This is a talk I gave at a seminar at the Perth Activist Centre 2 July 2011 hosted by Socialist Alliance and Resistance.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
United States: Supreme Court grants private companies control over women's bodies
Along with two other family-owned firms, it sued the federal government, saying they should not have to pay for health insurance plans covering four contraceptives to which they object on religious grounds.
The decision represents an expansion of corporations’ rights at the expense of workers, health care provision and women’s reproductive health choice — all in the name of protecting religious freedom.
Most health insurance in the US is privately provided through employer-sponsored schemes. Under President Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms introduced in 2010 (often called “ObamaCare”), all large employers have to pay for their employees’ health insurance schemes by 2016. Regulations stipulate that all new insurance plans must cover all available Food and Drug Authority-approved contraceptives.
Republicans opposed ObamaCare and are seeking to wind it back piece by piece. The Supreme Court’s ruling is part of a pattern of attacks on the scheme.
It reveals both the lengths those opposed to any moves towards universal healthcare will go to undermine it, as well as the weakness of a scheme that relies on individuals and large employers to purchase privately provided health insurance rather than build a publicly funded scheme.
The contraceptives Hobby Lobby objected to were levonorgestrel and ulipristal — emergency contraceptives that work after sex predominantly by delaying ovulation — and copper and hormonal intrauterine devices (IUDs).
The copper IUD works mainly by preventing fertilisation. The hormone-releasing IUD stops the fertilized egg from being implanted in the womb. The religious objectors claimed such methods cause abortions.
In a five-to-four decision, the Supreme Court sided with Hobby Lobby, saying “closely held” (a legal term to describe “family-owned”) companies with religious objections did not have to comply with the regulation.
In dissenting, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made several criticisms of the majority decision. She pointed out that while the people who own the companies might have religious beliefs, corporations are artificial, legal entities without religious (or indeed any other) feelings or beliefs.
Corporations also differ from religious groups, which are set up to pursue the religious objectives of a community with a shared faith — and as such are provided with exemptions under the law. As profit-making enterprises, corporations are set up to make money. The workers who contribute their labour cannot be obliged to share their owners’ religious views.
Most corporations in the US are family-owned; they include giants Cargill, Koch Industries and Mars, each with multi-billion dollar turnovers and tens of thousands of employees. Therefore, the ramifications of this decision are extensive in terms of the numbers of workers potentially affected as well the impact on contraception and other health services.
Since the court does not have a role in determining how sincerely a religious belief is held, or how critical it is to the practice of a religion, it does not take much imagination to suppose that for-profit companies would claim an exemption not only from the contraceptive mandate, but from anything else that might be construed as running counter to their religion in order to save money.
Even if we supposed that a for-profit business had the right to protection of its “religious practice”, most views recognising freedom of religious practices accept these are limited by the rights of others not to be harmed and the broader public interest.
This ruling, however, allows employers to impose their religious views on others regardless of the potential harm it may cause. There is nothing in Obama's health care reform that forces employers to use contraceptions they object to. There is nothing that obliges any employee (with or without religious objections) to use any form contraception.
The ruling allows employers to impose their non-scientific religious interpretation of contraception onto their workers as well as the workers' families who are also covered by the health care plan.
Ginsburg highlighted several other health treatments that are the subject to some religious objections — blood transfusions, medications derived from pigs (including anaesthetic, intravenous fluids and medications coated with gelatin), and vaccinations.
The ruling opens the way for a plethora of treatments that workers may need, but which their boss may be able to use “religious objections” to refuse to pay for the insurance to cover it.
It may also open the way for discrimination on religious grounds against the provision of certain kinds of health care to people from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer communities.
But just looking at the decision on the contraceptive mandate, the potential impact on women requiring contraception is huge. Already, many women are stopped from using the contraception of their choice due to cost.
Ginsburg noted that provision of IUDs (which could be up to 90 times more effective than condoms) cost about a month’s salary for those on minimum wage. This places them out of reach of minimum wage earners who are not covered by health insurance.
The impact in terms of unwanted pregnancy may be substantial. And its impact in furthering the ideological push to stop women from making their own decisions about reproductive health needs is incalculable.
