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Again, for the record Susan Colins and Lisa Murkowski, both Republican Senators have authored legislation that they say will preserve abortion rights on a federal level in America. The Colins-Murkowski proposal is likely not perfect but it does provide a potential pathway forward. The Democrats continue to rake in money and ignore Colins and Murkowski entirely. No effort whatsoever to construct a cooperative solution.
Justice Clarance Thomas is or should be professionally vulnerable right now. His wife was clearly involved it a collaborative, seditious effort to overthrow the United States government with violent extremists, culminating in the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. There is no effort underway by the Democrats to hold Thomas accountable or to force his resignation from the Supreme Court. There absolutely should be. But again this requires fighting spirit.
In short the Democrats have no plan to defend abortion rights or reign in this rogue, politically appointed, politically motivated Supreme Court. Just handing the Democratic party more and more money does nothing to preserve abortion rights or any of the other rights and protections this court is hell-bent on eradicating.
Abortion Chaos
Expect abortion rights to be replaced by legal chaos nationwide as jurisdictions for and against abortion rights face off over enforcement. This decision will create social disruption and upheaval on a scale not seen since the Vietnam war. A literal avalanche of legal challenges looms. For 50 years Roe v. Wade has been settled law. It is now replaced by interstate legal tribalism. Good luck predicting where this is going to go.
Dobbs v. Jackson, the case that overturned Roe V. Wade is done. Supreme Court v. American Social Progress is the case we will now all be litigating. Save your money for proven fighters. Choose your battles wisely. The Real fight is just beginning.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
Lawyers are warning of a new chapter of mass incarceration akin to what has been seen during "war on drugs." (photo: EPA)
This hypothetical is part of how the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) is training its members to prepare for a possible wave of criminal charges as the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.
Only it's not a hypothetical — this happened in 2019. After a California woman delivered a stillborn baby at 8 months, she tested positive for meth at the hospital and the staff called the police. The Kings County prosecutor charged her with the "murder of a human fetus" and she spent 16 months in jail before the charges were dismissed.
NACDL executive director Lisa Wayne watched the case with concern. She and her colleagues decided they needed to be proactive and start getting ready for what they felt was inevitable.
"Although, I don't think you can ever say you'll be totally prepared for this kind of watershed moment," Wayne said.
'Overcriminalization'
The NACDL published a report last August warning the public that, without the legal protections under Roe v. Wade, thousands of abortion laws could lead to a new chapter of mass incarceration.
The invasion of privacy alone is a big concern to the NACDL. Anyone who needs or wants an abortion outside of the legal limits of their state is not only a target for criminal charges, but risks implicating others, too — by confiding in friends or family, crossing state lines for procedures, or even using a transportation app to get to an appointment.
"Not just fines. We're talking about prison time," Wayne said. "We're talking about minimum mandatory sentences — aiding or abetting someone who gets ultimately charged with manslaughter or murder, which is a life sentence."
And for those who think a future of mass incarceration is too unlikely, Wayne points to the War on Drugs, starting in 1971.
"Suddenly people who were being prosecuted for small amounts of drugs were now involved in larger and greater conspiracies with minimum mandatory sentences," Wayne said. "People were looking at life sentences and still remain incarcerated to this day. You have to ask yourself, what lessons did we really learn?"
Who will actually pay the price?
The NACDL has tens of thousands of members. Actual feelings and opinions on abortion vary within the organization, as expected. But that's not what this collective red alert is about.
Wayne says that despite a range of personal views, the membership as a whole is concerned about invasion of privacy, government overreach, and a massive stretch on legal resources if a wave of abortion-related criminal charges hits the U.S.
And that pain won't be distributed equally.
"Whenever you're talking about overcriminalization, you're talking about money," Wayne said. "Rich people will always be able to lawyer up. They will always have access to attorneys. Poor people will be left behind."
She points to an already overwhelmed public defender system, which people can't access until after their legal troubles have started.
