The fight for abortion rights turns to state constitutions

[TNHarley]

“A suit in Oklahoma contends that the state’s competing abortion bans violate due process as well as a constitutional ‘right to personal autonomy and bodily integrity.’
That argument actually makes sense.
roeVwade was a farce of a decision. I am as pro choice as they come and agree the ruling last week was the right one.

 

[Tom Paine 1949]

“A suit in Oklahoma contends that the state’s competing abortion bans violate due process as well as a constitutional ‘right to personal autonomy and bodily integrity.’
That argument actually makes sense.
roeVwade was a farce of a decision. I am as pro choice as they come and agree the ruling last week was the right one.

Glad to see that, despite your opposition to Roe vs. Wade as “a farce of a decision,” you support a woman’s right to have an abortion.

We agree that it makes sense for Oklahomans to support a “constitutional right to personal autonomy and bodily integrity.”

I know you are a strong defender of state’s rights. I’m wondering if — besides your opposition to Roe as a usurpation of “states rights” — you see anything else especially objectionable about it?

 

[martybegan]

Glad to see that, despite your opposition to Roe vs. Wade as “a farce of a decision,” you support a woman’s right to have an abortion.

We agree that it makes sense for Oklahomans to support a “constitutional right to personal autonomy and bodily integrity.”

I know you are a strong defender of state’s rights. I’m wondering if — besides your opposition to Roe as a usurpation of “states rights” — you see anything else especially objectionable about it?

It was made up wishful thinking is the objectionable part, the same as it is when the same logic is used at the State level unless the State Constitution specifically mentions abortion.

 

[JohnDB]

I'm thinking that it's going to be very interesting to see how "snowflake " babies are handled.

For those who don't understand...
A snowflake baby is a leftover embryo from an IVF procedure.
There are literally catalogs of babies that can be adopted...whatever genetic traits or appearances you want can be had.

Some are destroyed...some are adopted...some are sold for research.

What happens to these "snowflake " babies isn't exactly headlines at the moment but...it's yet another reality that the laws are not addressing.

 

[Tom Paine 1949]

“About Roe?” -TNH

I guess I’m asking if you are more absolutist than Roe was in regard to protecting the “constitutional right to personal autonomy and bodily integrity” … and thus want an even stronger pro-abortion guarantee by states than Roe provided nationally.

Roe recognized, besides the woman’s right to abortion, gradually growing potentially competing “interests of the state” in the life and health of the fetus — especially after viability in the third trimester. Would you like to see state constitutions or state laws do the same?

Of course there are many different state laws and guidelines being proposed and instituted, some very draconian, others not. I’m sure, since you are generally in favor of a woman having the right to terminate a pregnancy, that you would oppose many of these extreme anti-abortion proposals, and that you would likely oppose severely punishing women and doctors who break them, treating them as “murderers,” etc.

Sorry my question is so abstract. Perhaps you can answer by saying when, if ever, you personally would like your own state to “ban abortion” … when the mother’s life is not at stake.

 

[Concerned American]

The Republican-dominated Supreme Court

That is false ^^^.

 

[Concerned American]

I’m asking if you are more absolutist than Roe was in regard to protecting the “constitutional right to personal autonomy and bodily integrity” … and thus want an even stronger pro-abortion guarantee by states than Roe provided nationally.

If you are going to limit posters to the privacy/states rights issue, don't be a hypocrite and promote abortion in the same thread. Abortion is murder.

 

[Concerned American]

And you obviously think fifty standards are worse than one. I think just the opposite, we then have fifty chances for everyone to find a solution that they are happy with. A complicated legal landscape is a good thing for freedom.

The left is scared to death that with the debate switched to the states, abortion will only be allowed in half a dozen states. WA, OR, CA, NY, MA, and MI

 

[flan327]

Did you read the OP? Maybe you should. This is the first line.

Here are excerpts from a much longer article that discusses the state by state legal fight for women’s reproductive rights,

Now are you less confused. The new double speak for abortion is reproductive rights. Abortion is the antithesis of reproduction.

Condescending twat

 

[Concerned American]

Condescending twat

Sorry, wrong sex for a twat. You don't have a very good command of the language do you. If you don't know what you are talking about, it is best to just STFU. A great woman once told me, "It is better to keep you mouth shut and let people THINK you are stupid, than to open it and remove all doubt." Words you might want to adhere to.

 

[Tom Paine 1949]

My home state, sunny Florida, before Roe was overturned had a law guaranteeing a woman’s right to abortion through the 24th week of pregnancy. After 24 weeks it was allowed only in cases where the health of the woman was threatened, or where rape or incest were involved.

