A series of appellate court decisions in the coming months could determine how and when the Supreme Court reviews the birth control benefit in the Affordable Care Act.
In the legal battle over the contraception benefit, conservatives see a chance to radically re-define the nature of religious liberty in the United States and to provide broad protections from obeying the law for businesses. It’s a dangerous combination of religious extremism and corporate extremism, which Circuit Judge Rovner laid bare last February. Now the appeals court is going to have another look.
(via hopeisreal42)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg on women taking over the Supreme Court!
Happy 80th Birthday, Justice Ginsburg!
Beatriz wants to live. She’s 22 years old and the mother of an infant, but the 18 week pregnancy she’s carrying is killing her — right now as you read this — and the government of El Salvador has refused to permit an exception to their abortion ban to save her life.
The fetus Beatriz is carrying is anencephalic; it has no brain and won’t survive birth even if her health allowed her to carry to full term. More to the point, Beatriz has lupus, worsened by a kidney malfunction, and it’s very dangerous for her to be pregnant. But under El Salvador’s abortion ban, both Beatriz and any medical staff involved in providing a therapeutic abortion would face criminal charges, carrying penalties as high as 50 years in jail for her and 12 years in jail for her doctors.
Both El Salvador’s Minister of Health and Attorney General for Human Rights support allowing an exception to save Beatriz’ life, yet the Supreme Court has delayed making this literally life and death decision. Now this impoverished young mother has entered early stage renal failure as her pregnancy steadily destroys her kidneys.
Sign now to stand with Beatriz’ husband and infant son today in asking the Salvadoran government to allow her doctors to save her life and their future together as a family.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the case Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl. While arguments touched on a number of topics, they centered on an issue crucial to all of us â how a parent is defined under the law.
While the most important things a child needs are love and stability, ideally children would have the opportunity to be raised by those who share their heritage and can teach them the culture and traditions of that heritage. Moreover, it is important for the law to presume that members of historically marginalized communities are legitimate and fit parents unless proven otherwise in order to correct for the bias that so often still exists to the contrary.
Trial Against Lt. Dan Choi for ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Protest Set for Today
With much press devoted to the Supreme Court arguments on California’s Proposition 8 and the federal Defense of Marriage Act, not everyone may be aware that LGBTQ rights are on trial in a third case this week: United States v. Daniel Choi.
The case concerns whether Lt. Dan Choi should serve up to six months in jail or pay a fine of up to $5,000 for chaining himself to the White House fence in protest of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy in November 2010. An Iraq war veteran, Arabic linguist, and West Point graduate, Choi was discharged for “coming out” while DADT was still in effect. He has been arrested while engaging in several high-profile acts of non-violent civil disobedience and activism, including three White House DADT protests, a White House protest of the Keystone XL pipeline, and a gay pride parade in Moscow.
Choi was one of 12 activists arrested during the November 2010 DADT protest, but he is the only one with an ongoing trial; the others pled guilty. Choi argues that since DADT has since been repealed, his charges should be dropped.
Iowa Anti-Choicers Admit They Want to Imprison Women for Abortion
Written by Amanda Marcotte for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
A little over a month into 2013, and one thing is absolutely certain: Anti-choice legislators aren’t going to let the damage that their war on women did to their fellow conservative politicians’ electoral prospects slow them down from competing with each other to show who can concoct the most vile schemes to undermine women’s rights. Now Iowa Republicans are flexing their muscles, trying to show that they hate the ladies even more than the forced-transvaginal-ultrasound folks in Michigan, Texas, and Virginia, or the women-can’t-think-on-weekends-and-holidays nuts in South Dakota.
Nine state representatives in Iowa have introduced a bill that would define killing a fertilized egg as “murder”.
707.1 Murder defined.
1. A person who kills another person with malice aforethought either express or implied commits murder.
2. “Person”, when referring to the victim of a murder, means an individual human being, without regard to age of development, from the moment of conception, when a zygote is formed, until natural death.
