Five Facts To Remember As Anti-Choice Activists Launch Attacks Against ‘Webcam Abortions’

Abortion opponents have rushed to introduce a slew of new abortion restrictions in the 2013 legislative session, attacking reproductive rights from all angles. But it’s not just about restricting access to existing medical procedures. Anti-choice activists are also looking ahead to the future, attempting to prevent medical technology from advancing to better accommodate women’s reproductive care.

Even though telemedical abortion services — which rely on new technology to allow doctors to meet with patients over video conferences, and distribute abortion pills with a remote control — can help expand reproductive care to women who wouldn’t be able to access it otherwise, abortion opponents are scaling a coordinated attack against it. Decrying “webcam abortions” as an unsafe medical procedure, despite the significant evidence to the contrary, anti-abortion lawmakers are increasingly advocating legislation to outlaw the practice. Here are five facts to keep in mind as the anti-choice community gears up for this fight:

1. Telemedicine is increasingly becoming a routine medical practice, and abortion is the only type of telehealth procedure that is tightly restricted. Telehealth, which first began being used in the 1960s to treat astronauts in space, has advanced over the past few decades to become a standard medical practice. In the past five years, telemedicine’s reach has quadrupled to treat 10 million Americans. The federal government has adopted the practice to treat chronically ill veterans. According to the chief executive officer of the American Telemedicine Association, abortion is the only area where lawmakers have restricted telemedicine. As Jordan Goldberg, the state advocacy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, explained to Bloomberg, “There is a very clear division: Women are different, women who are attempting to access medication abortion are different.”

2. Nearly 95 percent of women who have telemedical abortions feel “very satisfied” with the procedure. Several studies have proven that telemedical abortions are safe and effective. Despite anti-choice activists’ insistence that women must be face-to-face with their doctors, there is no difference between the women who visit a doctor’s office for a follow-up appointment after an abortion and the women who simply call to follow up instead. And 94 percent of women who terminate a pregnancy with the help of video technology report they feel “very satisfied” with their procedure.

3. Restricting telemedical abortions disproportionately hurts low-income women in rural areas. Women who live in rural areas typically lack access to nearby abortion providers, and low-income women in particular often can’t afford the transportation to the closest health clinic. That problem is exacerbated by the mounting number of restrictions imposed on abortion providers, which narrows the pool of available abortion doctors even further. But after Iowa piloted the nation’s first telemedical abortion program, rural women’s abortion access significantly increased.

4. Allowing health clinics to practice telemedicine decreases the number of second-trimester abortions. If women in rural areas have more readily available options to access the reproductive care they need, they won’t have to put off having an abortion until they can travel to a surgical abortion clinic. The case study in Iowa proved that expanding telemedical abortion services can help lower second-trimester abortions. While abortion is still a very safe procedure when it is performed in the second trimester, earlier abortions do have a slightly lower chance of complications — and, of course, women who decide to terminate a pregnancy should not be forced to wait months to have the voluntary medical procedure.

5. Most of the states that are restricting telemedical abortions don’t offer those services in the first place. At least ten states have banned the use of telehealth services to provide abortion care over the past several years, and another five are considering passing legislation to do so this year. But Bloomberg points out that telemedical abortions weren’t even being offered in the majority of those states the first place; Iowa is the sole state where lawmakers are considering a ban that would restrict a procedure that is already in place. The anti-choice community — led by Americans United for Life, the anti-abortion group that drafted the language for the telemedicine bans — is working proactively to prevent the expansion of telemedical abortion services, particularly through indirect abortion restrictions that would require doctors to show women an ultrasound in person.

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Three December Facts That Prove ‘Uncertainty’ Isn’t Plaguing The Economy

In recent months, as the United States approached the so-called “fiscal cliff,” lawmakers and business executives argued that the supposed uncertainty brought on by the cliff’s combined automatic spending cuts and tax increases was depressing America’s economic growth. It has made a convenient narrative for chief executives who want to cut government spending and corporate taxes and institute policies more favorable to their companies.

Even in the wake of the deal to avert the fiscal cliff, which adds certainty to tax rates if not to spending cuts, CEOs are making the same argument. There is only one problem: it doesn’t appear to be true. Three indicators from December — job growth, holiday sales, and housing — prove that the uncertainty argument doesn’t hold water:

JOBS REPORT: The economy added 155,000 jobs in December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly report released this morning. That was in line with projections and equal to the monthly average over the last year. Hourly earnings also rose, and the unemployment rate remained constant from November. In all, it offered no indication that the supposed uncertainty surrounding the end-of-year fiscal cliff drove down hiring over the month.

HOLIDAY SALES: Holiday sales over Thanksgiving weekend rose 13 percent in stores and online, not far from the 16 percent rise over the same weekend in 2011. And despite forecasts in mid-December that holiday sales were slumping, retailers reported a 4.5 percent jump that actually beat earlier projections. Auto manufacturers, meanwhile, had their strongest sales month since 2007.

