U.S. Circuit Court Of Appeals To Rehear South Dakota Law Promoting Abortion-Suicide Link
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will re-examine on Jan. 9 whether a 2005 South Dakota law mandating what doctors say to women seeking abortions is constitutional. The court will address again a specific provision in the law requiring physicians to inform patients of possible suicide risks in relation to the procedure.
The provision allows women seeking abortions to make informed decisions and should be allowed to stand, said South Dakota Attorney General Marty Jackley.
“The state is pleased that the full court will address the important issue of suicide risk disclosures for women considering an abortion,” Jackley said in an email. “The 2005 disclosure legislation was an attempt by the [South Dakota] Legislature to put in place proper disclosure requirements to ensure a women considering an abortion makes a knowing and voluntary decision. … It is the state’s position that the legislative enactment on suicide risk disclosures is reasonable, factually accurate, not ambiguous, and lawful.”
Planned Parenthood officials and other abortion rights advocates argue that a link between abortion and suicide never has been proven, and that the law forces doctors to provide patients with erroneous medical information.
“We believe that scientific research is on our side and that when the court hears the merits of the issue, they will uphold the court’s prior decision,” said Jennifer Aulwes, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota. If the provision is allowed to stand, “doctors providing abortions would need to read a medically inaccurate and scientifically unsupported script to a patient that he or she is about to provide medical care to. It brings up ethical issues for health care providers.”
A long court history
The abortion disclosure requirements have been in dispute since their enactment in 2005. Among other mandates, the state law required doctors to tell women seeking abortions:
- That abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.
- That the patient has an existing relationship with the unborn human being that is protected by law.
- A description of all known medical risks associated with having the procedure, including an increased risk of suicide.
Before the law took effect, Planned Parenthood sought an injunction against the requirements, a request that was granted by a district court. An appeals court subsequently overturned the injunction, in part, as it related to the law’s “human being disclosure” provision. In a September 2011 decision, a panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court agreed with the state that doctors must disclose “all known medical risks” of abortion, but the court concluded that the specified suicide risk disclosure violated the U.S. Constitution. The full court, and not just the panel, will rehear the case Jan. 9.
The state says suicide is three to six times more frequent in women who receive abortions compared with women who undergo childbirth. The state’s data primarily relies on a 2009 analysis done by Priscilla Coleman, a human development and family studies professor at Bowling Green (Ohio) State University. She examined the mental state of women who had abortions from data collected by the National Comorbidity Survey, a national mental health survey. She found that compared with other women, women who had abortions were at increased risk for anxiety, mood disorders and substance abuse.
But Aulwes, of Planned Parenthood, pointed to an analysis of the same data in 2010 by Julia Steinberg, an assistant professor of health psychology at the University of California, San Francisco. Steinberg’s analysis failed to find the same connection, even without taking into account preexisting factors such as a history of mental health problems.
By: Alicia Galleges, American Medical News, January 2, 2011
Mitt Romney Switched ’94 Abortion Stance Based On Polling Results
Mitt “Groucho” Romney: “These are my principles. And if you don’t like them, I have others.”
When he challenged Ted Kennedy in the 1994 U.S. Senate race, Mitt Romney used polling data to determine that he would run as a pro-choice candidate while remaining personally pro-life, according to a new book by Boston journalist Ronald Scott.The Washington Examiner revealed the moment in Scott’s book:
According to Scott, Romney revealed that polling from Richard Wirthlin, Ronald Reagan’s former pollster whom Romney had hired for the ’94 campaign, showed it would be impossible for a pro-life candidate to win statewide office in Massachusetts. In light of that, Romney decided to run as a pro-choice candidate, pledging to support Roe v. Wade, while remaining personally pro-life.
Well, that’s certainly pragmatic. If your positions will keep you from getting elected, change your positions. Now he’s trying to win the primaries, so Mitt’s switched his abortion stance back to his original anti-abortion position (or an even more draconian one, I can’t keep up) and no doubt during the general election he’ll find yet another position to take.
