Amanda Marcotte | They're Taking Away Abortion, for Real

05 March 20

---

If the Need for Funding Were Not Serious We Would Not Say So

Funding is in fact critically lacking and the situation is now becoming quite serious.

Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News

Sure, I'll make a donation!

---

Update My Monthly Donation

---

If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611

04 March 20

It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News

---

Amanda Marcotte | They're Taking Away Abortion, for Real

Amanda Marcotte, Salon
Marcotte writes: "With everything going on in the news these days, most Americans have no idea that the religious right is, after over four decades of trying, quietly on the verge of ending Roe v. Wade as we know it."

EXCERPT:

What changed? Not the medical science or rationale for these backdoor bans. No, it was the makeup of the court. With Donald Trump appointee Brett Kavanaugh on the bench instead of Justice Anthony Kennedy, anti-choice activists believe they have just enough votes to end Roe in all but name — precedent be damned. 

But, as reproductive health researchers Carole Joffe and David Cohen argue in their new book, "Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle To Get An Abortion in America," for many women in America, it's already a post-Roe world. Years of state Republican legislators passing restrictions on abortion in a piecemeal fashion has created a situation where the procedure may be legal, but out of reach for millions of women. The court's expected ruling this year will simply make this already terrible problem much worse. 

Joffe spoke with Salon about what life looks like when legal abortion access is denied to so many. 

On March 4th the Supreme court will be hearing a case called June Medical Services vs Russo. It's about Louisiana state regulations that threatened to shut down abortion clinics in that state. So what's this case about and how worried should we be about it affecting access to abortion in the U S?

Well, I think we should be very worried on two counts. One, the case ignores Supreme Court precedent, in the 2016 case Whole Women's Health vs. Hellerstedt. The court decided, that if you're going to impose restrictions, there had to be evidence and the benefits to women had to outweigh the cost.

Put more colloquially, the courts said to state legislators, you can't make s**t up. Scientific experts, both medical and social science, showed that these restrictions would impose hardships, and that there was no medical benefit.

So, reasonably enough, people in the pro-choice movement thought this was settled. And now just a few years later, here comes the state of Louisiana totally ignoring it.

READ MORE

Bernie Sanders greets supporters at the end of his rally at Woodrow Wilson Senior High School in East L.A. on Saturday. (photo: Genaro Molina/LA Times)

ALSO SEE: Black and Latino Voters Were Hit Hardest by Long Lines
in the Texas Democratic Primary

Latinos Boosted Sanders on Super Tuesday. A Lesson for the Biden Campaign?
Suzanne Gamboa, NBC News
Gamboa writes: "Latino voters boosted Sen. Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday, coming through for him after a big investment in the community by his presidential campaign."
READ MORE

Former vice president Joe Biden at his Super Tuesday night rally in Los Angeles, Calif., March 3, 2020. (photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)

The Case Against Joe Biden: Former VP's Long Career Shows a Recurring Theme of "Appeasing the Right"
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "Following his Super Tuesday wins, we look closely at the record of former Vice President Joe Biden, from his central role in supporting the Iraq War to expanding the so-called war on drugs."

READ MORE

In union-heavy primary states the fight over single-payer health care is fracturing organized labor. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty)

Last Night's Exit Polls Show Medicare for All Has Strong Support From Democratic Voters
Jason Lemon, Newsweek
Lemon writes: "Most Democratic voters in every Super Tuesday state support a universal government-run health care system, like the one Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed, instead of private insurance, despite former Vice President Joe Biden winning in most states, exit polls showed."
READ MORE

An Iraqi priest celebrates Mass at the Church of St. John in Qaraqosh, Iraq, a predominantly Christian town. (photo: Ahmad Al-Rubaye/Getty)

The Trump Administration Calls Iraq Dangerous for Christians - Until It Wants to Deport Them
Yeganeh Torbati, ProPublica
Excerpt: "To deport Iraqi Christians, Trump's immigration officials rely on testimony saying they won't be at particular risk. But to justify funding and attention, officials elsewhere in the administration say the Christians face grave danger."
READ MORE

A Sheriff's officer and a social worker in a homeless encampment in Anaheim. (photo: Frederic Brown/Getty)

Encampment Sweeps Take Away Homeless People's Most Important Belongings
Rick Paulas, VICE
Paulas writes: "Last July, the city of Los Angeles was hit with a class action lawsuit from homeless advocates and seven unhoused people whose property was taken when city workers swept the places where they were living."