HOUSING: Housing prices continued to rise in October (the latest data available) according to recent reports. The S&P/Case Shiller index showed that prices rose 0.7 percent, beating the 0.5 percent increase projected by economists. In the 20 cities the index follows, prices rose 4.3 percent from October 2011. The December jobs report also showed that 30,000 construction jobs were created last month, another indication that the housing market has rebounded. “The housing turnaround continues,” the Washington Post’s Jim Tankersley tweeted. “It’s driving job growth now.”

Of course, “uncertainty” is really just the CEOs’ way of asking Congress for corporate tax cuts and massive spending cuts. But their preferred budget policies have done plenty to slow down the economy. The public sector shed another 13,000 jobs in December, and it has lost more than 600,000 jobs since the end of the recession. Nonpartisan agencies from the Congressional Budget Office to the International Monetary Fund, meanwhile, have warned Congress about the perils of further spending cuts.

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Obama’s Continuing Assault on the Law, History, and Facts

In the wake of President Obama’s moronic and widely-lampooned comments on judicial review yesterday, President Obama offered the following lame (and incorrect) walkback today:

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, first of all, let me be very specific. We have not seen a Court overturn a law that was passed by Congress on a economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce — a law like that has not been overturned at least since Lochner.  Right?  So we’re going back to the ’30s, pre New Deal.

And the point I was making is that the Supreme Court is the final say on our Constitution and our laws, and all of us have to respect it, but it’s precisely because of that extraordinary power that the Court has traditionally exercised significant restraint and deference to our duly elected legislature, our Congress.  And so the burden is on those who would overturn a law like this.

The President, of course, is once again either displaying complete ignorance or cynical hackery. Our federal Congress, per the constitution, is a Congress of enumerated powers. It may only do the things which it is authorized to do under Article 1, Section 8. The onus is always on Congress to demonstrate that its actions have fallen within one of its enumerated powers, not on a person challenging an act of Congress to demonstrate that Congress has acted without those powers. However, more importantly, as Powerline pointed out, Obama has once again also gotten his history wrong:

 Is there any truth to Obama’s claim that the Supreme Court hasn’t invalidated any statutes that are “economic” and relate to “commerce” since Lochner v. New York, which was in 1905? Of course not. To name just a few examples a great deal more recent than 1905, the Court ruled unconstitutional provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that had permitted only “for cause” removal of members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in 2010; the 1990 Mushroom Promotion, Research and Consumer Information Act in 2001 (this case was actually quite similar to Obamacare because the Court held unconstitutional provisions that required mushroom growers to contribute to mushroom promotion programs); provisions of the Patent and Plant Variety Remedy Clarification Act, the Trademark Remedy Clarification Act, and the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act in 1992; the Harbor Maintenance Tax Act in 1998; the Transfer Act which authorized the transfer of operating control of Washington National Airport and Dulles International Airport from the Department of Transportation to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority in 1991; and many, many more dating back to 1905.

Obama’s bungling on this (which has yet to be called a “gaffe” or more properly “a series of lies” by anyone I’ve yet seen in the media) prompted the Fifth Circuit yesterday to ask a DOJ lawyer who was litigating a case concerning Obamacare to clarify whether the DOJ was now taking the position that the federal judiciary did not have the power to overturn Obamacare. Some folks on the left went absolutely apopleptic over this, because it was an unusual event. Mostly, however, that is because most lawyers aren’t cursed with clients who are dumb enough to say, on the news, that the court currently deciding their case has no legitimate authority to do so. As was pointed out at Hot Air, Obama is the head of the DOJ and the Fifth Circuit was entitled to know if Obama’s statements signaled a change in the government’s position during this litigation.

One final point is in order here, which is to clarify for President Obama what is meant by an activist judiciary. An activist judiciary is not one that strikes down laws passed by Congress. An activist judiciary is one that strikes down laws passed by Congress for reasons that cannot be fairly said to be contained within the text of the Constitution, or more properly one that invents law from the bench.

Allow me to helpfully illustrate. Most conservatives were in favor (generally speaking) of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, which was  passed with broad, bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress. When the Supreme Court struck this act down, I don’t recall any conservative accusing the Court of engaging in judicial activism, because the Court’s reason for striking the bill down was firmly rooted in the text of the Constitution. By way of contrast, an excellent example of judicial activism would be virtually every SCOTUS Eighth Amendment decision for the last 65 years. The plain text of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments indicate that the government can constitutionally take a person’s life (so long as he or she is afforded due process of law). At the time these amendments were enacted, capital punishment was virtually the uniform punishment for all felonies. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court has taken it upon itself to declare the death penalty unconstitutional for every crime other than murder, despite the fact that neither the text of the constitution nor history compels this result. At one point, the Supreme Court actually declared that the death penalty was unconstitutional, despite the fact that the constitution explicitly provides for the death penalty. This is what is meant by “judicial activism,” not “striking down statutes that were passed by Congress.”

It would be helpful, if the President wants to debate using conservative terms, if he took the time to understand what they meant.

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