. I turned on Morning Joe. I got annoyed at hearing a guest advocate the Democrats campaign for a federal law codifying Roe v. Wade. I stand by what I wrote in The New Dred Scott? that legislation is not the solution. The only solution is to amend the Constitution. Yes, the Democrats need to campaign, need to vote, on Republican tyranny so as to amend the Constitution.

Not getting more Democrats into Congress will leave abortion and our liberty at the mercy of Republicans, of minority control by an increasingly authoritarian clique:

Asked what types of abortion legislation Republicans would work to advance if they took over the House, GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who is in line to replace Pelosi as speaker, said: “We will continue to look wherever we can go to save as many lives as possible.”  As Senate-Confirmed Justices End Roe, How Will Voters React?

The Liberal Patriot's The Political Battle Over Abortion Will Never End sees nothing no good on the right or the left, but does have a solution for the center:

The rest of us in the patriotic center will just have to tune out politics even more and try to vote for people with common sense and a commitment to leaving people alone and protecting their rights. And maybe in the meantime, we could all agree that women should at least have widely available, free contraception to help prevent unwanted pregnancies in the first place. 

But no recognition of amending the Constitution. 

The Bulwark's Cathy Young's What Comes Next? does no better with political ideas instead of social, private solutions, but does recognize the legislation fallacy:

And what about the other side? Although some pro-choicers have been calling for Congress to codify Roe nationwide, it seems unlikely that Democrats have the votes to do so. Besides, a national law protecting abortion would still leave abortion rights at the mercy of political shifts (what one Congress can do today, another Congress can undo tomorrow) and even open the door to a push for a national abortion ban.

Biden remains sane: Biden Quickly Shuts Down Democrats’ Calls To Expand Court Post-Roe Decision

 I hear people at work complain about Biden. One woman said she prefers Kanye West. They think Biden incompetent. I do not. Unlike Trump, Biden is not lost in his own delusions of grandeur and ineptitude.

In The New Dred Scott? I pointed out the problem of expanding the Supreme Court. It does not solve the problem of a Supreme Court intent on ruling rather than interpreting. Read How the Christian right took over the judiciary and changed America from The Guardian.

At the core of the Dobbs decision lies the conviction that the power of government can and should be used to impose a certain moral and religious vision – a supposedly biblical and regressive understanding of the Christian religion – on the population at large.

 To my friends and family who thonk themselves conservative, this decision was anything but conservative. This will be the kind of power grab that when labelled as "creeping socialism" gets you shaking in your boots. We, the American people, are about to ride the tiger. Failure means a dictatorship. Is that what us meant by conservatism?

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Greg Pence and Literary Voices on Abortion

I signed onto a DailyKos form letter about abortion. The letter went to my Congressman and Senators.

This was the response from Greg Pence:

June 28, 2022

Dear Mr. Hasler,

Thank you for contacting my office regarding the recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court decision. I appreciate you taking the time to share your views on this important matter, and I welcome the opportunity to respond.

I am pleased to see the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade (1973) and correctly return the right to protect unborn children back to the states and elected officials. After nearly fifty years, this historic ruling will save countless lives. This decision truly marks a win for life, families, and freedom.

I faithfully support protecting those who cannot protect themselves and will always back this mission with every vote I cast. As a nation, we must protect and defend the sanctity of life. I believe that the right to life is sacred and unalienable, as proclaimed by our founding documents. Our fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness precede the existence of government. It is our duty to ensure the voiceless and the defenseless are cared for, which is why I proudly support the Hyde Amendment and am a cosponsor of bills like H.R. 619, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. Rest assured, I will continue fighting for laws that support mothers, children, and families at every stage of life and promote a culture of life and human dignity. We must never give up in the fight for life.

As your Representative in Congress, it is an honor to serve Hoosiers of Indiana's Sixth Congressional District. You can visit my website at pence.house.gov to learn more about how I am representing you in Congress.

Nothing on the subject from my Senators.

I know Pence sent a form letter, I expected this, and find nothing wrong in it being a firm letter. But I have to wonder what support goes to mothers. I should take the time to see how this Pence voted on gun safety. Sanctity of life surely extends past the fetus stage.

I had one thought reading The Supreme Court’s Unusual Move on the Death Penalty that is relevant to the abortion topic. I thought does not the Roman Catholic oppose the death penalty? I do not see Justice Alito voting with the majority. Sanctity of what life?

Meanwhile over in Illinois: Republican Who Hailed Abortion Decision As Win For ‘White Life’ Wins House Primary

LitHub published  Essential reading: literary voices respond to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. 

