Donald Trump has flip-flopped on the issue of abortion for decades, from declaring himself “very pro-choice” in the 1990s and “pro-life” in 2011 to hinting this year that he’d support a national abortion ban.

“Trump Patriarchy,” Digital, Dream / Cartoon v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Abortion is a topic of huge importance in American politics this year: it could decide the United States presidential election, and the way states regulate abortion access will have life-or-death consequences for women.

Apart from Trump’s preposterous claim that Democrats support the execution of babies after birth — infanticide, in other words, which is illegal in all 50 American states — Trump did concede during the recent presidential debate that he supports abortion access for certain reasons: pregnancy arising from rape or incest, and to save “the life of the mother.”

American legislators should look to Ireland to understand the real-life consequences of a ban on abortion, the chilling effect on health-care professionals of an exception only in cases of a threat to the life of the pregnant woman, and the significant problems with attempting to legislate abortion access only for certain reasons, like rape and incest.

Tragic repercussions

In the early 1980s, the Irish people voted by referendum to insert a provision into the country’s constitution, known as the Eighth Amendment. In explicitly inserting, for the first time, constitutional protection for a right to life of the unborn — stated to be equal to that of the right to life of the mother — the amendment operated as a near-blanket ban on abortion for more than three decades.

This constitutional ban did not prevent abortion from taking place in Ireland: it simply drove women who could afford it to other countries to access abortion services.

Others ordered abortion medications on the internet and took them alone, without medical supervision. An unknown number of vulnerable women were forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

The ban also impacted women with much-wanted pregnancies. The Savita Halappanavar case concerned a young woman who was happy to be pregnant with her first baby. But she began experiencing an inevitable miscarriage and ultimately died in hospital after her medical team hesitated to intervene while a fetal heartbeat was still being detected.

Halappanavar’s death led to an outcry for action to lift the constitutional ban on abortion and ensure that all pregnant women could have access to appropriate medical care.

Another tragic Irish case involved a pregnant woman who was looking forward to welcoming her third child but sadly suffered brain-stem death during her pregnancy. She was subjected to extraordinary life support measures in an effort to save her fetus, even as her body had already begun to decompose.

The woman’s family had to launch legal action against the Irish health service to secure an order for the withdrawal of treatment to allow their daughter to die with a measure of dignity. The court heard how medical staff felt compelled to keep the dead woman on life support, for legal reasons, as the fetus still had a heartbeat.

Making health care dangerous

In the run-up to Ireland’s 2018 abortion referendum, the public debate and opinion polls were focused on the possibilities of providing access to abortion for certain reasons, such as those identified by Trump at the debate: when the pregnancy is posing a risk to health, or the pregnancy arose from rape or incest.

The citizens’ assembly established by the Irish government to review the abortion issue in 2016 did a comprehensive examination into the provision of abortion services. It shone a light on the substantial problems of specifying reasons and developing processes for pregnant women to establish their eligibility for an abortion.

Statistics tell us that most sexual assaults go unreported; prosecutions often result in acquittals; and prosecuting a sexual offence can take years. So how can a pregnant woman prove her rape to access a legal abortion, and from a humanitarian perspective, why should she be required to?

Imposing conditions around the prescription of abortion pills and the ability of doctors to carry out certain procedures also impacts women who are miscarrying and whose lives and health may be put in grave danger by a pregnancy that is ending but will not pass naturally.

Anti-abortion measures cost lives

Politicizing the issue of abortion, instituting bans, carving out abortion from the wider reproductive experience, limiting access to abortion medication and surgeries for certain reasons that must be policed and adjudicated: Ireland’s experiences have shown that none of these actions makes health care safer for pregnant patients. Nor do they provide sensible guidance for their doctors.

In fact, anti-abortion measures make pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion and the entire spectrum of reproductive health care exponentially more dangerous, more stigmatized and much lonelier. These actions, instituted for political reasons and not for better patient care, cost lives.

Many Canadians tuning into the Trump/Harris debate — or listening to various U.S. politics over the past eight years — may feel relief that abortion is not a top political issue here and does not seem to have caused the same level of polarization.

But with a federal election looming, there’s little stopping the issue from becoming a political football in the years ahead.

It’s estimated that one in three women in Canada will have an abortion in their lifetime, so now is the time to learn lessons from other countries, especially the U.S. and Ireland, on what not to do.

Seána Glennon, Postdoctoral Fellow, Constitutional Law, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Texas is trying to ban the use of its roads by people seeking care outside the state — and even dispatching right-wing vigilante groups to chase them.

