Tag Archives: Roe

March for Life activists excited Roe could soon be overturned: ‘2022 is the year’

January 22, 2022 Admin Leave a comment

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Activists at the 49th annual March for Life told Fox News Digital they were excited 2022 could be the year Roe v. Wade gets overturned.

The March for Life is an annual march to the Supreme Court that started in 1973, the same year as the landmark abortion decision in Roe. The theme for the march this year was “equality begins in the womb.”

Activists are hopeful that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which was argued before the Supreme Court in December, will overturn or weaken Roe v. Wade. The decision on the consequential abortion case is expected by this summer.

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“I think this is a great year to be here because of the upcoming Dobbs decision,” one marcher named Katie told Fox News Digital. “I think this is just going to be a groundbreaking year.”

Another activist named Ryan said seeing so many people at the march gave her hope.

“I think 2022 is the year. I really do,” Ryan said.

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“I came out here because when my mom got pregnant, it was a new thing, she was 18, she really wasn’t sure what she was going to do,” another marcher named Jaden told Fox News Digital. ” She chose life, she kept me.”

Rhonda speaks with Fox News Digital at the 2022 March for Life.

A woman from Philadelphia named Rhonda said: “What brings me out here is that I’m a Black woman, and once upon a time, Black people weren’t human beings. We were three-fifths of a human being. And so that’s the same issue as abortion and the claim that this isn’t a human life.”

Activists gather outside the Supreme Court during the 49th annual March for Life.

“If you look around, it’s all young people standing up for what they believe in,” a college student named Olivia told Fox News Digital.

Another college student named Michael who drove nearly six hours to attend the march said he thinks younger generations recognize the importance of equality and human rights issues.

MARCH FOR LIFE ACTIVISTS OPTIMISTIC ABOUT ENDING ROE BUT SAY MOVEMENT NEEDS TO DO MOVE TO HELP WOMEN

“That’s why I really just try and tell people my age abortion is a human rights issue because these are humans that we’re dealing with,” he said.

“Gen Z is really out here in great numbers,” an activist named Gideon told Fox News Digital, “We are the pro-life generation, and we are going to get Roe overturned.”

Noah speaks with Fox News Digital.

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Noah added, “I think that this is a particularly hopeful year, and I’m really excited about the future and what 2022 will hold for this pro-life generation.”

“I really have faith in the judges, especially the ones that President Trump has appointed,” Gideon added. “I’m hoping for at least a 5-4 or 6-3 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, but we will see what happens.”

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What John Roberts’ role in Texas’ abortion case could signal for the future of Roe

December 11, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

“The clear purpose and actual effect of S.B. 8,” Roberts wrote, referring to the Texas ban on abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy, “has been to nullify this Court’s rulings.”

That controversial case from Mississippi, argued before the justices on December 1 and unlikely to be resolved until June, could lead to a broadscale reversal of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision that gave women a constitutional right to abortion at the early stages of pregnancy.

The entire abortion debate at America’s high court in recent months has revealed a transformation in the majority’s view toward reproductive rights and Roberts’ loosening grip on the bench.

A committed conservative in most areas of the law, Roberts has moderated his views on some social policy dilemmas to try to halt the court’s rightward lunge. Those efforts succeeded in earlier years but since the addition of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the third appointee of former President Donald Trump, Roberts has found himself increasingly dissenting. And as the nine have fractured, their opinions have grown more acerbic.

Friday’s dispute revolved around a procedure in the Texas law that delegates enforcement of the ban to private citizens and attempts to insulate all state officials from lawsuit.

“Texas has employed an array of stratagems designed to shield its unconstitutional law from judicial review,” Roberts observed, noting that clinics have been deterred from providing abortions because they have so far been unable to obtain any pre-enforcement review of the ban that flouts a landmark decision nearly a half century old.

In 1973, Roe v. Wade said women have a constitutional right, rooted in 14th Amendment privacy protection, to end a pregnancy before a fetus is viable, which is estimated today at about 23 weeks.

The new decision — controlled by the five conservatives to Roberts’ right, including the three Trump appointees — gives abortion providers a limited ability to seek relief in federal court. Clinics said Friday’s mixed judgment was likely to keep them from resuming regular operations for the near future.

Since September 1, when S.B. 8 took effect, Texas women seeking to end a pregnancy, and having the resources, have traveled to neighboring states for care. The ban empowers private citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion or assists a woman in ending her pregnancy. Any person who wins such a case could obtain at least $10,000 in damages.

The court majority, in an opinion by Justice Neil Gorsuch, said while most state officials remain shielded from clinic lawsuits, certain licensing officials could be sued because they would be specifically responsible for enforcement actions against those who violate S.B. 8.

Roberts, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, countered in dissent that many more state officials could be held responsible, from state court clerks to the Texas attorney general himself.

The chief justice has been at odds with the majority from the start. He urged his colleagues to suspend the law while litigation on its merits played out. A 2005 appointee of President George W. Bush, Roberts has in past cases voted for increased regulation of abortion. But he also is an institutionalist who has tried to slow the rightward momentum on the bench.

More broadly, Roberts condemned Texas’ attempt to usurp the high court as it denied its residents the exercise of a constitutional right. And he warned that other states might follow.

Quoting a court precedent from 1809, Roberts wrote, “Indeed, ‘if the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgment, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.'”

Roberts added, “The nature of the federal right infringed does not matter; it is the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system that is at stake.”

In a separate dissent, Sotomayor wrote sharply of the consequences to women in the state, as she has done at every stage of this litigation.

Since the ban took effect, she wrote, “the law has threatened abortion care providers with the prospect of essentially unlimited suits for damages, brought anywhere in Texas by private bounty hunters, for taking any action to assist women in exercising their constitutional right to choose. The chilling effect has been near total … . The Court should have put an end to this madness months ago, before S. B. 8 first went into effect.” She was joined in her dissent only by Breyer and Kagan.

When the court heard oral arguments in the case, it appeared Barrett and Justice Brett Kavanaugh were more suspicious of the Texas law specifically designed to insulate state officials from responsibility for unconstitutional measures.

But both signed onto the court opinion penned by Gorsuch making only a limited group of officials liable, and they wrote no separate statements to explain their views. (Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas were also in the majority; Thomas, however, would have barred the abortion providers from suing all state officials in their effort to block S.B. 8.)

Whether the chief justice made any headway with either Kavanaugh and Barrett as the Texas case was privately negotiated is not known.

During separate December 1 arguments in the Mississippi abortion case, Roberts signaled that he was trying to persuade at least one justice in that right-wing bloc to join him in a decision that would preserve at least a small part of Roe v. Wade.

Roberts appeared ready to uphold Mississippi’s prohibition on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, which would violate Roe’s fetal viability cutoff, yet still preserve some constitutional right to abortion in earlier weeks.

It seemed a tough sell, though possible, at the time. The five-justice majority’s overall disregard for Roe on Friday suggests such a compromise may be even more elusive than it appeared.

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Why the threat to Roe may not save Democrats in 2022

December 5, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

By the time ballots were cast, just 8 percent of voters listed abortion as the most important issue facing Virginia, according to exit polls. Even worse for Democrats, of the people who cared most about the issue, a majority voted for the Republican, Glenn Youngkin.

“It hasn’t moved people to the polls in places like Virginia and New Jersey this year. It wasn’t an issue in either state,” said Julie Roginsky, a former top adviser to New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, who won reelection this year, but by a far narrower margin than expected. “I wish we lived in a world where outrage mattered. But I think we live in a post-outrage world, and voters today are affected only by that which directly affects them, which is why the economy, affordability and cost of living is such a major issue for so many people. While a lot of people will express sympathy for that 12-year-old girl in Texas who got raped but no longer can terminate her pregnancy, it’s not what motivates them to go to the polls, sadly.”

Roginsky, who began her career as a researcher at the pro-abortion rights group EMILY’s List, said it’s possible abortion rights will resonate more next year if the Supreme Court completely overturns Roe rather than paring it back. But she said, “Every time we’ve run on issues like women’s health, they have polled through the roof. But … they have been completely ineffective at getting voters to the polls. There’s a difference between something that polls really well, and something that gets voters to the polls. And that is what a lot of people are confusing.”

