This happened in Poland but it will be happening in the US now. Women will die due to these anti- abortion laws and bans.
Following the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, CNN’s Melissa Bell takes a closer look at life in Poland – where abortion has been restricted for 30 years
I hate to use CNN. I am sorry for those who use CC as it really is horrible on CNN. But they do the most reporting on the horrible crimes Russia is doing to Ukrainian people. Hugs
At least 18 people are dead, dozens wounded and several missing after a Russian missile attack on a mall in the central Ukrainian city of Kremenchuk. CNN’s Salma Abdelaziz was at the site of the strike where Ukrainian prosecutors and investigators are collecting evidence to prove what they say is another Russian war crime.
Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis is pushing out a pediatrician from a board in charge of running the state’s Healthy Kids program because of her viewpoints on vaccines for children under five.
The brief email did not go into great detail, but said that Patronis — a Republican running for re-election this year — was removing Gwynn from the Florida Healthy Kids Board because she had made “some very political statements that do not reflect the CFO’s point of view, even going so far as to as to say that the state is ‘obstruct(ing)’ access to vaccines.”
“The CFO does not share your opinion and believes the state has gone to great lengths to protect lives in the face of the Coronavirus,” reads the email sent to Gwynn by Susan Miller, who is Deputy Chief of Staff for Patronis.
In an interview with Florida Politics, Gwynn said the Healthy Kids Board of Directors has only met once since her appointment in March.
But Gwynn has appeared in approximately ten interviews with television, radio and print media since Gov. Ron DeSantis and Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced the state won’t make COVID-19 vaccines available for children under five years of age at local county health departments.
The local health departments play a key role, Gwynn said, in childhood vaccination efforts. Some of the state’s poorest children in the state go to the county health departments to get vaccinated.
But health departments also play a key role in helping distribute vaccines to pediatricians who work in rural areas or in small group practices.
Pediatricians who don’t have access to large amounts of cold storage capacity rely on the local county health departments to supply COVID-19 vaccines for their patients. Additionally, pediatricians who don’t meet the minimum number of doses required to order through the state system also rely on the health departments to provide them vaccines for their patients.
“Pediatricians can still do that to this day for kids over five,” Gwynn said of relying on the health departments to provide them with COVID 19 vaccines. “They, the Governor and the state Surgeon General, just chose to not allow the under 5 to be carried (by the health departments). This is about health equity and children that live in poverty. That’s what this is about.”
The Healthy Kids Corporation provides subsidized health insurance to children throughout the state with funding that comes from both the federal government and the state.
Gwynn, a South Florida pediatrician who cares for poor children, told Florida Politics she never identified herself as a member of the Florida Health Kids Board in any of the interviews.
“I don’t like to play this game. That’s not my intent to engage in this political war,” she said.
Sen. Tina Polsky, a Boca Raton Democrat who has been talking to Gwynn about the impact of the DeSantis administration’s decision on vaccines for small children, criticized Patronis’ actions.
“I am appalled at the decision of the CFO to oust Dr. Lisa Gwynn, the President of the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, an expert in pediatric care and vaccines, from the Florida Healthy Kids Board because she spoke out against the administration in an effort to get her youngest, most vulnerable patients a life-saving vaccine,” Polsky wrote in a text. “The tyranny of this administration continues to smother any dissenting opinions (e.g. Dr. Scott Rivkees). All Floridians should know how an acclaimed doctor has been treated by the DeSantis regime.”
Gwynn says the board has only met once since her appointment in March. Florida’s surgeon general, mentioned below, is associated with the anti-vax extremist group America’s Frontline Doctors.
Things are getting worse in Florida.
