[On Monday], Senator Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara), Chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus, issued the following statement on the second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade:
“It has been two years since millions of women across the country lost access to essential reproductive care with the overturning of Roe v Wade. In 2024, it is a sad reality that women seeking reproductive care today have fewer options than the previous generations before them.
“As we continue to see the consequences of this decision, California has stepped in to protect and advance healthcare access for women. Reproductive care remains safe and legal in the Golden State.
“The California State Legislature has gone to great lengths to protect women’s access to essential reproductive health care. The Legislature has ensured that doctors who provide abortion care and the women who seek that care, are not penalized with civil lawsuits. We have provided funding to reproductive care clinics that are seeing an influx of patients due to bans across the country and we have taken steps to protect women’s access to mifepristone and will do all that we can to ensure this medication remains accessible.
“California has and will always be a national leader for reproductive justice. We will continue to stand together and fight back against laws that seek to strip reproductive health care access for millions of women across the country. ”
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Monique Limón represents the 19th Senate District, which includes Santa Barbara, Ventura, Goleta, Buellton, Carpinteria, Guadalupe, Lompoc, Santa Maria, Solvang, Camarillo, Fillmore, Ojai, Oxnard, Santa Paula, and Port Hueneme. She currently serves as the Chair of the Senate Democratic Caucus and as Chair of the Senate Banking and Financial Institutions Committee.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson writes (https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-25-2024):
A study published yesterday in the pediatrics journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA Pediatrics) shows that the idea of returning women to roles as wives and mothers by banning abortion has, in Texas, driven infant death rates 12.9% higher. The rest of the country saw an increase of 1.8%. Infant deaths from congenital anomalies increased almost 23% in Texas while they decreased for the rest of the nation, showing that the abortion ban is forcing women to carry to term fetuses that could not survive.
When the Texas ban went into effect, Governor Greg Abbott said there was no need to make an exception for rape, because Texas was going to “eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas.” Instead, in a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers estimated that in the 16 months after the Texas ban, 26,313 rape-related pregnancies occurred in the state.
Earlier this month, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to oppose in vitro fertilization (IVF), and today, Representative Matt Rosendale (R-MT) announced he would file an amendment to the 2025 defense appropriations bill stripping it of funding for IVF, saying “the practice of IVF is morally wrong.”
Trump advisors behind Project 2025 want to enforce the 1873 Comstock Law to ban medical abortion and contraception nationally. Yesterday the Biden-Harris campaign released a tape in which Jeff Durbin, a Trump ally who is pastor of the Apologia Church in Tempe, Arizona, and the founder and head of End Abortion Now, says that abortion is murder and those who practice it deserve execution: “You forfeit your right to live.”
But for Americans, particularly American women, reality trumps the Republicans’ fantasy, and they are demanding that their right to reproductive health care be protected. Liz Crampton of Politico noted that yesterday, on the second anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that protected abortion rights, Republicans were silent. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) didn’t post about it on social media, those vying to be Trump’s vice-presidential pick kept quiet, and Trump himself didn’t boast about it (although his former vice president Mike Pence did say in a National Review op-ed that the Dobbs decision had made the U.S. “a more compassionate nation”).
Republicans in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas determined to reestablish patriarchy have now taken on the cause of eliminating no-fault divorce. Eric Berger of The Guardian explains that right-wing opponents of no-fault divorce note that women, especially educated, self-supporting women, file for divorce more often than men and that no-fault divorce means men can’t fight it. They claim divorce hurts families and, by extension, society.
Berger points out that it was then–California governor Ronald Reagan, who had been divorced, who signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law in 1969. Other states followed, with New York last in 2010. Berger also notes that in states that approved no-fault divorce, domestic violence rates dropped about 30%, the number of women killed by an intimate partner fell by 10%, and women’s deaths by suicide dropped by 8–16%. It’s hard to imagine American voters are going to embrace an end to no-fault divorce.
Hey Sen. Limon… Whar are you doing about keeping JOBS in California…? What are you doing about businesses LEAVING your State…? Why did the State LIE about the State 2023 job gains…? The LAO (California Legislative Analyst’s Office) showed that CA lost 150k jobs….NO NET JOB GROWTH— Yet you and your croonies in Sacramento told us the State GAINED 130k jobs… What are you doing about repealing the terrible laws that State Senators have written protecting criminals and juveniles who commit serious crimes…? What are you doing about the rampant retail theft issues that are plaguing our State…? WHY are so many restaurants in CA Closing…? Why are we inundated with “homeless/vagrants”/drug and alcohol abusers on all our City Streets and underpasses across the State….??? DO YOUR JOB….!!!!
COAST – waaaaahhhh waaaaahhhh whataboutwhataboutwhatboutwhatabout?
Good Lord, man.
What effect does abortion have on the unborn?