.

Indeed and it should be legal because we're not talking about killing a human being (Or at least it's too strongly disputed to be a basis for extreme laws)

Pregnancy is a pretty unique situation but for most of us it's simply not killing a human being so the problem you see doesn't exist.

if someone thinks abortion is murder regardless of when it occurs, what's the difference between it happening right after conception or right before natural birth?

Didn't you answer your own question there - or am I misunderstanding something?

Q (to someone thinks abortion is murder regardless of when it occurs)
What's the difference between it (abortion) happening right after conception or right before natural birth?

A (from said person)
None - it's murder regardless of when it occurs

then why the fuss about how 9th month abortion is so grotesque? I mean I get why - they want to paint pro-choice as more evil every opportunity they can.

but logically, if abortion is murder, they shouldn't get any more excited about it happening at any point of the pregnancy than any other random point.

Also rape and incest exceptions shouldn't exist either.

Some news relevant to the thread:

In 2016, in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, the 4 liberals + Kennedy decided 5-3 (Scalia's seat was empty) that a Texas law requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital was unconstitutional. This overruled a decision by the Fifth Circuit, which had allowed the law.

Louisiana had passed basically an identical law in 2014, but was not enforcing it. However, the Fifth Circuit ruled on it late last year, and despite being bitchslapped by SCOTUS on an identical law in Texas, they again ruled this law was constitutional.

So, abortion providers in Louisiana have asked SCOTUS for an emergency stay. If it is not granted today, the law will go into effect on Monday, which would cause the entire state of Louisiana to be served only by a single abortion doctor. And keep in mind that since the Whole Women's Health decision, the 5-3 majority lost Kennedy and the minority gained Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

Opening Arguments' episode today goes into detail on this, but what they basically laid out was: issuing a stay should be a no-brainer, based on the Whole Woman's Health precedent. If SCOTUS denies a stay, it is a lock that they will seek to overturn Roe v. Wade this year. If they do issue a stay, they still might overturn it anyway, but are not being so brazen about it.

Don't think they're ever going to actually overtly overturn Roe vs. Wade, but a bunch of stuff like this is going to happen, which will effectively accomplish the same thing:

The facts behind Whole Woman's Health are bonkers and it's a great illustration of how Alito is the least-qualified Justice on the court. Read the transcript if you want to see the three women jurors being awesome and Alito sucking.

Paraphrase:

Counsel: In the five years prior to enactment, the number of clinics in the state was fairly stable. Following the enactment of HB2, more than 20 clinics closed within a very short period of time.

Alito: How do you know they closed because of the act?

Counsel: 11 of them closed, literally, on the day the new requirements took effect.

Alito: Seems like coincidence.

Kagan: In the two-week period that the ASC requirement was in effect, more than a dozen facilities closed, and then when the ASC requirement was lifted, they reopened again immediately. Isn't that a perfect experiment that demonstrates they closed precisely because of the new requirements?

Alito: I guess we'll never know.

[Later good stuff from RBG on the completely hypocritical position that Texas women weren't inconvenienced, because they could travel to New Mexico. Even though New Mexico didn't have the requirements that were apparently necessary to protect those women.]

So tilting.

As mentioned in the OA podcast, the Fifth Circuit decision in this case (June Medical Services v. Gee) explicitly acknowledges that the Louisiana law provides "minimal benefits" to women.

Downloading it now. Thanks for the update.

Alito issues a temporary block until Thursday, saying justices need more time to review before deciding on a stay

SCOTUS votes, 5-4 with Roberts + liberals, to halt Louisiana from enforcing law until case is considered

This is, of course, ****ing terrifying: all hopes now rest on John Roberts making a pro-abortion ruling.

It's hilarious, and also not surprising, that 4 justices on the Supreme Court wanted to allow Louisiana to start enforcing a law that was ruled unconstitutional just three years ago.

Don't worry, Collins made sure that abortion rights would be protected.



To be fair, this isn't Kavanaugh trying to overturn Roe or Casey or Whole Woman's Health - his dissent is arguably reasonable. As I understand it, this isn't a petition to the Supreme Court about whether the law is constitutional, it's whether the law should be stayed while it's disputed.

Yeah, Roe looking dead. They don't even have to explicitly kill it if they just let states close all the clinics. Back alley hemorrhaging for poor black people and discreet trips to California for the mistresses of GOP congresscritters is their ideal outcome.

I really need to read the opinions. Per the reporting I heard this morning, this stay is similar to one issued over a similar law passed by Louisiana in 2016. That vote was 5-4 as well, with Kennedy voting with the liberals.

The person who wrote the dissenting opinion in that case was...John Roberts.

That line of argumentation is bull****, though, when the law in question is virtually identical to one that was already struck down as being unconstitutional. If Kavanaugh wasn't looking to upend abortion precedent, the obvious thing is to deny enforcement of a law that is plainly unconstitutional per precedent.

this is exactly how they will end roe.. with laws like this that do things like require abortion clinics to have physicians that have admitting privileges, and then the hospitals will just not grant them to any of these physicians, and poof no more rights to abortion.

even though pretty much this exact case was already decided in 2016.