"I don't get a lawyer, if I'm poor, until I'm actually charged with a crime in this country in most jurisdictions," she said. "So I have to wait until that moment until I get charged. If I have money, access to counsel, I get advice on the front end of being able to perhaps avoid the consequences that I would face if I didn't have money."
The perfect victim
A future without Roe v. Wade ultimately leads back to that courtroom and jury, where the task at hand becomes navigating perception. The burden of being "the perfect victim" is nothing new when it comes to cases of harassment, sexual assault and domestic violence.
"To be a perfect victim of sexual assault, human trafficking or intimate partner violence, you cannot also struggle with addiction, poverty or mental illness," wrote Amanda Rodriguez, a former federal prosecutor and the executive director of Baltimore's rape crisis center, TurnAround Inc, in a 2021 op-ed for the Baltimore Sun. "To be a perfect victim, you cannot accept a drink, engage in commercial sex or walk alone at night. You cannot wear tight clothes or have a criminal record. You cannot be human."
Except with a criminalized abortion, the "victim" isn't pressing charges. They're fighting them.
"At the end of the day, it's going to be the bias going into the courtroom," Wayne said. "The bias dealing with the district attorney who has preconceived notions of their own about how these cases should be prosecuted, the judges who oversee these cases and how they feel — and then ultimately go to the jurors' bias."
And that's a main focus of NACDL's training at the moment: preparing to help clients who have been charged with abortion-related crimes look sympathetic and relatable to a group of their peers (wherein the degree of difficulty varies, depending on your race.)
But in some cases, that might not be enough. More than a dozen states have trigger laws that immediately went into effect after Roe was lifted. The Supreme Court has just granted state lawmakers the freedom to ban abortion however they want.
So when a jury is asked to determine whether someone broke a law post-Roe, even a "perfect victim" might still be a guilty one.
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A police officer. (photo: Adobe Stock)
The 6-3 decision, with the court's three liberal judges dissenting, in Vega v. Tekoh, essentially concluded that failing to "Mirandize" or give someone their Miranda warning, does not allow a person to sue law enforcement for a federal civil rights violation of the Fifth Amendment's protection against compelled self-incrimination.
Though the decision does not mean Miranda goes away, it guts a major pathway – filing a civil rights lawsuit – to incentivizing police to provide a Miranda warning and ensuring their accountability when they do not, said Emily Galvin-Almanza, co-founder of Partners for Justice, a nonprofit that works to empower public defenders nationwide. She said it also prevents a record of past civil rights misdeeds that can potentially be used to discredit an officer in any future criminal proceedings.
The change also makes it easier for police to obtain coerced confessions – by continuing to ask questions even if someone doesn't want to speak – and lets them play with what wiggle room their positions of power already give them, legal experts said.
"The courts are not generous in how they interpret people interpreting their rights. You have to say the magic words," Galvin-Almanza said. "This decision is really damaging because it says the courts don't have to tell you what the magic words are. You better come in knowing your rights."
She pointed to a recent Louisiana case where a suspect in an interrogation told detectives "just give me a lawyer, dawg" and the state's Supreme Court ruled that the suspect was asking for a "lawyer dog" and not actually invoking his Constitutional right to an attorney.
Those magic words, legal experts told USA TODAY, must be affirmatively and explicitly stated as, for example, "I want my lawyer and I want to remain silent" or "I want my lawyer and am invoking my right to remain silent." And then you should stay silent.
If information is obtained without a Miranda warning, a defense attorney can argue that the evidence is inadmissible and should be suppressed. That remaining remedy means most law enforcement agencies will probably continue to train and encourage their officers to give such warnings, but it also relies on police properly representing the information they received to prosecutors and adequate defense representation, Galvin-Almanza said.
Steve Vladeck, a constitutional law expert at the University of Texas School of Law, said that while Miranda remains, the court has "made it a lot less useful" and perhaps even incentivized further violations of Miranda moving forward.
He noted that in cases where police interrogate the wrong person for hours without reading them their rights, the individual has no remedy.
