Yet another ruling against states' rights, women's rights, and medical privacy rights.
Pam Belluck in The New York Times:
"A federal appeals court issued a ruling on Friday temporarily halting the ability of abortion providers to prescribe pills using telemedicine and send them to patients by mail, blocking what has become a major avenue for women seeking abortions in recent years.
...
The court order, citing Louisiana’s claims that making pills available by mail has allowed patients there to access the medication despite the state’s near-total abortion ban, said that “Louisiana has shown that it is irreparably harmed without a stay.”
Me: fuck you, Louisiana.
Let's talk irreparable harms.
Louisiana leads the nation in maternal mortality (source: Axios).
The only state as bad as Louisiana for infant mortality is Arkansas. (source: CDC)
Louisiana is 5th in the nation for the number of women murdered by men, often their domestic partners (source: Partners for Family Health).
From 1999 to 2019, Louisiana's child death rate from assault was 2x the national average (source: Center for Child Wellbeing).
Meanwhile, more than 4000 Louisiana children are in foster care (source: Louisiana Dept. of Children & Family Services)
and 19% of Louisiana children, around 200,000 of them, live in poverty (source: Louisiana Illuminator).
More from the NYT article:
"After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, a wave of politically conservative states, including Louisiana, implemented abortion bans. In response, a number of states that support abortion rights passed shield laws to protect the ability of abortion providers to prescribe pills by telemedicine and ship them to patients in states with abortion bans.
Under shield laws, more than 100,000 patients per year in states with abortion bans have been receiving abortion pills through the mail. A few shield-law providers have been targets of criminal charges or civil actions from Louisiana and Texas, in cases that legal experts believe are setting up a constitutional showdown over whether states must honor one another’s abortion laws.”
...
"[L]egal experts say that a court ruling that dictates decisions for a federal agency sets a precedent that could open the door for many other states to challenge federal agencies if they disagree with their policies and regulation."
Me: gee, what federal regulations will racist, religious bigot, homophobic & transphobic states stampede to interfere with? How about any damn laws they perceive as protecting the rights of anyone who isn't a straight white Christian-identifying cisgender man?
This is part of the DJT.2 / magat / Heritage Foundation regime's Project 2025 agenda. It's right there in the document, multiple times. The HF wants no abortion rights, anywhere, ever. And its tools throughout the country, motivated by Christian nationalist dogma and the ever-popular "protect the children" whine, while gutting laws that actually protect living children, like the ones that provide education and healthcare and housing assistance, will do whatever it takes - including interfere with the right of states to regulate themselves in all ways not specified as functions of the federal government BY THE CONSTITUTION.
Oh, and let's not forget, the best way to prevent abortions - putting a condom on every penis - just got more expensive, thanks to the pointless and unprovoked war that's costing billions and that Congress has yet to even pretend they want to rein in.
Every elected Republican in the US needs to be voted out.
If a Republican represents you, let them know that their complicity in the destruction of civil rights in the US will be remembered.
And if you want to throw my paragraph about irreparable harms at them, be my guest.