According to CNN, Alabama’s governor Kay Ivey just signed the state’s restrictive abortion bill, passed solely by Republican men, into law. We already know it’s in opposition to Roe v Wade, and that it allows NO exceptions for pregnancies due to rape or incest. No matter what you think about abortion, it’s reprehensible to force women who were victims of rape and incest to have their baby. Even Pat Robertson, as I saw on the evening news, is opposed to this law.
It’s a long road from the Alabama legislature to the Supreme Court, and nobody, I hope, will be prosecuted for performing abortions in the state until there’s a ruling. I’m hoping desperately that the Supreme Court thinks hard about how it rules here, and what it will mean for the country, but it’s all a mystery at this point.
In the meantime, I despise those in Alabama who have made abortion a felony, punishable by up to 99 years in prison.
No worries at all. Scotus will strike it down as unconstitutional. Won’t even get to the date it becomes effective.
I wasn’t at all worried about Trump getting elected.
Scotus isn’t the same as voters. No worries at all. Don’t blow it out of proportion.
You are correct. SCOTUS is significantly more Catholic than the electorate.
Now who’s the fear monger? Scotus will strike it down
Want to put your money where your mouth is? I reckon I’ll take that bet
Sorry, I don’t bet against the people or the Constitution. We just disagree. Let’s just leave it at that.
Grabaspine, you seem almost flippant about this. Have you not been watching the highly partisan votes in the Supreme Court these last few years?
My sentiments exactly. I am not so sure we should confidant that the current SCOTUS as is currently composed will be acting as we might want.
Heller, Hobby Lobby, ACA come to mind as examples of rulings that blatantly ignored the Constitution to promote a political agenda.
Sub
I think it’s entirely possible that SCOTUS combines many different Abortion challenges into one, and then greatly restricts the right or increases State power to regulate it, without allowing an Alabama-sized change.
It’s a bit of a straw man to parse this as ‘between current law and Alabama’s, SCOTUS won’t choose Alabama’s’, because SCOTUS may choose to overrule Roe or the other abortion cases partly. And that would still be bad thing for women.
It’s possible that, if there’s a consolidation, the issue could get decided in SCOTUS 4-1-4, with the four liberals voting to strike it down, the four conservatives voting to uphold it, and Chief Justice Roberts casting the deciding vote, writing for himself, alone carving out some middle ground. But that’s an unstable way for the High Court to operate when conducting constitutional jurisprudence — one unlikely to survive the Court’s next appointment.
I doubt Roberts wants to preside over (and have “the Roberts Court” known as) the one that wildly flip-flopped on such a crucial, high-profile issue.
I agree with everything you say. Yet, I don’t see Goresuch, Alito, or Thomas being reasonably median on this issue. They will rule in favor of conservative law. So either (a) Roberts joins them, or (b) Roberts puts a band-aid on the problem, or (c) Roberts joins the liberal branch to uphold abortion rights. And while I think the latter is the best for the country, I also think it’s the least likely.
The only hope is that Chief Justice Roberts does not want to see something like this become part of his legacy. Otherwise all five right wing activists on the court will uphold these abortion laws.
A lower court will strike it down and the Supremes will decline to review it. They aren’t idiots.
It’s not “idiots”, its politics. To have conservative judges oppose pretty much half of the GOP would cause an angry revolt. Future GOP presidents would require even more stringent ideological tests – just to survive the primary and selection process.
I hope Roberts chooses to stand on the side of history, too. But I don’t mistake my hope for probability.
Takes the votes of only four justice to grant certiorari to hear a case. Of the four hard-right conservatives on the Court — Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh — which do think will vote to decline to take the issue on?
I expect that at least Alito would be smart enough to realize that overturning Roe would be a disaster.
We’re assuming that none of the four liberals on the Court will vote to grant certiorari. They might, if any of the numerous new state statutes restricting abortion gets upheld in the lower courts.
You’re exaggerating and hyping. Will never happen. Chill with all the fear mongering
Repeating an assertion over and over doesn’t really make it any more convincing.