As much as we might scorn Romney for changing his past position purely based on polling numbers, I think I might find this even more shallow, though:
In an October 1994 debate, Romney said he believed that abortion should be “safe and legal” and that Roe v. Wade should stand. He added, “And my personal beliefs, like the personal beliefs of other people, should not be brought into a political campaign.”Sen. Kennedy seized on his stance: “On the question of the choice issue, I have supported the Roe v. Wade. I am pro-choice. My opponent is multiple choice.”
Romney responded, “I have my own beliefs and those beliefs are very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my beliefs on other people.” He then told the story of a family friend who passed away from an illegal abortion.
So at least back then, his justification for changing his position is that he would not impose his beliefs on other people (bringing a family relative into it as an example). Now he’ll “impose his beliefs” on you happily, I guess, because the Republican base wants him to.
This is what I find so detestable about Romney. Not any individual positions, or even the more atrocious elements of his corporate past, but his apparent lack of any strong principles whatsoever. Every stance is “whatever it has to be,” and tomorrow it might be something else. Both his corporate and his electoral lives have demonstrated a complete lack of personal conviction or morality. Just ambition.
By: Hunter, Daily Kos, December 30, 2011
Today’s GOP Makes Mississippi Look Liberal
The flailing Rick Perry is trying to revive his sinking campaign by histrionically announcing he’s changed his views on abortion and now opposes it even in cases of rape and incest. Apparently Perry met a young woman who’d been conceived as a result of rape, and that changed his mind.
“Looking in her eyes, I couldn’t come up with an answer to defend the exemptions for rape and incest,” he said at a “tele-town hall” sponsored by far-right Iowa radio host Steve Deace. “And over the course of the last few weeks, the Christmas holidays and reflecting on that … all I can say is that God was working on my heart.”
It’s just one more step toward society’s political margins for the GOP contenders. Perry has already announced his support for the “personhood” movement, which declares that life begins the moment an egg is fertilized, a measure that was rejected by the deep-red state of Mississippi as too extreme. But Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum also back the personhood crusade. That’s your modern Republican Party: It makes Mississippi look liberal. They’d like women to have more rights before they’re born than after.
It’s obvious the Tea Party is pulling the GOP even further to the right. While the movement’s fans used to insist it was about the economy, not social issues, in fact its House caucus has used its year in office working harder to stop all funding for Planned Parenthood than to reduce unemployment. The House even passed a bill that lets health providers “exercise their conscience” and refuse to perform an abortion even in cases where the woman would die without the procedure. (h/t Digby)
But their target is no longer just abortion, but contraception as well. At Tuesday’s “tele-town hall,” Bachmann lied about President Obama’s Plan B stance, insisting the president is “putting abortion pills for young minors, girls as young as 8 years of age or 11 years of age, on [the] bubblegum aisle.” Of course, Obama backed HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ decision to override the FDA and refuse to allow Plan B to be sold on drugstore shelves, specifically citing concerns about young girls. Personhood legislation would make the IUD illegal, as well as any measure that interferes with a fertilized egg attaching itself to the uterine wall, including some fertility treatments.
Resurgent front-runner Mitt Romney stands apart from the far right on some of these issues. He hasn’t supported personhood legislation, for instance (yet). But in some ways Romney’s flip-flopping on abortion is as disturbing as his rivals’ extreme anti-choice fanaticism. Running for Massachusetts governor, Romney told voters he’d become pro-choice after a close family friend died due to a botched illegal abortion. (Salon’s Justin Elliott told the tragic story here.) What happened to his feeling for that friend? How could he flip-flop again, after a supposed moral and political awakening like that? And libertarian Ron Paul opposes full liberty for women: He’s antiabortion (though he’d leave it to each state to decide). The man who wants to deregulate industry wants to regulate women’s bodies. That doesn’t sound like libertarianism to me.
