Today I learned, via the Washington Post, that several blue states have made it legally possible to ship abortion pills to women in states where they've been outlawed:
A new procedure...allows U.S. medical professionals in certain Democrat-led states that have passed abortion “shield” laws to prescribe and mail pills directly to patients in antiabortion states....The telemedicine shield laws, enacted over the past year in New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Vermont and Colorado, explicitly protect abortion providers who mail pills to restricted states from inside their borders.
....In less than a month, seven U.S.-based providers...have mailed 3,500 doses of abortion pills to people in antiabortion states, according to Aid Access, putting just this small group alone on track to help facilitate at least 42,000 abortions in restricted states over the next year.
....Some lawyers say these doctors could face repercussions, even if they steer clear of traveling to states in which abortion bans call for prosecuting abortion providers....[Julie] Kay said that traditional extradition laws would be difficult to apply in these circumstances. “One state can extradite if a person commits the crime in the state, then flees,” Kay said. “But no one is fleeing here. You are just sitting in your office in New York.”
It turns out that having a makeshift network of doctors do this is just a temporary stopgap. The pills are actually supplied by a pharmacy in California, which will be able to ship directly to customers as soon as California enacts its own shield law—which should be soon. SB345 easily passed the state Senate several weeks ago and is close to passing in the Assembly. It should be signed into law by the end of August.
If or when republicans get greater control of the federal government, this too will end. Meanwhile here's another dumb ass far left wing project that leaves me shaking my head in contempt.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/opinion/legalization-sex-trade.html
"The push in recent years to allow pimping seems odd to me, because elsewhere we liberals are alert to the potential for exploitation. We bar work among consenting adults if it’s performed for less than the minimum wage, for example, and we block consensual high-risk work like using window-washing platforms without many safeguards. Commercial sex is more dangerous than window-washing or almost any other job..."
Who are these people advocating this nonsense? Why do we give them the time of day or in any way associate our larger policy goals with these fringe freak shows?
Wow!!! The business community is passing up a chance to profit. Require sex workers to work in a fixed location that can be inspected on a regular basis like hotels or restaurants. Make street solicitation illegal. Does the EU have legal "red light districts"?
The whole project to throw abortion laws to the states was an example of policy making without making any attempt to project what might happen --typical for SCOTUS these days -- so no surprise that this workaround has been created. It will force the GOP to run on its record of forcing young women (and children who have been raped) to give birth, and it won't be a good look. What social conservatives have wanted and fought for all these long years will be the albatross around the neck of every GOP candidate across the country who isn't representing a rural red-state region.
Pass the popcorn.
More and more these days I think this SCOTUS majority isn't just about enacting a reactionary agenda, it's as much about the Bannonite project of sowing chaos. In other words, breaking things. Chaos favors the ruthless, the small-scale organized, the conscienceless, the vengeance-prone, the violent, the rich, and the armed. It also distracts attention from other ongoing agendas.
I'm moving toward the point where the only real question is whether they're purposeful chaos agents or unwitting ones surprised at reactions to what they do.
Dear Justin, the NYT article you note is pay-walled to me...still, I note:
Almost everyone has more fun with SEX than Americans. Just get off the city wide light rail in Vienna at the Danube Island stop....and everyone will be naked if it is a sunny day. Since I was in a suit and tie, it shocked me a little....likewise maybe Cannes, France, walk the topless beach for a couple of hours and no one cares, not even you in that it is too common to even notice anymore.
American's make a fetish of everything....which can be fun I suppose...but still, American's are very strange. I haven't even touched on Latin America where sex is often entertainment....and fun too.
Sex in America is just so dangerous...so many politicians and maybe people I would like to like, ruined...by...(wait for it)....just plain old vanilla sex...that would not be scandalous anywhere but here.
Well, if you have to make something human difficult so you can comodized it and make money off of it...why not? Though it seems perverse to me.
