July, 13 2022, 05:03pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Planned Parenthood South Atlantic: Molly Rivera, molly.rivera@ppsat.org
Planned Parenthood Federation of America: media.office@ppfa.org
Center for Reproductive Rights: center.press@reprorights.org
South Carolina Abortion Providers File New State Court Challenge to 6-Week Abortion Ban
Providers assert ban violates South Carolina Constitutional rights.
WASHINGTON
Today, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, Greenville Women's Clinic, and two physician plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in state court seeking to again block Senate Bill 1, South Carolina's ban on abortion after approximately six weeks of pregnancy. Today's new challenge to the law comes less than a month after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the federal constitutional right to abortion.
Abortion providers have asked a state trial court to block the law on the grounds that it violates South Carolinians' constitutional rights to privacy and equal protection by banning abortion, by providing inadequate protections for patients' health, and by conditioning sexual assault survivors' access to abortion on the disclosure of their personal information to law enforcement.
Shortly after South Carolina lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1 in 2021, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and Greenville Women's Clinic challenged the law on the ground that it was inconsistent with Roe. A federal district court blocked the ban while litigation proceeded, and a federal appeals court upheld the lower court's injunction this past February.
Nearly immediately after the Supreme Court issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on June 24, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster filed an emergency motion to stay the injunction that had blocked Senate Bill 1. The federal district court granted that request on June 27, allowing the ban to take effect after being blocked for more than a year.
Because of Senate Bill 1, South Carolina providers have been forced to turn away patients who need abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy - before many people even know they are pregnant. While Senate Bill 1 remains in effect, South Carolinians who need care past the earliest stages of pregnancy will be forced to travel out of state, seek abortion outside the health care system, or continue pregnancies against their will.
Plaintiffs are seeking a temporary restraining order that would prevent enforcement of Senate Bill 1 and immediately allow abortion providers in South Carolina to resume abortion services after six weeks of pregnancy. Plaintiffs are also asking the state court to enter an injunction against enforcement while the litigation proceeds.
The plaintiffs in the case are Planned Parenthood South Atlantic and Greenville Women's Clinic - which operate the only clinics offering abortion in South Carolina - and two physicians who provide abortion in South Carolina. They are represented by Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and the law firm Burnette Shutt & McDaniel.
Statement from Jenny Black, President and CEO, Planned Parenthood South Atlantic:
"Planned Parenthood South Atlantic has long vowed to do everything in our power to protect abortion access for our patients in South Carolina, and today we continue that fight. With today's state court challenge, we are once again seeking to block this harmful law that cruelly denies South Carolinians the power to make their own personal medical decisions. This fight is not new to us, and we know what's at stake: Without court intervention, South Carolinians will continue to suffer in a state with dangerously high rates of maternal mortality and infant mortality, particularly among Black women and babies. We urgently need this court to reject Senate Bill 1 for what it is: a direct assault on our health care, our lives, and fundamental human rights."
Statement from Alexis McGill Johnson, President and CEO, Planned Parenthood Federation of America:
"Patients in South Carolina and across the country have been thrust into chaos after the Supreme Court's devastating decision to eliminate a federal constitutional right we have relied on for nearly half a century. We are facing a national health care crisis, and we are in the fight of our lives to restore and protect abortion access as lawmakers in states like South Carolina race to further restrict it. The Supreme Court may have abandoned people, but we never will. Planned Parenthood and our partners will keep fighting for our patients state by state, law by law, until every person has the power to control their own bodies, lives, and futures."
Statement from Nancy Northup, President and CEO, Center for Reproductive Rights:
"The fallout of the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has been swift and catastrophic. There has been mayhem at an unimaginable scale as people have struggled to find the essential health care that they need. With today's lawsuit, we are continuing our fight for South Carolinians' fundamental right to make personal decisions about their own lives, futures, and families. We will not back down. We will continue to work tirelessly across the nation to preserve and protect abortion access."
The Center for Reproductive Rights is a global human rights organization of lawyers and advocates who ensure reproductive rights are protected in law as fundamental human rights for the dignity, equality, health, and well-being of every person.
(917) 637-3600LATEST NEWS
Violent Arrest of Emory Professor Spotlights Brutality of Police Crackdown on Campus Protests
"To sustain this level of blind support for Israel, the U.S. must erode its own democracy," said one foreign policy expert. "And that is what we see happening on U.S. campuses now."
Apr 26, 2024
Emory University economics professor Caroline Fohlin approached several police officers who were holding a student down on the ground on Thursday and demanded an explanation—but by the end of the day videos of her own arrest became some of the most widely circulated images of the rapidly spreading anti-war movement on college campuses across the U.S.
As she knelt down to ask the university officers, "What are you doing?" another law enforcement agent grabbed her arm and pushed her away before repeatedly ordering her to "get on the ground."
"Stop it!" Fohlin yelled before the officer pushed her to the ground and called for more police to help subdue her.