Neither does your asserting SCOTUS will uphold. Chill
Who are you talking to? I don’t recall making such an assertion.
The Midnight Flipper cares about his reputation?
It appears I missed the earlier post – and only just now have ventured out from the fray.
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I’m really dismayed by this Alabama law. I think some bad times are coming, and I’m not sure there is much that can be done to stop it.
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Regarding the number of rude comments on the other post (from commenters I’ve never seen round these parts) – how do those folks end up here? As the first commenter, no less? It was an exhausting read.
I don’t know. I approve a first comment if it’s okay and sometimes the commenters have a dark side not reflected in their first comment. Plus I don’t read every comment on every post, hard as I try to.
I cannot imagine how one would. I do not envy your job of moderation one bit – though I’m appreciative of the fruits. Most conversations here are productive and civil, even when passionate. If only those fly-by folks that appear on threads like that would take the time to read your other posts, perhaps they would be a bit better informed.
Andy comment of “sloppy religious thinking” was called “vitriolic”. Now I know how Satan feels. 🙂
Heaven forbid we point out lazy argumentation! (Pun intended, for their purposes, at least ;).
I’m not sure who “Andy” is in my comment. I meant “And I”. Autocorrect!
I can’t say I didn’t hop over to the other post and ctrl-F Andy before I figured it out. But figure it out I did!
I’m almost certain that the three federal district courts in AL (and the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that sits above them) will stay enforcement of this statute pending a final ruling on the statute’s constitutionality.
I also imagine Chief Justice John Roberts just went out and re-upped his stock of Maalox. He’s in for a shitload of agita from now until this issue is resolved.
I am sort of hoping that it was subversively written to be so horrible that while those supporting the bill think it is just what they want, but the real intent is to show their intolerance and contempt for women’s rights, and put public opinion and possibly scotus back on the right track.
Or, it might be just what it seems to be.
Unfortunately, things that are ‘subversively written to be so horrible’ that no-one in their right mind would support it, have a nasty habit of coming true, much to everyone’s dismay.
Trump, and Brexit, for instance.
cr
I wish editing was possible. That is one poorly constructed assemblage of grammar.
This is Alabama, Max; I don’t think they do the good kinda subversive.
I think, in fact, that might have been a principle motive of some. For others, it could have been just a way to push the Supremes to act on Roe v. Wade. Lot’s of possibilities, including those who are completely sincere in their attempts to stifle women.
Didn’t Barnum – or W.C.Fields, or Bierce, or one of that vintage – answer that question with his “nobody ever lost money by underestimating the taste of the public” comment?
We are a species that has repeatedly protested against the abolition of both executions and public executions.
The whole basis of opposing abortion is no one has the right to commit murder.
It’s not murder, but trying to convince someone otherwise by harping on women’s rights is a non-starter.
Assuming that contempt for women is the hidden motivation of pro-lifers — many of whom are themselves women — will only lead to ineffective counter-measures.
As we see, cannot put anything past Alabama. And there are many other states that have taken action to put up road blocks and make getting abortions more difficult. All of these states are the red ones and not just the south. However, roe v wade is majority for and this will simply add to the killing the republicans are going to take next election.
What is really needed is a democratic house and senate that will take this matter out of the hands of the court and make it law in congress. Then the Supreme court can just find something else to wreck.
Congress can only pass statutes; the Court interprets the constitution. Legislation can be repealed as easily as it’s passed; the constitution can be amended only through the ratification process (a difficult procedure that’s occurred just 27 times in the Republic’s history, and only once in the last 48 years).
Statutes come and go, but the constitution is essentially forever.
Sorry I did not see your comments until now but will say the following anyway. Seems very much like the defeatist democratic stuff we have been getting for a long time. Excuse me if I do not follow the herd as most all others do.
Everything comes and goes with time, even people. The congress has passed approximately 20,000 statues since 1789. How many of this have covered this issue – my guess is none. In 1965, the voting rights act was passed, although why they bothered I don’t know. It could all be changed later, right?
