March 7 (Reuters) - Five women who said they were denied abortions despite grave risk to their lives or fetuses sued Texas on Monday, in the first apparent case of pregnant women suing over curbs imposed after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
The lawsuit asks a state court in Austin, the state's capital, for a ruling clarifying that a doctor cannot be prosecuted for providing an abortion if, in the doctor's good faith judgment, the abortion is necessary to treat an emergency that threatens a pregnant patient's life or health.
Texas, like most of the 13 states with abortion bans, allows exceptions when a physician finds that there is a medical emergency. But the lawsuit, backed by the abortion rights group Center for Reproductive Rights, says that the law is unclear, leading doctors to refuse to perform abortions even when the exception should apply for fear of losing their licenses and facing up to 99 years in prison.
Texas banned abortion shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned its landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed abortion rights nationwide.
Four of the women in Monday's lawsuit had to travel out of state to obtain abortions in order to avoid serious medical complications. A fifth was hospitalized in Texas with a premature rupture of membranes, which meant that her fetus could not be saved, but was not given an abortion until she developed a severe infection that required her to stay in an intensive care unit, according to the complaint.
In a speech to educators in Chicago on Tuesday, Vice President Harris decried the July 4 mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois & renewed the call for an assault weapons ban.
A 7th person died in the aftermath of the parade shooting, & the suspect, Robert E. Crimo III, has been charged with 7 counts of first degree murder.
The local prosecutor has promised that dozens more charges would be sought.
“I don’t need to tell NEA (National Education Association) we need to end this horror,” Harris said at the NEA’s annual meeting. “We need to stop this violence.”
Harris pointed to the bipartisan gun safety legislation recently signed by President Joe Biden, but said the country needs to do more. And she called on Congress to act.
“Congress needs to have the courage to act & renew the assault weapons ban,” she said. Harris also called on Congress to repeal the liability shield that prevents gun manufacturers from being sued for damage caused by their products.
“So let’s talk about what an assault weapon is designed to do,” Harris said.
“An assault weapon is designed to kill a lot of human beings quickly. There is no reason that we have weapons of war on the streets of America,” she said.
The vice president added: “We need reasonable gun safety laws.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court has ended constitutional protections for abortion that had been in place nearly 50 years in a decision by its conservative majority to overturn Roe v. Wade. Friday’s outcome is expected to lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states.
The decision, unthinkable just a few years ago, was the culmination of decades of efforts by abortion opponents, made possible by an emboldened right side of the court that has been fortified by 3 appointees of former President Donald Trump.
The ruling came more than a month after the stunning leak of a draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito indicating the court was prepared to take this momentous step.
It puts the court at odds with a majority of Americans who favored preserving Roe, according to opinion polls.
Alito, in the final opinion issued Friday, wrote that Roe & Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed the right to abortion, were wrong the day they were decided & must be overturned.
“We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion. Roe & Casey must be overruled & the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives,” Alito wrote.
Authority to regulate abortion rests with the political branches, not the courts, Alito wrote.
Joining Alito were Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh & Amy Coney Barrett. The latter three justices are Trump appointees. Thomas first voted to overrule Roe 30 years ago.
Chief Justice John Roberts would have stopped short of ending the abortion right, noting that he would have upheld the Mississippi law at the heart of the case, a ban on abortion after 15 weeks & said no more.
Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor & Elena Kagan — the diminished liberal wing of the court — were in dissent.
“With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent,” they wrote.
The ruling is expected to disproportionately affect minority women who already face limited access to health care.
Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, which is at the center of the case, continued to see patients Friday. Outside, men used a bullhorn to tell people inside the clinic that they would burn in hell. Clinic escorts wearing colorful vests used large stereo speakers to blast Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” at the protesters.
Posted by ChasinDatPaper on September 1, 2021 at 10:18am
Abortion rights are now squarely on the chopping block after the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stop the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the country from going into effect.
The Texas law prohibits abortions after the 6th week of pregnancy As you know, many/most women don't even know they're pregnant during the first 6 weeks. What's more, if an abortion is performed after the 6th week, any citizen in the country -- not just Texas, but the entire country -- can sue anyone who helps facilitate the abortion for $10,000 plus attorney's fees.
That means someone could sue not only the clinic, but the Uber driver who took the woman to the facility, a friend who made a call to the clinic on the woman's behalf, a counselor who advised the woman, the spouse of the woman, etc.
The Supreme Court was asked to put the law on ice Tuesday night, before it went into effect at midnight, but SCOTUS was silent ... and in this case, silence speaks volumes. If the justices didn't feel this law squarely violated Roe vs. Wade, it's a loud, screaming signal about their feelings toward Roe.
There are 5 justices -- and possibly 6 -- who have strongly indicated they would be inclined to overturning Roe, and they will have a shot at that soon, because a Mississippi anti-abortion law is a direct challenge to the 1973 precedent that gives women the right to an abortion.
For now ... Roe vs. Wade is effectively not the law of the land in Texas, where abortion clinics cannot exist at this point ... and its fate now hangs in the balance.
LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AP) — Russia was slapped Monday with a four-year ban from international sports events, including next summer’s Tokyo Olympics, over a longstanding doping scandal, although its athletes will still be able to compete if they can show they are clean competitors.
The ruling by the World Anti-Doping Agency’s executive committee means that Russia’s flag, name and anthem will not appear at the Tokyo Games, and the country also could be stripped of hosting world championships in Olympic sports.
