Friday, June 24, 2022
This day in Herstory: On June 24, 2010, Julia Eileen Gillard AC assumed office as the first female Prime Minister of Australia. Gillard (born September 29, 1961) is an Australian former politician who served as the 27th prime minister of Australia from 2010 to 2013. She held office as leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). She is the first and only female prime minister in Australian history. (more)
US - Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, ending right to abortion upheld for decades
From NPR (USA)
By NINA TOTENBERG and SARAH MCCAMMON
June 24, 2022
In a historic and far reaching decision, the U.S. Supreme Court officially reversed Roe v. Wade on Friday, declaring that the constitutional right to abortion upheld for nearly a half century, no longer exists.
Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that the 1973 Roe ruling and repeated subsequent high court decisions reaffirming Roe "must be overruled" because they were "egregiously wrong," the arguments "exceptionally weak" and so "damaging" that they amounted to "an abuse of judicial authority."
The decision, most of which was leaked in early May, means that abortion rights will be rolled back in nearly half of the states immediately, with more restrictions likely to follow. For all practical purposes, abortion will not be available in large swaths of the country. The decision may well mean too that the court itself, as well as the abortion question, will become a focal point in the upcoming fall elections and in the fall and thereafter. ... read full article
US - We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse
We are entering an era not just of unsafe abortions but of the widespread criminalization of pregnancy.
From The New Yorker (USA)
By Jia Tolentino
June 24, 2022
In the weeks since a draft of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—a case about a Mississippi law that bans abortion after fifteen weeks, with some health-related exceptions but none for rape or incest—was leaked, a slogan has been revived: “We won’t go back.” It has been chanted at marches, defiantly but also somewhat awkwardly, given that this is plainly an era of repression and regression, in which abortion rights are not the only rights disappearing. Now that the Supreme Court has issued its final decision, overturning Roe v. Wade and removing the constitutional right to abortion, insuring that abortion will become illegal or highly restricted in twenty states, the slogan sounds almost divorced from reality—an indication, perhaps, of how difficult it has become to comprehend the power and the right-wing extremism of the current Supreme Court.
Support for abortion has never been higher, with more than two-thirds of Americans in favor of retaining Roe, and fifty-seven per cent affirming a woman’s right to abortion for any reason. Even so, there are Republican officials who have made it clear that they will attempt to pass a federal ban on abortion if and when they control both chambers of Congress and the Presidency. ... read full article
US - It’s Worse Than You Think
That doesn’t mean we get hopeless
From All in Her Head by Jessica Valenti (USA)
By Jessica Valenti
June 24, 2022
Last month I wrote that America post-Roe would not be as bad as we thought, but a thousand times worse. We already know this decision will quite literally kill people, just as we know the most vulnerable among us will be targeted, arrested, and jailed. Feminists have been laying out this reality for decades.
But there’s a difference between saying and writing these things, and living through them. So let’s be clear what a country without Roe really looks like on a tangible, real-life level.
Getting care for a miscarriage could set off an investigation into how, exactly, that pregnancy ended. As Jia Tolentino pointed out in the New Yorker today, “abortion and miscarriage currently occur more than a million times each year in America, and the two events are often clinically indistinguishable.” That means while you’re in a hospital room, in the midst of losing a pregnancy, you could be questioned by a police officer or reported to the authorities by a suspicious nurse or doctor. ... read full article
US - Why It Matters
Overturning Roe is about abortion access. But it's also about the status of women.
From Jill Filipovic (USA)
By Jill Filipovic
June 24, 2022
The bastards actually did it: The Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the era of legal abortion in the United States, and returning women as a whole to the status of second-class citizens — people who have ostensibly equal rights right up until one of our eggs is fertilized, at which point we have fewer rights than a corpse.
I am having a hard time writing this newsletter, because I am so absolutely fucking incandescent with rage. There are not enough goddamned italicized adjectives to emphasize how devastated / manic / scorchingly furious I am.
