Tag Archives: Texas

When Metaphor Becomes Reality: The Abortion Battle and the Necessity of the FACE Act

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PP entrance

Clinic escorts at a Washington, D.C. Planned Parenthood. Photo: Bruno Sanchez-Andrade Nuño via Flickr

Serving as the medical director of a reproductive health clinic made Dr. George Tiller a lightning rod for constant vitriol — and more than once a target of violence. Picketers routinely gathered outside his clinic in Wichita, Kansas, a site of their protests because it provided abortions, including late-term abortions. In 1986, Tiller saw the clinic firebombed. Seven years later, in 1993, he suffered bullet wounds to his arms when an anti-abortion extremist fired on him outside the property. Finally, in 2009, he was fatally shot while attending worship services at a Wichita church.

Anti-abortion extremists can create life-threatening scenarios for those who seek reproductive health care.

In the wake of Dr. Tiller’s death, many reproductive rights advocates argued that his assassination could have been avoided. The shooting was not the first time his murderer, 51-year-old Scott Roeder, broke the law.

Roeder could have been stopped prior to the shooting under a federal law, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which was enacted in 1994 — 19 years ago this Sunday — to protect the exercise of reproductive health choices. The FACE Act makes it a federal crime to intimidate or injure a person who is trying to access a reproductive health clinic. It also makes it unlawful to vandalize or otherwise intentionally damage a facility that provides reproductive health care.

Roeder’s ideology was the root of his criminality. Roeder subscribed to a magazine, Prayer and Action News, that posited that killing abortion providers was “justifiable homicide.” Roeder also had ties to a right-wing extremist movement that claimed exemption from U.S. laws and the legal system. Continue reading →

Roe v. Wade: An Overview

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The name of the case Roe v. Wade is familiar to many people in the United States. So is its main impact, to establish a constitutional right to abortion — which it did exactly 40 years ago today.

That said, many fewer people know the details, both of the factual case and of the case’s finding. Do you?

What did abortion law look like at the time?

At the time the facts immediately behind the case started, abortion statutes varied by state, though most states restricted abortion significantly. In Texas, where Norma McCorvey (“Jane Roe”) lived, the law prohibited “procuring or attempting an abortion” except to save the mother’s life.

Who was “Jane Roe,” and why did she sue?

“Jane Roe” was Norma McCorvey, a single woman who learned she was pregnant. In 1970, Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington brought suit on her behalf under the alias of Jane Roe. They asserted that the Texas law violated the Constitution on the grounds “that the Texas Abortion Laws deprive married couples and single women of the right to choose whether to have children” (N.D. Texas Opinion of U.S. District Court June (17,) (1970) – Per Curiam:). Continue reading →

Roe v. Wade at 40: Lost Ground and the Moment to Reclaim It

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As 2012 came to a close, one of the last attacks on reproductive freedom in Arizona was in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where the state of Arizona fought to defund Planned Parenthood. The state was appealing an injunction against HB2800, a new measure that would strip funding for family planning services from any health care facility that provides abortions.

The 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade should serve as a call to action to defend reproductive freedom.

Following a year that saw more state-level legislation to restrict abortion access than any year in the last three decades, 2012 saw no reprieve. Besides HB2800, Arizona lawmakers voted on bills that barred employer coverage for birth control and access to medically necessary abortions. In response to part of the latter bill, the Arizona Department of Health Service’s website added a new section on abortion, which made its debut late last year, called “A Woman’s Right to Know” — a guide that employed scare tactics and other manipulation to deter women from seeking abortions.

