"It's like someone gave me $1 million and told me, 'Leslee, go shopping.'

"Stereotypes on sale, aisle eleven!"

Is she even for real?

She spent the day conferring with lawyers on how to leverage the ruling to maximum effect in the states. "We're brainstorming, and we're having fun," she said.

I just love how she makes it sound like she cares more about beating the Pro-Choice contingent than on the actual issue. If the ruling had went the other way you wouldn't have seen me be like "I'm going to gather up all my pregnant friends so we can have partial-birth abortions and rub it in pro-lifers faces"

Instead we'd still be talking about women's rights and how it's a victory for us...not about how much it's going to piss other people off...cause you know..we care about the situation.

a sidenote: I was facilitate a female inmate group in a jail and we were discussing the ban as most of them have no clue what's going on. All of a sudden this fifty year old woman was like "The gov't needs to stay the fuck out of my crotch."
Love It!

unfortunately she is real, well at least as far as there is a bag of meat walking around claiming to be her spewing such bits of wisdom any time she can get someone to pay attention to her.

This ranks right up there with her proclamation that she was going out for lobster after the SD governor signed her abortion ban.

The woman is every bad stereotype about women, insists that she is a feminist and speaks for all women. She is seriously deranged. She had a very bizzare mental meltdown on live TV after her ban lost the public vote in November .

Wow, I'm glad that taking away other women's choices gives he the same rush as a new pair of shoes. Good luck to all those women who won't have a choice anymore and won't even be able to pay their medical bills, but I'm gonna buy me some PURSES!!!

Seriously, I hate this woman. She is everywhere and each and every time I hear her name or see her face, I start seething.

As I am too depressed for most words lately, I just wanted to say "bwah?" Um, Leslee, you do realize that this applies to you too, right? Or, probably not, since she's likely rich and white. Nothing like sticking it to the rest of us!

SDstuck - "bag of meat" made gin & tonic come out my nose. I have a new cutting remark and can't wait to use it. Thanks!

Astonishing. I've never seen anybody so giddy with self-righteous spite. This woman would probably ban condoms if she got the chance.

She sounds like the type of person who would want to put into law a bill that would force all women to be pregnant all the time. Round up all the unpregnant women like the cows she thinks we are and spermafy us.

I can imagine her freaking out all wide eyed, pulling her hair out, screaming "All sperm is sacred!!!"

Wow, I scared myself.

It seems like we could have the civility to refrain from insulting Ms. Unruh's status as a human being, while at the same time disagreeing with her political opinions in the strongest (and even snarkiest) possible terms. If we're asking those who disagree with us not to attack us with vicious, personal language, we should not do the same.

That being said, I think the Abstinence Clearinghouse and Ms. Unruh are out of touch with reality and their glee at this court ruling makes me positively cross-eyed with fury.

STstuck -- Is the Unruh meltdown video on youtube?

Ann, I may have found it. SDstuck - is this it? It doesn't seem like a meltdown to me, exactly, but more like a severely delusional woman walking around with blinders on. How many times can she say "Planned Parenthood" and spew forth lies about them not informing women ...about what, exactly, Leslie?

And her ranting about women coming to her, and suddenly finding solace among her group about not feeling shameful about their abortions - heavens! It's people and organizations like HER that make people feel shameful and guilty about their abortions. No compassionate pro-choicer would ever make any girl or woman who had an abortion feel ashamed.

I'm also glad the abortion debate can be summed up so easily: "Dead baby bad, live baby good!" Yes, family planning, reproductive rights, pregnancy, and maternal health. That black and white statement of yours is really all it comes down to, eh, Leslie?

Fuckin' hell.

stringbeanjen-that vid is bonkers...she doesn't make much sense, huh? i was particularly struck by, "we are now the majority, planned parenthood, we the women who you have killed our children." as if PP is terminating women's pregnancies without their permission, let alone consent. and when she champions a woman no longer feeling ashamed to talk about her abortion, i mean: great. that's actually great. i'm not sure why she's so happy about it though.

also, re: the original post. there are so many things about it worth reacting to, but i think i'll just say this. it strikes me as SO pathetic to compare this enormous and devastating (to her in a good way, to me in a tragic and terrifying way) supreme court decision to a shopping spree. it just seems so disengaged from the gravity of it, and such a sort of stereotypical "dream come true" thing for a woman. i don't know. i should be more articulate, but my heart's broke and this woman feels like queen of the world. or the mall, anyway.
gross.

I feel so horribly oppressed right now. I've never felt this way my whole 20 years of life. I feel like there's nothing I can do. I'm shaking with anger.

There's also a video of her spewing about abstinence and purity. She drank every drop of the kool-aid.

