Category Archives: rights

Federal and State Funding for Abortion

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There is a move afoot in Congress to remove from Medicare reimbursements for abortion, and there is a case before the Supreme Court that will impact States’ ability to remove funding for abortion from Medicaid reimbursements. The removal from Medicare, should it come to fruition, would be entirely consistent with the Court’s Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, which rescinded Roe v Wade and put the abortion question entirely in the States’ hands. Now many States are attempting to act on their newly restored authority—hence the case before the Supreme Court.

It’s true enough that it’s a fraught decision for the mother to bring an unwanted pregnancy to term, but my concern here is for the life of the baby. From this, I see two boundary cases that are especially difficult.

One is where the health of the mother is at risk if the pregnancy continues. In this case, the mother’s health must be weighed extremely carefully against the life of the baby. This weighing may need to occur—must occur?—in open court, with competent, well-trained lawyers speaking for the baby.

The other is a mother’s pregnancy as a result of incest or rape. Carrying the baby to term here is an especially terrible choice for the mother—the pregnant child incest or rape victim may be too physically young to carry her baby to term, in which case, see above. Even where the victim mother can safely do so, it remains an especially terrible choice to carry inside her body a constant reminder of the monster who did this to her. Carrying the baby to term isn’t a matter of the mother’s inconvenience for nine months as some extremists on the right claim—the emotional damage to the mother from that is real, extreme, and often irrepairable.

Conventional wisdom is to permit abortion in the these narrowly defined, and not so often occurring compared to “ordinary” unwanted pregnancies, cases of incest or rape. Conventional wisdom here is not a completely bad bit of wisdom, but I remain concerned: why should the baby have to pay with its life for the crime of another? The baby needs competent, well-trained lawyers speaking for him or her in these cases, also.

It’s also true enough that, while Republicans are attempting to do more to provide fiscal support for those mothers during their pregnancies, in the period surrounding birth, and in the early years after birth (here including adoption options), they need to do better at specifically identifying those needs and then providing for them—and to do so publicly. That shortfall, though, shouldn’t be allowed to impact whether the baby is allowed to live at all.

Excellent but Insufficient

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Kristin Shapiro, of the Independent Women’s Forum, has an excellent idea for checking up on colleges’ and universities’ admissions criteria and seeing whether they’re still using race and gender in their admissions decisions, even though those plainly racist and sexist criteria are illegal.

[R]equire colleges and universities to report the average standardized test scores and grade-point averages of admitted and enrolled students by race.

This can be improved on, however. In addition to publicly reporting those averages for admitted and enrolled students, the institutions should be required to post the averages’ standard deviations, which measure the degree of dispersal of those scores around their averages, and they should be required to post as well the median scores of those distributions. Medians tend to be less heavily influenced by extreme outliers. In addition, the institutions should be required to do that for the populations of students whose applications were rejected.

Better still, would be to require the institutions to make publicly available and searchable their databases of raw scores and GPAs, redacted only of student-identifying data while leaving in the identifications of the high schools and transferred-from colleges and universities of admitted students and of students whose applications the institutions rejected.

Let independent analysts conduct their own investigations rather than requiring the public to rely on the claims of institutions whose integrity already is questionable.

Whose Property Is It?

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“Wall Street” is all in a tizzy over an entirely private deal made by the owner of all two of companies involved in the deal [emphasis added].

The valuation was surprising and so was how the companies got there. Only one set of advisers worked for both sides, when a deal of this size would normally take armies. In short, the unusual process resulted in a megadeal few public companies could get away with.

The news writers willy-nilly assume that all deals must have “armies” of advisers, just because. Why would an owner of two private enterprises need more than his own teams—or himself—to assess whether or how to merge his privately owned companies? Other than spreading fees out among a plethora of Wall Street investment advisor firms, I mean.

The news writers spent a whole section of their piece on the matter of The advisers worked both sides.

This proceeds, cynically, I claim, from a false premise: both private companies are/were owned by the same man. What “both sides?” There was only the single owner’s side.

And whence the question, in the first place? These are private enterprises, beholden to no one in the public sphere, especially the denizens of The Street. Even were the two private enterprises owned by two separate private individuals, no one on The Street has anything legitimate to say about the matter. Maybe this sort of interference-wannabe is part of the motivation for not going public and for taking public companies private.

No, the question implied, but never asked out loud, by these Wall Street Wonders is who owns the two companies—Elon Musk or “Wall Street?” The two news writers address this for themselves, but never put it to the wonders they claim to cite.

Supreme Court Has the Louisiana Redistricting Case

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After the 2020 census, Louisiana’s Republican-controlled legislature

only drew one majority-Black congressional district when it redrew the boundaries for the state’s six seats in Congress. A group of Black voters, who make up about a third of the state’s population, sued the state in 2022, arguing that section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, required lawmakers to add a second majority-Black congressional district.

Here’s the entirety of what that Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act actually says:

SEC. 2. No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.

Drawing voting districts explicitly to favor one group of Americans over other groups in that same district is precisely what the CRA prohibits. However the Supreme Court rules in this case, it’s imperative that the Court finally recognize the truth of our Declaration of Independence and the foundational American law that’s before them in the form of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution, which says in pertinent part,

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

One of the most basic privileges accruing to us American citizens is our right to vote, and all of us voters are equal under law—regardless of skin color, or religion, or….

In fine, as citizens, as voters, we’re all exactly alike. Gerrymandering to create districts that favor one group over any others necessarily disadvantages those others—and it denies all groups, and more importantly, every individual regardless of group equal protection of the laws, and so it is unconstitutional.

As an aside, and one of the more favorable aspects of earlier times, the entire CRA fits within seven Word® pages, and contains less than 5500 words, at least as it is presented at the link.

University Dependence on Federal Funds

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And one other matter. Against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s withholding/canceling of $400 million worth of grants and contracts for Columbia University, there are a couple of things that stand out.

One is this:

[S]ome board members deeply concerned the university is trading away its moral authority and academic independence for federal funds.

Columbia has already shed any pretense of moral authority—see below. Columbia’s dependence on Federal funding is Columbia’s conscious, deliberately done choice. The school has a $14.8 billion dollar endowment. Even if that were to be frozen—no further donations into it, the endowment’s investments would only break even—that’s enough to fund 37 years of grants and contracts at the rate of those $400 million per year Federal largesse. A lot can happen in those 37 years.

Then there’s this, from Joseph Howley, a classics professor at Columbia:

It is really a red line for the independence of universities, for academic freedom, for shared governance.”

No it isn’t. Requiring a university to shed—to divest itself of—its antisemitic bigotry and (not or) its support for terrorists is not a threat to university independence or of academic freedom. Indeed, as Columbia’s support for that bigotry and that support demonstrates, removing them would produce a sharp increase in academic freedom, especially for the students—an aspect of academic freedom the Precious Ones of Columbia’s faculty carefully ignore.

Beyond that, there should be no “shared governance” at universities. Administrators should govern; professors should teach. Full stop.