Imani is a recovering attorney turned political blogger and women's rights activist. She was the publisher of Angry Black Lady Chronicles (winner of the 2012 Black Weblog Award for Best Political Blog) from 2009-2013. She is currently Editor-at-Large of This Week in Blackness (TWiB!) and co-host of TWiB! in the Morning. Her work has been featured at The Grio.com, AlterNet, and she appears regularly on the Hal Sparks Radio Program on WCPT in Chicago.
I would argue that the new proposed rules don’t change anything for women. At all. They don’t restrict contraception access, nor do they take away contraception access previously available.
There’s an old saying: A hit dog will holler. That phrase came to mind as I read Personhood USA’s unhinged response to the new study conducted by Lynn Paltrow of National Advocates for Pregnant Women and Professor Jeanne Flavin of Fordham University. Never mind the facts, Personhood USA makes up its own.
I have grown to hate the term “judicial activism” because it is frequently used by conservatives to criticize court decisions they simply don’t like. Still, there are few alternative phrases that accurately describe the Alabama Supreme Court’s decision in the consolidated cases of Amanda Kimbrough and Hope Ankrom, two women who were swept up in the Alabama judiciary’s zeal to promote an anti-choice personhood agenda by redefining the word “child” in Alabama’s chemical endangerment statute, so that it now applies to pregnant women who uses any amount of controlled substances, whether prescribed by a doctor or not.
Conservative critics have criticized Justice Sotomayor’s decision to reject Hobby Lobby’s request for an emergency injunction on the birth control benefit under the ACA. The question before her was: Are Hobby Lobby’s rights so indisputably clear that an emergency injunction was required? She answered that question correctly: no.
As women’s rights and pro-choice activists continue to sharply criticize the ongoing attempts to grant personhood rights to eggs, it is important to examine what “personhood” actually means, what fetal personhood laws would mean for our movement, and how personhood activists are getting it all wrong.
A perhaps unintended consequence of Administration compromises on the birth control benefit is to concede that insurance coverage of contraception can be “participation in sin.” Women’s rights activists and attorneys must adjust and re-frame the argument to address this new development in birth control benefit litigation.
For the first time, a court has held that the religious rights of corporations and persons are not co-extensive. Individuals may avail themselves of constitutional protections of religious freedoms, but secular corporations may not.
It seems outlandish to claim that the Catholic bishops’ own crusade against contraception is anti-Catholic. Still, arguments that this position is anti-Catholic seem not only well-founded but reasonable, whereas the Catholic bishops’ incessant interfering in American women’s lady-business is spectacularly unreasonable.
Today, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Fisher v. Texas, the first case on affirmative action to be heard by the court in almost a decade. If the Supreme Court strikes down the UT Plan, both students of color and white students will lose out.
Late last month, Honorable Carole Jackson in the Eastern District of Missouri issued a forceful rebuke of the arguments being made by the various religious organizations that are filing lawsuits against the Department of Health and Human Services alleging that the birth control benefit infringes upon their religious liberty.
