2,000 stories of regret swayed Court

[teach1st]

Source: St. Petersburg Times

Each affidavit was just two or three sentences. They made no legal argument, contained no legal verbiage. Each just vented pain and guilt. "Twenty years later it still hurts, " one Florida woman wrote.

These affidavits helped sway the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling on April 18 that for the first time set limits on how abortions are performed. The testimonials were cited by Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion upholding a federal ban on a procedure that opponents call "partial birth" abortions. "The emotional and psychological pain does not go away, " Kennedy wrote.

There were 2, 000 affidavits, 124 written by Florida women, all of whom have had abortions. They constitute "the largest body of legal evidence on how abortions hurt women, " says one of the women who collected testimonials in Florida.

"I went from an honor roll student to drug addict, " Dana Nicole Landers of Lakeland wrote about her abortion in 1997. It ended up in Kennedy's opinion. "It came from my heart, " says Landers, now 28. "I never expected what I wrote to be part of an historic decision."

Read more: http://www.sptimes.com/2007/04/30/State/2_000_stories_of_regr.shtml

[orleans]

1. oh my god! how absurd is this??

they ruled on late term abortions. did all these regretful women have late term abortions? not from how the article describes it:

"There were 2, 000 affidavits, 124 written by Florida women, all of whom have had abortions. They constitute "the largest body of legal evidence on how abortions hurt women, " says one of the women who collected testimonials in Florida."

so why not take a looksie at women who regret giving their children up for adoption and ban all adoptions?

and then why not look at women who, late in life, have regrets over never having a child--and make childbearing mandatory--and take that a step further and outlaw contraception since women are only depriving themselves of the ability to have a child (something they ALL will surely regret)

and while we're ruling based on regrets, i think marriage should be banned because i have heard countless people say they regret ever getting married.


""The emotional and psychological pain does not go away, " Kennedy wrote."

oh, kill me!

when did kennedy get his brains jammed up his ass?


and how were these "testimonials" or whatever the fuck even allowed into this proceeding without the same type of affidavit being allowed or looked at or offered up from women who are not regretful? (riddle me that one john roberts--you freak!)

[Richard Steele]

3. Very. Very absurd, very out of line with ANYTHING even close to a rational, fact-based opinion.

The word "medieval" springs to mind unbidden.

[Richard Steele]

2. So, a big pile of uncorroborated anecdotes now amounts to "the largest body of legal evidence"?

"They made no legal argument, contained no legal verbiage"....
but somehow they add up to a "the largest body of legal evidence", eh?
Just how does THAT work now?

I refer to the case of The People vs. Oscar mayer:
"now matter how thick you pile it, it's still baloney!"

The Dick rests.

(eddited fer spellin- I KNEW "uncoroborated" dint luuk qwite rite!)

[aquart]

4. She blamed her addiction on her abortion?

That lady is lying to herself.

[Richard Steele]

5. And the Supreme Court used that to base a "decision" upon.

Shit like this is the real reason i still own firearms, you know.

Just sayin.

[rosesaylavee]

33. Just like an untreated addict would do. n/t

[aquart]

6. Is this grounds for the judges to be disbarred?

I am simply horrified.

[depakid]

9. Four of them should never have been confirmed

and the other should have been- and still should be impeached for his role in Bush v. Gore.

History will not look kindly on this court- nor on the sell outs who voted to confirm these men.

[Karenina]

7. I wonder who organized

this bit of astro-turf... :eyes:

[Dogmudgeon]

8. When I was a lad of 17 ...

... a promiscuous young woman wanted to have immoral carnal relations with me.

I spurned her lewd blandishments.

I went from an honour roll student to not knowing how to spell 'honor' in the American orthography.

Here I am, 31 years later, broken in health, without a penny to my name, clinically insane and an antihistamine addict. Oh, the humanity!

Three decades later, it still hurts.

Woe is I!

--p!

