Tag format: How Federal Laws Protect Access to Abortion and Women’s Health under Severe Restrictions?
A new commonly asked questions (FAQ) sheet, published by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), explains how abortion access and women’s health can be protected under a pending court case over two rigid abortion restrictions across Louisiana.
The case, which is set for final arguments on March 4, could allow the state to enforce an undue burden on women’s health and raise barriers to access for low-income women and women of color who are already fired square into the “crosshairs” of political anti-abortion violence as a result.
Under federal law, doctors in Louisiana cannot provide abortions before the patient is subject to mandatory, medically unnecessary delays, according to the ACLU.
But the state has been going around this for a while now, and has been suspending medical licenses and imposing criminal penalties on doctors who provide abortions, in clear violation of federal anti-abortion dispute settlements, which force doctors to first seek an injunction before facing penalty. In practice, this freezes doctor’s licenses and leaves them at risk of disciplinary action–and professional ruin–before they can even ask a court for protection from legal reprisal.
As noted by the ACLU, while courts have stopped similar restrictions elsewhere, federal judges in Louisiana have upheld those measures, and have continued to do so, leaving a gaping deficit in both reproductive rights and women’s health for the state’s already disenfranchised low-income women and women of color.
In addition to obstacles and undue burdens specifically stacked against low-income women, who do not have the financial luxury to wait out these penalties in court, the ACLU’s report shows that the state’s deceptive anti-abortion restrictions in violation of federal law are particularly hostile to women of color in specific areas, and dangerous in a number of other ways.
In addition to economic barriers enforced by Louisiana’s state lawmakers, one federal court judge has already denied protection and dismissed a case in New Orleans, where a patient was at risk of losing her license if she had wanted to provide an abortion to that patient.
As reported by Rewire, a three-judge panel of the court, in a December 2015 ruling, re-affirmed that “political condemnation, usual or rare, is an insufficient basis to overturn a legislative judgment,” and failed to address the ways in which the undue burden of these restrictions harmed low-income women and women of color specifically.
Ultimately, the case hinges on the standard that is supposed to inform federal court decisions on whether restrictions meant to impede a woman’s access to abortion actually infringe upon her rights by establishing an undue burden.
In the Supreme Court’s 2014 Hellerstedt ruling, the Court introduced a standard in which any laws that create an “undue burden” on women’s health by imposing an “undue burden” are in violation of established law.
Louisiana, several lower courts have put it, is in clear violation of this standard, and is in danger of further criminalizing the state’s unfortunate women of color, who already suffer from dangerous consequences as a result of these policies, policies that federal law is supposed to prevent.
“Every woman, low-income women and women of color in particular, is harassed, intimidated and made to feel like a criminal,” noted Nancy Northup, President and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, in a recent joint statement.
“When women face barriers to the care they need, they are forced to make choices based not on their own best judgment, but on the dangerous restrictions that are rooted in unyielding ideology,” she added.
“Politicians have the audacity to claim that aggressive intervention in women’s health care is about ‘quality care,’ but their actions speak otherwise,” Northup continued. “Senseless restrictions have dangerous and life-threatening consequences. They have supported recent legislative efforts to ‘repeal and replace’ the Affordable Care Act, proposing to cut funding for family planning, reduce access to affordable care, especially for low-income women, and end protections for millions of women.”
These barriers subjected to not only economic barriers, but also exposed to what the ACLU has called dangerous “ideologically driven state policies,” which is perfectly in line with how these restrictions function.
These restrictions don’t simply harm low-income women of color, they actually kill them, as the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia so graciously illustrated for all of us.
These sharp disparities, while deeply troubling, are not unique to Louisiana in the least. In a piece published by The Guardian at the start of this commonly anti-female, anti-low-income, anti-women of color administration, ublogger and climate scientist Michael E. Mann highlighted the rolling back of women’s health across the United States over the last decade, revealing a fight that feels never-ending.
“America has the worst record in the developed world when it comes to maternal mortality,” Mann noted. “We should all be outraged that women are dying needlessly, and intensifying efforts to solve this intensifying public health crisis.”
Establishing real-life baseline benchmarks is imperative in order to understand both where Louisiana, for instance, is specifically scoring lower than other states and where those states are scoring lower or higher in injuries or deaths as a result of state-imposed restrictions similar to those currently, and further, under legal review.
The Women’s Health Center of West Virginia has a baseline all its own, and losses mount, time and again, as a result of these state-dictated conditions, allowing precious access to women’s health and reproductive rights generally.
It’s fitting then that Louisiana’s ongoing fight is proceeding under a legal framework that protects Louisiana, itself, from responding in a civil manner, and is further exacerbated by President Trump actively dismantling our nuclear regulatory commission, allowing severe restrictions on all women’s reproductive rights to be fast-tracked by way of politicized decision-making.
What we are left with then is an undue burden that still manages to flicker and undulate, dependent as it is on reactionary agendas and ideological fervor.
Covering more than 90 million women living in 189 countries, the Lancet study has Europe in the lead, with Denmark in fourth place after Sweden, the Netherlands, and France. The U.S. doesn’t make the top ten, cautiously edging out countries with considerably less financial resources, like Poland, Ukraine, and Romania.
Only entirely unsurprisingly, what’s a catastrophic situation for poor countries is all too often spun as an unwelcome inconvenience and we carelessly get away with it.
Look no further for your calendar’s lowest rung, and what should look like blinking flashing lights continue to blink, tremble, and quiver in the darkness, go unheeded. Based on the passage above, Summarize the federal laws that protect access to abortion and women’s health under severe restrictions according to the ACLU.
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