Fohlin then screamed, "Oh my God!" as the police pushed her down and told the police that she was a professor at the university as they held her on the ground.
Fohlin's arrest—after which she was detained for 11 hours and then charged with "battery of a police officer"—came a week after Columbia University suspended more than 100 students for setting up an encampment in solidarity with Gaza, where more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed by the U.S.-backed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since October, and allowed police to arrest them. The mass arrests only served to galvanize students and faculty at Columbia and at dozens of other schools, with more than 400 peoplebeing detained so far.
The American Association of University Professors called the arrest "antithetical to the mission of higher education."
"Our institutions exist to foster robust exchanges of ideas and open dialogue in service of knowledge and understanding," said the group. "Sometimes that includes open dissent. Peaceful campus protests should never be met with violence."
Foreign policy expert Trita Parsi suggested that Fohlin's arrest was among the on-campus incidents that have strained the Democratic Party's argument that "democracy is on the ballot in November."
"To sustain this level of blind support for Israel, the U.S. must erode its own democracy. And that is what we see happening on U.S. campuses now," said Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, sharing a video of police tasing an Emory student who was already being held down on the ground.
Emil' Keme, a professor of English and Indigenous studies at Emory, toldDemocracy Now! on Friday that the scene on campus resembled "a war zone," especially after university and Atlanta police deployed tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters.
"I started feeling the tear gas, and I held arms with some people," he said. "We were being pushed back out of the encampment. And the student I was holding arms with, she was then arrested and the next thing I knew I was on the floor and I was being arrested."
Writer Abdullah Shihipar said Emory president Gregory Fenves—and all university administrators who have allowed the arrest of students who have peacefully protested, including several who have unilaterally altered school codes in order to ban protests—should resign.
"It has been a disgusting and embarrassing week for higher education," said Shihipar.
The crackdown on Emory students and faculty came a day after Texas state troopers descended on the University of Texas at Austin campus, some on horseback, and clamped down on a student walkout there, arresting more than 50 protesters.
Also on Thursday, students at Indiana University and Ohio State University (OSU)—where more than 30 and a dozen students were arrested, respectively—reported seeing snipers stationed on the rooftops of campus buildings, which an Ohio State representative denied.
The Biden administration has not directly addressed the protests or their demands since Monday, when President Joe Biden suggested the nationwide student uprising is "antisemitic."
"The use of state violence against peaceful protestors is unacceptable," said Sara Haghdoosti, executive director of Win Without War. "Police batons deployed against students calling for peace in Gaza are not a source of safety on campus, nor are they a bulwark against antisemitism. They hurt people, impinge on fundamental liberties, and serve an extreme right-wing agenda that threatens Jews, Muslims, and the right to protest across the country. University leaders and government officials must take steps to protect students exercising their right to protest, not enlist police to attack them."
"Antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry are on the rise and serious issues nationwide, including on college campuses," continued Haghdoosti. "The people endangered by these scourges deserve better than to be the targets of cynical political ploys or to be used as excuses for violent repression. No one is made safer by police violence, and politicians who say otherwise are only attempting to sow division for their own reprehensible ends. What we need from our leaders right now is to de-escalate, permit protests, and not allow state violence against people exercising their fundamental rights."
Irene Khan, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, said Thursday that the protests spreading across the U.S. and internationally are a sign that "the Gaza crisis is truly becoming a global crisis of the freedom of expression."
"Legitimate speech must be protected," Khan said Thursday, "but, unfortunately, there is a hysteria that is taking hold in the U.S."
"We must not mix [antisemitism] up with criticism of Israel as a political entity, as a state," she added. "Criticizing Israel is perfectly legitimate under international law."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'We Are Alive, But We Are Not OK': Gaza Doctors Detail Horrific Toll of Israeli Assault
"Our suffering is being live-streamed, but the world watches in silence. We have been failed."
Apr 26, 2024
Healthcare workers in the Gaza Strip have witnessed firsthand the appalling toll of Israel's war, treating badly wounded patients and amputating limbs without anesthesia, delivering babies condemned to starvation by the Israeli blockade, and enduring repeated attacks on overwhelmed medical facilities.
Such horrors have had devastating physical and psychological consequences for doctors living and volunteering in Gaza, including hundreds of staffers for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), also known as Doctors Without Borders.
On Friday, MSF published unnerving testimony from several members of its staff, including Dr. Ruba Suliman, who works at the Indonesian Field Hospital in Rafah, an overcrowded city in southern Gaza that Israeli forces are preparing to invade.
"There is constant noise from the drones, which never leave us. Sometimes it's really hard to sleep," said Suliman, whose family was displaced by Israel's assault. "I have this moral obligation to help people around me and I have this other obligation to save my kids."
"We are alive, but we are not OK," she said. "We are tired. Everybody here is devastated."
MSF also published a video Friday featuring an interview with Dr. Audrey McMahon, a psychiatrist who recently returned from Palestine.