The ruling comes in the context of a global tussle over rights — between the rights of women to reproductive healthcare, and the rights to freedom of conscience of others.
Some doctors, nurses and pharmacists have invoked the right to refuse to provide reproductive healthcare — ranging from contraception, sterilisation and abortion and abortion aftercare, to artificial reproductive technologies and prenatal diagnosis.
But the global consensus reflected in United Nations treaties such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other regional charters and conventions, recognise that the freedom to practice religion can be restricted to protect the rights of others.
As debate continues about whether any group or institution has the right to refuse care, we must insist the overriding interests of women's health and right to control their own bodies prevails.
A version of this article first appeared at Green Left Weekly.
Music to listen to while reading this article: David Rovics' Corporations are People too , and Taylor Ferrera's Hobby Lobby is Pro-Abortion, and Businesses are People too.
All the news that's fit to sing
All The News That’s Fit to Sing
David Rovics
Released July 4
www.davidrovics.bandcamp.com
Review by Kamala Emanuel
So here it is, the latest album from prolific radical songwriter David Rovics All The News That's Fit to Sing.
It contains some completely new songs and some previously released some already available on Youtube, some that die-hard fans might have heard on the sneak preview Rovics gave on his Spreaker online radio show, “June in History and Song”.
The album brings these new songs together and the studio recordings include new arrangements and backing vocals that make it worth streaming or downloading for old fans and new.
Rovics plays acoustic folk music with a punk influence that has become more pronounced over the years. Several of the songs on this album set a mellow acoustic mood, but most are upbeat with the energy of percussive guitar rhythms. Many are enhanced by Rovics’ own harmonies.
For this reviewer, the music is a wonderful medium, but even more, it’s the message that contains the prime appeal. And as Rovics fans would expect, there are songs about topical issues.
“TPP 101” lifts the lid on the latest free trade agreement being negotiated by the US and other Pacific nations to strengthen the hand of the rich in “the transnational class war”.
“Mudslide” tells the story of the tragic mountainside collapse in Oso, Washington, earlier this year an avoidable tragedy predicted by scientists and the consequence of erosion from hillside logging.
“Mitch Daniels” tells of the former Indiana governor's censorship of radical historian Howard Zinn's work: “Because a patriotic history of half-truths and lies/Is all the history you need.”
And “Moazzam” provides an impassioned musical argument for the release of Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo prisoner and British national, arrested again by the British government on “terror” charges. His real “crime” was essentially for blowing the whistle on that government's cosy relationship with the Syrian government sending prisoners to be tortured by the Assad regime.
“Tax the sun” blasts the Oklahoma government for penalising solar power while subsidising fossil fuels. “Eat the rich” offers a lighthearted “theme song” for an annual Norwegian festival of the same name.
“Bubbling Up” provides a somewhat cryptic critique of Hollywood star Scarlet Johansson’s decision to support Sodastream — a company profiting from the illegal occupation of the West Bank and a target of the pro-Palestinian global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
Then there are the contributions to keeping people’s history alive. “The Dam” lauds the dramatic direct action opening to Iceland’s environment movement. “Dead” relates the chillingly calculated murderous mentality of those responsible for the shooting of antiwar campus students of Kent State and Jackson State universities in 1970.
And “Song for Oscar Grant” tells of the 2009 extra-judicial police killing of Oakland man Oscar Grant, movingly painting a picture of the impact on Grant’s four-year-old daughter.
Elsewhere (“Love of an Unknown Soldier”) Rovics wrote “Every song I’ve ever written has been a love song.” The album contains a love song in the more recognisable form (“Judy”), as well as compassionate cameos that tell stories of homelessness (“Invisible Man”) and loneliness “Hoarder Song.”
In “Welcome to the Working Class,” Rovics pokes fun at the popular misconception that “we’re all middle class now,” leaving it for the audience to work out who benefits from this myth.
There’s even something for cricket fans (“Sachin”).
With the title track, he takes aim at those in power who would keep us in the dark to maintain the status quo, urging us, “Turn off your tv or you won’t learn a thing/Gather round I’ll give you all the news that’s fit to sing.”
