[Reflection on the Anniversary of Roe v. Wade]

Yesterday was the fifty-second anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. On June 24, 2023, the Supreme Court held in Dobbs that the “Constitution of the United States does not confer a right to abortion”, overruling Roe and Casey, and reversing forty-nine and thirty years, respectively of precedent, not only in law, but in women’s physical safety.

When I was born, Roe didn’t exist, but do you know what did? Women dying from blood loss, sepsis, and incompetent medical persons (I hesitate to use the word “professionals,” who either weren’t proficient in women’s reproductive health care or didn’t care and were only there to make a quick buck off the backs of desperate women and girls.

There is no such thing as banning abortion. Abortions have been happening since pregnancy; since the dawn of time, whether elective, medically necessary, and/or spontaneous (what is sometimes referred to as a miscarriage). I would suggest that Dobbs is a not-so-spontaneous abortion – a miscarriage of justice. A step away from women’s bodily autonomy. A step in the wrong direction. It should not be dismissed that in Alito’s opinion, he quotes Sir Matthew Hale, a long discredited abusive misogynist and witch trial judge, and someone excoriated in his own time (the 17th century).

When then-Senator Kamala Harris asked then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh if he could think of any law restricting a man’s medical decisions, he thought for a moment and said no. The moment he “thought” about it was performative. No one needs to think about the answer to that question: it is most definitely no, there has never been a law that restricts a man’s bodily autonomy.

Women have died.

Women are dying. Right now.

Women are being arrested for having a miscarriage, and that’s after attempting (more than once) to get medical care.

Women are being lied to about what is and isn’t physically possible. For example, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard politicians tell women that for an ectopic pregnancy, the fetus can be replanted in the uterus. This is NEVER the case.

Another example is the disgusting rhetoric surrounding “post-birth” abortion. There is NO SUCH THING! No one is killing babies in the maternity ward after they’re born. NO ONE. Who believes this nonsense?!

The biggest problem is that politicians are not doctors. They don’t know how women’s bodies work, and they prove that every time they open their mouths to debate and pass legislation against women, and let’s be clear – that is exactly what it is; it’s not anti-abortion or “pro-life,” it is anti-women and girls. Even the trans bigotry shows this. They don’t care about the safety of girls or the “sanctity” of girls’ sports.

If you don’t believe that, just look at the ignorance at the most recent executive order claiming that there are only two genders, but then in the same order requiring that people identify their gender as the one they had at conception. The new president (and his cronies) just made the male gender illegal since biologically we are all female at conception.

How many other laws are being passed that violate our rights because of the ignorance of right wing no-nothings?!

Abortion bans at six weeks when most women don’t know that they’re pregnant.

Heartbeat laws when there is no heart.

They want to ban abortion from the moment of conception.

Roe v. Wade saved women’s lives.

Dobbs is killing women.

It really is that simple.

And if you can’t see that, I ache for the future of such an ignorant world, and hope to all that is holy that my daughter’s generation is paying attention, and can reverse this misogyny which has been built into the fabric of our country from the beginning.

Election Connection – NYS Prop 1

19 Days

I belong to a group that is a religious based group. I get that I am on the outside of the norm for doctrine, for civil rights, and other issues, but for the most part we amicably disagree and I only correct factual errors. I have never, as far as I know, given my views on abortion. I do speak forcefully on trans rights.

So, here we are.

I was on a conference call last week when one of the members asked to make an announcement, and then proceeded to express a political ad in opposition to New York’s Proposition 1 that will appear on the ballet this Election Day, November 5, 2024.

An announcement would be something akin to informing what the proposition is and where to find more information to make your own judgment call. This was not the usual Catholic call to vote your conscience. This was an out and out vote no, and here’s why.

I listened anyway. I have an open mind, and I want to know where others are coming from. But when he began spewing misinformation, I blew a gasket. Silently, of course, we’re all muted, and I wasn’t going to call him out when 90% of the call would be against me, but I did hang up, and that is something that everyone on the call could hear.

