The Assault on Womens Sexual and Reproductive Rights

[Happy_Go_Lucky]

[Medusa]

OMFG.

I'm SO FUCKING PISSED OFF.

So here is the article talking about about Mississippi Rennie Gibbs giving birth to a stillborn daughter and the medical examiner finding that the death was a "homicide" due to cocaine toxicity.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...omen-criminals

Today, this case came up in a discussion at work in a very casual space at lunch. Someone was pontificating about how this "crackhead" deserves to rot in jail for "killing her baby" and proceeded to go on and on about how it was her "responsibility as a Mother to bring this child into the world".

The person then went on a rant about how pregnant women should be charged with crimes when their child is born with "preventable medical issues".

I looked at her (yes, a fucking WOMAN was saying this shit) and said, "So, if I get pregnant and my child is born with a predisposition to diabetes then clearly I should be in jail for eating twinkies during my pregnancy."

She actually looked at me and said, "Well...yes!"

So basically, women are fucking incubators and there are actual real live fucking people in this world who want to charge women with fucking CRIMES for not being a good brood mare.

Talk about a fucking Margaret Atwood world.

Gross.

[deedarino]

Sometimes, I am truly afraid for the future.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014...rty-analogies/

Whenever the subject material of an abstinence-only lesson is reported in the media, Americans are typically shocked to hear what kids are hearing in their classes or at their school assemblies. In addition to withholding valuable information about preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, some of these courses also rely on harmful shame-based attitudes about human sexuality to impart negative messages to the 95 percent of Americans who have sex before marriage.
Here are five common analogies that abstinence-only curricula use to teach youth that becoming sexually active will make them worthless — and five good reasons that more states should enact comprehensive sex education requirements:

1. Dirty chocolate.
Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that a school district in Mississippi uses a Peppermint Patty in its sex ed classes. Allegedly, students are asked to unwrap the chocolate and pass it around to see how dirty it becomes after being touched by multiple people. A spokesperson from the school district says that while that lesson was part of a state-approved curriculum that passed three years ago, the “dirty chocolate” lesson is not currently being implemented. Nonetheless, there’s some evidence that this analogy isn’t unique to that particular district. Other internet commenters recall doing the same Peppermint Patty exercise in their own classes. Others did the “dirty chocolate” lesson with a Hershey Kiss.

2. Used tape.
Tape is another popular tool to demonstrate how sexually active teens become “unclean.” In these demonstrations, a piece of tape is affixed to a student’s arm, then removed, and repeated with several other students. This lesson is supposed to illustrate that, just like tape loses its ability to form a tight bond after coming into contact with multiple people, it’s hard to have an emotionally fulfilling relationship after having multiple sexual partners. Sometimes participants’ wrists are taped together to drive home the point further.

3. Chewed up gum.
Last year, a school district in Texas made headlines after some parents complained about a middle school curriculum that encouraged teachers to tell kids that having sex makes them like a used toothbrush or a chewed up piece of gum. Like the other examples on this list, that’s a popular analogy. Elizabeth Smart — the kidnapping and sexual assault victim who was held in captivity for nine months — famously pointed out emphasizing the importance of purity can make rape victims feel dirty and worthless, and described hearing the same lesson about chewed up gum when she was younger.

4. A cup of spit.
“Drink the spit” is an exercise that requires students to pass around a cup and spit in it. Then, students are asked if they would choose to drink that cup. The idea is the same as the chocolate or the tape lessons — having multiple sexual partners, and subsequently exchanging bodily fluids with multiple people, is undesirable. Sometimes the symbolism of this lesson gets pretty explicit. For instance, one variation involves pouring the cups of spit into an empty glass pitcher placed next to a pitcher of clean water. Students are asked to which pitcher they would like their “future husband” or “future wife” to come from.

