As Louise said so eloquently on Friday, the Supreme Court’s decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, upholding the federal ban on certain medically approved abortion procedures, is a devastating blow to those of us who care about both our right to choose whether and when to have children and our right to make private medical decisions without state intervention.

It was an incendiary decision. And in New York it has already lit a fire. A coalition of women’s health advocates, led by the New York Civil Liberties Union, has been at work for months on a proposal for a piece of legislation that would overhaul and dramatically strengthen New York State’s outdated reproductive rights law. Last week, after the decision came down, Governor Eliot Spitzer stood up before a room full of women — women who have had children, women who have had abortions, women who believe it’s within their right to make their medical decisions on their own — and promised to submit that very bill for introduction in the New York State Legislature.

For the Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act to become law would be a major victory for women in New York and nationwide. Even as the Supreme Court continues to narrow federal protections for reproductive rights, the new New York law would protect not only the right to end a pregnancy but also the right to bear a child, the right to use or refuse birth control, and the right to keep reproductive decisions private. It would make sure women’s health doesn’t take a back seat to politics. And it would ensure that New York stands as a beacon in an impending storm.

New York was one of the first three states to make abortion legal. It did so in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade was decided. Now it’s time for New York to take its cue from Carhart, step up again, and lead the ongoing struggle for women’s right to control their reproductive destinies.

“[T]he Court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety.”

, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent to Gonzales v. Carhart.

“I’m ecstatic. It’s like someone gave me $1 million and told me, Leslee, go shopping. We’re brainstorming, and we’re having fun.”

, Leslee Unruh, one of the architects of last year’s failed attempt to ban nearly all abortions in South Dakota, explaining her reaction to the Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Carhart.

Last Wednesday, the United States Supreme Court upheld the first ever federal law banning certain abortion methods. The Court’s decision is a devastating blow to women’s health, reproductive rights, and the ability of all Americans to make private medical decisions.

The decision is the first ever in which the Court has upheld an abortion restriction that lacks protection for women’s health. The decision is thus unprecedented and dangerous. It undermines a core principle of Roe v. Wade that women’s health must remain paramount. It signals the Court’s willingness to defer to politicians, not doctors, when it comes to matters of our health. And it invites states to pass still more restrictions, to further limit our access to abortion and with it our autonomy.

And, strikingly, it is the first decision of the Court since Justice O’Connor resigned. There’s no getting around one core fact: Last week’s decision was a reversal of a 2000 decision , in which the Court struck a similar state ban in part because it lacked a health exception , and the change in result reflects the change in the Court.

The decision has sparked anger and ire , all warranted. A doctor in California writes a satirical letter-to-the editor (see last) referring his case of lupus nephritis to the Court; Ellen Goodman connects politicians’ eagerness to interfere in private medical decisions with Terri Schiavo; and an editorial The New York Times points out the Court’s patronizing tone towards women.

Now it’s time for the decision to spark activism , by those of us who care about our right to decide whether and when to have a child; who want doctors, not politicians, to make medical decisions; and who care about women’s lives and equality. The ACLU stands ready and in firm defense of our rights.

We’ve all read the infuriating stories in the press from around the country about how some pharmacies are refusing to fill women’s prescriptions for contraception based on the pharmacy’s or an individual pharmacist’s religious objection. Denying women access to birth control , medication that only women use , is sex discrimination, and pharmacies have the responsibility to ensure that women are able to purchase birth control at their stores without added delay. Pharmacies should try to accommodate individual pharmacists with a religious objection so long as the pharmacy makes sure that women get their pills at the same pharmacy without added delay. This protects the health care needs of women and the religious freedom of individual pharmacy employees.

To address this problem, the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project and the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief just released a joint report, Religious Refusals and Reproductive Rights: Accessing Birth Control at the Pharmacy. The report includes a legal backgrounder on the issue, the ACLU’s framework for analyzing religiously based refusals in the pharmacy, and concrete advocacy ideas.

Activists should take note: This is an area where you can make real strides in protecting birth control access for women in your communities. In response to women’s complaints from across the country , including complaints gathered by the ACLU of Florida , that Wal-Mart pharmacists were refusing to provide birth control, earlier this month Wal-Mart changed its nationwide corporate policy to require all of its pharmacy counters to satisfy women’s requests. Activists in Washington State just celebrated a victory when its state pharmacy board issued regulations that require pharmacies across the state to satisfy all lawful requests for medication, including birth control, in a timely manner.