The video begins with screenshots of a series of text messages McMahon received from an unnamed colleague in Gaza.
"I feel lost," the messages read. "I don't have a home. My home and my city were destroyed... Our suffering is being live-streamed, but the world watches in silence. We have been failed."
McMahon said that while doctors are "trained to see blood" and other things that "would be hard to see for most people," what they've witnessed over the past six months "is extremely distressing and disturbing for any human being who would see it."
"They've been seeing people coming missing one or many limbs, dismembered children, and women and men in acute extreme pain," said McMahon. "In the beginning we had no more supplies, and so some amputations were done without any painkillers or sedation, which is beyond imaginable."
"Some doctors, some medical staff, received their own people—their own family or extended family," she continued. "Having to witness that and treat your own people adds another layer of something potentially very, very traumatic."
More than 480 healthcare workers are among the more than 34,000 people who have been killed by Israel's military assault, which has almost completely destroyed Gaza's healthcare system—a major war crime. Not a single hospital in the territory is fully functional, and mass graves were recently discovered at two of the enclave's largest medical complexes, both of which Israeli forces reduced to ruin.
In a briefing to the United Nations earlier this year, MSF secretary-general Christopher Lockyear said that "there is no health system to speak of left in Gaza."
"Israel's military has dismantled hospital after hospital," said Lockyear. "What remains is so little in the face of such carnage."
Amparo Villasmil, an MSF psychologist who worked in Gaza in February and March, said Friday that "when we say that there is no safe place in Gaza today, we are not just talking about the shelling."
"There isn't even a safe place in people's minds," said Villasmil. "They live in a state of constant alert. They can't sleep, they think that at any moment they are going to die; that if they fall asleep, they won't be able to react quickly and run away, or protect their family."
Villasmil described finding a fellow psychologist in Gaza "leaning his head on his knees" and "on the verge of tears," telling her "how exhausted he was."
"He asked me what he was supposed to do, where he should go, and when this war would stop," said Villasmil. "I had no answers to give him."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Amid Israeli Bombs, Bullets, and Blockade, Gazans Now Face Suffocating Heat
"The tent feels like it's on fire," said one young refugee mother. "It's so hot you can't bear it, especially with young children."
Apr 26, 2024
Just a few months ago, Palestinian children exposed to the elements amid Israel's genocidal assault on of Gaza were dying of hypothermia. Now they're facing potentially deadly heat as temperatures soar to over 100°F in the embattled strip, where hundreds of thousands of forcibly displaced people are sweltering in tents and other makeshift shelters.
The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) warned Friday that "unexpected blistering temperatures across Gaza have added to the daily misery faced by the enclave's people and sparked new fears of disease outbreaks amid a lack of sufficient clean water and waste disposal."
"It is so hard. It's a heat that I can't describe."
Although there was a repsite Friday, temperatures in Gaza have soared as high as 108°F in recent days, and it's not even May yet. During the hotter summer months, the mercury can soar to over 120°F. Even with air conditioning and refrigeration during less trying times, Gazans often struggled with the summertime heat.
Now those luxuries are gone, replaced by suffocating heat, privation, and the ever-present threat of death or injury from Israeli bombs and bullets as the approximately 1.5 million people sheltering in Rafah brace for an impending invasion.
Many refugees are sheltering in structures made from heat-trapping agricultural greenhouses.
"The tent feels like it's on fire," Maryam Arafat, a young mother of three, toldThe New York Times earlier this week as her infant daughter screamed in discomfort. "It's so hot you can't bear it, especially with young children."
Gaza City refugee Mustafa Radwan told U.N. News that "it is like living in a greenhouse, no one can tolerate living inside."
Arafat and Radwan are but two of the approximately 2 million Palestinians forced from their homes by Israel's relentless bombardment and invasion of Gaza following the October 7 attacks.
Day after day, refugees are forced to wait in long lines for water and other necessities. Safe drinking water is particularly hard to find. Ice is nonexistent.
"Everything is a queue, everything is suffering in displacement," lamented Radwan.
Arafat said: "Everything has become difficult in this world. There is no water."
The scorching heat only adds to the misery. So do recent decisions—trees that were chopped down in the cold months for heating and cooking fuel are no longer there to provide shade as spring marches into summer.
Warmer temperatures also bring insects, some of which carry diseases.
"We can't sit outside and we can't sit inside the tent," Fadwa Abu Waqfa, another mother of three living in a tent in Rafah, told the Times. "It is so hard. It's a heat that I can't describe."
Dr. Ahmed Hanouda, director of a pop-up clinic in the Mawasi area of the devastated southern city of Khan Younis, told U.N. Newsthat "with the onset of summer, difficulties increase from water scarcity and overcrowding, leading to the spread of infectious diseases, skin sensitivities, lice, and other illnesses."
"We are, of course, trying to address these problems and provide services to the displaced people under these challenging circumstances based on the available resources," Hanouda added. "We look forward to offering better services and providing better facilities in the coming days."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular