Abortion & Contraception Rights Under Attack

[LFC]

More fascism on abortion as 17 state AGs warn Google not to block anti-abortion groups that falsely present themselves as abortion clinics from their search results. When a political party is all in on protection of its propaganda while attacking factual information you know there's nowhere left for them to go but down further into the sewer of alternative facts. The threat is blatant and explicit. It also, once again, completely misrepresents the First Amendment. This ... is ... fascism.

A coalition of 17 state attorney generals are pressuring Google to prevent it from limiting the search results of so-called “crisis pregnancy centers” known for masquerading as legitimate abortion clinics and persuading pregnant people away from receiving abortions.

Critics warn unrestricted search results could steer abortion seekers toward these clinics, potentially putting their health at risk. Republicans, on the other hand, say efforts to limit those bad faith clinics in search results amounts to market discrimination against anti-abortion organizations.

In a letter spearheaded by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, the Republican lawmakers pushed back against earlier pleas from Democrats and claimed Google’s decision to moderate its results, “would constitute a grave assault on the principle of free speech.” The Republicans then lashed out at previous Democratic efforts to pressure the company before proceeding to, seemingly unironically, threaten Google if they didn’t get their way.

“We wish to make this very clear to Google and the other market participants that it dwarfs: If you fail to resist this political pressure, we will act swiftly to protect American consumers from this dangerous axis of corporate and government power,” the lawmakers wrote.

[LFC]

Time to put Republican Senators on record. I suspect Moscow Mitch will block it from an inconvenient vote. Dems to attack any Senate Republican who does not explicitly support the bill as wanting to take away contraception from women. Unfair? F*** NO! They'll have a chance to support it. If not we need to assume what they want, regardless of how many weasel words they toss out.

Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and Ed Markey (D-MA) on Tuesday demanded that their Republican colleagues go on record about whether they support the right to contraception, a day before Democrats are set to push the Right to Contraception Act through the upper chamber.

During a press conference on Tuesday, Hirono took aim at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling last month, which overturned Roe and with it the constitutional right to an abortion.

In his concurring opinion, Thomas said outright that the high court should revisit other landmark privacy-rights cases such as protections for same-sex marriage and contraception access.

“This is called signaling,” Hirono said, referring to Thomas’ concurring opinion. “When a far-right Supreme Court Justice, now in the majority, signals, we have to pay attention.”

After stressing that the public needs to realize that access to contraception is under threat, Hirono called on Republican senators to go on the record about where they stand on the issue.

“We need to put every single Republican on the record on whether they support the right to contraception and, indeed, the right to bodily autonomy,” Hirono said.

During the presser, Senate Health Committee chair Pat Murray (D-WA) also said the Democratic senators will try to get the bill on the floor through unanimous consent.

Markey said he expects Republicans to object to unanimous consent for the bill. He said that if a GOP senator does object, then that will signal to the country that Republicans intend on giving the conservative-majority Supreme Court permission to repeal the right to contraceptive care.

Markey then echoed Hirono’s demand, saying that the vote on the Senate floor will put Republicans on record about whether they support access to contraception.

Last week, the House voted 228-195 to codify federal protections for contraception access into law, with just eight Republicans joining Democrats on the issue. The bill, which protects the right to buy and use contraception without government interference, heads to the Senate next. According to a poll conducted by Gallup in May, a vast majority of Americans support access to contraceptive care, with 92 percent indicating they see contraception as “morally acceptable.”

[LFC]

Dems keep pushing Republicans on contraception. Good. They need as many avenues of attack as they can get to illustrate just how extreme the Christian-fascist party has become.

Senate Democrats on Wednesday swiftly rebuked their GOP colleagues shortly after Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) objected to Democrats’ unanimous consent request to pass the Right to Contraception Act.

Sen. Pat Murray (D-WA) called the objection — which Ernst brought within seconds of Democrats submitting their request — a sign that Republicans are “trying to distract from their extreme position” on the right to contraceptive care.