If you or someone you know faces a refusal at your local pharmacy, there is something that can be done about it. There are pharmacy boards in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that have complaint procedures for consumers who are treated unfairly by their pharmacist or pharmacy. The person who faced the refusal in the pharmacy can file a complaint and the pharmacist or pharmacy may be disciplined for acting unprofessionally, like the Wisconsin pharmacist who not only refused to refill a woman’s prescription for birth control, but refused to transfer the prescription to another pharmacy at the woman’s request.

Access to safe and effective contraception is a critical component of basic health care for women. The refusals of pharmacies , state-regulated businesses with the responsibility to supply medication to their patients , should not be tolerated.

After a week of blogging from Guantanamo, where he was a legal observer, our staff attorney Ben Wizner published his observations in the L.A. Times last Thursday, reflecting on the David Hicks hearings how they showed the world that the prisoners’ only hope of release from Gitmo is to plead guilty.

As someone who lived in New England for two-thirds of my life, I am well aware of the point-and-laugh attitude of much of the country toward the state of Texas. The backward thinking, the crazy cults and the racial injustice. Texas is notorious for its "shoot first, ask questions later" approach to life, which leaves many appalled and disgruntled.

Some of the anti-immigration bills filed at the Texas Legislature are the embodiment of Texas’ hard-line approach and in-your-face tactics. Some of them are not just hateful, they also attempt to defy the U.S. Constitution. These bills have drawn national attention, which of course was the exact intention of their sponsors. The ACLU saw it as a national opportunity as well.

We, here at the ACLU of Texas, were thrilled to read yesterday’s editorial opinion by Lawrence Downes in The New York Times. The piece demonstrates that not all legislators or conservatives in Texas are as unreasonable as they could be. The ACLU is part of a broad coalition of business, education, minority and civil rights groups that have joined together to find practical and reasonable solutions to immigration. Some of our Republican leadership have picked up on this as well, which is why some of the crazier bills will never see the light of day.

The ACLU is proud to play a role in the shifting paradigm in Texas, and we’re proud that Mr. Downes shed light on some of the good that happens here in the Lonestar State.

Yesterday, Wade Horn, Assistant Secretary for Children and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, announced his resignation. Horn, a 2001 appointee, oversaw the dramatic increase in federal funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs under the Bush Administration. Federal funding for these programs, which in the last decade has topped over a billion dollars, mirrors the government’s obsession with legislating morality. Instead of encouraging teens to postpone sex until they are mature enough to make healthy decisions, these programs drill teens with a singular message: Abstain from sex until you are married or suffer the consequences.

Indeed, these programs must teach that abstaining from sex outside of marriage — at any age — is the expected standard of human activity, and that sex outside of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.

The problem with this “standard” is that the vast majority of Americans don’t abide by it, and haven’t for decades. By the age of 20, 75 percent of Americans have had premarital sex — by age 44 that percentage jumps to 95 percent.

Unfortunately, dealing with reality isn’t the only thing lacking in abstinence-
only-until-marriage programs — they also struggle with the truth. Not only are programs encouraged to tell teens that condoms fail (in fact, recipients of federal dollars may not advocate contraception use or teach contraception methods except to emphasize its failure rates), but a report by the U.S. House of Representatives released in 2004 found that some of the most widely used federally funded curricula exaggerate contraceptive failure rates and include misinformation.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, it does. Abstinence-only-
until-marriage programs often discuss gender stereotypes as if they are scientific fact, address same-sex sex behavior only within the context of promiscuity and disease, and, as in the case of the Silver Ring Thing, use taxpayer dollars to promote religion.

Abstinence-only-until-marriage programs raise a host of serious civil liberties concerns, but more importantly, they put teens’ health at risk in the name of pushing a particular moral agenda. Teens deserve better. One can only hope that Mr. Horn’s successor will understand the importance of replacing such medically inaccurate, misleading, and biased curricula with programs that provide teens with real information about protecting themselves against unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

— Rachel Hart, ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project

The Guantanamo detainees fell one vote short yesterday of persuading the Supreme Court to hear their challenge to the Military Commissions Act, which strips the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions filed by so-called "enemy combatants."