I was really furious.

Yes, of course, vote your conscience, but learn the facts about an issue. Telling a captive audience that this bill is a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” and making it about “girls’ sports” and of course, the behemoth single issue, abortion, I just can’t.

Proposition 1 is:

This is the complete text that you will see printed on your ballot.:

Adds anti-discrimination provisions to State Constitution. Covers ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, and sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity and pregnancy. Also covers reproductive healthcare and autonomy.

[Italics mine.]

This is an official summary of the measure provided by your election administrator:

This proposal amends Article 1, Section 11 of the New York State Constitution. It prohibits any person, business, or organization, as well as state and local governments from discrimination pursuant to law. The current protections in the Constitution cover race, color, creed, and religion. The proposal will add ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, and sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy. The amendment allows laws to prevent or undo past discrimination.

[Italics mine.]

Combatting Misinformation

Myth#1: This will increase abortions.

This will NOT increase abortions. This will save women’s lives. It will decrease the unnecessary deaths of women (look up Amber Thurman of Georgia). It will give everyone bodily autonomy and enable them to make their own medical (and other) decisions. Women are not second-class citizens. When Brett Kavanaugh was asked during his confirmation hearing if there were any laws restricting a man’s choices for his body, he could not name one. That’s because there are none. Equality is for everyone.

Reproductive rights include the decision of when and if to have a family, the use of fertility procedures and contraception. Bodily autonomy includes cancer treatments and vaccinations. Some contraception drugs are used for other ailments. Those decisions are between a patient and their doctor.

And don’t forget that more than a few Republican politicians including the candidate for VP, Senator Vance has said they will require girls and women to submit to a pregnancy test before they are allowed to travel across state lines.

Myth#2: Loss of Parental Rights due to anti-age discrimination laws

This is a ludicrous argument. Children will not be able to do whatever they want any more than they do now. Parents will still have a say in their children’s decisions. This is no way that will change that.

Your 5-Year-old still cannot get a tattoo. Your 15-year-old still cannot have breast enlargement (or reduction) surgery. Your 10-year-old cannot now drive a car. When you say these things, you sound stupid unless you’re just fear-mongering which frankly is worse.

Myth#3: Trans Rights will threaten girls’ sports

And while we’re on the subject, I mean, why no concern over boys’ sports?

Is it that we honestly don’t care? We certainly didn’t care when Michael Phelps won award after award, and no one batted an eye despite his “natural advantage,” something genetic, with which he was born. (Google it.)

Trans girls and women are not “men in dresses”. They are women and girls, and they deserve to spend their childhood playing the sports that they want to (just like the boys do).

Let me ask you a few questions:

Do you color your hair? Cut it? Wear nail polish? Makeup? Choose a style of eyeglasses? Do you shave your legs? Or face? Or go to the gym?

These are ALL examples of gender-affirming care.

For Catholics (which is the group on my conference call), there is nothing inherently anti-doctrinal about trans people, but there is and should be an issue when you are bigoted and when you misinform about who and what trans people are, and transness is.

You can call it freedom of speech, you can call it parental rights, you can call it protecting girls’ sports, but what it really is, is bigotry, plain and simple.

Saying everyone should be equal, and passing laws that do just that should be a positive thing; we should be striving towards equality for all, and not creating a caste system of second-class citizens.

Equality for all means EQUALITY. FOR. ALL.

I will be voting YES on Prop 1 in New York state, and I hope you will too.

Mourning

I have come to realize that “pro-life” is a misnomer. The people who espouse it, who embrace it, who shout it from the rooftops, don’t actually know what it means. When I hear the phrase “pro-life” I’m supposed to think that the person shouting it believes in life. But they don’t believe in life when the life is gay, when the life is Black, when the life is an immigrant or someone who’s accented, when the life is poor or homeless or addicted to drugs. They don’t believe in life when they allow three people, three human beings, a mother and her two small children drown while watching, and actively stop help from getting to them. They don’t believe in life if they are killed by guns, which are more sacred to them than the life it takes. They claim to care about the life of people who aren’t people yet, still unborn, still getting their life from their host woman, but if that woman dies because she can’t receive a lifesaving abortion, well, that’s life. But it’s not pro-life.