[caligirl]

40. Hilarious, you write well.

[Dogmudgeon]

45. Thank you. Pain is good for Art.

And I've got art out my ass. Which, when you think of it, is pretty disgusting. Like the filthy stain that is my mortal soul.

But my life has been one long string of regrets over all the women I never laid, boinked, pronged, porked, swived, and with whom I never made the beast with two backs. I have no one but myself to blame. But I can at least try.

And one day, when I am standing naked and ashamed before the Judge Final and Triumphant, I will have naught to offer in my defense except the blood shed by my Redeemer upon the cross.

I often wonder: if He is Rh-, then are most of us truly and divinely fucked? Would that make the Basques and Irish the new Chosen People? Alas, it is time to snort a few more lines of chlor-trimeton.

There really ought to be an Operation Rescue for people like me.

Thanks again!

--p!

[Demeter]

10. Out Of How Many Legal and Safe Terminations of Unwanted Pregnancies

over the past 34 years, all they managed to scrape up is 2000?

There must be a LOT of grateful Catholic women out there,


Hell, if all it takes is an unattributed, undocumented affidavit to win this case, Choice would be the law of the land. We could bury the Supremes in them.

[yardwork]

41. Hell, I could write 2,000 "quotes" in a week or so

I wonder who got paid to ghost-write these?

[WePurrsevere]

11. Were they all *sworn* affidats? Anyone can write a BS letter & say it's true

even when they in fact had never had an abortion at all. It's just a feeling that I have (based on real life fundie experience) that if someone did some digging they'd probably find that all or many of these "2,000" were a part of an anti-choice scheme by someone somewhere.

Although I'm sure there are women who regret having an abortion and would go back in time and change things if they could, I'm sure there are also many who have no regrets or if they do they also know it was the right thing to do considering all the factors going on in their lives at the time. There's also a BIG difference in "partial-birth" abortions and a regular abortion... actually if I remember correctly it's rather rare and only done if medically it's considered absolutely necessary.

[badgerpup]

43. Wonder if they were answering an advert in a paper...

"If you had an abortion within the last 2o years and regretted it, call this number!
$$$ for your story!"

:sarcasm:...but maybe not...

[Solly Mack]

12. and they get to speak for all women? I don't think so

Their pain has absolutely nothing to do with my choices. They don't get to seek absolution for a life choice they made and now regret by denying others the same choice....and that's all they are doing.

Oh, they will lie to themselves and claim they are only trying to save others their pain - but that's bullshit. They feel guilty. They feel bad - and they want others to make up for what they feel bad about. Well, no can do.

Your guilt.You seek professional help for it. You are the one that has to live with how you feel.YOU. Not me. Own your own feelings and stop trying to make others pay for them.

Leave the rest of us alone.

[Xipe Totec]

13. Can we collect affidavits on the pain of teeth extractions?

maybe we can use those to ban dentistry.

:sarcasm:

[LizW]

14. A common authoritarian ploy.

This load of crap tactic is very common in out-of-control, unaccountable government entities. I've seen it recently even down at our city and school board level.

A group with an agenda takes over a decision-making body (in this case the anti-choice minority took over the SC -- in my city, big land developers took over the City Council and ultimately the School Board). They know from the git-go that their agenda is not what the majority wants, but they are going to ram it through come hell or high water. The first tactic they use is secrecy, so that the people don't know what they are doing. The SC has secrecy on its side because they are legally obligated NOT to discuss the cases that are before them.

They know the majority is going to be outraged by their decisions, so to diffuse the criticism, they create a supportive constituency in advance. (While at the same time, trying to suppress opposing views.) Then they say, "Look how many people we heard from on this issue! The response was overwhelmingly one-sided! We are doing the people's will, and you people who are complaining are just a vocal minority, out of touch with the mainstream of opinion."

I've seen this over and over again on a local level, and it particularly horrifies me to see the SC adopt this authoritarian tactic on the issue of reproductive rights.