5. A rose with no petals.
In this lesson, a teacher is instructed to “hold up a beautiful rose.” The rose is passed around the classroom, and each student is asked to remove a petal. Then, when nothing is left except for a thorny stem, the teacher explains that each petal symbolizes a sexual relationship, and this is what happens when people choose to give away the most personal part of themselves. “Ask: Of what value is the rose now?… The rose represents someone who participates in casual sex,” one curriculum instructs.
***
Abstinence-only programs have received over $1.75 billion in federal funding since the creation of the Title V State Abstinence Education Grant Program, which was first attached to a provision in the 1996 welfare reform bill and has been periodically renewed since then. After this funding ballooned under George W. Bush’s administration, President Barack Obama eliminated Title V when he first took office. But during the political fight over the health reform law, Republicans forced through an amendment to Obamacare that restored funding for abstinence programs.

Some lawmakers continue to fight to end abstinence-only programs for good. At the end of last year, Democrats in the House introduced the “Repealing Ineffective and Incomplete Abstinence-Only Program Funding Act of 2013,” a measure that the same group of lawmakers has repeatedly — and unsuccessfully — attempted to push through.

[Kobi]

The U.S. Supreme Court just made it harder for women to visit their doctor’s office in peace — but we won’t let them win.

Today the Court overturned a Massachusetts buffer zone law, which since 2007 had kept protestors away from the immediate entrances of women’s health centers. Today’s ruling means that staff and patients simply trying to get in for health care could now be met with signs, shouts, and sneers right in their faces.

“This decision shows a troubling level of disregard for American women, who should be able to make carefully considered, private medical decisions without running a gauntlet of harassing and threatening protesters.” —Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

The case, McCullen v. Coakley, challenged a 2007 law in Massachusetts that established a 35-foot zone around health centers in which no protests or demonstrations were permitted during operating hours.

In today’s decision, the Supreme Court said the Massachusetts law violates the First Amendment — mostly because it includes a public sidewalk. Shockingly, Court said that the protesters seek only “to engage in personal, caring, consensual conversations with women about various alternatives.”

Let’s Look at the Facts

The 2007 law aimed to strike a balance between patient safety and free speech while helping ensure that women could get medical care without the close-up intimidation and harassment of anti-abortion protestors who had caused chaos in the past.

Before An Act Relative to Public Safety passed in Massachusetts in 2007, protesters stood shoulder to shoulder, blocking the doorway of reproductive health centers. But that’s not all. The protesters obstructed and took pictures of cars trying to enter health center driveways; dressed up as police officers in order to obtain patients’ and staff members’ personal identifying information; screamed at patients and staff; and even touched their bodies.

After the 2007 law, there was a peaceful coexistence: Protesters still got out their message, but Massachusetts women had a few short seconds of calm before walking into our doors.

Did we mention that buffer zones are not unique to health centers? Funerals and polling places have had them for years. In fact, the Supreme Court itself has a buffer zone around its 252-by-98-foot marble plaza.

Buffer Zone Background

State and local buffer zone laws for reproductive health care centers in particular came about after an era of unprecedented violence against the facilities. In the 1980s, extremists who opposed abortion initiated an epidemic of firebombing, vandalism, burglary, death threats, and assault across the nation.

In response, Congress made it a federal crime to use force to intimidate or interfere with reproductive health care providers and patients — that’s the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE). That law is still in place. Moving beyond FACE, states and many municipalities across the country created buffer zone laws for women’s health centers.

Planned Parenthood patients and staff will continue to be protected through FACE, as well as from state and local patient protection statutes across the country. However, many of the state and local buffer zone laws operate differently from one another. Moreover, one state and nine localities have ordinances like the Massachusetts law (with a fixed-distance buffer zone) that are at risk if challenged.

What Planned Parenthood is Doing

In Massachusetts, Planned Parenthood will work with the governor, the attorney general’s office, and local law enforcement on new legal remedies to protect women’s ability to access health care with dignity and respect. Already, more than 100 people have signed up to train as clinic escorts to ensure that women can safely come in and out of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts health centers.

In recent years, we’ve seen some political leaders stand with a small yet vocal fringe dead-set on turning back the clock on legal abortion access in America — and now the Supreme Court has issued this decision. But Planned Parenthood and our supporters are fighting back. We are fighting to ensure that in spite of this ruling, the privacy and safety of every patient accessing health care and every staff member doing his or her job will be protected — no matter what.


