Author: moiv

There’s a lot of talk these days about what might happen if Roe falls, and most opinion...

from Our Word OK, everybody, how about some good news for a change?   If you live in Rhode...

from Our Word

Governor Mel Blunt signed an omnibus bill to restrict access to abortion in Missouri only weeks ago, but the sole abortion providing facility in Springfield, Missouri has already been forced to close its doors–leaving women in that region 160 miles away from the nearest doctor who is willing to provide abortion care.

The new law requires that doctors who perform abortions must hold professional privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of any location where an abortion is performed.  But abortion providing physicians now have become such a rare breed that many must travel considerable distances, so that the nearest hospital where a doctor has admitting privileges can lie much farther than 30 miles away from the clinic where she or he provides abortion care.

Like all TRAP laws, its provisions might apply to doctors, but women are the ones who get trapped.

Abortion is in the headlines this week.  On Saturday jsmdlawyer at Daily Kos diaried Clarence Thomas’ attempt to prevent an imprisoned woman in Missouri from having the abortion to which she was legally entitled, just because she didn’t have the $350 she needed to get to the clinic (before we were through with that one, she could have hired a limo, but how much better for women everywhere that she didn’t need it after all).  

And this morning none of us was shocked–shocked!— to hear about Harriet Miers’ 1989 promise to support a Constitutional amendment banning abortion altogether.  

But now I’m going to tell you an abortion story that hasn’t made the news, and probably won’t–a story about the women of Katrina, and about the hurricane relief effort no one talks about–the Katrina aid that dare not speak its name.

It had to happen somewhere, sooner or later, and none of us should be surprised that it has...