The sanctions are the harshest punishment yet for Russian state authorities who were accused of tampering with a Moscow laboratory database. Russia’s anti-doping agency can appeal the decision to the Court of Arbitration for Sport within 21 days — an action it has signaled it would take.
“Russia was afforded every opportunity to get its house in order ... but it chose instead to continue in its stance of deception and denial,” WADA president Craig Reedie said.
Russian athletes can compete in major events only if they are not implicated in positive doping tests or if their data was not manipulated, according to the WADA ruling.
For soccer’s 2022 World Cup, WADA said the Russian team will play under its name in the qualifying program in Europe. If it qualifies to play in Qatar, the team name must be changed to something neutral that likely would not include the word “Russia.”
At the past two track and field world championships, Russians competed as “Authorized Neutral Athlete.” A softer line was taken ahead of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games, when the International Olympic Committee suspended the Russian Olympic body yet allowed athletes and teams to compete as “Olympic Athlete from Russia.”
Going forward, “they cannot use the name of the country in the name of the team,” WADA president-elect Witold Bańka told The Associated Press.
Legal fallout from the WADA ruling at CAS seems sure to dominate preparations for the Tokyo Olympics, which open July 24.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev urged sports organizations to appeal and said WADA’s ruling was “a continuation of this anti-Russian hysteria which has already become chronic.”
The latest round of sanctions were imposed because tampering with the Moscow data was a new violation of anti-doping rules committed as recently as January.
Handing over a clean database to WADA was a key requirement given to Russia 15 months ago to help bring closure to a scandal that has tainted the Olympics over the last decade.
WADA investigators and the IOC agreed that evidence showed Russian authorities corrupted data from the Moscow lab that was long sealed by security forces. Hundreds of potential doping cases were deleted and evidence falsely planted to shift the blame onto whistleblowers.
“Flagrant manipulation” of the data was “an insult to the sporting movement worldwide,” the IOC said last month.
Athletes whose data was manipulated in the 2012-15 testing period now face disciplinary cases by their sport’s governing body.
“Yes, we do know who those athletes are. They will be kept out of the (Tokyo) Games,” said British lawyer Jonathan Taylor, chairman of the WADA panel whose proposed sanctions were unanimously approved Monday.
However, the doping watchdog’s outgoing vice president was left frustrated by an unwillingness to fully expel Russia from the Tokyo Olympics and 2022 Beijing Winter Games.
“I’m not happy with the decision we made today. But this is as far as we could go,” said Linda Helleland, a Norwegian lawmaker who has long pushed for a tougher line against Russia. “This is the biggest sports scandal the world has ever seen. I would expect now a full admission from the Russians and for them to apologize on all the pain all the athletes and sports fans have experienced.”
Although the IOC has called for the strongest possible sanctions, it wants those sanctions directed at Russian state authorities rather than athletes or Olympic officials.
That position was opposed by most of WADA’s athlete commission. It wanted the kind of blanket ban Russia avoided for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics and the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games when a state-run doping program was exposed by media and WADA investigations after Russia hosted the 2014 Olympics in Sochi.
The decision to appeal has been stripped from RUSADA chief executive Yuri Ganus, an independent figure criticizing Russian authorities’ conduct on the doping data issue. Authority was passed to the agency’s supervisory board after an intervention led by the Russian Olympic Committee.
The ROC on Saturday labeled the expected sanctions as “illogical and inappropriate.”
Russia has stuck to its claim that deceptive edits in the data were in fact made by WADA’s star witness, Grigory Rodchenkov. The former Moscow lab director’s flight into the witness protection program in the United States was the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary.
“As usual, Russia has disregarded all of its promises and obligations to clean sport,” Rodchenkov said Monday in a statement from his lawyers.
Sports fans worldwide will still be watching top-tier events from Russia in the next four years despite the hosting ban.
In soccer, St. Petersburg will still host four games at the 2020 European Championship and the 2021 Champions League final, because European soccer body UEFA is not bound by the ruling. Nor is the Formula 1 racing series, which goes to Sochi’s Olympic Park for a race each year.
“The contract is valid through 2025,” Russian Grand Prix spokeswoman Tatyana Rivnaya told the AP in a telephone interview.
World championships in lower-profile Olympic sports — including luge in two months and wrestling in 2022 — could stay in Russia due to legal difficulties moving them.
“There will be practical issues,” Taylor acknowledged, “and we can’t ignore those.”
However, Taylor said a block on Russia bidding for or being awarded sports events in the next four years would have a longer effect beyond the ban.
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AP Sports Writer James Ellingworth in Duesseldorf, Germany, contributed.
Artist Name: PurpMan Kash EP Name: "Cant Ban The PurpMan"
Description: PurpManKash aka Pmk is an indie hip-hop artist out of the St. Petersburg, Florida. PurpManKash is working on his debut EP titled “Cant Ban The PurpMan” which is set for release July 17th, 2018. PMK is a hip-hop artist that has the versatility to breakthrough genres and deliver words (rhymes) that have meaning and can move any listener. Set to drop his lead single "Jeezy" PurpManKash plans to keep his foot on the pedal with bringing you quality street music.
Lil Boosie is working on his first album since being released from prison entitled Touchdown 2 CauseHell. He's been keeping the streets hot in the meantime by hopping on various features and dropping singles.
Here he remixes Birdman, Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan's single, "Lifestyle."
}