ECOCIDE

One Of The Largest US Petrochemical Plants Is Spewing Excessive Smoke After Hurricane Ida Knocked Out Its Power

Industrial sites often spew dirty gases into the air during emergency shutdowns and restarts, threatening nearby communities with smog and other pollution that can make it hard for people to breathe.

Zahra HirjiBuzzFeed News Reporter
Last updated on September 2, 2021

Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
Vehicles drive past the petrol chemical plant near Highway 61 in Norco, Louisiana, on Aug. 30, 2021, after Hurricane Ida made landfall.

A massive Royal Dutch Shell manufacturing complex in Louisiana’s St. Charles Parish is releasing nonstop plumes of smoke into the air after Hurricane Ida knocked out its power.

Local, state, and federal officials are monitoring the incident.

The plumes of smoke at Shell’s Norco plant are just one of a growing number of sources of industrial pollution slowly coming into view across the Gulf Coast following the Category 4 hurricane’s devastating blow to the region.

Ida washed out roads, flattened homes and businesses, felled trees, and knocked out power for roughly 1 million people, including the entire city of New Orleans. At least seven people died in the region due to the storm.

At this point, Shell is not saying much about the problems plaguing the Norco facility, one of the largest petrochemical plants in the country.

In response to questions from BuzzFeed News, an oil company spokesperson declined to say what gases are being released or what amount of emissions have already gone into the air.

The company also did not share a timeline for when the plumes of black smoke would stop.

“While the site remains safe and secure, we are experiencing elevated flaring,” Curtis Smith, a Shell spokesperson, told BuzzFeed News in an email. “We expect this to continue until power is restored.”

When it’s up and running, Shell’s combined refinery and chemical plant in Norco processes about 250,000 barrels of crude oil and 170,000 barrels of gasoline a day, in addition to generating billions of pounds of ethylene, propylene, and other chemicals.

Like other refineries and industrial sites along the Gulf Coast, Shell shut down the plant ahead of Ida’s landfall.


Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images

Smoke from flaring operations a refinery in Norco, Louisiana, drifts on the horizon with clouds as homes stand in a neighborhood that experienced flooding in LaPlace, Louisiana, on Aug. 30, 2021, in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida.

Industrial sites often spew dirty gases into the air during emergency shutdowns and restarts, threatening nearby communities with smog and other pollution that can make it hard for people to breathe.

Back in 2017, Hurricane Harvey led to Texas chemical and petroleum plants releasing a year’s worth of pollution in a matter of days and weeks, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis.

According to Shell’s Norco permit, some flaring in emergency situations is allowed, but it's unclear whether the current emission levels exceed what’s allowable under the permit.

“Shell Norco is flaring,” Gregory Langley, press secretary of Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality, told BuzzFeed News in an email. “When there is an emergency condition, they are allowed to do this under their permit.”

That being said, Langley added, “The flares at Shell Norco are large and produce some smoke.”

Starting Thursday, Louisiana’s environmental officials will monitor Norco’s air quality using what’s called a Mobile Air Monitoring Laboratory.

The Environmental Protection Agency is also sending a special plane to help monitor local air emissions in Norco, agency press secretary Nick Conger told BuzzFeed News in an email. EPA has received reports of the facility flaring four types of noxious gas: butadiene, benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and hydrogen, Conger added.

“Excessive smoke seen in the community is a result of a lack of electricity” at the plant, EPA officials wrote in an incident summary posted online Wednesday afternoon.

They noted that Shell is conducting its own air monitoring along the Norco fence line and in the surrounding community, reporting that information to emergency officials in St. Charles Parish, and company engineers “are looking at all options to try to reduce emissions to flare.”

St. Charles Parish officials did not immediately respond to questions from BuzzFeed News. Shell also declined to provide information about its air monitoring results to BuzzFeed News.

Norco residents say the current flaring levels aren’t normal.

“This is bad,” Norco resident Peter Anderson told DeSmog. “I have never seen this many flares.”

Beyond Norco, Shell is still assessing whether Ida damaged a chemical plant in Geismar, Louisiana, as well as any of the company’s floating platforms and other infrastructure used for extracting fossil fuels offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.

Ongoing power outages, widespread storm debris, and impassable roads are complicating the ability of companies and government officials to quickly identify environmental impacts, such as emission releases and spills, triggered by the storm.

At least 138 major industrial sites are located in parishes hit hard by Ida, according to the New York Times.

As of Wednesday afternoon, the EPA had received 28 reports of possible spills and pollution events in places hit by Ida, including 17 possible air pollution incidents. None of them have so far required the EPA to do on-the-ground assessments.