The #DeSantis regime is retaliating against pediatricians for speaking out against their unprecedented obstruction of COVID vaccines for kids.https://t.co/VAildh9WG8
Florida's decision not to pre-order COVID vaccines for children six months to five years old will lead to delays since doctors and hospitals in the state will be responsible for ordering them. https://t.co/pBCb2WyN7f
At yesterday's briefing, Dr. Ladapo made clear neither he nor Gov. DeSantis believe Florida parents should have the choice to vaccinate their children against the coronavirus at county health departments, the primary point of care for 33,000 Florida kids.
— Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis (@COVIDOversight) June 29, 2022
At yesterday's briefing, Dr. Ladapo made clear neither he nor Gov. DeSantis believe Florida parents should have the choice to vaccinate their children against the coronavirus at county health departments, the primary point of care for 33,000 Florida kids.
— Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis (@COVIDOversight) June 29, 2022
Sooooo, move heaven and Earth to protect the unborn zygote but if it’s an actual, live, miniature human being it “Die motherfuckers”. Republican “logic”….
FILE – The drug misoprostol sits on a gynecological table at Casa Fusa, a health center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Friday, Jan. 22, 2021. Facebook and Instagram have begun promptly removing posts that offer abortion pills to women who may not be able to access them following a Supreme Court decision that stripped away constitutional protections for the procedure. (AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano, File)
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FILE – Boxes of the drug mifepristone line a shelf at the West Alabama Women’s Center in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Wednesday, March 16, 2022. Facebook and Instagram have begun promptly removing posts that offer abortion pills to women who may not be able to access them following a Supreme Court decision that stripped away constitutional protections for the procedure. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed, File)
Such social media posts ostensibly aimed to help women living in states where preexisting laws banning abortion suddenly snapped into effect on Friday. That’s when the high court overruled Roe v. Wade, its 1973 decision that declared access to abortion a constitutional right.
Memes and status updates explaining how women could legally obtain abortion pills in the mail exploded across social platforms. Some even offered to mail the prescriptions to women living in states that now ban the procedure.
Almost immediately, Facebook and Instagram began removing some of these posts, just as millions across the U.S. were searching for clarity around abortion access. General mentions of abortion pills, as well as posts mentioning specific versions such as mifepristone and misoprostol, suddenly spiked Friday morning across Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and TV broadcasts, according to an analysis by the media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.
By Sunday, Zignal had counted more than 250,000 such mentions.
The AP obtained a screenshot on Friday of one Instagram post from a woman who offered to purchase or forward abortion pills through the mail, minutes after the court ruled to overturn the constitutional right to an abortion.
“DM me if you want to order abortion pills, but want them sent to my address instead of yours,” the post on Instagram read.
Instagram took it down within moments. Vice Media first reported on Monday that Meta, the parent of both Facebook and Instagram, was taking down posts about abortion pills.
On Monday, an AP reporter tested how the company would respond to a similar post on Facebook, writing: “If you send me your address, I will mail you abortion pills.”
The post was removed within one minute.
The Facebook account was immediately put on a “warning” status for the post, which Facebook said violated its standards on “guns, animals and other regulated goods.”
Yet, when the AP reporter made the same exact post but swapped out the words “abortion pills” for “a gun,” the post remained untouched. A post with the same exact offer to mail “weed” was also left up and not considered a violation.
Marijuana is illegal under federal law and it is illegal to send it through the mail.
Abortion pills, however, can legally be obtained through the mail after an online consultation from prescribers who have undergone certification and training.
In an email, a Meta spokesperson pointed to company policies that prohibit the sale of certain items, including guns, alcohol, drugs and pharmaceuticals. The company did not explain the apparent discrepancies in its enforcement of that policy.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone confirmed in a tweet Monday that the company will not allow individuals to gift or sell pharmaceuticals on its platform, but will allow content that shares information on how to access pills. Stone acknowledged some problems with enforcing that policy across its platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram.
“We’ve discovered some instances of incorrect enforcement and are correcting these,” Stone said in the tweet.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said Friday that states should not ban mifepristone, the medication used to induce an abortion.
