Written by Sarah Seltzer for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

The Child Catchers chronicles the hypocrisy of anti-abortion & right-wing Christian activists.

Kathryn Joyce’s new look at the adoption industry, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption, contains within its pages true horror stories. Perhaps most shockingly, the book details what appears to be the long-term abuse of a group of Liberian orphans “adopted” into a life of virtual slavery in Tennessee — starved, hit, manipulated, and isolated by “parents” practicing an extreme brand of back-to-the-land Christianity.

But Joyce, through intensive reporting around the world, also tells the stories of “orphans” who have actual families, even mothers, back home and who were adopted under false auspices, as well women in the United States who are manipulated into relinquishing children for adoption by crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs).

Throughout the book, these dynamics of exploitation are recreated on a macro scale as the increasing drive for Westerners, often people of faith, to adopt orphans keeps feeding into, and off of, a global system of poverty, corruption, and mistreatment of women and children. Joyce’s work touches on bigger social issues, like the intersection of capitalism with reproduction, the role of religion in shaping policy, and the way conventional — and even inspirational — narratives of care and charity intersect with old paradigms of oppression and power.

Joyce recently spoke to RH Reality Check about how the movement she chronicles relates to abortion politics and the treatment of biological families of adoptees at home and abroad.

RH Reality Check: Ideologically speaking, how did the concept of adoption as a positive alternative to abortion end up morphing from “Don’t have an abortion, adopt!” rhetoric into this massive movement to actually facilitate adoption on a broad scale?

Kathryn Joyce: Adoption and abortion have long been linked. For years, it’s been presented as a neat, common-ground solution to the abortion debate — something that politicians on the right and left can agree on. For liberal politicians, it offered a way to moderate support for abortion. For conservatives, it was presented as a solution for women who didn’t want to parent, or who couldn’t. It was also framed as an answer to the pro-choice challenge: Who is going to care for all these babies you want women to have?

RHRC: You also address how the post-Roe landscape demographically affected the practice of adoption.

KJ: The real push to increase adoptions came in the last few decades, after the rate of domestic infant relinquishment for adoption dropped, going from around 20 percent of never-married white women in 1972 to closer to 1 percent today. The rates were historically lower for women of color, who were less likely to be pressured to relinquish in pre-Roe days because there was more adoption “demand” for white infants. Today, I think domestic relinquishment rates for Black women are statistically zero. So as demand outstripped “supply,” a lot of organizations became invested in increasing the number of women relinquishing.

RHRC: The capitalist angle strikes me, almost like the “market” for adoption mimics 19th century European imperialism, going to new territories to find “supply” through exploitation.

KJ: Yes, I think you see that overseas as well as here in the United States — the sort of “country-hopping” that happens in inter-country adoption, as adoption booms and busts move from nation to nation, but also in the experiences of U.S. mothers, about whom some organizations wrote multiple reports, trying to figure out how they could encourage more adoptions.

RHRC: Given your contact with people on both sides of the equation, do you think the choice to carry to term and then relinquish is never going to be as common as adoptive parents want it to be, which tips the power relationship?

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Written by Kathy Bougher for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

See all our coverage of Beatriz here.

Petition the El Salvadoran President and Supreme Court for Beatriz’s life here.

On Wednesday, May 15 the Supreme Court of El Salvador will hear testimony from Beatriz, the 22-year-old woman who has petitioned the court to allow her to have a life-saving abortion, a procedure prohibited under all circumstances in El Salvador and punishable by lengthy prison terms. She is pregnant with an anencephalic fetus; it is missing most of its brain and will not survive outside the womb. In addition, Beatriz, the mother of a toddler, suffers from lupus, hypertension, and renal insufficiency. Her doctors at the Maternity Hospital, where she has been for almost a month, advised her that an abortion was necessary to save her life.

“I want to live,” has been Beatriz’s consistent response to her doctors as well as to those who oppose her request.

The court has summoned Beatriz, her lawyers, and her doctors to testify, according to Morena Herrera, president of the Agrupación Ciudadana por la Despenalización del Aborto Terapeutico, Etico and Eugenico (Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Therapeutic, Ethical and Eugenic Abortion) in a phone call with RH Reality Check. The state prosecutor and the Institute for Legal Medicine will also provide testimony. Both oppose her petition for an abortion. Sí a la Vida, a right-to-life group, requested permission to participate, but was denied. Herrera reports that her group learned recently that the director of the Institute for Legal Medicine is married to a member of the board of directors of Sí a la Vida. Although the Supreme Court has the demonstrated capacity to respond to petitions from Salvadoran citizens on other matters within as little as 24 hours, it has stalled for weeks in this matter. At this point it is unknown whether the court will issue a final decision on May 15.