- See more at: http://www.plannedparenthoodaction.o....2l4CqSW2.dpuf

[Kobi]

Tomorrow at 10 am, the Supreme Court will hand down its decision on the Hobby Lobby case — and it will be a big one. Here's what to expect.

https://www.facebook.com/PlannedPare...ion?fref=photo

[Allison W]

http://online.wsj.com/articles/supre...law-1404155510

Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby Ruling Ignites Debate Over Religious-Freedom Law
Decision Cites Two-Decades-Old Religious Freedom Restoration Act

By KRISTINA PETERSON
June 30, 2014 3:11 p.m. ET

WASHINGTON—Monday's Supreme Courtdecision enabling some private companies to opt out of the federal health law's contraception coverage requirements ignited partisan dueling over not just the 2010 health-care law but over a 1993 religious-freedom law cited in the decision.

The high court's decision in the Hobby Lobby case refocused attention on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that passed Congress overwhelmingly in 1993, with the support of some lawmakers still serving in both the House and Senate. The statute requires federal laws to accommodate individuals' religious beliefs unless there is a compelling interest at stake that can't be attained through other means.

While Republicans on Monday triumphantly pointed to the law's role in the decision, Democrats said they hadn't anticipated the law would be so broadly expanded.

In the case, the owners of Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., an Oklahoma City arts-and-crafts chain owned by an evangelical Christian family, and other companies challenged the Affordable Care Act by saying their religions consider certain birth-control methods immoral and therefore they weren't obliged to help provide them under the religious-freedom law.

The Supreme Court's majority agreed, citing the religious-freedom law in its decision.

Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the lead Republican sponsor of the religious-freedom law when it passed the Senate in a 97-3 vote, said Monday's decision affirmed Congress' decision to pass the law in the first place.

"As the Supreme Court rightfully said today, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act could not have been clearer in saying religious liberty of all Americans must be equally protected and not unnecessarily burdened," Mr. Hatch said in a statement. "That's why RFRA passed Congress overwhelmingly more than 20 years ago."

The bill passed the House on a voice vote and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.

But Democrats who had supported the law in 1993 said they hadn't intended for it to be used as a shield protecting for-profit employers from the health law's requirements. The 1993 law refers to "persons" and the Obama administration contended that the law doesn't include for-profit companies like Hobby Lobby.

"No matter how sincerely held a religious belief might be, for-profit employers—like Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood—should not be allowed to wield their beliefs as a means of denying employees access to critical preventive health-care services," said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.) who supported the law in 1993. At the time, lawmakers kept in place a principle that religion doesn't exempt for-profit businesses from complying with civil rights laws, for example, Mr. Nadler said.

The bill was introduced in March 1993 by Charles Schumer of New York, then in the House, now a member of the Senate's Democratic leadership. Mr. Schumer joined a group of 18 other Senate Democrats who filed an amicus brief supporting the Obama administration in the Hobby Lobby case. In the brief, the Democrats had urged the court to clarify that the religious-freedom law doesn't permit for-profit businesses to deny health coverage to their employees based on their owners' religious objections.

In a statement Monday, Mr. Schumer called the Supreme Court's decision "dead wrong," saying the law he introduced was intended to give individuals the ability "to exercise their religious beliefs without government interference." The law "was not intended to extend the same protection to for-profit corporations, whose very purpose is to profit from the open market," he said.

Republicans had filed their own briefs supporting the challengers and arguing that the health law's mandate violated the religious-freedom law.

The law in question was originally intended to nullify a decision from Justice Antonin Scalia in the early 1990s that denied religious exemptions from generally applicable laws. The dispute arose when Oregon denied unemployment benefits to adherents of a Native American religion who used peyote, a controlled substance, in their ceremonies.

—Jess Bravin, Beth Reinhard and Louise Radnofsky contributed to this article.

[Allison W]

(I was just going to post the link to this article as an addendum to the above post, but after taking a look, I decided this article was better anyway. Lawl @ Boehner taking this opportunity to flog the deceased "repeal Obamacare" equine.)