Reasons to be hesitant about Roe’s role in the midterms are plentiful. While a majority of Americans think abortion should be legal in most cases and pollsters saw the issue rise as a motivating factor for Democrats after the Texas case, abortion does not appear to be a top priority to voters overall. In an Economist/YouGov poll last month, abortion ranked behind taxes and government spending, health care, climate change and the environment, immigration and jobs and the economy as an issue of significance. That’s in line with exit polling from both 2016 and 2020, when the stakes on abortion and the Supreme Court could not have been more clear.

In 2016, despite then-candidate Donald Trump pledging to nominate “pro-life” justices and Hillary Clinton’s explicit warnings about the implications for Roe, only about one in five voters ranked Supreme Court appointments as the most important factor in their vote — and by a wide margin, those voters were more likely to be Republicans, according to exit polls. Four years later, after Trump had already begun to remake the court, Supreme Court appointments factored even less in voters’ minds — and that was just days after Republicans had secured a new 6-3 conservative court majority.

It’s true that Roe was still intact at that point and the electoral significance of its dismantling has not yet been tested. But the first-of-its-kind Texas statute was fresh on voters’ minds when Virginians voted.

“It’s the question of the moment and the honest answer is I don’t know,” David Axelrod, the former Barack Obama adviser, said in an email. “Can gutting Roe produce the kind of outpouring of women voters for Democrats we saw in 2018, particularly in the suburbs? Or will traditional metrics — standing of the president; feelings about the economy and overall direction of the country — govern people’s choices?”

He said, “I lean to the second,” though he added, “We’ve never seen abortion rights move large numbers of Democrats in national elections, but we’ve also not seen in half a century the rolling back of those rights we’re likely to see next year.”

Publicly, Democrats are posturing as though Roe will be of decisive strategic value next year. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) wrote that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe, it would “drive a blue wave next year,” while his fellow Californian, Rep. Jackie Speier, told NBC “the country hasn’t seen the rage of women speaking out.”

Natalie Murdock, a Democratic state senator from North Carolina, said the threat of losing Roe featured heavily in discussions among lawmakers at the National Black Caucus of State Legislators meeting in Atlanta this week, where Democrats are girding for Republican-controlled legislatures to ban or severely limit abortion access if Roe goes down.

“It’s going to be a voting issue,” Murdock said. “It will be part of the myriad of issues, because voters are multi-faceted … You can be concerned about gas prices and still be concerned about having the right to do what you want to do with your body.”

But some Democratic operatives preparing for midterm campaigns are far from convinced that abortion will factor significantly — or that their candidates will message on the issue. One Democratic strategist working in the Southwest said it’s “wishful thinking” that abortion will be a determinative issue in 2022, adding, “If anything, Republicans rally around abortion-based issues way more than Dems.” Another strategist dismissed abortion rights-based campaigning in a text message, writing “Roe isn’t going to surpass community issues, vaccine mandates, schooling, etc.” And a campaign manager who has worked on House and Senate races throughout the country said inflation — not abortion — is “the big factor.”

In a sign of how integral Roe has become to the Democratic Party’s orthodoxy, however, the strategist asked for anonymity, saying, “Don’t want people to think I’m downplaying Roe.”

One complication for campaigning on abortion rights is that the timing of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Mississippi case — which could come as late as June — will likely not be as advantageous to Democrats as many expect. While June falls squarely in the middle of the midterm year, that is also four full months before the election — an eternity in modern politics.

One Republican strategist in Washington, D.C., said, “We’ve got nine news cycles a day. You put four or five months there … we’ll have aged 100 years between June and November.”

It’s certain that abortion will be a motivating factor for many voters, and in close elections, even small slivers of an electorate can prove decisive. Mallory Quigley, a vice president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, which will spend millions of dollars in the midterms, noted that in Virginia, the proportion of voters who ranked abortion as a top concern, while relatively small, was still larger than the margin of victory.

“It absolutely is going to be a huge part of the election,” she said. “We’ve seen the way this issue can affect races on the margins.”

For Democrats, a Supreme Court ruling undercutting abortion rights protections could mobilize younger women “who never imagined living in a world without Roe,” said Rose Kapolczynski, a Democratic strategist and adviser to former Sen. Barbara Boxer of California. The court’s decision may incite older Democrats who do remember a world before Roe, and the issue may have salience with more affluent, college-educated women in suburbs where many of next year’s competitive Senate races will be decided.

“I think it’s an issue for certain constituencies, and I think it could be motivating for certain parts of the base for Democrats, and I think that’s ultimately how we have to view it,” said Danielle Cendejas, a Democratic mail strategist whose firm did campaign mail for both of Obama’s presidential campaigns.

But paradoxically, some Democrats believe the most effective use of the Supreme Court’s decision next year may not be to highlight Democratic positions on abortion at all — but rather, to depict it as an issue Republicans are obsessed with at the expense of more pressing concerns like the economy and jobs.

Molly Murphy, a Democratic pollster who has studied public opinion about abortion extensively, said that rather than frame the issue as “Republicans are bad on abortion, Democrats are good on abortion,” Democrats should use the Supreme Court’s ruling next year — and likely bans that follow — as an opportunity to set up a different contrast: Between a Democratic Party focused on kitchen table issues and a Republican Party “that wants to ban abortion and put people in jail or slap them with onerous fines.”

“That’s the construct that has proven to be powerful,” said Murphy, a partner at ALG Research, the firm that was President Joe Biden’s lead pollster in last year’s election.

That approach to Roe would seem to square with what Democratic operatives have learned from Virginia, and from their experience canvassing voters elsewhere. Democrats may care deeply about abortion rights, but there’s little evidence that a decision undercutting Roe next year would upend the election on its own.

Aimy Steele, the executive director of the New North Carolina project, which is working to register and turn out voters of color in a state that is home to one of a handful of Senate races that could determine the balance of power in the upper chamber in 2022, said the people her organization reaches out to have the economy, the coronavirus, health care and schools on their minds.

“This is what people are talking about as we knock their doors and talk to them on the phones and by text,” she said. “Many people care about Roe v. Wade. But does that translate into everyone voting and casting their ballot? … Absolutely not.”

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John Roberts’ long history with abortion and Roe v. Wade

November 28, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

He helped hoist the banner against Roe in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. But years later, during 2005 Senate hearings for the chief justice post he now holds, Roberts testified that Roe should be respected as precedent, particularly after being affirmed in 1992. And he has largely held to that.

Now, Roberts, the Supreme Court and the country face a pivotal moment for abortion rights. And Roberts’ action in a dispute the court will take up this week, over Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, could be his most consequential. He leads a conservative bench that, since last year’s succession of Amy Coney Barrett for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has appeared on the precipice of reversing Roe v. Wade.

Dueling parties in the Mississippi case known at Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization have laced their briefs with lines from Roberts’ opinions regarding abortion rights and the value of adhering to precedent or, alternatively, discarding it. The chief justice writes with care, never leaving himself in cement, which lets both sides emphasize the words that suit their purpose.

Roberts represents more than one vote among the nine. As chief, he steers the discussion. If he is in the majority, he also assigns the opinion that will speak for the court. Further, Roberts has tried to inspire public confidence in the federal judiciary and repeatedly argued that its opinions reflect justices’ neutral, impartial views rather than any political instincts.

Polls show that public approval of the court has dropped in recent months, notably since September 1 when the majority allowed a Texas ban on abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy to take effect even as litigation over the law that plainly conflicts with Roe v. Wade was underway. Roberts broke from his colleagues on the right wing in that case, dissenting as he wrote that the court should at least temporarily suspend the ban while courts assessed the validity of the law. The court heard oral arguments on November 1 and has yet to rule.

Unlike the distinct procedural dispute in the Texas case, the Mississippi abortion controversy goes right to the heart of abortion rights, testing whether women nationwide have a right to end a pregnancy before viability. That is, when a fetus can live outside the womb, at 22-24 weeks.

Both Roe v. Wade, nearly a half century ago, and the decision that affirmed it two decades later, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, declared viability to be the cutoff line for when the pregnant woman’s interest could be eclipsed by protection for the fetus.

“Casey reaffirmed ‘the most central principle of Roe v. Wade,’ ‘a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy before viability,'” Roberts wrote in a 2020 Louisiana case as he quoted the 1992 decision.

The question now is whether that line will hold.

The Reagan and Bush years

After graduating from Harvard law school and completing a Supreme Court clerkship with then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist, Roberts joined the Reagan administration in 1981.