Beatriz’s mother, Delmy, spoke Tuesday at a press conference organized by Herrera and the Citizen Group, saying, “It is now that my daughter needs support and help, not when her health gets even worse…. My daughter wants to live. I don’t want my daughter to die…. Her life is in your hands.” She has written a letter to the court that will be presented on Wednesday.

Beatriz’s petition has ignited controversy and debate on many fronts within El Salvador and around the world. Amnesty International, the United Nations, governments of several countries, and the Interamerican Human Rights Commission strongly support Beatriz. The Catholic Church and so-called right-to-life groups oppose her request.

Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes spoke publicly on the issue for the first time on Monday when, as Herrera explained in her phone call to this writer, feminists confronted him as he inaugurated a new bridge in the town of Suchitoto with banners asking “Mauricio Funes, if Beatriz were your daughter, what would you do?” Funes, the first president from the leftist FMLN party, finally said, “Beatriz has the right to make decisions about her life.” On behalf of the government, he entrusted the case to Dr. María Isabel Rodriguez, minister of health, who has supported Beatriz’s position from the beginning.

At the end of last week the minister reiterated her position that a therapeutic abortion was the “viable, just solution, without a doubt.” The Institute of Legal Medicine conducted its own studies and declared that Beatriz was not in imminent danger and could continue her pregnancy. The Minister called those comments, “uneducated and vulgar.”

Rodriguez reiterated that Beatriz’s life is in danger. She also discredited the report from the Institute for Legal Medicine that was presented to the court: “It is not true that she is not in danger. The lupus that this young woman has is not curable and can’t be changed overnight. We know this disease is systemic, which means that it attacks all the organs, and we can’t know at what moment we’re going to have complications with her.”

As Herrera explained, in a country where until recently even abortion rights supporters were cautious about using the word abortion out loud, student groups at the University of El Salvador have petitioned the school administration to suspend classes tomorrow so that they can attend the massive demonstration planned in support of Beatriz outside the Supreme Court building. Youth groups have participated in the frequent rallies supporting Beatriz.

The Citizen Group and other feminist organizations have maintained a constant presence with rallies, press conferences, and news releases. On Sunday they demonstrated in front of the cathedral with a banner that read “Letting Beatriz Die Offends God.” Sí a la Vida has also been active in Catholic churches, voicing its opposition to Beatriz’s petition and claiming that feminists are using Beatriz to further their agenda. At the same time, Funes states that the government is taking care not to exploit the case for political ends.

Radio de Todas, a feminist radio station in El Salvador, will broadcast the proceedings on Wednesday morning online in Spanish beginning at 8:30 a.m. Central Standard Time.

Written by Adele Stan for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan is part of a dangerous reframing of "religious liberty."

At a gathering of Catholics in his archdiocese last year, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York, uttered a strategic point that would have done Machiavelli proud. The bishops, he said, are perhaps not the church’s best messengers.

“In the public square, I hate to tell you, the days of fat, balding Irish bishops are over,” he told his flock, according to the New York Times, at a diocesan convocation on public policy. Reporting for the Times, Tim Stelloh and Andy Newman wrote of an example he gave the crowd, an apparent reference to the hiring of Helen Alvaré by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1990:

[Dolan] told a story about bishops hiring an “attractive, articulate, intelligent” laywoman to speak against abortion and said it was “the best thing we ever did…”

Dolan, as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), decided this week to operationalize his assessment by hiring Kim Daniels, a former operative for Sarah Palin’s political action committee, as his spokesperson — a new position with a much broader mission than that covered by Alvaré in the 1990s.

An attorney and youthful mother of six who echoes the bishops’ disdain for contraception and abortion, Daniels is a smart cookie with an appealing personality. In other words, an “attractive, articulate, intelligent” laywoman.

When the USCCB announced Daniels’s appointment, the thing that grabbed reporters’ attention was her work in 2010 as an operative for Sarah Palin’s political action committee, SarahPAC — a résumé entry conveniently omitted from the bishops’ announcement about their new hire. If there was any doubt remaining of the bishops’ total alignment with the most right-wing part of the Republican Party, that data point should lay it to rest. But the rest of Daniels’ career is far more interesting — and troubling.

