UKH

US Supreme Court halts right to abortion

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-61928898

What next, contraception?

Would you move your family to the states – all things being equal?

But you can now carry a gun anywhere. Save lives here, lose lives there. So it will kinda even out.

It is a bit of a farce as it just leads to pills being posted across State boundaries or even popping across to Mexico or Canada.

The anti abortion fundamentalists just cannot think there are ways round it.

Recently discussed on MoreOrLess - guns are the biggest cause of child death in the US. Apologies couldn't find the link.

I'd heard some states plan to make it illegal to leave the state to have an abortion. 

I doubt  that is practical.

Sometimes you just have to step back and think...how the hell are they going to enforce/apply it.

I think the problem with your assumption is that for many, many US women there isn't a way around it.

If they have money, or can travel, its probably going to be very difficult but possible.

Otherwise, nope.

What an awful, mixed up country

I have the opportunity to visit family there and be looked after, but I'll stick to his visits back to the UK!

I agree. If this was Afghsnistan the US would be condemning an authoritarian, fundamentalist anti-women regime. 

I could weep at 50 years of rights being wiped out by a minority supported Supreme Court.

This is not democracy. 

There is, but it is highly dangerous! Backstreet abortions happened widely before people could get legal, safe abortions. This practice will resume, to everyone's detriment.

I know a few people - myself included - are discounting further trips to the States because it is becoming increasingly alien, hostile.

I know the loss of tourist revenue won't be a big deal, but it is 'interesting'. 

There is talk of using more bounty hunter style laws to empower anyone to go after a woman who has an abortion - like the Texas law, where anyone can sue someone for helping a woman have a termination, from the doctor who performs it to the uber driver who drives her to the clinic.

i imagine they’re going to find a single poor black woman and jail her for ten years to make the base happy and encourager les autres. That seems to be the usual US procedure.

jcm

It might prompt any women who are going to college/university to choose one in a State that does allow abortion/the pill/etc..

For that matter, it might be in their best interests never to go back home after graduation if their home state is one of these redneck ones.

Furthermore, I wonder what the situation might be for the USA military, if a woman is posted to a state that refuses a woman's right to control her own body. Removing military bases from such states and transferring them to "more enlightened" ones is something the Federal Government could do, and that could severely affect the economics of the local area.

Agreed. Sorry, I meant legal, safe access.

If you remove the college educated from these states it’s unlikely there would ever be an electorate who would change them from GOP to Dem no matter how bad things got

One of the supreme court justices said that the right to contraception is another ruling that needs looking at. 

It’s coming here next. Once the victimisation of immigrants has run its course the right will need a new hobby horse. Currently it’s climate denial but Lord Moylan (former advisor to Johnson) has already tweeted his approval 

That's unlikely for a number of reasons, but I'd say the most significant is the political independence of UK courts.

In the US this has only happened because of the political makeup of the Supreme Court - ironically brought about by Trump but who has since stated that the ruling will be bad for Republicans. Going against public opinion like this could backfire by giving Democrats a major campaign issue around to unify.

The victimisation of immigrants has been the right’s go-to since the Huguenots and long before; it’s not going to run its course any time soon. Besides, I can’t see an attack on abortion working here - you need a much more undemocratic system than we have to get it off the ground.

jcm

I don’t think the independence of the courts has much to do with it; if the Tories woke up tomorrow, withdrew from the ECHR, repealed the HRA and amended the Abortion Act to make abortion illegal, I don’t see what the courts could do about it. It’s not the non-independent courts that are the US problem so much as the silly ancestor-worship they go in for.

To be fair to SCOTUS, if you forget the emotive subject matter, this is a very defensible decision. It’s not actually about whether abortion is right or wrong but about whether the 1776 slave owners intended to grant it as an inalienable right or not. If I had to guess, I would say with the majority that they did not. Of course in reality the division even on the court is political, but that is true of both sides.