Since Roe was overturned by the conservative Republican-dominated Supreme Court, this state law has been replaced with a law supported by Florida’s popular Republican Governor (and possible Presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis, which ALLOWS abortion up to 15 weeks but bans it afterwards even in cases of rape and incest.

“While DeSantis signed a bill, HB 5, this year banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, it only outlaws a small number of abortions. More than 96% of abortions in 2019 were done within 13 weeks of a pregnancy. Many red states have gone further, limiting abortions to just the first few weeks of pregnancy or outlawing them entirely.”

This new law has been fought over in state courts but for now will probably stay in effect despite appeals that it violates the State Constitution “privacy” guarantee. Of course if DeSantis runs for President, he will carefully consider if it is in his political interest to replaced the 15 week allowance with a bill that outlaws ALL abortions.

The present 15-week law was designed to show Republican “reasonableness” in the period leading up to Roe being overturned. Florida is not as strongly anti-abortion as other parts of the South. Indeed, a slight majority of Floridians generally favor women’s right to abortions rather than oppose them. My guess is that DeSantis and Republican politicians will test the wind carefully and do whatever they believe will protect their political interests before changing the law again.

Details on the abortion situation in Florida can be found here:
DeSantis promises more ‘pro-life protections.’ What will he do next on abortion?

 

[EvilCat Breath]

It is reasonable to question the motives of a woman who cannot decide whether the child was conceived as a result of rape or incest until after 25 weeks.

 

[HikerGuy83]

Here are excerpts from a much longer article that discusses the state by state legal fight for women’s reproductive rights, now that Roe v Wade has been over-ruled by a Republican-dominated SC. Please use this thread for discussion of state legal and political struggles on this important issue:

“Anti-abortion actors have long claimed that overturning Roe — and sending the question of whether individuals should enjoy reproductive freedom back to state politicians — would simplify the legal landscape. But legal scholars say the opposite is true …. The lack of a single standard regarding the legality of abortion is unleashing a flood of litigation as restrictions are challenged against individual state constitutions, and competing visions about reproductive freedom give rise to new interstate battles…

“Only four states have constitutions that explicitly do not protect abortion rights. A majority of the first wave of lawsuits seeking to block bans are based on state constitutional protections that lawyers argue are more expansive than those provided in the U.S. Constitution.

“Lawsuits pending in Idaho, Ohio, and Utah, for example, cite broad privacy rights and liberty interests, arguing that abortion bans discriminate against women and violate equal protection guarantees.

“A suit in Oklahoma contends that the state’s competing abortion bans violate due process as well as a constitutional ‘right to personal autonomy and bodily integrity.’

“The Kentucky lawsuit argues that the state’s two abortion bans (a trigger ban and a six-week ban) violate state constitutional rights of privacy and self-determination.

“A suit in Mississippi, meanwhile, filed on behalf of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, argues that the state’s Supreme Court already concluded in 1998 that the constitution explicitly protected abortion. ‘As confirmed by the Mississippi Supreme Court … the decision about whether and when to have children belongs to individuals and families, not to the state’s politicians,’ said Rob McDuff, a lawyer with the Mississippi Center for Justice, which is among the groups representing the state’s lone abortion provider.

“And in Florida, a suit challenging a new 15-week ban notes that in 1980, voters amended the state constitution to provide robust individual privacy rights, which were designed to include the right to abortion; in 2012, voters rejected an attempt to repeal that right. Protecting the right to abortion in Florida is considered crucial to maintaining access in the South.”

The Fight for Abortion Rights Turns to State Constitutions

States working it out.

Great !

 

[Tom Paine 1949]

The different states are now — and not for the first time — taking different views on abortion rights. This needs a bit of historical perspective.

First of all, the greatest crime and most horrible example of anti-abortion fervor, completely controlling women’s bodies, and enforcing reproduction for commercial gain, was the original one — plantation slavery.

For white women North & South, East & West, there was a very different reality before the Civil War. In all these places there were networks of midwives in place not only to help most women birth children, but also to help them terminate unwanted or life-threatening pregnancies — without laws making their action illegal. There were certainly no out-of-family “overseers” or slavemasters to punish them because they wanted those babies as slaves. Let’s look at those times…

In 1851, Sojourner Truth delivered a speech best known as “Ain’t I A Woman?” to a crowded audience at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio. At the time, slavery remained in full force, a vibrant enterprise that fueled the American economy…
Ms. Truth condemned this disgraceful enterprise, which thrived off not only uncompensated labor, but also physical and psychological terror.