Crystal had her dad’s ashes taken from her, Angel had pictures of his daughter taken away, Veronica had her phone, stove, paperwork, makeup, and grandma’s jewelry all tossed away.

ast July, the city of Los Angeles was hit with a class action lawsuit from homeless advocates and seven unhoused people whose property was taken when city workers swept the places where they were living. 

The lead plaintiff is Janet Garcia, a housecleaner who lost her apartment in March 2017 and had been sleeping in a Van Nuys Metro station when, in April of 2019, it's alleged that L.A. Sanitation workers "took most of Ms. Garcia's belongings while she was watching her neighbors' property so her neighbors could go with outreach workers—to sign up for unemployment benefits and obtain a new identification card." As a result, according to the lawsuit, Garcia lost cleaning jobs, and is now worried that if she leaves her things unattended they will again be seized by workers.

"These sweeps leave her feeling that she has an impossible choice," the lawsuit reads, "either lose her job or lose all of her belongings." 

People who live in houses rarely consider the consequences of "sweeps"—they may even ask for the city to clean up homeless encampments—but for the homeless people affected by these operations, they can be devastating, traumatic events that deprive them of the few resources they possess. Sweeps are often conducted with an utter disregard for the well-being of the people they affect, and are failures of both city management and basic humanity. The good news is that relatively simple tweaks to protocol could lessen the damage done.

How encampment sweeps work

When a city considers a tent encampment to be a nuisance—most commonly due to complaints issued from nearby homeowners, business owners, and other power brokers in the city—it is then "swept." (Civic institutions largely forgo this term and instead use the euphemism "cleaned.")

While there are specific quirks for each municipality, the general process is largely the same. A notice is posted nearby with an allotted time frame, usually three days or so, during which people need to vacate the area. (Sometimes notices don't appear at all.) At some point after that time elapses (if it's raining or if there is a protest, the sweep may be delayed a few days), a combination of police officers and sanitation workers invade. Police escort those living in the tents away, and may fence off the area. Once the area is "secure," sanitation workers begin throwing everything into the idling garbage truck. 

"People are only given a short amount of time in which they have to move everything, and if they can't, people lose everything," said Osha Neumann, consulting attorney for the East Bay Community Law Center, who just helped win a $2 million settlement against the California Department of Transportation for destroying homeless folks' property. (In 2019, I profiled Neumann's work for the San Francisco Chronicle.) "People are simply cleaned out," he said. "The day begins with them having what they need to survive, and they come back and don't have a home." 

Sweeps can deprive people of the few possessions they have

After Brooke Carrillo lost her home in Los Angeles, she placed everything she could into storage. When she couldn't pay those bills, the company got rid of her belongings, but Carrillo still believed she could manage as long as she had her more important items. She was living on the sidewalk for about three weeks when she experienced her first sweep. 

"They came and started to tell me they were taking my stuff, and I was in shock," Carrillo said. "They give you 15 minutes to get what you want. Fifteen minutes to think of what's happening and what you need. They ended up taking my birth certificate, my Social Security card, my mother's necklace that her mother gave her, the only pictures of my brother and my dad, both of who are no longer here. I felt like my own life went in the trash. I felt alone, worthless, and that I was going to die by my own hands, or just by being out here with nothing. It makes you feel like you don't matter." 

For the past year, the grassroots organization Stolen Belonging has been documenting what has been lost during sweeps in San Francisco, in the process talking to people like Carrillo whose lives have been upended. Sometimes they lose tents or beds, or basic necessities like clothing or toiletries. Sometimes it's items of real monetary value, like computers, telephones or bikes. Important documents that people need to obtain benefits, like birth certificates or IDs, can also be thrown into the trash, along with truly irreplaceable objects—Crystal had her dad's ashes taken from her, Angel Amador had pictures of his daughter taken away, Veronica Ocampo had her phone, stove, paperwork, makeup and grandma's jewelry all tossed away.