Speaking on the Senate floor, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) asked his GOP colleagues to not object to Democrats’ request to pass via unanimous consent a bill ensuring access to contraception. The bill passed in the House last week and serves as a response to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ concurring opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling last month, which overturned Roe and with it the constitutional right to an abortion.

In his concurring opinion, Thomas blatantly advised the high court to revisit other landmark privacy-rights cases such as protections for same-sex marriage and contraception access.

Markey said that if any Republicans object to their unanimous consent request, their position “will be clear to everyone.”

Ernst swiftly stepped in to object to the request, calling the bill “insidious” and arguing that it “purposefully goes far beyond the scope of contraception.” In her spin, Ernst argued the bill includes provisions that could provide funding for abortion providers, could expand access to abortion-inducing drugs and would force providers to administer contraceptives despite their moral or religious beliefs.

Ernst went on to push her own bill, which she claimed would incentivize manufacturers of contraceptive to file an application for over-the-counter access for routine use of birth control.

Sen. Markey called her out on her "Look! Squirrel!" bill that would do very little that isn't already happening today since the FDA is already performing this review.

[LFC]

The insanity continues to ramp up as Republicans embrace laws that tell women they must die rather than have an abortion. I've already posted about the woman who was bleeding out in Texas despite the fetus having zero chance but still having a fetal heartbeat. The main culprit? This is the same thinking we've seen on other issues: conspiracy and worrying only about who might "get away with it", not the majority cases.

When Americans used to imagine life post-Roe, many seemed to believe that at the very least the country would agree on one thing: the need for an exception to save a woman’s life. These exceptions enjoy sweeping public support; a recent Pew Research Center poll found that 73 percent of Americans favored legal abortion if a woman’s life or health was at risk. Only 8 percent of respondents favored no exception whatsoever to criminal abortion laws.

Life-of-the-patient exceptions do not even require anti-abortion-rights Americans to change their minds about fetal personhood. Even if someone believes that a fetus enjoys the same rights as an adult, abortion could be justified much in the same way that people who are anti-violence can understand the need in certain situations for self-defense. Support for the so-called life-of-the-mother exception seemed unshakable.

Not anymore. Anti-abortion-rights groups, like Wisconsin Right to Life, have described the “life of the mother” exception as unnecessary and wrong. The Idaho GOP just approved a platform with no lifesaving exception. Republican candidates like Matthew DePerno, the Republican running to be Michigan’s attorney general, oppose all exceptions to abortion bans, and that includes to save a mother’s life. Conservative states are rushing to eliminate or narrow existing exceptions to their laws. Powerful groups like Students for Life, Feminists for Life, and the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) argue that “abortion is never medically necessary” and that doctors should always be punished for intentionally taking a fetal life.

Why has what was once unthinkable suddenly become a legal reality, despite its extreme unpopularity? Recent changes in both the GOP and the anti-abortion-rights movement have something to do with it, but the problem runs deeper: a twin skepticism of women and the medical establishment. Even though activists of the anti-abortion-rights movement and the politicians who support them sometimes argued that women must be protected in certain cases, they question the honesty of people—both doctors and patients—who invoke emergency exceptions. These dual suspicions have produced a new definition of abortion—as the intentional, criminal taking of a life—and a growing consensus that abortion bans should have no exceptions.

The fact that right-wing extremism is no longer a negative, hell it's often not even a positive but rather a requirement, allows it to go completely off the rails. The fact that a doctor may be forced to forego lifesaving treatment is actually acknowledged by these people.

Cracks in the consensus on exceptions showed early, however. In 1976, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, a rider to an appropriations bill for the Department of Health and Human Services that banned Medicaid reimbursement for abortion unless a person’s life would be endangered if they carried a pregnancy to term. Every year, when the Hyde Amendment came up for reconsideration, a fight began about whether it should have additional exceptions. Unless a patient’s life was on the line, the answer for Republican anti-abortion-rights leaders was a firm no.

