In today’s news and poll of the day - part 2

So the Political Party that bends over to give tax cuts to the rich and big corporations is now trying to pretend they care about the little guy.  Really?

11-28-2021

I personally don’t believe in abortion but it’s not my place or anyone else’s for that matter to tell a woman what she can and cannot do with her own body.  

Here we have the woman AG for Mississippi try and make the case why overturning Roe v Wade won’t be a bad thing for the women of this country.  But after reading her opinion I’m wondering what country she lives in because it’s not this one. 

From the Washington Post…

“Opinion: Mississippi attorney general: Overturning ‘Roe’ will return abortion policy to the people”


By Lynn Fitch
Today at 8:00 a.m. EST


Lynn Fitch is the attorney general of Mississippi, defending the state’s abortion law.

“On Dec. 1, we will make the case to the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade and returning decision-making about abortion policy to the people. We recognize the magnitude of what we are asking. But the reason it represents such a monumental change is because almost 49 years ago the court put political intuition above sound legal reasoning and reached a conclusion in Roe utterly unsupported by the Constitution or the court’s own jurisprudence. It is time to correct that mistake.

There is no question that the issues involved in abortion policy are tough, complex and emotionally charged. But it is precisely because of such challenges that the Constitution gives the people the difficult task of balancing competing interests, devising compromises and developing policy. It is the core principle of democratic self-governance that U.S. citizens act on hard issues through the men and women they elect and can hold accountable at the ballot box.

When the Supreme Court decided Roe, it took abortion policymaking out of the hands of the people. It set it apart from all sorts of other difficult policy issues and created a special set of rules that have acted to keep abortion policy behind the bench, where unelected judges decide the fate of the people’s laws.
For decades, states have tried in vain to craft laws that would satisfy those special rules and also promote the people’s legitimate interests, such as defending the sanctity of life and protecting women’s health. Over and over again, those attempts have been quickly quashed by the judiciary, which itself has struggled to make sense of the special rules of abortion jurisprudence. The world in which we live today barely resembles the world of 1973, yet states have been unable to reflect our changed experiences in our laws.

In deciding Roe v. Wade, the court, almost paternalistically, worried about the “distressful life and future” of a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy. But in the intervening years, it has become easier for women to reach the very pinnacle of our success, economically and socially, fully independent of the right those seven male justices bestowed upon us.

Law and public policy, culture and society have all advanced to give women more opportunities to pursue success in our professional lives and also have a family. Maternity leave and even paternity leave are commonplace. Women regularly achieve our professional goals with flexible work schedules, telecommuting and independent business opportunities. Men and women are sharing responsibilities in the home better than ever before.

Meanwhile, contraceptive quality has vastly improved, its cost has dropped, and it is more widely accessible. Safe haven laws that allow women to leave an unharmed newborn at a hospital or other designated refuge now exist in every state, giving women that last final option without judgment or retribution.

The court in Roe pitted women against our children, and woman against woman. It came to a political conclusion through a nonpolitical process and threw our society into a chaos that has plagued U.S. politics and jurisprudence ever since. It forced Americans to decide between being pro-life or being pro-choice, and left little room for those who didn’t want to label their values as one or the other. It forced states to seek creative workarounds to enforce legitimate state interests.

In Roe, the court turned actual policymaking in state legislatures into an almost academic exercise, blocking the people and their elected officials from having the truly difficult debate about how we assert the basic human dignity of women and their children in our laws.

I have great faith in the American people and our elected leaders, so I am certain that when the court overturns Roe, an honest debate over true policy will ensue. It will be messy and it will be hard, and that debate may play out differently and reach different conclusions from state to state. But that is the role the Constitution gave to us, to the people, and that is the role the court needs to return to us now.”

He wants riots.  We really need to get rid of this family.

Is trump challenging people to debate him over the 2020 election??

11-29-2021




I wonder how many of these Republicans officials that will now rewarding people for not getting vaccinated are vaccinated themselves?