The main problem is that many US people are religious nut jobs. It’s not obviously wrong to have matters such as this decided at a state level. What is wrong is politicians voting to please their base and not enact the popular will in a matter of conscience of this kind.

jcm

I should have been clearer, I don’t think it would succeed here but I think it will be something the right will start to play up as they start a new front in the cultural wars. Fortunately we don’t really have much of a politically active Christian evangelical movement in the UK

Possibly if this includes the other party involved in the knocking-up in the first place it might make some people think more about how ridiculous it's all getting.

I moved back to the States last year after more than 20 years abroad, mostly in the UK.  This country is f'kd, and that's my optimistic viewpoint.  I wouldn't be here if it wasn't necessary at the moment.

Just last Sunday I was out on my local run which goes up the Black Mountain ridge.  It was a quiet, stunning morning, nobody about.  Nearing the top of the ridge I saw a young lady and two young fellows coming down the trail carrying backpacks, had obviously been out camping the night before.  They politely stepped aside to let me pass, my head was down as the path is steep and rocky but I looked up to say thanks and good morning and noticed that the two lads were both carrying assault rifles across their chest, literally as if out on patrol.

This is what is allowed here, and it's completely insane.  Luckily these two fellas were the self-appointed "good guys with guns" keeping us all safe from the bad ones.  But I didn't know that, they weren't wearing signs announcing that they were just good Christian folk with good intentions.   It shattered the sense of peace as simply carrying a gun is an act of aggression, as they are assuming power over everyone.

Now this Roe v Wade comes out this morning, and I'm not surprised in the least.  I grew up in the South and I've been around this evangelical shite most of my life.  And it's only going to get worse as a significant proportion of Americans think the election was stolen and Trump is appointed by God, and I wish that was hyperbole.

The most dangerous thing would be to think it can't happen elsewhere.  

They don’t have to enforce it before, just afterwards. Fines and prison sentences for women travelling for abortions once they get home. Possible bounties to catch women in the act if the state can’t manage it. Getting data from fertility tracking apps as proof. Criminalising doctors who treat abortion-related complications. 
 

I mean, those white Christian supremacist Americans are dictatorial nut jobs who want to make women second class citizens, who knows what crazy unhinged shit they will come up with.

Depressing viewing 

https://www.leica-oskar-barnack-award.com/en/shortlists/shortlist-2021/gabr...

There are already charitable organisations doing this type of support. Very sad that it had to come to this.

This last year, a group of mostly old, white British people have routinely been “protesting” in our local university city with placards plastered with gory medical images re: abortions, with many students reporting they feel highly threatened and harassed.  They claim to be doing this in the name of Jesus Christ.  Retirees being weaponised (gammonised) into the culture war.  There have been other signs of women’s body autonomy being gammonised over here; a couple of the pop-up posters from the covid era got themselves checked out over a recent thread on that subject here.  One could almost think there’s a malevolent force behind it all in the UK too.

Also some are looking at same sex marriage, LGBT rights etc. Utterly appalling.

It all strikes me as being somewhat Talibanesque, loads of old men controlling society.

There is no shortage of people here who condemn Afghanistan, Iran etc in one breath and emphasise our shared values with the US in the next.

Imagine the headlines if they weren't white and had big beards.

The mid term elections will be pivotal, if you get republican majorities in the house and senate (i.e. 60 or more republican senators) then things could get really scary. 

Having argued/been successful that it’s up to states to decide on abortion (indirectly via appointment of Supreme Court justices) there is a view with a majority they will try to legislate at a federal level to ban abortion everywhere and other items (such as same sex marriage) and overwrite states rights…..obviously this is totally contradictory/nonsense but am sure they will come up with a reason why it’s all consistent.

The real problem is all the people who need abortions but can't travel thousands of miles to get one. 

Fascism 

The evangelical Christian element is the key difference. Yes in theory here the right could start playing with abortion as an emotive subject but I just don't think it would be push the same buttons as it does in the United States. I think most right (not politically) thinking, non religious people believe abortion isn't a 'good' thing, but it's an option for women when the alternatives are worse and the choice should be theirs. 

However if I were truly an evangelical Christian, my motivation would be that I was literally saving souls of unborn children, and that of their mother from an eternal damnation in a hell I strongly believe is real. It's hard to comprehend that and it shows why there's such strong feeling in the US but at least in the UK fewer people profess to be Christian and even those that are tend to be mostly of the more mild, less fire and brimstone variety. 