Most will remember Ms. Truth’s oration for its vivid descriptions regarding physical labor; Black women were forced to plough, plant, herd, and build — just as men. Yet far too little attention centers on her condemnation of that system, which made sexual chattel of Black women, and then cruelly sold off Black children. This was human trafficking in the American form, and it lasted for centuries. Ms. Truth pleaded:

“I have borne 13 children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”

The Racist History of Abortion and Midwifery Bans | News & Commentary | American Civil Liberties Union

Nobody can read minds or “textually” determine the “Founding Fathers’ intent” concerning possible future laws regulating abortion. One wonders why we never ask what our “Founding Mothers” would think about all this if they were still alive! Anyway, traditional exegesis of “holy texts” is useless and irrelevant here.

The modern history of anti-abortion law in the U.S. begins after the Civil War. It had no connection to the liberating postwar Amendments — far from it. It was a state by state project, and it wasn’t until 1910 that abortion in every state became illegal. It wasn’t done on the basis of Constitutional texts — any more than a Constitution was needed to take women from Africa to enslave them, to rape them or force them to have children so they too could be slaves and worked or sold for a profit.

It was more pedestrian than that at the beginning of the modern postbellum period. In the 1880s the male-dominated “Medical Establishment” in the AMA began to unleash a powerful campaign nationally against the traditional roles of midwives (who were their competition) and against abortion and other “barbaric” practices. The elitist and patriarchal AMA “medical professionalism” campaign gradually became linked to the campaigns at that very time to convince bourgeois white women to have more children to counter the influence of immigrants from non-English-speaking countries.

This was also the time that forced sterilizations by doctors and new eugenics boards all over the country became very active. Purifying the racial stock of white America (as in Hitler Germany) implied increasing middle-class Anglo-Saxon population via anti-abortion and health campaigns, while at the same time sterilizing poor (especially black) women who gave birth in the Deep South, as well as Latinos in California and Native Americans. This was a basically middle-class patriarchal, class and race-based campaign.

Today’s progressive fight for women’s “right to choose” is best characterized as part of the historical fight for women’s “reproductive rights.” The fight for women’s right to control their own bodily integrity is a key democratic fight that men should support. The fact that it is once more the poorest women of the “Deep South” who will suffer the most from laws banning all abortions … is no accident.

 

[BlackSand]

This thread is not a discussion of “abortion” or of the “rights of the unborn” per se, but of the developing legal and political battles in separate states over the issue.

There are plenty of places to discuss whether “the unborn” have rights — including in discussions of the potential “end of human life” caused by possible overpopulation, environmental catastrophe or nuclear war!

Similarly, people’s professed moral or theological opinions on the issue, as interesting as they may be, is better discussed elsewhere.

I’m also personally not interested at this point in discussing whether the 50 year precedent established by Roe vs. Wade was rightly or wrongly — or could have somehow been “better” — decided. A future Supreme Court may reverse this court, or new Federal laws or even a Constitutional Amendment may ultimately be passed. Right now the struggle goes on in individual states. In the next years we shall see if this Republican “victory” improves or worsens the situation for women’s rights … and for national unity.

.

But what is the legal struggle you are interested in?

The States are free to use the Powers defined by their legislation to Amend their Constitutions, or write Legislation is they so choose.
If people want to continue to struggle with that ... Then they need to go to their elected State Representatives, and not the Courts.

.​

 

[Tom Paine 1949]

Good question. There will be different political struggles in every state, and most will certainly take the form of electoral struggles, struggles over passing or rejecting laws in state legislatures, and court battles based on State constitutions. Probably some states will end up having their constitutions amended — for better or worse.

Where individuals are concerned it will likely take the form of civil disobedience, or getting “illegal abortions.” Desperate women trying to end unwanted pregnancies have often in the past had to “break the law” and I assume we will see this happen in the future.

Some state laws may be so strict that authorities will hunt down women who use certain contraceptive methods (that prevent implantation of the fertilized woman’s egg in the womb). Today there are “morning after” pills and mail order “chemical abortions” available as well. Let us hope that the days of death from “coat hanger abortions” don’t return.

 

[Concerned American]

.

But what is the legal struggle you are interested in?

The States are free to use the Powers defined by their legislation to Amend their Constitutions, or write Legislation is they so choose.
If people want to continue to struggle with that ... Then they need to go to their elected State Representatives, and not the Courts.

.​

Bottom line, who do the leftists in CA, WA, NY etc think they are that they feel they can dictate their values on OH, OK, AR, TX, SD etc? You want to legalize the murder of innocents in your shithole---go for it and leave states who believe in the sanctity of life alone.

 

[Tom Paine 1949]

The sad truth is that now that Roe has been repealed by a 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court, many Christian evangelical and MAGA anti-abortion types want to outlaw abortion … nationally.