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/hobby-lob...-narrow-ruling

Supreme Court rules for Hobby Lobby in contraception case
06/30/14 10:21 AM—UPDATED 06/30/14 05:03 PM

By Irin Carmon

The Supreme Court has ruled in a 5-4 decision that a closely-held company can be exempt from contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

The closely watched case pitted the administration and its allies, including women’s health advocates, against the religious right, which has repeatedly accused President Barack Obama of waging a war on religion in the public square.

Hobby Lobby stores, an Oklahoma-based, evangelical-owned craft chain with about 13,000 employees, and Conestoga Wood Specialties, a small Mennonite-owned cabinet maker in Pennsylvania, were two of the 49 for-profit companies that said the requirement violated their religious freedom.

The Obama administration had provided exemptions for the law for houses of worship and an accommodation for religious nonprofits (the subject of pending litigation) but not for for-profit corporations.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the law at issue in the case, has never been applied to for-profit entities. The Court had to decide whether corporations even have religious exercise rights – making the beliefs of the employer synonymous with the entire company – and weigh that question against the potential harms to the employees.

Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood objected to a handful of contraceptives that they speculate can block a fertilized egg, which is neither documented in the science nor the medical definition of abortion. Other for-profit plaintiffs object to any birth control coverage at all.

The case was the first time the Affordable Care Act returned to the nation’s highest Court since it was first largely upheld as constitutional, and was argued by current Solicitor General Don Verrilli and former Bush administration solicitor general Paul Clement.

Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood got two very different results at the appeals court. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals declared of Hobby Lobby that “such corporations can be ‘persons’ exercising religion.” In ruling on Conestoga’s bid for exemption from the requirement, the Third Circuit disagreed: “For-profit secular corporations cannot exercise in religious exercise.”

Kyle Duncan, lead attorney on the Hobby Lobby case and general counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, told msnbc earlier this year. While employers can’t stop their employees from using birth control (including paying for it with their wages), Duncan said, “Their moral objection is being made to participate in the process.”

Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell praised the ruling Monday. ”Today’s Supreme Court decision makes clear that the Obama administration cannot trample on the religious freedoms that Americans hold dear,” he said in a statement.

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) weighed in, too, saying “The mandate overturned today would have required for-profit companies to choose between violating their constitutionally-protected faith or paying crippling fines, which would have forced them to lay off employees or close their doors.” He also renewed calls for the repeal of Obamacare.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said in a statement: ”Today’s decision jeopardizes women’s access to essential health care. Employers have no business intruding in the private health care decisions women make with their doctors.”

“This ruling ignores the scientific evidence showing that the health security of millions of American women is strengthened by access to these crucial services,” he added.

Reid pledged that Democrats would “continue to fight to preserve women’s access to contraceptive coverage and keep bosses out of the examination room.”

“Although the Court restricted their ruling to ‘closely-held’ companies, this ruling will immediately affect the lives of millions of women across the country. Over 90 percent of America’s businesses are ‘closely-held,’ including such large employers as Koch Industries and Bechtel,” said Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. “Women should not be forced to jump through extra hoops to secure the fundamental health care they need.”

The White House released a statement in disagreement with the decision, in which they said: “We’ll continue to look for ways to improve America’s health by helping women have more, not less, say over the personal health decisions that affect them and their families.”

The decision was met with chants of ”HOBBY LOBBY WINS, HOBBY LOBBY WINS” from a group gathered outside the courthouse in support of the company. One pro-Hobby Lobby woman reportedly ripped up her “losing speech” following the verdict.

Barbara Green, the co-founder of Hobby Lobby, said she was “overjoyed” by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“The Court’s decision is a victory, not just for our family business, but for all who seek to live out their faith. We are grateful to God and to those who have supported us on this difficult journey,” said Green.

Lori Windham, senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, called it a “landmark decision” arguing that “American families do not lose their fundamental rights when they open a family business.”

Most Americans disagree with the majority opinion of the Court. According to a March 2014 NBC/WSJ poll 53% of Americans believe that employers should not be able to be exempt from the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health plans cover prescription birth control.