But the thing to do is let the elected officials who put these unaccountable tyrants in place know that we are NOT stupid, and our memories are long. We know exactly who to hold responsible, in election cycle after election cycle, for these unacceptable consequences. We will come out and vote them out of office. It is stuff like this that will establish a permanent Democratic majority!

[KittyWampus]

21. It occurs to me we are now officially a Banana Republic. Our SCOTUS & Fed. Judiciary

have been totally corrupted.

[Barrett808]

28. Great post! n/t

[SheilaT]

15. Here's another way to think about this.

To start with, I'm not the least bit surprised it was possible to come up with a couple of thousand women who were willing to put it in writing that they regretted what happened. That's actually a remarkably common feeling, even many years later. Often there's a lot of guilt and shame attached to having gotten pregnant in the first place. Very possibly the woman wished at the time, and maybe still wishes, that it were possible to go ahead and have the baby and live happily ever after. But the situation is such that an abortion is the better decision. But it's not a decision easily made, no matter how the anti-choice people present it.

If there were better access to birth control, including "Plan B", and if sex education were taught from an early age, if religions didn't teach young people that sexual feelings and the act of sex are immoral and wrong, in short if we had a sensible and open attitude about all this, abortions would still happen but there might be a lot less guilt, shame, and regret.

Keep in mind that they didn't go out trying to get affidavits from women who'd had abortions and had no regrets. They'd get millions of those.

[undeterred]

16. I bet we could come up with 2 million letters of regret from Bush voters.

[Tesha]

17. Bullshit. 5 Catholic, anti-woman Justices swayed the Court. (NT)

[iverglas]

18. now read what Rugh Bader Ginsburg had to say about that

http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-380.pdf
(square bracketed interpolation marks, italics in original omitted; boldface mine)

Revealing in this regard, the Court invokes an antiabortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence: Women who have abortions come to regret their choices, and consequently suffer from “severe depression and loss of esteem.” Ante, at 29.7 Because of women’s fragile emotional state and because of the “bond of love the mother has for her child,” the Court worries, doctors may withhold information about the nature of the intact D&E procedure. Ante, at 28–29.8 The solution the Court approves, then, is not to require doctors to inform women, accurately and adequately, of the different procedures and their attendant risks. Cf. Casey, 505 U. S., at 873 (plurality opinion) (“States are free to enact laws to provide areasonable framework for a woman to make a decision that has such profound and lasting meaning.”). Instead, the Court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice, even at the expense of their safety.9

This way of thinking reflects ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution—ideas that have long since been discredited. Compare, e.g., Muller v. Oregon, 208 U. S. 412, 422–423 (1908) (“protective” legislation imposing hours-of-work limitations on women only held permissible in view of women’s “physical structure and a proper discharge of her maternal function”); Bradwell v. State, 16 Wall. 130, 141 (1873) (Bradley, J., concurring) (“Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. . . . The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother.”), with United States v. Virginia, 518 U. S. 515, 533, 542, n. 12 (1996) (State may not rely on “overbroad generalizations” about the “talents, capacities, or preferences” of women; “such judgments have . . . impeded . . . women’s progress toward full citizenship stature throughout our Nation’s history”); Califano v. Goldfarb, 430 U. S. 199, 207 (1977) (gender-based Social Security classification rejected because it rested on “archaic and overbroad generalizations” “such as assumptions as to women’s dependency” (internal quotation marks omitted)).

Though today’s majority may regard women’s feelings on the matter as “self-evident,” ante, at 29, this Court has repeatedly confirmed that “the destiny of the woman must be shaped . . . on her own conception of her spiritual imperatives and her place in society.” Casey, 505 U. S., at 852. See also id., at 877 (plurality opinion) (“Means chosen by the State to further the interest in potential life must be calculated to inform the woman’s free choice, not hinder it.”); supra, at 3–4.


