KY Anti-Abortion Law Struck Down

Holy Shit.  And another excuse for Gov. "Only Penises Have Rights" to waste more tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in fruitless appeals.

From the AP:

In a victory for abortion-rights supporters, a federal judge struck down a Kentucky law that had put the state's last abortion clinic at risk of closing when Gov. Matt Bevin's administration cited it in a licensing fight with the facility.

U.S. District Judge Greg Stivers, in a long-awaited ruling, said Friday that the two-decade-old law violates constitutionally protected due process rights. The law required Kentucky's abortion clinics to have written agreements with a hospital and an ambulance service in case of medical emergencies.
Stivers said the so-called transfer agreements "do not advance a legitimate interest" in promoting the health of women seeking abortions.

"The court has carefully reviewed the evidence presented in this case and concludes that the record is devoid of any credible proof that the challenged regulations have any tangible benefit to women's health," Stivers wrote in his 60-page ruling. "On the other hand, the regulations effectively eliminate women's rights to abortions in the state. Therefore, the challenged regulations are unconstitutional."

The ruling was welcomed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which joined the legal fight on behalf of the Louisville abortion clinic. A spokeswoman for Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin said the decision will be appealed.

In a statement, ACLU attorney Brigitte Amiri said: "The court's decision recognized the Kentucky law for what it is: an attack on women wrapped up in a bogus justification and pushed by politicians who've been transparent in their pursuit to ban abortion in the state of Kentucky."

Read more here: https://www.kentucky.com/latest-news/article219207890.html#storylink=cpy

Abortion-By-Cop

So who will be the first freakazoid authoritarian hypocrite to declare that she deserved it for not submitting instantaneously to Big White Cop (yeah, you know who's white and who's black)?  Besides, the kid would just be another moocher anyway.

Crooks and Liars:

A Georgia woman claimed in a lawsuit that police officers in Albany beat her so badly that she had a miscarriage.

In a complaint filed in federal court, Kenya Harris explained that she went to the Albany Police Department in May 2011 to pick up her minor son after he was arrested, according to Courthouse News.

Harris said she waited five hours for her son before informing Officers Ryan Jenkins that she needed to return home to take care of her other children.

"Defendant Officer Jenkins stated that he did not appreciate the tone in which she was communicating with him, and further stated that if she continued he would take her head and 'put it to the floor,'" the lawsuit stated.

The mother once again insisted that she needed to leave, and that's when Jenkins decided to use force.
"Defendant Officer Jenkins, without provocation, grabbed plaintiff, who weighs less than one hundred twenty (120) pounds, by her neck and slammed her to the ground," the lawsuit said. "Plaintiff momentarily blacked out and came to with defendant Officer Jenkins sitting on her back, and with his knee on her arm. Plaintiff was pregnant at the time."

"Defendant Officer Jenkins put handcuffs on plaintiff and slammed her against the wall. Plaintiff was placed into an interrogation room after she was beaten and handcuffed."

Harris asked for medical attention, but officers denied the request. Instead, she was charged with obstruction, and spent one night in the Dougherty County Jail.

In the lawsuit, Harris asserted that excessive force caused her miscarriage. She also suffered injuries to her knee, neck and other areas.

"With malice, defendants Officer Jenkins and with the compliance of Officer Brown, repeatedly slammed Ms. Harris, causing her severe physical harm and the loss of her baby, when less force was required and should have been used," the complain noted.

The lawsuit names Officers Ryan Jenkins and Richard Brown, Jr., Police Chief John Proctor, and the City of Albany. Harris is seeking $50,000 plus punitive damages for excessive force, assault and battery and emotional distress.

Roe Ended a Genuine Holocaust

Well of course the first and more important item on the agenda of the new repug majorities in the states is saving women from the horrors of legal abortion slapping the bitches back to the kitchen.

Applying our standard rule that reality is precisely the opposite of what repugs claim it is, we should find that legal abortion in fact save women's lives.

Yep, that's exactly what it does. 

Dr. David Grimes, who has been providing abortion care for four decades, is worried that the time period before abortion was legalized in the United States is becoming a distant memory.

“I’m 67 now, and people younger than me don’t remember what the bad old days were like. That’s why people seem so complacent about allowing those days to return,” he said in an interview with ThinkProgress.

Grimes, who currently works as a clinical professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, was in his final year of medical school when Roe v. Wade was handed down. When he was a young doctor, he treated some of the women who were injured by the unsafe abortions that were still being performed in the 1970s.

People younger than me don’t remember what the bad old days were like.

He still remembers some of the extreme cases he encountered. One patient, for example, was running a 106 degree fever after having a rubber catheter inserted in her uterus in an attempt to terminate a pregnancy. Another arrived at the hospital in a state of antiseptic shock with a dead fetus inside of her.