By Jim Hightower | –

( Otherwords.org ) – Here’s our big word of the day: extraterritoriality. It expresses a sketchy legal theory asserting that rulers in one state have a right to enforce their laws in another state.

Its most prominent was in the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required officials in Northern anti-slave states to capture and return escaped slaves to their plantation “owners” in the South, thus applying Southern slave laws in Northern jurisdictions. This abomination was finally repealed in 1864.

Katie Couric Video: “”I was forced to carry my child full term”: Texas abortion plaintiff”

But 160 years later, here comes another faction of right-wing zealots trying to revive the slave-law concept of extraterritoriality — this time applying it to any and all American women who dare to make their own reproductive health decisions.

I’m ashamed to say that this repressive use of the doctrine is being led by my state’s misogynistic governor, Greg Abbott, and our corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton. These two tyrannical men have already saddled Texas women with the most draconian abortion ban in the country, including piously forbidding abortion in cases of rape and incest.

For women to exercise their inherent right to control their own bodies, they’re forced to travel to nearby states. But Texas’s brutal extremists bark that “we’ll ban that, too!” They’ve pushed a flagrantly unconstitutional scheme to outlaw the use of public roads to drive out-of-state for care. And they’ve even sanctioned right-wing vigilantes to follow suspected medical travelers to doctors beyond our borders.

And, going full-tilt totalitarian, the Abbott-Paxton posse has demanded that out-of-state-care groups hand over the names and addresses of Texas women they’ve helped outside of Texas.

Talk about government overreach! Big Brother isn’t just watching… he’s stalking you. To oppose this brutish repression — and to keep it from coming to your state — contact RewireNewsGroup.com/abortion.

Jim Hightower

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.

Via Otherwords.org

He’s also provided some of America’s favorite headlines and jokes, even for progressives like me. As one fictional mom quipped in a Saturday Night Live skit at the end of his term in office, “If he’s gone, what am I supposed to do? Focus on my kids?” She was also mockingly lamenting the possibility that startling headlines like “‘Grab ‘em by the pussy” would disappear from our all-American world.

It turns out she needn’t have worried! It seems the media is far more eager these days to cover the former president’s endless missteps (or are they just steps?) than highlight the investments made by President Biden’s administration, which have finally started to pay off in terms of higher wages, more jobs, and lower carbon emissions. Big as we are on short-term gratification (or gloom) and the latest polls, we seem so much less interested in examining what presidents actually do.

Among Us

With the 2024 election heading toward us the way that asteroid hurtled toward the dinosaurs, while our sensationalistic political culture shows little sign of changing anytime soon, I’d suggest that we turn the conversation from the crazy stuff “Orange Jesus” loves to say to the fact that Trump and his supporters are, for the foreseeable future, going to be among us. Isn’t it time, imagining the worst to come, to start talking about what an anti-Trump resistance would look like?

To do so, we’d first have to take a closer look at what some of his most influential supporters are planning for the next time around. You may have noticed that a set of conservative think tanks and scholars, who call themselves Project 2025, have drafted a nearly thousand-page blueprint for a hypothetical Trump second term. It’s a document labeled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (though all it really purports to conserve is an abiding American focus on funding our military-industrial complex). The document covers everything from how a Trump administration ought to handle federal staffing to how it could restructure military and federal law enforcement agencies to its own benefit. Let me flag a few parts of that document that I find particularly concerning and suggest small ways in which you and I might act to preserve democratic values in a country that seems either to take them all too much for granted or care about them less and less.

“Taking the Reins of Government”

When it comes to the plans of Trump’s advisers to reshape the executive branch in an autocratic fashion, should he be reelected, the title in the relevant section of their document — “Taking the Reins of Government” — perfectly catches the top-down approach to power they envision. For years now, the Orange Jesus has made no secret of his urge to launch retribution against those in the Washington bureaucracy who opposed him and ensure that tens of thousands of career public service positions in federal agencies and the White House will, in (his) future, be held by people vetted for their loyalty to him (and only him!). So reads the first major section of that Mandate, which outlines how a second Trump administration would assert far more direct White House control over this country through the federal bureaucracy.

In fact, the document’s authors advocate that an incoming Trump administration circumvent the Vacancies Reform Act, which establishes standards for congressional vetting of temporarily appointed federal personnel. They suggest instead indefinitely using acting personnel in vacant positions, particularly ones the first Trump administration was hostile to like State Department diplomatic posts.