“This is a deeply troubling decision. For the first time, the highest court in the country has said that business owners can use their religious beliefs to deny their employees a benefit that they are guaranteed by law,” said Louise Melling, deputy legal director of the ACLU.

At oral argument, as hundreds of women rallied outside in support of birth control access, Paul Clement argued, “This is not about access to the contraception, it’s who’s going to pay for the government’s preferred subsidy.” Justice Elena Kagan, for her part, had a different answer: ”Congress has made a judgment and Congress has given a statutory entitlement and that entitlement is to women and includes contraceptive coverage, and when an employer says, no, I don’t want to give that, that woman is quite directly, quite tangibly harmed.”

The contraceptive benefit was widely seen as a political win for Obama in the 2012 election, galvanizing single women to go to the polls. Democrats are hoping a similar strategy pays off in key elections this fall.

[ProfPacker]

Speaking with Katie Couric on Yahoo Global News, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that five of her male counterparts on the court have “a blind spot” when it comes to women’s issues.

After noting that all three female justices were in the minority in the recent Hobby Lobby decision, Couric asked Ginsburg whether she “believed the five male justices truly understood the ramifications of their decision.”

Following a long pause, Ginsburg said, “I would have to say, ‘No.’”


“But,” she added, “justices continue to think, and can change. So I’m ever hopeful that if the Court has a blind spot today, its eyes can be opened tomorrow.”

“But you do, in fact, feel that these five justices had a bit of a ‘blind spot’?” Couric asked.

“In Hobby Lobby?” Ginsburg replied. “Yes.”

“Because they couldn’t understand what it is like to be a woman?” Couric asked.

“They all have wives. They have daughters. By the way, I think daughters can change the perception of their fathers.”

Ginsburg went on to note that her opinions on these matters are contained in her dissents, and that there is a tradition of dissents becoming “unquestionably, the law of the land.”

In her scathing dissent in the Hobby Lobby case, Ginsburg noted that the majority’s willful misreading of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act would have unintended consequences.

“Little doubt that RFRA claims will proliferate, for the Court’s expansive notion of corporate personhood – combined with its other errors in construing RFRA – invites for-profit entities to seek religion-based exemptions from regulations they deem offensive to their faith,” she wrote.

Earlier this week, in fact, the Satanic Temple declared that it would use the majority’s interpretation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act just as Ginsburg predicted groups would.

[Cin]

Since stealing the presidency for Bush caused a host of unforeseen difficulties for the Republicans, and ultimately for everyone, the GOP luckily discovered it really doesn't matter that much who is POTUS if they can control the House, the Senate, the Media, and the Supreme Court. Of course there is that pesky issue of nominating Supreme Court judges, that does make POTUS somewhat desirable. So we will see how that plays out for them this time around.

But until then, through gerrymandering, voter suppression and legislative tricks, the GOP has managed to gain control of the House and the Senate. The Supreme Court is systematically dismantling individual rights and freedoms, while protecting the personhood of corporations. Since corporations have the same rights as people, except corporate rights are more diligently protected, it is only a matter of time before the Corporate powers that be decide to exercise their 2nd amendment rights. But I digress. Here's a look at the next assault on a woman's right to choose.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...-abortion-case

The Supreme Court Just Agreed to Hear a Case that Could Destroy Roe v. Wade

On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it will hear its first abortion case in nine years. At issue in Whole Woman's Health v. Cole is HB 2, an omnibus Texas abortion law that made national headlines in 2013 after Texas Sen. Wendy Davis spent 11-hours filibustering the bill that eventually passed anyway.

Since 1992, the court has ruled on three abortion cases, each time affirming further abortion restrictions. In 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a divided court upheld the right to abortion, but left it to the states to set abortion restrictions, saying that these regulations can't put an "undue burden" on abortion access. This broad ruling opened the door for the hundreds of so-called Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers or TRAP laws that states have passed in recent years—onerous regulations placed on abortion providers, often purporting to protect women's health. In its last ruling in 2007, the court upheld a law outlawing dilation-and-extraction second-trimester abortions. If the court continues its pattern of voting against abortion rights and rules to allow Texas to move forward with several burdensome abortion restrictions, it will open the door for other states to do the same, dealing a serious blow to the right to legal abortion guaranteed by Roe v. Wade.

