Tag: Brett Kavanaugh

Legal battles over abortion heat up in the USA

Volume 393    Number 10184               11 May 2019               
WORLD REPORT   Changes to Title X, several legal challenges, and a change to the Supreme Court composition could mean drastic changes for access to abortion in the USA. Susan Jaffe reports.

“We are the department of life…from conception until natural death, through all of our programmes”, US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Alex Azar said earlier this year…. The government’s anti-abortion efforts have ignited lawsuits from Maine to California. Eventually, one or more of these cases are expected to reach the Supreme Court. With its newest arrival—Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whose nomination by Trump was championed by abortion opponents—the Supreme Court’s ideological balance has now shifted towards a conservative majority [raising] opponents’ hopes that a sympathetic court will diminish, if not overturn, Roe v. Wade...

Late last week, lawyers for the HHS appealed decisions by two federal court  judges in Oregon and Washington state to temporarily halt new administration rules that would limit the information about abortion services that federally funded health-care providers can tell their patients.    

“We are fighting back in the courts, we are fighting back in Congress and in state legislatures all across the country”, said Planned Parenthood president Leana Wen, noting that one in four women in the USA will have an abortion in their lifetime. “The public is with us when it comes to defending access to safe legal abortion, which people understand is part of the full spectrum of reproductive health care, which is health care.” [Continued here.]…

Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh

Volume 392, Number 10144   

 28 July 2018

 

WORLD REPORT   If confirmed, Kavanaugh could tilt the court toward the president’s views on US public health policy. Susan Jaffe, The Lancet‘s Washington correspondent, reports.

Before Republicans chose Donald Trump as their party’s candidate for president in 
2016, some doubted whether the New York real-estate developer seeking political office for the first time was truly conservative. To shore up his conservative credentials, Trump produced a list of judges with help from the conservative Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society that he promised to choose from to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court should an opening occur during his presidency.... 
Health-care issues are expected to dominate the debate over [Judge Brett] Kavanaugh’s nomination in the US Senate, which will decide if he should join the court. Several cases involving the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and reproductive rights are working their way through the legal system. …If Kavanaugh, aged 53 years, is approved, his lifetime position on the court means his vote could be a deciding factor in cases for several decades. [Continued here.]

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