“States may not ban mifepristone based on disagreement with the FDA’s expert judgment about its safety and efficacy,” Garland said in a Friday statement.
But some Republicans have already tried to stop their residents from obtaining abortion pills through the mail, with some states like West Virginia and Tennessee prohibiting providers from prescribing the medication through telemedicine consultation.
Content that attempts to buy, sell, trade, gift, request or donate pharmaceuticals is not allowed. Content that discusses the affordability and accessibility of prescription medication is allowed. We've discovered some instances of incorrect enforcement and are correcting these.
With its decision on Roe v Wade, the court has signaled its illegitimacy – and thrown the American project into question
‘Can a country be properly understood as a democracy if it subjugates half of its population?’ Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
As of 24 June 2022, the US supreme court should officially be understood as an illegitimate institution – a tool of minority rule over the majority, and as part of a far-right ideological and authoritarian takeover that must be snuffed out if we want American democracy to survive.
On Friday, in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, the supreme court overruled its nearly 50-year precedent of Roe v Wade, the 1973 case that legalized abortion nationwide. It is difficult to overstate just how devastating this is for pregnant people, for women as a class and for anyone with even a passing interest in individual freedom and equality.
But it’s also devastating for those of us who care quite a bit about American democratic traditions and the strength of our institutions. Because, with this ruling, the supreme court has just signaled its illegitimacy – and it throws much of the American project into question. Which means that Democrats and others who want to see America endure as a representative democracy need to act.
Of the nine justices sitting on the current court, five – all of them in the majority opinion that overturned Roe – were appointed by presidents who initially lost the popular vote; the three appointed by Donald Trump were confirmed by senators who represent a minority of Americans. A majority of this court, in other words, were not appointed by a process that is representative of the will of the American people.
Two were appointed via starkly undemocratic means, put in place by bad actors willing to change the rules to suit their needs. Neil Gorsuch only has his seat because Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, blocked the ability of Barack Obama to nominate Merrick Garland – or anyone – to a supreme court seat, claiming that, because it was an election year, voters should get to decide.
And then Donald Trump appointed Amy Coney Barrett in a radically rushed and incomplete, incoherent process – in an election year.
And now, this court, stacked with far-right judges appointed via ignoble means, has stripped from American women the right to control our own bodies. They have summarily placed women into a novel category of person with fewer rights not just than other people, but than fertilized eggs and corpses. After all, no one else is forced to donate their organs for the survival of another – not parents to their children, not the dead to the living. It is only fertilized eggs, embryos and fetuses that are newly entitled to this right to use another’s body and organs against that other’s will; it is only women and other people who can get pregnant who are now subject to these unparalleled, radical demands.
This raises a fundamental question: can a country be properly understood as a democracy – an entity in which government derives its power from the people – if it subjugates half of its population, putting them into a category of sub-person with fewer rights, freedoms and liberties?
The global trend suggests that the answer to that is no. A clear pattern has emerged in the past few decades: as countries democratize, they tend to liberalize women’s rights, and they expand abortion and other reproductive rights. Luckily for the women of the world, this is where a great many nations are moving.
But the reverse is also true: as a smaller number of countries move toward authoritarian governance, they constrict the rights of women, LGBT people and many minority groups. We have seen this in every country that has scaled back abortion rights, reproductive rights, and women’s rights more broadly in the past several years: Russia, Hungary, Poland, Nicaragua and the United States.
The same week that the supreme court issued its decision in Dobbs, the US House of Representatives has been holding hearings to inform the public about what actually happened during the attempted coup of 6 January 2021, and to ideally hold perpetrators, traitors and seditionists to account. We are only a year and a half past that disgraceful day, when an angry mob decided that they, an authoritarian, patriarchal, white supremacist minority, should rule – that any other outcome, no matter how free and fair the election, was illegitimate.