They lie about the services at Planned Parenthood.

They lie about the activities inside “crisis pregnancy centers.”

They lie about women’s* bodies or they simply don’t understand how women’s bodies work, which should be the first clue that they shouldn’t be legislating on women’s bodies.

I’ve seen legislators who don’t understand the basics of puberty or menstruation or how babies are conceived, thinking that the only party is the woman who holds the responsibility for her actions and the future of three people.

They sound pathetic and stupid, and it’s embarrassing.

On this anniversary of the now reversed Roe v. Wade, I’m in mourning. I’m in mourning for what pro-life people did to Roe, the person: manipulating, gaslighting, and abandoning. I’m in mourning for my daughter. I’m in mourning for her friends. I mourn for the residents of Texas and Florida especially.

The only pro-life option is safe and legal abortions for anyone who needs one.

Why is there upset and indignation when the “pro-life” set is called pro-birth or forced birth, but what else are they if not that? No one comes to pray outside of social services or the WIC offices for the children once they are born. No one prays outside of counseling centers, real counseling centers for victims of sexual assault and incest. The only prayers are for doctor’s offices and clinics that offer full service reproductive health services. Why is that?

How can you be anti-abortion and pro-death penalty?

How can you be pro-war?

Things to think about because your hypocrisy is showing, and it has been for a very long time. With the Dobbs ruling, women are dying, women are being prosecuted and persecuted for having miscarriages, women are being denied life-saving care, women are left to die of sepsis, are left to infertility, and families are just left.

*When I say women, read: all child-bearing people.

Election Connection – Women’s Rights Today

Today marks 134 days before the next Election Day, and 500 days until the next Presidential Election Day. It seems like a very far time away, but it really isn’t. It will be here before we know it. It is also not too early to become familiar with your local elections and issues happening that will be addressed on the next two Election Days.

Our voting numbers in this country are abysmal. I know we want to represent freedom, and you should have the freedom to decide whether or not you want to vote. However, that should come with a dreading realization that with your one vote, you can change how things are done in this country. Look at Michigan. I am personally for a national day off for voting and automatic registration at 18 as well as requiring all those eligible to vote. We are still using a Presidential election system built on slavery and proportioning electoral college votes on land rather than on people.

How does this affect women’s rights, the presumptive focus of this missive?

Election Connection – Abortion Access

It’s important to remember that one of the things left out of the abortion access discussion is that it is a freedom of religion issue. Banning abortion violates the tenets of some religions. It is also important to remind people that despite declarations of the opposite, this is not a Christian nation. It is not founded as a Christian nation, and many of us need to be reminded of that. More often it seems.

In fact, in the Treaty of Tripoli, signed in 1796 and ratified by the United States Senate in 1797, UNANIMOUSLY and without debate under the Presidency of John Adams stated that explicitly:

“…the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
Article 11, Treaty of Tripoli, rat. 1797

The below article was posted in USA Today on February 13, 2023. It is written by Christine Fernando and can be read here:

‘It’s time for us to be Bold’: Why Six Religious Leaders are Fighting to Expand Abortion Access

The six leaders highlighted in the article are:

Rev. Cindy Bumb of United Church of Christ
Rabbi Susan Talve of Central Reform Congregation
Jamie L. Manson, president of Catholics for Choice
Sheila Katz, CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women
Aliza Kazmi, co-executive director at HEART
Katey Zeh, Baptist minister and CEO of Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice

Roe v. Wade Today

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that gave women the right to an abortion. More specifically, and importantly, they found the right to an abortion under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that we all have a fundamental “right to privacy”. Any laws that prohibited an abortion would be subject to strict scrutiny by the Courts.