I thought it was ironic that the conservative right in America were saying that 'bans don't work' when discussing assault rifle regulation but we're happy to ban medical intervention for women in the same breath. 

I am in the midst of a conversation on Facebook at the moment with an American guy who shared a flat with my husband at uni in Edinburgh. He falls in the "pro-life" camp, but very much feels they need massive social reforms to make it far more feasible for people to follow through with a pregnancy, which I can't fault him for. However, he is also pro-guns. I am arguing with him just now over the inconsistency of his arguments. He is essentially arguing that America exists as a nation because they armed themselves against the British in the 1700s. That seems to be the main point of his argument!! He has served in the US military, so he knows that any civilian "well armed militia" (were they to even vaguely manage to organize such a thing) would be no match for US military might. 

I despair!

”One could almost think there’s a malevolent force behind it all in the UK too.”

Exactly this.

I worry where the UK will head. Johnson and the lot propping him up (visible and unvisible), need to be got out asap. I hope it will not be too late by the time we have our next general election. 

They will be sent abortion pills in the post from overseas. 
 

I think it is in one of those books in the law of unintended consequences which points out that the crime rate in the USA fell after Rode v Wade. So expect it to go up in a few years time.  

There is some very compelling studies that show the drop in crime in the 90’s in the US was down to the effect of Roe V Wade, unfortunately it was at the time attributed to the zero tolerance stance of politicians like Rudy Gulianni. The zero tolerance approach just resulted in the the BLM movement.
It is quite possible that the Supreme Court sitting at the moment may result in the US falling off the precipice which will have real consequences for the worlds ability to deal with things like climate change and other challenges. Not to mention the immediate tragic personal consequences for 10’s of thousands of women.

https://law.stanford.edu/publications/the-impact-of-legalized-abortion-on-c...

And for those who this isn’t appropriate/possible? Or those who suffer serious complications from the medication and need further treatment but can’t access it? Sitting at home rapidly losing blood and knowing that you’ll likely be prosecuted if you go to hospital to get the blood transfusion you need? Or when this unregulated source of medication turns out to not be what it was sold as? Etc etc

Now, maybe try to imagine what it might be like to be a pregnant adolescent rape survivor having to make potentially life changing and traumatic medical decisions in secret with no support from anyone around you. 

This ruling really isn’t as inconsequential as you keep making out. 

It's been attributed to removing lead from petrol as well because of the affect lead can have on growing brains. I don't think it comes down to one thing but one undeniable fact is that harder access to safe abortions disproportionately affects the underprivileged in society. 

Girlmonkey said one of her acquaintances cited the founding notion of fighting off British repression as a justification for gun culture. Many people parrot this but frankly some people like having guns, the justification is looked for afterwards like so many factors in life. 

I haven't had a leisure trip to the US since 2008 but tend to go every year or two for work and I work directly with American based colleagues every day. I wouldn't even entertain the thought of living there right now, even if it was a work transfer which would mean nice corporate housing, health care and all the privileges of the higher echelons of American society. I can see it getting worse before it gets better. 

We had a trip planned in 2020 which obviously didn't happen then or the year after, because Covid.  This year we ditched it because of the general gung-ho Covid attitude there seemed to be in the US.  Last night, we decided that we'd definitely do it next year because neither of us were comfortable leaving it any later in a country that seems to be heading for further division and internal strife.  Plus, it seems to be on fire a lot, or dessicated, or both.

Great shame.  But if we don't make that trip next year, I have my doubts whether it will happen at all.

T.

"Well regulated militia"

I seem to remember one of the compelling aspects of the research was that states where abortion had been legal prior to ‘73 did not see the drop in crime, it was only in places where the laws changed post Roe v Wade. I can’t remember the fine detail though. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/what-caused-the-crime-...

There's a good article here which basically suggests no single factor has a definitive causation that can be proven. The biggest mystery is that violent crime tended to drop across most developed countries in the same period (including where gun availability and abortion access where not major issues). It's just that the US came from such a high peak (2.2k murders per year in NY City is insane and basically warzone per capita death levels). 