The supreme court decision stems from that same rotted root: the idea that a patriarchal minority should have nearly unlimited authority over the majority. The conservatives on the court rightly understand that individual rights and women’s freedoms are incompatible with a system of broad male control over women and children, and a broader male monopoly on the public, political and economic spheres.
But that authoritarian vision is also incompatible with democracy.
And so Democrats now have a choice. They can give speeches and send fundraising emails. Or they can act: declare this court illegitimate. Demand its expansion. Abolish the filibuster. Treat this like the emergency it is, and make America a representative democracy.
Jill Filipovic is the author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind
Pride Glasgow was gate-crashed by a small group of counterprotestors. (PinkNews)
On Saturday (25 June) afternoon, Glasgow was decked in the colours of the rainbow for the first Pride Glasgow in three years due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
But a small group of less than a dozen counter-protesters bearing signs saying homosexuality is a “sin” as they set up camp in George Square.
“Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out,” read one sign.
The thousands of Pride-goers – many protesting against the British government’s refusal to ban trans conversion therapy – quickly circled the group. They drowned out the counter-protesters as they carried rainbow flags and kept spirits high.
Among them was Glasgow’s Metropolitan Community Church, an inclusive church founded by and for LGBTQ+ people, that stressed it is “fundamentally opposed” to what the counter-protesters stood for.
One of the groups of people who gathered to drown out the preachers' hate speech were from @MCCGlasgow – a church founded by queer people of faith which has been serving the LGBTQ+ community here in Glasgow since 2008 (2/?) pic.twitter.com/1KJ5mEs063
It didn’t take long for the religious demonstrators to get the message.
By around 3pm, the picketers took down their signs and walked away from the Pride to a chorus of cheers and whoops by Pride attendees.
This is the minute the anti-LGBTQ preachers finally gave up, packed up their signs and left #GlasgowPride, to a chorus of cheers and flag waving 🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈 (4/4) pic.twitter.com/notxTBgWZg
Scotland, however, may do things a little differently. Though riddled by delays, drafted legislation from the ruling Scottish National Party proposes that trans Scots should no longer have to receive this diagnosis before changing their legal gender.
This would mean they could more easily obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate and have their identity legally acknowledged. This move comes as part of the country’s ongoing discussions around reforming its gender recognition laws.
The Scottish government is also hoping to go ahead with its own trans-inclusive conversion therapy ban. As much as Boris Johnson’s proposals only apply to England and Wales, Scottish ministers have committed to legislating a ban that includes trans people regardless.
“We don’t fit into your boxes – we make our own,” said Glasgow’s first trans councillor, Elaine Gallagher, at Pride Glasgow.
Speaking to the crowd from atop a double-decker bus awash with rainbows, she said: “That’s why the people and the pundits and paid-for opinions all demand that trans people be eradicated. Starting with the kids that are excluded from sports, toilets, schools and life.”
“Conversion is torture,” she added, “it is child abuse. We don’t condone or practise child abuse no matter what the bigots say – it’s them who do.
“And after the trans people and the rest of the queer alphabet, who’s next? We’ve seen whose next. Women who wear their hair short or stand too tall, or don’t wear clothing a man approves of or, God forbid, want to have their own opinions or govern their own bodies.”
Rightwing justice appears to offer preview of the court’s potential future rulings after decision to remove US abortion rights
Donald Trump with Clarence Thomas as Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed to the supreme court in October 2020. Photograph: Alex Brandon/AP
Many Americans reacted to the supreme court’s decision to reverse Roe v Wade and remove federal abortion rights in the US with shock, but many also asked a terrified question: what might be next?
The conservative justice Clarence Thomas appeared to offer a preview of the court’s potential future rulings, suggesting the rightwing-controlled court may return to the issues of contraception access and marriage equality, threatening LGBTQ rights.
“In future cases, we should reconsider all of this court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell,” Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion to the ruling on Roe.