Buy the Book

Notably, the document is remarkably explicit about its recommendation to appoint acting personnel in departments already known for their abuse of American civil rights. (Think: Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials kidnapping Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland during the summer of 2020.) A chilling example is the Mandate’s discussion of how a Trump White House could appoint acting personnel at DHS from scratch to “guarantee implementation of a Day One agenda.” I can’t help thinking: Is this what Trump meant when he told a Fox News Town Hall that he would be a “dictator” only on day one? Ostensibly, he could make many of the worst decisions immediately and then leave his goons to carry out the rest of the dirty work, Putin-style.

Given such a topsy-turvy reality, if you were hoping that journalists would still be close at hand to help call out any disastrous lapses in integrity, think again. Because count on something else: serious journalists wouldn’t be allowed within a country mile of Donald Trump and his closest advisers. In fact, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the authors of the Mandate suggest the White House should have a very different relationship with its press pool, if there even were to be one at all. In describing a future Trumpian White House Office of Communications, the Mandate reads, “No legal entitlement exists for the provision of permanent space for media on the White House campus, and the next Administration should reexamine the balance between media demands and space constraints on the White House premises.”

Right! A Trump White House undoubtedly wouldn’t have space for all too much. At another point, in a paragraph on how Trump’s future communications director would need to “navigate the mainstream media” to advance the president’s agenda, the authors write, “The new Administration should examine the nature of the relationship between itself and the White House Correspondents Association and consider whether an alternative coordinating body might be more suitable.”

An “alternative coordinating body” organized by Donald Trump and crew? What could possibly go wrong?

In fact, just imagine a Trumpian future in which those with the president’s ear on every topic will be chosen by and aligned with that very same unhinged person, while his administration attempts to transform the media into its own propaganda arm, while repressing anything that might prove hostile to him in any way. In a second Trump White House, supporting an independent media would mean more than just subscribing to the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and local newspapers that will undoubtedly come under existential threats. It’s also going to mean providing an actual safe space for journalists whose exposés of government abuse will make them prime targets for the Orange Jesus’s followers. Think, for an analogous example, of murdered Russian war correspondent Anna Politkovskaya, who exposed abuse by Russian security forces against Muslim minority communities in the south of that country.

Now imagine, in an unhinged second Trump presidency, what sorts of doxing and other nightmares writers and their families might have to endure. We’ll all have to be ready to let such figures (or their threatened children and spouses) into our homes, lock the doors, and tell no one that they’re there. Meanwhile, the rest of us would have to protest — and get others to join us – when journalists and other oppositional figures start to be arrested under bogus charges or attacked by thugs. In a second Trump era, it will be of crucial importance for the rest of us to stand with those who continue to insist on telling the truth, even if you don’t agree with them politically.

It will be no less important to elevate and celebrate the writing of people who describe acts of resistance and heroism, be it their own or of others. I’m thinking about people like Washington Post columnist and author Jennifer Rubin or former Republican politico (and truthteller) Liz Cheney, who have made a point not just of critiquing the fascists aligned with Trump but of describing how to build life-affirming new policies that would serve the very constitution a second Trump term would undoubtedly try to toss into the gutter.

“The Common Defense”

Those would-be Trump presidential advisers have been remarkably detailed in describing their hopes for how a second Trump presidency could transform the U.S. military, and that section of their Mandate, I must admit, initially sounded okay to me. After all, they seemed to want to keep this country out of yet more foreign conflicts, while making the Pentagon accountable for how it spends its money. They also want more employment and financial support to be offered to military families (like mine!). In other words, many of the things I’ve been writing about at TomDispatch for years.

I was even initially impressed that they claimed to want the military to deprioritize “manufactured extremism” — until I realized that what they’re evidently referring to is the Pentagon’s plan (largely stalled at this point) to screen new and existing servicemembers for alignment with Nazi-style and white supremacist ideologies. In fact — I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn — their blueprint goes on to describe a military remade in the very image of those Project 2025 leaders as white, cisgender, and heterosexual men, and they want to start ’em young, too. The Mandate recommends standardized testing in all federally funded schools to check kids’ aptitude for military service. They want, in other words, to offer the Pentagon increased access to children for the purpose of recruitment. And the proposal only gets “better” after that. In fact, Trump’s future would-be advisers go on to support expelling people with gender dysphoria from that very military.