Health exceptions, argued abortion foes, functionally allowed abortion on demand. Similarly, women could claim to have been raped and get an abortion whenever they wanted. Henry Hyde, the author of the eponymous amendment, complained that women could just claim to have been sexually assaulted, and everyone would believe them. “No additional accountability,” he added, “is required of them.” The Hyde Amendment fight created two worlds: one for low-income patients, many of them people of color, and another for everyone else.

In the past decade, whatever Republican support there once was for many such exceptions disappeared more or less completely. The Republican Party that emerged from the Tea Party wave in the state legislatures of 2010 and the 2016 presidential election was more populist and conservative on abortion. In some red states, lawmakers no longer feared a competitive general election; the only real threat came from conservative primary challengers, who could wield support for any abortion-ban exceptions as a sign of weakness.

Once Donald Trump came on the scene, the national GOP doubled down on extremism. Trump never appealed to a majority of voters, but that hardly seemed to bother him. His recipe for electoral victories was to turn out conservatives and frighten other voters that Democrats were even worse than he was. Identifying plans that appealed to the average voter hardly seemed worth the trouble. Other Republicans tried to replicate Trump’s winning formula, but with a focus on abortion, detailing positions intended to please the most ardently anti-abortion-rights voters, no matter what anyone else thought.

During this same period, leaders of the anti-abortion movement have developed deep suspicion of elite medical organizations like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and even the CDC. The more that anti-abortion-rights Americans distrust mainstream science, the easier it is for them to believe that there is no need for a woman to have an abortion to save her life, ever. This belief is in some ways dependent on semantics. Pro-life doctors distinguish “direct abortions,” where doctors intend to end a pregnancy, from morally permissible procedures where the termination of pregnancy is the secondary effect of another emergency medical procedure. This distinction lines up with Catholic religious teachings: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops instructs that abortion, defined as the “directly intended termination of a pregnancy, is never permitted,” but allows for “procedures that have as their direct purpose the cure of a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman.”

This intent-based definition of abortion has spread throughout the anti-abortion-rights movement, and fits into an ascendant anti-abortion-rights model framing abortion as a crime, like homicide, defined by the perpetrator’s state of mind. AAPLOG, the movement’s leading medical organization, argues that “direct abortion is not medically necessary to save the life of a woman.” The organization suggests that doctors may separate “a mother and her unborn child for the purposes of saving a mother’s life,” but not with the intention of taking a fetal life. And even doctors with the right intentions must make “every reasonable attempt to save the baby’s life.”

In theory, that would allow doctors to treat ectopic pregnancies and HELLP syndrome, a serious complication tied to high blood pressure during pregnancy. But the truth is that, in practice, the mandate to avoid direct abortion can change or delay the treatment that doctors provide. John Seago of Texas Right to Life recently acknowledged in The New York Times that the prohibition on direct abortions means delaying medical interventions; he stressed that a doctor could not choose to “cause the death of the child today” because of a belief that “they’re going to pass away eventually.”

[LFC]

EDITED SUBJECT: Added "contraception" since the utter nutters are going after that too with the claim that several forms of contraception actually cause abortions.

The Biden administration is "reminding" health insurers that not covering birth control is against federal law. This is after they "reminded" the pharmacists that they don't get to pick which medicines they do or don't want to dispense, something the immoral right has wanted for years. AFAIC any pharmacist deciding which pharmaceuticals a patient should or shouldn't get is practicing medicine as they are interfering with treatments and they should be open to malpractice lawsuits for doing so.

The Biden administration issued guidance on Thursday reminding health insurers that they must comply with the Affordable Care Act’s birth control mandate, which guarantees coverage of contraceptives at no additional cost. The administration said it will take enforcement actions if insurers fail to comply.

In a statement on Thursday, Labor Secretary Marty Walsh said the latest guidance on birth control coverage — which was jointly released by the HHS, Labor and Treasury departments — comes amid “troubling reports” that health plans and insurers are not complying with the law.

“We expect them to remove impermissible barriers and ensure individuals have access to the contraceptive coverage they need,” Walsh said. “If plans and issuers are not complying with the law, we will take enforcement action to ensure that participants receive this coverage, again with no cost sharing.”

