Only men have rights
Meanwhile Trump is getting his jollies by forcing women to have babies they don’t want to have.
Jane Doe is a 17-year-old undocumented immigrant detained in Texas who is 15 weeks pregnant and is seeking an abortion. The Constitution grants her that right, but the Trump administration is determined to subvert it as part of its war on women’s reproductive rights.
Late Friday, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled that the teenager must be allowed to have an abortion, but it gave the federal government until Oct. 31 to find her a sponsor so that the government itself does not have to arrange for the procedure.
She’s in Texas. Texas has passed a law outlawing abortion after 20 weeks.
The ruling came hours after the court heard the case, in which the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement said that if it released her to see a doctor it would “facilitate” an abortion, an action it said would contradict its interest in “promoting child birth and fetal life.”
What interest? Since when does the Office of Refugee Resettlement have an interest in promoting child birth? Let alone “fetal life”?
It doesn’t seem to matter to the government that adult women in detention by law have access to abortion, or that this teenager has followed Texas law and obtained a waiver from a state court allowing her to get an abortion without her parents’ consent. And while the Office of Refugee Resettlement refuses to let employees at the shelter where she is being held take her to get an abortion, it ordered them to bring her to a “crisis pregnancy center” with the goal of talking her out of the procedure.
Why? Because Trump put an anti-abortion maniac in charge of the ORR, and the maniac is using his new job to force women to bear children they don’t want to bear.
To all who wondered why religious conservatives struck a Faustian bargain with a morally compromised candidate, this case provides one answer. Anti-abortion advocates, from Vice President Mike Pence on down, find President Trump useful for converting their beliefs into policy.
At the health department, Teresa Manning, a former analyst with the conservative Family Research Council who opposes abortion and most forms of contraception, is deputy assistant secretary for population affairs, in charge of the Title X program. The program provides family planning funding for four million poor or uninsured Americans. Charmaine Yoest, former president for Americans United for Life, is the department’s assistant secretary of public affairs. Matthew Bowman, who worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian anti-abortion legal advocacy group, is now a lawyer at the department, and a reported architect of new Obamacare rules making it easier for some companies to claim religious or moral exemptions to requirements that they cover the cost of birth control. Katy Talento, an abortion foe who wrote an article beginning, “Is chemical birth control causing miscarriages of already-conceived children? What about breaking your uterus for good?” is now a health policy adviser on the White House Domestic Policy Council.
Trump doesn’t give a rat’s ass about The Holy Fetus but he does love making life hell for women.
Trump doesn’t have his own principles in any matter except self aggrandizement and enrichment, and so he will never see anything wrong in importing someone else’s principles so long as he earns praise for it. Which means he is governed by the worst of the conservatives, giving the worst of them everything they want. This is why almost all R’s stick to him no matter how brazenly repugnant he is.
So here we are, a man previously ambivalent or fairly neutral on abortion now giving the anti-abortion crowd what they want because it plays nice with the press he watches, and he doesn’t give a shit about anything outside himself so fuck it, why not.
And on top of that, they can take a moral stance of “of course he’s awful, but what can we do? The public wanted him”. And blame him for all the nasty stuff they’ve wanted to do forever.
He’s become a lightning rod for them, attracting all the press and holding the attention of everyone in the country while they loot the country, strip the social safety net, gut environmental protections, and just generally act in a selfish, greedy, and nasty manner. And come off looking well by contrast, because they at least know how to have a veneer of civilization. Look at Ted Cruz, for instance. During the presidential primaries, he looked almost like an ordinary person next to Trump, and he is so far out there in right-wing land, he scared me more than most. He’s a great foil for them, because the Paul Ryans and Ted Cruzes of the world can finally move the middle to their spot and make people think they are reasonable. That is why Democratic politicians look so “liberal” to so many people, because the middle has moved so far right that Richard Nixon looks like a bleeding heart liberal in comparison.