"Being able to sue for damages was a critical way of ensuring that law enforcement officers would always be incentivized to provide the warning," Vladeck said.
Vladeck said it's hard to split the difference between Miranda being a "full-fledged Constitutional right" and a "second-class right only enforceable in some circumstances sometimes. That's what today's opinion does to the detriment of countless interrogation subjects going forward."
Those suspects largely tend to be people of color who are lower income. But it will also have outsized impacts on juveniles – whose brains are still maturing – the mentally ill and developmentally disabled, Galvin-Almanza.
Many studies detailing police interrogation tactics, which include lying to suspects, show they can lead people to falsely confess to crimes. They account for 25% of all convictions later overturned based on DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project, a civil rights organization.
But it's not just false confessions that are of concern.
"A confused statement can cause someone to be subject to a vastly overblown set of charges," Galvin-Almanza said. "We forget about that because it's not a wrongful conviction. But it's not justice either."
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent that while the majority said defendants may seek to have statements suppressed at trial, that "sometimes, such a statement will not be suppressed. And sometimes, as a result, a defendant will be wrongly convicted and spend years in prison. He may succeed, on appeal or in habeas, in getting the conviction reversed. But then, what remedy does he have for all the harm he has suffered?"
In a statement, Brett Max Kaufman, senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union said denying people the right to sue under the nation's most important civil rights statute "further widens the gap between the guarantees found in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the people’s ability to hold government officials accountable for violating them.”
The ACLU represented Ernesto Arturo Miranda in the original 1966 Supreme Court case.
Russian soldiers in Ukraine. (photo: Shutterstock)
Ukrainian forces are retreating from the eastern city after weeks of fierce fighting, but some analysts say Moscow’s victory is symbolic, rather than strategic.
On Friday, Ukrainian forces were abandoning the town in the Luhansk region, after weeks of fierce fighting.
“Keeping positions smashed to pieces over many months just for the sake of staying there doesn’t make sense,” regional governor Serhiy Haidai said in televised remarks.
Heavy Russian bombardment has destroyed almost every defence position of the Ukrainian forces in the area, but the fall of the nearly-destroyed town is insignificant, a top military expert said.
“It’s a minor loss, there’s still Lysychansk [the neighboring town controlled by Ukraine], and Severodonetsk has largely served its purpose,” Ihor Romanenko, former deputy chief of Ukraine’s general staff of armed forces, told Al Jazeera.
The Kremlin is trumpeting the takeover of Severodonetsk because it remained one of the few Ukrainian-controlled towns in Luhansk, one of Ukraine’s smallest and poorest regions that was partially taken over by pro-Russian separatists in 2014.
“There is a geopolitical component for Russians, it’s a district centre in the unoccupied part of Luhansk. But we will live through it, we are more interested in the military aspect,” Romanenko said.
The claimed Russian victory in Luhansk was so important to Moscow that it ordered the redeployment of its troops from the occupied southern region of Kherson, and the partially-occupied Zaporizhzhia, where Ukrainian forces are regaining ground, Romanenko said.
Western and Russian analysts agree with him.
“The loss of Severodonetsk is a loss for Ukraine in the sense that any terrain captured by Russian forces is a loss – but the battle of Severodonetsk will not be a decisive Russian victory,” concluded the Institute for War, a US think tank that has been closely following the war since it began exactly four months ago, on February 24.
Two months of intense fighting also significantly decimated Russian forces in Severodonetsk, where the pre-war population was about 100,000.
“Ukraine has ground down a significant mass of Russian troops and retreated,” Pavel Luzin, a Russian-based expert with the Jamestown Foundation, a think tank in Washington, DC, told Al Jazeera.
To some observers, Moscow’s long-term perspectives in the war do not look promising because of heavy losses and demoralised manpower amid Western sanctions that prevent the production of high-precision weaponry.
“Time works against Russia [because] its military potential is largely irreplaceable,” he said.