The Reframing of Religious Freedom

Over the course of the last several decades, as reasonable people, including most lay Catholics, increasingly rejected the church’s medieval worldview on women’s rights, human sexuality, and LGBTQ rights, the political power of U.S. bishops has been on the wane. During the debate over health-care reform, President Barack Obama went around the prelates in order to confer some Catholic buy-in on the deal, ultimately winning the approval of a number of highly placed nuns, who signed a letter to that effect, as well as the head of the Catholic Health Association, who also happens to be a Catholic sister.

The bishops were incensed. At that moment, their lack of sway over their own people was revealed for all to see. They needed a new angle, one that could also speak to the hearts of those ordinary Americans who, in the wake of the church’s massive child-sex-abuse scandal, now judged them to be mere mortals, and deeply flawed mortals at that. Enter the Red, White, and Blue.

The success of the Tea Party movement, with its bigoted and misogynist underpinnings dressed in the regalia of patriotism, was apparently not lost on the bishops. On the heels of their humiliating defeat with the Affordable Care Act, the bishops found a new, patriotic-sounding cause to wrap around their attempts to codify prejudice and discrimination as secular law: religious freedom, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Summon the fife and drum!

Trouble is, the bishops’ notion of religious freedom differs a bit from that of the founders, who sought to avoid the establishment of a state religion by promising Americans freedom of worship. What the bishops seek, on the other hand, is the right to impose their religious views on those who do not subscribe to their theology. Any impediment to their totalitarian view is now framed as a breach of their religious freedom. And Kim Daniels has been deeply involved in the advancement of this strategy.

Media-Friendly and Studio Ready Church Ladies

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Written by Editor-in-Chief Jodi Jacobson for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

The Gosnell case shouldn't inspire legislators to crack down on reproductive freedom.

There are two roles anti-choicers like to play for which they are ill-equipped. First, they like to play doctor. And second, they like to play God. In doing so, they spread outright lies about both abortion and contraception to mislead and whip the public into a frenzy about sex, pregnancy, and childbirth. And then, believing themselves to be the righteous ones, they seek to capitalize on their self-created panics to make public health and medical policy for the country based solely on emotion, facts be damned. Their end goal, as they make clear, is to outlaw abortion and contraception no matter the costs to public health, women’s lives, or society writ large.

The trial of Kermit Gosnell provides anti-choicers and their allies with a perfect platform for their efforts. In Gosnell, they have an unethical, unscrupulous criminal acting as a doctor. He preyed on women too poor to seek early, safe abortion care, ran a filthy “clinic,” and conducted illegal abortions during which, it is alleged, some infants were born alive and killed. In their quest to make safe, legal abortion care as inaccessible as possible, anti-choicers are now seeking to sway public policy by conflating safe abortion care with Gosnell’s atrocities, to tar all legitimate providers of safe abortion care as Gosnell clones, and to use a criminal case as a justification to drive legitimate providers out of business.

One recent example of this effort comes courtesy of Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, who, in a column Wednesday, suggested several ways to further diminish access to safe, legal abortion care in the United States through what she calls a “Gosnell amendment.” If you read the piece, it is clear she has no idea what she is talking about.

Rubin, for example, calls for changes in Medicaid but appears not to understand how Medicaid works in the first place. She also calls for changes in federal funding of abortions, but appears not to understand that current law already severely restricts public funding of abortion.

She writes:

First, all Medicaid and other federal support for abortion services should come with caveats—health standards (of the type Pennsylvania refused to issue and enforce) and appropriate training for all personnel. Second, federal taxpayer dollars should not go for late-term abortions.

Let’s start out by making clear that this is the kind of grasping for irrelevant straws I described above (using the existence of a criminal to tar and feather an entire field of professionals who have no relationship to the criminal activity). For one thing, as confirmed in a phone call today to the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, and notwithstanding the fact that what he did was illegal in the first place so the case illustrates nothing about safe abortion care, Gosnell was not receiving Medicaid payments for women seeking abortion. In fact, in 2010, there were only seven abortions in the entire state of Pennsylvania paid for by state tax funds, and no federally funded abortions anywhere in the state that year. As in zero. Zip.

But no mind: Rubin claims that Gosnell proves there are problems with federal Medicaid funding of abortion care, because eliminating Medicaid funding of abortions for any low-income woman under any circumstance is high on the anti-choice agenda and Gosnell gives them a platform for their arguments.

