OK so let’s go on a bit of a tangent but like Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, I promise it’s relevant, your honor. Your girl (the blogger) has worked in journalism for a few years now and one thing that’s obvious… is when a writer gets played. Like, it def happens to good writers, but you get a “secret government” source and you maybe think you got some good info but really… you were PR for them and wrote something that’s NOT REALLY A STORY. And that is 4 hundo percent what happened to Emma Green at the Atlantic who was ALL too willing to tell this… gah we hate to use this term but… nothingburger (lol ok no we aren’t gonna use it … garbage, that’s the word) story of a poor nurse who HAD to perform an abortion even though she morally objected.
A million alarms shoulda gone off that this was the government trying to make their “conscience clause” seem noble and necessary, but naw, she just wrote about it with not nearly the level of skepticism it deserved… cuz you know anti-choicers love to play themselves.
And we bring this article up again and this story up again because AS IT TURNS OUT it’s prob about one of ten stories like that that occur a year, not the HUNDREDS the frickin’ government wants to pretend occur.
And that brings us to this great Law360 article, a coalition of groups such as the Planned Parenthood Federation of America are seeking an injunction against HHS’s latest “conscience clause.” And unlike CERTAIN journalists… it appears this judge will NOT be played by to the government into believing this “oh the POOR doctors who just DON’T WANT TO DO THEIR JOB SOMETIMES, THEY’RE BEING PERSECUTED FOR GOING INTO MEDICINE AND YET STILL NOT BELIEVING ABORTION IS HEALTHCARE” argument.
So Judge Paul A. Engelmayer went through all the alleged complaints and whittled them down to like, 20 cases that actually seemed valid. He looked through 343 complaints and found… like a fraction of them to be valid. And to this we say: of course.
We honestly, love a no nonsense judge because truly our hearts have been broken again and again by judges this year (SCOTUS, we’re looking at you.) I mean… this quote is just incredible:
“I'm looking for some dollop of evidence,” Judge Engelmayer said. “Do you have anything?”
LOLOL and the witness like… didn’t yo, he just said that the Conscience Clause was within the rights of HHS all along.
The judge was like “Naw, trick” to this. Then he gave a bunch of hypotheticals which truly… again… we love being on the side of logic because these are just LOGICAL questions that reveal how FUCKED UP this conscience clause is:
“…. the government admitted that its rule could mean that if an ambulance driver discovered on the way to the hospital that a passenger was on her way to an abortion he could tell her to get out and the driver would be protected by the new rule.”
CAN YOU IMAGINE??? I mean, this is a very specific situation but IMAGINE thinking an AMBULANCE DRIVER whose SOLE JOB is GETTING YOU TO THE HOSPITAL ON TIME a person you call in YOUR MOST VULNERABLE MOMENTS could… straight up leave you on the side of the road.
Any way this case is not done, it’ll have to be decided by November 22. We hope logic prevails… but we’re in the worst timeline so who knows.