Griswold v Connecticut established a married couple’s right to use contraception without government interference in 1965. The court ruled in the 2003 case of Lawrence v Texas that states could not criminalize sodomy, and Obergefell v Hodges established the right for same-sex couples to marry in 2015.
In the decision written by Justice Samuel Alito, the conservative majority makes it clear that the decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization should not be interpreted as a threat to other major precedent cases. But the court’s three liberal justices – Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – dismissed that logic as a farce in their fiery dissenting opinion.
“Either the mass of the majority’s opinion is hypocrisy or additional constitutional rights are under threat,” the liberal justices wrote. “It is one or the other.”
Thomas’s concurring opinion confirmed what many progressive lawmakers and reproductive rights advocates have feared for years. The end of Roe marks the beginning, not the end, of judicial overreach by the court’s conservative majority, they say.
“It is important that Americans understand that this supreme court and Republicans in Congress will not stop here,” said Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “It is clear [Thomas] and the court’s majority have no respect for other precedents that have been won in recent decades.”
Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, warned that the court’s decision to overturn Roe would only intensify its “giant legitimacy crisis” with millions of Americans.
“Five Republican justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote are routinely making hyper-partisan decisions that take away the rights of Americans,” Green said.
For now, Thomas does not seem to have the support of his conservative colleagues in overturning other major cases, as they did not join his opinion. But the majority decision written by Alito could lay the foundation for discarding decades-old precedents that have become central to the American way of life, said Paul Schiff Berman, a professor at George Washington University Law School.
“The logic of Justice Alito’s opinion, as the dissent pointed out, would absolutely threaten the constitutional legitimacy of all constitutional privacy rights,” Berman said. “It goes against the institutional obligation to respect precedent. And it also goes against, as Chief Justice Roberts pointed out in his opinion, the principle that you don’t decide in a given case, more than you have to resolve in that case.”
Berman expressed concern that the Dobbs decision could weaken public trust in the supreme court, which has already been waning in recent years. According to a Gallup poll taken this month, only 25% of US adults say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the supreme court. That is the lowest reading in Gallup’s nearly 50-year history of polling public perception of the court.
“I think this opinion reflects the fact that a radical faction of the supreme court is moving in a maximalist direction, despite the fact that the American people as a whole are becoming increasingly progressive on this issue,” Berman said.
For the millions of Americans dismayed by the reversal of Roe, they have few options to change the composition of the court in the near future. Justices are appointed to lifelong terms, and the three conservative judges confirmed during Donald Trump’s presidency – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – are all under 60.
Democratic lawmakers are instead looking at legislative ways to protect Americans’ fundamental rights, and demands for action will probably only intensify now that Roe has been overturned.
The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, issued an urgent demand for Americans to support Democrats in the midterm elections this November, thus giving them an opportunity to codify the right to abortion into federal law and protect other crucial freedoms.
“Termination of pregnancy is just the opening act,” Pelosi said on Friday. “A woman’s right to choose, reproductive freedom is on the ballot in November. We cannot allow [Republicans] to take charge so that they can institute their goal, which is to criminalize reproductive freedom.”
But some progressives are looking beyond legislation to significant reform of the court itself. Immediately after the decision in Dobbs was announced, a number of progressives reiterated their calls to expand the court, which would allow Democrats to confirm more liberal justices.
“As we fight to make abortion legal at the federal level, I continue to reject the legitimacy of such an undemocratic institution,” the progressive congresswoman Ilhan Omar said on Twitter. “Expand the court.”
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‘A slap in the face to women’: Nancy Pelosi condemns overturning of Roe v Wade – video
As of now, Democrats do not have the votes in the Senate needed to expand the court. That could change after November, if the American people decide to give Democrats the chance to do so.
At the Glastonbury Music Festival in England, pop superstar Olivia Rodrigo and hip-hop icon Megan Thee Stallion slammed the Supreme Court for their decision on Roe v. Wade. Texas Paul reacts.
Scottie's Playtime 