"The Court now has the opportunity to decide whether we will continue to allow elected officials to play politics with women's health," wrote Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, in a statement. "This case represents the greatest threat to women's reproductive freedom since the Supreme Court decided Roe vs. Wade over 40 years ago. Laws like the ones being challenged in Texas are designed to subvert the Constitution and end the right to a safe and legal abortion."

In this case, the justices are expected to focus on two of the Texas law's most onerous requirements: that abortions be performed in ambulatory surgical centers, hospital-like facilities that specialize in outpatient surgery, and the requirement that abortion providers obtain admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. Many medical professionals argue that these restrictions put unnecessary burdens on abortion providers: Building and maintaining an ASC is expensive, given the strict requirements regarding features like hallway width and ventilation. Nor do ASCs enhance the standard of care for abortion; the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and other medical groups have repeatedly noted that the procedure can be safely performed in a typical doctor's office. The admitting privileges' provision gives hospitals in conservative communities or with a religious affiliation the power to effectively stop abortions by denying the necessary admission privileges to doctors.

"The common-sense measures Texas has put in place elevate the standard of care and protect the health of Texas women," wrote Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a statement released following Friday's Supreme Court's announcement. "We look forward to demonstrating the validity of these important health and safety requirements in Court."

The number of abortion clinics in Texas has already been cut by more than half, as elements of HB 2, such as restrictions on medication abortion, a 20 week abortion ban, and the admitting privileges requirement, have gone into effect over the last two years. Before the law, there were 41 clinics in Texas. Today, there are 18. As my colleague Molly Redden reported in September, this has created large swathes of the state where women must travel hundreds of miles to get abortion care. If the Supreme Court upholds HB2 in full, including the ambulatory surgical center requirement, the number of abortion clinics in Texas could fall to ten.

[Cin]

[Cin]

This morning an article about a Washington Post poll explained 3rd party voters are hurting Clinton and not Trump. It stated that the large majority of 3rd party voters would usually be voting Democrat. It also mentioned these people are voting Gary Johnson 3 to 1 over Jill Stein. This is really puzzling to me, this love of Libertarian ideology. Not that I am advocating anyone vote 3rd party instead of voting for Clinton, but if you must vote 3rd party, why Libertarian over Green? Isn't what is going on environmentally scary enough to get people's attention? What is it going to take? And I really don't get this attraction to Libertarian ideals. I am not going to get into what those ideals entail in this thread but this is a simplistic interpretation of the ideology that would shred the social contract between the government and its citizens; libertarians generally believe the power of government should be limited to what is necessary to protect the rights of the citizenry. The government does little to protect the rights of the citizenry as it is, we don't need more limitations. Here is an article explaining how Catholic hospitals are putting women's lives at risk and getting judicial support allowing them to continue medical negligence.

https://rewire.news/article/2016/09/...e-denial-care/

Appeals Court Won’t Hold Catholic Hospital Responsible for Denial of Care

In 2010, when Tamesha Means showed up at Mercy Health Partners in Muskegon, Michigan, while having a miscarriage, she had every reason to expect the hospital doctors and staff would treat her emergency medical condition. Instead, the Catholic-affiliated health-care entity turned her away twice, effectively telling her to just “wait and see” what would happen.

Means filed suit against Mercy Health Partners and the United Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in 2013. On Thursday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that she had failed to state a viable legal claim.

Thursday’s ruling is a narrow one. It does not prevent other patients who have faced similar denials of care from Catholic-affiliated health care facilities from suing based on those denials. But it does suggest those claims will be very difficult to win.

Means’ case is, in some ways, the perfect example of conservative federal courts’ reluctance to second-guess the medical decisions made at religiously affiliated hospitals. When Means first showed up at Mercy, the only hospital in her county, she was 18 weeks pregnant. Her water had broken, and she was beginning to miscarry. Doctors and staff at Mercy Health—which is operated by Trinity Health, a multi-billion dollar network of Catholic-run hospitals—told Means there was no medical care they could offer her. That was because treatment would mean the termination of her pregnancy: a violation of Catholic directives preventing any care resulting in the death of a fetus, even a non-viable one.