Upon their own judgement, in the moment?

No thanks to that.

So we are to assume all the countries where abortion was illegal up to 50 years ago were authoritarian, fundamentalist anti-women regimes? Like New Zealand, Ireland etc.

The court decision was whether it comes within the remit of the federal government to make a ruling or the individual states right to self-determination. Obnoxious as it might be the decision was foreseeable, that's their system.

Thread 

Perhaps worth noting that until 2019 the UK was in pretty much the position the US is now - there was no universal right to abortion and it was banned in Northern Ireland.   A bit of pot calling the kettle black going on?

The Irish government issued a formal apology for the Magdalene Laundries, which would certainly fit that description I think, in 2013.  The last one closed in the late '90s.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-magdalene-laundry/

Edit to add:
As for it being "their system" - it seems very much from this recent ruling that two of the supreme court judges lied when they were directly asked about their feelings on this, under oath, during their confirmation hearings quite recently.  That's not supposed to happen.

Not a lawyer, but my understanding is you are wrong here. What SCOTUS has found in 2022 is that the SCOTUS of 1972 was wrong in finding a constitutional basis of a woman's right to choose an abortion, under her right to privacy. No constitutional protection and it reverts to state governments to decide. That is essentially what Roe was, a constitutional basis for a woman to have control over body, the decision yesterday is simply there never was such a basis.

The federal government could theoretically amend the constitution to give that protection but it can't currently because you need 2/3rds of Congress and States IIRC, to agree to a constitutional amendment. Additionally the filibuster means the democrats in power can't even pass federal laws protecting abortion access.

People might be interested in this https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/us/abortion-supreme-court-roberts.html on just how marginal the chief justice has become and how he can't control the court now. His incremental approach has been blown apart and his respect for past precedent (i.e. Roe v Wade) ignored. Thomas has already publicly said the court must now revisit other 'wrongly' decided cases such as the constitutional right to gay marriage and so on. 

In that context and at the time, yes. Maybe best to ask the views of women who were around in these countries at the time. Re Ireland, the last horrendous scandal I can think of was this: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/27/world/europe/savita-halappanavar-ireland...

https://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/abortion-laws-savita-halappanavar-sto...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/08/abortion-refusal-death-irelan...

I have very warm feelings for Ireland and the Irish but the influence of the Catholic Church on Irish society is imho as backward, evil and deserving of condemnation as the theocratic misogynistic fascism of any number of states we happily opine on (Saudi, Afghanistan, Iran, take your pick). 

Something I used to say about the more hardcore Christian unions found at some older universities.  

I think there's a big difference between situations where abortion wasn't legal 'yet' 50 years ago, and a modern democracy removing that right today.

Don't be ridiculous. That's not the point I'm making. 

It's the reversal of the decision that is Talibanesque. 

 UK burnt witches at the stake in the 15th century and hung people in the 20th. We have to live with that past, but a return to those laws would be regarded as an unenlightened decision. 

Here's a French cartoon from one of their newspapers.

It's disturbing but then so can the consequences be when a load of fundamentalists vainly throw their weight around.

https://www.liberation.fr/resizer/aY8_hlmNSJ3LG6d6UsTqXdxzOOI=/600x0/filter...

Not awful, Divided yes just like the uk.

Which in itself is wrong. They exist because of overseas power throwing cash and weapons at them in order to try and damage the British and get revenge for a previous war.

Its also rather telling the first serious engagement was the British trying to seize a militias arsenal.

Which was a qualified success since the expenditure pushed the French monarchy over the edge financially.

Whilst less fun for the average person who likes hanging out down the range if he did want to be ready to rebel against an unjust government then learning chemistry and electronics so he can make IEDs would be a far better investment in time. Or possibly computer skills for cyber attacks.

There is talk ? this is nonsense.

provide evidence please...... Thanks.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220323-another-us-state-passes-abor...

You do know about Google, right?

The 'abortion bounty hunter' isn't new.

https://www.google.com/search?q=texas+abortion+bounty+hunters&oq=texas+...

I dunno. I’m in the US just now. And whilst geographically interesting, socially it’s pretty awful.