As for regulations and “health standards,” both the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services and state Medicaid agencies already work together both to certify and regulate Medicaid providers of all kinds, and both medical societies and advisory boards at the state and federal level set standards for care. Does this mean there is never any fraud? Of course not: Republican Rick Scott, the current governor of Florida, was implicated in one of the biggest Medicare frauds in the country in the late ’90s, showing that laws on the books are in fact broken until evidence is accumulated to bring a case. It was not lack of law or regulation, but rather lack of enforcement that allowed Gosnell to carry on for so long. Changes to Medicaid would therefore not have prevented and will not prevent past, current, or future quacks or criminals from operating in such a capacity until they are caught, just as homicide laws will never prevent all homicides and laws against arson won’t eliminate arsonists. Laws and regulations are meant both to define and to hopefully reduce criminal activity but will never eliminate it.

Rubin’s suggestion that federal taxpayer dollars should not go for abortions also is a head-scratcher, since the Hyde Amendment already forbids the use of federal funds for abortions except in cases of life endangerment, rape, or incest. This law has guided public funding for abortions for low-income women under joint federal and state programs since 1977. At a minimum, states must cover those abortions that meet the federal exceptions. States also are free to expand coverage of Medicaid funding of abortion for other reasons, using their own funds. Pennsylvania does not offer expanded Medicaid coverage for abortion.

Moreover, the system in Pennsylvania (as in many states) is such that even in cases of rape and incest it is virtually impossible to get reimbursed for a Medicaid-eligible abortion. As Claire Keyes, former director of a clinic in Pennsylvania, told RH Reality Check via email:

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Written by Jon O’Brien for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

At a time when state legislatures continue to break new records for the number of restrictions on reproductive health-care access introduced, passed into law, and placed on ballots, when lawsuits against birth control coverage continue to trickle into the courts, when political candidates can’t even get it right on rape and the White House has repeatedly used abortion and birth control as bargaining chips, those of us who support reproductive autonomy face critical questions. One question should not be, as some have recently posited, whether or not a group adheres to a pro-choice or a reproductive justice frame when doing its work. It should be how each of us, individually and as organizations, can best use our knowledge, strengths, resources, and values to bring about change that makes women’s reproductive autonomy a reality.

Pro-Choice Action

Right now, we need every voice and perspective we can get to speak out loudly, strongly, wherever, and to whomever they can, in whatever language they speak best, to protect rights that many thought were guaranteed. A movement that is monolithic does not use the best everyone has to offer. One that allows all organizations and individuals to identify as they see fit and truly put their passions to work on shared or complementary goals will thrive. We win when we have a definite, common goal that requires real action, and we win when we allow a variety of groups to speak to their own communities with their own voices. We recently saw this in Florida, where women’s organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the League of Women Voters; religious organizations such as Catholics for Choice, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice; and reproductive justice organizations such as the Miami International-Latinas Organizing for Leadership and Advocacy (MI-LOLA) all worked to soundly defeat two ballot measures aimed at curtailing abortion access and real religious liberty.

Unfortunately, some advocates for reproductive health, rights, and justice insist we wordsmith the movement rather than take action. Some folks are paralyzed by semantics, stuck in a vain search for a magic word or phrase that will convince everybody to agree with us. In doing so, the focus is taken off what we believe and what we need to do, and we are reduced to creating word clouds of marketing frames outlining why we must replace the concept of “choice.” “Reproductive justice” has been suggested as this magic phrase.

Both choice and reproductive justice have a place in our battle for women’s autonomy. But one cannot take the place of the other.

At Catholics for Choice, we approach the word “choice” from an ideological standpoint, one that includes justice at its very core — social justice. We are called by our faith to advocate most strongly for policies that protect and lift up all people, particularly the most marginalized and the poorest of the poor. Our religious beliefs compel us to recognize the dignity and rights of all people, who deserve respect and equal access to reproductive health care, no matter their race, color, class, or creed. We cannot settle for any less. Why some people have failed to recognize that justice is an inherent part of what we do is a mystery to us.

We believe, however, that the reproductive justice model is an important piece of the reproductive rights movement. It works for some groups to reach the constituencies that they must reach. It reminds the rest of the movement that we are not, nor should we be, a homogenous steamroller.