So instead, they sent Means home.

Means came back the next day, in pain and this time bleeding vaginally. As detailed in court documents, doctors and staff at Mercy again told Means the only thing they could do was to wait and see how the miscarriage progressed.

Means returned to Mercy Health a third time just days later. Now, she was suffering from a significant infection from her untreated miscarriage. This time, instead of telling Means to just wait it out, hospital staff gave Means some aspirin to treat her fever and prepared to send her home yet again. But before the hospital discharge process for Means was complete, she started to deliver her dying fetus. It wasn’t until then that the hospital agreed to admit her; she delivered a baby who died within hours of birth.

Means eventually sued, claiming the Catholic directives followed by the hospital amount to the provision of negligent care.

These “Ethical and Religious Directives” are not the same thing as professional standards of care, which dictate when a hospital or doctor has committed an act of medical negligence. Rather, they are expressions of religious beliefs. Still, Mercy deferred to them as a defense for its actions, saying its doctors and staff did nothing wrong in relying on those directives, rather than medical standards, when they turned away Means and refused to treat her.

And both a lower court and, now, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled Means’ case could not go forward. This was, in part, because the court felt it was not its job to judge the directives and decide whether or not following them amounted to negligence in the delivery of health care by Mercy and its doctors and staff.

Part of these decisions rests in a legal doctrine dating back more than 100 years called “ecclesiastical abstention.” Both the federal district court and the court of appeals ruled in part that this doctrine prevents courts from reviewing cases like Means’.

According to the doctrine of ecclesiastical abstention, civil courts should be limited in their role in deciding matters of religious controversy. The idea behind the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine is that courts should not settle what would amount to disputes about religious doctrine, which Catholic-affiliated hospitals like Mercy claim their refusal to provide health care to patients like Means amounts to. Specifically in Means’ case, the defendants claimed the directives offer “a statement of the Roman Catholic Church’s moral and religious postures as it relates to health care issues” and are in place “to provide authoritative guidance on certain moral issues that face Catholic health care today.” That means, the bishops and Mercy argued, that interpreting the directives in the context of whether or not carrying out those directives amounts to medical malpractice means interpreting Catholic theology. And according to the bishops and Mercy Health, that is exactly the kind of thing which the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine prohibits.

Thursday’s ruling did not decide definitively whether or not the directives are insulated from judicial review in cases of medical negligence. Instead the court ruled that the USCCB could not be sued in Michigan in this case. According to the court, USCCB’s action of publishing the directives does not “create a substantial connection” between USCCB and Michigan hospitals sufficient to justify bringing the bishops into court to respond to claims like Means’.

But the court used topsy-turvy logic to justify refusing to allow Means to sue the USCCB. According to the court, “Michigan—like every state—does have Catholic hospitals, and USCCB does intend the Directives to be implemented by all Catholic healthcare institutions. USCCB may even have known that Trinity Health is a Catholic hospital network operating in Michigan,” the court wrote. But this is not a “substantial connection” enough that USCCB could expect to be sued when following those directives results in medical negligence, according to the court. Similarly, Mercy cannot be sued in this case for following those national directives.

Approximately one in six hospital beds in the United States are in a facility where health-care delivery is governed by the Catholic directives. In some states, more than 40 percent of all beds fall into that category, with those hospitals routinely refusing to provide comprehensive reproductive health care to patients. As Means’ case illustrates, some patients’ only choice is to seek care at a Catholic-affiliated hospital. If courts are unwilling to hold those institutions accountable for delivering to their patients shoddy and substandard care, in part on the grounds that those hospitals have a religious imperative that courts cannot second-guess, where does that leave patients like Means, whose lives are being put at risk in the name of religiously driven health care?

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Hospitals and hospital staff have judicial backing to put lives at risk because of their religious beliefs. It seems like it would be possible to not treat someone who had medical issues because they used birth control. I guess it would be possible to refuse treatment to a person who was gay or transgender for religious reasons. It's very scary.