Reagan had campaigned on a platform against Roe v. Wade and a declaration of “the sanctity of innocent human life.” His administration worked against reproductive rights in its policy agenda and court filings.

Roberts, who was a junior lawyer in the Reagan Justice Department and then White House counsel’s office, assumed more responsibility for the administration’s legal agenda when the first President Bush came to office in 1989. Roberts became deputy US solicitor general, representing the federal government before the high court.

Roberts shepherded the 1991 case of Rust v. Sullivan, as the administration argued it could forbid family planning clinics that received federal funds from providing abortion counseling. The case tested whether that prohibition impinged the free speech of physicians and other health care providers.

“We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled,” the Bush administration asserted in the brief signed by Roberts. It contended Roe v. Wade lacked any support in the Constitution’s text or history. The high court had grounded the right to end a pregnancy in the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process guarantee of personal liberty and relied on past cases affirming personal privacy rights.

The Supreme Court ruled narrowly for the Bush administration in Rust v. Sullivan, letting the government forbid abortion-related counseling at federally funded clinics, but forgoing any new review of Roe.

The following year, in the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey case, justices in the majority highlighted at the outset that the Reagan and Bush administrations had argued in a total of six cases over the previous decade for reversal of Roe: “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Yet 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, that definition is still questioned. Joining the respondents as amicus curiae, the United States, as it has done in five other cases in the last decade, again asks us to overrule Roe.”

On the bench

During Senate hearings when President George W. Bush chose him first for a US appellate court and then elevated him to the Supreme Court, Roberts said his arguments on behalf of past administrations reflected his professional advocacy and not necessarily his personal views. He also said Roe was entitled to respect under principles of “stare decisis,” that is, adherence to precedent.

Unlike fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, Roberts has declined to publicly press for reconsideration of Roe in his writings as a justice.

He also has not voted as rigidly against abortion rights as Justice Brett Kavanaugh or been as personally outspoken as Barrett. Before becoming a judge, Barrett, a Notre Dame law professor, was a vocal critic of Roe v. Wade, including signing a statement that denounced Roe’s “barbaric legacy” and called for “the unborn to be protected in law.”

Roberts is a lifelong Catholic whose wife, Jane, provided pro bono legal counsel to anti-abortion nonprofit Feminists for Life. Roberts told senators in 2005 that his faith would not be a factor in his rulings.

Two years after his confirmation, Roberts helped forge a five-justice bloc to rule that the federal government could ban an abortion procedure in which the woman’s cervix is dilated and the fetus is removed intact. Critics called it “partial birth abortion.” The 2007 Supreme Court decision essentially reversed a 2000 ruling that had invalidated a similar prohibition on the procedure under Nebraska law.

The Supreme Court’s next major abortion case came nearly a decade later, in 2016, and Roberts dissented as the majority struck down Texas requirements that physicians who perform abortions obtain “admitting privileges” at a local hospital and clinics convert to costly, hospital-grade facilities.

But in a 2020 dispute over similar physician credentialing requirements in Louisiana, Roberts voted against the law based on that 2016 precedent. Roberts said he still disagreed with the 2016 decision but would follow it as precedent. His rationale and key decisive vote in that case of June Medical Services v. Russo would, however, bolster states’ ability to defend abortion regulations.

Citizens United

The Mississippi case stands to transform reproductive rights. It centers not on a discrete regulation of abortion but a wholesale ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The state wants the high court to reverse the holding of Roe that protects a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy before viability.

Mississippi officials assert that “Roe and Casey are indefensible,” and they retrieve lines from Roberts’ opinion in the 2020 Louisiana case suggesting the balancing of government interests and women’s reproductive rights should be left to “legislators, not judges.”

Mississippi’s lawyers highlight Roberts’ vote and concurring opinion in the 2010 case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, when the justices by a 5-4 vote reversed precedent and lifted regulations on corporate independent expenditures in election campaigns.

“Stare decisis’s ‘greatest purpose is to serve a constitutional ideal — the rule of law,'” the Mississippi state lawyers write, adopting Roberts’ phrasing from 2010 and arguing that “adhering to Roe and Casey ‘does more to damage this constitutional ideal than to advance it.'”

A group of constitutional law scholars backing the Jackson Women’s Health Organization counter those arguments with other lines from Roberts’ Citizens Union opinion, noting he wrote that “Fidelity to precedent—the policy of stare decisis—is vital to the proper exercise of the judicial function.” Even as he voted to overturn precedent, Roberts had observed in that case that stare decisis promotes predictable development of the law, fosters reliance on rulings and contributes to perceptions of judicial integrity.

Jackson Women’s Health Organization itself briefly cites Citizen United as it asserts that while some may disagree with past rulings, “it is critical that judicial protection hold firm absent the most dramatic and unexpected changes in law or fact,” so justices not be seen as merely exercising their own preferences.

Other supporters of Jackson Women’s Health Organization, including the Department of Justice, represented by the administration of Joe Biden, revive Roberts’ assertion from the June Medical Services case that “for precedent to mean anything, the doctrine (of stare decisis) must give way only to a rationale that goes beyond whether the case was decided correctly.”

And that is the essence of the Supreme Court’s loyalty to precedent. The principle goes beyond whether a decision can be called “correct” or “incorrect,” to whether it remains so central to the fabric of American law and sufficiently relied on to — in the end — preserve.

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Health

The Vaccine Rollout Failed Pregnant People

November 4, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

Cassie Holcomb learned she was pregnant in January 2021, a few weeks after COVID-19 vaccines had become available. The 35-year-old from Arlington, Virginia, had registered to get the shot before getting pregnant but ultimately waited until after giving birth to get vaccinated, due to the terrifying amount of conflicting information thrown at her. “As we went through the pregnancy, both the CDC and WHO’s recommendations changed a bunch of times, as did my doctor’s,” Holcomb told Jezebel.

During her first prenatal visit, her doctors said they weren’t recommending the vaccine; at a later appointment, they changed course and offered it to her on the spot. It seemed like a fast switch, and Holcomb wasn’t comfortable with making the decision that day. By the time she was five months pregnant, her doctors reversed course again and recommended against it. They said the vaccine wasn’t linked to miscarriage or preterm birth, but said there wasn’t information on whether it affected child development, because it was just too new. Holcomb said this was very convincing, especially since she didn’t have job-related exposure—she had worked as a pastry chef, but was laid off during the pandemic. “That’s really what solidified my decision to wait until after I gave birth to get the vaccine,” she said. “But they reversed again about 10 days before my due date.”

During that August visit, Holcomb says the doctor strongly recommended she get the vaccine that day and told her about unvaccinated pregnant people dying from COVID and their babies being admitted to the NICU. “It scared the shit out of me,” she said, but she was so close to her due date that she chose to wait. “I’m glad I waited until after, but it was scary to get through nine months with people dying trying not to get COVID,” she said. She felt embarrassed telling people she wasn’t vaccinated and always prefaced her answer with an explanation of all the back-and-forth and uncertainty she experienced.

Scenarios like this one are preventable—they happen because pharmaceutical companies exclude pregnant people from their clinical trials, and public health agencies push decision-making risks onto individual citizens. Undergirding these interlocking failures is the fetal exceptionalism in the United States and the immense amount of judgement and paternalism US society heaps on pregnant people. The lack of early safety data on pregnant people and seeming disagreement from global health agencies opened a gaping hole where anti-vaccine misinformation seeped in.

Vaccination rates among pregnant people are about half that of the adult population: 34.8 percent of pregnant people ages 18-49 are fully vaccinated as of October 23, compared to 69.8 percent of people over 18 as of November 4, according to the CDC.

Holcomb and her baby are healthy, but other families have experienced tragedy: As of November 1, at least 24,000 pregnant women were hospitalized with COVID-19, at least 218 pregnant women have died, and an unknown number had near-death ICU stays, to say nothing of unvaccinated women infected with COVID who have experienced premature births, miscarriages or stillbirths.

The exclusion of pregnant people from clinical trials is a longstanding problem, and in this case it was magnified by the fact that experts were dealing with a new virus and evolving knowledge, said Jamila Perritt, MD, MPH, an OB/GYN and the president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health.