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday that there’s a mileslong black slick of oil near an oil rig in Gulf waters. The spill was identified using aerial imagery.

UPDATE
September 2, 2021
This story has been updated to include a response from the Environmental Protection Agency, noting that officials have received reports detailing how four types of gases are being flared at the Norco plant and how the agency is deploying a plane to monitor local air emissions.

Feds responding to reports of oil, chemical spills after Ida

NOT CLEANING UP JUST LOOKING

By MICHAEL BIESECKER

This image provided by NOAA taken Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2021 and reviewed by The Associated Press shows oil slicks at the flooded Phillips 66 Alliance Refinery in Belle Chasse, La. State and federal regulators responded to the spill site after AP provided the photos of the spill Wednesday and the company acknowledged a "sheen of unknown origin" at its flooded refinery. (NOAA via AP)


WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal and state agencies say they are responding to reports of oil and chemical spills resulting from Hurricane Ida following the publication of aerial photos by The Associated Press.

Environmental Protection Agency spokesman Nick Conger said Thursday that a special aircraft carrying photographic and chemical detection equipment was dispatched from Texas to Louisiana to fly over the area hard hit by the Category 4 storm, including a Phillips 66 refinery along the Mississippi River where the AP first reported an apparent oil spill on Wednesday.

Coast Guard spokesman Petty Officer 3rd Class Gabriel Wisdom said Thursday that its aircraft has also flown over the refinery, as well as to the Gulf of Mexico. The AP published photos of a miles-long brownish-black slick in the waters south of Port Fourchon, Louisiana.

Photos captured by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration aircraft Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2021 and reviewed by The Associated Press show a miles long black slick floating in the Gulf of Mexico near a large rig marked with the name Enterprise Offshore Drilling. The company, based in Houston, did not immediately respond to requests for comment by phone or email on Wednesday. EPA officials said Wednesday hey were unaware of any leak requiring a federal response. (NOAA via AP)

The AP first reported the possible spills Wednesday after reviewing aerial images of the disaster zone taken by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Ida made landfall Sunday, its eyewall carving through Louisiana with 150 mph winds and a storm surge so powerful it temporarily reversed the flow of the mighty Mississippi.

The NOAA photos showed a black and brown slick floating near a large rig with the name Enterprise Offshore Drilling painted on its helipad. The company, based in Houston, said Thursday that its Enterprise 205 rig was safely secured and evacuated prior to the storm’s arrival and that it did not suffer any damage.

“Enterprise personnel arrived back at the facility on September 1 and confirmed the integrity of all systems and that no environmental discharges occurred from our facility,” the company said in a statement.

Sandy Day, spokesperson for the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which regulates oil rigs, confirmed it had received a report Wednesday about which the oil spill the AP had published photos. But the location was inside state waters, rather than the federal jurisdiction farther offshore.

Patrick Courreges, spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, said his agency had no way to physically investigate the spill.

“It’s going to be awhile for us before we can make our way out there,” Courreges said Thursday. ”We don’t have planes, helicopters or Gulf-seaworthy boats.”

Aerial photos taken by an NOAA aircraft Tuesday also showed significant flooding to the massive Phillips 66 Alliance Refinery in Belle Chasse, Louisiana. In some sections of the refinery, a rainbow sheen and black streaks were visible on the water leading toward the river.

In statements issued Monday and Tuesday, Phillips 66 said “some water” was inside the refinery, but did not respond to questions about environmental hazards.

Only after the AP sent the company photos Wednesday showing extensive flooding and what appeared to be petroleum in the water, the company confirmed it had “discovered a sheen of unknown origin in some flooded areas of Alliance Refinery.”

“At this time, the sheen appears to be secured and contained within refinery grounds,” Phillips 66 spokesman Bernardo Fallas said Wednesday evening, three days after the hurricane blew through. “Clean-up crews are on site. The incident was reported to the appropriate regulatory agencies upon discovery.”

Though Fallas characterized the spill as a “sheen of unknown origin,” the report Phillips 66 made to Louisiana regulators Wednesday called it “heavy oil in floodwater,” according to a state call log provided to the AP. The log also contained a call from an oyster harvester concerned that water contamination from the refinery was fouling environmentally sensitive beds downriver.

Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality spokesman Greg Langley said Wednesday that a state assessment team was sent to the refinery and observed an on-site oil spill being addressed with booms and absorbent pads. A levee meant to protect the plant had breached, allowing floodwaters to flow in during the storm and then back out as the surge receded.

Langley said there was no estimate available for how much oil might have spilled from the refinery.