Astra Magazine published WRITERS AROUND THE WORLD RESPOND TO AMERICA’S ABORTION RULING

They hope these works will make sense of what has just happened in this country.

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Update on Indiana Abortion Ban

The Indiana Senate Republicans surprised everyone with a total ban on abortions except for rape, incest, or a threat to the life of the mother. See Indiana lawmakers propose abortion ban with narrow exceptions.

I find more interesting what looks like the compromise I see here:

Sen. Sue Glick, R-LaGrange, said the bill won’t impact treatment of miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, or fatal fetal anomalies. The procedure would be allowed in instances of rape, but only until 20 weeks of gestation, as outlined in current state law.

The bill would not limit access to the “morning after” pill or any forms of contraception. Current Indiana law makes it a felony for a doctor to perform an illegal abortion and under the bill most abortions would be illegal. There are no criminal penalties for women who seek abortions in the bill.

No chasing women who leave the state for abortions, no banning of contraceptives. We get to prove we are not Texas. I still wonder how the women of Indiana like having the General Assembly legislate their choices. I wonder if the legislators put too much faith in the efficacy of contraceptives.

Meanwhile, Businesses,  faith leaders react to abortion bill lays out how no one - activists, religious groups, businesses - like the proposal. I latched onto this one:

Mike Fichter, the Indiana Right to Life president and chief executive, called the bill “weak and troubling,” saying it fell “woefully short” of what he’d suggested.

“The bill fails substantively in many areas, but chiefly in its failure to provide any meaningful enforcement provisions,” Fichter said. “This bill goes through the motions on paper, but lacks any teeth to actually reduce abortions in Indiana.”

I suspect the politicians here know something Mr. Fichter does not: the people of Indiana are not as rabidly anti-abortion as he is. 

On one hand I hope never to see a headline like this about an Indiana politician: GOP Candidate: Hypothetical 14-Year-Old Incest Victim Is 'Perfect Example' For Abortion Ban. Then there is the thought what a boon this would be to the Democrats. 

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America's Mental Health Crisis - The Newt Gingrich Case

From Fox News and written by Newt Gingrich: Clueless elites wrong about Trump-Harris debate, and now we know why

Is Mr. Gingrich suffering from mental health issues? He certainly does nothing to help others suffering from MAGA delusions.

He writes:

Nothing better illustrates the gap between reality and our political elite (including a number of famous Republicans) than their complete misreading of what happened in the clash between the ABC News-Harris Team and the lone opponent, President Trump.

The gap between reality and one's thinking is called a delusion. Projection is when one puts one's own thinking onto another. That there was an "ABC News-Harris Team" is the first sign of the gap in Mr. Gingrich's thinking and his first projection.

Is Gingrich indicating that he knows Trump supporters are deluded, or is it only himself?  

Every Trump supporter and independent witnessed the astounding dishonesty of ABC’s moderators (who were actually active debaters helping Harris take on President Trump). Their reaction has been outrage and, in some cases, a condemnation of ABC and Vice President Harris.

 What dishonesty is there in correcting Trump four times about false facts? Trump would have been better served if he had shut up Haitians eating pets when the moderator pointed out there was no verification of the story. 

The moderators would have been actively debating if they had called Trump to explain his tariff policy.

If Trump supporters witnessed such dishonesty, they watched a different debate than I did.

Trump’s base is 48 percent of Americans who feel there is a corrupt establishment trying to control their lives and rip them off. The spectacle of ABC News so blatantly rigging the fight just confirmed everything they already believed and firmly placed Harris in the corrupt establishment wing. Walking through three airports on Thursday, I was greeted by dozens of people who were infuriated by the debate and bitterly angry at how stupid Harris thinks they are.

Certainly, there is a corrupt establishment. It wants voters to not believe their own eyes and ears. They want the voters to put them in positions of influence so that they can take billions from the Saudis, give themselves tax breaks, keep themselves from going to prison for their own crimes, and use the U.S. Treasury as their own piggy bank. Getting power means convincing the voters that they alone are the virtuous ones while they lie through their teeth, That does mean treating the voter as an idiot who believes things like Haitians in Ohio are eating people's pets.

Three airports? Dozens? So about four people per airport. Even then, I doubt they were people with real jobs who will be the ones paying for Trump milking the Treasury and ruining the economy with his tariffs.

Harris further hurt herself by spending a large part of her listening time making faces and looking cute. It was the behavior of a spoiled teenager, not a commander-in-chief.

