contraception

(Update) SCOTUS: the defining issue in the 2016 election

by

Last year I posted SCOTUS: the defining issue in the 2016 election, a quick glance at attorney Rick Hasen’s  longread for TPM, which is well worth your time to read.  It begins:

The future composition of the Supreme Court is the most important civil rights cause of our time. It is more important than racial justice, marriage equality, voting rights, money in politics, abortion rights, gun rights, or managing climate change. It matters more because the ability to move forward in these other civil rights struggles depends first and foremost upon control of the Court. And control for the next generation is about to be up for grabs, likely in the next presidential election, a point many on the right but few on the left seem to have recognized.

Justices600x480

Today Hillary Clinton  has a new op-ed in the Boston Globe emphasizing the importance of the high court in this year’s election:

There’s a lot at stake in this election. Nowhere is this clearer than in the US Supreme Court.

The court’s decisions have a profound impact on American families. In the past two decades alone, it effectively declared George W. Bush president, significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act, and opened the door to a flood of unaccountable money in our politics. It also made same-sex marriage legal nationwide, preserved the Affordable Care Act not once but twice, and ensured equal access to education for women.

Read more

GOP fear mongers about Syrian refugees while ignoring domestic terrorism

by

While the GOP presidential candidates, led by Donald Trump, and a cowardly Congress spent the better part of the past week fear mongering about Muslims in America and Syrian refugees fleeing civil war and terrorism, it turns out that the one terrorist attack in America this past week came from a domestic terrorist in Colorado Springs.

The definition of “terrorism” is ter·ror·ism /ˈterəˌrizəm/ (noun) the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. The American media is loath to use the term “terrorism” when reporting the acts of anti-abortionists who kill doctors and patients and vandalize or blow up abortion clinics, but make no mistake, they are terrorists.

The Colorado Springs Gazette reports, Possible motive for accused Planned Parenthood gunman: ‘No more baby parts’:

As Colorado Springs tried coming to grips with its second mass shooting in a month, the revelation of four words uttered by the gunman upon his surrender hinted at anti-abortion zealotry leading up to the attacks.

RobertDearMugshotRobert Lewis Dear, 57, told investigators “no more baby parts” after surrendering to heavily armed officers at the city’s lone Planned Parenthood clinic Friday, multiple news outlets reported.

The comment offered the first clue as to a motive for the shooting spree, which left two civilians and a university police officer dead and nine others – most of them law enforcement officers – wounded from gunfire.

Dear’s remark alluded to videos released over the summer by anti-abortion activists, which sparked a storm of controversy about Planned Parenthood’s practice of using fetal tissue for research. The videos led to calls on Capitol Hill by Republicans to de-fund the organization.

Read more

SCOTUS grants review of religious objections to contraceptive coverage in ‘ObamaCare’

by

ProtestorsThe broadly expanded “religious liberty” argument which is being wielded like a sword by the religious right to exempt themselves from having to comply with any law with which they disagree as a matter of a “personal sincerely held moral conviction or religious belief” is once again being  wielded against contraceptive coverage in the Affordable Care Act aka “ObamaCare.”

This is the natural progression of appeals resulting from the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (.pdf). The coming decision on the birth-control mandate will have the title of the first such case filed at the Court: Zubik v. Burwell.

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog writes, Court to hear birth-control challenges (UPDATED):

On Friday, for the fourth time in three years, the Supreme Court agreed to rule on challenges to the new federal health care law — this time, religious non-profit institutions’ objection to the Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate, which requires employers to provide their female employees with health insurance that includes no-cost access to certain forms of birth control.  The Court accepted parts of all seven cases on that issue filed with it under the ACA.  It has not yet spelled out how those will be consolidated for a hearing — planned for late March.

Read more

If you don’t like abortion then you need to be supporting this

by

Crossposted from DemocraticDiva.com

IUDs

I went to the salon discussion hosted by Arizona Family Health Partnership on the Colorado birth control experiment Thursday night and I have to say it exceeded my already high expectations of it. It was no elaborate production (though it was held in a nice art gallery), simply AFHP president Brenda Thomas giving a brief introduction of Greta Klingler, who then spoke about leading the effort in Colorado from 2008 to the present to address unplanned pregnancy among young and low-income women by offering them effective forms of birth control control for free. A six year study on the program’s effectiveness determined the results were “startling” in lowering unintended pregnancy and abortion rates.

They did in a big way, and the results were startling. The birthrate among teenagers across the state plunged by 40 percent from 2009 to 2013, while their rate of abortions fell by 42 percent, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. There was a similar decline in births for another group particularly vulnerable to unplanned pregnancies: unmarried women under 25 who have not finished high school.

“Our demographer came into my office with a chart and said, ‘Greta, look at this, we’ve never seen this before,’ ” said Greta Klingler, the family planning supervisor for the public health department. “The numbers were plummeting.”

Read more

Contraception cases are likely headed to the U.S. Supreme Court

by

The Eight Circuit Court of Appeals today became the first Court of Appeals to accept the view that an employer who provides an employee health insurance plan has a “religious liberty” not to be “complicit” in providing birth control and contraception to its employees by the simple act of filling out a form for an exemption that allows the employer not to have to pay for it. This is about paperwork. Contraception opt-out violates religious freedom: US appeals court:

ProtestorsA U.S. appeals court has ruled that President Barack Obama’s healthcare law violates the rights of religiously affiliated employers by forcing them to help provide contraceptive coverage even though they do not have to pay for it.

Parting ways with all other appeals courts that have considered the issue, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis on Thursday issued a pair of decisions upholding orders by two lower courts barring the government from enforcing the law’s contraceptive provisions against a group of religiously affiliated employers.

Read more