Even my kids have said they can’t imagine ever wanting to live there.

Yep, I saw that. Horrific and unpalatable, but nowhere near as much as the réalité.

What's your threshold of awful? Genuinely interested.

What a chilling cartoon.

True and fear-inducing

I was just reading about Gerri Santoro.  She died after attempting an unsafe abortion in a motel bathroom in 1963, and a police photo of her body was published in a feminist magazine and subsequently became a symbol for the American abortion rights movement ten years later.  I had never seen the photo before, but I think that French cartoonist probably has.

I won't post the pic because it's grim, but you can see it in the Wikipedia article about her here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerri_Santoro

This is what "pro-life" Americans are bringing back.

Not a chance.

You can't ban abortion, you can only ban safe abortion.

People who are "pro-life" are anti Women's rights, they're despicable. And people who are "pro-life" but against gun laws are despicable hypocrites.

We were still burning witches in the 18th century.

Pedantic (sorry not sorry) but..
British 'witches' never were burned at the stake as a rule, if they were executed they were usually hanged. 

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/histories/eight-witchcraft-myths/

I'll give you 'witches' rather than witches, but I didn't say burned at the stake, I just said burned. I think Janet Horne was burned for witchcraft in Scotland in the 1700s.

You're right - I should have said English rather than British witches were hanged not burned.  Same in America incidentally. 

In Scotland they were mostly strangled to death, and their bodies were burned* afterwards.  (In England they were buried after being hanged, sometimes with iron nails driven through their bodies to stop them rising from the grave.) 

You're right about poor Janet Horne too it seems.  The last Scottish 'witch' to be executed, she was unlucky enough to be burned alive.  Apparently her name probably wasn't Janet Horne, that was a sort of generic name for a Scottish witch at the time so it's unclear what her real name was.

And while I'm derailing the thread with pedantic historical nonsense, crikey check this out: the last British woman convicted of witchcraft was sentenced to 9 months in Holloway Prison in 1944!
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Helen-Duncan-Scotla...

(Not really though - the prosecutors at her trial weren't really accusing her of witchcraft.  They used the old law, inappropriately really, to prosecute her as a fraudulent medium and also for revealing low-grade military secrets during the war.)

Edit to add:
*Yes, at the stake.  But given that they were already dead by then, I think that was more a sort of upright cremation.

As your quotation marks eloquently point out these people aren’t pro life. They are pro death. More dead pregnant women, more deaths during child birth, more dead children in child birth. Pro life couldn’t be a bigger misnomer. 

I live in Italy. A friend of mine is a retired gynaecologist. He was one of the first doctors in Italy to conduct legal abortions after the law was changed in 1978, just a few years after Roe Vs Wade. The local priest organised protest Masses in the village church to denounce him. But also, his anti-abortion gynaecologist colleagues would secretly advise women seeking abortions to contact him! He's lived with the fallout of this all his life, and still keeps the letters he received at the time - some thanking him, some condemning him.

And just as foreseeable, the conservative judges confriemd by the senate under Trump lied in their conformation hearings about the value they put on precedence vs. constitutional literalism.

It is just something the cons do like breathing. I wonder when the progressive side finally learns that the right wingers anywhere are the enemy of decency, justice, fairness, honesty eetc., and that there can be no compromise with them, ever.

And I say this as someone who generally leans conservative in the literal sense of keeping what is good and tested (including e.g. our environment) and who is unhappy with the social experiments of the Greens.

CB

Just wondering when they'll decide to change the countries name to Giliad?

They were under oath at those hearings, and deliberately telling a lie under oath at a hearing is perjury.  I'm fairly sure that's a crime even for a Supreme Court judge, it's disappointing that there don't seem to be any consequences for them.

This has got to be giving dystopian writers pause for thought. How many books penned as dire warnings go on to become inspirational instruction manuals! At least Jurassic Park will give us dinosaurs!

It's mindbogglingly grim with absolutely no end to the madness even imaginable.

jk

If you read at least the condensed versions of what they said you'll find they re-affirmed the importance of precedence in law but also that basically said their job is to look at precedence and decide whether it overrides other factors. There were plenty of longer and better established laws in the USA which the Supreme court dismissed, racial discrimination is probably one of the main ones in my lifetime. None of the judges actually gave an direct opinion on the issue, generally saying it was the subject of ongoing cases and petitions and pre-empting any future procedings would be against the principles of justice.

