What civil liberties? Kentucky’s medieval abortion law amounts to state-sanctioned rape – By Bob Cesca (Salon) / Dec 10 2019
Abortion horror show gets worse: Supreme Court lets stand bizarre Kentucky law, and choice is on the critical list
Unusual times demand unusual measures. If you value Salon’s original reporting and commentary, please take a moment to support our writers directly. Right here, right now, you can make a financial contribution to Bob Cesca to help make his work possible. All donations go directly to writers.
Anti-choice conservatives aren’t big fans of science, but the decision this week by the Supreme Court to uphold a Kentucky law mandating transvaginal ultrasounds for women seeking abortion procedures isn’t just anti-science, it’s medieval. It’s state-sanctioned rape. And it’s not the first time the Court has steamrolled both civil rights for women and science fact in lieu of misogyny and science fiction.
Let’s rewind. In the brutally misguided Burwell v Hobby Lobby case of 2014, in which the Christian owners of the hobby-store chain disputed on religious grounds the birth control coverage mandate in the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the pre-Trump Supremes decided that religious gibberish superseded actual fetal biology.
The question before the Court was whether the “morning after” prescription coverage allowed in the ACA prevented implantation of a fertilized egg or whether the medication merely blocked fertilization in the first place. Hobby Lobby wrongly insisted it was the former, that the medications were “abortifacients,” or abortion-inducing drugs. Multitudes of experts in the field, as well as the architects of the bill’s language, will attest to the reality that the morning-after pills required under the ACA in fact block fertilization. They do not induce abortions. The meds listed in the law prevent pregnancy in the first place, blocking the sperm from entering the ovum.
In other words, the ACA requires all health insurance plans to cover morning after pills — but only the specific types of pills that block fertilization, or non-abortifacient medication. Again, the pills mandated in the law, according to actual science, are absolutely not abortion-inducing. And yet the Supreme Court sided with Hobby Lobby anyway, essentially ruling that if a corporation believes the pills are abortion-inducing, the corporation doesn’t have to pay for employee health plans that include the pills. As a bonus, the Court confirmed that “closely-held” corporations are capable of holding religious beliefs, too — they are “persons” under the law, after all! — which might actually be more destructive than establishing corporate speech rights in the Citizens United case.
Ultimately, Hobby Lobby was a victory for hocus-pocus nonsense, and a major loss for scientific fact.
Continue to article: https://www.salon.com/2019/12/10/what-civil-liberties-kentuckys-medieval-abortion-law-amounts-to-state-sanctioned-rape/