How are we then to trust that the Department of Defense won’t be used against the American people, if our troops are distinctly shaped not to reflect our exploding diversity? In fact, The Donald has called the 2024 election “the final battle” and has already suggested that he might take out after his foes (“vermin”), even possibly invoking the Insurrection Act to use the military to do so. And then, it seems, the rest of us would have to live with a military that embraced the very types who sought to tear down our elected government on January 6, 2021.

Oh, and even better news! The Mandate writers also propose increasing the number and size of American companies producing munitions here in the U.S., funding arms acquisition and training at more universities, and increasing the power of the arms production industry even further.

They also propose — and what could possibly go wrong here? — that the government should enhance its ability to deploy special forces and conduct irregular (nonstate) warfare “across the spectrum of competition, crisis, and conflict.” Hmmmm…. It’s hard for me not to recall a recent response by a Trump lawyer to a question by a federal judge in which he claimed that a president should be immune from prosecution for ordering a special forces unit to assassinate a political opponent. Welcome to 2025 and Trump 2.0!

All You Need Is Love

If former President Trump listens to his all-too-well-prepared advisers — and many think he would be more disciplined in doing so a second time around — there would be far less of a buffer of reasonable civil servants loyal to the Constitution between him and the rest of us. Given that, I’m suggesting that those of us in military communities tell our loved ones to defy any orders to brutalize other Americans who pose no violent threat to the rest of us — those exercising freedom of assembly and speech, running for public office, writing the truth. And even though this may sound counterintuitive to some of you, get rid of your guns! If the Trumpian security state that might arise did everything its would-be advisers advocate, there would be no point in taking up arms against it. After all, civil wars are the bloodiest forms of human conflict, with the worst impact on civilians.

But don’t give up either. Make sure in every way you can that elections continue, and show up to vote. Volunteer to get people to the polls and inform them of their rights as voters. Become an election worker or volunteer. Do your damnedest to keep a non-Trumpian world alive.

Change is afoot, and it could be bad, but who knows? It’s also possible that election 2024 will prove to be white supremacy’s dying gasp. Think of how readily Trump’s supporters scuttle away when the candidates he endorses lose elections. And if our very own Orange Jesus is more decisively denied access to power through a jail sentence or another big election loss, maybe all the planning of his toadies won’t mean a tinker’s damn. But that will only be true if we all show up and act, starting now.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

Staunchly against bodily autonomy for women, Johnson supports a nationwide ban on abortion which he considers, “a holocaust.” This inexperienced, soft-spoken Ned Flanders suggested that abortion activists want to kill babies that are “half way out of the birth-canal,” and voted against Americans having access to purchase legal contraception. The most powerful Republican in Washington insisted that, if only women would bear more “able-bodied workers,” he wouldn’t be forced to cut trillions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Hostile towards gay and transgender people, Johnson called them “dangerous” and “deviant” threats to the American way of life and defended laws that criminalized homosexual relations between consenting adults that he called “inherently unnatural.” He warned that same-sex marriage was a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.”

Last year, Johnson introduced legislation that would prohibit the use of federal funds for providing education to children under 10 that included LGBTQ topics — a national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. He also is working to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.

Johnson is a virulent Christian Nationalist, an ideology modeled on Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s program of “illiberal democracy,” and defense of Christendom against Muslims, progressives, and the “LGBTQ lobby.” Johnson “pushed all kinds of hateful anti-LGBTQ bigotry while at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian Nationalist legal outfit that wants to drag this country back to the 5th century,” warns Andrew L. Seidel, civil rights attorney and author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American. For nearly twenty years, Johnson served as senior legal counsel and spokesman for the ADF.

Designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ADF is a legal advocacy organization that not only supported “re-criminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults,” but has also defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people and contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia. Johnson and the ADF claim that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society.

Politicon: “James Carville explains everything about Mike Johnson”

The ADF, according to the New York Times, is the “largest legal force of the religious right.” They would go on to successive Supreme Court victories, most notably rolling back abortion rights in the Dobbs decision, undermining LGBTQ rights in the (purported) same-sex wedding website case 303 Creative, allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control, and twelve other cases related to curtailing the civil rights of women and LGBTQ people.

Johnson’s rise to the speakership is best understood in terms of the ongoing white Christian nationalist takeover of the American government through MAGA rather than, as the mainstream press suggested, the quirky, exhausted and embarrassed result of a bickering caucus. Since the rise of the Tea Party, the primary driver for both the GOP’s dysfunction and its incipient fascism is the political might of organized right-wing Christianity, successfully redeployed especially in primaries, to wrest control from establishment “Republicans in Name Only” (“RINOs”).