Murder includes killing another person through any means that terminates the life of the other person including but not limited to the use of abortion-inducing drugs. For the purposes of this section, “abortion-inducing drug” means a medicine, drug, or any other substance prescribed or dispensed with the intent of terminating the clinically diagnosable pregnancy of a woman, with knowledge that the drug will with reasonable likelihood cause the termination of the pregnancy. “Abortion-inducing drug” includes the off-label use of drugs known to have abortion-inducing properties, which are prescribed specifically with the intent of causing an abortion, but does not include drugs that may be known to cause an abortion, but which are prescribed for other medical indications.
The point of this bill is, simply put, to throw women in jail for “murder” for deliberately ending pregnancies — and quite possibly for trying to prevent them, as many anti-choicers continue to insist, despite the evidence against them, that the pill and emergency contraception work by “killing” fertilized eggs.
Latest Seventh Circuit Decision on Birth Control Benefit Paves Another Path To SCOTUS
Written by Jessica Mason Pieklo for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Just days before the Obama administration announced new rules concerning the birth control benefit, a split 7th Circuit Court of Appeals granted an injunction allowing another for-profit business to opt out, putting to rest any lingering doubts that the issue will eventually land before the Supreme Court.
The Grote Family owns and operates Grote Industries, a for-profit business located in Madison, Indiana. Grote manufactures vehicle safety and lighting systems. The business employs 1,148 workers over a variety of locations. It’s a privately-held business with a self-funded insurance plan. The Grote’s are Catholic and claim to operate their business according to the “precepts of their faith.” This includes adhering to the Catholic Church’s teachings regarding “the moral wrongfulness of abortifacient drugs, contraception, and sterilization” and denying their employees contraception coverage in the company’s plan. When faced with complying with the birth control benefit the Grotes sued to block the mandate and enjoin the Obama administration from enforcing its penalty provisions. The district court denied their request, but in a 2-1 decision the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court pending appeal, which means for now, the Grotes do not have to comply.
What’s noteworthy about the decision in this case is not the outcome, but the detailed and well-reasoned dissent crafted by Circuit Judge Ilana Rovner.
In Malpractice Case, Catholic Hospital Argues Fetuses Aren’t People
Written by John Tomasic for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Cross-posted in partnership with the Colorado Independent.
For further coverage of the treatment of pregnant women in Catholic Hospitals, click here.
Lori Stodghill was 31-years old, seven-months pregnant with twin boys and feeling sick when she arrived at St. Thomas More hospital in Cañon City on New Year’s Day 2006. She was vomiting and short of breath and she passed out as she was being wheeled into an examination room. Medical staff tried to resuscitate her but, as became clear only later, a main artery feeding her lungs was clogged and the clog led to a massive heart attack. Stodghill’s obstetrician, Dr. Pelham Staples, who also happened to be the obstetrician on call for emergencies that night, never answered a page. His patient died at the hospital less than an hour after she arrived and her twins died in her womb.
In the aftermath of the tragedy, Stodghill’s husband Jeremy, a prison guard, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of himself and the couple’s then-two-year-old daughter Elizabeth. Staples should have made it to the hospital, his lawyers argued, or at least instructed the frantic emergency room staff to perform a caesarian-section. The procedure likely would not have saved the mother, a testifying expert said, but it may have saved the twins.
The lead defendant in the case is Catholic Health Initiatives, the Englewood-based nonprofit that runs St. Thomas More Hospital as well as roughly 170 other health facilities in 17 states. Last year, the hospital chain reported national assets of $15 billion. The organization’s mission, according to its promotional literature, is to “nurture the healing ministry of the Church” and to be guided by “fidelity to the Gospel.” Toward those ends, Catholic Health facilities seek to follow the Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church authored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Those rules have stirred controversy for decades, mainly for forbidding non-natural birth control and abortions. “Catholic health care ministry witnesses to the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death,’” the directives state. “The Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn.”