Louisiana regulators were tracking about 100 reports of chemical and petroleum spills statewide as of Wednesday. The reports ranged from sunken boats leaking diesel to overturned fuel tanks and flooded oil pipelines, according to the call log. Several chemical manufacturers also reported venting or flaring off toxic chemicals due to losing electricity.

Stephanie Morris, spokesperson for the Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office, said that four days after Ida hit, state regulators were still in the very early stages of responding to the environmental hazards spawned by the storm. She said a state aircraft had been flying over the affected area, focusing more on identifying ongoing threats than quantifying what had already leaked into the water and air.

“We’re in what we call the rapid assessment phase, because we are trying to assess it from the air,” Morris said. “We’re just getting a sense of what’s out there and locations. We don’t have a sense yet of what the sources of sheens might be or volumes.”

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Follow AP Investigative Reporter Michael Biesecker at http://twitter.com/mbieseck

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Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org.

Ohio Republican claims Afghan refugees could 'infiltrate' US government like 'America-hating' Ilhan Omar

Matthew Chapman
September 02, 2021

Facebook


On Thursday, former Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel — a leading candidate for the state's Republican nomination for Senate — fired off a racist screed against Afghan refugees on Twitter, following a report that some could be resettled in Cleveland.

"This is exactly how we ended up with America-hating, Christian-hating, Jew-hating, Ilhan Omar infiltrating the U.S. government," said Mandel — referring to the Somali-American congresswoman from Minnesota who came to America as a refugee at a young age.

Mandel, who previously lost a Senate race against Democrat Sherrod Brown in 2012 and is now seeking the vacant seat from retiring Rob Portman by boasting of his allegiance to former President Donald Trump, has repeatedly come under fire for racist rhetoric.

In March, he was briefly suspended from Twitter after polling his followers on which "type of illegals" will commit the most crimes: "Muslim Terrorists" or "Mexican Gangbangers." He has focused particularly on Omar, calling for her to be deported.

The real reason abortion opponents also hate mask and vaccine mandates
John Stoehr
September 02, 2021

President Donald Trump's campaign rally on August 22, 2017 (Photo: Screen capture)

I received this morning a message via Twitter from a very well-known television news host. It seemed to be regarding yesterday's column about what I think is the proper place of abortion in American politics. It isn't a fight for the sanctity of life or "life" or what have you, I said. It is a fight against democratic modernity itself. Here is their response:

Focus on this: when does a "person" begin? That is the question. We have no consensus. We evolved on the question of when life ends that fostered much of the law around demise … That's the real issue here. And Roe was never the best-reasoned decision.

This response suggests that this very well-known television news host did not get the gist of my piece. Or perhaps they did not want to. In any case, if I were to believe that the question of life's beginning is the "real question" and the "real issue," I'd be restricting myself from considering a whole range of knowledge, history and argument, including the fact that few but Catholics cared about abortion for most of American history. It did not become a political issue until Americans organized themselves to force it to become a political issue. Why would I or anyone ignore that in favor of a carefully designed and narrow question the answer to which privileges anti-abortionists?

When you expand the question — from one of "morality" (and I'll get to why I put that word on quotes in a moment) to one of politics — you can make enough room to see that the question of consensus is a question built on sand. There may be no consensus about when "life" begins, but there's damn well consensus about individual liberty. Most Americans are for it. There may be no consensus about when a person becomes a person, but there's damn well consensus about forcing individuals to subordinate themselves (or their bodies, in the case of abortion) to an authoritarian collective. Most Americans are against it. Imagine a political debate over abortion that's actually political.

Restricting politics to one of "morality" makes pro-choice Americans seem immoral, even downright evil. That's the point! And that's why I put "morality" in quotes. In yesterday's column, I tried to make clear that while anti-abortionists say they believe in the sanctity of life, or say they believe an embryo is a person, they do not really believe this. How do I know? If individuals mattered as much as they say they matter, a half-century-old anti-abortion movement would not exist. As I said: "The authoritarian collective that comprises it requires that the needs of individuals be expendable compared to the interests and needs of the collective. If the authoritarian collective really believed in the sanctity of the individual's life, such respect would threaten the integrity of the hierarchies of power that literally define the anti-abortionist's life. Such respect would mean psychic death."