Will the GOP’s continuing shift right on abortion, clearly intended to court the religious-right base during the primaries, hurt the party in the general election? I have to assume so. Ever since Ronald Reagan campaigned with the blessing of the Christian right, there’s been a pronounced difference between men and women when it comes to their attitude toward the Republican Party. Women have been registering and voting increasingly Democratic, not just because of abortion rights or other so-called women’s issues. It’s also because women are more likely to believe in a government safety net, to back programs like Head Start, education funding and other services for poor families as well as Social Security and Medicare. I don’t think that means women are more compassionate than men; I think it reflects their greater economic vulnerability, since poverty rates are higher and median incomes lower for women than men. Clearly the far-right GOP is writing off increasing numbers of women, as well as blacks and Latinos, immigrants, and gay people. Good luck with that, long term.
There are two warring forces at work in the world: One is the empowerment of women, especially in the developing world. There is no magic bullet for global poverty, but the only thing that comes close is expanding education and human rights for girls. Educated girls have children later, and when they do become mothers, their children are healthier and better educated. Their family incomes rise, and so do the living standards of their community. It is clear that promoting the rights and status of women improves the well-being of the entire society; some people, and governments, get that, globally.
But there’s also an intensifying hostility to full freedom for women in all corners of the world. One of Wednesday’s most disturbing stories was the New York Times tale of an 8-year-old Orthodox Jewish Israeli girl spat upon and abused by ultra-Orthodox bullies because even her modest outfits didn’t conform to their stifling dress code for girls and women. Israel, which was once defended as a European enlightenment outpost in the supposedly backward Middle East, is facing a rising tide of far-right religious activism trying to ensure that women are neither seen nor heard outside the home. Literally. These crusaders believe in separate worship for each gender, because men are not supposed to hear a woman’s voice in public, not even singing hymns. On some bus lines serving ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, women are literally made to sit at the back of the bus.
Meanwhile, the Arab Spring hasn’t ushered in more rights for women. In the “new” post-Mubarak Egypt, men are using sexual assault and violence to suppress female activists. Islamic fundamentalists, like their ultra-Orthodox Jewish brothers, likewise want to make women second-class citizens.
No, I’m not comparing the personhood movement or the GOP contenders to violent misogynist Egyptians or to the religious extremists who want to exclude women from Israeli or Arab public life. But the increasing extremism on choice that is now seeping into public policy on contraception reflects a related discomfort with full personhood for women. There is no freedom or equality for women without reproductive freedom. Having been raised a Catholic, I understand religious objections to abortion, and my only answer is, by all means, don’t have one. Work to make them less common. A rape victim who doesn’t want an abortion is of course free to make that decision. But a secular society has no business imposing one religion’s values on everyone. (Lost in all the insanity about abortion is the fact that the incidence of abortion has declined by at least a third since the 1980s.)
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, December 29, 2011
Rick Perry “Gives Some Thought” To Rape And Incest
As noted in my last post, one of the most counter-factual assertions about the Republican presidential nomination contest is that it’s “about” the economy.
Guess that’s why Rick Perry, who began his campaign boasting of his world-beating jobs record (sic!) in Texas, is now ending his go-for-broke comeback effort in Iowa by announcing he is suddenly adopting the most extreme position available on abortion:
Gov. Rick Perry said Tuesday that he had undergone a “transformation” on the issue of abortion and now believed that there should be no exceptions made for rape, incest or the life of the mother….“I really started giving some thought about the issue of rape and incest,” Mr. Perry told a local pastor who had questioned whether he had changed his position on the issue.
While it’s good news to hear that Perry is “giving some thought” to any issue, having pretty much campaigned on the basis of what the reptilian segments of his brain dictated, the reality is that his campaign is now focused monomaniacally on outflanking Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Santorum in appealing to Iowa’s divided Christian Right activist base.
This isn’t Perry’s first lurch to the right on abortion; back in August, under interrogation from Christian Right chieftain Tony Perkins, he repudiated his previous “states’ rights” position in favor of the more radical proposition of a federal constitutional amendment to repeal the right to choose.
But the more Perry “thinks” about it, the more determined he becomes to bend the knee to the most hard-core anti-choicers. If the Iowa caucuses were somehow delayed a couple of weeks, he’d probably come out for a national compulsory pregnancy mandate.
By: Ed Kilgore, Published in Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 28, 2011
A Progressive Defense Of The White House On Plan B
I get the reasons for liberal outrage at the Obama administration’s Plan B decision. But I can’t quite join in the indignation. I know that I am a man—a fact I’ve been aware of for some time—and so readers male and female can factor that in here as they wish. But it seems to me that to call this merely a case of politics cynically trumping science is way too dismissive of some concerns that parents with all kinds of political views might have about their teenage daughters buying this pill without their knowledge.
Much of the opposition to allowing underage girls to buy the pill over the counter amounts to straw-man arguments. There’s the line that taking the pill amounts to abortion. Watch this lurid ad by a right-to-life group and think about what sort of cacophony must be raging inside the mind that could even come up with such an egregious thing. Outside the realm of anti-abortion fanaticism, I don’t think most of us would equate the prevention of a pregnancy with the removal of an existing fetus. It’s called “emergency contraception” because it’s contraception, not abortion.
There’s also an argument about harmful effects on young girls of the pill’s heightened progesterone levels. I am far from being an expert on such matters, but unanimous view of the scientific community appears to be that the pill is safe for all females of child-bearing age, and that’s good enough for me.
Those are ideological issues, and ones that can be dismissed easily. But it seems to me that there is a fair issue here, and it has to do with parents having a right to know about and be involved in what their kids are up to. You simply don’t have to be a right-winger to have concerns about your 14- or 15-year-old daughter having easy access to such a pill.
That is not a political question per se. A parent’s view on that matter will be partially informed by politics, but only partially (and in some cases not at all, since lots of people have no political views to speak of). Parents’ opinions on this will be informed most of all by the parent-child relationship; by the parents’ views about sexuality and morality; by the parents’ feelings about their authority vis-a-vis their child’s autonomy. These areas might have a lot to do with a parent’s political views, but they might not. We all know people who are politically conservative but sexually libertine, or politically liberal and as chaste as Mother Teresa.
In other words, this is less about appeasing the right than acknowledging reality in all its complications out there in the country, where many people probably have mixed feelings. I’d be fascinated to see some polling on this, and I expect we will soon.
In an ideal world, parents would rationally support the idea of their daughters having every means available to them to correct an error (or, obviously, to override a violation) that happened a day or two prior. But parents don’t always think rationally about these things. That makes these issues sensitive by definition, and it’s hardly illegitimate for a government to take such matters into consideration. I’d have had more respect for Kathleen Sibelius in this situation if, instead of that blather about 11-year-old girls not being able to follow instructions and take the pill properly, she’d just said: “Look, I respect the science, but this raises ethical and moral questions about what is the proper age for access to emergency contraception, in addition to the scientific ones. And that’s a public debate we ought to have more of before we pull this trigger.”
Such pills are generally available in other advanced countries, but there are some limits. In England, you have to be at least 16 to buy them. In Finland, 15. In Quebec, you have to consult a pharmacist. In Italy, it requires a doctor’s prescription.
So advanced societies haven’t yet made an across-the-board decision that all girls from 11 up should be able to buy this pill, and the United States always lags behind in these things, for all the reasons we know.
I wouldn’t doubt that the administration feared the development of a narrative here. Newt Gingrich in particular is very adept at that sort of thing: This election, he’d have announced with his usual fanfare, is a contest between traditional values and 13-year-old girls having no-consequences sex. It’s hard to know the extent to which that would have taken off.
But I doubt this was just politics. It was only in August that this same “anti-woman” administration issued new standards requiring insurance companies to cover all government-approved contraceptives for women, without co-payments or other fees. That will take effect, under the new health-care law, in January 2013 and should go a long way toward lowering the cost barriers to birth-control services for insured women. If the administration so lives in fear of political fallout from the cultural right, then why did it do that?
So maybe there was something more going on here. Maybe we should have a longer debate about the appropriate age at which this pill should become available. And maybe the right answer, an answer that much, but not all, of the advanced world has agreed on, is that there shouldn’t be a limit. The science says it’s safe, and it will undoubtedly prevent unwanted pregnancies—and, in an irony that the anti-abortionists never grasp, it will prevent abortions, too. But it’s now the job of advocates to make the culture catch up to the science.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 9, 2011
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