CMS administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure noted that the guidance also reminds employer-sponsored health plans and health insurance issuers that they are obligated to provide the “full range” of contraceptives approved by the FDA to their employees under the ACA, which include birth control pills, rings, IUDs, emergency contraception (such as Plan B), diaphragms and sponges.

The latest guidance comes weeks after the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) sent memos to tens of thousands of pharmacies nationwide to warn that the refusal to fill abortion or contraception care medications prescriptions goes against federal law.

[LFC]

Indiana is rushing forward with their anti-abortion law.

Indiana state senators narrowly passed a near-total abortion ban Saturday during a rare weekend session, sending the bill to the House after a contentious week of arguments over whether to allow exceptions for rape and incest.

The Republican-controlled Senate voted 26-20 after about three hours of debate, passing the bill with the minimum 26 votes needed to send it on to the House, which Republicans also control.

The bill would prohibit abortions from the time a fertilized egg implants in a uterus. Exceptions would be allowed in cases of rape and incest, but a patient seeking an abortion for either reason would have to sign a notarized affidavit attesting to the attack.

Indiana is one of the first Republican-controlled states to debate tighter abortion laws since the U.S. Supreme Court last month overturned the precedent establishing a national right to an abortion.

But the GOP splintered after the rape and incest exceptions remained in the bill Thursday when an amendment failed that would have stripped out those exceptions.

Ten Republican senators voted against the legislation Saturday, including a handful who support abortion rights.

One of them, Republican Sen. Vaneta Becker of Evansville, said the measure will interfere with women’s medical choices, their lives and free will by setting strict limits on abortion access in Indiana.

“Women deserve to have us protect their lives and free will. Senate Bill 1 destroys both. Shame on us for doing this,” she said, noting that only eight of Senate’s 50 members are women.

“We are considering dictating medical decisions with blinders and ignorant of the astounding, unintended consequences we are creating,” Becker warned, saying the Senate is “just making a mess.”

Republican Sen. Mike Young, whose amendment calling for no exceptions except for the life of the mother previously failed, said he voted against the bill not because he agrees with its opponents but because he has qualms with some aspects of the legislation he hopes are addressed.

Young said one provision that concerns him states that a doctor can perform an abortion if he believes a woman’s life is in danger but it doesn’t require the doctor to inform that woman that her life is in danger.

[pnwguy]

Aug 1, 2022 15:23:03 GMT LFC said:

Indiana is rushing forward with their anti-abortion law.

"Shame on us for doing this,” she said, noting that only eight of Senate’s 50 members are women.

If she wants to be in a party that can be shamed, she needs to leave the GOP.  There is no amount of shame that works on them now, except to be shamed by Beetlejuice.  

[LFC]

Other Republican controlled states are charging ahead, several using special sessions to jam their restrictions in ASAP.

More Special Sessions To Ban Abortion On The Horizon

Several GOP-controlled state legislatures have rushed to push abortion bans via special sessions in wake of the Supreme Court’s dismantling of Roe v. Wade. Arkansas, Nebraska and South Carolina could be next.

Abortion On The Ballot This Week

Amid the many high-stakes primary elections on Tuesday is a key vote in Kansas on whether to amend the state’s constitution to strip the right to an abortion and kick the issue over to the state’s Republican-controlled legislature instead.

[LFC]

Michigan.

County prosectors in Michigan can enforce a 91-year-old abortion ban, the Michigan Court of Appeals ruled Monday.

The 1931 law criminalizes the act of performing an abortion — by both physicians as well as pregnant people who use abortion medications — in all cases except to “preserve the life” of the mother.

The law was unenforceable for nearly half a century thanks to Roe v. Wade. In May, a month before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, a Michigan Court of Claims judge granted a preliminary injunction that paused the enforcement of the law.

But on Monday, a three-judge court of appeals panel said that injunction applied only to Michigan’s attorney general and those under her control and supervision — which excludes county prosecutors, the court ruled. The ruling will take effect in 21 days, and Planned Parenthood of Michigan, one of the plaintiffs in the original court of claims suit, has indicated it may appeal the decision.

