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Tag: abortion rights
Under Trump, Far Right Plans 'Department Of Life'  To End Abortion Rights

Under Trump, Far Right Plans 'Department Of Life'  To End Abortion Rights

A coalition of far-right groups assembling a presidential transition plan in the event former President Donald Trump (or any Republican) is elected to the White House is doubling down on their plans to further restrict reproductive rights.

Axios reported Saturday that Project 2025 — a multimillion-dollar campaign led by the Heritage Foundation — remains unrelenting in its stated goals of asserting even more control over women's bodies should Republicans retake the presidency in November. The group's 887-page blueprint, "Mandate for Leadership," includes a section on how it would drastically restructure the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to focus heavily on making abortions even harder to get.

The document states that the HHS should become "known as the Department of Life," specifically by "rejecting the notion that abortion is health care and by restoring its mission statement under the Strategic Plan and elsewhere to include furthering the health and well-being of all Americans 'from conception to natural death.'"

The group also seeks to eliminate a reproductive rights task force the Biden administration put in place and instead "install a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children."

Other proposed restrictions on abortion rights include the defunding of Planned Parenthood (even though abortions count for a small fraction of the organization's healthcare services for women), and reversing FDA approval of abortion medication proven to be safe and effective, like Mifepristone. Project 2025 also wants to strengthen the ability of healthcare providers to cite "religious objections" as a valid reason to not provide reproductive healthcare.

Trump campaign senior adviser Chris LaCivita has said that Project 2025 doesn't speak for the former president and that Trump would be releasing his own transition plan in the event he wins the November election. However, John McEntee, who is Trump's former director of the Presidential Personnel Office, now works for Project 2025 in a senior role, which may mean that the group is more closely intertwined with Trump's inner circle than LaCivita suggests.

Project 2025 is already pre-screening potential employees in the next Republican administration with the expressly stated goal of filling the executive branch — and the federal civil service — with yes-men committed to the far-right's political goals. The group is calling for Trump, or the next Republican president, to pass an executive order dubbed "Schedule F" that would overhaul numerous employment protections for federal workers in order to drastically increase the number of presidential appointments from a few thousand to more than 54,000.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

President Joe Biden

Biden Marks Roe Anniversary With New Abortion Protections (And A Stinging Ad)

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are commemorating the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, kicking off what will be a year-long campaign to put abortion and reproductive health rights at the forefront in 2024. That includes the White House announcing new steps to strengthen protections and access to contraception, abortion medication, and emergency abortions at hospitals, facing Donald Trump and his packed Supreme Court head on.

It also includes blasting out this 60-second ad featuring Dr. Austin Dennard, an OB/GYN and a mother of three, who fled the state to get an abortion. The fetus she was carrying had a fatal deformity and carrying it potentially threatened her life.

“In Texas, you are forced to carry that pregnancy, and that is because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade,” Dennard says in the ad. “The choice was completely taken away. I was to continue my pregnancy, putting my life at risk,” she continued. “It’s every woman’s worst nightmare, and it was absolutely unbearable.”

Biden’s statement on the anniversary of Roe makes the stakes of this election clear: Abortion opponents want women in every state to be subjected to what Dennard faced. “Even as Americans—from Ohio to Kentucky to Michigan to Kansas to California—have resoundingly rejected attempts to limit reproductive freedom, Republican elected officials continue to push for a national ban and devastating new restrictions across the country.”

It also puts forced birth advocates on the spot. They want a national abortion ban, but they know that saying that out loud is a political suicide. Even at Friday’s March for Life, prominent lawmakers and activists steered clear from talking about abortion bans, or even from taking a victory lap at having finally succeeded in overturning Roe. Instead, many talked about efforts to divert federal funding to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, trying to put a caring face on forcing people to carry unwanted, often dangerous, pregnancies.

“This is a critical time to help all moms who are facing unplanned pregnancies,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at the rally. “To work with foster children and help families who are adopting, to volunteer and assist at our vital pregnancy resource center and maternity homes, and to reach out a renewed hand of compassion and to speak truth and love.” Right, it’s all about compassion and love with the GOP.

Biden and Harris aren’t going to let Republicans get away with that, rhetorically or in terms of policy. The measures the White House unveiled expanded access to contraception, guaranteed access to the abortion pill, and a new task force dedicated to enforcing the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which requires hospitals to provide “stabilizing” health care for patients in emergency situations, including labor. That care, the Biden administration maintains, includes abortion.

That puts the administration at loggerheads with the Trump-packed Supreme Court, which will hear a proposed law from the state of Idaho prosecuting emergency room doctors who provide abortions in the course of stabilizing patients. The Justice Department is preparing to argue the law at the Supreme Court later this year.

Biden is also taking the court on by announcing he is “directing further efforts to support patients, providers, and pharmacies who wish to legally access, prescribe, or provide medication abortion.” The court will decide on restrictions on that access—even in states where abortion remains legal—later this year.

Meanwhile, Harris is kicking off her “Reproductive Freedoms Tour” of swing states starting Monday in Wisconsin. She’s taking the fight to Trump in a speech previewed by Politico: “He made a decision to take your freedoms, and it is a decision he does not regret. Just two weeks ago, he said, that for years, ‘they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated.’ And then he bragged, ‘I did it, and I’m proud to have done it.’”