8 Notwithstanding the “bond of love” women often have with their children, see ante, at 28, not all pregnancies, this Court has recognized, are wanted, or even the product of consensual activity. See Casey, 505 U. S., at 891 (“On an average day in the United States, nearly 11,000 women are severely assaulted by their male partners. Many of these incidents involve sexual assault.”). See also Glander, Moore, Michielutte, & Parsons, The Prevalence of Domestic Violence Among Women Seeking Abortion, 91 Obstetrics & Gynecology 1002 (1998); Holmes, Resnick, Kilpatrick, & Best, Rape-Related Pregnancy; Estimates andDescriptive Characteristics from a National Sample of Women, 175 Am. J. Obstetrics & Gynecology 320 (Aug. 1996).

7 The Court is surely correct that, for most women, abortion is a painfully difficult decision. See ante, at 28. But “neither the weight of the scientific evidence to date nor the observable reality of 33 years of legal abortion in the United States comports with the idea that having an abortion is any more dangerous to a woman’s long-term mental health than delivering and parenting a child that she did not intend to have. . . .” Cohen, Abortion and Mental Health: Myths and Realities, 9 Guttmacher Policy Rev. 8 (2006); see generally Bazelon, Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome? N. Y. Times Magazine, Jan. 21, 2007, p. 40. See also, e.g., American Psychological Association, APA Briefing Paperon the Impact of Abortion (2005) (rejecting theory of a postabortion syndrome and stating that “access to legal abortion to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is vital to safeguard both the physical and mentalhealth of women”); Schmiege & Russo, Depression and Unwanted First Pregnancy: Longitudinal Cohort Study, 331 British Medical J. 1303(2005) (finding no credible evidence that choosing to terminate an unwanted first pregnancy contributes to risk of subsequent depression); Gilchrist, Hannaford, Frank, & Kay, Termination of Pregnancy and Psychiatric Morbidity, 167 British J. of Psychiatry 243, 247–248 (1995) (finding, in a cohort of more than 13,000 women, that the rate of psychiatric disorder was no higher among women who terminated pregnancy than among those who carried pregnancy to term); Stodland, The Myth of the Abortion Trauma Syndrome, 268 JAMA 2078, 2079(1992) (“Scientific studies indicate that legal abortion results in fewer deleterious sequelae for women compared with other possible outcomes of unwanted pregnancy. There is no evidence of an abortion trauma syndrome.”); American Psychological Association, Council PolicyManual: (N)(I)(3), Public Interest (1989) (declaring assertions about widespread severe negative psychological effects of abortion to be “without fact”). But see Cougle, Reardon, & Coleman, Generalized Anxiety Following Unintended Pregnancies Resolved Through Childbirth and Abortion: A Cohort Study of the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, 19 J. Anxiety Disorders 137, 142 (2005) (advancing theory of a postabortion syndrome but acknowledging that “no causal relationship between pregnancy outcome and anxiety could be determined” from study); Reardon et al., Psychiatric Admissions of Low-Income Women following Abortion and Childbirth, 168 Canadian Medical Assn. J. 1253, 1255–1256 (May 13, 2003) (concluding that psychiatric admission rates were higher for women who had an abortion compared with women who delivered); cf. Major, Psychological Implications of Abortion—Highly Charged and Rife with Misleading Research, 168 Canadian Medical Assn. J. 1257, 1258 (May 13, 2003) (critiquing Reardon study for failing to control for a host of differences between women in the delivery and abortion samples).

