http://socialistaction.org/court-blocks-texas-abortion-crackdown/
Court blocks Texas anti-abortion law
Published July 13, 2015. | By Socialist Action.
July 2015 Abortion
By STEFANIE LEVI
The struggle for women’s right to choose gained an important, if
temporary, victory in the state of Texas. On June 29, in a five to four
vote, the U. S. Supreme Court blocked HB2, a portion of Texas’ new
abortion laws that would have forced the July 1 closure of many of the
state’s abortion clinics. Justices Ginsburg, Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer,
and Kennedy granted the application for an emergency stay in the case of
Whole Women’s health, et al v. Cole, Commissioner, and Texas DHS, et al.
This action puts on hold a June 9 ruling from the Fifth Circuit Court of
Appeals that had previously upheld Texas’ new abortion laws as “not
being unconstitutionally burdensome on women.” This will allow a number
of clinics to remain open, including Whole Women’s Health, in Austin,
whose owners filed the lawsuit with the Supreme Court [SCOTUS].
In its statement on the decision, NARAL Pro-Choice America pointed out:
“In early June, the politically charged 5th Circuit Court of Appeals
upheld provisions of an anti-abortion law passed in 2013, HB2. The law
has already forced more than half of Texas’ [40] abortion clinics to
close and would leave the state with fewer than 10 abortion clinics had
the Supreme Court not intervened.”
“[The decision] only postpones a public health disaster,” said NARAL
Pro-Choice Executive Director Heather Busby. “Health care should not
depend on your zip code or your bank balance. We can celebrate this
decision today, but the reality is that Texans’ health and safety are
still in jeopardy.”
The statistical impact of the justices’ ruling was succinctly voiced by
Susan Hays, legislative counsel for NARAL Pro-Choice Texas, “If the
Court had not issued this order today, we would have more than 60,000
Texas women trying to fit through nine clinic doors per year.” Hays also
said the stay will ensure low-income women and those living in rural
areas can access clinics closer to home.
“We’re relieved that the High Court has, once again, prevented
anti-choice politicians from pushing safe and affordable abortion care
entirely out of reach for Texas women, said Amy Hagstrom Miller, chief
executive of Whole Women’s Health, one of the plaintiffs in the case.
The ever-morphing strategies of the religious right and politicians
whose aim is to completely overturn women’s constitutional right to safe
abortion, as ruled by SCOTUS in 1973 in Roe v. Wade, are evident in
Texas’ HB2 and in a plethora of other states’ anti-abortion legislation.
Severely circumscribing the entire social milieu necessary for women to
receive accurate medical information about abortion procedures and to
have a safe, timely abortion has been the modus operandi of
anti-abortion proponents for five decades.
HB2 would have banned all abortions except in the case of rape or incest
with a minor. It required doctors performing abortions to have admitting
privileges with a hospital located within 30 miles of the clinic, and
stated that clinics must contain the same equipment as ambulatory
surgery centers. Moreover, clinics were required to administer
abortion-inducing medications in the presence of a doctor, a stipulation
that would have forced many patients to travel long distances.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ June 9 ruling was a clear example of
how legal precedent is set in the apparently never-ending war on women’s
right to choose abortion. The three Fifth Circuit judges who wrote the
opinion pointed to the 1992 Supreme Court ruling in Planned Parenthood
v. Casey, which upheld Pennsylvania’s 24-hour waiting period for any
woman seeking an abortion. The SCOTUS justices found that such
restrictions were constitutional unless they proved to be an “undue
burden” for women seeking abortions.
The Fifth Circuit judges followed many other state courts in their
interpretation of the “undue burden” clause in order to uphold
increasingly restrictive abortion laws. The appellate judges noted that
the High Court had acknowledged in Casey that Pennsylvania’s 24-hour
waiting period would be “particularly burdensome” for poor rural women
and would have ‘the effect of increasing the cost and risk of delay of
abortions,’ but the Court had not considered such factors to be an
“undue burden.”
In recent anti-abortion legislation, the religious or political authors
and proponents often couch the control over women’s reproductive rights
in terms of “concern for the health and welfare of the mother and
fetus.” This is particularly appealing to those looking to build careers
in the religious sector and those hell-bent on promoting their own
political trajectories. But this manipulation comes at the cost of the
quality of women’s and children’s lives—if not life itself!
The constant battles on multiple fronts for every woman in the U. S. to
have the right to safe and legal abortion as protected under Roe v. Wade
is a reminder of the roots of those same struggles here and elsewhere on
our planet—in particular under capitalist regimes.
Dianne Feeley, in Against the Current, reviewing Leslie Reagan’s book,
“When Abortion Was A Crime,” points out that for white women in the
early days of European settlement on this continent, and later, also for
slave women in what is now the United States, abortion was not a crime.
According to “both Common Law and popular belief … prior to quickening,
a woman had a right to abort the fetus and restore her menstruation
cycle.” It was precisely with the advent of the American Medical
Association in 1857 that the formal campaign to make abortion illegal
was initiated.
Just a couple of years before Roe v. Wade was passed, in her book
“Woman’s Estate,” Juliet Mitchell told us: “Degrees of availability of
contraception and abortion differ in the various countries. In all of
them its distribution and safety is random and haphazard. In none of
them is it considered the automatic right of every woman. In all of them
it is the privilege of the rich (white middle class) or the abuse of the
poor (e.g. the use of Puerto Ricans as guinea pigs in testing birth
control devices).
“Even the most liberal laws on abortion, as in Scandinavia, England and
New York, force the woman to provide ‘reasons’ which are equivalent to
self-denigration (physical or financial difficulties are rarely as
acceptable as confession of psychological ineptitude). All this in
industrial countries urging (for the rest of the world?) population
control: countries extolling individualism and its correlate—a high
degree of personal attention for the young child.
“All these countries exhibit an essential imbalance of production and
consumption. Women as housewives are seen as the main agents of
consumption. The ethic of consumption (spending money) is counterposed
divisively to that of production (creating wealth)— the province of the
husband. Appealed to as consumers, women are also the chief agents of
that appeal: used aesthetically and sexually they sell themselves to
themselves. Used in these advertisements they also lure men into the
temptation of ‘luxury’ spending.
“Woman’s fundamental job as provider of food, health and welfare comes
to seem an extravagance and so does she along with it. Her
responsibility for the most basic needs of people is converted into a
leisure-time activity and she a play-thing (if she is young enough) that
accompanies such work.”
At the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, class, and geography,
women in the U.S. (and in other countries) must rise together in
organized struggle to take control over our biology, which includes all
of our reproductive rights. This means we will have to use defensive and
offensive strategies to combat the confrontations and setbacks thrown
our way through regressive and progressive reformists and by the radical
right-wing anti-abortionists, just to keep our little bit of ground as
we advance.
Photo: Pro-choice activists face anti-abortion proponents in Austin,
Texas, in January 2015. Eric Gay / AP
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Posted in Women's Liberation. | Tagged abortion, clinics, feminism,
NARAL, pro-choice, SCOTUS, Supreme Court, Texas, women.
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