Democrats in Michigan’s Republican-dominated (and historically gerrymandered) legislature have tried, unsuccessfully, to repeal the abortion ban.

[pnwguy]

It will be interesting to see what the effect on college recruitment looks like in a few years. Expect GOP-controlled states to lose female students to Pro-Roe states, and for GOP-controlled states to have more incels.

[LFC]

Aug 1, 2022 19:22:51 GMT pnwguy said:

It will be interesting to see what the effect on college recruitment looks like in a few years. Expect GOP-controlled states to lose female students to Pro-Roe states, and for GOP-controlled states to have more incels.

That's fine with them. Women going to college and ending up making more than men or, horror of horrors, being managers of men was never in God(tm)'s divine plan.

[LFC]

Democrats seem to be learning. Although Senate Republicans will likely kill it anyway they are creating a bill that is very limited and very simple. When Republicans kill it the Dems can use this as a cudgel to beat them with as they say, "Look! We tried to do the most basic thing and the extremists killed it!"

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) said it himself upon unveiling a new, bipartisan bill that would, at the very least, codify the right to an abortion into federal law: it’s the bare minimum.

“What the four of us were trying to do was put a statutory minimum in place that replicated what the law was a day before Dobbs,” Kaine said of the Reproductive Freedom For All Act, which he introduced with Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) this afternoon.

The language of the law is a bare bones compromise, seemingly aimed at putting something on the books that would prevent red states from outright banning access to abortion, which we’ve seen proposed and passed in several states across the nation since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June. It could also help protect people living in states with old trigger laws on the books that are now going into effect post-Roe.

The bill was also introduced with no guaranteed support from the number of Republican senators needed to overcome the filibuster. Kaine nodded at that practicality as well on Monday, calling it mostly an effort to outline some middle ground between Republicans and Democrats on an issue that the majority of Americans from all sides of the political spectrum support despite Roe’s overturning — that Americans should have access to safe abortion care.

The bill protects the right to contraceptive access and preserves “conscience protections” — a hobbyhorse for Collins who has been vocal about protecting the religious freedom of practitioners and physicians who want to opt out of abortion care for moral reasons. The bill would also “prohibit state regulations that impose an undue burden on a woman’s access to pre-viability abortions, while allowing states to enact reasonable restrictions on post-viability abortions – provided that states cannot ban abortions that are necessary to protect the life or health of the mother,” the group outlined in a press release Monday.

They're just shooting for the status quo.

“By reinstating — neither expanding nor restricting — the longstanding legal framework for reproductive rights in this country, our bill would preserve abortion access along with basic conscience protections that are relied upon by health care providers who have religious objections,” Collins, who has been widely criticized for her vote to confirm now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, said in a statement today.

[LFC]

Republicans are no longer capable of pushing any position without lying or cheating. The fact that they are incapable of simply presenting their views shows just how weak and unpopular their actual positions really are.

Something Fishy’s Going On

Someone’s sending anonymous texts to Kansas voters urging them to vote “yes” on a constitutional amendment on abortion rights on today’s ballot in the state, which the text falsely claims “will give women a choice.”

• “Vote YES to protect women’s health,” the anonymous text says, per the Kansas City Star.

• Yeah, that’s a straight-up lie: Voting “yes” means adding language to the state’s constitution stating that it does not guarantee Kansans’ right to an abortion and allows the issue to go to the legislature, where the GOP majority will be empowered to pass an abortion ban. A “no” vote leaves the Kansas constitution as it is.

[LFC]

The DOJ is suing over Idaho's extremist anti-abortion laws.

The Justice Department sued the state of Idaho Tuesday over new abortion restrictions that allegedly put the lives of pregnant people in danger.

The suit came in response to the impending enforcement of Idaho’s 2020 “trigger” abortion ban, which as a result of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade is set to go into effect on Aug. 25. But any state whose abortion prohibitions provide no exception for protecting the health of mothers could be violating federal law, Attorney General Merrick Garland said at a press conference Tuesday.

The Idaho law prohibits abortions in all cases except documented cases of rape, or when “deemed necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman.”

But federal law is broader than that, the suit argued. It cited the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, which requires hospitals receiving Medicare funds to stabilize anyone seeking care for an “emergency medical condition.”

Such emergencies apply not just to life-threatening situations, but also “those that place a patient’s ‘health’ in ‘serious jeopardy’ or risk ‘serious impairment to bodily functions’ or ‘serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part,’” the suit noted. The complaint listed pregnancy-related emergencies including “ectopic pregnancy, severe preeclampsia, or a pregnancy complication threatening septic infections or hemorrhage.”

Amid a wave of reports of doctors denying emergency abortions to patients due to post-Roe restrictions, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Bercerra wrote to medical providers nationwide last month, reminding them of the requirements under EMTALA. Tuesday’s suit noted a July 29 letter the feds sent to Idaho officials, detailing concerns that the state’s new abortion law clashed with federal law. The suit noted, “The United States did not receive a substantive response.”

What’s more, the Idaho law’s “affirmative defense” language means doctors could be prosecuted for performing abortions in Idaho even under the narrow exceptions laid out in the law, the suit alleged. Physicians, in such instances, would be forced to affirmatively demonstrate that an abortion was necessary to protect the life of the mother.

Under the Idaho law, the suit argued, “Physicians will be faced with an untenable choice—either to withhold critical stabilizing treatment required under EMTALA or to risk criminal prosecution and potential loss of their professional licenses.”

“As a result of Idaho’s physicians being placed in this position, patients will suffer—including by having their care delayed or losing access to necessary health care that is guaranteed under federal law.”

[indy]

Well, Kansas voters sure turned out last night to have their say on abortion.

Thunderclap ballot box victory on abortion rights in Kansas gives Democrats a potent midterm issue

[LFC]

Looks like the Kansas vote wasn't even close (over 60% saying "no"). Notice how they tried to avoid the November election to jam it through rather than trying to defend their position on its "merits."

Republican lawmakers purposefully put the amendment vote on the sleepy August primary ballot, while slating two other unrelated amendments for the November general election. In Kansas, primary elections usually attract a much smaller pool of much more conservative voters, as independents and low-propensity voters drop out. The state in general supports abortion rights, mirroring national sentiment.

On Tuesday, it seemed the plan for an under-the-radar constitutional amendment had backfired, with Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab telling reporters earlier in the day that voter turnout was significantly higher than expected.

More than 60 percent of voters had rejected the amendment when networks, including NBC and CNN, began to call the race shortly before 11 p.m. ET. Roughly 78 percent of the vote had been counted. Preliminary results suggested that Tuesday’s turnout had come close to doubling 2018’s primary turnout.

[LFC]

Georgia now allows embryos to be declared as dependents. Does that mean an in-vitro clinic is now a day (and night) care center?

Georgia Now Allows Embryos To Be Claimed As Dependents

Georgia’s Department of Revenue has put out new guidance stating that ​​the agency “will recognize any unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat […] as eligible for the Georgia individual income tax dependent exemption.”

• The guidance directly cited Georgia’s ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy (when many people don’t know they’re pregnant), which was recently upheld by a federal court.

• Now Georgians are allowed to claim $3,000 tax exemption for each embryo.

[goldenvalley]

Aug 3, 2022 13:34:32 GMT LFC said:

Georgia now allows embryos to be declared as dependents. Does that mean an in-vitro clinic is now a day (and night) care center?

Georgia Now Allows Embryos To Be Claimed As Dependents

Georgia’s Department of Revenue has put out new guidance stating that ​​the agency “will recognize any unborn child with a detectable human heartbeat […] as eligible for the Georgia individual income tax dependent exemption.”

• The guidance directly cited Georgia’s ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy (when many people don’t know they’re pregnant), which was recently upheld by a federal court.

• Now Georgians are allowed to claim $3,000 tax exemption for each embryo.

Next up...child support payments from sperm donors that created the unborn child with a detectable "human" heartbeat?  Human? 