Yesterday I posted an opinion piece by the female AG of Mississippi in which she claims it would not be a big deal for today’s women if Roe v Wade was overturned.  After reading it I wondered what country she lived in because it certainly wasn’t this country.

Today another opinion piece on why it would be a big deal for today’s women…


“Opinion: Economists can tell you that restricting abortion access restricts women’s lives”


By Caitlin Myers
Today at 9:00 a.m. EST


Caitlin Myers is the John G. McCullough Professor of Economics at Middlebury College.

Members of the economics profession were silent in 1973 when the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, we were silent again in 1992 when the Court reaffirmed that decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and we have largely remained silent in major cases concerning abortion since. Perhaps this seems unremarkable — what do economists know about constitutional law or when life begins? But we actually do know a whole lot about one key issue in these cases: the causal effects of abortion access on people’s lives.

On Dec. 1, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, a case that could decide the fate of Roe and the future of abortion access. In this case, Mississippi and its supporters assure the Court that “there is simply no causal link between the availability of abortion and the ‘capacity of women to act in society.’” Perhaps this was the breaking point for economists, as, in response to this unfounded assertion, more than 150 of us finally weighed in and filed an amicus brief with the Court to share what we know.

Becoming a mother is one of the most economically important decisions a woman faces. If she chooses to become a parent, she can expect her earnings to be reduced by more than one-third, while new fathers’ earnings decline only slightly. The United States is one of the only countries in the world that does not mandate paid maternity leave, and 81 percent of workers lack formal paid leave even as they face median child-care costs of $10,400 per year for an infant. This assumes parents can even obtain reliable child care, something many struggle to do.

Millions of Americans experience an unintended pregnancy, and at current rates, about one in four women will obtain an abortion in their lifetime. Seventy-five percent are low-income, 59 percent are already mothers and 55 percent are experiencing disruptive life events such as losing a job. We don’t need to guess what happens to them when they encounter obstacles to obtaining the abortions they want: we have solid scientific evidence.

As this year’s Nobel Prize in economics demonstrated, economics has undergone a methodological revolution that uses “natural experiments” to provide credible evidence on questions about cause and effect. Natural experiments are situations in which events have produced random assignment of treatment akin to that in randomized controlled trials. For instance, we can observe the natural experiment arising from the pre-Roe repeal of abortion bans in several states to measure the effects of abortion legalization, and we can observe the natural experiment that took place when a 2013 Texas law closed half of the state’s abortion clinics to measure the effects of increased travel distance to clinics on the incidence of abortion.

These natural experiments allow us to peer into alternate worlds where abortion is less available, and the resulting evidence is that women’s lives look very different there. The legalization of abortion caused dramatic decreases in births in the 1970s. And it was expanded access to abortion — rather than expanded access to the birth control pill — that allowed women to begin delaying motherhood and marriage, reducing the number of teen mothers by one-third and teen brides by one-fifth.

Not surprisingly, abortion access still matters today. When travel distances to abortion clinics increase to 100 miles, more than 1 in 5 people seeking abortions are unable to reach a provider, and most give birth as a result. Given the outsize role motherhood plays in women’s economic fortunes, it’s not surprising that the effects of abortion access reverberate beyond unplanned births. Access to abortion has been found to increase women’s educational attainment, labor force participation, entrance into professional occupations and earnings, and to decrease financial stress and poverty for women and their families. A study using Experian credit reports finds women who were turned away from an abortion clinic on account of arriving just past a gestational limit experience an 81 percent increase in records related to bankruptcies, evictions and court judgments compared to women who arrived just under the limit and were provided abortions.

Now that economists are no longer silent, what we can tell you about abortion is that there is absolutely a causal link between abortion access and women’s lives. Period. Whatever one personally thinks about abortion, it is absurd to suggest Roe could be overturned without drastic consequences.”

 

Love the response.  But feel the better response is “don’t hold your breath”.

Boebert is a real peach isn’t she.

I wonder who “they” are?