In keeping with Rovics’ progressive politics, his songs cover themes of anti-capitalism, environmentalism, solidarity with Palestine, anti-racism, free speech and deep humanism.
“I don’t have all the answers,” the song acknowledges, and women’s struggle for liberation remains a set of questions and answers absent from his repertoire.
He sings some wonderful songs about women tender, poignant and sexy songs about lovers; songs paying tribute to women fighters, prisoners and martyrs like Assata Shakur, Ana Belen Montes, Chelsea Manning, Judi Bari and Rachel Corrie.
And he sings songs that relate to feminist themes that the personal is political and in support of abortion rights. However, these latter are songs addressed to men (“Sit down to piss”) and about a man (assassinated abortion doctor George Tiller, “In the name of God”), respectively.
Songs about any of the many struggles women have organised and won against their oppression as women would certainly round out his immense, diverse and inspiring body of work.
The album is available online to stream or download. It can be purchased at a price determined by the listener (useful to remember that this is how such artists pay their bills and that liking and sharing helps build an audience and support base). And Rovics gives a "guided tour" of the album at http://www.spreaker.com/user/davidrovics/guided-tour-of-new-album - not great quality at first, but bear with it, it gets better.
Progressives, folkies, activists, history buffs here are songs to inform, anger, move and energise us. Listen to them; share them; enjoy.
A version of this review was first published at Green Left Weekly.
David Rovics
Released July 4
www.davidrovics.bandcamp.com
Review by Kamala Emanuel
So here it is, the latest album from prolific radical songwriter David Rovics All The News That's Fit to Sing.
It contains some completely new songs and some previously released some already available on Youtube, some that die-hard fans might have heard on the sneak preview Rovics gave on his Spreaker online radio show, “June in History and Song”.
The album brings these new songs together and the studio recordings include new arrangements and backing vocals that make it worth streaming or downloading for old fans and new.
Rovics plays acoustic folk music with a punk influence that has become more pronounced over the years. Several of the songs on this album set a mellow acoustic mood, but most are upbeat with the energy of percussive guitar rhythms. Many are enhanced by Rovics’ own harmonies.
For this reviewer, the music is a wonderful medium, but even more, it’s the message that contains the prime appeal. And as Rovics fans would expect, there are songs about topical issues.
“TPP 101” lifts the lid on the latest free trade agreement being negotiated by the US and other Pacific nations to strengthen the hand of the rich in “the transnational class war”.
“Mudslide” tells the story of the tragic mountainside collapse in Oso, Washington, earlier this year an avoidable tragedy predicted by scientists and the consequence of erosion from hillside logging.
“Mitch Daniels” tells of the former Indiana governor's censorship of radical historian Howard Zinn's work: “Because a patriotic history of half-truths and lies/Is all the history you need.”
And “Moazzam” provides an impassioned musical argument for the release of Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo prisoner and British national, arrested again by the British government on “terror” charges. His real “crime” was essentially for blowing the whistle on that government's cosy relationship with the Syrian government sending prisoners to be tortured by the Assad regime.
“Tax the sun” blasts the Oklahoma government for penalising solar power while subsidising fossil fuels. “Eat the rich” offers a lighthearted “theme song” for an annual Norwegian festival of the same name.
“Bubbling Up” provides a somewhat cryptic critique of Hollywood star Scarlet Johansson’s decision to support Sodastream — a company profiting from the illegal occupation of the West Bank and a target of the pro-Palestinian global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.
Then there are the contributions to keeping people’s history alive. “The Dam” lauds the dramatic direct action opening to Iceland’s environment movement. “Dead” relates the chillingly calculated murderous mentality of those responsible for the shooting of antiwar campus students of Kent State and Jackson State universities in 1970.
And “Song for Oscar Grant” tells of the 2009 extra-judicial police killing of Oakland man Oscar Grant, movingly painting a picture of the impact on Grant’s four-year-old daughter.
