The Food and Drug Administration is updating its labeling guidance for the use of mifepristone, the most commonly used abortion drug in America. The changes are likely to increase access.
Updating its initial guidance from 2000, the FDA changed the dosage regimen to recommend two (lower) doses, allow women to take some doses of the drug at home, and take the drug up to 70 days after conception.
This is the regimen that most doctors have been using for years; in most states, it's okay for doctors to prescribe off-label use of abortion drugs just as it is for any other drug.
The new guidance will, however, have an impact in North Dakota, Ohio, and Texas, where state law requires doctors to follow the FDA label. Under the old guidance, this effectively discouraged women from getting medical abortions because of the cost of multiple doctor visits.
Of course, for some state lawmakers, the point of such laws is less safety than restricting abortions — which is why Arizona, at least, has already queued up a bill explicitly requiring doctors to follow the old FDA guidelines and ignore the new ones.
This constant escalation arms race on abortion restrictions is the sort of thing the Supreme Court is currently considering in its case about Texas's law restricting abortion providers. Ultimately, it raises the same question: At what point is limiting abortion tantamount to prohibiting it?
Donald Trump (to Chris Matthews), March 30, 2016, approximately 3 pm EDT: "The answer is there has to be some sort of punishment." ("For the woman?") "Yes."
Donald Trump campaign, March 30, 2016, approximately 5 pm EDT: "The doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman. The woman is a victim."
Despite the denial, though, it seems like the flip-flop over whether to criminally punish women who get abortions might follow Trump for a while. It appears to confirm one of two things pro-choicers think pro-lifers believe: either that abortion is murder and women should be punished as murderers, or that since women shouldn't be punished abortion must not really be murder after all.
For the actual pro-life movement as it exists, though, the consensus — that abortion is murder, but the women are not the ones doing the murdering — is both firm and the product of years of careful messaging to find a broadly supported position. So Trump has them in an awkward position.
Trump's women supporters don't necessarily agree with Trump (at least the 3 pm version) about punishment. But, par for the course with Trump, they're not letting a little thing like the issues get in the way of their support.
For most women, though, including Republicans, Trump was a uniquely unacceptable candidate even before all this happened. His net favorability with women? -42 points.
The commutations, of which Obama has done about 250 in total, are intended to bring the prison sentences of drug offenders sentenced under now-obsolete federal laws and policies in line with what their sentences would be if handed down today.
250 is a lot of people compared with previous presidents. The problem is that in 2014, the Obama administration promised a huge new push on commutations — saying they would shorten thousands of sentences this way before President Obama left office.
But the government is still struggling to process the 10,000 applications it asked for and got in 2014. It's extremely unlikely it will be able to even come close to thousands of commutations.
And the pardon attorney brought in to do it resigned earlier this year because the administration wasn't allowing her to do her job.
Meanwhile, of course, the prisoners — even when the president himself shortens their sentences — have a vertiginous, often overwhelming, and frequently dangerous world to return to.
Only 8 percent of high-tech workers in Silicon Valley directly employed by their companies are Hispanic. But 52.9 percent of blue-collar contract workers in Silicon Valley are.
Telemedicine abortions — where women consult with doctors via Skype but still do lab work and get the pills at a clinic — greatly increase access, and encourage earlier terminations. Only two states are on board.
"The Associated Press news agency entered a formal cooperation with the Hitler regime in the 1930s, supplying American newspapers with material directly produced and selected by the Nazi propaganda ministry, archive material unearthed by a German historian has revealed."
"After a suitable period of time — let’s say by the end of September of 2016 — Judge Garland should simply suit up and take the vacant seat at the court. This would entail walking into the Supreme Court on the first Monday in October, donning an extra black robe, seating himself at the bench, sipping from the mighty silver milkshake cup before him, and looking like he belongs there, in the manner of George Costanza."
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