A Supreme Court Skirmish Won in the Struggle for Women's Healthcare

You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Perhaps you’ve heard or seen media claiming the Supreme Court ruled against a lawsuit intended to limit access to mifepristone. Some reporting even refers to the drug as an abortion pill.

Put a mental bookmark by the name of where this reporting pops up, because it should serve as a reminder that the source is either extremely lazy or deliberately manipulating the truth.

The Supreme Court did not pass judgment on access to mifepristone. 

They did not rule on the legality of the drug. 

It was a decision based on a technical error by the plaintiffs, a group of anti-abortion doctors who haven’t actually prescribed the drug, who the court said had no standing to claim that its availability somehow injured them.

This technicality, in a world where facts are important, means the case never should have made it into a courtroom. Lower courts, especially in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, have been emboldened by other Supreme Court decisions rolling back previous rulings, like the case overturning Roe v Wade.

The ruling dismissed a lawsuit seeking to block rules the Food and Drug Administration implemented in 2016 and 2021 that made it easier to access the drug, including by mail.

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In Texas, where this case began, one Trump-appointed federal judge in one district is the starting place for far right legal groups looking to change the world.

From The Nation:

• In the Northern District of Texas, if a case is filed in Amarillo, litigants are sure to draw Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. Kacsmaryk is a Trump-appointed Christian fundamentalist who acts like an inquisitor charged with bringing about the dominion of white men over everybody else, as he thinks God intended. He’s virulently anti-LGBTQ, despises reproductive rights, and is willing to embrace literally any crackpot legal theory that brings him his desired outcomes. 

This particular judge’s willingness to grant nationwide injunctions on cases lacking in merit led to an effort aimed at impeding “judge shopping.” Kacsmaryk’s rulings (and the Fifth Circuit’s affirmations) say the quiet part out loud about the aims of fringe law groups. Institutionalists are averse to such maneuverings as they undermine respect for the process.

In other words, the Supreme Court majority prefers their turds to be polished.

FYI- Medication abortion represented 63% of all U.S. abortions in 2023, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute, and it’s believed that the rise in abortions since Roe was overturned is largely due to the availability of abortion pills by mail.

It won’t take long for anti-abortion zealots to find a quack with standing to file a similar lawsuit, but this process wouldn’t get to the Supreme Court until after the general election.

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Also, the legal strategy for limiting access to medications that is considered more legally defensible involves reviving a law not used in over a century as recommended in the notorious Project 2025.

From the New Republic:

• A coalition of conservative groups, led by the Heritage Foundation, has prepared a nearly 1,000-page “playbook” for a potential Republican president in 2025, including plans to restrict abortion. This would include directing the FDA to rescind its approval of mifepristone and stopping “promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs”—a reference to the Comstock Act.

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Although the presumptive Republican nominee for President is encouraging candidates to play it cool and sound reasonable on women’s reproductive health, the Dobbs decision has unleashed an extremist movement determined to put women back in their place. (Which for now is 1918, prior to women being allowed to vote)

This week the Southern Baptist Convention endorsed a statement standing in opposition to in vitro fertilization, and, while there is broad public support for the process, an emerging consensus on the right is that acts leading to reproduction should be limited to a man and a woman within the institution of marriage.

The necessity of a patriarchal structure in society as a foundation for authoritarian rule is the long game, already being played out in social media campaigns encouraging women to become stay-at-home moms. While having only one income in a household is a non-starter for most families, selling the concept of women being submissive as a virtue will have to do for now.

One other little fact to note is that this year, for the first time in our country’s voting history, voting age women will outnumber men, 101-96. Unlike the racial minorities that reactionaries fear replacing them, you can’t just deport women.

The steps needed to get society to the place where radical anti-abortionists and their allies are aiming include discouraging birth control, banning in vitro fertilization, dialing back free public education, and making heterosexual orthodoxy the law of the land. 

In states where public support for women’s healthcare has spawned ballot initiatives, reactionaries are utilizing a spectrum of tactics to short circuit those efforts. 

