July, 18 2023, 09:23am EDT
Iowa Court Temporarily Blocks Six-Week Abortion Ban
Des Moines
Today, an Iowa state district court granted abortion providers’ request to temporarily block a newly-enacted ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. For now, abortion in Iowa remains safe and legal. The new law briefly took effect on Friday, July 14, after being signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds.
The ban, HF 732, is virtually identical to a 2018 law kept blocked by the Iowa Supreme Court in June. In the order granting a temporary injunction, the district court confirmed that under Iowa Supreme Court precedent, abortion restrictions that unduly burden the right to abortion are unconstitutional, writing that the court “does not get to declare that our Supreme Court got it wrong and then impose a different standard. Such would be an alarming exercise of judicial activism. This court is bound to decide this matter pursuant to the instruction of our Supreme Court.”
The lawsuit — brought by the Emma Goldman Clinic, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, and Dr. Sarah Traxler — asserts that by banning the vast majority of abortions, this law violates Iowans’ constitutional rights to abortion and substantive due process. The ban also violates the Iowa Constitution’s Inalienable Rights Clause, which explicitly guarantees those rights to women and guarantees equal protection under state law.
HF 732 bans abortion before many people know they are pregnant. While the ban contains some so-called exceptions, the reality is that if it goes into effect, the vast majority of Iowans will be unable to access abortion. In addition to narrow exceptions for the life of a pregnant person and certain medical emergencies, the bill also purports to provide exceptions to the ban for certain survivors of rape and incest, those experiencing miscarriage, and those with particular fetal diagnoses. However, each exception includes significant barriers to accessing care. The experiences of patients and providers across the country have demonstrated that so-called exceptions like those in Iowa’s abortion ban are unworkable, put patients’ lives at risk, and further deprive people of their reproductive freedom.
“We are deeply relieved that the court granted this relief so essential health care in Iowa can continue. We are also acutely aware that the relief is only pending further litigation and the future of abortion in Iowa remains tenuous and threatened,” said Dr. Abbey Hardy-Fairbanks, medical director of the Emma Goldman Clinic.
“Today’s ruling means patients across Iowa will be able to access abortion care and retain control over their bodies and futures. We are proud to continue providing the care our patients need and deserve,” said Ruth Richardson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood North Central States. “The fight to preserve Iowans’ fundamental right to reproductive freedom is far from over. We will continue to oppose this egregious, unconstitutional ban as it works its way through the courts."
“We are relieved that Iowans will be protected in their ability to seek abortion care for the time being under the order issued today,” said Rita Bettis Austen, legal director for the ACLU of Iowa. “This order is essential to protecting the bodily autonomy rights and freedom of Iowans, as well as their health and safety, while this unconstitutional and dangerous abortion ban is litigated. We know Iowans stand with us in wanting to protect abortion rights and keep politicians out of doctor-patient decisionmaking. We are also grateful to the court for hearing and deciding this case so quickly, as necessitated by the state’s unnecessarily cruel emergency effective date provision.”
“Today’s ruling brings relief to abortion patients who can continue receiving care in Iowa,” Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO, Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “But this fight is not over. We know that some Iowa politicians are hellbent on banning abortion in defiance of the state constitution, and will keep trying to deny Iowans’ access to essential health care. While these attacks continue, Planned Parenthood and our partners will not back down.”
Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) is many things to many people. We are a trusted health care provider, an informed educator, a passionate advocate, and a global partner helping similar organizations around the world. Planned Parenthood delivers vital health care services, sex education, and sexual health information to millions of women, men, and young people.
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Trump Taps Anti-Trans Lawyer Harmeet Dhillon for Key Civil Rights Post
"Dhillon has focused her career on diminishing civil rights, rather than enforcing or protecting them," argued one critic.
Dec 10, 2024
LGBTQ+ and voting rights defenders were among those who sounded the alarm Tuesday over Republican President-elect Donald Trump's selection of a San Francisco attorney known for fighting against transgender rights and for leading a right-wing lawyers' group that took part in Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election to oversee the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.