In his new book — entitled Every Third Woman in America: How Legal Abortion Transformed Our Nation — Grimes returns to those days. And he uses the stories from that time period to argue that medical historians will put legal abortion on par with antibiotics, vaccinations, and modern contraception as one of the most meaningful advances of the 20th century.

SNIP

In the decade when Grimes was born, the 1940s, there were records of more than 1,000 women dying each year from unsafe and largely self-induced abortions. Every large municipal hospital in the U.S. had a “septic abortion ward,” and treatment for the complications from so-called “incomplete abortion” was the single leading cause for admission for OB-GYN services across the country. National Opinion Research Center surveys conducted in the 1960s found that hundreds of women were attempting to self-abort by penetrating themselves with knitting needles, coat hangers, bicycle spokes, ballpoint pens; others tried to swallow chemicals like turpentine, laundry bleach, and acid.

“When the laws began to change, almost overnight, deaths from septic abortion disappeared,” he told ThinkProgress. “Any way you look at it, abortion has been an astounding public health success.”

SNIP

The current juggernaut of laws are designed to drive women back into the back alley.

“An entire generation of Americans has grown up expecting safe and legal abortion to be there, and it may not be — as we’ve seen with this recent skirmish in Texas,” Grimes said. “The current juggernaut of laws are designed to drive women back into the back alley. But people don’t really understand what the implications are.”

Let's Hear From Women Who Had Abortions Out of Pure Selfishness

Because those abortions - like every other abortion, regardless of cause or reason - are nobody's fucking business but theirs.

Playing the some-abortions-are-better-than-others game falls into the freakazoid women-haters' trap.

Think Progress:

It’s certainly never easy to disclose so much personal information to the general public — especially when it comes to talking about having an abortion, a personal revelation that can lead to death threats. But it’s important to remember that Davis’ abortion story is a relatively safe one. She had “good” abortions, so to speak.

“Good” abortions are the types of procedures that are more palatable to the American public because they don’t involve situations in which critics could paint a woman as being selfish. They’re abortions that are typically compelled by reasons that most Americans see as non-negotiable: in cases when women’s health is at risk, in cases when the fetus has fatal abnormalities, and in cases when the woman became pregnant as a result of rape or incest. They always require some type of justification, some “proof” that the abortion was truly the right moral choice.

“Abortion stigma is the shared understanding that abortion is morally wrong and/or socially unacceptable. The fact that there is dichotomy between ‘acceptable’ reasons for having an abortion and more ‘unacceptable’ reasons is because of abortion stigma, plain and simple,” Steph Herold, the deputy director of an organization called Sea Change, which works to combat abortion stigma, told ThinkProgress via email.

Convicted for Being Female. In America.

None of your fucking business, motherfuckers. Not how women dress, not how women act, not how women have sex, not how women deal with pregnancy, none of it.

None. Of. Your. Mother. Fucking. Business.

Also, it's not a "child" or "baby" until it's outside a woman's body, breathing on its own. Until then, it's a piece of her body, and, again: None. Of. Your. Mother. Fucking. Business.

Think Progress:

A woman in Montana has been charged with criminally endangering a child, which is a felony, after testing positive for illegal drugs. According to court records, she is in her first trimester of pregnancy. The case clearly illustrates how an increasing number of states are using fetal harm laws to criminalize pregnant women’s behavior and blur the lines about exactly when personhood begins in the eyes of the law.

According to the Ravalli Republic, 21-year-old Casey Gloria Allen has been charged with “putting her unborn child at risk by taking illegal drugs” after a drug test came back positive for benzodiazapines, THC, and opiates. She is reportedly 12 weeks pregnant and had been out on bail for previous drug possession charges. “The reality for some of these women is the need for drugs is stronger than any maternal instinct they have,” Ravalli County deputy attorney Thorin Geist told the local outlet.

However, as several reproductive rights advocates have pointed out, Allen’s “maternal instinct” isn’t really the issue at hand. It’s unclear whether Allen knew she was pregnant in the first place, or whether she has any plans to continue the pregnancy. Abortion is, of course, still legal at 12 weeks of pregnancy. Regardless of whether or not Allen ought to be using illegal drugs, charging her with endangerment of her “unborn child” suggests that the state of Montana is endowing her fetus with its own rights.

This is a frequent issue with fetal harm laws, which are on the books in 36 states. This type of legislation is intended to allow states to bring additional charges against someone who physically harms a pregnant woman, like a drunk driver who crashes into her car and causes her to suffer a miscarriage. But unless they’re very carefully worded, they can end up giving equal weight to the rights of both the woman and her fetus — which reproductive rights experts worry could be used as a legal argument for restricting abortion.

Touch My Gun

ummagumma.co:

(via redakota)