“He is proud,” Harris continues. “Proud that women across our nation are suffering? Proud that women have been robbed of a fundamental freedom? That doctors could be thrown in prison for caring for patients? That young women today have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers?”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Federal Appeals Court Rules Emergency Rooms Need Not Perform Lifesaving Abortions

Federal Appeals Court Rules Emergency Rooms Need Not Perform Lifesaving Abortions

By Eleanor Klibanoff

Federal regulations do not require emergency rooms to perform life-saving abortions if it would run afoul of state law, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

After the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services sent hospitals guidance, reminding them of their obligation to offer stabilizing care, including medically necessary abortions, under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA).

“When a state law prohibits abortion and does not include an exception for the life of the pregnant person — or draws the exception more narrowly than EMTALA’s emergency medical condition definition — that state law is preempted,” the guidance said.

Texas sued, saying this was tantamount to a “nationwide mandate that every hospital and emergency-room physician perform abortions.” Several anti-abortion medical associations joined the lawsuit as well.

Since summer 2022, all abortions have been banned in Texas, except to save the life of the pregnant patient. But doctors, and their patients with medically complex pregnancies, have struggled with implementing the medical exception, reportedly delaying or denying abortion care rather than risk up to life in prison and the loss of their license.

At a hearing in November, a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice said that while Texas law might not prohibit medically necessary abortions, the guidance was intended “to ensure that the care is offered when it is required under the statute.”

“Individuals [are] presenting to emergency rooms, suffering from these emergency medical conditions,” McKaye Neumeister said. “Right now, HHS can’t ensure that the hospitals are following their obligations in offering the care that’s required.”

In August 2022, a federal district judge in Lubbock agreed with Texas, saying this guidance amounted to a new interpretation of EMTALA and granting a temporary injunction that was later extended. The Fifth Circuit heard arguments in November, and the judges seemed prepared to uphold the injunction.

Judge Leslie Southwick said there were several “extraordinary things, it seems to me, about this guidance,” and said it seemed HHS was trying to use EMTALA to expand abortion access in Texas to include “broader categories of things, mental health or whatever else HHS would say an abortion is required for.”

Tuesday’s ruling, authored by Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt, said the court “decline[d] to expand the scope of EMTALA.”

“We agree with the district court that EMTALA does not provide an unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child,” Englehardt wrote. “EMTALA does not mandate medical treatments, let alone abortion care, nor does it preempt Texas law.”

This article originally appeared inThe Texas Tribune, a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.


Abortion rights supporters

Ohio Voters Torch GOP Scheme To Kill Abortion Rights Amendment

Ohio voters on Tuesday rejected a Republican-backed measure called Issue 1, a proposed constitutional amendment that would have made it difficult to ever change the state's constitution again. The proposal was failing 62-38 with 36% of the estimated vote tallied when the Associated Press called the race. The result means that pro-choice advocates will need to win a simple majority on Nov. 7 in order to pass their own amendment to enshrine abortion rights into the state's governing document instead of the 60% supermajority that Issue 1 would have imposed.

The outcome also ensures that activists seeking to pass other amendments opposed by Ohio's GOP-dominated state government will not need to contend with the dramatically increased signature requirements that Issue 1 would have required in order to qualify measures for the ballot. (Republicans in numerous other states have also been trying to make it tougher to pass progressive ballot change at the ballot box, mostly without success.) That's good news for a 2024 effort to create an independent redistricting commission in place of a broken bipartisan board that tilts heavily to the GOP, as well as a campaign to raise the minimum wage from its current level of $10.10 per hour.

Both sides, however, chiefly viewed Tuesday's contest as a proxy fight over abortion rights, with Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose outright declaring in June, "This is 100 percent about keeping a radical, pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution." The "no" side ran a barrage of ads highlighting those comments from LaRose, who is seeking the GOP nomination to challenge Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, warning that "[c]orrupt politicians and special interests" were "trying to rig the rules to lock in Ohio's extreme abortion ban and stop efforts to restore our rights."

Conservative groups, though, seem to have decided that abortion rights were too popular to directly attack in a state where, according to Civiqs, voters agree 55-40 that the procedure should be legal in all or most cases. The "yes" side instead resorted to transphobia by insisting, "Out-of-state special interests that put trans ideology in classrooms and encourage sex changes for kids are hiding behind slick ads." (Neither Issue 1 nor the abortion amendment has anything to do with any of these issues.)

Other right-wing ads insisted that Issue 1 was necessary to stop "radical groups" from "tak[ing] away parents' ability to be informed and to make decisions for their children," even though the November abortion amendment wouldn't impact the state's parental consent laws.

The pro-Issue 1 side further claimed it was trying to stop out-of-state interests from changing the state's governing document for their own ends, despite the fact that much of their money came from one out-of-state billionaire, Illinois megadonor Richard Uihlein. But Uihlein's deep pockets were not enough: AdImpact reports that the "no" side outspent its rivals $15.9 million to $10.7 million on TV and radio ads.

None of the GOP's messages helped avert defeat on Tuesday, but it remains to be seen whether conservatives will adopt different tactics heading into the fall. And another expensive battle looms: The groups backing abortion rights tell NBC they'll spend at least $35 million to pass their amendment, while their opponents at Protect Women Ohio say they've already booked $25 million in ad time.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.