Maybe you are feeling the same way. I hope you are. I hope you are ready to burn it all down. ... read full article
US - Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas says gay rights, contraception rulings should be reconsidered after Roe is overturned
From CNBC (USA)
By Dan Mangan
June 24, 2022
KEY POINTS
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said landmark high court rulings that established gay rights and contraception rights should be reconsidered now that the federal right to abortion has been revoked.
Thomas wrote that those rulings “were demonstrably erroneous decisions.”
The cases he cited are Griswold vs. Connecticut, in which the Supreme Court said married couples have the right to obtain contraceptives; Lawerence v. Texas, which established the right to engage in private sexual acts; and Obergefell v. Hodges, which said there is a right to same-sex marriage.
The Supreme Court tossed out Roe v. Wade, which established abortion as a constitutional right.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on Friday said landmark high court rulings that established gay rights and contraception rights should be reconsidered now that the federal right to abortion has been revoked.
Thomas wrote that those rulings “were demonstrably erroneous decisions.”
The cases he mentioned are Griswold vs. Connecticut, the 1965 ruling in which the Supreme Court said married couples have the right to obtain contraceptives; Lawrence v. Texas, which in 2003 established the right to engage in private sexual acts; and the 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which said there is a right to same-sex marriage. ... read full article
US - The Heritage Foundation’s Paper On Puberty Blockers And Hormones Is Quite Bad
So naturally it went viral in conservative circles
From Singal-Minded (USA)
By Jesse Singal
June 24, 2022
Recently the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, published a report by Jay P. Greene about puberty blockers and hormones for trans youth. Greene claimed to have found, as he put it on Twitter, that “easing access to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones has actually increased youth suicide rates, contrary to the claims of the Biden admin, advocates, and flawed prior research.”
That’s an extremely strong causal claim for a social scientist to make. A scary one. Unsurprisingly, it’s being spread far and wide by right-wing commentators eager to score points in the culture war — it’s very unfortunate that that’s what it is right now — about youth gender medicine. Some big conservative outlets picked up the study, and they tended to echo that same causal language ... read full article
US - Drag Queen Charged With 25 Counts of Felony Child Sexual Abuse Material Possession
From REDUXX (USA)
By Reduxx Team
June 24, 2022
A Drag Queen who performed in front of children has been charged with 25 counts of child sexual abuse media possession after a lengthy investigation by law enforcement officials connected him to a disturbing Dropbox account.
Brice Patric Ryschon Williams is currently being held at Franklin County Jail in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania on a $100,000 bail he was unable to post. He has been charged with 25 counts of felony Class 2 child pornography, and 18 counts of criminal use of a communications facility. ... read full article
US - How do transgender inmates get placed in California’s prison system?
From KTLA (USA)
By Nexstar Media Wire, Jason Kotowski
June 24, 2022
When Hannah Tubbs was transported to Kern County to face charges including murder, jail staff had a number of factors to take into consideration when deciding where to place her.
Tubbs is a transgender woman. There is a list of criteria jail personnel review before housing any inmate, but extra steps are taken when placing transgender or intersex inmates, KTLA sister station KGET reports.
Ultimately, Tubbs, convicted of molesting a 10-year-old girl in Los Angeles County in a case that received heavy media coverage, was placed in administrative segregation, meaning she has a cell to herself and is kept separate from other inmates. ... read full article
US - Trans Activists Target Idaho Students Through School Clubs
From Idaho Freedom Foundation (USA)
By Anna Miller and Kaitlyn Shepherd
June 24, 2022
Lakes Middle School in Coeur d’Alene invited children as young as 12 years old to attend a Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) club meeting wherein students were taught about LGBT-related issues without parental knowledge or consent.
Parents and public officials may be tempted to think this is an isolated incident. However, there are at least 28 GSAs in middle and high schools across Idaho that are working to further the sexualization of children. GSAs are influential in public schools across the country. Activist administrators and teachers running GSA clubs recruit children beginning in elementary school and tell them to lie to their parents.
... read full article
UK - My body, my choice: from now on, abortion rights must be fought for from first principles
A new push to criminalise sex-selective abortion shows us that the untidy truce that passes for abortion legislation in the UK is no longer holding. We must remake the law to recognise that women are people with rights over their own bodies.