9 Eliminating or reducing women’s reproductive choices is manifestly not a means of protecting them. When safe abortion procedures cease to be an option, many women seek other means to end unwanted or coerced pregnancies. See, e.g., World Health Organization, Unsafe Abortion: Global and Regional Estimates of the Incidence of Unsafe Abortion and Associated Mortality in 2000, pp. 3, 16 (4th ed. 2004)(“Restrictive legislation is associated with a high incidence of unsafe abortion” worldwide; unsafe abortion represents 13% of all “maternal”deaths); Henshaw, Unintended Pregnancy and Abortion: A Public Health Perspective, in A Clinician’s Guide to Medical and Surgical Abortion 11, 19 (M. Paul, E. Lichtenberg, L. Borgatta, D. Grimes, & P. Stubblefield eds. 1999) (“Before legalization, large numbers of women in the United States died from unsafe abortions.”); H. Boonstra, R.Gold, C. Richards, & L. Finer, Abortion in Women’s Lives 13, and fig. 2.2 (2006) (“as late as 1965, illegal abortion still accounted for an estimated . . . 17% of all officially reported pregnancy-related deaths”;“deaths from abortion declined dramatically after legalization”).

Not much needs to be added.


From the article quoted in the opening post:

They constitute "the largest body of legal evidence on how abortions hurt women," says one of the women who collected testimonials in Florida.

I wonder why I bothered going to law school and learning things like the rules of evidence ... how testimony is inadmissible if not subject to cross-examination, how only experts are qualified to give opinion evidence ... . Why didn't they just teach me how to deceive and manipulate a complicit court?



(edited to touch up copied pdf text; copying tends to result in words all mashed together)

[Barrett808]

29. Awesome. n/t

[KittyWampus]

19. How about 10,000 from families of DEAD WOMEN? Either the ones using coat hangers

or crappy doctors to abort an early pregnancy or the families with women carrying a late term fetus buy who died carrying it to term?

[Doctor_J]

20. Evidence? Maybe. Legal? No fucking way.

I thought the courts were supposed to decide based on THE LAW, not on an opinion poll

[slampoet]

22. I have nothing but comtempt for these often welloff women who got abortions in their time of need...

...and then seek to deny the same thing to younger women.

These people need to grow up and become real Americans.


Frankly I see this as nothing but the older generation ripping off the younger generation once again.

[iverglas]

24. sadly, many of them aren't well-off

They're vulnerable, often young and/or isolated and/or economically disadvantaged, and the vultures who operate "PASS" (post-abortion stress syndrome) covens in "crisis pregnancy centres" or, very commonly, churches, exploit them mercilessly.

A woman who is depressed -- whether because of an abortion or, more likely, because of an unplanned pregnancy and the problems it both arose from and caused/exacerbated -- may need psychotherapy. Instead, she is offered "forgiveness", which of course depends on her first internalizing the shame assigned to her.

Some of them (Norma McC0rvey/"Roe") like the attention or, to be more compassionate, need the support, whatever form it takes, and need the identity and sense of worth the manipulators give them to hook them in, and go whole hog into the political end of the business. Some just continue to lead lives of quiet misery, trapped in the shame/dependency net -- but are probably easily manipulated into signing whatever their captors ask.

[slampoet]

31. At least they're not holding an expensive baby to boot. Plus why are about 90% of them now married?

They're married because A) they had no kids to get in the way, B) because the pro-lifers specifically choose women who had abortions and then got married and try to pass them off as marriages that would have come along in just a little while if the woman had kept her pregnancy.

I'm not talking about women who have had this, I'm talking about the women the pro-life movement pushes forward as their patsies.

[iverglas]

32. absolutely

Wallowing in "oh I did a terrible thing and I wish I hadn't" is not exactly productive -- and seldom honest.

Women who have early unplanned pregnancies (i.e. children) are far less able/likely to form stable family units later in life. For most people, a stable family unit is virtually a necessity for emotional, social and economic stability. Early unplanned childbearing can have very serious consequences for women in those respects, with other ripples affecting their physical health as well (economic security being a determinant of health), and ultimately their life expectancy.

Very few, if any, women are genuinely coerced into having abortions, but a whole lot of women under the sway of / with the encouragement of these vultures become heavily invested in that idea: it just wasn't their fault. Well, if there were no fault attached, it wouldn't be an issue.

