Abortion

Jman220 · February 8, 2024, 12:48pm

How would this prevent citizens from voting on a constitutional amendment?

Edit: Nevermind read the article.

Also holy shit if this amendment is on the ballot in FL in 2024… Did the democrats actually do something smart for once?

It’s going to be super tilting when the abortion amendment passes with 60 percent of the vote at the same time that Trump wins the state with 55 percent of the vote.

commonWealth · February 8, 2024, 4:12pm

“and to acquire, possess, and protect property.”

Sounds like some rich people are about to pass some property to some fetuses to dodge taxes if fetal personhood becomes a thing.

LouisCyphre · February 18, 2024, 6:39pm

Spinetta · February 18, 2024, 6:43pm

WTF, was that written by a judge or a priest?

Danspartan · February 18, 2024, 8:08pm

Why not both.

Jman220 · February 21, 2024, 11:24pm

Lol, largest hospital in Alabama pausing fertility treatments:

Worth noting that 10 percent of women who go on to become pregnant received some form of fertility treatment. This coupled with Trump’s inevitable mass deportations means that Alabama is going to be facing a demographic and population crisis really fucking fast.

Melkerson · February 24, 2024, 8:54pm

Your pony is a bit slow. Last I checked there are 8 facilities in Alabama that offer it. 3/8 have paused, the other 5 were still proceeding with it. This was as of 2 days ago. Might be more pauses since then. Or some resumptions.

Also it’s not all “fertility treatments” that they are pausing. It’s just IVF.

eyebooger · April 9, 2024, 5:26pm

boredsocial · April 9, 2024, 5:40pm

Every single judge that ruled on this was appointed by a Republican. If something like this is going to happen (and it was) I guess I’m grateful(?) that it’s happening 7 months before an election that is going to largely be fought over reproductive rights.

goofy · April 9, 2024, 5:57pm

Hopefully the referendum gets on the ballot for November.

CaffeineNeeded · April 11, 2024, 10:08pm

Had a scary case today. Saw a woman with diffuse belly pain. Exam was pain everywhere kind of exam, typically that is something less serious. Order some meds, labs and CT scan. Patient says her period has been irregular lately, having some bleeding every day. She’s older so this isn’t super concerning.

Patient then passes out. That happens, she gets better, but her blood pressure is soft. Start some fluids. I grab an ultrasound and see blood everywhere in her abdomen. Go to her pelvis and sure enough, there’s a fetus with a heart beat, but not in the uterus. It’s an ectopic. Patient starts getting more confused, give two units of blood, starts doing a lot better.

Patient goes to the OR, they report 2L of blood loss. (Note: this is always too low - you have about 5L of blood). Luckily this was in california, because I’m certain that this patient would have been held up from going to the OR because of that heartbeat. Even though most of the state laws are written in such a way that ectopics aren’t covered, doctors are afraid of going to prison and shit, so stuff like this gets delayed.

LouisCyphre · April 17, 2024, 9:17pm

https://x.com/DNCWarRoom/status/1780667110114329030

LouisCyphre · May 18, 2024, 3:42pm

goofy · May 22, 2024, 1:19am

goofy · May 22, 2024, 1:52am

Don’t read this one unless you want to be mad:

non-paywall link

In Etowah County, in 2013, the sheriff, the district attorney, and the head of the local child-welfare agency held a press conference to announce they intended to aggressively enforce that 2006 law. Instead of going after the manufacturers of meth, though, they planned to target pregnant women who used virtually any substance they deemed harmful to a developing fetus.

“If a baby is born with a controlled-substance dependency, the mother is going to jail,” then-Sheriff Todd Entrekin said at the time. Police weren’t required to establish that a child was born with a chemical dependency, though — or even that a fetus experienced any harm — a drug test, a confession, or just an accusation of substance use during pregnancy was enough to arrest women for a first offense that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. One public defender would later call these “unwinnable cases.”

Over the following decade, Etowah County imprisoned hundreds of mothers — some of whom were detained, before trial, for the rest of their pregnancies, inside one of the most brutal and inhumane prisons in the country, denied access to prenatal care and adequate nutrition, they say — in the name of protecting their children from harm.