As our colleague Loretta Ross, the co-founder and national coordinator of SisterSong, has noted, it was American women of color who first coined the term “reproductive justice” almost 20 years ago, in 1994. They did this to embrace a broader range of concerns that many women of color in the United Sates shared and that were not being addressed by some in the pro-choice movement. They found a phrase to express their unmet needs and through which they could develop solutions. SisterSong continues to highlight these concerns, and we are a stronger movement because of their efforts.

Unfortunately, as others have adopted this framework, some people have chosen to denigrate the language and framework of choice, even sighing a “huge sigh of relief” when others choose to stop identifying as pro-choice. We do not need to tear down each other in order to build ourselves up, and it is misguided to assume that there is a single way to approach a common goal or a single way of viewing the work that we do and why we do it. Those who have dismissed choice have most often misrepresented it. They have pointed to polling data claiming that the number of people calling themselves “pro-choice” is in decline, when most of us already believed that putting “choice” vs. “life” in head-to-head polling is a mindless approach. We’ve long known that Americans have felt that pitting the two terms against each other creates a false dichotomy, and that even those who consider themselves staunchly “pro-life” don’t want to see Roe v. Wade overturned and do support abortion access at least some of the time.

Some have also claimed that Millennials don’t “get” choice, that choice does not reflect what Millennials need to hear in order to support access to reproductive rights. As Jennie Bristow noted in her perceptive essay on the alleged generation war over abortion rights in the United States, “Winning the argument for choice might be difficult today — though it is hard to see why it is more difficult now than in previous decades. What is certain is that younger generations of women, and their daughters, will lose a great deal if we turn our back on the ‘pro-choice label.’” It is, on the one hand, patronizing to assume that young people do not understand what being pro-choice means or must be told something different in order to gain their support for reproductive rights. It is equally troubling that many of those claiming that we need to use something other than choice to speak to Millennials view young people as a problem to be solved rather than a source of energy and people power for our movement.

Young people are the ones most often out canvassing, working phone banks, staffing, and leading our organizations, and they are more supportive of reproductive rights than other generations. They are the ones who are of reproductive age. The supposed “intensity gap” between pro-choice young people and anti-choice young people today largely tracks the so-called “intensity gap” between people of different generations. That perceived lack of involvement does not mean that young people cannot or will not prioritize choice. It does mean that those of us charged with sustaining the movement need to do less talking at young people about how they are the problem. We need to instead offer them real action that all people — young and old — can rally around.

It is not as if reproductive justice itself is not without its challenges. While it is absolutely right for some organizations, we cannot afford to be Pollyannaish in assuming it is right for everybody. In particular, we cannot be dictatorial in charging every group to use the term or pretend that it is inherently superior to choice in its ideology.

Some of the challenges of the reproductive justice framework illustrate why it cannot be a substitute for choice, as a concept or as a practical strategy. They include the following.

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Written by Kathy Bougher for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

The women of El Salvador are denied life-saving access to abortion.

Beatriz wants to live. A 22-year-old Salvadoran from a poor, rural community, Beatriz (a pseudonym to protect privacy) suffers from chronic and severe medical conditions. She is the mother of an infant. And she is roughly 18 weeks pregnant with an anencephalic fetus, a fetus without a brain. Doctors at the Maternity Hospital determined that the pregnancy is life-threatening, and Beatriz requested that Salvadoran medical personnel perform an abortion, but a 1998 law in El Salvador prohibits all abortions, without exception.

The Salvadoran feminist organization Agrupación Ciudadana por la Despenalización del Aborto Terapéutico, Ético y Eugénesico (Citizen Group for the Decriminalization of Therapeutic, Ethical and Eugenic Abortion), which has been working to decriminalize abortion in the country since 2009, petitioned the Salvadoran Supreme Court on April 15 to intervene and to direct medical personnel to provide without fear of criminal prosecution the procedures Beatriz needs to save her life. Under current law, both Beatriz and any medical personnel involved in an abortion would face criminal charges and prison time. The court responded with a temporary directive that medical personnel provide the care necessary to guarantee her life and health while they make a decision regarding the petition for an abortion. Medical personnel were also directed to present to the court within five days a report on the condition of the mother and the fetus to inform their deliberations.

Within the past few days Amnesty International has initiated a petition asking for life-saving medical care, including an abortion; the United Nations has spoken; and the Salvadoran Minister of Health, Dr. Maria Isabel Rodriguez, has requested that the Supreme Court approve the request. Dr. Rodriguez emphasized that Beatriz’s kidney function continues to deteriorate as the pregnancy advances, and that the public health system is ready to perform an abortion. The Salvadoran Attorney General for Human Rights also supports the request.

