Allison Fine wrote a passionate column in defense of reproductive rights in which she quoted the civil rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer: “Nobody’s Free Until Everybody Is Free.”
No one is free in America today because millions of people have lost the national guarantee of the power to control if and when they have children.
But the barbaric treatment of pregnant people, and the ongoing harassment and death threats against clinicians, isn’t the end of our story, it is the beginning of a new chapter. Our job is to keep getting up, and to keep showing up, just like Fannie Lou.
Fine describes a growing ecosystem that is growing up to provide help to women who seek abortion services, including take health consultations and abortion pills by mail.
She writes that the nation is in a state of “legal chaos” as a result of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe V. Wade, reversing a Court-guaranteed right for the first time in US history.
I am raising this issue to emphasize that we are in a totally chaotic period legally right now. It is actually a really profound moment for our country in terms of national versus states’ rights. Can I mail abortion pills to Mississippi, a banned state, today? No one knows the answer. The State of Mississippi says no, but BioGenPro, one of the two U.S. manufacturers of mifepristone, the abortion medication, with the force of the FDA and national postal service behind it, says yes, and they brought suit against MississippI to force them to allow it. We need to watch how this suit unfolds very closely over the next few months.
Please remember that just because states are passing crazy-ass laws doesn’t mean those laws will stand. They will all be challenged in court.
Sadly, the Supreme Court is sure to overturn any laws that conflict with their Dobbs’ decision.
But think about reality. Can a state actually ban the mailing of abortion pills? Will they open every package delivered to every woman in their state? How can Mississippi or Texas or any other state stop women from receiving the pills?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Here, a portrait in opposites:
The compassionate, intelligent, contemporary Allison Fine
The backward, heedless, smarmy, sexist Samuel Alito
Will they open every package delivered to every woman in their state?”
Let them try. Opening the US mail without a federal warrant is a federal offense punishable by imprisonment.
This is another reason why we must not privatize our postal service. It needs to be free of political whims since ballots can be posted and so can the abortion pill. It must remain wholly public. Just imagine if Wilks&Dunn, The Waltons, the Kochs or the DeVos family or any other unscrupulous group decided to buy the USPS.
Well, in a symbolic way, the USPS is partially privatized at the top. Louis DeJoy (GOP privatizer general) is an American businessman (predatory capitalist) STILL serving as the 75th U.S. postmaster general. If he could get away with it, DeJoy(less) would love to privatize and de-unionize the USPS. DeJoy is like a fifth columnist and Trojan Horse at the top of the management of the USPS.
I don’t understand why DeJoy is still Head of the USPS.
He should have been fired on Biden’s first day in office and probably also indicted.
DeJoy should be history. I cannot understand how Biden could keep an obvious traitor. Perhaps some donor wants it this way. This is how we lose the common good through the drip, drip of acquiescence.
Biden also kept the ACO Reach, a horrible plan leading to the privatization of Medicare and Medicaid. This was a Trump plan that Biden has allowed to continue. More drip, drip of the common good.
Disruption causing chaos is part of the right wing agenda. If people are perturbed, they are less likely to notice than the billionaires and corporate vandals are stealing our lunch and democracy.
Fannie Lou Hamer would be quick to call out the NASTY Sam ALITO who flew over to Rome Italy on 7/20 so he could address the Notre Dame Law School Religious Liberty Initiative.
He played to his extremist, right-wing audience and showed his True Colors when he boasted.
“I had the honor of writing a decision lambasted by foreign leaders.
One of those was Boris Johnson who paid the price.
Macron, Trudeau, Prince Harry.
I am waging a battle to protect religious freedom.”
Alito is waging a Crusade for the pedophile-protecting Pope.
He would doubtless have been a member of the Spanish Inquisition had he lived back then.
Subjecting women to back alley abortions is every bit as bad as the tortures carried out by the Spanish Inquisition.
The very idea that Notre Dame “Law” school has anything at all to do with liberty (or even with nonsectarian “law”) is a joke.
A law school at a religious institution is an oxymoron, unless it means Religious law, of course.
“Can a state actually ban the mailing of abortion pills? Will they open every package delivered to every woman in their state? ”
Of course not. Laws against any tiny substance people want have failed miserably even in the face of large majorities belief that such substances are dangerous to society. Fentanyl is killing people daily despite laws restricting it. The most restrictive environments in history still always experienced deviance.
There will be a black market created by this chaos that will dwarf the drug market we have now. Along with it, general distrust
Of government will grow as people experience government in a negative way. Maybe this is the real goal.
When the feds made it difficult to buy the precursor for making meth, this was just a jobs program for Latin American drug cartels (and American biker gangs).
I bet there will be a market for mifepristone breath mints..
They could call them Trick Tacs
Correction: “No one is free in America today because millions of WOMEN, OVER HALF THE POPULATION, have lost the national guarantee of the power to control if and when they have children.”
Fannie Lou also famously said (& I use this a lot), “I’m sick & tired of being sick & tired.”
Our cousin, the late, great Sue Kling wrote the first book about Ms. Hamer, &: I was very lucky to get a few of the copies (from her daughter) that were still available, which we donated to the local high schools & middle schools. These are suburban schools that still have libraries, but there have been school board members/people running for school boards attempting to get books tossed out of them.
!!!!
I had a very good friend who was a delegate from Oregon to the Democratic convention in 1964. When the credentials committee seated the segregationists from Mississippi, they ignored Fannie Lou Hamer’s request to have her delegation seated instead. My friend walked out and gave his credentials to Hamer so that she could get on the floor. I’m not sure if I’m glad he’s not around to see this country now. On the other hand, I know who would be on the front lines to fight American fascism.
https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/27-the-sixties/fannie-lou-hamer-testimony-at-the-democratic-national-convention-1964/
Oh, as to the last: which is EXACTLY why we donated the books to these libraries.
The conservative talk- radio host, Dan Profit, ran people for these boards (high school & library), &, luckily, each came in dead last.
Dan himself went the way of gazillionaire Ken Griffin: packed up all his toys & moved to Tony Naples DeINSANEtisland (that’s Flori-DUH in BobSpeak). Good riddance, because I, for one, don’t want to go back to being ILL-Annoy.
Flor-uh-duh
Uh, as in “I don’t understand” and duh, as I’m certain. Meaning: I don’t understand anything, but I’m certain about everything.
It’s the Florid uh duh way.
That’s NOT “Tony Naples” (like the name of a monster, although one could correctly compare these so-called people). It’s tony,
w/a lower case t. Also, Proft’s last name is NOT “Profit,” although he’s certainly raked it in, considering he can afford to live in Naples.
I HATE autocorrect 🤬!!
Some people, mostly fascists, nationalists, narcissists, evangelicals, psychopaths, sociopaths, and ALEC libertarians (there’s more we could add to this list), think that “freedom” means they have the right to suppress other peoples’ freedoms and force them to live by whatever they think even when they don’t always practice what they think.
In short, these toxic tribes decide what the rules are and also reserves the “freedom” to break their rules when it suits them, while not allowing anyone else to do the same thing.
This quote comes from Thom Hartmann’s blog. I think it expresses very well the challenges that this country faces.
………………………………………………….
…Why would the party claiming to be the last bastion of reverence for “life” in America also be the party that supports 50,000 American gun deaths every year, the leading cause of death among children and more than every other developed country in the world combined? Why would they support anti-abortion laws that don’t even contain exceptions for the life of the mother? Why do they fight so hard to keep healthcare out of the reach of so many Americans (12 GOP-controlled states still refuse to offer Medicaid — 90% paid for by the federal government — to their low-income working people)?…