Home of the Soul Cookie

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Posted at Molly Saves the Day:
For the women of South Dakota: an abortion manual

Why is she posting this information? As she says in another post:

When my friends and I began to discuss the way the wind was blowing regarding Roe — and the fact that there might not be abortion-friendly laws in the United States, especially in red states, soon, several commented that within a few years, there would of course be setups built to handle it — safe illegal clinics, another Jane network, newsgroups developed for the sole purpose of transporting women, et cetera. But even as this idea soothed us a little, it also suggested something horrible: that for a few years, there would be a service gap that would kill many women unlucky enough to get pregnant during those lean years.

I am posting this now so that the information is available for anyone who believes it is needed where they are, as a hedge against these laws. No woman should be caught in a gap, forced to give birth or attempt self-abortion.

Brava, Molly.

S.D. Governor Signs Abortion Ban Into Law

[AP] PIERRE, S.D. – Gov. Mike Rounds signed legislation Monday banning nearly all abortions in South Dakota, setting up a court fight aimed at challenging the 1973
U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

The bill would make it a crime for doctors to perform an abortion unless the procedure was necessary to save the woman’s life. It would make no exception for cases of rape or incest.

/stunned and dismayed

[EDITED TO ADD:] Planned Parenthood is asking for help in what’s surely going to be a Supreme Court battle over this anti-Roe v. Wade.

This is an embarrassment. From the Human Rights Watch website (emphasis added):

In a reversal of policy, the United States on Monday backed an Iranian initiative to deny United Nations consultative status to organizations working to protect the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, a coalition of 40 organizations, led by the Human Rights Campaign, Human Rights Watch, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, called for an explanation of the vote which aligned the United States with governments that have long repressed the rights of sexual minorities.

…

In voting against the applications to the NGO committee, the U.S. was joined by Cameroon, China, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, Senegal, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. Votes in favor of consultative status came from Chile, France, Germany, Peru, and Romania. Colombia, India, and Turkey abstained, while Côte d’Ivoire was absent.

Ah, we’re teaming up with such happy, shiny comrades-in-oppression as Iran and Zimbabwe. From elsewhere on that page:

As the U.S. government acknowledged in its 2004 country report on Iran, Iranian law punishes homosexual conduct between men with the death penalty. Human Rights Watch has documented four cases of arrests, flogging, or execution of gay men in Iran since 2003. In its 2004 country report on Zimbabwe, the U.S. government noted President Robert Mugabe’s public denouncement of homosexuals, blaming them for “Africa’s ills.” In the past, Mugabe has called gays and lesbians “people without rights” and “worse than dogs and pigs.”

[via John Wick]

Y’know, Clinton’s impeachment hearings weren’t ever really about his Monica-given BJ’s: It was about him lying about it and covering it up.

So I don’t understand why the American zeitgeist is so astonishingly indifferent to the wholesale sidestepping of our civil and legal rights that the current administration has been engaged in — from Jose Padilla to the warrantless wiretaps on Americans abroad… and those are just the injustices we know about.

After all, we’re dealing here with people whom the State says it suspects, but has not yet proven, are “drug dealers.” With those people (and, of course, with “suspected terrorists”), anything goes, even before a trial and without any due process of any kind. All of this can be done strictly on the Government’s say-so, even if the Constitutional “niceties” which exist to prohibit such behavior haven’t been complied with. “It may be wrong,” spits out Jonah, but we should do it anyway, because these people deserve it.

Isn’t it exactly this depraved thinking which lies at the heart of almost every current controversy we have? The whole point of the Bill of Rights — really, its principal function — is to prevent the Government from punishing those whom the Government claims (but has not yet proven in a court of law) are bad people deserving of punishment. That’s why there is a sequence mandated by the Constitution before rights can be abridged and punishment inflicted — first, charge someone with a crime, then give them the right to defend themselves along with other protections of due process, and then convict them. Only then are they considered criminals whose rights can be abridged.

Glenn Greenwald has a nice essay called “A Nation of Jonah Goldbergs” that is, IMHO, on the mark.

(Counterpoint: My friend Doug has a different point of view.)