The directives can complicate business deals for Catholic Health, as they can for other Catholic health care providers, partly by spurring political resistance. In 2011, the Kentucky attorney general and governor nixed a plan in which Catholic Health sought to merge with and ultimately gain control of publicly-funded hospitals in Louisville. The officials were reacting to citizen concerns that access to reproductive and end-of-life services would be curtailed. According to The Denver Post, similar fears slowed the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth’s plan over the last few years to buy out Exempla Lutheran Medical Center and Exempla Good Samaritan Medical Center in the Denver metro area.
But when it came to mounting a defense in the Stodghill case, Catholic Health’s lawyers effectively turned the Church directives on their head. Catholic organizations have for decades fought to change federal and state laws that fail to protect “unborn persons,” and Catholic Health’s lawyers in this case had the chance to set precedent bolstering anti-abortion legal arguments. Instead, they are arguing state law protects doctors from liability concerning unborn fetuses on grounds that those fetuses are not persons with legal rights.
You Can’t Have it Both Ways: The Interpretation of Catholic Health Policy and the Consequences for Pregnant Women
Written by Marge Berer for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Republished with permission from Reproductive Health Matters.
“There is only one way to be sure a woman’s life is at risk, that is, after she dies.” — Christian Fiala, 2012
In 1987, the year the first Safe Motherhood Initiative was launched by the World Health Organization (WHO), there were more than half a million maternal deaths annually. The women who were dying were often anonymous and their deaths never recorded or studied. They were mainly from poor and often rural backgrounds in developing countries, such as India. A study in India published in 1999 comparing 100 maternal deaths in a Rajasthan hospital in 1983-85 to 100 in 1994-96 found that: “Most of the women who died in hospital in 1994-96 would have died at home in the earlier decade.”1 What had changed was that they had reached a hospital and were therefore no longer anonymous, but they were still overwhelmingly women living in poverty with little or no access to skilled pregnancy and delivery care.
Contrast this with the death of Savita Halappanavar on 28 October 2012, a dentist from a privileged background in India, who miscarried 17 weeks into a very wanted pregnancy and died in the maternity ward of a hospital in Ireland, a country with a very low maternal death ratio.2 Savita’s death was anything but anonymous; her name and photograph circled the globe within days of her death and sparked street demonstrations and protests, not only across Ireland but also in many other parts of Europe and in India. Six weeks later, articles and blogs about her death continued to be published in many countries, demands by her husband for a maternal death audit were headline news, and the Irish government has been forced to consider the effects of her death for the law, health policy and the Constitution of Ireland.
Savita’s death became iconic for a number of reasons. First, preventing maternal deaths has been a global priority since 1987 when the first WHO Safe Motherhood Initiative was launched. Since 2000, reducing maternal deaths by 75 percent by 2014 has been the main target of Millennium Development Goal No.5, and since 2010 it has been one of five main goals of the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s Global Strategy on Women’s and Children’s Health. Hence, maternal deaths have started to be a news item globally, with journals like Reproductive Health Matters carrying studies and the media in many countries where deaths remain frequent, reporting successes and failures to reduce deaths, and individual stories regularly.
Secondly, holding governments accountable for their failure to provide the required services, both antenatal and delivery care and emergency obstetric care, to prevent avoidable maternal deaths has become the subject of public protests by women’s rights advocates, of court cases, including in India, and of hearings by human rights bodies, particularly CEDAW, examining individual cases and making policy recommendations to governments.3
What was different about Savita’s death, however, was the fact that it was also about whether and when to terminate a pregnancy when it is not viable and the woman’s health and life are at risk, and how that intersected in Savita’s case with individual health professionals’ interpretation of Catholic health policy and the law on abortion in Ireland.
As a committee of the Irish Parliament considers proposals to offer limited legal abortion in Ireland, this paper explores how these issues came together around Savita’s death, the interpretation of Catholic health policy and the consequences for pregnant women.