[LFC]

After the Kansas vote Josh Marshall basically says that Democrats need to take this issue and ram it up the Republicans' ... noses. To be fair he said that before the vote. This just drives it even further home.

While vote counting slowed overnight with about 96% of the Kansas anti-abortion referendum vote counted, “No” (pro-abortion rights) is steady at 59% of the vote. It is unlikely to tick down more than a point or two further, at most. This was considered a too-close-to-call race with the advantage to the “Yes” vote. When a result is this lopsided and this unexpected for most political observers it’s not only a political earthquake but a sign many political professionals have seriously mistaken the political environment. When there is a backlash as strong as the one against Dobbs and one party is as firmly tied to it as Republicans are here, clearly the opposing party needs to grab on to it with both hands. You jump right into the slipstream of that political tide.

We’ve been discussing how to do that for months. Democrats need to make the connection as explicit and tangible as possible. And the way to do that is with a firm Roe and Reform pledge, to pledge to pass a Roe law in January 2023 and suspend the filibuster rules to guarantee that that bill gets a simple majority vote. If voters choose to give the Democrats this specific election outcome — the House and two more senators — Democrats will pass this law. But that only works if everything is spelled out, a firm commitment with all the needed votes explicitly on board.

The Kansas vote shows us how unpopular Dobbs is. But that’s not all it showed. Kansans didn’t turn out to send a message about Dobbs or Roe. They turned out because with a single vote they could ensure that abortion rights remained protected in their state for the foreseeable future. The closest Democrats can get to duplicating that dynamic at the federal level is with a Roe and Reform pledge. You give us this and we will give you that. But there can’t be any ambiguity, no vagueness about the filibuster or hemming and hawing. Right now 31 of the 48 senators have committed. 15 are sort of, kind of there but haven’t been willing to make a clear commitment — thus short-circuiting the whole effort. There are two possible hold outs — King of Maine and Warner of Virginia. But they will get on board if their constituents apply pressure. Here’s the list of where everyone stands.

If they’re basically on board why won’t they just say it? Well, some of it is just SenateWorld, that instinctive resistance to making firm commitments, the myopia of thinking that what matters is the internal politicking of the Senate as opposed to the actual political world outside the body. I know specifically some of the senators and their staffs say privately, ‘Of course we’ll be there if it comes to a vote. But I don’t want to make it uncomfortable for colleagues who are more hesitant.’ In other words, everyone is basically on board but waiting for everyone else to take the plunge and thus in their collective dillydallying ruining the chances of a clear election message. Voters — you and your phone — can change this right now.

[indy]

Correlation is not necessarily causation but sometimes it is.

[LFC]

The dog caught the car but now the car is backing up over them. Oops.

GOPers Realize They Might’ve Done Fucked Up With War On Abortion

Several Republican senators who spoke to HuffPost on Wednesday admitted to seeing some major red flags after voters in ruby-red Kansas voted overwhelmingly to preserve abortion rights in their state’s constitution the day before.

• “It’s definitely a wake-up call for us,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said.

• “Kansas, which is a pretty red state―it’s hard to find the words. I think people should look at it,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said.

I suspect that those will be fightin' words for the theocratic wing of their base. As long as Democrats keep up the pressure Republicans will be force to choose between pissing off the Christian nationalists and the more sane people who don't think a woman's body should be ruled by the beliefs of one particular religion.

[LFC]

The NY Times has an analysis of the Kansas anti-abortion vote. (Paywall dodging link here.) Long story short is that Republicans miscalculated on several fronts. I wouldn't expect the state to flip but you can bet that Kansas Democrats will be running on a platform of protecting abortion rights, something the people of the state obviously overwhelmingly favor.

Abortion opponents underperformed even in conservative areas.

Going into Election Day, many observers believed the outcome of the referendum would be determined in increasingly Democratic areas like the Kansas City suburbs — that is, by whether enough voters turned out there to compensate for the very conservative lean of the rest of the state. But abortion opponents did surprisingly poorly even in the reddest places.