Severodonetsk stands on the Siversky Donets river that the Russians have unsuccessfully tried to cross several times – with heavy losses of manpower and armoured vehicles.
One reason Severodonetsk fell was because of Russia’s superiority in artillery.
Moscow has used multiple rocket launchers, bombers and even outdated Tochka U cruise missiles to pound Ukrainian positions and residential areas.
“Aviation is working. Tochka Us are working. A whole set of artillery. They are advancing in all directions,” Roman Vlasenko of the Severodonetsk administration said in televised remarks on Friday.
However, the takeover of the entire Luhansk region – which seems imminent after the potential fall of Lysychansk – will not bring about the victory Russian President Vladimir Putin wants.
Months ago, Russian troops failed to seize Kyiv and northern Ukraine, losing thousands of troops and hundreds of tanks and armoured vehicles – as they were accused of committing war crimes against civilians.
They retreated in early April, and Putin said Russia would focus on capturing the Donbas region that includes Luhansk and Donetsk.
But at least two-fifths of Donetsk, a far larger and more populated province, is still controlled by Ukrainian forces.
They have built extensive defence installations there since rebels seized a third of Donetsk in 2014 – and taking them over will prove far more difficult than seizing Luhansk.
Meanwhile, the immediate economic consequences of losing all of Luhansk are minimal.
The industrial core of Luhansk with dozens of plants, power stations and coal mines has been under the rebels’ control since 2014, while the Kyiv-controlled part was mostly farmland.
The only industrial pockets there were the chemical and cellulose plants in Severodonetsk, Lysychansk and the town of Rubizhne that had been taken over in early May.
The plants almost stopped working because of the hostilities and shifting front line, Kyiv-based analyst Aleksey Kushch said.
“The economic effect is minuscule,” he told Al Jazeera.
The loss of Mariupol, that served as an administrative capital of the Ukrainian-controlled part of Donetsk, was far more consequential because the city was a crucial seaport and had two giant steel plants that accounted for a sizeable part of Ukraine’s steel output, he said.
Meanwhile, the fighting over Severodonetsk showed that Ukrainian forces could soon achieve parity with Russian troops as Moscow is losing reserves, morale and reliable weaponry.
“They are exhausted,” military expert Romanenko said of the Russians.
As Ukraine reorganised its troops following the defeat, the Kremlin maintained its widely criticised narrative that today’s Europe is similar to Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.
“When World War II was about to begin, Hitler gathered a significant part, if not most of the European nations, for a war against the USSR,” Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday. “These days, the European Union together with NATO are gathering a modern-day coalition to wage a war on the Russian Federation.”
A scene from Full Metal Jacket. (photo: Warner Bros.)
Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket was released 35 years ago. Gregory Wakeman explores how the film, and others by the director, revealed "the mindlessness and cruelty of conflict" – as well as the transformation of young men into killing machines.
Kubrick's fascination with war actually dates back to his debut outing as a director, 1953's Fear and Desire, which he made when he was just 24 years old. Set during an unnamed dispute, Fear and Desire revolves around four soldiers who crash-land behind enemy lines, and somehow have to find their way back to base. Even though he would later disown it as "a bumbling amateur film exercise," Kubrick would continue to explore Fear and Desire's brutal yet tender look at the human and mental cost of conflict.
Nathan Abrams, a professor in film at Bangor University, who has written extensively about Kubrick, says that "he used war as the backdrop to examine the bigger issues that he was interested in, like the nature of humanity, men, masculinity and evil. He's not interested in war, per se. He's interested in what war tells us about us."
Peter Kuznick, a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at the American University in Washington, DC, believes that "Kubrick understood, on a very deep level, the insanity of modern warfare."
That was clear in his next war film, Paths of Glory (1957), which tells the true story of three French soldiers killed for cowardice after surviving a suicide attack. But while Dr Strangelove (1964) and finally Full Metal Jacket (1987) would follow, Kubrick's interest in using cinema to examine the psychological, physical, and emotional impact of war wasn't just restricted to the films he actually made.