The democrats have lost their way on many of these issues and abortion is right there at the top of the list. Oh my, we can’t do anything because of the supreme court. What will we do, we are doomed. Kind of makes me sick.
My only point was that, if the right to reproductive freedom is grounded in the constitution itself, the right will be much stronger and more durable than if it is merely provided by statute.
I have no objection to reproductive freedom also being addressed by congress in legislation, although I’m uncertain which of the powers enumerated in Article 1 of the constitution gives congress the authority to do so, except, perhaps, for a broad extension of its authority under the Commerce Clause. I think such a broad exercise of Commerce Clause powers to preempt state law would cause greater dissension among the states and the people.
I understand the states would be upset, as they have been before, such as full blown amendments to the constitution but I also think you must use what you have and I see the legislature in general as very cowardly on this one. It is the state legislatures who are doing great damage to Roe V Wade and it seems to me that our federal legislature should be doing something besides nothing. If the next election gives democrats the senate and the executive office, I would suggest they work fast on several items and stop being nice to the enemy.
If this law is upheld and Roe is overturned, the GOP will be like the dog that caught the bus.
Maybe I am not uderstanding ‘dog that caught the bus’. I thought getting Roe vs. Wade overturned is exactly what they want. So they know exactly what they are doing.
I’ll try to explain the metaphor.
The bus is the die-hard, mostly evangelical and distinctly minority “pro-life” constituency that the dog (Republicans) are chasing. Once they catch it they’re fucked, like the dog caught under the wheels and crushed into dog burger, because there’s overwhelmingly popular support the abortion rights.
It would be a shame if it came to this.
I don’t know this metaphor either. I hope it’s not the Deeets-unfriendly interpretation that “S” put up.
Even with all due respect to Deet’s attempts to rise to cat-hood, I very much doubt that he’d know where any bus he caught was actually going to. That’s my reading of dogs on buses. “Hold very tight please, ting, ting!”
Remind me how this has nothing to do with religion and therefore separation of church and state is preserved?
Surely, I’m a fear monger; but perhaps not.In a previous post on the subject I engaged in some japery about the kinds of things that could happen to women who traveled out of state to get an abortion. Of course, I exaggerated, but the basis centers on an overlooked part of the bill that would make it a capital crime not only for providers (doctors, nurses, et al.) and women who have abortions in state, but would even criminalize women who go out of state to have an abortion (and I guess the out of state providers as well). This is not much different from Wahabi zealotry in Saudi Arabia.
For some questionable relief I turned to Cowboy Copas singing his one hit song, “Alabam.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmDYchDxBvw
Poor “Sal” epitomizes the status of women in Georgia,
“There comes Sal walkin’ down the street
With run down shoes tied to her feet;
Good Mornin’, honey, stand over there, baby
Get over there, now.
Hello Sal, I know you
With a run down slipper and a tore up shoe.”
Barefoot and pregnant, and obedient to her man (any man). She may be wearing a rundown slipper and a tore up shoe, but she’s still barefoot, pregnant, obedient to a man’s desire and command. Outside of this stanza, the song could use a fresh set of lyrics appropriate to the new law. If I had a guitar, I’d get to work.
How would anyone know someone traveling out of state is pregnant?
That’s why, in my previous post, I imagined check points, pregnancy tests, and detention centers.
Jenny does dystopia.
One might say so. Then again, sounds like a dystopian take on “Debby Does Donuts” or something like that. Heaven forfend! I see that women in Alabama are dressing up as characters in the “Handmaid’s Tale,” an apt dystopian novel for the day if there ever was one. Dystopia rules the day here.
BTW, for those interested in trivia, Cowboy Copas was killed, along with Hawkshaw Hawkins (a great country singer), in the plane crash that killed Patsy Cline.
Plenty of other people – legislators, public prosecutors looking for re-election, populist politician’s speech writers) – are looking for dystopias from which they can benefit. Jenny’s efforts to think ahead of them must be distasteful, but they’re necessary.