“The part that we’re not communicating really well as providers and public health folks is that what the public is experiencing is science happening in real time,” Dr. Perritt told Jezebel. “Folks are concerned, they feel like they’re hearing something different now than they did last year or last month, right? And to a certain degree, that’s true.” In the beginning of the vaccine rollout, the phrase “talk to your doctor” was everywhere for a reason, she said: Providers were “trying to support folks in making an autonomous decision in a data-free zone.”

Why Exclude Pregnant People from Clinical Research?

The disaster of the morning-sickness drug thalidomide causing birth defects in the 1960s looms over all discussions of the risks of pregnancy research, even though the FDA never approved that drug for use in the US. During the 2009 H1N1, or swine flu, pandemic, Anne Lyerly, MD, an obstetrician and bioethicist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s department of social medicine, and others noted that flu vaccine hesitancy among some pregnant people and their providers is directly tied to the exclusion of pregnant people from clinical trials.

Dr. Lyerly told Jezebel she was hopeful at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, because it seemed like there was heightened awareness of the need to get pregnancy-specific data as early as possible in order to help stave off reticence people might have in using medications and vaccines for the virus ripping through the country. Women and pregnancy-capable people are overrepresented among frontline workers in fields like healthcare, education, retail and hospitality, and it was clear they might be among the first to want this vaccine. The early vaccine candidates, made by Pfizer and Moderna, both used mRNA technology, which doesn’t use any live virus and doesn’t have what researchers call a “theoretical risk” to pregnant people, she said. Researchers should probably be more comfortable with the mRNA vaccines than they are with the yellow fever vaccine, which contains a live, replicating virus and is still given to pregnant people at risk of catching it.

And yet it didn’t happen: Pregnant people were barred from enrolling in the clinical trials, though some people got pregnant after enrolling. “This was a really important opportunity for pregnant people to be enrolled in the studies, but they weren’t,” Dr. Lyerly said. (Animal research is done before any humans are studied, the researchers told me, and after a few months of human trials, vaccine manufacturers could have seen that it’s safe for people generally and enrolled a separate arm of the trial that just follows pregnant people who opt to get the shot.)

At a country level, it seemed we learned nothing from a decade prior. We are still, Dr. Lyerly said, protecting pregnant people to death. “Pregnant people have been protected from research rather than being protected through research, which is how we attend to most other populations,” Dr. Lyerly said.

The exclusion creates a catch-22 where risk concerns keep pregnant people out of the very trials that are needed to recommend treatments for them, said Geeta K. Swamy, MD, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University, who’s also a member of the American College of Obstetrician and Gynecology’s COVID-19 expert working group. “You’re basically punishing pregnant women from the beginning,” Dr. Swamy told Jezebel. (Pfizer did start a study with pregnant women in February 2021, but it’s a randomized, placebo-controlled trial. “Why would you go get a placebo when we know that a vaccine is already working?” Dr. Swamy asked.)

ACOG and other groups were meeting with officials from the CDC, NIH, and FDA about including pregnant people in trials, but “no one really picked up this charge and carried it forward,” Dr. Swamy said. “That’s just a fact, otherwise we wouldn’t be where we are today. I don’t mean they didn’t care, and I don’t mean that they were indifferent and they didn’t understand it was a problem, but they just didn’t, for whatever reasons.” In her view, the government should pass legislation requiring researchers to justify why they aren’t enrolling pregnant people. As Dr. Perritt said, “the data that we have now about the vaccine and pregnancy is not because people were enrolled in the trials during pregnancy, but because they happened to get pregnant.”

One possible reason for this research exclusion is doctors and the state prioritizing the fetus ahead of the person carrying it when thinking about the risks of medications, vaccines, and other interventions, Dr. Lyerly said. It’s a problematic kind of protection—a misprotection, even—where researchers and government agencies ignore the fact that the health of the two beings are intertwined, and inadequate treatment can be dangerous for both. “People fail to also recognize that the best way to take care of the health of the child is to make sure its mother is as healthy as possible,” she said.

Even well-meaning people and groups sharing information around pregnancy do things that Dr. Lyerly said are “highly problematic.” In January 2021, the CDC said pregnant women should talk to their doctors about the vaccine, but at the same time, the WHO said pregnant people shouldn’t get the shot unless they were at high risk of contracting COVID because of their jobs or preexisting health conditions. The WHO message was bad for leading with precaution, rather than emphasizing the benefits of protection from the virus, she said, but the CDC’s tack wasn’t great either. “People will talk to their doctors,” she said, “but there isn’t a particular reason or set of circumstances that people should parse through with their doctor that could lead to a reasoned decision not to get vaccinated based on science.”

“Talk to your doctor” language is “in some ways an effort to sort of push responsibility for any imagined risk away from the organization and into the realm of the pregnant person and her doctor, which isn’t really fair, frankly,” Dr. Lyerly said.

One task force, which included ACOG, took a better approach, releasing guidance in February that pregnant people who want the vaccine shouldn’t be denied it by their healthcare providers—a step the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not take. ACOG recommended the vaccine for pregnant people at the end of July, and the CDC recommended it on August 11, shortly before the Pfizer vaccine got full FDA approval. The CDC updated its language on September 29 to “strongly” recommend the shot after seeing more pregnant people hospitalized during the late summer. When the CDC did recommend “urgent action” to get pregnant people vaccinated, it was via a rare health advisory, and Dr. Lyerly said she just wished they’d done it sooner. “A lot of pregnant people—nearly 160 at that point—had already died.”

Maven Clinic, a virtual clinic for women’s and family health, commissioned a representative survey in mid-October of 500 pregnant people in the US and the results are illuminating: Just 39 percent of respondents said they knew the CDC recommends all pregnant people get the vaccine, two full months after the agency had done so, and only 29 percent said they knew that pregnant people are more likely than others to get severely ill from COVID. Nearly 70 percent of people surveyed said at least one source advised they not get the vaccine during pregnancy and, of those people, 29 percent said a medical provider made that suggestion. (In September, Mississippi’s state health officer issued a standing order for pharmacists to vaccinate pregnant people after reports that some had refused to do so.)

Despite loads of fact–checking, a mere 35 percent said they knew the vaccine doesn’t cause infertility. The myths still persist and gain news coverage: In October, ESPN reporter Allison Williams announced she was leaving the network over concerns that its vaccine requirement would affect her future fertility, when there is no evidence of fertility problems. Days later, right-wing site The Daily Wire announced that Williams was coming on board to host a new series billed as “sports without the woke.”

The genuine vaccine hesitancy some people experienced around pregnancy due to the botched vaccine information rollout has, in effect, given birth to a more toxic brand of anti-vaxxer propaganda that is not based at all in science or reasonable thought.

The Specter (and Guilt) of Pregnancy Loss

There’s also another subconscious reason why some pregnant people are hesitant to get the vaccine, Dr. Perritt says: internalized guilt over pregnancy loss that is rampant in our culture. “So: ‘You made the decision to move forward in this way, and it harmed your baby, and that was your fault,’” she said. “There is a really tight association between othering and punishing pregnant people that I think is deeply embedded in this and never discussed in this vaccine debate.”

Black and brown pregnant people may not only face individual guilt, but they are more likely than white women to be criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes, Dr. Perritt said. In one recent Oklahoma case, a 21-year-old Native American woman, Brittany Poolaw, was convicted of first-degree manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison after a miscarriage. (Poolaw had tested positive for drugs and the fetus had congenital abnormalities but even experts involved in the case said it was unclear what caused the miscarriage and the drugs weren’t directly responsible). While this case involved illicit substances, “whether you’re incarcerated or just simply stigmatized and blamed, I think that it’s all part and parcel of the same culture,” Dr. Perritt says. And without the (limited) protections of Roe v. Wade, even more pregnant people will be charged for miscarriages and stillbirths.

For Black women, layered on top of these concerns is the historical and often personal experience of medical providers doing them harm. “It’s not enough to say [to pregnant Black women] ‘oh go get vaccinated,’” Dr. Perritt said. “There are lots of complicated reasons why people may or may not interact with the health care system.”

Holcomb, who is white, also felt guilty when making her choice to wait to get the vaccine, noting that pregnant people are surveilled and judged when they so much as drink a cup of coffee in public. “People are so judgmental of decisions you make now,” she said. The vaccine was one of many loaded decisions. “If you got the vaccine and something did happen to your child, what does that look like?” Holcomb said. “The amount of guilt that comes along with making that decision is just tremendous.”

While she would have felt guilty for getting it, she also felt bad for waiting—it was a lose-lose situation. “I felt irresponsible for not being vaccinated. But at the same time, I did feel like it was the best decision I could make with the information that I had for my daughter,” Holcomb said, adding that she would have gotten vaccinated before giving birth if she had gotten pregnant later when there was more data available.

And the flip-flopping doctors did not help. “I could have been told not to get it at the same time somebody else could have been getting told, ‘absolutely get it.”

Dr. Swamy said we will keep having these problems until pharmaceutical companies are forced to update their practices. “If we never enroll [pregnant people] in trials, we will never improve upon pregnancy itself. We will never be able to get to a place where we have healthier mothers and healthier babies,” she said. Without it, “I’m not sure we’re going to see a significant sea change.”

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What abortion access looks like in America even before the Supreme Court reconsiders Roe v. Wade

October 9, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

Since the 1973 decision that enshrined a constitutional right to an abortion, activists and their partners in statehouses across the country have enacted more than 1,300 laws since that ruling have made the procedure more difficult to obtain.

Five states have only one clinic within their borders, and in large swaths of the country, abortion-seekers must travel for miles to obtain the procedure. States also impose limits, like waiting periods, parental consent requirements, advice mandates and restrictions on the specific types of procedures offered.

About 580 of such restrictions have been enacted just in the last decade, according to the reproductive rights think tank Guttmacher Institute. These restrictions compound upon each other, and particularly in states in the South and Midwest, abortion patients face not one or two, but several separate obstacles to obtaining the procedure.

“You’re told that you can’t actually act on your decision until you jump through all the hoops that the state where you live has put out in front of you,” said Elisabeth Smith, the director of state policy and advocacy at the Center for Reproductive Rights. “That is all that is all meant to make the person seeking abortion care feel the stigma that anti-abortion folks believe it is true.”

This incremental approach to limiting access is, all at once, a strategy of policy, politics and law. By focusing on laws that chip away at the availability of the procedure, anti-abortion activists have secured key court decisions upholding those laws that have helped inch the Supreme Court closer to rethinking Roe, while keeping the issue in the national conversation.

“The way to deal with Roe v. Wade was to understand that, if we were going to change it, we had to — in the interim — operate under it, but challenge it, or at least save lives in the meantime, with provisions that would limit abortion,” James Bopp, the longtime general counsel of the National Right to Life Committee, told CNN.

Sometimes states passed laws in reaction to court decisions that opened the door to more restrictions, according to Katie Glenn, the government affairs counsel for the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life.

“Or, it’s pushing the boundaries,” Glenn told CNN. “It’s like: here’s the policy we want in our state, let’s go ahead and pass it. Let’s see what we can do in the court.”

In the meantime, abortion remains extremely difficult to access for some women, regardless of whether the Supreme Court upholds, reverses or waters down Roe in the case, concerning Mississippi’s 15-week ban, being heard in December.

Targeting clinics with regulations that make them tough to keep open

Abortion providers in nearly two-dozen states, per Guttmacher, face licensing mandates and other requirements that set them apart from facilities that offer comparable medical procedures.

Abortion rights advocates blame these and other restrictions for how number of clinics in certain states continues to shrink.

Some states have mandates around hallway or room size, or a clinic’s distance to a hospital; a dozen states require that clinics have a special relationship with a local hospital, according to the think tank. Such requirements make it more expensive to operate clinics, particularly when their facilities don’t already meet the mandates, and more difficult to staff with physicians who have the required licenses.

Texas saw the number of clinics in its state cut in half over the last decade, while a clinic regulation law was being litigated. Louisiana went from having 11 clinics several decades ago to having seven in 2011, and now, just three.

These numbers would be even more dire had the Supreme Court not ruled in favor of providers that challenged certain clinic regulation laws — known as Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, or TRAP, laws — passed in those states in recent years, which would have left Texas, the country’s second-most populous state, with fewer than 10 providers. All but one clinic in Louisiana would have closed.

Glenn, whose group supported that wave of bills, denied that the goal was to close clinics, and said they were passed “for safety reasons” for the patients’ health.

Regardless, as clinics have shuttered, available care has been condensed to urban areas.

The distances can be daunting for women who can’t easily afford the travel expenses, child care and the time off work required to make the trip. According to one 2019 study, nearly “one-fifth of U.S. abortion patients traveled more than 50 miles one-way and the most common reason reported for clinic choice was that it was the closest.”

“For folks that are in rural communities, access is just really difficult because of the travel,” said Tamya Cox-Touré, co-chair of the Oklahoma Call for Reproductive Justice, which helps women navigate seeking the procedure.

Additional hurdles once patients make it to their provider

Getting to the clinic is often only the first step.

About half of the states have in effect waiting periods — ranging from 18 to 72 hours — which further compound the time and travel cost individuals must expend to obtain the procedure.

South Dakota’s is the most extreme, as it excludes weekends and holidays from the waiting period count, meaning that if a woman shows up on a Friday to get the procedure, she will not be able to get it until the following Wednesday.

These requirements — and particularly ones in states that require women see the same physicians for their first and second visits — complicate operations for clinics too, by hamstringing staff time and scheduling.

Minors face an additional hurdle in the 38 states that require parental involvement in the decision, either with a notice or a consent requirement; in three states, both parents must give their consent, according to Guttmacher.

While the vast majority of those states offer a judicial bypass for minors who do not want their parents’ involvement, that court process can be time-consuming, and in some states, a judge’s permission is only granted under certain circumstances.

The hurdles are not just ones of cost and time, but of emotion, as several states require that providers tell abortion-seekers certain things about the procedure that aren’t necessarily true or accurate.

In five states, patients are told falsely that the procedure increases the risk of breast cancer, while eight states require that recipients of a medication abortion be told inaccurately that the procedure can be reversed midway through.

“It’s a testament to how much people want and need abortion that they still go through with it, after everything that the state is requiring them to hear,” said David Cohen, a professor at the Drexel Kline School of Law and co-author of the book “Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America.”

Restrictions on the types of procedures

Since Roe, federal courts have been mostly skeptical of laws that ban abortion before viability. But other restrictions that target abortion based on the type of procedure offered have been broadly successful in limiting women’s options based on where they are in their pregnancies.

Several states have sought to ban an abortion procedure known as D&E, or “dilation and evacuation,” the method most commonly used for women in their second trimester. Texas’ ban was recently upheld by a federal appeals court.

Medication abortion — in which patients terminate their pregnancies by use of pills — have also become a target of legislators in places like Texas, which recently enacted a law threatening felony punishment for physicians who provide medication abortion pills without meeting the state’s informed consent requirements. Nineteen states effectively outlaw the use of telemedicine in administration of medication abortion.

The laws, outside their practical effects, also carry a political impact.

“The procedure bans are a way that anti-abortion folks can try to define abortion care and define this medical procedure … in a way that makes people oppose to it,” Smith, of the Center for Reproductive Rights said, pointing to how anti-abortion activists have rebranded medication abortion as “chemical abortion.”

As anti-abortion activists see it, these types of laws let them highlight the “the extremity of the pro-choice position, and possibly of Roe v. Wade itself,” Bopp told CNN.

Financial constraints

Then there is the question of how abortion patients are going to pay for the procedure. Given that seekers of the procedure tend to be lower-income or poor, they are hit especially hard by policies of the federal government and nearly three-dozen states that limit the use of Medicaid to pay for abortion.

Glenn, of Americans United for Life, pointed to polls supporting limits on public abortion funding, and said that “nobody should feel like they should have an abortion because of a financial decision related to government benefits.”

About a dozen states put limits on the coverage of abortion by private insurance plans.

The time women spend saving money has knock-on effects. It might take so long that they get too far in their pregnancies to receive less invasive types of the procedure, like medication abortions. In some states the gestational limit might pass.

“When a person is living in a state like Texas where there are a lot of abortion bans and restrictions that work together, prohibiting coverage is one thing that can push abortion, out of reach for someone,” Smith said. “Abortion is time-sensitive medical care, so if you do not have the funds to pay for it out of pocket. You are having to figure out how to pay for it.”

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Susan Collins calls Texas abortion law ‘inhumane,’ defends Roe v. Wade as ‘law of the land’

October 3, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), speaks during a US Senate Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing to examine covid-19, focusing on an update on the federal response in Washington, DC, on September 23, 2020. (Photo by Alex Edelman / POOL / AFP) (Photo by ALEX EDELMAN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said Saturday that she believes the Texas law banning most abortions in the state, which took effect last month, is “extreme, inhumane and unconstitutional,” according to the Associated Press.

TEXAS ABORTION PROVIDERS ASK SUPREME COURT TO FAST-TRACK APPEAL OVER STATE’S FETAL HEARTBEAT BAN

In addition, Collins voiced support for Roe v. Wade as the “law of the land.” Roe v. Wade is a landmark decision that legalized abortion across the country in 1973. It’s not the first time Collins, a moderate, has voice support for what many conservatives have opposed for decades.

“I support codifying Roe,” Collins said in September, the Los Angeles Times reported. “Unfortunately the bill … goes way beyond that. It would severely weaken the conscious exceptions that are in the current law.”

Collins was referring to a Democrat-backed bill in Congress to help ensure abortion access in all 50 states. Collins opposed that bill.

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Collins’ comments came as the first Women’s March during President Joe Biden’s presidency took on Washington, D.C., at the Supreme Court.

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Technology

Maneater, Killing Floor Boss Supports Texas Anti-Abortion Law

September 5, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

Photo: Sergio Flores (Getty Images)

According to a tweet posted yesterday by John Gibson, the president of Tripwire Interactive—the studio behind Maneater and Killing Floor—he is “proud” that the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a new Texas anti-abortion law to stand earlier this week.

The controversial law bans abortion after six weeks and goes so far as to allow private citizens to sue abortion providers or anyone even suspected of helping a woman end a pregnancy. This essentially creates a bounty system targetting abortion-seekers and enforced by random residents of Texas.

Tripwire president John Gibson’s September 4 tweet, via his personal Twitter account, explained that he was “proud” of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to refrain from blocking Texas Senate Bill 8. The bill, which became law at midnight on Wednesday, September 1, bans abortions in the Lone Star State after six weeks.

However, the state’s police and elected officials will not be its enforcers. Instead, that duty will fall to private citizens, who are now empowered to bring lawsuits against any person or group that they believe is facilitating someone getting an abortion. This could even include people who merely drive a patient to a clinic, help them enter by pushing a wheelchair, or hold their hand for comfort. Any Texas citizen can now sue them for $10,000.

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Texas has effectively created a surveillance system operated by private citizens, the sole purpose of which is to prevent women from safely accessing abortions. While abortions will still be legal within the first six weeks, a majority of women don’t yet realize they’re pregnant by then. As Jezebel notes, “Though patients in Texas are still guaranteed the right to an abortion by Roe v. Wade, after Tuesday it will be theoretical at best.”

Clearly this is an evil, misogynistic law that will hurt thousands of women and other folks with uteruses who lack the resources to travel outside of Texas to access safe abortions. Desperate women will face the unimaginable choice of attempting to access potentially dangerous, unsafe procedures away from prying eyes or to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term against their will. It’s an unthinkably awful law made legal only through the Supreme Court’s increasing abuse of the so-called shadow docket to rule on extremely consequential cases.

Yet Tripwire Interactive president John Gibson is happy about it all. In his tweet, he also described himself as a “pro-life game developer.” He felt this was very important to share with the world. Mr. Gibson also mentions he doesn’t “get political” very often. He clearly decided to make an exception to share a little excitement over this law designed to hurt women by stripping them of basic human rights.

Kotaku has reached out to Tripwire Interactive about Gibson’s tweet supporting the controversial anti-abortion law.

Reactions to the tweet came quickly as it spread across social media, with numerous video game devs, writers, designers, and fans dunking on Gibson’s troubling tweet. Many also expressed disappointment that Gibson’s statement will undoubtedly lead to greater stress for the folks who work under him at Tripwire and now have to deal with this shit. Plus, it can’t feel good to know that your boss is fine with Texas women losing the right to control their own bodies. Some people have sworn to stop playing existing and future Tripwire games, going so far as to block the publisher on their Steam accounts.

Update: September 5, 6:04 p.m. ET: Shipwright Studios, a self-described “co-development” studio, announced it is canceling all contracts with Tripwire Interactive as a direct result of Gibson’s tweet. The company had previously worked alongside Tripwire to help the studio develop Maneater and Chivalry II.

“We cannot in good conscience continue to work with Tripwire under the current leadership structure,” said Shipwright in a statement posted on Twitter. “We will begin the cancellation of our existing contracts effective immediately.”

Original story follows:

If you want to help women pay for safe abortions, you can donate to the Lilith Fund, Jane’s Due Process, or the Texas Equal Access Fund. These groups help women in the state afford abortions, provide support and resources for them, and other useful services. With the shocking passage of Texas Senate Bill 8, support from organizations like these has become even more important for Texas women, who face an uncertain future in a state that now denies them control over their very bodies.

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Supreme Court declines to block Texas’ restrictive abortion law, dealing a blow to Roe v. Wade

September 2, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

A divided Supreme Court late Wednesday declined to block a restrictive Texas law banning abortions after a fetal cardiac activity can be detected, or as early as six weeks into pregnancy, and allowing anyone in the U.S. to sue abortion providers or others who help women get the procedure after that time frame.

The vote was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts dissenting alongside the three liberal Justices Elaina Kagan, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Each wrote a separate opinion opposing the majority decision.

The lack of action by the nation’s high court deals a blow to Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationally, essentially legalizing the law’s language incentivizing private litigation to cripple abortion care and support services.

The law, known as Senate Bill 8, went into effect at midnight Wednesday, after the Supreme Court did not take immediate action to block it.

Abortion rights advocates say the measure is the most restrictive anti-abortion law to go into effect in the U.S. in years, with provisions that amount to a near-total ban on abortion in the state.

Abortion providers in Texas filed an emergency request Monday asking the Supreme Court to block the law, saying the measure “would immediately and catastrophically reduce abortion access in Texas, barring care for at least 85 percent of Texas abortion patients (those who are six weeks pregnant or greater) and likely forcing many abortion clinics ultimately to close.”

The plaintiffs — led by the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the American Civil Liberties Union and including multiple Texas abortion providers — filed the request of the Supreme Court after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had refused to block enforcement of the law.

Texas’ law bans abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected, which occurs as early as six weeks into pregnancy — before many women even know they are pregnant. Unlike other states’ anti-abortion laws, Texas’ unique ban is enforced through private citizens’ lawsuits against abortion providers rather than through state government.

The law includes first-of-its-kind language that allows anyone, even those outside the state, to sue abortion providers or others who help women get abortions after the six-week limit and seek $10,000 per defendant.

Targets of the lawsuits could include not only organizations that help pay for abortions and practical support groups that provide women in need with transportation, lodging, recovery care and child care, but also doctors, nurses, domestic violence counselors and even friends, parents, spouses and clergy members who give aid such as driving a woman to a clinic or providing counseling about whether to have the procedure.

Abortion groups that provide those services say the law would cripple their ability to operate by allowing abortion opponents to flood the courts with lawsuits to harass doctors, counselors and family and friends of those seeking the procedure.

Abortion advocates have said the law is unconstitutional. Prior landmark rulings by the Supreme Court made it illegal for states to ban abortion before a fetus is viable, which generally happens at about the 24th week of pregnancy.

But S.B. 8 was designed not to criminalize abortions outright after six weeks, allowing the law to evade that standard. Rather, critics say it was written to incentivize civil lawsuits at the municipal, county and state levels — litigation that abortion supporters would have to pay potentially crippling costs to defend against regardless of the outcome of the cases.

That language also makes it difficult for abortion care advocates to fight back against the law’s implementation. For example, with a traditional ban enforced by a state government, plaintiffs would sue the law enforcement entities to block the law from going into effect. In this case, because the law is enforced by lawsuits from private citizens, plaintiffs have resorted to suing a large number of state and local courts in hopes of blocking the suits from being filed. Experts said numerous loopholes could still exist that would allow anti-abortion lawsuits under the state law.

The law is also uniquely designed to put defendants at a financial disadvantage, requiring them to pay their own as well as the plaintiffs’ legal fees if the latter should win. All damages, meanwhile, would go right into a plaintiff’s pocket, and those thought to be helping women get abortion care could be sued multiple times by different parties.

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Entertainment

Comedian Jamie Kennedy on How He Ended Up in the Anti-Abortion Propaganda Film ‘Roe v. Wade’

April 2, 2021 Admin Leave a comment

There are a number of names you might expect in Roe v. Wade, a new anti-abortion film that walks the line between melodrama and propaganda. Jon Voight, Stacey Dash, Roger Stone, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Tomi Lahren all make appearances. MyPillow conspiracist Mike Lindell pops up in a bizarre cameo. It is co-directed by and stars Nick Loeb, best known for waging legal war against ex-fiancée Sofia Vergara in order to gain control over their embryos. And then there is Jamie Kennedy, the stand-up comic and star of films like Scream and Malibu’s Most Wanted.

Kennedy plays Larry Lader, an abortion-rights champion who founded NARAL. In the film, which is packed with conspiracy theories and lies (though claims to be “based on a true story”), Lader is depicted as part of a behind-the-scenes cabal of rapacious activists pushing abortion to make money (there is no evidence that Lader conducted himself in this way). And Kennedy, a 50-year-old “centrist” who supports a woman’s right to choose, seems both intrigued by the controversy that the film has stoked and worried about the ramifications it may have for his career. After all, as I reported during filming, a number of crew members—including the director, first assistant director, costume designer, and location manager—all quit during the production after learning of the film’s extreme anti-abortion bent.

“People would walk mid fuckin’ stream and say, ‘I didn’t know it was going to be this,’ and that’s not good,” recalls Kennedy. “And maybe you’re saying, ‘Hey Jamie, why didn’t you follow suit?’ and I guess because I just rode it out and wanted to see what the final product was.”

He adds, “I’m not some crazy right-winger, but I’m also not some crazy left-winger. I’m a guy who needs to be educated some more about politics. I’m not some guy in Hollywood who acts like they’re an expert about politics, and you can print that. I’m sick of that.”

In a wide-ranging conversation with The Daily Beast, Kennedy discusses how he wound up in one of the most appalling movies of the year.

OK, so with Roe v. Wade, I’m curious what attracted you to the film.

Well, you know, here’s what it is: In Hollywood, a lot of people were talking about this movie, and first and foremost, I’m an actor. I act. I’ve worked with Jon Voight twice before, and he’s one of the greatest actors ever. I thought it was an important story, and to be honest, I got offered the role. It was a more dramatic part and a real offer, and so I did some research. I knew there was a lot of stuff we were walking into but in other parts in Hollywood, I have to read, read, read, and this was a nice offer.

This is obviously a controversial subject, so what about the story itself attracted you to it?

It’s such a controversial subject. It’s so hard to comment on it as a man, you know, because we don’t conceive the baby. We help. Look, Cathy [Allyn] and Nick [Loeb], the directors, producers, and writers, they were like, “This is a movie, it’s gonna be about Roe v. Wade.” They showed me all of these books. I was reading the script and like, “Did this happen?” and they were like, “Here’s the quote.” They introduced me to a lot of the history of Margaret Sanger, Larry Lader, and Planned Parenthood. I knew it was going to be a hot-button issue going in, but I saw what they were quoting from, and I was like, “That’s interesting. I didn’t know that.” They said everything in this movie was taken from books. Whether they took some liberties, I don’t know. I didn’t fact-check everything.

There were a lot of liberties taken. I did try to fact-check the film before speaking with you about it. Your character Larry Lader, for instance, is depicted as a shady figure pulling strings from behind the scenes who treats abortions as a money-making operation.

Um… OK… So, you’ll have to educate me. So… what I was told is that Larry was a student of Margaret Sanger. I don’t know enough about Margaret Sanger, but one thing I know is that she was a women’s activist, right? And they say that she also may have done some stuff with eugenics. In the movie, Larry hooks up with Betty Friedan, who’s obviously a huge feminist icon, and it looks like he’s saying that with Planned Parenthood, there’s some money to be made there. For sure, the character says that. It looks like he’s in there for some profit, for sure. But is that true? Is there money being made? That is the question.

Let’s unpack that. At the film’s end, it presents a “fact” that “Planned Parenthood made $1.6 billion last year.” So, I pulled their most recent annual report, as they’re a non-profit with 501(c)(3) status, which reveals that while Planned Parenthood pulled in $1.64 billion in revenue, they had $1.57 billion in operating and other expenses, and only have $22 million in total assets. So, they’re not making a ton of money. That is a blatant misrepresentation at the end of the film. Also, the idea that they’re making all this money off of abortions is strange as well. Abortion is only 3 percent of what Planned Parenthood does. Fifty-two percent of it is STI treatment and testing, 25 percent is contraception, and 6 percent is cancer screenings. The idea that Planned Parenthood is raking in money due to abortions is a lie.

Yeah, I’ll have to look at the facts again. Like I said, I’m just an actor. You do hear one thing in the media, and then you hear another thing when we’re on set. A woman and a man made this movie together—they’re co-directors—and whatever people write about Nick, he’s done nothing but treat me with the utmost respect. And Cathy is a level-headed, intelligent person.

Were you wearing prosthetics in this?

[Laughs] Yo, that’s fucked up! My hair, we thinned it out a little bit and combed it over, and I put a little weight on. I wanted to look different. For me, it’s cool to get a cool role. It’s controversial, but that’s what good TV and movies should do. They should make you talk.

As a comic, I imagine you’re anti-censorship, and one thing that struck me as odd is that this film is co-produced by the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which is a pro-censorship organization that attacks any media that pokes fun at the Catholic Church. This group has come after Dogma, Kathy Griffin, and a number of other films and comedians just for lightly mocking the Catholic Church.

I didn’t even know that, and to be real with you, there’s a lot of people that produced this, and… I didn’t even know that. I didn’t know the Catholic League did that. I believe in free speech, too. I just thought it was a very cool role. Did I know how controversial it was going to be? No. Did I know Nick’s background enough? No. Was it directed by a woman? Yes. But she left, and another woman came in. I’m in the middle as a human being. I’m a centrist.

“That is true. A ton of people left, from high up, like camera crew and editors, to PAs who were like, “Fuck this, I’m out!” mid-shot. I had never seen anything like that. People did leave.”

You mentioned that the director left and was replaced by Cathy. But there were many crew members that left during production, right?

Tons! That is true. A ton of people left, from high up, like camera crew and editors, to PAs who were like, “Fuck this, I’m out!” mid-shot. I had never seen anything like that. People did leave.

Why did they leave? From my reporting, it seems like some members of the crew were misled as far as what the film would be about.

I mean, that’s a slippery slope if you say that, but I see what you’re saying. When I signed on to the movie, I knew I was walking into a potential ticking time bomb. But there was a lot of stuff in the thing that people just weren’t vibing with. There’s a part where a song happens and I remember that day a couple of people just said, “This is it,” and they left during that song.

The scene where characters sing, “There’s a fortune in abortion.”

Yes. And [Nick] said, “It’s in the book.” It’s taken from, I believe, Dr. Bernard Nathanson’s book, where they apparently sang this.

This is a good example of how the film distorts things. In Nathanson’s book, he claims that as an intern some people sang this song. So, it was never sung by Larry Lader or any other activists, and again, he claims it was widely sung among medical interns at the time yet Bernard Nathanson—in his book, after he became a die-hard anti-abortion activist—is the only person to ever mention its existence.

Yes. So, therein lies the rub.

Well, it’s taking a single dubious source’s claim as fact. And again, Nathanson claimed it was sung when he was an intern, so having Larry Lader and members of NARAL sing it in the film is at best a wild distortion. The film has this song being sung by leading pro-choice activists of the time, which never happened.

You know, I don’t know how to answer that.

Nick Loeb’s character says in the film, “We can’t turn a woman’s body into a business negotiation.” That struck me as pretty ironic, given that it’s pretty much what he did in real life with Sofia Vergara?

Now, I don’t know enough about that. So, you’ll have to educate me. I know he’s in some battle over her embryos.

A curious thing about this film is that it was filmed in Louisiana, the same place where he had initiated legal proceedings against Sofia Vergara to try to claim full ownership over their embryos. So, he was essentially shooting an anti-abortion propaganda film in the very state that he had pursued this case, and at the same time. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. But they broke up, they had frozen embryos, and he wanted to unilaterally, without her consent, assume control over the embryos.

I don’t know enough about that case, but I’ve been hearing and reading some stuff about it. I guess… I don’t know enough about it, but there’s definitely something going on there, and people can assume what they assume.