Consider far western Kansas, a rural region along the Colorado border that votes overwhelmingly Republican. In Hamilton County, which voted 81 percent for Mr. Trump in 2020, less than 56 percent chose the anti-abortion position on Tuesday (with about 90 percent of the vote counted there). In Greeley County, which voted more than 85 percent for Mr. Trump, only about 60 percent chose the anti-abortion position.

Yes, the swing areas swung left.

Certainly, though, the cities and suburbs deserve some credit. The comparatively slim margins of victory for abortion opponents in western Kansas left the door wide open, but abortion rights supporters still had to walk through it, and they did.

Wyandotte County, home to Kansas City, Kan., voted 65 percent for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, but 74 percent for abortion rights on Tuesday. Neighboring Johnson County, the state’s most populous, voted 53 percent for Mr. Biden but more than 68 percent for abortion rights.

What was striking, in fact, was the degree to which the picture was similar everywhere. From the bluest counties to the reddest ones, abortion rights performed better than Mr. Biden, and opposition to abortion performed worse than Mr. Trump.

Turnout was high.

We won’t know exactly how many people voted, much less their partisan breakdown or demographic characteristics, until the results are fully counted. But we can already say that statewide turnout was much higher than expected — nearly as high as it was in the last midterm election.

Roughly 940,000 Kansans voted in the referendum, according to preliminary New York Times estimates, compared with about 1.05 million people in the November 2018 midterm election. The gap between turnout in primaries and general elections is usually much larger than that.

Finally there was SCOTUS. You can understand why there were reports of a number of congressional Republicans wanting the vote to be taken after the November elections.

The Supreme Court scrambled abortion opponents’ calculus.

Abortion opponents’ strategic decisions around the amendment started with the choice to put it on Tuesday’s ballot in the first place. The primary electorate was expected to be small and disproportionately Republican, and it seemed like a reasonable supposition that the amendment would have a better chance of passing in that environment than on a general election ballot.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade in June upended that strategy, turning what might otherwise have been an under-the-radar ballot measure into a nationally scrutinized referendum on abortion rights. Many voters might previously have seen the stakes as theoretical: If the U.S. Constitution protected abortion rights, how much did it really matter whether the Kansas Constitution did? But then the Supreme Court undid the first part of that equation, and Kansas abruptly became an island of abortion access in a sea of Southern and Plains states banning the procedure.

Groups on both sides blanketed the state with millions of dollars in advertising. Democrats who would otherwise have stayed home, knowing their party had few competitive primaries on the ballot, turned out specifically to vote against the amendment. Supporters of abortion rights were gripped with that great political motivator: anger.

On Tuesday, the results were clear.

[AnBr]

The guidance directly cited Georgia’s ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy (when many people don’t know they’re pregnant), which was recently upheld by a federal court.

Plus, don't forget that a fetus at 6 weeks is only about 0.13 in., smaller than a grain of rice.

[LFC]

As expected.

Indiana Passes Near-Total Abortion Ban

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb (R) late Friday signed the state GOP-controlled legislature’s ban on abortion that has only limited exceptions for rape, incest and the pregnant person’s health.

[LFC]

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SCumbag) should just STFU about abortion when he knows this little about how babies are made. With a statement this dumb he should probably just STFU about everything.

In his latest fundraising email, Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) paints a very dark picture for the GOP if the party doesn’t win back the Senate in November.

“If we don’t take back the Senate, Dems will pack the courts, give DC statehood, grant abortions up to 52 weeks, and Republicans will never win again,” he wrote to supporters Monday.

Right now, Democrats control the Senate, House and the White House, and none of those things have happened. And it sure seems like Republicans have a great shot at winning back control of Congress in November. Structurally, the Senate map favors Republicans long-term, so the idea that the GOP will “never win again” is nonsense.

But even more head-scratching is the idea that Democrats will “grant abortions up to 52 weeks.”

“A full-term pregnancy is approximately 40 weeks,” Dr. Meera Shah, chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic, told HuffPost. “It is not logical or medically accurate to say that people can be pregnant at 52 weeks ― let alone be seeking an abortion. It is comments like this one that underscore exactly why medical decisions should not be made by politicians.”