Much has been made of the plaintiff, Roe expressing her regrets for her abortion. She had gone back and forth on this issue, and honestly I feel that she was taken advantage of by both sides. She was paid by the right to recant her wish for an abortion, and stated in the 2020 documentary, AKA Jane Roe that she hadn’t ever supported the antiabortion movement.

Roe’s holding was reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in 1992 while at the same time overruling the trimester framework established in the Roe decision and moved from “strict scrutiny” to “undue burden”.

In 2022, the Supreme Court overruled Roe with their ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the right to an abortion was not “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history or tradition.”

This is false, and it is simply Justice Alito (and his cohorts) grasping at straws and making law whole cloth from their beliefs which violate the Constitution as well as basic human rights of women to their own bodily autonomy. In the ruling, they also included questioning rights now recognized as to contraception, interracial marriage, and marriage equality (same-sex marriage). Some on the right are suggesting we take another look at those rights already enshrined in law (and common sense, to be quite honest).

Abortions have been happening for as long as there’s been pregnancy. The real value of legal abortion is safety. When abortions are illegal, women are less safe. In addition, many, if not all of the proponents of eliminating legal abortion have no idea how pregnancy and birth works. They throw out terms that they don’t understand, pass laws, and criminalize medical care for women under the guise of stopping abortion.

Since Dobbs, women have died from miscarriages that weren’t treated; ectopic pregnancies that were left to fester. Women have lost the ability to have more children because of doctors waiting for the last minute to help women, afraid that anything they do to save the woman will create a liability for themselves and their facilities.

The right set up pregnancy centers who lie to women and scare them and do not give them all of their options as far as family planning and abortion. If their way is the right way, why do they need to lie?

This is horrifying, and it needs to end.

Women need to be able to make informed decisions on their family planning, their pregnancies, their terminating or continuing of pregnancies. My daughter has less rights than her grandmother had.

In addition to our activism and raising our voices, we need to contact our Congresspeople and especially Leader Jeffries, and have them bring a bill to the floor and pass it to make the Supreme Court more modern. The last time the Supreme Court was changed with respect to number of justices was with the Judiciary Act of 1869 during the Grant Administration. We currently have nine justices and thirteen circuit courts. We should have 13 justices to correspond to the circuits. For those saying that this is packing the Court, it is unpacking the Court that Mitch McConnell gave us by blocking President Obama’s duly chosen nominee in 2019 and then reversing his “logic” and pushing through Amy Coney Barrett while we were in the middle of an election. Literally while voting was happening.

We can’t stop speaking out.

The only way we can solve this disparity and reproductive health crisis is by reinstating Roe, expanding it, and codifying it into law.

Election Connection – 85 Days and Counting

Wednesday marks eight-five days until Election Day – the all important mid-term elections.

A few things happened today that I want you to be aware of as we head into these mid-term elections. (Unfortunately, I do not have links, but this are easy to google.)

First, thanks to a commited Democratic party, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which goes a long way to meet our climate goals as well as reducing the deficit whlie providing help to families.

Second, the FDA is making hearing aids available over the counter (probably by mid-October). This is crucial, and not just to people on Medicare. I have been using hearing aids since I was 52. It should have been longer than that but we weren’t able to afford it. To get them, I had to see my primary doctor, an ENT specialist, have an MRI, get signed off by the ENT, then go to a hearing aid place to be fitted with hearing aids. The aids themselves were over $5000 without the doctor’s visits and the MRI. We were “lucky” because that year my son was in the hospital and so we reached our deductible in March rather than at the end of December (like usual) and a close relative died.

Third, a 16 year old in Florida has been told in a ruling by a court that she cannot have an abortion. The reason? She is not mature enough to make that kind of life altering decision. But raising a baby, she’s mature enough for that? GTFOH.