"I think you get a better idea of Kubrick's interest in war from the totality of what he attempted to do," says Abrams, who points out that Kubrick spent years striving to make films on Julius Caesar, the Holocaust and Napoleon, while also noting how both Spartacus and Barry Lyndon stray into the genre, too.
Sex and violence
Paths of Glory's exploration of the "irrationality, mindlessness and cruelty of warfare", according to Kuznick, means that it is widely regarded as one of the finest anti-war films ever created. But it is Dr Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket's mixture of sex and violence that really epitomises Kubrick's viewpoint on the genre.
"Kubrick is very aware of certain things, especially the connection between sex and violence," explains Kuznick. It's there in the opening title sequence of Dr Strangelove, as Kubrick shoots the mid-flight refuelling of an aircraft as if it was a sex scene.
"The sexual imagery carries on through the entire movie," says Kuznick, who points out how one of Dr Strangelove's final sequences sees Major TK "King" Kong (Slim Pickens) straddling and riding a nuclear bomb as it falls to its target. "Even the name of the film," adds Kuznick. "Strangelove. What is Strange Love referring to? It's a love of death."
While he's renowned for his subtlety, Kubrick wasn't afraid to be very blatant with his themes when required. Such is the case in Full Metal Jacket, when the tyrannical drill instructor Sergeant Hartman (R Lee Ermy) tells the privates he is training that they have to give their rifles women's names and sleep with them. There's even a scene where they march around holding their weapons in one hand and their genitals in the other, chanting, "This is my rifle. This is my gun. This is for killing. This is fun."
All of which raises the question, why was Kubrick so intent on repeatedly showing the link between sex and violence? "I think he's saying that the same urge that can turn people into obsessively sexual beings is interconnected to our proclivity towards violence," explains Kuznick. "Ultimately, I think that's what makes Kubrick pessimistic about human beings."
Kubrick's cynicism towards humanity is apparent all the way through Full Metal Jacket. Split into two separate stories, the first hour details the boot camp training of US Marines by Hartman. He is so abusive to Private Leonard (Vincent D'Onofrio), who is less intelligent and more overweight than the other trainees, that Hartman is ultimately murdered by him.
"Full Metal Jacket is about the abuse of young men, which has been going on in the military since the start of society. These young men are turned into killing machines," explains Abrams.
Robert Muller, who was paralysed from the chest down in Vietnam and subsequently founded the humanitarian organisation Veterans for America, regularly appears as a guest speaker in Kuznick's classes. Muller tells the students that the boot camp Kubrick recreated in Full Metal Jacket is exactly the same as his own experience.
"The film is a comment on the sadism, the cruelty and the malleability of human nature," says Kuznick. "Muller has said, 'They take little butter-balls like me and turn them into killing machines. I went from being a good guy to going over to Vietnam, and laughing at seeing women and children being wasted.'"
The second half of Full Metal Jacket follows Joker (Matthew Modine) and his platoon to the Vietnam War, where we see the true horrors of the Tet Offensive unfold, all as the soldiers become increasingly blasé about death. "He wants to debunk movie clichés about war in general, and about the Vietnam War in particular," says Abrams.
Full Metal Jacket was, in part, Kubrick's response to the increasingly macho action films of the 1980s. Kubrick and his fellow screenwriters Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford wanted to eradicate the action movie stereotype. So when Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin) runs to save a wounded Eightball (Dorian Harewood), bullets are strewn over his shoulders with a bandolier, much like Sylvester Stallone's Rambo or Arnold Schwarzenegger's Commando.
"That's an image that we take from Vietnam War movies. It's a culturally processed image. Kubrick must have known that it wasn't authentic. But he didn't care because he was interested in the image of the hyper-masculine Vietnam soldier, which he puts into this racist character," explains Abrams. "At the same time, though, he's the soldier who actually runs in to save Eightball. That just makes the image all the more complex."
