This is all happening as Texans can’t afford to lose more access to medical care. In 2022, 15 percent of the state’s 254 counties had no doctor, according to data from the state health department, and about two-thirds had no OB-GYN. Texas has one of the most significant physician shortages in the country, with a shortfall that is expected to increase by more than 50 percent over the next decade, according to the state’s projections. The shortage of registered nurses, around 30,000, is expected to nearly double over the same period. Already, Texans in large swaths of the state must drive hours for medical care, including to give birth. According to recent research from the nonprofit March of Dimes, it is among the worst states for maternity care access, which has decreased in a dozen Texas counties in the past two years, mostly due to a loss of obstetrics providers.
This is happening despite Gubner Abbott’s full knowledge that Texas is short on docs and HCWs (from 2020):
Houston also has the world’s largest medical campus, if I remember correctly. Something like 15 different hospitals on one campus, across the street from Rice University. Which means there must be virtually no one else in the rest of the state, to have those dismal stats in total.
On top of going after online speakers who create and post content, the bill also targets internet service providers (ISPs)—companies like AT&T and Spectrum that provide access to the internet. HB 2690 would require ISPs to “make every reasonable and technologically feasible effort to block Internet access to information or material intended to assist or facilitate efforts to obtain an elective abortion or an abortion-inducing drug.”
A private Texas Internet should work as well as the power grid.
After a law professor filed an amicus brief that helped steer an ESG case back out of his court, it turns out that Judge Kacsmaryk is petty and thin-skinned too.
The professor responded with an excellent dunking.
My Governor did this today. Even if the republicans get power again, between our constitutional amendment and repealing these laws, they will be very hard pressed to make abortion anything but a legal right in Michigan.
This is good. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of repealing bills gutted by courts. It is so important and seriously not that hard most of the time! For most zombie laws, a simple clean-up bill every session will do it. If a SC finds a law unconstitutional, it needs to be repealed post haste.
Now, like @tcg550 said, that law won’t suddenly come back to life if the GOP ruins the SC. It also won’t be around to confuse people. An unconstitutional law should not be permitted to stay in the legal code.
On the heels of Kacsmaryk’s decision, a federal judge in Washington state issued a decision in a separate case involving mifepristone that preliminarily blocked the Biden administration from altering the status quo as it relates to the availability of the drug. The two competing orders sets up a high-stakes showdown likely to land before the Supreme Court.
So what happened to the republicans wanting states to decide the abortion issue? Now they have federal judges making the decision for the nation, so much for state rights.
Here in Michigan our Attorney General, Dana Nessel, is not happy.
“The clear shame and cowardice of this lone Texan judge, to issue his ruling well into the evening of Good Friday, speaks volumes about the integrity he assigned his judgment,” Nessel said. “This ruling, while an obvious judicial embarrassment, was cruelly timed for a moment when the government and good faith public servants would be at a disadvantage to respond in defense of the constitutional rights of all American women. “The way the courts are supposed to work, in the architecture of our judiciary, seismic, tumultuous change such as this, affecting the people across the entire nation, is not meant to fall to the judgment of one singular arbiter. The Supreme Court, where matters concerning decades of precedent ought be decided is notably nine jurists. These types of decisions were never meant to be made the way this ruling came from Northern Texas tonight.”
“Michigan will remain a safe haven for women in our region whose home state access to reproductive health care has been curbed by this ruling,” she said.
…Only the unborn are spared the right’s cruelty. Conservatives claim personhood for the fetus, who cannot disobey and requires nothing but a womb. The fetus is more valuable than the child because the fetus is a means to an end: the subjugation of women. Once born, a child’s value depreciates. The parental right to “train” the child takes precedence over the child’s basic rights. There are ways to circumvent a child’s established right to an education, as conservatives know. Homeschooling laws are so lax in the U.S. that thousands of children have essentially disappeared into an academic void. Even if a child goes to public school, chronic underfunding deprives many children, especially in poor areas, of a sound education. In much of the country, trans youth aren’t treated like people with medical needs but political targets. This is ownership, and the U.S. rarely interferes. There is one exception to the right’s belief in absolute parental rule: trans-affirming parents. A defiant parent is a threat to the right. They’ve stepped out of place and must be subdued.
And also depriving people for whom mifepristone is an important treatment for other disorders of their medicine. How nuts would the right wing have gone if hydroxychloroquine and ivermectine had been completely pulled from the market because they were being used off-label for COVID? And that’s still not comparable because this ruling affects states where abortion is legal, too.
