Without explanation
Women have no rights that the manly men must accept.
TikTok has briefly suspended the account of Hey Jane, a prominent telemedicine abortion service, four times without explanation. Instagram has suspended Mayday Health, a nonprofit that provides information about abortion pill access, without explanation as well. And the search engine Bing has erroneously flagged the website for Aid Access, a major seller of abortion pills online, as unsafe.
The [abortion] groups and women’s health advocates say these examples, all from recent months, show why they are increasingly confused and frustrated by how major technology platforms moderate posts about abortion services.
Is that the job of technology platforms? No it is not.
They say the companies’ policies on abortion-related content, including advertisements, have long been opaque. But they say the platforms seem to have been more aggressive about removing or suppressing posts that share information about how to obtain safe and legal procedures since the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. And when the platforms do restrict the accounts, the companies can be difficult to contact to learn why.
When in doubt, bully women. Rights are for men; forced pregnancy is for women.
How on Earth can rights under the the constitution be removed by the court without the agreement of the government and the country?
Presumably, they believe that at whatever stage of its development, a foetus has rights, and the woman carrying it, none in this regard. So quite possibly, the next Orwellian stage is for women to present their period gear, like tampons and sanitary pads, at some clinic attached to their local cop station, and to show cause why this should NOT be considered as artificially induced, and therefore illegal, with an instruction, to step inside the nearest cell and be banged up until they have it sorted to their satisfaction.
It’s THAT dopey.
Omar: I imagine the Proud Boys and Three Percenters and other Christofascist groups will provide a supply of ready recruits for the forthcoming American version of the Romanian Securitate, which I understand did just that. Especially given the rights panic over not enough white babies..
Tigger @ 1
I assume you mean a right to an abortion?
That’s never been a right under the constitution, and Democrats have consistently leaned on legal precedent rather than pushing to make it constitutional.
Omar @ 2 – Romania was way ahead of you.
OB: Romania used to be called Transylvania, ruled a while ago by one Count Dracula, who had, shall we say, an abnormal interest in blood. So it’s all starting to make sense…
Actually, starskeptic @#4, I was reacting to the part of the quote which claimed that the supreme court ended the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. If it never was a constitutional right, but one based on legal precedent, that would make more sense; but, then, why did the writer make the claim that it was a constitutional right?
My understanding is that the Roe v Wade ruling itself said that women have a constitutional right to abortion, in part based on the Fourteenth Amendment. The Wikipedia article on the decision also claims the Dobbs decision ended “the Constitutional right to abortion”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade?wprov=sfla1
tigger, the Supreme Court said that women have a right to abortion due to a constitutional right to privacy. The right to privacy is not, per se, stated in the constitution. That was an interpretation of the court. The conservatives have long claimed there is no such right. The Fourteenth Amendment, mentioned by Sackbut, was used to apply the law not only to having a federal right, but also a state right, which means that the states are not allowed to pass laws restricting abortion.
It has been standard on the court to follow precedent set in previous cases, but not always, which can be good, such as when the precedent is something like the Dred Scott case, which stated northerners had to return fugitive slaves to their masters in the south. Actually, it just said the law requring that was constitutional, but it had the same effect.
This court, which calls itself conservative, is overturning precedents when they want to, based on their political ideology. This applies to cases involving civil rights, religion, LGB, and women, from what I can tell. It will almost certainly manifest also in cases involving things like safety or environmental regulations.
Sorry for the long dissertation, but it does seem like it can confuse a lot of people. I think it’s meant that way.
Expanding a bit on iknklast’s dissertation, the right to privacy in the US was first established in Griswold v. Connecticut, in which the court ruled that the government couldn’t prohibit married couples from using contraceptives. Later that was applied to abortion. But as iknklast notes, the right to privacy isn’t explicit in the Constitution; the court found it in the “penumbras”. That seems like a pretty weak thread on which to hang what ought to be an unlimited right such as abortion (and contraception).
My understanding is that Alito and Thomas at the least (no surprise) have said that the reasoning in Dobbs should also be applied to precedents that established the right to contraception, mixed race marriage, gay marriage etc. That despite the Courts decision in Dobbs explicitly saying it should not.
It highlights both exactly why you should not rely on precedent alone to ensure rights; and also just how tenuous, self serving, and unfounded the Dobbs decision actually is.
Worth noting that RBG felt that the outcome of Roe was correct, but the reasoning used to get there was wrong.
Trigger@7
Excellent question.
Iknklast@9 pretty much covered it; as long as a ‘right’ is recognized by interpretation and legal precedent, it is vulnerable to being brushed aside. The Democrats have faced periodic pushes to codify those by amendment but, with the opposition always promising to behave, why do the hard work?
That’s why several states have faced votes on changing their respective constitutions to include a right to abortion.