(not including the link because it's 8 minutes of your life you could never get back)

lindsayPW, i kno exactly what you mean, i keep asking my boyfriend and our roommate when it gets better, when i stop feeling so hurt and defeated. i havent been in this much pain and shock since i started having rape flashbacks, and i was able to fix that with therapy, i cant fix this with a few visits to my amazing shrink. ive basically been self medicating with pot, sourdough, and dark chocolate since i heard the news, and just staying in my house. i donated to planned parenthood and sent the letter from naral to my senators and representative, but now what?

She's trying to demoralize pro-choicers. This is also why the Christian Coalition described the ruling as a strike against Roe--when in reality, if you read the thing, it's anything but.

This is the danger of being a pro-choicer who spins a ruling that says "Congress can ban one abortion procedure as long as the ban does not constitute an undue burden on a woman's right to have an abortion" as "Oh, God, the Supreme Court just overturned Roe! We're all doomed!" Because then the right wing goes "Oh, God, the Supreme Court just overturned Roe! You're all doomed!" and our movement gets demoralized.

When pro-choicers do insist on spinning an incremental ruling as a death spiral, the other side is always more than happy to oblige. It's great for creating new anti-abortion activists because they see that their actions have consequences. It's lousy for creating new pro-choice activists because it sends the message that our activism doesn't work.

The truth is that Kennedy's ruling is entirely consistent with the position he has always held, dating back to Casey, and that unless we expected Alito or Roberts to be better pro-choicers than Kennedy, there is no reason to be surprised by this ruling. The only surprise I found in it is that Alito and Roberts refused to join Scalia and Thomas' anti-Roe dissent, which could signify something very good--an actual 7-2 majority in favor of Roe--or nothing at all. We won't know for a while. But if you had told me last week that you thought Alito and Roberts wouldn't join Scalia and Thomas' dissent, I wouldn't have believed it.

Cheers,

TH

I meant to say Scalia and Thomas' concurrence, not dissent. I went into it a little more lucidly here.

I want to emphasize here that I don't mean to make light of anyone's pain over this ruling. It is a bad ruling, no question. But as far as I know I've never met a woman who has had an intact live D&X, it's not terribly difficult to kill the fetus prior to extraction, and so what we're really talking about here is an extremely rare procedure that could very well be safer in some cases, but then again might not be.

Kennedy was very clear in the majority ruling that if more of a consensus had emerged about the need for intact live D&X, the law would have posed an undue burden. Because it is not clear that the fetus still needs to be alive at time of intact D&X to reap the safety benefits of the procedure, I am not sure what the ruling actually does. If I were Leslie Unruh, I'd put that $1 million into good mutual funds and wait until I had something to celebrate.

Cheers,

TH

I appreciate your clear-headed analysis, Tom, and hopefulness about the actual impact of the ruling. I agree that there is very little gained, politically, by over-blowing the negative impact of this ruling, and starting to spin-out doomsday scenarios.

However. That having been said, there are many people (including Justice Ginsburg, not just us freaked-out pro-choicers), who consider this a landmark ruling that reverses some of the Court's earlier rulings on abortion and has serious real-world implications. I don't think anyone is really surprised by the way the court went (it's why we were so opposed to Alito and Roberts in the first place, right?); speaking as a woman, it does have a visceral impact now that we're talking reality rather than a theoretical future court opinion.

The far-and-away most hurtful thing about the opinion, to me, is the way it rejects the centrality of reproductive choice and independent moral agency in women's lives. As Justice Ginsburg points out in her dissent:

Women, it is now acknowledged, have the talent, capacity, and right "to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation." Their ability to realize their full potential, the Court recognized [in the past], is intimately connected to "their ability to control their reproductive lives." Thus legal challenges to undue restrictions on abortion procedures . . . center on a woman's autonomy to determine her life's course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.(p. 4)

This decision, which supports such a challenge, then, is a direct attack on my autonomy as a woman "to determine [my] life's course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship." It makes me feel very personally invaded and degraded by the government. I think a lot of women are feeling the same.

SDstuck says... "well at least as far as there is a bag of meat walking around claiming to be her spewing such bits of wisdom any time she can get someone to pay attention to her."

I'm sorry, WHAT? The woman is a human being. Perhaps there is more than a little mysogyny going on here as many of these comments are attacking this woman for the way she made her statement, not her ideological stance. That, my friends, is a straw (wo)man.

These people are totally anti-freedom and anti-American.

I'd like to know where the hell these 5 Supreme Court justices got their medical degrees.

My medical decisions should be made by my physician and me.

