The Supreme Court hears arguments Wednesday in a case centered on whether emergency room doctors can provide abortions to women who need them to avoid serious illness and permanent damage — or whether they have to withhold medical care until those women are nearly dead.
The most conservative court since the 1930’s, when the court began rejecting the laws that eventually stabilized the nation after the Great Depression. What saved it was FDR’s threat to stack the court, thereby minimizing the role of the conservative justices. The difference between then and now is that FDR also had devastating majorities in the Congress and could have imposed the threat if necessary. It wasn’t necessary.
It’s necessary now… If we achieve large majorities in November, I really pray that we grow and stack the court to make Alito and Thomas irrelevant.
But first the court will have to consider the much larger question:
Are women really people? How can we be sure?
Which 5th century jurist proved that women do not float because they are, in fact, not made of wood?
Kagan and Jackson are eviscerating the attorney from Idaho.
Sotomayor now raking the Idaho attorney over the coals.
I live in Washington State where a woman’s right to health care is respected and provided.
Many women from the Cruel State of Idaho come here for health care. Soon Idaho will be without Doctors and nurses and women. Idaho will be populated by mad MAGA rednecks and evangelicals wingnuts.
Would you rather have an Idaho redneck or an immigrant family as a neighbor?
Look for the fascists to do something like SCOTX did with our local “life of the mother” “exception.” They will nominally uphold the rule while giving zero protection against prosecution for anyone who seeks to use it.
“The anti-abortion movement has long implied that the only women who need abortions are young, promiscuous and cavalier about using protection. But the women most at risk from a pro-Idaho ruling here are the kinds of women the anti-abortion movement purports to support.”
Far too long the pro-choice movement has allowed the anti-abortion crowd to establish the narrative. I think we would be in a different place if the media had emphaised the real world instead of constantly leading everyone to believe that abortion is used exclusively by women as late term birth control.
Generally speaking and based on my experience of hanging around doctors and a hospital for 40+ years… doctors suck at lawyering because they’re not trained for the law. Conversely, judges, justices and lawyers suck at practicing medicine.
This comment is in general and not specific as there are lawyers here whom I respect highly.
Idaho has lost OB-GYNs as a result of their horrific anti abortion laws.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar was very impressive arguing recently in favor of the continued availability of the drug Mifepristone, and hopefully she will be just as prepared and articulate before this hostile Court.
You are right. My company is in the medical field so there are a lot of doctors I highly respect but they aren’t so good at lawyering. That is why we have both doctors and lawyers. Don’t even get me started about designing software.
My wife and I are both nurses whose entire careers occurred inside the window between Roe and Dobbs. The thought that this question/case even exists is almost beyond comprehension. Ectopic pregnancies, placental abruptions, severe pre-eclampsia (pregnancy induced hypertension), uncontrollable bleeding - life threatening conditions that can only be treated safely by abortion. EMTALA is an excellent law designed to make sure that patients are treated and stabilized BEFORE they are shipped off to other hospitals for financial or other non-medical reasons. In many, many cases a woman can be quickly stabilized by a simple medical procedure called a D&C (dilation and curretage) - this is a form of early abortion.
This is so stupid I am not sure I can even bear to think about people like Alito and Thomas discussing woman’s medical issues. This is at the same level as accusing people of witchery - it is medieval.
The male justices have been pretty quiet.
Idaho’s prescription for women’s health:
Refuse to expand Medicaid, putting poor people at risk and creating healthcare ‘deserts’ in isolated medically underserved rural communities as hospitals close and insurers flee.
Restrict prenatal and early childhood care.
Restrict sex education to abstinence only.
Drain public school budgets through unlimited vouchers and the proliferation of for-profit charter schools.
Target Planned Parenthood clinics serving poor women of child-bearing age with regulations meant to drive them out of business: requiring floor areas comparable to surgical centers ( even though many abortions are not surgical, and even though many cosmetic or dental surgery clinics are not required to comply with similar regulations), and requiring abortion providers to obtain hospital privileges (even though abortion providers would not be called in to a hospital in the event of an emergency, the growing number of Catholic-run hospitals would not grant such privileges, and that denial of hospital privileges can have adverse effects on the ability to obtain malpractice insurance).
Divert family planning funds to ‘crisis pregnancy centers.’
Attack OB/GYN training programs at medical schools and teaching hospitals as ‘abortion mills.’
Require doctors and other healthcare providers to repeat misinformation about abortion.
Cut Free/Reduced lunch for children in financially needy households.
Idaho: Another state with a legislature full of tax-free Christ-punchers and its hand out every fiscal year.
When will we stop being lectured by the failed states of America?
When there’s no money in it.
I did medical research… ovarian cancer specifically. So, I also did some teaching of med students and had a lab with usually 4 or 5 grad students. If an MD was gonna participate in some procedure in the lab I’d get this queasy feeling knowing benchtop science is not what doctors do.
This is a literal truth. These “pro-life” people are driven by a desire to punish women for what they see as an evil form of birth control. Cruelty underlies it.
“…whether emergency room doctors can provide abortions to women who need them to avoid serious illness and permanent damage — or whether they have to withhold medical care until those women are nearly dead.”
What kind of a stupid fucking country is this? 330M people are now forced to live under the hocus pocus bullshit superstitions of the mental illness of religion that affects a small percent of the population who are simply the loudest and most violent, embodied everywhere from anti-abortion protesters to women in the middle east, beheaded for being human. The human race will end in fire over which mass delusion is “the right one.” The rest of us need to mock and humiliate these losers until they crawl back inside their ignorance. Fuck religion, all of them.