The Abortion Map Today by Linda Greenhouse

[elleng]

'IN his smart opinion piece last week, “A Mason-Dixon Line of Progress,” Timothy Egan noted the “retreat to bigotry” sweeping across the old South as politicians clinging to the past (under the banner of religious freedom) line up to authorize discrimination against gay people. The column prompted me to think about whether the battlegrounds in the never-ending abortion wars display a similar geographic concentration.

The answer is that to a startling degree they don’t. The battleground is much bigger. With the exception of the West Coast and most (but not all) of the Northeast, recently enacted abortion restrictions can be found almost everywhere.

Since 2011, 10 states, from the Canadian border to the Great Lakes to the Southwest, have each imposed 10 or more new barriers to access to legal abortion. An additional 21 states have enacted between one and 10 restrictions — the lower number in some cases simply reflecting a state’s creativity in having already adopted a long menu of anti-abortion measures.

It comes as no great surprise that each of the top 10 states (Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas — only four of which were part of the Confederacy) is headed by a Republican governor. Politics — political culture — outweighs geography.

The Supreme Court is now considering a Texas law that imposes unnecessary and unattainable requirements on abortion clinics in the name of protecting women’s health. The requirements that clinic doctors obtain admitting privileges at nearby hospitals and that the clinics retrofit themselves as small hospitals threatens to force most of the state’s remaining clinics to close. The eight justices heard the case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, last month. It’s unclear both whether they will be able to decide it, and if they can, how a decision will affect other kinds of anti-abortion laws.

Some of what’s been happening in states scattered around the country come under the “you couldn’t make this up” category. There’s the Wisconsin law, struck down by a federal appeals court, that gave doctors a July weekend to put their hospital admitting privileges into compliance.'>>>

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/14/opinion/the-abortion-map-today.html?

[Baobab]

1. A former colleague of mine was a self-styled adoptee rights activist and she told me this incredble

thing. Evidently, MONEY from adoption facilitation is what is driving the anti-choice movement.

In big chunks of America, fundamentalist churches main source of funding is so called "adoption facilitation" and its a huge unregulated export business. Evidently, no other country in the world with a Caucasian population - besides Russia where babies are now I think prevented from being adopted to the US, treats expectant mothers as badly as we do now, in terms of their being able to keep their babies. (All others in particular, have free health care, but we stick young mothers and/or families with huge bills if they do not have insurance or have inadequate insurance)

And that is intentional. because the fundamentalists churches now make something like $100k from each baby they take and sell. (In that case they pay the hospital bill)

Because of some law, from decades ago, they have some kind of monopoly on this.

[elleng]

2. Glad to say I hadn't heard this.