From The New Statesman (UK)
By Sarah Ditum
June 24, 2022
If you want to know how flimsy we hold women’s humanity, start by looking at the laws governing pregnancy. The 1967 Abortion Act is often claimed to have legalised “abortion on demand”. It didn’t. In practice, the 1967 Act modifies the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act sufficiently to allow most women who seek a termination to obtain one within the law under most circumstances – but to do so, a woman must convince two doctors that continuing the pregnancy would cause “grave permanent injury to [her] physical or mental health”. It’s not enough for her to simply say, “No, I do not want to have this baby”. Ever so subtly, our law starts from the position that the default outcome for all pregnant women should be motherhood: it’s left to each individual to persuade the medical authorities she is an exceptional case who should be allowed to determine the use of her own body. … read full article
UK - Hen don’t
DANGER, women may be having fun in YOUR neighbourhood
From The Critic (UK)
By Josephine Bartosch
June 24, 2022
Sucking a mojito through a novelty penis straw and belting out karaoke classics might not be everyone’s idea of a laugh, but surely only fun-crushing fundamentalists could object to the British tradition of a hen party?
Enter Cardiff’s Queer Emporium. Owners of the social enterprise have launched a campaign against the granting of a licence to a nearby hen-party themed bar called “Blame Gloria”. They have done so on the somewhat spurious basis that it would “endanger LGBTQ+ children”. … read full article
UK - The BBC gets new orders: back trans rights, ignore women
From The Spectator (UK)
By James Kirkup
June 24, 2022
For the record, I knocked two out. One woman’s skull was fractured, the other not. And just so you know, I enjoyed it. See, I love smacking up Terfs in the cage.’
Can someone who says such things be considered a respectable commentator on women’s rights and interests? I suspect that most people who glory in battering women would struggle to get a hearing in national conversation on such topics, much less a slot on Radio Four. Yet this week the author of that quote, Fallon Fox, was invited on to the Today programme to talk about women’s sport and trans women’s right to participate in it. ... read full article
UK - Sharron Davies: I Was an Olympic Swimmer, I Want Trans Women Banned From all Female Sports
From Newsweek (USA)
By Sharron Davies
June 24, 2022
The stadium was packed full of 10,000 people. They were predominantly Russian, this being the 1980 Moscow Olympics. I was the only non-Communist in the swimming final. Everyone else was Russian, Polish or East German. So everybody was cheering like crazy until they got to my lane and then they all went quiet—apart from my dad, who was cheering as loudly as he possibly could. I was just 17 years old.
There was an awful lot of pressure. Once I became double Commonwealth Games champion in '78 there was a lot of expectation on my shoulders to go to the Olympic Games and to win medals. You don't want to let anyone down. … read full article
Scotland - Nicola Sturgeon ‘let women down’ by posing with anti-abortion politician
From The Times (UK)
By Mark Smith and Kieran Andrews
June 24, 2022
Nicola Sturgeon has been accused of “overlooking women’s rights” and “sending a negative message to women in Scotland” after she met a congressman who is against abortion during her tour of the US. …
The encounter with Aderholt to discuss “Scotland’s core values” was overshadowed because of his pro-life views and support for efforts to overturn Roe v Wade, the ruling that has enshrined the right to abortion in US law for the past 50 years. ... read full article
Brazil - Brazilian Feminist Facing Up To 25 Years In Prison After Calling Trans Politician a “Man”
From REDUXX (USA)
By Anna Slatz
June 24, 2022
A Brazilian feminist is reportedly facing up to 25 years in prison after being charged for calling a trans-identified male politician a “man” in a case she says she hopes will wake the world up about the impact of gender ideology on women’s rights.
Isabela Cêpa, also known by her social media handle FEMINISA, is a feminist influencer well-known in Brazil for her advocacy on the issues of sexual and domestic violence. She spoke exclusively to Reduxx on what she describes as “unconstitutional” criminal charges that have been formally lodged against her by the State on behalf of a trans-identified male politician – Erika Hilton of the Socialism and Liberty Party. ... read full article