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| Abortion rights demonstrators |
It's been a bad day for conservative Christians trying to sneak through a ban on abortions in the USA, despite the constitutional right to abortion services.
In another reversal for the 'pro-life', misogynistic Christian right, the US Supreme Court has struck down a Texas law, introduced on the pretext of conserving hospital resources during the coronavirus pandemic, which effectively banned all abortions in the state.
On Monday, despite the Trump-inflicted right-wing Christian fundamentalist bias in the Supreme Court, they wiped off the books a lower court ruling that had upheld an order by the Republican Texas governor, Greg Abbott, that banned nearly all abortions during the pandemic.
Abbot's ban on all medical procedures that were deemed non-essential or 'elective' was seized on by Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton, who declared that abortions came under this heading and were thus prohibited by it. This order was blocked by U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel of Austin. His ruling was appealed by the state and, by a 2-1 vote, the three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld enforcement of the Governor's order. This latter ruling has now been struck down by SCOTUS.
Similar prohibitions on abortions were inflicted on women in Alabama, Ohio, Oklahoma and Iowa. The SCOTUS ruling also has the effect of overturning those.
It is ironic, and a measure of their hypocritical double standards, to say the least that the conservative Christian right, who have been amongst the most vociferous opponents of measures to control the coronavirus pandemic, even declaring it to be a liberal elitist hoax, an attack on religion because of the controls on gatherings in places of worship and a denial of basic human rights with the demands for wearing face-masks in public places, quickly decided the pandemic was a serious threat after all, when they realised here was a chance to ban abortions.
What is perhaps surprising is not how keen and eager conservative Christians were to try to take a constitutional right away from women but that SCUTUS ruled against them. They had regarded it as a victory that President Donald Trump took the opportunity to pack the Supreme Court with his right-leaning placemen, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, giving the court a built-in conservative majority. This was supposed to be the beginnings of a fundamentalist Christian takeover of the US legal system and an eventual reversal of Roe v. Wade.
However, with President Biden's pledge that his administration will introduce legislation to codify Roe v. Wade into US federal law, if SCOTUS ever does overturn it, this is now looking increasingly unlikely.
All-in-all, it's looking like a bad time to be a right-wing Christian with the dream of having a right-wing theocratic regime governing American.
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