At a press conference the Agrupación convened in San Salvador on April 18, Esther Major, an Amnesty International representative in El Salvador, characterized the way Beatriz is being treated as “nothing less than cruel and inhuman.”

“While we are talking, while the Court is thinking and the government is delaying, Beatriz is suffering. … The Salvadoran government has clear obligations, international as well as domestic, to protect Beatriz’s life, and to assure that Beatriz can access vital treatment as soon as possible.”

Legal reforms in 1998 in El Salvador, promulgated by conservative religious forces, outlawed  abortion without exception. Previously it was permitted if the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, the mother’s life was in danger, or the fetus was not viable. In addition, a constitutional amendment was added declaring that life begins at conception, which means that prosecutors can charge women who seek abortions with aggravated homicide, punishable by 30 to 50 years in prison, rather than the lesser crime of abortion, which carries a term of two to eight years.

Threats of prosecution and prison terms are not to be taken lightly under the 1998 law. The Agrupación has mounted legal and educational campaigns to secure the release of six women from prison. Since no comprehensive data exist in the country, the Agrupación is conducting its own research, which reveals that currently at least 24 women are serving prison terms of up to 40 years for abortion or aggravated homicide related to abortion charges.

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Written by Jessica Mason Pieklo for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

A court ruled communications with Tiller's killer to be covered by ministerial protections.

On Friday U.S. District Judge J. Thomas Marten handed anti-choice terrorist Angel Dillard a win, ruling Dillard doesn’t have to disclose “ministerial discussions” she had with Scott Roeder, the man convicted of murdering abortion provider Dr. George Tiller.

As reported in the Topeka Capital-Journal, Marten’s ruling reversed an earlier decision that Dillard’s communications with Roeder were not protected by the ministerial exception because Dillard is not an ordained minister. But Marten held that Dillard was acting as a lay minister and was therefore entitled to the protection. It’s an incredible expansion of the privilege and one which the radical anti-choice community is no doubt taking notice.

Dillard is accused of sending a threatening letter to Dr. Mila Means who was training to provide abortion services after Tiller’s murder. According to the Department of Justice complaint against Dillard, the letter to Means mentioned Tiller’s assassination and warned Means against providing abortion services in Wichita.

In the same ruling Marten said Dillard must disclose communications she had with another inmate, Robert Campbell. Campbell claims Dillard hired him to stalk Means, while Dillard denies this and claims Campbell is trying to blackmail her.

But just because those communications must be disclosed does not guarantee they will make it into evidence in the trial, currently slated for October. At the time of trial they can be excluded from evidence if a judge decides the statements are too unreliable, a fact judge Marten made clear in his ruling. At issue in the case is whether the letter Dillard wrote to Means was a “true threat” in violation of the federal law designed to protect access to abortion clinics. In the letter, Dillard allegedly wrote that thousands of people from across the nation were scrutinizing Means’ background and would know “your habits and routines.”

The letter is chilling. In it Dillard writes, “They know where you shop, who your friends are, what you drive, where you live,” the letter said. “You will be checking under your car every day — because maybe today is the day someone places an explosive under it.”

The Dillard trial has shed light on the violent underworld of radical anti-abortion activists and the last thing this community needs is any additional enabling by the federal courts. But that’s exactly what this ruling does. If someone like Dillard can claim to be a minister so as to shield communications with convicted assassins like Scott Roeder who have admitted to wanting to instigate more deadly violence against clinic workers, then we can expect to see a lot more ministers among the most violent actors in the anti-abortion movement.

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Written by Tara Murtha for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

A journalist looks at the barriers to reporting on women's reproductive freedom.

In recent days, amidst cries of a media “blackout,” a number of journalists have admitted to either missing or dismissing the story of Dr. Kermit Gosnell over the past two years. As one of the many journalists who has been covering the Gosnell story since it broke in early 2011, all I can say is: We tried to get the story out there. But more importantly, this politics-of-media framework distracts from the circuitous politics that enabled, and resulted from, Gosnell’s actual crimes and the women who were affected.

What Media Blackout?

After spending much of 2010 interviewing 58 witnesses, in January 2011 the Philadelphia district attorney’s office published a 281-page report accusing Kermit Gosnell of grotesque, depraved crimes.