In Arkansas, there is a robust effort to harass petition gatherers. In Ohio, Kansas, and Michigan, where abortion rights advocates won major victories in ballot measures over the past two years, anti-abortion groups and lawmakers are now turning their focus to blocking implementation of the initiatives by proposing bills and threatening lawsuits that would restrict the reproductive rights those elections protected. 

Despite an all-out effort to get people to withdraw their signature from an initiative petition in Missouri, organizers turned in more than double the number needed to place it on the ballot. 

In Florida, where activists went to the State Supreme Court to gain ballot access, polling shows the majority support the measure legalizing abortion, but not enough to pass the required 60% threshold.

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While Democrats generally see access to women’s healthcare as a mobilizing issue, I believe support needs to go beyond the ballot box, if for no other reason to maintain public awareness of the threats on the horizon.

There will be gatherings to protest the second anniversary of the Dobbs decision in San Diego later this month. It’s sad that organizers felt the need to limit publicizing the location. (If you know somebody in Indivisible, I’ll bet they can clue you in) 

Here in sunny Southern California where public opinion stands firmly against anti-abortion extremists, their past public appearances stand as an example of just how “pro-life” they aren’t.

One final thought. When pollsters and politicians raise the question of under what circumstances and how far into a pregnancy abortion should be allowed, they’re leading the public into the right wing’s framing.  By phrasing questions this way, pollsters are implicitly accepting the idea that the government has a role in making decisions about women’s bodies. They don’t. And you don’t have to play along.

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Thursday’s Noteworthy News Links

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A Toxic Ticket via Oliver Darcy at Reliable Sources

• Ticketmaster is linking arms with right-wing extremists, boosting their ability to reach mainstream audiences and profiting off their dangerous and hateful rhetoric ahead of the November election.

• The ticketing sales giant is the distributor of the forthcoming live speaking tour from Tucker Carlson, who announced plans this week to criss-cross the country with a 15-city arena tour, inviting fellow conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor Greene to join him along the way.

• On the Ticketmaster website, Carlson is referred to as "the leading voice in American politics" and "an alternative to corporate media dedicated to telling the truth about the things that matter — clearly and without fear." While it is hard to imagine that Ticketmaster conjured this glowing description of Carlson itself, it is remarkable the company would approve it and promote it on its site.

(Tucker Carlson’s website says the tour will be “Fun as hell.” I guess that’s one way to describe it.)-dp

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Column: The fast-food industry claims the California minimum wage law is costing jobs. Its numbers are fake by Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times.

• Figures for California fast-food restaurants from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis show that on a seasonally adjusted basis employment actually rose in the September-to-January period by 6,335 jobs, from 736,160 to 742,495.

• That’s not to say that there haven’t been employment cutbacks this year by some fast-food chains and other companies in hospitality industries. From the vantage point of laid-off workers, the manipulation of statistics by their employers doesn’t ease the pain of losing their jobs.

(See also: “Everybody Knows” and the Restaurant Business by this Doug Porter guy at The Jumping Off Place

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Battle rages over Prop. 47, crime bill package by Steve Puterski at North County Pipeline

• A vicious bipartisan battle is brewing in the state legislature over reforms regarding Proposition 47, the controversial measure passed in 2016 reducing criminal sentences and reclassifying certain crimes as misdemeanors.

• The battle is in contrast to a bipartisan effort to support a proposed ballot measure known as the Homeless, Drug Addiction and Theft Reduction Act, which would reform Prop. 47. Several months ago, a bipartisan coalition of elected officials, district attorneys and others launched a signature drive with one press conference in March in San Marcos featuring San Diego County District Attorney Summer Stephan and San Marcos Mayor Rebecca Jones and others.

• But the battle in the legislature has ramped up in recent weeks as Democrats and Republicans have put forward a multiple-bill package, known as the Safer California Bill Package. It addresses retail crimes, theft and drug crimes, especially fentanyl.