Yes, it's authoritarian. Yes, it's a collective. (I explain why in yesterday's column.) And yes, individuals are expendable. That individuals are indeed expendable means anti-abortionists don't mean what they say. (It also means the very well-known television news host who asked me to focus on the "real question" is a dupe or a patsy or both.) Even as they say life is precious, life is expendable, even disposable. This fact is abundantly clear in all kinds of ways when you expand the frame of the debate over abortion. The poor are disposable. Racial and sexual minorities are disposable. Of course, in the case of abortion, women are disposable. (Though, to be sure, abortion will be accessible to any woman of means.) Even the authoritarian men and women who make up the authoritarian collective are disposable. I don't think anything illustrates that better than the GOP response to the covid pandemic.

You'll have noticed by now that anti-vax Republicans are dying in droves. That's OK from the point of view of the authoritarian collective. If sacrificing a few of their number ends up sabotaging the president's effort to bring the country out of the pandemic — if it makes room for the new delta variant to mutate and spread — then such sacrifice is worth it. It could create conditions by which a majority of the American people blame Joe Biden and his party, and return the Republicans to power in the 2022 midterms. Why do many of the same people who desire bans on abortion also desire bans on vaccine and mask mandates? The link isn't "freedom." That's the lie they tell themselves and everyone. The link is the preservation and expansion of the authoritarian collective at the expense of individuals. They accuse pro-choice Americans of being evil as means of covering up the barbarous flesh-eating reality of their larger political project.

As for the very well-known television news host, I'm not naming them for their sake. I don't think they're biased in any ideological way (though I should make room for that being the case if so). The reason I mention them at all is because their response to me is example of the tight framing of the abortion debate among members of the Washington press corps that in effect favors the anti-abortionists and covers up the Republican Party's gothic politics. As I said, there's plenty of consensus in this country if you know how to find it.

Right-wing hysteria has reached a boiling point
History News Network
September 02, 2021

(Shutterstock.com)

Although right-wingers like Rudy Giuliani argue that left-wing cancel culture is dangerous to free speech, the ongoing right-wing movement to ban Critical Race Theory (CRT) from school curriculums fits into the right's long history of attacks on progressives' free speech. The Texas Senate bill removing Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech, Native American history, and the history of white supremacy from public school curriculums may be blocked from passing right now, but it has made waves throughout the internet. This bill comes amidst nationwide right-wing outrage over CRT, which Fox News reportedly mentioned nearly 1300 times between March and June this year.

This hysteria reached a boiling point last month when a Virginia school board meeting was shut down by right-wing protestors over a curriculum that allegedly promotes CRT, although Loudoun County Schools officials publicly stated that CRT is not part of their curriculum. The ongoing distress over CRT is fueled by a massive, right-wing media-backed movement to control school curriculums. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, for example, recently called for teachers to wear body cameras to monitor CRT teaching, despite previously arguing in favor of free speech on campuses.

The panic over CRT may seem to have come out of nowhere, with media coverage of it skyrocketing in recent months, but progressive movements in academia have caused alarm for decades. This began with conspiracy theories about critical theory (CT), a method of systemic critique which was the predecessor of CRT. These conspiracy theories focus on the developers of CT, the Frankfurt School thinkers, who were mostly Jewish, and claim that they infiltrated American universities with the goal of destroying Western culture and implementing "Cultural Marxism."

While these theories may seem far-fetched, they are still promoted today by right-wing thinkers like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson. Frankfurt School historian Martin Jay traced these conspiracy theories back to LaRouche movement writer Michael Minnicino's essay that relies on little to no source material to make false, exaggerated claims. Minnicino claims, without evidence, that "the heirs of Marcuse and Adorno completely dominate the universities" and teach their students "'Politically Correct' ritual exercises." The essay reduces the Frankfurt School's complex "intellectual history into a sound-bite sized package available to be plugged into a paranoid narrative," according to Jay. Despite the suspicious beginnings of this conspiracy theory, right-wing thinkers like Jeffrey A. Tucker and Mike Gonzalez continue to blame the Frankfurt School thinkers for today's attacks on free speech, going as far as to suggest executive action to prevent their influence.

While the evidence supporting CT conspiracy theories is dubious, there is historical evidence to suggest that the Frankfurt School thinkers were far too divided to have devised such a world-changing plot. One must only look towards Adorno and Marcuse's final letters to each other—their correspondence on the German student movement in the 1960s—to see these divisions on full display.

In these letters, the two thinkers debated whether it was justified for Adorno to have called the police on a group of students who occupied his classroom demanding that he engage in self-criticism. While Adorno dismisses the students and their demands as "pure Stalinism," Marcuse aligns himself with the students and their goals, finding it more helpful to aid the movement than disparage it. These thinkers differ in one key aspect: while Marcuse finds solidarity with the students in their goals, and is less concerned with how they achieve them, Adorno is repulsed by the means. How can a group that cannot even agree on which movements are good for society have possibly conducted such a mass, societal shift? The historical, fact-based evidence makes it clear—they didn't.