There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs. Semi-conscious women scheduled for abortions were moaning in the waiting room or the recovery room, where they sat on dirty recliners covered with bloodstained blankets. All the women had been sedated by unlicensed staff — long before Gosnell arrived at the clinic — and staff members could not accurately state what medications or dosages they had administered to the waiting patients. Many of the medications in inventory were past their expiration dates.

Fetal remains were stored in milk jugs and cat food containers. A janitor admitted he routinely pulled fetal parts out of pipes. Unlicensed, untrained staff, including a high school student, pumped cheap, powerful drugs into the veins of women who were chemically coaxed into zombie-like stupors that sometimes lasted days.

Last week, Kristen Powers published an op-ed in USA Today that sparked a Twitter shame campaign, directly asking prominent national journalists why they hadn’t covered the case. And it worked. Now, more than three years after the raid and more than two years after the grand jury report, some national journalists who ignored the case entirely are suddenly wildly interested.

After years of coverage from outlets in Philadelphia and Harrisburg, outlets focused on women’s health issues, and yes, mainstream media outlets, apparently all it took to catch the attention of writers such as Slate‘s Dave Weigel, The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf, and Jeffrey Goldberg of Bloomberg was to target their collective egos — specifically, their insecurity about being perceived as having a liberal bias.

Weigel, one of the first writers to develop a sudden interest in Gosnell after Powers’ piece, wrote that when he read about Gosnell back in 2011, he didn’t “see a political story to chase.”

At 3801 Lancaster, the site of Gosnell’s clinic, patients chose their medicine and painkillers a la carte. In other words, the more cash a patient could give Gosnell, the more painkiller she could get. The poorer the patient, the more she would suffer. With all the talk about the Affordable Care Act, you’d think that such starkly stratified access to quality health care would be an interesting political story. The story touches on poverty, abortion, civil rights, state rights, healthcare, increasing inequality and race, to name a few topics of political interest that, if nothing else, came up quite a bit during the presidential election.

What Weigel really meant, of course, is that he didn’t see a story worth chasing. “Bored media,” indeed.

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Written by Erin Grant for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

See all our coverage of the Kermit Gosnell case here.

The Gosnell case highlights issues of class, race and access to reproductive healthcare.

Some reporters and media critics have claimed that not enough is being written about the trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, an illegal abortion provider who operated far outside the bounds of legitimate medical practice. In a recent column for USA Today, for example, Kirsten Powers claimed that the case is not receiving the attention that it deserves.

As a resident of Philadelphia and an abortion provider, I beg to differ. Gosnell’s atrocities have been covered widely. But what haven’t been covered as much as they should be are the reasons why the women who turned to Gosnell for abortion care were disproportionately low-income women of color who felt they had no other place to turn.

Whether you are a supporter or opponent of women’s health rights, or just interested in things related to reproductive justice, you should know that the Gosnell case has been written about steadily since February 2010, when Gosnell’s clinic was raided by the Drug Enforcement Administration and his license was suspended. The story was widely covered in the national mainstream media and by women’s health advocates in 2011 when the case’s Grand Jury report came out. So while the trial is news, there is little to no information that has not already been reported about Gosnell up to this point.

Indeed, when Google renders about 9,000 hits in 0.15 sec using the search term “Kermit Gosnell,” it’s hard to say this story lacks attention.

But this case is about more than just a practitioner who did bad things. His case embodies the “off-the-grid” abortions we can expect to see in states like Mississippi and North Dakota, where anti-choice harassment and regulations purposefully pass to close all clinics providing legal, safe abortion care mean only one clinic is left in each state, and even those are under threat of being shut down.

Gosnell’s “Women’s Medical Society” was not an unknown entity. In fact, it was surrounded by well-known and respected hospitals and clinics. But because they adhere to safe abortion care practices and because health care is expensive generally, the cost of care at these clinics was often out of reach to women who, without public assistance, don’t have and cannot afford regular health care of any kind.

Gosnell’s operation bears no resemblance to safe abortion care. His entire “practice” was illegal: There were untrained medical “assistants” and abortions performed at viability without medical cause. His “clinic” was unsanitary and unsafe and what Carole Joffe has referred to as a “chamber of horrors.”

Moreover, in a gruesome quid pro quo, Gosnell charged on a “sliding scale” for anesthesia; you got more anesthesia the more money you paid, so the poorer you were, the more pain you suffered. Women who went to Gosnell may have known of other places to receive abortion care, but they were either beyond the legal time limit when they could get an abortion in the state, or they could not afford safe abortion care.

What this case reveals is that the cost of dignity in health care has risen, and the attack on poor women intensified.