Or in Alabama, where, in 2019, Marshae Jones walked into the Pleasant Grove Police Department with her six-year-old daughter expecting to be interviewed for a police investigation. Months earlier, Jones, four and a half months pregnant at the time, had been shot by her co-worker during a dispute. In the hospital after the shooting, Jones underwent an emergency C-section; her baby, whom she’d named Malaysia, did not survive. Rather than indicting the shooter, though, a grand jury indicted Jones, who they decided “intentionally” caused the death of her “unborn baby” because she allegedly picked a fight “knowing she was five months pregnant.” The charges were ultimately dismissed, but Jones’ lawyer says her record still shows the arrest, and Jones, who lost her job after the incident, struggled to find work after her case attracted national attention.

goofy · May 26, 2024, 8:14pm

goofy · June 1, 2024, 6:27pm

The lawsuit, filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, was the first on behalf of women denied abortions after the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago. While the case revolves around the question of what counts as an exception — unlike other lawsuits, it did not seek to overturn a state ban — it has changed the political debate around abortion by underscoring the potentially devastating medical consequences of abortion bans even for women who were not seeking to end unwanted pregnancies.

The court’s 38-page decision on Friday agreed that the experiences the women had recounted in testimony — some so painful that a judge ordered the court into recess — were “filled with immense personal heartbreak.” But it said that Texas law allowed abortions for any woman who faces a life-threatening condition, “before death or serious physical impairment are imminent.”

Echoing arguments from the state and anti-abortion groups, the court blamed doctors for misinterpreting the law.

“A physician who tells a patient, ‘Your life is threatened by a complication that has arisen during your pregnancy, and you may die, or there is a serious risk you will suffer substantial physical impairment unless an abortion is performed,’ and in the same breath states ‘but the law won’t allow me to provide an abortion in these circumstances’ is simply wrong in that legal assessment,” Justice Jane Bland — like all nine of the justices and the attorney general, an elected Republican — wrote in the unanimous opinion.

Here’s the kind of stuff Texas is blaming doctors for:

“This could be you, this could be someone you love,” said Ashley Brandt, who went to Colorado to abort one of her twin fetuses because it had no skull, after doctors in Texas said the condition, known as acrania, threatened the other twin’s life as well as hers, but that they could not give her an abortion. “Abortion is health care and exceptions do not work.”

The ruling on Friday reversed one last summer from a trial court judge, a Democrat, that had expanded the definition of exceptions allowed under Texas’ ban. That ruling said doctors could perform an abortion if in their “good faith judgment and in consultation with the pregnant person” it would be medically unsafe for a woman to continue a pregnancy, or if her fetus has a condition making it “unlikely to survive the pregnancy and sustain life after birth.”

The Supreme Court on Friday affirmed the narrower definition of exceptions in the Texas ban, which allows abortion if in the “reasonable medical judgment” of a doctor a woman faces “risk of death” or “substantial impairment of a major bodily function.” As in most states with bans, there is no exception for fatal fetal conditions.

Melkerson · June 1, 2024, 6:53pm

Obviously, I think what TX is doing is awful, but I have a hard time arguing with the logic of above.

I haven’t been following the specific case, but it sounds like the court is saying abortion would have been fine in this spot

Now this point is fairly obvious, so plaintiffs must have argued against it. What exactly was their argument?

commonWealth · June 1, 2024, 8:03pm

I think the issue is, you’re forcing doctors to risk their medical license and freedom with no direct personal benefit to doing so. Anytime they make the right call, and the authorities agree with them, nothing happens. Anytime the make the right call, and the authorities disagree with them, they are at great financial and legal risk. Anytime the make the wrong call, likewise.

Meanwhile the law is vague, and basically comes down to their own opinion. So it seems they are (predictably) being very cautious. It’s also pretty obvious IMO that for extreme right wing conservatives this is all a feature, not a bug.

Like, what is the “substantial impairment of a major bodily function?” Heart, lungs, brain, those all seem obvious. Of course, then it gets into, what is substantial? But, we’ll shelve that one. Is the ability to procreate in the future a “major bodily function?” Most of us would say, “Yeah, that’s a pretty fucking big bodily function.” But, it’s not necessary to survive and function day to day.

Melkerson · June 1, 2024, 8:08pm

It seems like the only real difference between the original law and what was overturned was the part about fetus having a condition making the fetus unlikely to survive. The rest of it seems approximately the same.