Kubrick spent most of his career ensuring that every aspect of his films was at the very least original and different. While most other Vietnam films were primarily set in the jungles of the country, Kubrick instead focused Full Metal Jacket on urban warfare, turning East London into the city of Huế. The likes of Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and Apocalypse Now ended with at least an inkling of hope, reflection, or realisation. Not so for Kubrick – and particularly not for Full Metal Jacket. "There's no Hollywood ending. There's no deeper understanding. There's no sense of learning from the experience really. It's just a sense of pessimism," says Kuznick.
For Abrams, this only underlines just how deep Kubrick's understanding of war and its impact was. "He abhorred war and the social and political structures that send people to do unimaginably horrific things. As [Sigmund] Freud got older, he wrote about the death instinct and the human proclivity towards destruction and self-destruction. Kubrick grappled with that more profoundly than any other filmmaker."
That's especially true of how Kubrick depicted technology and machinery in his films. Not only does HAL murder Frank in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Full Metal Jacket is named after the casings around bullets, while Dr Strangelove's plot is focused on the imminent launch of the doomsday device that will cause a nuclear apocalypse.
"Kubrick deals with the connection between the human death instinct and the machines we created to wreak havoc, destruction, and do the killing for us. He does so better than any other filmmaker, too," insists Kuznick. "He knows there is something deeply irrational and absurd about human beings who create machines that will only end life on the planet."
Such a negative viewpoint of the world probably helps to explains why, even though he was the most celebrated director of his generation, Kubrick was never rewarded with an Academy Award for his obvious talents. "He didn't play the publicity game," says Abrams. "In his early years, sure, he wanted to win an Oscar. But by the mid 60s, he'd slowed down. He makes as many films between 1953 and 1964 as he does afterwards because he was more interested in making sure his films delivered something new, and that he didn't repeat himself."
Which probably explains why Kubrick kept on coming back to the war genre. It was so rich in action, drama, emotion, and themes of grief, ego, sacrifice, and guilt, that Kubrick could go from searing the politics of war in Paths of Glory, to satirising the insanity of nuclear bombs in Dr. Strangelove, before finally showcasing the human cost of battle in Full Metal Jacket, without coming close to duplication. All of which he achieved while proving that he was the master of both transfixing and enlightening his audience at the same time.
So, while it may be a shame that Kubrick only made 13 films, perhaps we should just be grateful for the ones he gave us.
Video showed Israeli police officers attacking mourners at the funeral of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian American journalist for Al Jazeera who was killed in the West Bank. (photo: Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)
"We have found no information suggesting that there was activity by armed Palestinians in the immediate vicinity of the journalists," U.N. Human Rights Office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said in a statement released Friday.
The office says it reached its determination after gathering information from the Israeli military and the Palestinian attorney general. Its staff also visited the scene where Abu Akleh was shot, spoke to witnesses and experts, and analyzed video and other records.
The journalist was covering an Israeli raid
Abu Akleh, a 51-year-old Palestinian American, was killed on May 11 while covering a morning military raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. She was shot in the head while wearing a helmet and vest marking her as press.
At first, Israel's military and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said Abu Akleh was likely killed by armed Palestinians firing indiscriminately — a narrative that was quickly questioned by witnesses and by B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights monitor.
After its initial statements, Israel acknowledged that it's possible one of its soldiers fired the shots, and it's been investigating the killing. But Israel has also dismissed the findings of outside investigations that laid the blame on its military, saying they were biased.
Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz called the U.N. inquiry into Shireen Abu Akleh's death "unfounded."
"Her loved ones deserve to know the truth behind her tragic death," Gantz said in a statement. "We may only uncover the truth by conducting a thorough ballistic, forensic investigation and not through unfounded investigations such as the one published by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights."
U.N. details the sequence of events before Abu Akleh's death
On the day she died, Abu Akleh was in a group of seven journalists that came to the Jenin refugee camp's western entrance shortly after 6 a.m. local time, according to the U.N. report. They were attempting to cover an Israeli arrest operation in the camp.