I am not so sure about the "looking cute" bit. She did spend her time listening to Trump and having the reaction everyone should have when an old man glowers and rambles on about his crowd size and pets as immigrant snacks. I suppose for old Newt glowering and ranting is the sign of a true commander-in-chief.

The elites value style over substance. They would like everyone to behave as though they were at a Washington cocktail party.

Newt would know about Washington cocktail parties, but I do suppose that people at such affairs do not rant about immigrants eating pets. 

But is having a concept of a plan substance? 

Yes, Harris was light on detailing her own plans, but she did have some details. She certainly had substance on reproductive rights.

Maybe there was substance in how Trump declared he would veto a national abortion ban? Oops, he did not answer that question, did he? Those mean moderators sure kept his feet to the fire by forcing him into substantial, definite answers.

Most Americans are not so highfalutin. Most Americans do not appreciate well-dressed, clever people treating them as if they are ignorant and incapable of realizing when they are being manipulated and lied to.

Oh, Newt! How right you are! That is why Trump cannot fool more than 48% of the voters. 

The simple fact is: Vice President Harris can’t tell the truth, because an honest admission of her beliefs – and the failures of the last three-and-a-half years – would doom her campaign. The ABC team did all it could to stop President Trump from telling the truth about her. The most glaring example was the blunt intervention in that there were no states in which babies could be left to die after they were born. That was an outright lie. The truth is that in Tim Walz’s Minnesota at least eight babies have been left to die after botched abortions. It is a matter of public record. If you want a pro-infanticide vice president, then "Tampon Tim" is your guy.

"It is a matter of public record." Odd, neither Newt nor Fox News link to this public record. They do link to other items, but not that one.

The truth is that infanticide is a crime in all fifty states. That was the issue. What the moderators did was state a fact that you do not like. Your dislike for reality is not a lie. It merely closes the gap between reality and your delusions in a way you do not like.

CNN: Trump falsely claims Democratic states are passing laws allowing people to execute babies after birth

Austin American-Statesman: No state allows people to 'execute the baby' after birth, as Trump claims during debate

Reuters: At debate, Trump shares falsehoods about pet-eating, infanticide

You might have just tried googling "united states infanticide legal", or minnesota infanticide. The latter would have given you the following:

Donald Trump used claims about abortion in Minnesota to paint Tim Walz as extreme. What did the governor sign into law?

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has not said abortion in ninth month is ‘absolutely fine’

Walz, who is Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, has made abortion rights one of his central issues as he stumps on the campaign trail for the Democratic ticket. He’s also taken heat from Republicans — both nationally and in Minnesota — for what they consider extreme abortion policies passed in the state after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

But Walz, while supporting broad access to abortion care, has never said abortion in the ninth month is “absolutely fine,” nor has he said that execution of an infant after birth is OK. That is known as infanticide, which is illegal in every state, including Minnesota.

The top item returned by Google about infanticide was the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' The Door Opens to Infanticide from 2000.

President Trump’s great attraction to the supporters who have been with him through thick and thin is precisely that he is not an effete, fawning, dishonest, and manipulative cretin from the governing class. Remember, they’ve stuck with him through the Russia hoax, a multiyear investigation, two impeachments, multiple lawsuits and slanderous attacks by the leftwing propaganda media. 

Well, Newt, two out of three is not bad, but I count you getting one out of one out of six. Trump does his best not to act effete; so much so that one might wonder if I am missing something. Fawning? I guess Kim Jong Un and Premier Xi and Putin got a good laugh out of that. The man getting convicted for business fraud, which was only the latest in a history of stiffing contractors and vendors, I guess makes him an honest man in your neck of the woods. That he wanted to overthrow the election doesn't count as dishonest? No, he has never tried to manipulate public opinion by playing the victim of non-existent election fraud, of playing to racist tropes, of generating hysteria over immigrants eating pets, and spewing too many lies in any one session for anyone to even fact-check him?

Trump is not of the governing class? He was President. Only this year, he got the Republicans in the House and Senate to kill an immigration bill that might have solved the border issue. Oh, yeah, there was another question that he never answered: why did he kill that bill?

Cretin? I am not sure if he is stupid, but he is if any of the following are true:

• He could make a deal with the Iranians after trashing what Obama got.
• That by giving back to the Taliban, their terrorists would turn the Taliban into pacifists.
• The Mexican government would pay for his wall.
• That he had convinced the North Koreans to stop playing with ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons.
• That injecting bleach would cure COVID.

You can like him or dislike him, admire him or disdain him, but what you get is the authentic Trump.

Newt, you speak the truth, finally! We got to see the real Trump at the debate.

Maybe there is hope. Maybe reality will get its respect from MAGA.

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