Stephan: Yesterday I gave SR over to the impact and implications of the Supreme Court's overturn of Roe. As you could see this is causing changes in American society that go way past just the immediate abortion issue. And here is another impact and this one like the others is going to change the culture of Red states particularly. Red states generally already have notably inferior healthcare compared to Blue states and, as this article lays out, I predict the already second-class healthcare for Red state citizens is only going to get worse. If you are a young doctor, particularly an OB-GYN, or internist are you going to set up your practice in a state that could send you to prison for even counseling a woman or child seeking an abortion, or in a Blue state where women have full rights over their bodies?
‘With the restrictive laws, you likely will see a behavioral change, that people will make decisions about where they choose to train, where they choose to practice.’ Illustration: The Guardian
For students pursuing their medical education in states banning abortion, the ruling leaves them grappling with the challenges of a healthcare procedure becoming criminalized
Fourth-year medical student Mackenzie Bennett was on a conference call when news broke that Roe v Wade had been overturned. The topic was telehealth and medication abortion.
“We stopped the meeting, we just had to log off and sit in those feelings for a minute. It was honestly really devastating,” says Bennett, who is pursuing dual medical and public health degrees specializing in OB-GYN at Emory School of Medicine in Atlanta.
In coming weeks, Georgia will probably ban most abortions after six weeks. For students like Bennett pursuing their medical education in states poised to ban abortion services, the ruling impacts not just the training they will receive, it leaves them grappling with the personal, moral and practical challenges of a common (and sometimes, life-saving) healthcare procedure becoming criminalized. […]
Stephan: Most Americans I talk with seem to believe that American agriculture is based on small family farms. Lovely image, but completely wrong. To quote Robert Reich, "Just four firms control 85% of all beef, 66% of all pork, and 54% of all poultry. This degree of monopolization is hurting farmers — and you. Monopolists control nearly every part of the food production process, from selling feed to farmers, to packaging the meat and poultry for supermarkets. Half of all chicken farmers report having just one or two processors to sell to."
Robert Reich Credit: Creative Commons
Former United States Labor Secretary Robert Reich released a new video on Thursday blasting agricultural conglomerates for decimating American farming.
Stephan: America's public education for generations was one of the nation's greatest points of pride. But, since the Reagan administration, the Republican Party has been trying to gut public education and to shift tax dollars to religious and charter schools where children can be indoctrinated instead of educated. Why is the Republican Party doing this? The answer is simple. Study after study has shown that the higher an individual's IQ and the more education a person has the more likely they are to vote Democratic. So, for the Republican Party what to do is obvious. Attract lower IQ voters and don't educate them, instead indoctrinate them into christofascism. Then they are easily manipulated because you can stimulate their fears. Thus, the MAGAt world was created, and it now incorporates about a third of U.S. voters.
Fox MAGAt propagandist Laura Ingraham Credit: Alex Wong / Getty
Anyone familiar with how Fox News gradually warms its audience up to an idea could see it coming. First, the network ran endless segments hyping the myth that school teachers were training kindergarteners to hate white people with something called “critical race theory.” Next came false claims that schools that accept LGBTQ teachers and students were “grooming” children to be sexually abused by pedophiles. Having implanted the idea that public schools are a scary place turning their grandkids into self-loathing sexual perverts, the end game was finally rolled out during the popular primetime program “The Ingraham Angle”: It’s time to end public education entirely.
“A lot of people are saying it’s time to defund government education or at least defund it by giving vouchers to parents so they can say, ‘No, we’re not doing this anymore,’” ranted host Laura Ingraham on Thursday. “And I think that just has to happen. We have to stop funding this madness.”
Alexander Burns, National Political Correspondent - The New York Times
Stephan: I see an important trend developing as a result of Roe being overturned. Republican governance which on the basis of hard social outcome data can be proven to always be inferior to Democratic governance is inflicting yet another degradation of society in the Red states. We are beginning to see corporations rethink keeping their headquarters in Red states. Why? Some perhaps because they realize Republicans do not support gender equality. But mainly, I suspect, because recruiting the best most competent workers, particularly women, will get much more problematic. What smart, socially progressive fertile woman would want to work in a red state that could potentially put her life at risk? Who would move from a Blue state to a Red one? This trend, I believe, is going to have long-term implications. In the following stories I will illustrate other aspects of this post-Roe impact.
Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, urged executives to rethink basing their companies in Texas, which he called “a state that strips its residents of their dignity.” Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis / The New York Times
As a group of conservative states enacted severe abortion restrictions last year, Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois sent letters to a handful of corporate executives with close ties to Texas.
Mr. Pritzker, a Democrat, urged executives to rethink basing their companies in “a state that strips its residents of their dignity.” Most workers, he wrote, did not want to live under a rigid abortion ban.
There was no immediate response to his overture. Companies thriving in Texas’ freewheeling business environment were not about to flee because of legally contested abortion regulations that were not certain to be enforced.
Ten months later, the political and legal landscape is radically different. And a Supreme Court decision that abolished the right to an abortion is now threatening to reshape the lines of economic competition between conservative and liberal states.
For companies anchored in economically vibrant conservative states […]
Stephan: The hysterical anti-choice crowd who are committed to keeping women in second-class status are now planning to try and stop girls and women from leaving Red states to go to Blue states where they can get the medical procedures or pills they need. And the mechanism for doing this is vigilantes. Fanatics who hope to make money stopping the women, or those who help them. It is very important that you be very clear that the anti-choice movement is not about protecting children. If that were the case then Red states would lead the Blue states in pre-delivery health care, delivery healthcare, early childhood support and healthcare, and youth education. But, in fact, none of that is in fact what is going on. In states like Mississippi or Louisiana, you would do better to have your child in any one of a number of African nations than those states. I think this vigilante scheme is going to backfire big time on the Red states because, again, what fertile woman or what mother of a raped girl, like the 10-year-old in Ohio, would choose to live in a Red state where one's life could be turned upside down by some White mouth breather -- they will all be Whites -- hoping to make money from your decision to terminate a pregnancy?
Lori Lamprich, volunteer driver with Midwest Access Coalition, drives her car from St. Louis, Missouri, over the state border to Illinois, on June 25, 2022. Lamprich drives abortion seekers across the Mississippi River to Illinois, where abortion remains legal. Credit: Angela Weiss / AFP / Getty
Following President Joe Biden’s Friday executive order protecting abortion rights, a Planned Parenthood of Montana spokesperson tells Truthout the organization will not reverse its decision to discontinue providing medication abortion to patients traveling from states where abortion has been banned after the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.
The organization, which operates five clinics in the state, had previously cited legal concerns about patients potentially traveling with abortion pills provided by Planned Parenthood of Montana clinics back home to states that have banned abortion, and then taking the pills there. The organization, however, is continuing to provide such patients with surgical abortion procedures (since they can guarantee the procedure happens in state).
While the safe and effective two-pill regimen may be given at a clinic in a state that has not banned abortions, like Montana, the […]