The journalists approached via a side street, saying later that the route avoided armed Palestinians and would also "make their presence visible to the Israeli forces deployed down the street," the U.N. report states.
Here's how the rights office describes the shooting:
"At around 06h30, as four of the journalists turned into the street leading to the camp, wearing bulletproof helmets and flak jackets with 'PRESS' markings, several single, seemingly well-aimed bullets were fired towards them from the direction of the Israeli Security Forces. One single bullet injured Ali Sammoudi in the shoulder, another single bullet hit Abu Akleh in the head and killed her instantly. Several further single bullets were fired as an unarmed man attempted to approach Abu Akleh's body and another uninjured journalist sheltering behind a tree. Shots continued to be fired as this individual eventually managed to carry away Abu Akleh's body."
Israel has called on Palestinians to conduct a joint investigation into the shooting. But Abu Akleh's family says that would be like relying on a suspect to investigate their own case, and they want the U.S. to investigate, as NPR's Daniel Estrin reported last week.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price has dismissed the idea of a U.S. investigation, saying Israel has the "wherewithal" to conduct an investigation that "culminates in accountability."
While exposure to harmful chemicals isn't good for anyone, pregnant people and children are especially vulnerable. (photo: Munshi Ahmed/Getty Images)
Communities near polluting sites tend to be disproportionately lower income and people of color — populations that are more likely to need abortion care in the first place.
Baytown’s legacy of pollution largely comes back to its high concentration of chemical facilities, including an ExxonMobil refinery that routinely spews hazardous chemicals and most recently caught fire in 2021. A notoriously leaky Superfund site that sits in the middle of the San Jacinto River contaminates the water and seafood in the area.
Petrochemical facilities in Harris County routinely emit “chemicals like benzene, toluene, and xylene that cause developmental and reproductive issues in human bodies,” said Nalleli Hidalgo, a community outreach and education liaison at the Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, a Houston-based nonprofit.
While exposure to harmful chemicals isn’t good for anyone, pregnant people and children are especially vulnerable. Because children’s bodies are smaller and still developing, they can become sick faster and at lower levels of exposure. Similarly, pregnant people experience physical and hormonal changes that make them particularly sensitive to pollution. Research shows that those who live close to pollution — whether that’s from oil and gas fields or traffic on roads and highways — suffer worse maternal health outcomes compared to those further away, with higher likelihoods of developing hypertension, having low birth weight babies, and giving birth early. And of course, pregnancy itself can be dangerous without proper care – conditions like preeclampsia and maternal hemorrhage can potentially result in disability or death.
In parts of Baytown, the rate of maternal morbidity, a term that describes unexpected outcomes at the time of labor and delivery and lead to significant consequences for health, is almost double the state average. In a 2018 study, researchers at the University of Texas in Austin found that on average maternal morbidity rates in Texas in 2016 were about 17 per 1,000 deliveries. But in Baytown the rate was as high as 31 cases of severe maternal morbidity per 1,000 deliveries. The outcomes are more severe for people of color: Statewide maternal morbidity rates in Texas are 2.1 times higher for non-Hispanic Black women.
A lack of access to abortion care will likely exacerbate these outcomes. Last week, Politico published a draft opinion from a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court justices overturning Roe v. Wade, the precedent-setting legal ruling that made access to abortion the law of the land almost 50 years ago. While the opinion isn’t final, it seems likely that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe this summer, potentially allowing states to determine whether abortion is legal within their own borders.
If finalized, a ruling reversing Roe would place additional burdens on those living in environmental justice and frontline communities. About 25 states look set to ban abortions if Roe is overturned, and many of these states are in the South and along the Gulf Coast, where communities of color already face disproportionate environmental and climate burdens. These are also some of the very same states where access to healthcare and family planning services is limited, uninsured populations are high, and maternal health outcomes are lacking.