Our present “Supremes” may very well endorse a national anti-abortion law if one is passed in Congress in the next period.

By November of this year it’s possible that both Houses of Congress will be firmly in Republican hands, and by 2024 Trump may be re-elected.

This thread is about the struggle going on state by state, but defenders of a woman’s right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy even in Blue States should be fully aware of this danger.

Here’s an “opinion” piece by a prominent conservative anti-abortion intellectual who writes for The Federalist and is editor of National Review and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute:

“The legal door may be open for a federal ban on abortion. How hard to push on it raises a series of prudential judgments…. The upshot is that pro-lifers should not rule out federal action in principle. Laws restricting abortion throughout the country should be our goal….” — Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

Of course many Republicans often in the past argued a “states rights” position on abortion, accusing the old Supreme Court majority of taking on legislative prerogatives that belong to the states on this issue, but note they also often dared Democrats to try to legislate a pro-abortion law in Congress instead of relying on the SC.

Republicans knew the Democrats didn’t have the numbers (or courage) to pass a national pro-Choice law, and of course long ago played a big role in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment.

A pro-abortion federal law certainly would be ruled un-Constitutional by THIS Supreme Court. But some radical MAGA anti-abortion authoritarians, with evangelical fanatics pushing them, and now confident their time has arrived. Even the milk-toast Pence says he is for a national law outlawing abortion.

Republican strategists and lawyers have been setting the groundwork for such a sweeping anti-abortion offensive for years. There are at least two ways a national anti-abortion law could be accepted by this pathetic Supreme Court.

One is simply by redefining a human fetus and embryo as a “person” with the “right to live” and thus constitutional protection under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment.

The other is by “hooking” an anti-abortion approach like the above to the commerce clause, legislating, for example, that concern for “the unborn” justifies the outlawing of “baby killing” businesses or devices or medications in interstate commerce. A bare majority of this Supreme Court might just prove sympathetic.

How the Supreme Court Could Approach Federal Laws Upholding—or Banning—Abortion

 

[Tom Paine 1949]

It has been a while since this thread was active. As I feared, extremist MAGA Republicans and rightwing evangelicals have waged their war on a women’s right to choose abortion when she suffers an unwanted pregnancy by passing draconian anti-abortion laws in many Red states. In my own state, Florida, politicians have forbidden it after the sixth week, though before then most women are likely not even aware they are pregnant!

The logic of the rightwing’s “culture war” to “Make America Great Again” has unleashed this crazy reactionary alliance of cynical MAGA witch hunters and evangelical moral absolutists against the “Demonrats” they accuse of being “communists” or “agents of Satan.” They have started agitating for a NATIONAL law banning abortion, and are working on outlawing “abortion pills” as well.

There is resistance of course. Here is a quick excerpt from Reuters:

Women state senators cross party lines to block proposed South Carolina abortion ban

April 28 (Reuters) - A day after all five women in the South Carolina state senate banded together to block a proposed abortion ban, Republican Senator Sandy Senn posted a picture of the group on her Facebook page calling the three Republicans, one Democrat and one Independent "united and unstoppable."…

In Kansas last summer, voters roundly defeated a measure that would have made it easier to ban abortion in that state….

The group's successful filibuster of the near-total abortion ban came on the same day that the legislature in Nebraska defeated a ban on most abortions after six weeks by just one vote….

Earlier this month, Wisconsin voters elected liberal judge Janet Protasiewica to the state Supreme Court, flipping control to a liberal majority ahead of rulings on an abortion ban and other matters that could play a role in the 2024 presidential election….

The vote to "continue," or delay, discussion of the proposed ban passed by just one vote on Thursday, state records show. The motion to end the women's filibuster also failed by one vote.

Women state senators cross party lines to block proposed South Carolina abortion ban

A day after all five women in the South Carolina state senate banded together to block a proposed abortion ban, Republican Senator Sandy Senn posted a picture of the group on her Facebook page calling the three Republicans, one Democrat and one Independent "united and unstoppable."

www.reuters.com

 

[Concerned American]

rightwing evangelicals have waged their war on a women’s right to choose abortion when she suffers an unwanted pregnancy by passing draconian anti-abortion laws in many Red states.

In my state WA, the legislators agree with you when it comes to the murder of unborn children. I find it ironic that democrat governor Jay Inslee also believes it is barbaric to exercise the death penalty against the most violent offenders among us. Murder is OK on the innocent, but not permitted against violent predators. For crying out loud. Inslee provides more protections for wolves than he does the unborn. Thanks for letting everyone know where you come down on this debate. Too bad your parents didn't exercise their abortion rights.