"I'm on very expensive medication and [Department of Public Works], for the fifth time, came and took my stuff," a San Francisco resident named Patricia told the Stolen Belonging team. "It was a 90-day supply. And just to get it back for a 30 days supply, the pharmacy is charging me $3,500. I can't afford that." 

Some cities have put in place certain protocols for sweeps, including specifications for notifications and how personal property should be stored. (Some cities claim to hold personal property for 90 days before disposing it, but many unhoused people VICE has spoken to say that the process of locations where the items are, and then getting to the location, is onerous.) 

Opposition to sweeps is growing across the country 

Whatever problems homeless people face living in an encampment, being ordered by their city to simply scram doesn't help them. Activists have dubbed this the "leafblower approach" to solving homelessness, essentially scattering people without hint or suggestion where they should go. (As I've previously explained, while some cities have available space in shelters, people have logical reasons to avoid them and remain sleeping outside.) 

It was this lack of clarity on where next to go that caught Andrea Henson's eye. She's a housed activist who witnessed a sweep in Berkeley, California, last September, and kept seeing people asking, "Where do we go? Where do we go?" Henson later went to the City Council manager, and no one could answer this question. So Henson decided to organize. She moved into a tent at the encampment to build solidarity and find out what was needed. 

"It was summer time, and it was freezing at night," Henson said. "You hear the rats all night, and you don't have a door, you have a zipper. Your day is spent thinking about where you go to the bathroom, where are you going to take a shower? How are you going to eat? You can't light a fire, can't wash dishes. Surviving becomes your daily routine."

Over time, she helped form a coalition of 130 or so people living in a few nearby encampments, who all now go by the name Where Do We Go Berkeley? They've raised money to buy new tents, install and maintain port-o-potties, and have participated in two marches as well as two acts of civil disobedience when they refused to move during a sweep. They have mostly been left alone since. 

This burgeoning resistance to sweeps is becoming more common. People experiencing homelessness have increasingly become connected to advocates and housed neighbors, with groups taking the initiative to send text blasts when a sweep is occurring. At the very least, this can result in people filming sweeps—last August's "Operation Clean Sweep" in Boston was documented by housed allies, which then became the material used in subsequent reports. 

An alternative to sweeps would be giving people what they need

Grassroots coalitions are also beginning to form to act as a protective measure against sweeps—in San Francisco, it's called Solutions Not Sweeps, in Los Angeles, it's Services Not Sweeps. What do "services" or "solutions" mean? "People want cleaning, everyone wants to feel safe and hygienic," said Kelley Cutler, an organizer in Solutions Not Sweeps. "But there's a big difference between a cleaning and a sweep." 

A cleaning would be some combination of a standard trash pickup—leaving bins, or going tent-to-tent and offering to take what's not wanted—while perhaps also providing outreach workers to help encampment residents trim their collections. (It's worth pointing out that housed people and businesses have been known to use encampments as illegal dumping grounds.)

Another important service is something all of us humans need: A place to piss and shit. Regularly maintained bathrooms are an obvious solution, but as hinted at with the private funding needed to be raised for Where Do We Go Berkeley's port-o-potties, cities often scoff at this logical measure. "It appears that if [a city] provides services, they are recognizing that people are staying there," Henson said, "and the acknowledgment creates liability issues."

"We also need to give people cleaning supplies, a color printed map to show exactly where is going to be cleaned, and social workers out there instead of cops," said Jed Parriott, an organizer for L.A.'s Services Not Sweeps. "We don't need cops at all out there. One of our demands is to remove LAPD completely." 

Parriott said that the city had agreed to this request, but due to pressure from sanitation workers and police unions, there is still a visible police presence during sweeps. The city had also agreed to create a website listing all upcoming sweeps, he said, so that people in the encampments would have accurate information, and also so community members could document the actions. This also has not yet taken place. (VICE reached out to the City of L.A. for comment but did not receive a response.)