“We know that being low income and being a person of color in the U.S. predisposes you to having lower access to health care,” said Hailey Duncan, an environmental justice policy analyst with the nonprofit Moms Clean Air Force. The “compounding factors” of being a person of color, living next to a polluting site like an oil and gas facility, and not having access to health care has an effect on pregnancy, she said.
Texas is one of the 13 states that have “trigger laws” that will automatically completely ban abortion as soon as Roe v. Wade is overturned, which means that if you are a person seeking an abortion who lives in Baytown, you will have to travel out of state. (Texas already has a law on the books outlawing abortion past six weeks; reversing Roe would eliminate even this early window).
Since almost all states bordering Texas are also trigger law states, you will have to travel a significant distance. One Marketwatch piece on the price of an out-of-state abortion — including travel, lodging, and lost wages — found that they cost thousands of dollars. One patient, who had to seek a complicated second-trimester operation, ended up incurring costs upward of $14,000. Even a $400 emergency cost would force 18 percent of households to borrow to cover it, and 12 percent would be unable to cover it altogether.
There is a refrain in the abortion rights movement that legally banning the procedure does not effectively end the practice of abortion; it simply limits who will be able to get them, or get them without fear of prosecution or governmental interference. That is, those who have the freedom and financial means to travel, take time off work, and cover medical costs will always be able to get an abortion if needed. And those who don’t will be left with few, if any, options.
Research abounds showing that those who live in the immediate vicinity of polluting sites tend to be lower income and disproportionately people of color — populations that are more likely to need abortion care in the first place. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 75 percent of abortion patients are poor or low income, and 61 percent are people of color.
Furthermore, those in environmental justice communities are often unable to move due to financial constraints, low valuation of their property due to contamination, and social or family ties. In Baytown, for example, the median household income is around $54,000, lower than both the national and state median of Texas; the median home value is $126,500, one third of the national median home price; and seventeen percent of Baytown households live under the poverty line, 1.5 times the national poverty rate.
“Low-income households are much more likely to be women-led,” said Khalil Shahyd, managing director of environmental and equity strategies at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. “Whether we’re talking about the risk of natural disaster and flooding or displacement from homes, those homes that are typically at the highest risk are going to be lower-income homes, which are predominantly led by female heads of household.”
And then, not to pile further onto the embattled Baytown, there is the issue of climate impacts. The aftermath of Hurricane Harvey unveiled brutal inequities in community recovery from severe rain and flooding, where poor households in Harris County actually received less federal assistance than financially secure ones. In addition, it is the more socially vulnerable communities that live in the greater Houston area’s high-risk flood zones, as shown by ongoing Rice University research. Heat waves, which pose health risks to both pregnant people and their fetuses, are also predicted to become both more frequent and extreme along the already-sweltering Gulf Coast.
During Hurricane Harvey, pregnant people and those with young children had to swim to safety, recalled Erandi Treviño, a community organizer in Houston with Moms Clean Air Force. Basic necessities such as clean drinking water were hard to find. The added stress of trying to keep yourself and your child safe during a hurricane is harmful to pregnant people, she said. “Having to live under these conditions creates stress which turns into ailments.”
Hidalgo, with Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, said that in the aftermath of hurricanes, she often has to remind pregnant people to avoid venturing outside if they smell unpleasant odors. Petrochemical facilities often shut down during hurricanes for safety reasons. When they start back up, they release millions of pounds of harmful chemicals. “We always remind people that if they plan to go outside for a walk or for a jog, to not go whenever there’s a chemical fire, or to look for other areas that might not be as contaminated because it’s a danger to not only them but also to their developing child,” she said.
The climate is changing, and everyone on Earth will have to deal with that reality as it develops. When activists emphasize that social, environmental, and economic inequities are all connected, it can feel overwhelming to grasp the vast and fundamental features of our society that must change. But it simply means that there is a version of our future in which additional burdens — barriers to reproductive healthcare, lack of affordable housing, stagnant wages — make all of the challenges of climate change acutely worse for already vulnerable communities, and there is one in which those burdens are alleviated by intentional, forward-thinking, and realistic policy.
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