Fourth, Liz Cheney lost her primary to a MAGA lunatic, and I’m being somewhat generous by using the term lunatic. Look her up. I’m not a Cheney fan, but at least she’s not part of the conspiracy theorists. She has been an admirable Vice-Chair for the Jan. 6 committee, and perhaps Chairman Benny Thompson can include her as part of the legal staff or committee spokesperson after she can no longer serve in January.

These four examples are only four of the very many reasons that everyone needs to vote in the Election on November 8th. Vote all the traitors, Q-anons, and corrupt Republicans out of office. Vote Blue.

We have the opportunity to turn things around. It will take time, more time than we’d like, but it will happen if everyone buckles up and does their part. Democracy is at stake. Our futures and the futures of our children are at stake.

Visit Vote Save America for ways to help your candidate and Democracy Docket.

Election Connection – Supreme Court Edition

I have been struggling as I know many people around the country are struggling, especially women, girls, and trans and non-binary people with uteruses. I can’t promise that my language will be consistently inclusive in this writing. I can promise to try. Not mentioning trans/NB people doesn’t mean that they are not part of the discussion or part of my thoughts and fears, but right now, I have two strong emotions at play: first, my daughter and millions like her and second, the Constitution.

For those of us who grew up with constitutional norms and the sentimentality as well as the reality of the rule of law, who grew up with William Brennan, Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and for the people following now in the turmoil and unease of an activist court and are looking towards Ketanji Brown Jackson for similar inspiration, the death knell of the Constitution is heart-wrenching. Not as heart-wrenching as the forced birth of pubescent children or the forced trauma of losing a wanted pregnancy as well as the derailment of dreams, but it is still something to be mourned. I’m not sure we can come back. My eternal USA-USA optimism has been shaken to its core these last several years and this term of the Supreme Court has been the nail in the ever lowering coffin.

I studied law for half my college career and that came after a hobby of reading everything law related available, studying in my own way the law, knowing legal precedents and bathing in the light of the dreams of freedom. Re-reading that sentence now, it is so clear that I am speaking from a place of extreme privilege, my whiteness showing starker than the background of the screen I type on. Everything else, my Jewishness, my womanhood, my economic status – all of that is hidden under the whiteness that wrote that beloved Constitution. When I graduated from college, I got rid of most of my textbooks, but I kept ALL of my law books. Why? Well, they were historical. They set precedent with opinions from the greats, both before and during my lifetime. These books would continued to be studied for generations and while they would be added to, they would still be the basis for many rulings to come.

Little did I know.

The year I had jury duty was the year Justice William Brennan retired. I went to Brooklyn Federal Court, after driving over an hour and a half, parking underground, and walking across a public park to the courthouse, and I bought a Time magazine with his picture on the cover. I read it during my lunch before I was assigned to a case. I was excited. Until I listened to the case and discovered the weight of my civic duty. I was a hold-out for awhile, but we sorted it out and I was dismissed with the thanks of a grateful court. I couldn’t wait to do it again.

With one term, one swoop of Russian interference, Republican obstinance and recalcitrance, Senatorial and Presidential corruption, and let’s be honest, overt racism, and those books on my shelf have become obsolete.

Miranda – not required.

Engel v Vitale – coercive prayer

Roe v Wade – no bodily autonomy if you’re a woman, no privacy

MA v EPA – overturned – enjoy your brown air and water

Griswold, Casey, Oberfell – their futures in question

But Skokie? Skokie remains. Oh, unless you’re picketing the Supreme Court justices. In that case, no first amendment rights for you. Who cares about McCullen v Coakley?

This week in Akron, Ohio, a ten year old girl was forced to go to Indiana to obtain an abortion after her rape because a judge ruled that she was three days over the legal limit to get one in Ohio. Truly, the Lord’s work, amirite? During this same week and same town, a Black man (Jayland Walker) was shot in the back sixty times (ninety rounds fired) for running away from a traffic stop.

These two incidents, traumas on families and communities are only a microcosm of what is happening across this country.

