The conservative right is on a mission to immediately pack the federal courts with as many anti-choice judges as they can.
Although President Donald Trump has faltered in fully implementing some of his biggest campaign promises, he has been very good at packing the federal courts with officials that, should they all get confirmed, would change federal law for decades. Perhaps irreversibly.
Trump has already outpaced both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama on judicial nominations, with five judges confirmed since January, including Associate Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Not surprisingly, those judges exist far outside the legal mainstream. They align far more with the extremism of Justice Clarence Thomas than with the problematically squishy jurisprudence of moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy.
The fifth and latest confirmation happened late last month, when the U.S. Senate confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit Kevin Newsom, a 44-year-old attorney from Alabama who in 2000, wrote a law review article equating the rationale of Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott v. Sandford, the infamous 1857 decision upholding slavery. Here’s the only response needed to that nonsense.
President Barack Obama had nominated federal district court judge Abdul Kallon to fill the vacancy Newsom now occupies. Like Newsom, Kallon was a former partner at the Bradley Arant law firm. Once Kallon was nominated to the Eleventh Circuit, however, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) and then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) refused to return “blue slips,” the process in the Senate that advances judicial nominations forward. Without a blue slip, the Senate Judiciary Committee is unable to take any action on the nomination. That means under the Obama administration the seat was left vacant for two years.
But back to the judge we got for that seat instead. When Newsom wasn’t busy comparing abortion to slavery, after he was hired as Alabama’s solicitor general by fellow arch-conservative and rumored Trump Supreme Court short-lister William Pryor, he advocated aggressively for Alabama’s right to execute people. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled executing juveniles unconstitutional; Newsom expressed disagreement with that decision. He would then go on to defend Alabama’s policy of refusing legal counsel to death row inmates looking to challenge their convictions—that’s how strongly he believes in the state’s right to execute people.
Among Trump’s other nominees is Steve Grasz, an attorney currently in private practice focusing on business matters. But Grasz previously served as Nebraska’s chief deputy attorney general, during which he defended a Nebraska statute prohibiting so-called partial-birth abortion at the Supreme Court in Stenberg v. Carhart.
Grasz lost Stenberg v. Carhart, and the Nebraska law was struck down. Notably, however, Justice Kennedy authored a searing dissent in Stenberg attacking “abortionist” providers and appearing to wholeheartedly buy the myth that “partial-birth abortion” is a medical procedure, rather than an anti-choice marketing term used to outlaw a provably safe method of second-trimester abortions. Republicans in U.S. Congress would ultimately pass a modified version of the law, which the Supreme Court would hold up in 2007 in Gonzales v. Carhart. In his opinion, Justice Kennedy discussed “abortion regret syndrome,” another anti-choice talking point grounded in junk science that has evolved to claims that fetuses feel pain at 20 weeks. Here, Kennedy appeared to be picking up largely on the failed rhetoric advanced by Grasz in Stenberg.
Should he be confirmed, Grasz would sit on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals where states like Arkansas, Missouri, and South Dakota have either passed or tried to pass dilation and evacuation (D and E) abortion bans. Arkansas passed such a ban, but it is currently blocked by federal court order. If one of the other states passes such a ban, and if a federal court—such as the Eighth Circuit—upholds it, conservatives may have found another pathway to attacking Roe. They are also hoping this kind of legal outcome happens while Justice Kennedy is still on the bench, as his dissent in Stenberg suggests he’s at least open to further banning specific abortion procedures.
This is, sadly, just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the threats Trump’s nominations pose to the federal courts. For example, the Senate last month confirmed former political blogger John Bush for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Bush also has a habit of comparing abortion with slavery, though during his confirmation hearing he tried to distance those statements as “personal views” rather than ones that would influence his decision making while on the bench.
With more than 100 federal court vacancies, reproductive rights advocates have a long road ahead to protect the fundamental right to reproductive autonomy. And it’s likely to only get longer.
.jpg)
Abortion - Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information 
It’s a fairly large number, 100,000, but nice and round. Easy to compute. Most of us could even divide it by 10, at a push. Apparently it is this convenient roundedness that led the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) this week to dismiss complaints about recent claims on a billboard that Northern Ireland’s abortion laws have saved “100,000” lives. In its statement, the ASA said: “We considered that 100,000 was a large, round number that readers would typically associate with estimates” – and was therefore unproblematic.
Funded by a campaign called Both Lives Matter, the billboard prompted 14 complaints, but the ASA decided that its assertion was not misleading – despite the campaign admitting that it is not possible to calculate an exact figure, although its estimate is both “credible” and “conservative”.
It is not just the advertisement that is misleading and offensive, but also the very name of the campaign behind the billboard.
Describing itself as “pro-women and pro-life”, Both Lives Matter is a recent addition to the Northern Ireland anti-choice landscape, where abortion is permitted only if a woman’s life is at risk or there is a very serious risk to her mental or physical health. Fatal foetal abnormalities and pregnancies resulting from sexual crime such as rape or incest are not included.
And yet, somehow, in all its talk of “both” lives mattering during a crisis pregnancy, the campaign fails ever to mention the pregnant woman. What is happening to that person’s life – their body, their dreams, their finances, their mental health – is, for a campaign seemingly more intent on oppressing women than liberating them, nothing more than a word association game meant to draw a provocative parallel with a real struggle for civil rights.
Playing on Black Lives Matter is not just cynical, it’s offensive. A campaign started by three black women – Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza and Opal Tometi – to highlight the gross injustice and racial dimensions of police brutality in the US, it owes much of its strength not only to the mothers of the men and women killed by police, but to women of colour writ large, who bear the brunt of America’s institutionalised racism and sexism. The concept of reproductive rights and reproductive justice, which goes far beyond the simple right to choose whether or not to continue with a pregnancy, is integral to Black Lives Matter, because it also means the right to parent your child in a safe environment without fear – something consistently denied to black families by police and institutional injustice.
Defined by the Sister Song Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities,” reproductive justice as a concept was developed by women of colour who saw many of their communities challenged not just by an absence of accessible abortion, but by poverty, racism and discrimination.
It is often poor women of colour whose access to reproductive healthcare is most affected by anti-abortion laws in states such as Texas, where the recent HB2 law increased the distance to the nearest abortion clinic by more than 100 miles in some places. This can be an insurmountable burden for women with low incomes, often women of colour, and is a pattern being repeated across America.
Concepts such as reproductive justice and campaigns such as Black Lives Matter are a response to oppression and domination. There are parallels to be drawn with abortion access in Northern Ireland, but it is not the one that anti-abortion protesters attempt to make. Rather, it is an understanding of how human rights might be used to liberate communities, rather than excuse and justify their oppression.
The hijacking of such a powerful concept by the Both Lives Matter campaign is a cynical attempt to spin the language of human rights into froth to hide their true agenda – the subjugation of women. An appropriation of intersecting oppressions, Both Lives Matter neither cares about women’s lives, nor shares an affinity with Black Lives Matter – beyond using a powerful rallying cry for human rights as a cover to maintain the marginalisation of women in Northern Ireland.
It is perhaps beyond the remit of the ASA to name this for what it is. But it is not beyond ours.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/04/anti-abortion-hijack-black-lives-matter-both-lives-matter-advert-northern-ireland?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=GU+Today+USA+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=238146&subid=15007573&CMP=GT_US_collection