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Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade Abortion-Rights Ruling
Greg Stohr, Bloomberg News
Demonstrators outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on June 23.
Photographer: Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg , Bloomberg
(Bloomberg) -- A deeply divided US Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and wiped out the constitutional right to abortion, issuing a historic ruling likely to render the procedure largely illegal in half the country.
The court voted along ideological lines, 6-3 to uphold Mississippi’s ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy, and 5-4 to go further and explicitly overturn Roe and the constitutional right it established. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the court’s majority opinion.
The impact promises to be transformational. Twenty-six states either will or are likely to ban almost all abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that backs abortion rights. Thirteen have so-called trigger laws designed to automatically outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned.
The ruling fulfills a decades-old dream for legal and religious conservatives, capping a half-century fight to overrule one of the most controversial opinions in US history. The majority also overturned Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that reaffirmed Roe and laid out what has been the controlling law ever since. Casey said the Constitution’s 14th Amendment barred states from imposing significant restrictions until fetal viability, roughly 23 weeks into pregnancy.
Abortion-rights supporters say overturning Roe will have a devastating impact, threatening decades of economic gain for women and depriving millions of the right to make deeply personal health-care decisions. They say the effect will be especially large for Black and Hispanic women, who are more likely to lack the funds and ability to take time off work to travel out of state for an abortion.
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Republican lawmakers introduce bill allowing adults to sue doctors who perform 'sex-change' surgeries
By Brandon Showalter,
Senior Investigative Reporter
Sen. Tom Cotton | Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images
Two Republican congressmen have introduced legislation that would allow adults who underwent body mutilating gender-transition surgeries as minors to sue the doctors who operated on them. The bill also includes a 30-year statute of limitations.
Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., introduced the Protecting Minors from Medical Malpractice Act on Wednesday. The legislation subjects medical practitioners who perform “a gender-transition procedure on an individual who is less than 18 years of age” to liability if the minor who had the cosmetic surgery or multiple surgeries experiences “physical, psychological, emotional, or physiological harms” from the surgery or “related treatment.”
Minors who believe they were harmed by a gender-transition procedure have 30 years from their 18th birthday to file a civil action against a medical practitioner by seeking “declaratory or injunctive relief,” “compensatory damages,” “punitive damages” and “attorney’s fees and costs.” The bill makes an exception for surgeries performed on individuals with disorders of sexual development, chromosomal anomalies sometimes referred to as intersex conditions.
Additionally, the measure calls for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to withhold federal funding from any state requiring medical providers to perform gender-transition procedures.
The proposed legislation defines a “gender-transition procedure” as the “prescription or administration of puberty-blocking drugs for the purpose of changing the body of an individual so that it conforms to the subjective sense of identity of the individual,” “the prescription or administration of cross-sex hormones” or “a surgery to change the body of an individual” for the same purpose.
In a statement on Twitter, Cotton warned that “Radical doctors in the U.S. are performing dangerous, experimental, and even sterilizing gender-transition procedures on young kids, who can’t even provide informed consent,” adding: “Our bill allows children who grow up to regret these procedures to sue for damages.”
Banks also commented on the bill, maintaining that “Quacks have irreversibly damaged tens of thousands of American children to further the radical left’s agenda.” He cited the legislation as evidence that Cotton and himself were “serious about holding them accountable.”
Quacks have irreversibly damaged tens of thousands of American children to further the radical left’s agenda. @SenTomCotton and I are serious about holding them accountable.
Read about our bill in @FoxNews. — Jim Banks (@RepJimBanks) June 22, 2022
The Protecting Minors from Medical Malpractice Act comes amid ongoing efforts at the state level as Republican-led legislatures and state agencies adopt measures restricting the medicalized gender transitioning of young people.
Last year, the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services published a letter characterizing “genital mutilation of a child through reassignment surgery” as “child abuse, subject to all rules and procedures pertaining to child abuse.” The state of Florida released a fact sheet in April declaring that no minor child should be prescribed puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones to treat gender dysphoria.
The Florida Department of Health document further stated — referencing a 2021 article in the Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy — that “encouraging mastectomy, ovariectomy, uterine extirpation, penile disablement, tracheal shave, the prescription of hormones which are out of line with the genetic make-up of the child, or puberty blockers, are all clinical practices which run an unacceptably high risk of doing harm.”
Last year, both chambers of the Arkansas Legislature overrode Gov. Asa Hutchison’s veto of the Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act, marking the first time a bill banning gender-transition procedures for minors became law anywhere in the country. Earlier this year, Alabama and Arizona followed suit by enacting similar laws.