These negotiations may seem focused on minor trivialities, but they're vital for those experiencing homelessness. As long as cities continue failing to figure out how to actually get people inside of homes, these sweeps will remain traumatic events for our most vulnerable neighbors.

"We get accused that we're just enabling people to be on the street, that we're fighting for people to sleep outside," Parriott said. "We all say we know that housing is the solution, but that's going to take so long, we need to start treating people with dignity and respect now."

READ MORE

To save insects we must give them the space they need to survive. (photo: Getty)

How to Save Insects
Andrew Urevig, Ensia
Urevig writes: "Butterflies and bees, ants and beetles, cockroaches and flies - whether loved or feared, insects help humans. Just sample the ways these animals enable life as we know it: they pollinate crops, give us new medicines, break down waste and support entire ecosystems."

utterflies and bees, ants and beetles, cockroaches and flies — whether loved or feared, insects help humans. Just sample the ways these animals enable life as we know it: they pollinate crops, give us new medicines, break down waste and support entire ecosystems.

Yet many insects around the world are in decline.

Writing in the journal Biological Conservation, more than two dozen scientists from countries around the world are warning of a wave of insect extinctions — and urging swift steps to curb the crisis. In a paper sketching solutions, the scientists say that to save insects we must give them the space they need to survive in the face of climate change: livable, interconnected habitats flush with a rich diversity of plant and animal life.

Ensuring that insects have room to thrive means setting aside local habitat, including parks, gardens, roadsides and the edges of farm fields. It also entails protecting continent-scale migratory passages like the corridor that monarch butterflies traverse from Minnesota to Mexico.

Not just any areas will do, the researchers caution. Insects need quality space, too. The closer an area is to the condition it was in before humans altered it for the worse, the better. "We need to move the needle of novel landscapes towards one of greater ecological integrity and more complex interaction networks," Michael Samways, one of the paper's authors and an insect conservationist at South Africa's Stellenbosch University, wrote in an email to Ensia.

Space that's free from pollution and invasive species, with diverse plant life and a varied landscape, will best help insects — and that includes enough room for the six-legged critters to find food, seek mates and just rest.

"Part of being able to move around is to be able to 'dodge' natural enemies, from bats and birds, to other insects like predatory ladybugs and parasitic wasps," Samways explained.

Our changing climate pushes many insects to evolve, move or die — a dynamic that often puts them up against the extensive transformation humans have wrought on Earth's surface. Habitat fragmentation exacerbates the threat by limiting insects' ability to traverse the landscapes separating them from more suitable surroundings.

But with quality space that's connected by conservation corridors and other adequate habitat, the researchers write, insects can leave enough healthy offspring to sustain their species.

Scientists know what insects need, but scaling proven strategies up to the massive level needed to make a dent in extinctions is a different challenge entirely.

"Especially when you're thinking about insects, you have to get public buy-in," said DeAnna Beasley, an ecologist at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga who was not involved in the paper. Highlighting this key hurdle, the report authors bemoaned "the current lack of sufficient collective political will and concerted effort" to save insects.

To build that will, the scientists call for greater efforts to communicate the value of insects to society. For example, Beasley has used cicadas — a kind of insect that needs "a large, contiguous space" to sustain big populations — in citizen science research, getting more data for science while building more appreciation for insects among the public. In one project the paper spotlights, students at schools in Austria successfully assessed the quality of space for butterflies, laying the groundwork for follow-up by trained scientists.

With many insects unnoticed or misunderstood, the researchers also recommend the continued use of "insect icons" and "flagship species" to promote support for conservation.

"Highlighting the animals that people know best is vital for our effort to get people engaged in invertebrate or insect conservation," says Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, who was not involved in the new paper. Black also underscores that charismatic insects are just a starting point.

"We need people to understand the consequences of not taking action and give them solutions that they can enact in their own lives," Black says. "As well as getting them to push their governments to take action."

READ MORE

---

Contribute to RSN 

Update My Monthly Donation