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Wednesday, December 11th, 2019

What civil liberties? Kentucky’s medieval abortion law amounts to state-sanctioned rape

Author:     BOB CESCA
Source:     Salon
Publication Date:     DECEMBER 10, 2019 12:00PM (UTC)
 Link: What civil liberties? Kentucky’s medieval abortion law amounts to state-sanctioned rape
Stephan:   When I was a young man two young women with whom I was not intimate, but with whom I was good friends, one 19 the other 23, died from back-alley abortions, and another two were sent away to Miss Foster's Special Education Facility for most of the year, to have unacknowledged babies they gave up for adoption. One committed suicide a few months after she returned. I think that is what made me such a strong pro-choice advocate. As I got older and understood the issues better I also came to realize that the anti-choice movement in spite of all its bloviation about protecting the unborn is not about fetuses, it is about controlling women, and that need to control women is stronger than ever in the United States. Recently I published an article on the Ohio anti-choice legislation and now, in neighboring Kentucky, this is going on, and I am doing this piece because of the insight it gives to the Supreme Court's thinking. Roe v Wade hangs by a thread in the U.S..    

Bloody coat hanger overlaid on the Supreme Court building
Credit: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty /Salon

Anti-choice conservatives aren’t big fans of science, but the decision this week by the Supreme Court to uphold a Kentucky law mandating transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortion procedures isn’t just anti-science, it’s medieval. It’s state-sanctioned rape. And it’s not the first time the Court has steamrolled both civil rights for women and science fact in lieu of misogyny and science fiction.

Let’s rewind. In the brutally misguided Burwell v Hobby Lobby case of 2014, in which the Christian owners of the hobby-store chain disputed on religious grounds the birth control coverage mandate in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the pre-Trump Supremes decided that religious gibberish superseded actual fetal biology.

The question before the Court was whether the “morning after” prescription coverage allowed in the ACA prevented implantation of a fertilized egg or whether the medication merely blocked fertilization in the first place. Hobby Lobby wrongly insisted it was the former, that the medications were “abortifacients,” or abortion-inducing drugs. […]

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