As the former political director of the AFL-CIO Michael Podhorzer wrote, “the political muscle provided by white Christian nationalism’s extensive church-based infrastructure in congressional districts, and its national reach through Christian broadcasting and national organizations, has turned MAGA into a ruthlessly successful RINO-hunting machine.”

Still, Johnson’s loathsome ideology and religious zealotry were not the main reasons for his elevation to the speakership — most Republicans share his repulsive worldview. Rather, the MAGA cult embraced his tireless advocacy on behalf of despotic Donald’s seditious attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Most House Republicans voted to back the Fabricator’s lies about the election; but few had worked as diligently as Johnson to foist fraudulent conspiracy theories, such as “rigged Dominion voting machines,” on Americans. A constitutional lawyer who uses the law to subvert democracy, Johnson enlisted dozens of fellow-members to support a sham Texas court case seeking to cancel the election results in battleground states.

Johnson’s role, neglected at the time, was such that the Times later called him “the most important architect” of the campaign to block congressional certification of the Electoral College results and thus overturn Trump’s defeat. Circulating his hollow rationale to the party, Johnson reminded them that Trump “anxiously awaited” their support. Proudly exhibiting a bizarre religious devotion to the Un-Christian Trump, Johnson helped plot the Jan. 6 attempted coup while calling the insurrection a “peaceful protest” and defending the Seditionist at both of his impeachment hearings.

At a time when Trump’s co-conspirators, probably including his Chief of Staff, admitted they lied about the election being stolen, House Republicans handed the reins of power to someone who showed no hesitation to help overturn American democracy. Johnson was given a powerful government position by people in the government who don’t believe in government — and installed an unrepentant election-denier leader two heartbeats away from the presidency.

In his first major initiative as House speaker, Johnson pushed through a bill to provide $14 billion in military assistance to Israel. Before the vote, he declared, “Israel doesn’t need a cease-fire.” However, Palestinians do. Israel’s aerial and ground offensive, ostensibly targeting Hamas infrastructure, has killed over 11,000 people while those who managed to flee Israel’s attack in northern Gaza now encounter a scarcity of food and medicine in the south. “Residents wait hours for a gallon of brackish water that makes them sick,” reported the Times of Israel. Scabies, diarrhea and respiratory infections rip through overcrowded shelters.” 

In addition, Johnson engineered the House censure of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian serving in Congress. The censure resolution is “rife with propaganda, fake history, and racism,” said Juan Cole on Informed Comment. 

In his first public appearance, the newly-elected Christian Zionist told a crowd of Jewish Republicans in Las Vegas: “We are going to stand like a rock with our friend and ally, Israel.” He boasted that his first act as speaker was passing the pro-Israel resolution in spite of “no” votes from several democrats, including Rashida Tlaib, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar. Their opposition was due to the bill’s failure to recognize Palestinian victims and call for a cease-fire. Johnson maliciously and deceitfully blamed their defiance on an “alarming trend of antisemitism” enabled by “academia and the mainstream media, and fringe government figures.”

The evangelical Christian’s rise to power is the biggest political victory for the evangelical movement to date and his connections to Israel reflect the movement’s deep ties to the Israeli far right. “God is not done with Israel,” said Johnson cryptically. He gushed that his 2020 visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount was the “fulfillment of a biblical prophecy.”

This remark references the Christian Zionist end-times belief, derived from a literal reading of the Bible, that Israel is God’s chosen nation and that its 1948 creation will lead to the Second Coming of Christ. In the real world, they rabidly support the state of Israel and its policies, especially regarding the expansion of settlements, the annexation of territories in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

In the biblical narrative, Christ will defeat Evil, or the Antichrist, in an apocalyptic battle that will take place in Israel at Har Megiddo, or Armageddon. Along with Christian believers and converts who have ascended to heaven in the Rapture, Christ will rule from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for a thousand years. Fueled by these fantasies of a cataclysmic war in the Middle East, Christian Zionists maintain that literal war is not something to be avoided, but inevitable, desired by God, and celebrated. These zealots condemn those that oppose Israeli occupation as being evil, aligned with the “Antichrist.”

The Bible becomes a script for those millennial Christians in power, like Mike Johnson — a self-fulfilling prophesy of violence and destruction that portends an apocalyptic foreign policy. In some warped minds, the current battle in Israel may be hastening the coveted dooms-day of reckoning. In a bizarre twist to the end-times prophecy, those Christian Zionists who are the most passionately pro-Israel also believe that those Jews who do not convert to Christianity will not be raptured, and if they don’t convert during the horrific cataclysm at Har Megiddo, they will be condemned to suffer eternally in the “lake of fire.”