Elsewhere (“Love of an Unknown Soldier”) Rovics wrote “Every song I’ve ever written has been a love song.” The album contains a love song in the more recognisable form (“Judy”), as well as compassionate cameos that tell stories of homelessness (“Invisible Man”) and loneliness “Hoarder Song.”
In “Welcome to the Working Class,” Rovics pokes fun at the popular misconception that “we’re all middle class now,” leaving it for the audience to work out who benefits from this myth.
There’s even something for cricket fans (“Sachin”).
With the title track, he takes aim at those in power who would keep us in the dark to maintain the status quo, urging us, “Turn off your tv or you won’t learn a thing/Gather round I’ll give you all the news that’s fit to sing.”
In keeping with Rovics’ progressive politics, his songs cover themes of anti-capitalism, environmentalism, solidarity with Palestine, anti-racism, free speech and deep humanism.
“I don’t have all the answers,” the song acknowledges, and women’s struggle for liberation remains a set of questions and answers absent from his repertoire.
He sings some wonderful songs about women tender, poignant and sexy songs about lovers; songs paying tribute to women fighters, prisoners and martyrs like Assata Shakur, Ana Belen Montes, Chelsea Manning, Judi Bari and Rachel Corrie.
And he sings songs that relate to feminist themes that the personal is political and in support of abortion rights. However, these latter are songs addressed to men (“Sit down to piss”) and about a man (assassinated abortion doctor George Tiller, “In the name of God”), respectively.
Songs about any of the many struggles women have organised and won against their oppression as women would certainly round out his immense, diverse and inspiring body of work.
The album is available online to stream or download. It can be purchased at a price determined by the listener (useful to remember that this is how such artists pay their bills and that liking and sharing helps build an audience and support base). And Rovics gives a "guided tour" of the album at http://www.spreaker.com/user/davidrovics/guided-tour-of-new-album - not great quality at first, but bear with it, it gets better.
Progressives, folkies, activists, history buffs here are songs to inform, anger, move and energise us. Listen to them; share them; enjoy.
A version of this review was first published at Green Left Weekly.
Random
So this isn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. Especially after some help from a friend.
Maybe this will be my blog after all.
It's still a pretty obscure name. Well, if anyone gives a toss, please say. Contenders in my mind were "Life, Love, Liberation," "Love n Solidarity," and "Unfuck the world." Maybe someone has already taken that last one.
Maybe this is really just a draft. Permanently. Everything's always only partial anyway.
Maybe this will be my blog after all.
It's still a pretty obscure name. Well, if anyone gives a toss, please say. Contenders in my mind were "Life, Love, Liberation," "Love n Solidarity," and "Unfuck the world." Maybe someone has already taken that last one.
Maybe this is really just a draft. Permanently. Everything's always only partial anyway.
Rainbow
Not exactly running out of colours, but sort of running out of colours. Posts on gender, sex, sexuality, and hey, why not relationship styles, fetishes and amories as well? Or maybe not. Let's see.
Black
I was born on Eora country, grew up on Minjungbil country, worked with Palawas and now live on Nyoongah land. I remember in primary school learning that racism still existed - I thought it had been eliminated. Still today I have so much to learn. I stand in solidarity with sovereign, indigenous and Aboriginal people of this continent (understanding different people and communities choose different words to describe themselves) in their struggles for recognition, treaty, land rights and justice. And against racism in all its forms.
Red
I thought that was obvious, but in case not: fighting poverty, emancipation of the working class, human liberation, anti-imperialism, Marxism, communism, socialism. Social justice.
Violet
(No, I didn't forget the n.)
Feminism, here: the Marxist kind. Women's liberation. The notion I'm not a doormat. And neither are you.
Feminism, here: the Marxist kind. Women's liberation. The notion I'm not a doormat. And neither are you.
First go
So this is my practice blog, because I really have no idea what I'm doing.
Big apologies to anyone who wanted this domain name - not that I expect there to be many. Pity it's so obscure, because I rather like it.
So anyway, here it is, maybe being useful as a way to figure out how to blog.
Big apologies to anyone who wanted this domain name - not that I expect there to be many. Pity it's so obscure, because I rather like it.
So anyway, here it is, maybe being useful as a way to figure out how to blog.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)