#MarilynLands, a Dem who made #ReproductiveRights a centerpiece of her campaign in deeply #conservative#Alabama, won a special election to the Alabama Legislature.
Lands’ victory in the suburban district in the #DeepSouth state was celebrated by #Democrats who have attempted to portray the state #GOP as too extreme on #abortion & reproductive rights.
“Today, #Alabama women & families sent a clear message that will be heard in Montgomery & across the nation. Our legislature must repeal AL’s no-exceptions #AbortionBan, fully restore #access to #IVF, & protect the #right to #contraception,” #MarilynLands said.
... #Project2025 actually attacks #contraception in many different ways, pushing for example to eliminate the morning after pill, and suggests instead that, “fertility awareness–based methods of family planning [the rhythm method, which is much less effective than birth control] are part of women’s preventive services under the ACA [Affordable Care Act].” In sum, the Project would restrict as much as is possible any access to services it views as related to #abortion, even contraception if necessary, even in those states that have elected to keep the procedure legal — Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) #quotes#quote
As Chris Geidner reports, once again the hard-right Fifth Circuit court has handed down a ruling that's all about "religious supremacy," not the law. Judge Kyle Duncan has mounted an attack on "the federal government’s longstanding policy that clinics receiving Title X funding need to provide adolescents with confidential access to contraception." Duncan was previously councel for the right-wing Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.
"An influential thinktank close to #Trump is developing plans to infuse #Christian nationalist ideas into his administration if he returns to power...
Those policies include banning immigration of non-Christians into the #UnitedStates, overturning same-sex marriage & barring access to #contraception...
Lisa Needham issues a warning: they're coming for birth control next:
"On X, Heritage’s official account posted last year that 'a good place to start would be a feminist movement against the pill and … returning the consequentiality to sex.'
"Religious conservatives are calling for a return to a world where sex isn’t recreational or for pleasure but is instead fraught with consequences — namely, pregnancies that can’t be terminated even when the pregnant person’s life is in danger."
"They are coming for birth control pills (and other forms of contraception). They are coming for the very concept of recreational sex — sex for fun (which, yes, partnered and married people do too!). Sex, they argue, should come with 'consequences.' Or, as the Heritage Foundation put it, conservatives should focus on 'restoring the consequentiality to sex.'”
"Republicans have … marched in lockstep to oppose the Right to Contraception Act introduced by Democrats because it would have included methods, such as IUDs and the morning-after pill, that some consider abortifacients. It’s hard to square support for IVF, which, as practiced in the United States, nearly always entails the loss of fertilized eggs, with opposition to Plan B because it may result in the loss of a fertilized egg."
Andrew Egger on what happens when the dog (the "pro-life" GOP base) catches the car (the elusive GOP promise to end abortion):
"Before Dobbs, it was easy for the GOP to let the pro-life movement take the lead when it came to setting their abortion-policy agenda—after all, none of that policy was ever going to become law. Expect more and more daylight between party and movement in the months and years ahead."
Greg Olear does an in-depth analysis of the plans Heritage Foundation in store for all of us, if Trump is elected — plans that are out in the open and public, so that if we vote for Trump, we're voting for these plans to be imposed on ourselves and the whole nation.
He notes that Mike Roberts, who heads Heritage Foundation, is an ultra-right Catholic who makes plain that he wants to dismantle democracy in favor of theocracy.
"The Cowboy Catholic and his Leonard Leo-backed extremists want to ban abortion at the federal level. They have stated this unequivocally, time and again. Trump is their vehicle for doing so. (Sidenote: Nikki Haley is totally on board with this, too.) And once abortion is outlawed, they’ll come for contraception, because these religious zealots harbor the erroneous belief that sex is for procreation only and not pleasure,"
Jonathan Weiler on how the critical point for contextualizing what awaits us if Trump is elected is that the end of Roe did not represent the culmination of a decades-long political project, but only a beginning of a nationwide project of controlling reproductive rights and the sexual choices of citizens, with a religious minority in the driver's seat.
"Women should be given full control of their contraceptive needs by being allowed to buy the morning-after pill in supermarkets and petrol stations in the UK, a coalition of healthcare bodies has said.
The Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare (FSRH) said it was high time the barriers to emergency contraception were removed by reclassifying the morning-after pill under the general sales list, meaning it could be bought in shops."
Dan Diamond reports that on the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Biden administration announced new steps to protect access to contraception, abortion medication, and emergency abortions at hospitals. The efforts include issuing guidance making no-cost contraceptives more available and creating a new health department team dedicated to enforcing the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act.
The link in /1 opens to a gift reading of the Dan Diamond article, provided by PRRI iin its Morning Buzz newsletter today. My summary of the article above is also quoting PRRI's summary.