Women may have abortions they would prefer not to have -- in the perfect world we don't live in, where pregnancy and childbearing don't affect their ability to continue their education, don't cause them to lose opportunities for security and advancement at work, and don't result in their men leaving them. Well, that's a choice -- for whatever reasons, childbearing is not the best option for them, of the available options. Limiting other women's access to abortion just isn't going to make those fairy-tale options magically appear, no matter how many booties and blankies and maternity smocks the sneaks at the "crisis pregnancy centre" hand out.

Instead of encouraging women in this situation to take responsibility for their decisions and respect themselves for making the decision that was in their own best interests (and probably the best interests everybody affected), at least as they understood matters at the time and not through some rosy rearview mirror, the vultures exploit their natural "what if" regrets and turn them into basket cases for the cause.

Check out two of the leading profiteers:

http://afterabortion.com/
"Jilly", the enabler

not to be confused with
http://www.afterabortion.org
Elliott, the chief guru

And the master plan behind it:
http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9804/articles/swope.html
(not accessible at the moment at its home site)

First Things
Abortion: A Failure to Communicate
Paul Swope
Copyright (c) 1998 First Things 82 (April 1998): 31-35.

This research suggests that modern American women of childbearing age do not view the abortion issue within the same moral framework as those of us who are pro-life activists. Our message is not being well-received by this audience because we have made the error of assuming that women, especially those facing the trauma of an unplanned pregnancy, will respond to principles we see as self-evident within our own moral framework, and we have presented our arguments accordingly. This is a miscalculation that has fatally handicapped the pro-life cause. While we may not agree with how women currently evaluate this issue, the importance of our mission and the imperative to be effective demand that we listen, that we understand, and that we respond to the actual concerns of women who are most likely to choose abortion.

The importance of a new approach became clear from the results of sophisticated research pioneered by the Caring Foundation, a group that presents the pro-life message to the public via television. This group has been able to tap into some of the most advanced psychological research available today, so-called "right brain" research. (The distinction between "right brain" and "left brain" activity may be physiologically oversimplified or even wrong, but it remains useful as a shorthand description of different ways of thinking.)

The right side of the brain is thought to control the emotional, intuitive, creative aspect of the person. Whereas most research involves analytic, rational questions and thus draws responses primarily from the left side of the brain, "right brain" research aims to uncover the underlying emotional reasons why we make particular decisions or hold certain beliefs. Such an approach has obvious applications to an issue such as abortion, as a woman in the grips of a crisis pregnancy certainly does not resolve this issue in a cold, logical, "left-brain" manner.

Read on, if you have the stomach. Remember to check your right brain at the gate, or you may experience overwhelming revulsion.

[Solo_in_MD]

23. There is no backup for the claim that the SCOTUS ever saw them

[iverglas]

26. that seems to be true, and important

What the Court did refer to was the Congressional "findings" on the subject (see the excerpt from Ginsburg's reasons in my post above). I can't see anything in Kennedy's reasons that looks remotely like it came from somebody's affidavit (as the woman in the article quoted claimed to see).

There's no such thing as these "findings" in Canadian legislation, or in British, as far as I know. It is not the job of a legislature to make findings of fact. That's a nonsense. A legislature legislates. Parliament, here, can insert a preamble, stating principles it recognizes and setting out its intent, and I suppose it could incorporate "facts" if it wanted. A court will consider a preamble if there is something unclear in the legislation itself that it is interpreting and applying; otherwise, it just figures that Parliament said what it wanted to say in the legislation, and that's all we need to know.

A case should come to an appellate court with the facts already found by a trial court. Neither appellate courts nor legislatures should "find" facts, or make shit up, as the case may be, to support their decisions/actions. Nor should they ignore the facts already found in previous judicial decisions on a subject, as this Court plainly did.