Eager to visit the Christian holy land, Johnson traveled to Israel with his pal Gym Jordan. Jordan, who was considered an aggressive and confrontational jerk, was rejected by his party for the speakership. Yet Jordan apparently served as a spiritual mentor to Johnson, who has guest-hosted Jordan’s national radio show Washington Watch, and praised Jordan as a “great friend and leader” and “a guiding light” on his podcast Truth be Told with Mike and Kelly Johnson.

Along with their wives, Jordan and Johnson’s week-long pilgrimage was sponsored by the New York-based 12Tribes Film Foundation, a small outfit that that describes itself as “online warriors for truth about Israel and the Jewish people.” The organization’s CEO Avi Abelow — an arch-Zionist — lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat.

Johnson’s first stop on his Abelow-organized visit was to receive a briefing from the Kohelet Policy Forum, a far-right Israeli think tank that would later help cultivate the Netanyahu administration’s despised plan to weaken the country’s judiciary. The itinerary included meetings with Israeli military officials, business owners, and political leaders including Netanyahu, current Israeli U.N. envoy Gilad Erdan, and other members of the far right Likud Party.

At the Golan Heights, the pair posed and smiled in front of a sign for “Trump Heights,” the name of an Israeli settlement honoring Trump for moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Located in occupied territory claimed by Israel, it is widely considered to violate international law.

Johnson also visited the Temple Mount compound — the Palestinian Aqsa Mosque complex — alongside Abelov, a Temple Mount activist, and Yehudah Glick — an Orthodox rabbi and former Likud lawmaker, who has led the fight to change the legal status quo and permit Jewish prayer at this Palestinian national symbol, the third holiest shrine in the Muslim world, and one of the most sensitive flashpoints in the world. In 2023 during Ramadan, Israeli forces repeatedly invaded the sacred al-Aqsa Mosque, in an act of “state terrorism,” where they beat and expelled Palestinian worshipers on behalf of Jewish extremists.

This visit to Israel, led by right-wing extremists, influenced the future speaker’s views regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During a video made of the trip, Johnson declares — without traveling to Gaza or meeting with Palestinian leaders or activists — that the Palestinian and Israeli people were “working well together” and that there was a “great cohesion of the people” in the West Bank. He blamed “activists and the leftist groups” for “pushing” the narrative that there was conflict, implying that Palestinians enjoyed life under Israeli occupation.

Johnson called Netanyahu, in his first talk with a foreign leader, during which he echoed the premier’s comments that Israel’s war is one of good vs. evil and light vs. darkness. “I assured the prime minister of our own unwavering support of Israel and the people in our Congress and under my leadership, we will be there until the end, we will be there until the end of this conflict.” He opposes basic human rights for Palestinians as well as many Americans.

In an appearance with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Johnson described himself as “a Bible-believing Christian” and said that to understand his politics, one only need to “pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” This is cultish nonsense that threatens democracy.

Democracy means that the candidate ordained by God, in Johnson’s view, lost an election, so he forsook his oath to the Constitution to keep a corrupt, seditious demagogue in power. Democracy also leads to abortions and gay marriage. Under democracy, Johnson also believes that white Christians are being “replaced”— by immigrants, by Muslims, by trans kids, by drag queens, and by a whole litany of scapegoats. So, perhaps, the only way to save the U.S. and white Christians is to end democracy.

In a potentially horrifying scenario, suppose Trump loses the 2024 election but again claims he won and the GOP demands his “victory” to be certified, House speaker Johnson is positioned to do so. A devout apostle to the Pagan Coup Plotter, MAGA Mike is prepared to subvert democracy in deranged obedience to Trump and his biblical fanaticism.

Dr. Jenna Beckham

Dr. Erica Pettigrew

Health care providers face similar confusion also. We are now having to constantly wonder if the evidence-based, standard of care we know we should provide to our patients is, in that moment, legal and/or if it fits within the narrow yet often vague confines of poorly written legislation. We are having to call our hospital and clinic attorneys, consult with ethics committees, and at worst times, turn patients away or defer care.  Some are even unable to refer or transfer patients elsewhere for care due to concerns for repercussions of “aiding and abetting”. As physicians, we completed numerous years of education and training in order to take care of patients. We did not go to medical school and complete residency training to find ourselves spending hours in meetings with lawyers about patient care, but that is what hundreds of doctors have had to do over the last year since the Dobbs decision has allowed states to further interfere with reproductive healthcare.