These realities underscore the real missing headline. In 2011, the Grand Jury report stated, “We think the reason no one acted is because the women in question were poor and of color.” Almost all of Gosnell’s patients are identified as poor women of color. Still, the mainstream media is largely not paying attention to the issues of race and class inherent in this story, which contribute to the reasons why Gosnell could thrive. Poor, under-insured women are not getting acceptable health care of any kind, but because this story is about abortion, these usually invisible women are suddenly the subject of public pity by anti-choice activists. They were made to suffer until many lives were taken.

In an age of rising stigma, discrimination, widespread misinformation, and violence against providers, facts get trampled. What Gosnell underscores is a point that women’s health and rights advocates have long asserted: Women who need to terminate a pregnancy will go to desperate lengths to do so, and by isolating abortion care, we drive women to back-alley providers.

Anti-choice conservatives know this but seem not to care. Mississippi state Rep. Lester “Bubba” Carpenter (R-Burnsville) put it bluntly at an Alcorn County GOP meeting:

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Written by Amanda Marcotte for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.

See all our coverage of the Kermit Gosnell case here.

Kermit Gosnell goes to trial soon for his torture of vulnerable women.

Kermit Gosnell, the sadistic monster who exploited lack of access to safe abortion care among poor and immigrant women to both torture women and kill actual babies, is finally on trial and anti-choicers are having a feeding frenzy. Unable to muster actual compassion for Gosnell’s victims, anti-choicers got right to work seeking ways to exploit his crimes to further reduce access to safe, legal abortion — and to create more Gosnells in the future. In order to achieve the goal of driving more women to monsters like Gosnell and away from safe, legal clinics, anti-choicers are telling more lies than usual. (Which hardly seemed possible, but once you wind them up, they can really get going.)  I don’t usually feel comfortable speaking for pro-choicers as a whole, but in this case, I believe we’re all on the same page, so I thought I’d use this space to get the facts straight.

So here is a list of the facts about how pro-choicers are reacting to the Gosnell case. Anyone who denies these facts is lying, and you have to ask yourself why they feel the need to lie to make their case.

Pro-choicers condemn Kermit Gosnell and hope that he sees justice. When the story broke, there was a rush of feminist journalists who covered the case and the tone was universal condemnation and advice on how to prevent such crimes in the future. A quick search of RH Reality Check demonstrates that, and you can read other feminist takes around the internet. For people who aren’t trying to prop up lies to confuse the situation, this universal pro-choice condemnation of Gosnell was entirely predictable. Not only do we believe he is a murderer and likely a sadist, but we believe he exploited the desperation of low-income women who need abortions but struggle to afford quality care. We agree with the prosecutors who wrote that Gosnell “ran a criminal enterprise, motivated by greed.” As advocates of quality health care for women, we have tried, sadly in vain much of the time, to remind people who simple fixes, such as offering Medicaid coverage of abortion, could take the issue of cost off the table and make it easier for women not to resort to illegal operators who use unsanitary and sadistic methods, like Gosnell.

Pro-choicers are the ones trying to prevent future Gosnells. Gosnell made money exploiting desperate women, so the way to prevent future monsters like him is to make sure women aren’t desperate. Pro-choicers raise money for abortion funds, so more women can afford quality care. They set up volunteer-staffed help lines to get women through the process of seeing a reputable provider. They demand an end to the Hyde Amendment, so low-income women can use Medicaid to pay for quality providers. As pro-choice blogger PZ Myers wrote, Gosnell “could get by with criminally substandard treatment because our government has been actively destroying the ethical and competent competition.” We try to keep the ethical competition afloat to keep men like Gosnell from getting business. Which should not be conflated, as lying anti-choicers are doing, with trying to stop regulation.

Pro-choicers support holding abortion clinics — and all medical facilities of any type — to a high safety standard. Pro-choicers want women to receive safe, clean, ethical abortion care. We fully and completely support government regulations of all medical facilities aimed at making sure patients get this kind of care. We are so supportive of safe, clean abortion care that we have our own organization called the National Abortion Federation to certify quality clinics. (NAF unsurprisingly refused to certify Gosnell, even though he cleaned his clinic up and pretended to have medically trained staff in an effort to trick them.)  The key here is that we believe that abortion clinics should be subject to the regulations like other medical facilities, and that those regulations should be aimed at making sure women get quality care.

Regulations demanded by anti-choicers have nothing to do with securing quality care for women.

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