When the Court decides not to hear a case, it typically issues a simple one-sentence order announcing that review has been denied without further elaboration. The Court’s four most conservative members , Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito , adhered to that practice, voting to deny review without explanation. The court’s remaining five members, however, joined in two separate opinions that accompanied Monday’s order.

Three of the Court’s more liberal members , Justice Souter, Justice Ginsburg, and Justice Breyer , voted in favor of review, with Justice Breyer and Justice Souter also urging that the case be heard on an expedited schedule this spring. Their reasoning was set forth in an opinion by Justice Breyer, who wrote that the case raised "important" questions that deserved the Court’s "immediate attention" for several reasons. First, habeas corpus is supposed to provide detainees with a "speedy" remedy for unlawful detention, and many of the Guantanamo detainees have already been held for more than five years. Second, he said, the detainees have presented a "plausibl[e]" argument that the court of appeals was wrong to uphold the Military Commissions Act and thus prolong their detention.

The Constitution provides that habeas corpus can only be suspended "when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." Because Congress had made no findings that even arguably justified the suspension of habeas corpus in the Military Commissions Act, lawyers for the Guantanamo detainees immediately challenged the constitutionality of the new law. They lost, by a 2-1 vote, in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The appeals court ruled that the Constitution does not apply to Guantanamo and that habeas corpus is not available to anyone outside the territorial United States , two rulings that are, at the very least, questionable in light of the Supreme Court’s prior decision.

With three votes for review and four against, the question of whether the Court would hear the case turned on the views of Justice Stevens, who wrote the earlier Rasul v. Bush decision in favor of the Guantanamo detainees, and Justice Kennedy, who is widely regarded as the Court’s critical swing vote. Together, they issued a short, two-page "statement" agreeing with Justice Breyer that the case was worthy of Supreme Court review but disagreeing about timing. Specifically, they concluded that the Supreme Court would be in a better position to consider whether Congress had provided the detainees with an adequate alternative to habeas corpus if the detainees first pursued the limited appeal rights that Congress has allowed from the combatant status review tribunals at Guantanamo, which have been widely condemned as kangaroo courts that fail to meet even minimum due process standards.

It is, of course, impossible to know what persuaded Justice Stevens and Justice Kennedy to defer Supreme Court review in this fashion. There has been speculation in the press that Justice Stevens was uncertain of Justice Kennedy’s position on the merits and, therefore, preferred to delay consideration of the Military Commissions Act rather than risk a decision upholding its constitutionality. Perhaps that is the explanation, perhaps not.

What is certain is that the Guantanamo detainees are now facing at least another year before they can get back to the Supreme Court, despite pointed comments by Stevens and Kennedy warning the government not to delay proceedings. And, even if the Guantanamo detainees ultimately win the battle over the Military Commissions Act on a return trip to the Supreme Court, the fight will still be about the proper procedure for reviewing their detention rather than whether they should be imprisoned at all. Procedure matters. But, five years after the first detainees were brought to Guantanamo, we should not still be arguing about the proper procedures for trying them. In the eyes of the world, it is hard to see yesterday’s Supreme Court action as anything other than a case of "justice delayed is justice denied."

Immigration reform is something that’s on everyone’s mind lately. There have been several legislative fixes proposed, the most recent being the [1] STRIVE Act introduced by Representatives Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.). The STRIVE Act has good intentions, but a major flaw is the inclusion of an electronic employment verification system (EEVS). The EEVS proposal would require everyone — both citizens and non-citizens — to obtain and present newly proposed documents such as a Social Security Card and a [2] Real ID Act-compliant driver’s license in order to work. These documentation requirements are not feasible and will cost the country billions of dollars. Additionally, a database that expansive would be a tempting target for identity thieves. Worse still, the EEVS would mean that hard working Americans would have to obtain a permission slip from the government every time they sought a new job –- and with the high error rate of the much smaller pilot program likely to get worse, this could be a major headache for all of us.

There is no easy answer to immigration reform, but we all understand the system is broken. The government’s reactionary policies are simply making the crisis worse. We commend Representatives Gutierrez and Flake for attempting to fix the problem. However, we need to make sure our immigration reform is a system based on American values of fairness and responsibility. America can only benefit from an evenhanded and reasonable approach to immigration reform.

- Cross-posted at http://blog.thehill.com/2007/04/02/immigration-reform-shouldnt-include
-blanket-id-law/