The past year has felt somehow simultaneously long and grueling as well as one that has moved at lightning speed with constant blindsides of legislative restrictions, court cases, and worst of all, tragic stories of patient suffering. Abortion is now completely banned in 13 states, numerous other states have enacted new laws with extremely strict restrictions, and on a federal level there are ongoing attempts to revoke the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs in the most common medication abortion regimen in the United States.

In a post-Roe United States, the effects of each state’s abortion policy extends beyond its borders, with broad reaching impacts on abortion access regionally and even nationally. Here in North Carolina, we have seen firsthand the effects of increasing abortion bans and restrictions in many of our neighboring states, and much of the southeast region.  As reported by the New York Times, the “Fall of Roe Turned North Carolina Into an Abortion Destination”.  The Society of Family Planning’s #WeCount project, a national abortion reporting effort that aims to capture the shifts in abortion access, reports that the average difference in abortions post-Dobbs in North Carolina has been an increase of 881 abortions per month, ranking us 3rd of the states with the greatest increase. We now commonly see desperate patients from states like Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida as a direct result of their respective abortion bans.

Come July 1, North Carolina will no longer be a refuge for those in dire need for basic health care, and for doctors who wish to practice in a state that respects the medical profession. Our new abortion ban restricts abortions prior to 12 weeks with medically unnecessary barriers and bans most abortions after 12 weeks. It became law on May 16th, a short 14 days after the public and most members of the legislature were first able read the bill that was introduced late in the night on May 2.

Just two weeks. That’s a shockingly short window of time for any bill to become law, let alone a 46-page monster bill that so negatively affects the practice of medicine. The NC Medical Society, NC Society of OBGYNs, and the NC Academy of Family Physicians are all against the law. The bill did not go through the typical process of vetting and debate which is how confusion over vague wording, contradictions, and uncertain intersections with other laws ended up as statute. And now we are having to do our best to interpret what the law says so that we are not criminally charged or do not lose our licenses for providing the best evidence-based medicine to our patients. A lawsuit filed on June 16 by North Carolina health care professionals highlights a few of the most egregious aspects of the law, but even a successful outcome there will not stop most of the law’s harmful effects.

So what are the consequences of these hastily passed, poorly drafted, medically dangerous laws? Patients are unable to receive the best possible care, or at times any care at all.  Doctors have to choose between medical malpractice and criminal prosecution. Some patients who can come up with transportation and hotel costs, childcare, and time off work are forced to become health care refugees when they have to  leave their own state for less restrictive states. There will also be many who are unable to jump through the hoops and travel to access care, therefore being forced to carry a pregnancy against their will or resort to self-managed abortion (a safe option in some situations but not one that is universally preferred.).

Medical professionals are burned out by the moral injury of turning patients away, and soon new abortion ban states like North Carolina are no longer desirable places to practice medicine. OBGYN applications are down 10% in abortion ban states, and that is only the beginning of this phenomenon. Doctors and medical students look for other places to practice when state politicians interfere with the practice of medicine. This healthcare provider shortage goes far beyond abortion care. Family physicians and OBGYNs providing abortion care often do so as a part of their practice. We also provide prenatal care, deliver babies, and serve as primary care providers. When we move away, those services become harder to find. Maternity care deserts grow, the struggle to find a PCP for diabetes and hypertension care becomes even more difficult, and overall accessibility to high quality, full scope medical care suffers. These harmful laws need to be repealed. Leave the practice of medicine to health care professionals, not politicians.

 

Dr. Jenna Beckham

Dr. Jenna Beckham, MD, MSPH, FACOG, is a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist and abortion provider in North Carolina. She also serves as the chair of the board of ProChoiceNC and board vice president of the ACLU of NC. A North Carolina native, Dr. Beckham completed her education and training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her views are her own.

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Dr. Erica Pettigrew

Dr. Erica Pettigrew is a North Carolina primary care physician, who is board-certified in both family medicine and preventive medicine. She is an associate professor, serves as the medical director of a county health department as well as medical director of Occupational Health Services. She earned her medical and law degrees at the University of North Carolina and a master of public health degree from Portland State. Her views are her own.

Via AZ Mirror

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 .

Sensing just how unpopular their agenda is, anti-choice extremists are attacking reporters for calling their abortion bans “bans.”

