[[link removed]] Ms. Memo: This Week in Women's Rights
January 10, 2024
From the ongoing fight for abortion rights and access, to elections, to the drive for the Equal Rights Amendment, there are a multitude of battles to keep up with. In this weekly roundup, find the absolute need-to-know news for feminists.
Do Pregnant Women Have the Same Rights Under the Law as Everyone Else? [[link removed]]
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Midwife Frances Jones-Coleman, owner of Full Circle Family Services, performs a prenatal exam on expectant mother Washima Feese with the help of student midwife Mimi Bingham (right) on March 10, 2023, in Houston, Texas. The Supreme Court will soon rule on an effort from the Biden administration to ensure additional abortion access in hospitals located in states with bans, like Texas. (Jahi Chikwendiu / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
BY JILL FILIPOVIC | Feminists often say that abortion bans make women second-class citizens. And it’s true: Abortion bans strip from pregnant women the basic right to bodily autonomy, which other people enjoy. This is true for any abortion ban. But this concept—that banning abortion puts pregnant women in a different class from “regular” people—is particularly apparent in laws that do not allow for a full range of emergency care to preserve a pregnant woman’s health.
These laws quite literally violate general duty-of-care requirements for emergency room workers, and do so only for pregnant women as a class. The anti-abortion movement writes them, promotes them, passes them, defends them, and fights for them in court. And the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear one of them, and decide: Can the law say that pregnant women are not entitled to the same protections as everyone else?
The case comes out of Idaho, which bans abortions almost entirely. The Idaho ban has an exception for abortions which save a woman’s life, but not those that are necessary to preserve her health. The Biden administration has issued a common-sense rule which basically says that, regardless of state law, emergency rooms and other medical facilities have to comply with federal law when it comes to providing care. That means they still have to afford pregnant women the same duty of care that they afford any patient—which is to take steps necessary to stabilize the patient, preserve their health, and save their life.
In no other case do emergency room physicians have to wait, as a matter of law, until a patient’s condition deteriorates to the point where they are going to die before they can provide necessary care to stabilize them. But if the patient is pregnant, and if what she needs to stabilize her is an end to the pregnancy, ER doctors in states like Idaho may face prison time for doing their jobs.
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Emergency Rooms Not Required to Perform Life-Saving Abortions, Federal Appeals Court Rules [[link removed]] Ohio Governor Vetoes Gender-Affirming Care Ban—Showing Republicans *Can* Respect Personal Medical Decisions [[link removed]]
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Marco Flores Deserves to Stay in the U.S.: A Feminist Argument Against Deportation [[link removed]] Democracy and Women’s Rights in 2024 [[link removed]]
What we're reading
Because it's hard to keep up with everything going on in the world right now. Here's what we're reading this week:
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"Americans
Are
Stockpiling
Abortion
Pills…Just
in
Case”
—
Mother
Jones
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[link removed] [[link removed]] Listen to United Bodies—a new podcast about the lived experience of health, from Ms. Studios, on Apple Podcasts [[link removed]] + Spotify [[link removed]] .
One of the most present themes in our lived experience of health in the past few years is the war on bodily autonomy, whether it’s the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the loss of legal abortion for millions, or the repeated pernicious efforts to ban gender affirming care for trans and nonbinary people. But the origins of the ideology driving these attacks is not new. It lies in the history of eugenics, racism, and ableism. And in many ways, it’s experienced in the everyday lives of disabled people. Think of us as canaries in the coalmine. Disability activist and creator Imani Barbarin says none of this is surprising. We’ve been dealing with this for a long time.
We hope you'll listen, subscribe, rate and review today!
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