[sinkingfeeling]

25. Where were the tens of thousands of countering stories that went to MS magazine or

the web-site, "I'm not sorry'? I've sent my abortion story to both of those. Don't they count as 'evidence'?

[DrZeeLit]

27. How can any of this be construed as "legal" documentation? And....

guess who drummed up this ploy?
Oh yeah.

I wonder if the Pro Choice crowd had wind of this or could counter with "affidavits" (what a term) from the other perspective?

Now, with no recourse, what can be said about thousands of women for whom an abortion SAVED their LIVES?

I feel like banging my head against a wall.

[superconnected]

39. let's not forget hte supreme court is stocked to accept anything

that supports their own views at this point.

[uppityperson]

30. k&r for assinine legal reasoning that people need to know about. eom

[TexasLawyer]

34. were these regrets over partial birth abortions? or just abortions?

The former might be vaguely relevant. The latter is irrelevant to the matter the court was deciding.

[iverglas]

38. but I'll bet you agree with me!

(earlier post) -- the things weren't *admissible* as evidence, not least of all because appellate courts do not try cases or make findings of fact.

But aha, I see -- and Solo_in_MD's assertion "There is no backup for the claim that the SCOTUS ever saw them" was wrong.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have long been open about their desire to overturn the court's abortion precedents, including Roe. But it was Kennedy who wrote for the majority in the recent case, Kennedy who seized on the affidavits of the women.

An appendix to his opinion is about 100 pages long. It includes 180 testimonials, 10 from Florida. They all were part of a brief submitted by the Justice Foundation on behalf of women who say they were harmed by their abortions. The foundation, an antiabortion lobbying group, submitted a separate brief with 2, 000 more affidavits, about 124 of them written by Florida women. They were identified by name only.

How absolutely, utterly inappropriate.

Bizarrely, if fresh evidence comes to light after a murder case is tried in the US (say DNA analysis that was not previously possible) that exonerates a convicted person, your courts not uncommonly refuse to reopen the case, as I understand it. (Up here in Canada, we have government inquiries and pro forma applications for new trials, resulting in a dismissal and no new trial, generally.) And yet this load of shit, which was obviously entirely available at the trial stage, got in the back door by being attached to a factum in the Sup Ct.

Disgusting. The Court has no respect for women, and not even any respect for its own process.

[rosesaylavee]

35. Stupid is as stupid does.

And these stupid white men have the authority to do what they do. Damn. We need to win in 2008.

[mark414]

36. so if i got 2000 people to write letters about how great pot makes them feel...

does that mean we could finally legalize grass?

this reeks of stupidity, incompetence, and unfiltered zealotry - we should hang our heads in shame that this is the basis of the new law of the land

[cascadiance]

37. Or letters praising prostitution for that matter...

Perhaps that might be more apt to happen now with the madam about ready to spill the beans on a lot of those in the beltway now! I wonder if some on the court might also be "affected"...

On the one hand you might get a lot of good letters from men that might push them one way, but then you might have a lot of other letters from women who were former prostitutes that might say the latter. The bottom line is that you can't rule "the LAW" based on a "write-in" campaign!

Perhaps we can get a letter to them from all of the women who went through illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade and the painful experiences they had to help lobby the other direction too!

[midnight]

42. As long as the United States Govt. is investigating policies /law

that hurt women, lets address poverty, education, joblessness, and unequal pay. How about from now on we just compile testimony about the emotional plight women who want to raise their children fight everyday on their own.

[MLFerrell]

44. "I went from an honor roll student to drug addict, "

And that is abortion's fault HOW?

Gee, for the party of "personal responsibility" they sure do love blaming abortion for all of their problems. Or immigrants. Or drugs. Or... you get the idea.

[Dragonbreathp9d]

46. Lets get affidavits from all the women who had kids too young in life

and from family members of women who died during childbirth, and from all the women who chose correctly, and from all the family memebers of FAS and other such maladies