( Otherwords.org) – Unfortunately, it’s 1984 again in America.

Not the year. The book. George Orwell’s classic novel tells of a far-right totalitarian clique that uses “newspeak” and “doublethink” to impose their rigid, anti-democratic doctrine on society. 

Their regime held power through mind control — they had a “Ministry of Truth” for perverting language and manipulating facts, while their “Thought Police” enforced ideological purity and suppressed dissent.

Thirty-nine years later, here comes a clique of theocratic extremists in our country using Orwellian manipulation in its crusade to take control over every woman’s personal reproductive rights. 

Having seized the Supreme Court and practically the entire Republican Party, these present-day autocrats are now demanding that state and national lawmakers enforce the group’s ultimate dictate: A total ban on abortions, even in cases of rape and incest.

Image by Mike Ljung from Pixabay

To their amazement, however, the great majority of Americans — including many Republican voters — think abortion ought to be generally available, with each woman deciding what’s best for her. Moreover, the idea of Big Brother imposing a federal ban is massively unpopular.

No problem, say today’s Orwellian newspeakers, we’ll just ban the word “ban” from our PR campaigns. Thus their harsh abortion ban has magically morphed linguistically into a “pro-life plan.” There — feel better?

Doubling down on their propaganda ploy, the abortion truth twisters are also plotting to ban reporters from using what one called “the big ban word.” Anti-abortion agents are now barraging news outlets with warnings that any use of that verb will be considered proof of political bias. 

Sure enough, rather than risk right-wing fury, some scaredy-cat reporters are already caving in, meekly describing bans as “restrictions on procedures.” How nice — a kinder, gentler tyranny!

To keep up with the 2023 version of Orwell’s Thought Police, follow journalist Jessica Valenti’s diligent tracking of anti-abortion trickery at Jessica.substack.com.

 

 

Jim Hightower

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.

Via Otherwords.org

 

This sharing by 71 CA police agencies violates state law and could be used by other states to identify and prosecute abortion seekers and providers.

( Electronic Frontier Foundation ) – SAN FRANCISCO—Seventy-one California police agencies in 22 counties must immediately stop sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data with law enforcement agencies in other states because it violates California law and could enable prosecution of abortion seekers and providers elsewhere, three civil liberties groups demanded Thursday in letters to those agencies.

The letters from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU NorCal), and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California (ACLU SoCal) gave the agencies a deadline of June 15 to comply and respond. A months-long EFF investigation involving hundreds of public records requests uncovered that many California police departments share records containing detailed driving profiles of local residents with out-of-state agencies.

ALPR camera systems collect and store location information about drivers, including dates, times, and locations. This sensitive information can reveal where individuals work, live, associate, worship—or seek reproductive health services and other medical care.

“ALPRs invade people’s privacy and violate the rights of entire communities, as they often are deployed in poor and historically overpoliced areas regardless of crime rates,” said EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Pinsof. “Sharing ALPR data with law enforcement in states that criminalize abortion undermines California’s extensive efforts to protect reproductive health privacy.”

The letters note how the nation’s legal landscape has changed in the past year.

“Particularly since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, ALPR technology and the information it collects is vulnerable to exploitation against people seeking, providing, and facilitating access to abortion,” the letters say. “Law enforcement officers in anti-abortion jurisdictions who receive the locations of drivers collected by California-based ALPRs may seek to use that information to monitor abortion clinics and the vehicles seen around them and closely track the movements of abortion seekers and providers. This threatens even those obtaining or providing abortions in California, since several anti-abortion states plan to criminalize and prosecute those who seek or assist in out-of-state abortions.”

Image by Simon from Pixabay

Idaho, for example, has enacted a law that makes helping a pregnant minor get an abortion in another state punishable by two to five years in prison.

The agencies that received the demand letters have shared ALPR data with law enforcement agencies across the country, including agencies in states with abortion restrictions including Alabama, Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas. Since 2016, sharing any ALPR data with out-of-state or federal law enforcement agencies is a violation of the California Civil Code (SB 34). Nevertheless, many agencies continue to use services such as Vigilant Solutions or Flock Safety to make the ALPR data they capture available to out-of-state and federal agencies.

California law enforcement’s sharing of ALPR data with law enforcement in states that criminalize abortion also undermines California’s extensive efforts to protect reproductive health privacy, specifically a 2022 law (AB 1242) prohibiting state and local agencies from providing abortion-related information to out-of-state agencies.

Via Electronic Frontier Foundation

Published under Creative Commons License 3.0.