It is only a matter of time before a rapist is granted joint custody with their victim for a forced birth baby. Who thinks that this is okay?

We (with SCOTUS leading the way) are dismantling the First Amendment. The most important amendment. So important it comes first, before anything else. I remind you that we are not a Christian nation. We are multicultural, interfaith, NO faith, multidimensional, and to stay free we must act free. All of us. Violating one person’s civil rights, their human rights is a stain for us all.

The First Amendment falls as fascism rises: little by little and then all at once. You are here in the timeline.

Yesterday morning, I attended my church online. I usually attend online. As the mass ended and the congregation was dismissed to relay the Good News, the priest and deacon processed from the altar to the music and singing of America the Beautiful. I can’t say what I would have done had I been there, but at home, online, I turned it off. I thought, and continue to think it’s inappropriate. I get that people want a patriotic song, and as far as patriotic songs go, this one isn’t bad, but as a recessional to mass?

No.

No. No. No.

The song on its own wasn’t the problem. Play it after the mass is actually over, while people are still congregating, but not as part of the closing.

I have two distinct memories of my father’s patriotism. We were at a professional baseball game (The Mets, of course), and I didn’t stand for the National Anthem. It wasn’t a protest. It was a lazy elementary school child. The look he gave me. The same for a school assembly when reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. I had no problem with the Pledge, but my sitting wasn’t an option. This look was accompanied by a whispered admonition. And I remember those moments with my dad. He wasn’t a nationalist; he wasn’t our country can do no wrong, but he knew the importance of that respect and I do too. I don’t think he would appreciate how I feel today and how I don’t want to celebrate Independence Day. Last week, the Supreme Court of the United States took away what little freedom my daughter and I had, and I can’t celebrate that. I hear Black and brown people asking what we’re celebrating in the first place, and I hear them.

I have four books to recommend to everyone and then one more thing:

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story created by Nikole Hannah-Jones
Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson
Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal, which I am currently reading.

About six or seven years ago, maybe a bit longer, I was driving in the car with my daughter and she suddenly said through a tight throat and tiny tears that she didn’t want to have a baby. She hadn’t even gotten her period yet. She was under ten or was ten, I don’t remember. What I do remember was trying not to cry because she was so appalled about the idea of having a baby, not the idea of being a mom even though that was kind of foreign to her, but physically being forced to have a baby when she didn’t want one. I said to that she didn’t need to worry about that. No one was going to force her to have a baby. She wanted to know how I knew that. I told her I knew that because I would never let that happen. Never.

And I never will.

Not my daughter, and not yours, and not trans men or non-binary folks. No one.

We won’t go back.

Election Connection Special Edition:

The Texas Abortion Ban

The Conservative Justices’ Reasoning in the Texas Abortion Case is Legal Mansplaining

This brilliant piece by Slate writer, Dahlia Lithwick is a must read by everyone who calls themselves pro-choice and those who don’t. The idea that the people crying ‘our body, our choice’ over masks are the same ones brutally stomping on the bodies of pregnant people. Stomping is not an exaggeration.

This law is unconstitutional, but somewhat more importantly it is unconscionable. We should be protecting women, transmen, and CHILDREN who find themselves pregnant and unready, for whatever reason, and not forcing them to give birth.

We must remember these draconian laws and constant attempts at controlling our reproduction and our bodies at every election moving forward. GET OUT THE VOTE. Each and every election.

Read the entire article, but this quote from Lithwick really brought it home for me.

The inevitable answer is chilling: This isn’t about guns or speech or money or war. It’s about women, their lives and their bodies and their autonomy. That’s what allows you to do shoddy work, with careless disregard, because who’s going to stop you? You only do the thing in the dead of night, without care or effort, because you believe women are so used to being gaslit that you expect them to just tolerate it. You only do the thing in the dead of night without care or effort because you genuinely believe that they’re only women, and they deserve what they get.
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate

Griffins and Ginger Snaps

-I write, and I have a blog because of course I do-

abortion