I don't think I agree with this. As I understand the Texas law and ruling (https://casetext.com/case/whole-woma...-v-hellerstedt), the law was not unconstitutional on its face. It was unconstitutional because of the practical effect that it would have in Texas, based on the nature of abortion providers in Texas. Kavanaugh's argument is that, if the law isn't unconstitutional on its face, but rather because of the demonstrated effects it had in Texas, there's no reason to stay the enforcement of the law until we have reason to believe that Louisiana would experience those same adverse effects. In other words, I don't believe that the Texas decision ruled that the specific law in question would be universally unconstitutional, but only that it was unconstitutional as enacted in Texas.

I think that approach lines up with the original decision in Casey, which said that a law is unconstitutional if it "has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus." I would say that laws having the *purpose* of placing a substantial obstacle on women are facially unconstitutional, while laws that have the *effect* of placing a substantial obstacle on women are only unconstitutional in light of evidence that the laws did have that effect.

Would be interested in real lawyers' opinion on this.

[Of course the Texas law was designed to limit abortion, and of course the Louisiana law was also designed to limit abortion, and of course Kavanaugh is going to vote to overturn Roe/Casey at the first opportunity. I just think this was particular decision on the Louisiana case is slightly more defensible than the media is portraying it.]

"We conclude that neither of these provisions confers medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens upon access that each imposes. Each places a substantial obstacle in the path of women seeking a previability abortion, each constitutes an undue burden on abortion access, Casey, supra, at 878, 112 S.Ct. 2791 (plurality opinion), and each violates the Federal Constitution. Amdt. 14, § 1."

what part seems texas specific?

i mean i get what kavanaugh is doing, he's disguising his dissent on the issue with a ripeness argument, which procedurally might be correct. but i think the clinics could use whole woman's health to show that attempting to comply with the law if put into affect prior to a decision would cause injury so the case is ripe even before a hospital denies them admitting privilege.

In Whole Woman's Health I think you can break it down into two pieces:

- does the law confer medical benefits?

- does the law impose burdens?

(And then obviously you weigh those two against each other to assess whether the obstacles are undue relative to the benefits.) In my view, the medical benefits question is not Texas specific - you can evaluate whether the particular medical requirements are likely to convey benefits, and then apply that judgment universally. But the costs in WWH are Texas specific, at least as the case was argued and decided. It was very much evaluated based on things like the number of clinics that closed and the population of reproductive-aged women in Texas within 200 miles of an abortion provider. Under the court's reasoning, I think that the assessment of burden would vary from state to state depending on how many clinics would close in the face of those requirements and, if so, how many women would continue to have access to providers.

I mean, I think my original point was in agreement with yours - that Kavanaugh is making an arguably correct procedural case on ripeness because the fact-based "burden" evaluation can't be made in advance. The only reason I made my original point was that I was surprised that Kavanaugh's argument had *any* merit, rather than just being a "Herp derp, all limitations on abortion are ok" decision.

The 5th circuit/dissenting SCOTUS justices are, of course, saying "having one abortion provider in the entire state of LA is not a burden"

Slight disagreement - I think they're saying "having only one abortion provider in the entire state would probably be a burden, but we can't rule on that hypothetical until we actually observe the other clinics closing".

More broadly, I think this case illustrates how successful the GOP can be when acting entirely in bad faith and using pretextual reasons for their laws, whether they're abortion laws or voting requirement laws:

1a) Offer a seemingly plausible motivation for the law (e.g., improve medical outcomes for women or make sure ineligible voters are not casting ballots)
1b) Create a law that has some link to that motivation, but is clearly designed for something else and will intentionally impose costs on targeted people/actions

In each case, the court is going to say that the item in 1a represents a legitimate state interest and that the item in 1b represents a plausible vehicle for achieving the state's goal. Here, the court also needs to judge whether the state's action is sufficiently narrow with regard to achieving that goal, so that it's not overbroad. In order to get the law/action reversed, petitioners have to show, in terms of the actual consequences, that the costs pose an undue burden to either voting rights or abortion rights.

The problem here (illustrated in the Louisiana case) is that under this pattern you can't move against the law until it's actually in force, so that you can observe the actual consequences. I think that's bull****, and I'd like to see more attacks on the first two pieces. In this abortion case, I'd like to see the following arguments:

a) Based on a review of the legislative history and how politicians have characterized their support of the law, protecting women's health is clearly a pretext to what they're actually trying to do. This law is designed to impose sizable obstacles keeping women from exercising their constitutional right to an abortion. As a result, the law is unconstitutional on its face, and there is no need to wait for or evaluate the consequences of this law.

b) This law has no measurable medical benefits. Moreover, if the medical benefits were real, the law would be applicable to all medical procedures with similar risk. Because the law has no benefits, any non-zero costs shift the balance to it being an unconstitutional burden on a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

But my read of the Texas case is that, for whatever reason, those two individual arguments weren't viewed as sufficient to overturn the law. (If we consider Roberts to be the swing vote, I don't think there's any way he's EVER going to rule that the "real" motivation for a particular law is different from the stated motivation, unless there's hard evidence of the legislature literally saying "hahaha, obviously women's health is a pretext that we don't care about, and it allowed us to effectively ban abortion".) So pro-choice advocates get pushed into a corner where they have to wait until a law's enforcement to make claims about its constitutionality.

This is a good article:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/kavana...er&via=desktop


My not-remotely-hot take: I think Roe/Casey survive in name (aren't directly overturned), but Louisiana-type laws will be held constitutional.

Predictive power: strong

Judge rules central Missouri clinic cannot resume abortions


Cool, cool

Probably the best strat for the true believers. Effectively bans abortions while keeping the matter alive as a campaign issue.