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Reproduction Rights News

Sep 2, 2011

maha

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This week a judge in Texas blocked parts of a new abortion law that requires women to receive sonograms, including trans vaginal sonograms, before an abortion and for physicians to provide a description of the sonogram written by Texas state politicians. As I understand it, the sonograms themselves are not blocked, but the judge said that for the legislature to mandate to a physician what to say to his patients about anything is a violation of free speech rights.

The judge also said that a woman can’t be compelled to look at the sonogram or read the propaganda leaflets the state wants provided to her. As I understand it, this reverses one part of the actual law that says women may refuse to listen to the description of the sonogram only under some circumstances.

However, to receive the privilege of not hearing the propaganda, she would have had to sign an affidavit declaring that she is a victim or rape or incest, or a minor receiving an abortion without her parents’ knowledge but with permission of a court, or that the fetus has an irreversible medical abnormality. The law doesn’t make clear how public those affidavits would have been. I’m also not sure who’s going to pay for all those sonograms.

This law was high on the agenda of Gov. Rick Perry, the current front runner for the Republican nomination. And I suppose I’ll have to change this photo from Holsteins to Longhorns.

In better news, NPR reports that the Obama justice department is more aggressively prosecuting abortion protesters who block access to clinics.

Spotlight

5 Comments

4 Comments

c u n d glag • Sep 2, 2011 @10:43 am

No matter what happens in TX, or anywhere else, their relentless drip-drip-drip slow motion assault on abortion will continue. They’ll find another avenue, making abortions more and more difficult to attain legally, thus forcing more and more women to the back streets. Then, they can harass the poor women who had little other ‘choice,’ but to go that drastic route.

The slow erosion of the right of choice, by making access to it more expensive, less available, and/or more cumbersome, are their alternatives to either making abortion completely illegal, and/or punishing the woman for aborting a fetus. Both of those are election losers for them, because they know that most women, short of their reliable religiously insane base, will not stand for this. The backlash would keep them far away from power until they changed their position, and abandoned that part of their base, realizing that it is a lunatic fringe.

And good for the DOJ.
Conservatives rely on intimidating women by protesting outside the clinics, blocking access.
They are bullies and cowards. Especially the men who are doing it.

If these same bullies and cowards were for temperance, how many of them, especially the men, would have the guts to be out there trying to block access to a bar by the docks as a shift ends and Happy Hour’s about to begin?
I didn’t think so…
tom B • Sep 2, 2011 @11:48 am

We need a Constitutional Amendment protecting women. It won’t happen this decade– maybe never–until more states go “purple” or blue.
twtfltrd • Sep 2, 2011 @11:50 am

“However, to receive the privilege of not hearing the propaganda, she would have had to sign an affidavit declaring that she is a victim or rape or incest”

Wow I guess all that “don’t tread on me” bullshit only applies to men in wing-nut dimwittedteabaggerland!
maha • Sep 2, 2011 @11:55 am

Wow I guess all that “don’t tread on me” bullshit only applies to men in wing-nut dimwittedteabaggerland!

No kidding. And I’d bet anti-abortion activists would have gained access to those documents so they could “investigate” the women’s claims.