On Monday, Trump announced his nomination of Harmeet Dhillon to head the key civil rights office, claiming on his Truth Social network that the former California Republican Party vice-chair "has stood up consistently to protect our cherished Civil Liberties, including taking on Big Tech for censoring our Free Speech, representing Christians who were prevented from praying together during COVID, and suing corporations who use woke policies to discriminate against their workers."
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Trump has picked Harmeet Dhillon as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. She has stated that it must be "made unsafe" for hospitals to provide trans care, and frequently shares Libs of TikTok posts. She intends to target trans people in blue states. Subscribe to support my journalism.
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— Erin Reed (@erininthemorning.com) December 10, 2024 at 8:14 AM
Reed continued:
Dhillon's most prominent work includes founding the Center for American Liberty, a legal organization that focuses heavily on anti-transgender cases in blue states. The organization's "featured cases" section highlights several lawsuits, such as Chloe Cole's case against Kaiser Permanente; a lawsuit challenging a Colorado school's use of a transgender student's preferred name; a case against a California school district seeking to implement policies that would forcibly out transgender students; and a lawsuit against Vermont for denying a foster care license to a family unwilling to comply with nondiscrimination policies regarding transgender youth.
Reed also highlighted Dhillon's attacks on state laws protecting transgender people, as well as her expression of "extreme anti-trans views" on social media—including calling gender-affirming healthcare for trans children "child abuse."
Last year, The Guardian's Jason Wilson reported that the Center for American Liberty made a six-figure payment to a public relations firm that represented Dhillion in both "her capacity as head of her own for-profit law firm and Republican activist."
Writing for the voting rights platform Democracy Docket, Matt Cohen on Tuesday accused Dhillon of being "one of the leading legal figures working to roll back voting rights across the country."
"In the past few years, Dhillon—or an attorney from her law firm—has been involved in more than a dozen different lawsuits in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. challenging voting rights laws, redistricting, election processes, or Trump's efforts to appear on the ballot in the 2024 election," Cohen noted.
As Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement Tuesday, "The Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division has the critical responsibility of enforcing our nation's federal civil rights laws and ensuring equal justice under the law on behalf of all of our communities."
"That means investigating police departments that have a pattern of police abuse, protecting the right to vote, and ensuring schools don't discriminate against children based on who they are," Wiley noted. "The nomination of Harmeet Dhillon to lead this critical civil rights office is yet another clear sign that this administration seeks to advance ideological viewpoints over the rights and protections that protect every person in this country."
"Dhillon has focused her career on diminishing civil rights, rather than enforcing or protecting them," she asserted. "Rather than fighting to expand voting access, she has worked to restrict it."
A staunch Trump loyalist, Dhillon has also embraced conspiracy theories including the former president's "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, and has accused Democrats of "conspiring to commit the biggest election interference fraud in world history."
She was co-chair of the Republican National Lawyers Association when it launched Lawyers for Trump, a group that urged the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene on behalf of the former president after he lost the 2020 election.
Cohen also highlighted Dhillon's ties to right-wing legal activist and Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo, described by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) as a "lawless con man and crook" for his refusal to comply with a Senate subpoena and his organization of lavish gifts to conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices.
"We need a leader at the Civil Rights Division who understands that civil rights protections are not partisan or political positions open to the ideological whims of those who seek to elevate a single religion or to protect political allies or particular groups over others," Wiley stressed. "We need a leader who will vigorously enforce our civil rights laws and work to protect the rights of all of our communities—including in voting, education, employment, housing, and public accommodations—without fear or favor."
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This is a breaking story… Please check back for possible updates...
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The existence of the handwritten document found on Mangione when he was taken into custody in Pennsylvania on Monday was confirmed by the New York Police Department, and major media outlets have quoted from it, but none had released it in full.
"My queries to The New York Times, CNN, and ABC to explain their rationale for withholding the manifesto, while gladly quoting from it selectively, have not been answered," Klippenstein said on his Substack.
According to Klippenstein—who previously published dossiers on Vice President-elect JD Vance and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the nominee for U.S. secretary of state—Mangione's manifesto reads:
To the Feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.
Common Dreams has not independently verified its authenticity.
Klippenstein
said on social media that the manifesto he published is "the real one, not the fake one circulating online."
NBC News deputy technology editor Ben Goggin noted that language shared by Klippenstein "matches what NBC has reported here as real."
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