Far-Right Players Behind Latest Attacks on Abortion in Emergencies (FUCK THE GODDAMNED WOMAN-HATERS)

(FUCK THE GODDAMNED, CHRISTOFASCIST, THEOCRATIC, PATRIARCHAL WOMAN-HATERS)


Far-Right Players Behind Latest Attacks on Abortion in Emergencies (FUCK THE GODDAMNED WOMAN-HATERS)
1/24/2024 by Ansev Demirhan and Lisa Graves

Who is behind the latest attack on access to abortion even in emergencies? Some of the same players trying to impose their religious worldview on others.



A projection condemning right-wing legal activist Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society as government watchdog website Accountable.US launches a campaign during the Federalist Society annual conference on Nov. 9, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Leigh Vogel / Getty Images for Accountable US)

Just days before what would have been the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Idaho to continue its near-total abortion ban despite federal rules that require hospitals protect patient’s health in medical emergencies. In April, the nation’s highest Court will hear Idaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States, a pair of cases that will determine whether the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) preempts state laws that impede emergency abortions needed to protect the health of pregnant people even if they are not on the brink of death. Both of these cases have ties to the main anti-abortion zealots that helped overturn Roe: Leonard Leo and Alliance Defending Freedom.

Anti-Abortion Extremists Play Politics in Idaho

On Aug. 25, 2020, Idaho passed an anti-abortion trigger law, called the Defense of Life Act (DOLA), which would immediately criminalize almost all abortions if Roe were overturned. That law was passed just weeks before Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. At the time, Donald Trump had already appointed two men hand-picked for the Court by Leo and strongly endorsed by anti-abortion groups: Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Within weeks of Idaho’s new law, the Republican-controlled Senate rammed through another appointee selected by Leo, Amy Coney Barrett, even though Americans were already voting in the 2020 presidential election that Joe Biden won.
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Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and then-Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho), arrive for the House Republican Conference meeting in the basement of the Capitol on Monday, Oct. 26, 2015. (Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call)

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Idaho’s abortion ban has driven OB-GYNs out of the state—because, for them, treating patients with nonviable pregnancies, where the fetus is not expected to survive, puts them and their patients in physical danger and under severe emotional distress. Research has shown that post-Roe, OB-GYNs have felt extreme anxiety as they have been forced to weigh the potential legal penalties for providing their patients with a moral and clinical duty of care. The argument that Idaho’s near-total abortion ban somehow values life and children is hard to square with the actions of a state where the GOP-led legislature failed to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage and turned down federal funding for childcare. Idaho is also the only state in America without a legal requirement to track and review the state’s maternal mortality rates. Idaho’s decision to disband its Maternal Mortality Review Committee in July of 2023 seems designed to obscure the effects of its abortion restrictions. The U.S. already has the highest maternal mortality rate among industrialized nations, with rates worsening post-Dobbs.

Dobbs has provoked a sustained backlash in the elections that followed it, as Americans have repeatedly rejected dangerous and repressive abortion bans and the candidates backing them. This has not stopped far-right dark money groups, the judges they helped put in power, and their other benefactors from attempting to impose their personal religious will over Americans’ who wish to maintain freedom to control their bodies and futures. When the Supreme Court rules on the Idaho case in a few months, Idahoans and other Americans will see if the right-wing faction Leonard Leo helped get installed on the Court changes course or continues to use the law to impose its religious worldview on Americans, despite the demonstrably dire consequences and even though most people oppose that extreme agenda.

Alyssa Bowen, director of True North Research’s Equality Project, contributed to this story.

https://msmagazine.com/2024/01/24/leonard-leo-idaho-abortion-emergency-alliance-defending-freedom/