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  • U.S. Supreme Court lets stand a decision barring emergency abortions

    From ltlee1@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 7 16:12:53 2024
    "WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a decision barring emergency abortions that violate the law in Texas, which has one of the country’s strictest abortion bans.

    Without detailing their reasoning, the justices kept in place a lower
    court order that said hospitals cannot be required to provide pregnancy terminations that would violate Texas law.
    ..
    Texas asked the justices to leave the order in place, saying the state
    Supreme Court ruling meant Texas law, unlike Idaho’s, does have an
    exception for the health of a pregnant patient and there’s no conflict between federal and state law.

    Doctors have said the law remains dangerously vague after a medical
    board refused to specify exactly which conditions qualify for the
    exception.

    There has been a spike in complaints that pregnant women in medical
    distress have been turned away from emergency rooms in Texas and
    elsewhere as hospitals grapple with whether standard care could violate
    strict laws against abortion."

    https://www.texastribune.org/2024/10/07/US-Supreme-Court-emergency-abortion-ban-Texas/

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  • From ltlee1@21:1/5 to All on Mon Oct 14 13:16:16 2024
    The abortion rollback is based on a non-scientific emotional argument
    fortified by an arcane legal framework.

    "But there is a legal framework—it’s just an arcane one. It’s called coverture.

    Under coverture, when a woman married, she ceased to have an independent
    legal identity and was instead “covered” by the legal identity of her husband. The eighteenth-century legal scholar William Blackstone
    described the concept in 1765: “By marriage, the husband and wife are
    one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the
    woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband ... and her condition during her
    marriage is called her coverture.” If this still feels a little
    abstract, here is a contemporary description from several political and historical scholars to put it in perspective: “Like children, servants,
    and slaves, a woman’s identity was inseparable from that of a male
    property owner. She could not sue, be sued, buy or sell property, or
    engage in the public sphere.… [A] woman’s body was not her own.”

    Sound familiar?

    The legal maneuver performed by coverture—the subsuming of a woman’s identity into a nearby and supposedly superior interest—precisely
    describes what happens in legislation that is advanced on the basis of
    the state’s interest in protecting potential life. In other words: When
    the state recognizes the legal interest of the fetus but not that of the pregnant person, it is subsuming the identity of the pregnant person
    into that of her fetus. From a legal standpoint, when a person becomes pregnant, she simply stops existing. The only thing that exists is her
    fetus.

    We can see this conspicuous absence all over the current panoply of
    abortion restrictions. This is particularly the case in the definitions embedded in the legislation, which often feature elaborate wordings that foreground the legal identity of the fetus and de-emphasize that of the pregnant person. For instance, the provision of the Georgia Code that
    defines classes of persons currently defines “unborn human child” to
    mean “a member of the species Homo sapiens at any stage of development
    who is carried in the womb”—but never references the person whose body contains that womb. " https://newrepublic.com/article/185911/abortion-coverture-arcane-legal-theory

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