The film features Milo Yiannopoulos as an abortionist. Were you aware that that was going to be happening?

Certain people came on the movie that I didn’t know, really. All these other players came in the day before [shooting] and stuff. I don’t know about Milo yet, but I know he’s a highly controversial figure. I think he’s called a right-wing person, but I see him on a lot of left-wing stuff.

Well, he’s defended hebephilia and he launched a racist campaign against Leslie Jones over the Ghostbusters movie. He once penned an article with the headline, “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” so it’s frankly ironic that he’s in this movie.

I don’t know enough about him.

Is it unfair to you and the cast for the filmmakers to insert incendiary far-right figures into the film after the fact? Because now you’re going to be associated with these characters.

I mean… yeah. That’s not fair to me, but it’s also not fair for people to think that because I’m in a project with them that I’m like that, or that I believe in this stuff. That’s not fair.

If someone popped up in Triumph of the Will, I would probably assume that they don’t like Jews very much.

Yeah, that’s a good point. I didn’t know all these people, and I didn’t know their histories. I didn’t do enough research on every single person in the movie.

Are you worried that you got roped into a right-wing anti-abortion film? Essentially a propaganda film?

I mean, yes and no. Films should make us think. This is making a loud noise about a subject that’s very polarizing, and this subject needs to always be at the forefront, because it’s a very important subject. Did I know it was going to be this controversial? Probably not. It’s going to be looked upon as a certain way, but I’m not that way.

“Did I know it was going to be this controversial? Probably not. It’s going to be looked upon as a certain way, but I’m not that way.”

You’re not anti-abortion?

I’m going to be as open as I can with you: My personal beliefs shouldn’t matter because I just did this as a role, but I’m not anti-abortion. When I started this movie, I was pro-choice. As I did this movie, I am still pro-choice, but I got educated on certain things that I have questions about, and I believe that, ultimately, it’s a woman’s right to choose. But I do have questions.

What are those questions?

How can I say this, dude? It’s all gonna blow up in my face, but I’ll just go for it. Let’s try to have responsible sex. The guy should come with a condom. If he doesn’t have a condom, men have to work on that. So, that’s number one. There are lots of ways to prevent pregnancy in a normal situation.

Condoms break.

It’s not that hard. When you’re about to climax, keep your condom on. Boom. And if something happens, there’s something called the morning-after pill. But late-term abortion? Come on, man. I don’t know anybody who really understands late-term abortion that can talk about that easily.

Late-term abortions are rarely practiced, and really only usually done if the health of the mother or fetus are at risk.

The people on this film will tell you different.

I’m going to be transparent with you and say that I believe in a woman’s right to choose. And the issue I have with some conservatives—and a lot of the people who are going to watch this film—is that you can’t crack down on contraception and also be anti-abortion. What is the solution then? If you do both those things, you really just want women to have the baby and be tethered to the guy.

I one thousand percent agree with you. That’s a conflicting message. I believe it’s a woman’s right to choose, and it’s a woman and a man’s right to be responsible. But yes, everybody has a right to have contraception.

One scene that I really took issue with in the film involves a secret abortion that’s taking place at a five-star hotel in Chicago, with mafioso-type gangsters overseeing it, and police conduct a sting operation and find buckets of baby parts in the room. I’ve done a lot of research and can’t find any evidence of an incident that comes close to this one. And the scene implies that the rich were getting abortions from doctors at five-star hotels and Chicago gangland-types were in on it in some sort of criminal conspiracy.

I’ve only seen the movie once. I do remember this scene. It was a very disturbing scene, dude, and when I saw it, I was sick to my stomach. I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I guess they’re alluding to how people were getting abortions any way they could. Probably, if you talked to people back then, there were some horrific abortions. I don’t know how the mob were connected to doctors. I don’t know. I’m an actor in it, and I don’t know what liberties were taken there.

Abortion is a very emotional and difficult thing for women to deal with, and in this film, all of the women having abortion procedures performed on them, we often don’t even see their faces. Not only are they given nothing to say, but they’re treated as disposable and interchangeable. In every scene in the film where the woman is getting this procedure done, she’s not a character. What does that say?

I agree with you, and maybe that wasn’t a part of this movie—and it should be—and obviously, it’s a very, very difficult choice. But, you know, you’ve definitely talked with women and they’re like, “Yeah, I got an abortion.” There are some women that are like, “Eh, I did it very quickly.”

Every woman I’ve talked to who has gotten an abortion has been pretty affected by it. I don’t think there’s a single woman who isn’t affected by it.

I agree with you, but I think there are some. I agree that it is the most important decision that a woman can make in her life. You know, people are saying this movie is “Jamie and a slew of right-wingers.” You can look this up: I only voted once in my life, and it was for Obama in 2008. I haven’t voted before, and I haven’t voted since, and you can judge me, and that’s a whole other article. To say it’s a slew of right-wingers is not true. There are people who are super right-wingers and people on the left. Jon Voight is a beautiful guy, and one of the most talented actors. When you go out with him, he’s the most courteous guy. He’s the first on set, he’s the last to leave. To think that Jon is a wild right-winger… I don’t know all of his beliefs.

“You can look this up: I only voted once in my life, and it was for Obama in 2008. I haven’t voted before, and I haven’t voted since, and you can judge me, and that’s a whole other article.”

I mean, he called Joe Biden Satan.

[Laughs] What can I say? Touché? I don’t know everything that he’s said.

I was frankly surprised to see you in this. A lot of the other names didn’t surprise me, but yours did, so I wanted to talk with you about it.

Like I said, I didn’t know what type of movie it was totally going to be. It was a great role, it was a respectful offer, and it was a great group of people. They took care of me as good—if not better—than any movie set I’ve ever been on. Some of the messaging in the movie is going to ruin people’s opinion of me, and I apologize for that. I’m an actor. Certain parts in Hollywood make me read nineteen times for the tenth season of a TNT show, and here comes along this detailed character. I’m an actor. I apologize if I’ve pissed people off. I’m willing to talk. You can look at the history of my career, and I’ve done a lot of stuff—some good, some bad—but the other stuff hasn’t been pro-right. Maybe the next thing I can do will be pro-left to even it out. But I’m going to get judged to the high heavens, and I have to deal with it.

I think you have been sold a false bill of goods here.

[Laughs] Probably!

This seems to be a pretty insidious right-wing propaganda film that you’ve found yourself in.

And I didn’t realize that. And now I gotta deal with it. My agent was like, “Oh, you’ve gotta do this,” and I kind of got put in it. I don’t know… I don’t know what’s going to happen.

Do you stand by the final product?

I have to watch it again. I haven’t seen it in a long time. I like my performance in it. I have to see if there are real facts in it.

There’s an end-credit sequence in the film that features Norma McCorvey, or Jane Roe. The voiceover says that she became pro-life, and it features her giving an anti-abortion spiel. But the documentary AKA Jane Roe came out last year featuring McCorvey where she gave a confessional interview saying that her anti-abortion shtick was all a lie—that she was always pro-choice, that she was a lesbian, and that she’d received bribes from anti-abortion Catholic organizations. McCorvey and the documentary even provide documentation of the “benevolent gifts” she received from these organizations to the tune of $456,911. She says in the film, “I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money, and they took me out in front of the cameras and told me what to say.” So, presenting McCorvey as an anti-abortion crusader at the end of the film when we know what we know now…

…That’s misleading. I agree, that’s misleading. I never knew any of that. I just was told that she was Jane Roe, and this and that, and I saw a bit of the Nightline stuff. Now, if what you’re saying is a hundred percent true, then there’s some duplicity going on.

You should watch AKA Jane Roe. It’s her deathbed confession.

I didn’t know that, and that’s crazy if that’s true. Here’s my thing: people are gonna say what they’re gonna say. I went into the movie as an actor with a very cool part that Hollywood doesn’t normally offer me. Do I have to be aware of what I’m getting into? Of course. Do these things change and turn as they go? Yes. Did this movie change like no other movie I’ve done? A hundred percent. But I knew what I was getting involved in, so I’m not totally innocent, but there were some things that were beyond my control. Do I have to be aware of the things I’m involved in? A hundred percent, and I have to be aware of the messages they put out. So, at the end of the day, I gotta see what the message is, because I hear one thing from those people, and I hear one thing from The Daily Beast side, and I gotta make my own assessments.

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