Justin is a troll. He doesn’t care one bit about actual sex workers, because he’s already admitted in other posts that he’s ok with millions of innocent people dying or having their lives ruined from many other causes (covid, war, natural disasters, poverty, etc). The threat of sex trafficking is just another piece of poo he can fling at someone who does care about the future of humankind.
Your comment reminded me of a co-worker from Ireland who said to me: In Murika, everyone talks about sex but no one does it. That was back in the 1970's.
Real on the web home based work to make more than $14k. Last month I made $15738 from this home job. Very simple and easy to do and procuring from this are just awesome.
For more detail visit the given interface.. http://incomebyus.blogspot.com/
Great--now they can report on neighbors who got a package from California.
Ship all boxes with the Amazon label.
“Some lawyers say these doctors could face repercussions, even if they steer clear of traveling to states in which abortion bans call for prosecuting abortion providers.”
Uh huh. Cause airlines have never been known to involuntarily reroute someone through an airport in an ultra red state. Dr Teleabortion books a flight from New York to Los Angeles via Chicago, and then ends up rebooked New York to Los Angeles via Dallas-Fort Worth because of weather and has to decide “Should I just cancel my trip? What are the odds Texas cops will be at the DFW airport waiting for me?”
This is so much a replay of the political and cultural fighting over slavery and abolition that was so bitter from the 1830s onward. Just watch, the House will now try to get a ban on sending abortifacients across state lines, same as their spiritual ancestors forcing the post office not to take abolitionist pamphlets mailed into slave-holding states. Then there was a gag rule prohibiting the House from taking up any discussion of abolition; now we're going to see the "Freedom Caucus" force McCarthy to ban any discussion of abortion in the House.
If these don't happen, I'll eat my hat. So predictable, and so dreary.
So, you are calling the pro-choicers the spiritual descendants of the abolitionists. That's the exact reverse of how the pro-lifers view themselves, since they see historic parallels between slavery and abortion (as far as their vision of the moral arc goes).
I'm paralleling anti-abortion extremists to anti-abolitionist extremists because of what they do. Anti-abolitionists mobbed and ultimately killed the abolitionist newspaper editor Lovejoy, who was situated in a free state; anti-abortionists like the Upton church group and others mob abortion clinics, and anti-abortionist extremists have killed more than one provider.
What happened in the 1830s-1850s was that more and more people in free states became convinced that anti-abolitionists' actions against abolitionists (who began this period as a small and unpopular minority), and against free speech and free legislative process, were incompatible with a free republican way of life, and they increasingly connected that extremism with slaveholders' untrammeled power over the humans they owned-- they needed to get their way in everything and didn't care how, in other words. And of course it was a Supreme Court decision in 1859 that pulled all these threads together enough that free states' votes were all it took to elect a candidate pledged to not letting slavery spread any further (he wasn't allowed on the ballot in any, or maybe more than one, slave-holding state-- not sure about DE).
I'm saying that there can and likely will be real trouble when we have even a small group that won't be satisfied unless its most extreme desires, held by only a few, must be enacted into everybody's law. Especially if they're willing to use mobbing and violence to get their way, and super-especially if they're willing to try restricting talk they don't approve of, above all in legislatures. We've seen that in some states already. If it happens in DC, that will be really ominous.
I know that some anti-abortion people and groups compare themselves to abolitionists and anti-Nazis. They're entitled to develop whatever parallels they want to-- we don't require licenses for people to use history-- and I know there's strong moral feeling in many cases, but tactically that's completely inverted. Small minorities of opinion that are absolutist in that opinion have to end up using extremist tactics. What else will get them what they insist on?
A continuing fine analysis by Altoid...so thanks, but I fear he/she is overall correct in where this might be going. Best Wishes, Traveller
Thanks, Traveller. I wish this direction didn't look so likely, and they don't *have* to go there, but the temptation will be strong. I hope cooler heads among them can resist it.