Internationally, several nations have begun halting the experimental practices to varying degrees. Among those countries reverting from prescribing puberty blockers or performing body mutilating surgeries are Sweden, France, Finland and the United Kingdom. Psychiatrists in Australia and New Zealand, likewise, are urging greater caution.
Echoing the Republican lawmakers, critics of the experimental practices have long said that lawsuits are likely coming, particularly from young people who recognized as adults that they were incapable of giving adequate informed consent to the drugs and surgeries as children and teenagers.
“Detransitioners,” those who underwent hormonal and surgical gender practices and wound up regretting it and reintegrating with their natal sex, have noted the hurdles that exist regarding taking legal action against the surgeons that performed the irreversible procedures on their bodies.
In a February 2020 feature story in The Christian Post, a male detransitioner who went by the pseudonym Marcus Fitz recalled how he endured years of opposite-sex hormone use and had an orchiectomy. He explained that most states, including California, where he lived, have one-year statutes of limitations for medical malpractice lawsuits.
“They’ll say, ‘I want to sue!’ And my first question to them is: ‘Well, how long has it been?’” he said, describing his interactions with other detransitioners.
“It often takes several years to come out of this gaslighting fog of what has happened to us and by then, it’s far too late.”
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Biden Launches Global Campaign Against “Conversion Therapy”
By Stefano Gennarini, J.D. | June 23, 2022
WASHINGTON, D.C. June 24 (C-Fam) The Biden White House announced a global campaign to eradicate any kind of therapy and counseling to help persons who struggle with unwanted same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria.
I wonder how he will defend that when he is standing before Jesus Christ?
The executive order directs the Secretary of State to develop an action plan to combat conversion therapy and “promote an end to its use around the world” including by leveraging U.S. foreign assistance and promoting initiatives against “conversion therapy” at the United Nations.
“We’re in a battle for the very soul of this nation, and that’s not hyperbole,” Biden said before signing the executive order, blaming the “MAGA agenda” of his predecessor President Donald J. Trump for inciting violence against persons who identify as homosexual or transgender.
Biden singled out Florida’s actions against Disneyland for promoting transgender education for children in schools as “going after Mickey Mouse.” And he said recent actions by Texas Governor Greg Abbot to investigate parents who help their small children to entertain gender transitioning as a form of child abuse were a form of harassment.
“Pride is back at the White House,” Biden said at the signing of the executive order.
God hates pride! Proverbs 8:13 - The fear of the LORD is to hate evil: pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way, and the froward mouth, do I hate.
The executive order aligns the U.S. government with several UN officials and bodies who have recently campaigned against so-called “conversion therapy.”
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet of Chile, last week called conversion therapy a “human rights abuse.”
'Forced' conversion is probably a human rights abuse, and probably doesn't work anyway. But sensible, compassionate, therapy should be available to anyone, especially those who are confused about their gender or sexual preference.
Victor Madrigal-Borloz of Costa Rica, the UN Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, issued a report calling for a global ban on all therapies and forms of counseling that do not encourage persons who experience homosexual inclinations to act on their inclinations, or that do not affirm individuals who experience confusion about their bodies and gender.
The term “conversion therapy” does not refer to an established method of therapy or counseling. It is a derogatory label applied by politicians and activists to any form of talk therapy or counseling to help persons deal with unwanted same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria. These kinds of therapies and counseling are offered by individual psychologists and therapists.
Psychologists who carry out this kind of talk therapy say the results are based on the motivation of the patient and his willingness to change his thoughts and actions. They say 30% of highly motivated patients leave same-sex attraction behind altogether, another 30% continue the struggle but still resist same-sex activity, while the remainder return to previous practices.
Critics of this kind of talk therapy say it causes harm. A recent review of 79 studies found that counseling to help individuals deal or overcome same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria did not pose any greater risk of harm than other kinds of counseling.
The executive order also directs federal agencies to fight against conversion therapy domestically and to develop strategies to eradicate it, alongside other policies to promote social acceptance of homosexuality and transgenderism in the justice system, schools, health care, as well as police and government agencies.
For example, the language in the executive order directs the Department of Health and Human Services to develop policies to ensure homosexual couples and transgender individuals are able to adopt children or obtain them through surrogacy and other reproductive technologies on an equal footing with men and women who are in a marriage.
Surreal madness!
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