This ruling is devastating. There have been a lot of celebrating about this and it makes me so angry. I wonder how much this issue is about asserting control over women as property and how it can be so thinly disquised as protecting 'life'. As if womens lives are not worth protecting.

annajcook, thanks for putting it so articulately. For me, it's not about the practical implications of the ruling, but the moral implications. My bodily autonomy is a moral issue, and that it's even up for debate and nitpicking is the part that is so demoralizing for me. It's also demoralizing when I express my outrage to someone (like the men in my life, who I typically think of as "on my side"), and they say something completely invalidating like "What are you so angry about?" Their worth as human beings and their right to value themselves more than a pregnancy is just something they will never, ever have to see debated in a legal forum, and that creates this divide that is difficult to bridge, at least in my life. And that hurts.

Well, also, I think it's important to look at the "why" of this procedure. From what I understand (as I've been vegging in front of the internets reading commentary), this procedure is primarily performed on women whose fetus runs into some serious complications later on in the pregnancy. Generally these women have wanted their babies all along, and are devastated to find out that the baby will not ever live a normal, healthy life (and possibly, not really live at all). In such cases, it is in fact sometimes necessary for the mother's life or health to have an abortion, and the now-banned procedure in some cases is the safest for the woman.

This ruling takes that option off the table, unless this specific procedure is necessary to save her LIFE. No worries if it will ravage her reproductive system and make her unable to bear more children in the future -- that's "health" so she doesn't get the abortion that would salvage her quality of life.

I appreciate Tom's view and I agree it's important for morale to take what we can from this decision. But, make no mistake, this opinion and this ruling are anti-woman in the extreme. I really and truly fear for my status as a full citizen and equal human being, thanks to this opinion.

The total meltdown where she was babbling and almost crying isn't on youtube. I got to watch it live on one of the other channels.

The dead baby rambling one is here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB6GyFspFe8
An her claims that she was going to run for Congress here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24_xG_HBhuE

I have a large amount of scorn for this women living in SD thus my rather not so nice statements about her.

This woman bought the babies of my classmates (for about $500), and sold them via illegal adoptions with a tidy profit. She weazeled her way out of prison time on it too. She forced her way into our high school against the health teachers protest to speak to our class. She proceeded to tell the class a mountain of lies including that contraception doesn't work, abortions will make you sterile and give you breast cancer. She got angry when students started questioning her statements. She also used to stand out in front of one of the local medical buildings yelling some rather vile things at any young female that entered the building. This was because one of the many doctors and businesses in this building occasionally did abortions.
The woman has a long track record of pretty disgusting activity in the community and having to actually deal with it probably makes me have a special amount of scorn for her.

TLF writes:
This ruling takes that option off the table, unless this specific procedure is necessary to save her LIFE.

Justice Kennedy didn't invent that standard; it's in the law itself. The question before the court, as I understand it and as the majority opinion described it, was "Is live, intact D&X clearly necessary enough in some cases that a ban on the procedure constitutes an undue burden on a woman's right to have an abortion?"

I recognize that Justice Ginsburg saw something more sweeping there, but that's how dissents usually read. If I judged every majority opinion by its dissents, I would have a very depressing view of our system of government. The opinion itself, which is the binding precedent here, is extremely narrow. If live intact D&X were a common procedure, then yes, it would be an attack on women. But if it's not, if killing the fetus prior to intact D&X is an option even in cases where intact D&X is needed, then the ban does not meet the undue burden standard by being excessively harsh.

Where I would argue that it might meet the undue burden standard, if any president were foolish enough to put me on the Supreme Court, is in its arbitrariness. But in order to be a harsh law, a law has to have harsh effects. I can't see how this law will have any effects, harsh or otherwise. Jill's article on the ruling in the Huffington Post, for example, linked to two examples of abortions that might be impacted--one where the fetus was already dead (so the law wouldn't be relevant), and one where the D&X is not specifically described as an intact D&X (and therefore might not even be affected by the ruling). I have heard and read many stories of an abortion, but I have never heard of anyone who has had a live intact D&X, much less a live intact D&X in a non-life-threatening context where a non-live intact D&X or traditional D&X would have been an inferior option.

If I actually knew women who had ever had a live intact D&X, or if it could be explained to me how this procedure would ever protect a woman's health, then I can understand the need for a health exception. But if we're talking about a procedure that's just on the table so so that obstetricians can have one more option, even if they never exercise it, then while the ban might be ill-conceived, I fail to see how it would constitute an undue burden by virtue of harshness. Maybe by virtue of arbitrariness, maybe by virtue of vagueness, but not by harshness. And if the problem with the law is that it's vague and arbitrary, not that it has any actual effect on women's lives, then I fail to see how it could be construed as an attack on women, or an attack on Roe, or an attack of any other kind. Attacks imply violence of some kind, and if we're not sure the law will even have any effects, I'm not sure how we can find violence in this ruling.

Cheers,

TH

In cases of non-intact "D&X," please pretend I said D&E (I know there's no "x" in "evacuation"). Medical terminology isn't my strong suit!

Cheers,

TH