Arizona reflected what was happening nationally. According to a recent study by the Guttmacher Institute, Arizona has joined a new majority of states that are “solidly hostile to abortion rights.” In 2000, a third of women of reproductive age lived in such states. Today, more than half do. Since 2000, the number of states considered hostile to abortion doubled from 13 to 26. Continue reading →

Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

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  • Another day, another moronic member of the GOP telling us that rape, in some way or another, isn’t all that bad for women. Maybe a pregnancy resulting from it was even “intended by God.” #Facepalm (HuffPo)
  • Joe Walsh, yet another imbecilic dunce from the GOP (they just keep crawling out of the woodwork, don’t they? Like termites!) says that advances in medicine have made pregnancy-related deaths obsolete and, thus, there’s never a need for abortions solely for the health of the mother. (Jezebel)
  • And if you thought it couldn’t get any worse than that, you’re sadly mistaken. Pennsylvania is considering a bill that would reduce welfare benefits for women who cannot prove their child was conceived from a rape. Nothing like dooming a woman and her offspring to abject poverty if she can’t prove her child was conceived without her consent. #GOPValues (Think Progress)
  • A sobering, fact-filled piece on rape being used as a political tool by Republican men in the debate over reproductive rights. (RH Reality Check)
  • President Obama wishes politicians would stay out of women’s health care. So do we, sir. (Politico)
  • Texas has won a court battle to exclude Planned Parenthood from the state health care program that provides services to low-income women. (Business Week)
  • Arizona and Indiana can forget about defunding Planned Parenthood, though, says the judicial system. (AP)
  • Meanwhile, in France, lawmakers passed a bill allowing free abortions for all women and free contraception for girls ages 15 to 18. (Global Post)
  • Somebody alert the rest of the media and call a press conference: Free birth control leads to fewer abortions. (South Florida Times)

Book Club: Flagrant Conduct

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Although books have shaped much of my political thinking, until recently I never did much reading about LGBTQ equality. My own reasoning made me an ally, so I wasn’t as well versed as I could have been. That’s why I never knew the full importance and the unlikely history of the 2003 Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas — the landmark case that put sodomy laws on trial — until I picked up Dale Carpenter’s recently published history of the case, Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas (W. W. Norton, 2012).

Sodomy laws gave police leverage to harass members of the LGBTQ community.

Flagrant Conduct tells the story of two men who were arrested for what they didn’t even know was a crime. They could have paid fines to put the incident behind them quietly, but activists and legal counsel convinced them to take their case all the way to the Supreme Court. Although they were strangers to activism, the two men agreed to use their case to defeat an unfair law. Five years later, the two men and their attorneys won a high-stakes victory in a conservative Supreme Court.

The arrest of John Lawrence and Tyron Garner in Houston on September 17, 1998 — 14 years ago today — was the event that led to Lawrence v. Texas. That night, deputies responded to a 911 call reporting that a man was “going crazy with a gun” in Lawrence’s apartment. The deputies who arrived never encountered a man with a gun, but they arrested Lawrence and Garner for engaging in, as the offense report put it, “deviate sexual intercourse[,] namely anal sex.” The two men were charged with violating the state’s “Homosexual Conduct” law, Section 21.06 of the Texas Penal Code. The law, which criminalized same-sex sexual intimacy, was put in place when Texas revised its sex laws in 1973, giving more sexual freedoms to heterosexuals but fewer to gays and lesbians. Continue reading →

Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

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  • Planned Parenthood’s fearless leader, Cecile Richards, put the verbal smackdown on Todd Akin and the rest of the anti-choice clowns of the GOP at the Democratic National Convention last night. (HuffPo)
  • And then Sandra Fluke chimed in with her own takedown of Mitt Romney! (ABC News)
  • Remember how Arizona (specifically Jan Brewer) passed legislation stipulating that only licensed physicians can provide abortion care? Well, new research concludes nurses and midwives can perform abortions just as safely as doctors. The study echoes research last year that found care delivered by advanced practice nurses is just as safe and effective, if not more so, than care provided by physicians. (Fierce Healthcare)
  • Karen Handel, former exec at the Susan G. Komen foundation, has written a book called “Planned Bullyhood” (haha @ that asinine title) in which she whines incessantly about the fallout from Komen’s ill-fated decision to pull its annual grant for breast cancer screenings from Planned Parenthood. Handel has the nerve to compare us to a “schoolyard thug.” Is that LOL-worthy or what?! She blatantly disregards the fact that it was Komen who decided to prioritize politics over women’s health. She fails to acknowledge it was Komen who was soooo eager to jump on the “Attack Planned Parenthood” bandwagon that they were just fine with ceasing funding for potentially life-saving breast exams to women simply for being patients at Planned Parenthood. Oh, and it was Komen who’d known for-freaking-ever that 3 percent of our services go toward abortion care, but only decided to pull the grant because of a highly charged political climate — without regard for the health of the women we both have a responsibility to serve. But we’re the bullies for fighting on behalf of the women who depend on us for their preventive care??? #YeahRight #NotGonnaFlyLady #TryAgain (The Daily Beast)
  • Fox News is making stuff up (shocking, I know) about the Affordable Care Act and pretending like there isn’t a GOP war on women. In other words, it’s business as usual at Fox News. (Newshound)
  • The prognosis for women in four southern states with high rates of maternal mortality — Texas, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi — could be getting even worse thanks to their Republican-led governments trying to decline federal aid to expand Medicaid. (Forbes)
  • The male birth control pill we’ve been waiting 50 years for might finally be on the horizon in the not-so-distant future. (Science 2.0)
  • A new animal study has found that an anti-HIV vaginal ring can prevent virus transmission. Yay science! (Science Daily)
  • Texas continues its fight against Planned Parenthood, and as per usual, it’s women who’ll have to deal with the negative consequences. (CBS News)

Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

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  • Image: billb1961

    Defunding Denied: Ohio House panel restores Planned Parenthood funding. (Ohio.com)
  • Texas can also forget about defunding Planned Parenthood. (HuffPo)
  • The state of Tennessee cares more about embryos than women. (Jezebel)
  • Are Women Too Stupid to Understand Abortion? Um, NO! (Slate XX Factor)
  • Is your doctor holding your birth control hostage? If so, you’re not alone. (Mother Jones)
  • The FDA could be close to approving the first drug for HIV prevention! (ABC News)
  • The approval of said drug would be welcome news for black women in metro Atlanta, who are being infected with HIV at alarming rates. (11Alive Atlanta)
  • Anti-choicers are champing at the bit to expose and shame women who’ve had abortions, and they’re not above stealing patient information from clinics and posting it online. (Care2)
  • This week, Utah became the only state in the country to enact a law that requires a 72- hour waiting period for a woman seeking an abortion. Any bets on which state will be the first to enact a 40 week waiting period? (Ms. Magazine)
  • Melinda Gates is crusading for women’s health and contraception worldwide. (The Daily Beast)
  • According to the CDC, teenage girls are waiting longer than ever to become sexually active and using contraception at levels never before seen! (CBS News)

Pro-Choice Friday News Rundown

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  • Since when in the history of ever has abortion based solely on race or sex been a prevalent issue in Arizona and why is Rep. Trent Franks wasting the legislature’s time with this fiasco? Does he really think a pregnant woman wakes up one day and feels compelled to abort because she’s just grasped the reality that the fetus inside her will grow into a baby OF HER OWN OR THE CHILD’S FATHER’S RACE?! Also, how do they intend to enforce something like that? #IsThisRealLife? (New American Media)
  • Oh and that’s only one of the craptacular anti-choice bills coming out of our legislature. #ItGetsWorse (AZ Central)
  • It’s complete and total bunk that insurance coverage of birth control impinges upon religious freedom. (RH Reality Check)
  • Seven states sue over Obama birth control coverage rule; surprisingly Arizona isn’t one of the usual suspects! (MSNBC)
  • Since no one with a uterus was present at the Republicans’ farce of a hearing on birth control last week, the Dems had their own hearing — with actual women! (HuffPo)
  • Good News: The Virginia bill requiring forced transvaginal ultrasounds on all women seeking abortions has been annihilated. (Associated Press)
  • Virginia’s “personhood” bill is also a goner! (USA Today)
  • Putting low-income women’s health at risk, Texas defies Obama administration, bars abortion providers from Medicaid. (The Hill)
  • MAYDAY! The rising power of crisis pregnancy centers is a cause for great alarm! (American Independent)