One is unlikely to become a member of the Supreme Court by outright lying or even making direct statements that coild later be used against oneself, a principle established under the failed nomination of Brown if I remember rightly.

Outright bare-faced lying used to be enough to prevent a person from taking up all sorts of important jobs.  Not so much any more sadly.

Also sadly, it seems you're quite correct and they did indeed weasel sufficiently to mislead senators without perjuring themselves.

They'll almost certainly also have no problem with "bad guys" being shot to death without trial by "good guys with guns", with Palestinians being blown to smithereens for resisting occupation by the regime of the 51st state in the only ways they can, for brown people in the middle east being treated as pawns in their proxy wars, for wrongfully convicted being executed on death row or any of the other myriad ways in which the USA spurns life.

"Pro-life" is devoid of meaning: a label for their side of the culture war -- for their "us", everyone else being "them" and of a second class, to be treated as such.

Of course, getting to that level in the judiciary means having considerable political experience i.e play them at their own game.

Does he think we're coming back?

They didn't mislead anyone. Collins and Manchin wanted a figleaf to let them pretend to the relevant parts of their base, that's all. No-one gets to be a US senator while being that naive.

jcm

Yeah, maybe you're right.  Perhaps they are trying to sit on the fence and avoid alienating either the anti-abortion or pro-choice sections of their electorate.

Mind you, it'd be nice to think that no-one gets into congress while being a completely hatstand swivel-eyed moron but, y'know:
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/marjorie-taylor-greene-jamie-raskin-...

Interesting. Someone should have asked them their thoughts on JC's Dad deciding to have him aborted 33 years beyond the UK's legal limit.

Not sure about the British ones but given the response, or lack of, to school shootings in the USA I suspect their variant would be fine with it.

The interest in life seems to stop at birth.

I'm just glad they did become independent - I wouldn't want anything to do with the shit-show that is the USA right now.

Yeah. We've got our own shit show to deal with, and that's more than enough.

Otherwise known as the US Army nationally, or the National Guard at a state level.  Or maybe this Supreme Court will find them to be unconstitutional too, since they aren't specifically mentioned in the Constitution.

Can't argue with that !

True.  But in many ways our shit show and their shit show are really just different aspects of the same larger shit show.

A picture is worth a thousand words...

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/donald-trump-signs-anti-abortion-9680191

In reply to rentaclimber:

Thanks for the excellent, thoughtful reply!  Like most non-Americans I find a lot of this baffling, especially the pseudo-religious deference to language the Constitution, no matter how ambiguous or inappropriate. 

Is that clear from the text?  I think this paranoia about the government getting 'out of hand' is the really puzzling bit for us - isn't the answer to that to vote them out of office rather than having self-appointed militias armed to the teeth?  Doesn't the Constitution also empower the Army to suppress insurrections?  Isn't all this a recipe for enabling a civil war?

I see the logic but the whole thing seems bonkers to me.

So, if you have to have something like this, why doesn't each state have an official 'well-regulated militia' - you say that some states do have a State Militia, isn't this the obvious solution to satisfying the Constitution?  The problem being, I guess, is that would mean individuals not being members losing the right to bear arms, and we can't have that, can we?

Assuming you think that anyone outside of the military needs to own a military grade weapon, then at least imposing some inconvenience seems a step in the right direction. 

It made sense back then for the authors of the constitution who had just 4 years earlier fought a revolutionary war to overthrow a government they regarded as getting out of hand.

Maybe, but how does it make sense 230-odd years after but they achieved independence and elected their own governments?  Ironically, the closest they've come to a dictatorship was at the hands of the most fervent supporters of the 2nd Amendment at the Capitol on January 6th. 

They have had a few close scrapes though..Nixon, McCarthy you could argue and it has been suggested it was a bit fragile in other periods.......Civil War....being a bit more serious.

In 2022, the US gun situation/culture/obsession makes little sense to me.