Imagine being a QC (or whatever the American equivalent is) who couldn’t anticipate the lines of attack that their adversary in an adversarial court system. Not a long or profitable career.
If they get an abortion at an out-of-state facility, there would be a record of their visit. But patient medical records are confidential, so it would be hard to prove that the procedure took place. This is all uncharted territory.
That sort of confidentiality can be as easily pierced as the right for women to decide for themselves about abortion.
Yikes! Major correction. With the various anti-abortion bills being put forth and enacted, most recently and notably in Alabama and Georgia, I conflated Alabama with Georgia. When I spoke of the laws restricting abortion in Alabama, I was actually referring to a law recently passed in Georgia https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/georgia-ohio-s-new-abortion-laws-will-harm-women-republicans-ncna1004001. Though I conflated the states, they’re two peas in a pod and the spirit of the laws is the same if not the exact letter.
I did not know that Alabama’s law criminalizes going to get an abortion out of state. That section of the law will not survive a challenge in court. A state’s jurisdiction starts and ends at their border. Alabama is trying to overrule other states laws, and that is well beyond any power they have.
This is unlikely to help the GOP any with white, suburban, college-educated women, the demographic that’s been shaping up as the key swing vote in recent elections.
The republican governor of Missouri said today that he will work to make Missouri the most pro-life state in the country…I suppose after that republicans will start working on taking away a woman’s right to vote.
Race to the bottom?
And for anyone who thinks this law has nothin* to do with religion and its bad ideas and sloppy thinking. https://twitter.com/governorkayivey/status/1128781312750432262?s=21
Ooooo, a Deeply Held Belief! A more potent belief that the merely Sincerely Held Belief!
DHB > SHB
We (some of us) shall see how precious every (only applies to human) life is when the human species exceeds the ability of the planet to support it.
Most of us have been watching it for most of our lives.
I’ll wager that there is a large overlap on the Venn diagram of people who say anti-abortion positions isn’t about religion and those who say the Civil War wasn’t about slavery.
But they’d all agree there is too much government intrusion into our lives.
I’ll wager too.
The governor is confused about on the one hand, committing to protect human lives (language of the bill’s title) – that’s a good thing obviously (duh) and causing injury to families who cannot support one, two, or more children in their family – without some other changes – six figure income, death of a child, winning the lottery, or … well, moving out of Alabama… the cost of living in Alabama is likely so low that they’ll be stuck there, compared to, say, California…. and the “cost of living” now includes the long term consequences of too many people and too few resources.
Alabama wrote this law to force it to go to the Supreme Court. The current conservative judges on the Supreme Court have placed their ideology over the principals that make our legal system work. They have overturned precedent when it disagreed with their personal feelings. One of my law school professors won a case in the SC about the Clean Air Act. Industry wanted to stop regulations if they cost them too much, but that wasn’t in the law. A few years later there were more conservatives on the bench and they reversed their own ruling. They did this again this week.
What I think will happen is the Supreme Court will intervene and they will call it a states rights issue and allow states to ban abortion if they pass a law that does that.
What the rightwingers who push these cases never seem to appreciate is that, if Roe v. Wade is to be overruled as wrongly decided — if, that is, the US constitution guarantees no right to privacy that encompasses a woman’s reproductive freedom — then the states are as free under our constitution to force women to have abortions as they are to prevent women from having them.
The religious right should pause and contemplate that one awhile.
I’d never considered that. Shocking.
Hmmmm…
Perhaps there are other implications that would frighten the Jesus out of any Fundie. Libertarian must be livid!
I’m having a mental image of a certain “parthenos” (“young woman”, or “virgin”, depending on which way you want to translate the Greek) who got pregnant by an angel, choosing to have an abortion instead of this “Gabriel” guy’s child. Regardless about what he said about being God’s turkey baster.
God forbid!
I wonder whether there is something funny in the water in Alabama. I am slightly acquainted with a member of the Biology faculty of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who was present when they had an unusually dramatic faculty meeting in 2010.
One professor named Amy Bishop (Harvard PhD) was rather miffed about her failure to gain tenure. To express her miffment, she pulled out a Ruger 9mm handgun and plugged half a dozen of her colleagues, killing three of them including the departmental Chair. [Come to think of it, maybe the something funny is in the water at Harvard, rather than AL.] In any case, Amy now enjoys tenure, for life, at a women’s prison in Wetumpka, Alabama.
I would think being sentenced to exist in a place named “Wetumpka” would be excessive punishment for any crime. Being located in Alabama is just the icing on the cake…
cr
I remember the murderous Amy Bishop. I followed the story closely at the time. It was morbidly fascinating from a psychopathological point of view as well as being the kind of calculated, cold-blooded violent crime usually associated with patently maladjusted males; but this committed by a superficially well-adjusted, married professional woman and mother against her colleagues in academia.
When these kinds of shootings occur, I often hear and read statements declaring that these kinds of crimes are committed exclusively by males; but while rarely committed by women, Bishop isn’t unique; in fact, one of the earliest blow-’em-away mass school shootings was committed by a a 16 year-old girl in 1979. As you say, Bishop finally got tenure. But if she drank something, she drank it way back in Massachusetts before she killed her brother and the fratricide was covered up.
It’s something else they drink in Alabama and Georgia, etc., some kind of psychological moonshine that stuns the brain. Jesus Juice.
As Saint Bob and Mr Fingers once wrote,
“Tell me why? /
– “I don’t like Mondays /
Tell me why? /
– “I don’t like Mondays /
I’m gonna shoot-ooh-oot the whole day down.”
As is often the case, The Onion has a good angle on this mess. https://local.theonion.com/abused-12-year-old-alabama-girl-doesn-t-think-she-can-h-1834787176
I can just imagine the meeting:
“Damnit with legal abortion only 50% of the population of Alabama are incestuous rape babies, gotta protect the base!”
And yeah Alabama you kind of just lost the right to be offended at that joke.
I was going to respond to a rather lengthy comment here that appeared in my email. But it seems to have evaporated.
Yeah me too – the one about the woman who signed the bill. I had already posted her tweet about God so was going to state that we know exactly what she thinks and why she signed.
I’m not sure were we are going as a world society.. but is there any thing they government bodies haven’t thought of making criminal charges seriously.. we have a problem in Australia were there trying to make a law for every thing in life…
Stephen Colbert’s take https://youtu.be/f-ag5kf1cOE
I didn’t know six women opposed the bill.
I’ve also heard it said that some Republicans do not actually want RvW overturned, etc. because campaigning *to* overturn it gives them a perpetual popular (in some circles) thing to be supported for. They can then use their platform to do other things (like ignoring the environment, being even more plutocratic, etc.)
The abortion ban is set to go into effect in six months, but is expected to face a lawsuit to block it from halting abortion access. Even supporters have said they expect it to be blocked by lower courts as they fight toward the Supreme Court. Gov. Ivey acknowledged Wednesday that the measure may be unenforceable in the short term.
“It’s to address the issue that Roe. v. Wade was decided on. Is that baby in the womb a person?” Collins (the bill’s sponsor) said.
As was pointed out in the previous thread on this, if one thinks that a fetus is a human being with full rights and that abortion is murder, then making an exception for rape and incest is logically inconsistent. For that matter, lumping rape and incest together makes little sense, since, unlike rape, incest might well involve sex between consenting adults. Finally, prosecuting an abortion doctor but not the woman is tantamount to sending a hit man to prison and letting the person who hired him go scot-free. My point is simply that logic seems to take a back seat on both sides of this issue.
Paraphrasing Weinberg:
For good people to do bad things, that takes religion.
Shouldn’t it be possible for a mother to apply for some sort of religious exception, or a sort of conscientious objector status – namely that one is free of religion, and is objecting to injury to their family by raising another child? Because the bill isn’t claiming the abortion is murder, right? And the chestnut underneath anti-abortion is that a supernatural god – basically the one on the Sistine chapel ceiling- inserts a soul in the fetus.