Some figures on the right have cancelled the Frankfurt School, reducing their complex history into buzzwords, and rendering their ideas meaningless. This is just one example of how right-wing figures cancel things that counter their worldview through misinformation. CT conspiracy theories fit with former Trump advisor Sebastian Gorka's claim that the Green New Deal will take your hamburgers, despite the proposal making no mention of meat. The theories also fit with the Governor of South Dakota Kristi Noem's claim that we need to defend the "soul of our nation" against gay rapper Lil Nas X, just because he released Satan-themed shoes. We saw this pattern of regressive fear-mongering at its worst last month when there were two-stabbings at a protest at a Los Angeles spa, spurred by a transphobic hoax. There is a pattern of misinformed reactionary cancelling in which even former President Barack Obama has been tied to the recent outrage over CRT. And these cancelling efforts clearly have had a wide-reaching effect, with 26 states making steps against CRT just recently.

Although reactionary cancelling is doing some damage, we can fight it through progressive cancelling. While reactionary cancelling serves oppression, pushing racist, anti-Semitic, or homophobic agendas, progressive cancelling advocates consequences for socially unjust actions and amplifies marginalized voices.

In his essay "Repressive Tolerance", Marcuse says that to realize universal tolerance, we first need to escape from our repressive society. One part of doing this is, instead of tolerating all opinions equally, to retract tolerance from opinions that perpetuate violence and oppression. Marcuse calls on us to fight the forces that serve oppression. We cannot play into the pocket of the oppressor like the Loudoun School Board meeting protestors. Instead, we must resist oppression like the 1960s student protestors who used progressive cancelling against perceived injustices like the United States' involvement in Vietnam.

Progressive cancelling is the same form of cancelling that hit J.K. Rowling, Harvey Weinstein, or even Christopher Columbus—one that centers marginalized people and says "enough" to violence and oppression. On a wide-enough scale, we could achieve what Marcuse called a "Great Refusal." To change our societal trajectory to one towards Marcuse's "opposite of hell," we need to fight reactionary cancelling through progressive cancelling.


Leah Allen is Assistant Professor of Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at Grinnell College.

This article was originally published at History News Network

Jen Psaki schools male reporters after abortion questions: 'You've never faced those choices'

Sarah K. Burris
September 02, 2021

Jen Psaki (AFP)

White House press secretary Jen Psaki had little patience for male reporters demanding she addressed abortion at the Thursday press briefing.

President Joe Biden announced Wednesday and again Thursday that he was committed to protecting women's health and reproductive freedom after the Supreme Court nullified Roe v. Wade by allowing a Texas law to take effect. The key part of the court ruling gave the constitutional right to privacy and an explicit liberty provision. Individuals in Texas can now demand private health details from those they suspect have had an abortion.

"The effort and the focus of the federal government is to look for every resource, every level at our disposal to ensure that women in Texas have the ability to seek healthcare," said Psaki as questions about the ruling began.

"Why does the president support abortion when his own Catholic faith teaches abortion is morally wrong?" asked one reporter.

"He believes that it is a woman's right, a woman's body, her choice," said Psaki. "He believes it is up to a woman to make those decisions and make those decisions with her doctor. I know you have never faced those choices nor have you been pregnant. But for women out there who have faced those choices, this is an incredibly difficult thing in the president believes that their rights should be respected. Go ahead. I think we need to move on. You have had plenty of time today."

See the video below:

Jen Psaki schools male reporters after abortion questions: 'You've never faced those choices'youtu.be

Joe Biden slams US Supreme Court refusal to block Texas' new 'extreme' abortion ban

The US president said the Supreme Court's ruling was "an unprecedented assault on a woman's constitutional rights".

A protest against the six-week abortion ban at the Capitol in Austin, Texas 

Source: Austin American-Statesman

US President Joe Biden lashed out on Thursday at the Supreme Court's refusal to block a Texas law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, warning that it threatens to unleash "unconstitutional chaos."

"The Supreme Court's ruling overnight is an unprecedented assault on a woman's constitutional rights under Roe v. Wade, which has been the law of the land for almost fifty years," Mr Biden said in a statement.

Roe v. Wade is the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case that enshrined a woman's right to an abortion in the United States.

"This (Texas) law is so extreme it does not even allow for exceptions in the case of rape or incest," Mr Biden said.

Texas valedictorian takes aim at state's 'dehumanising' new abortion law in viral graduation speech

The Democratic president took particular aim at a provision of the bill passed by Republican politicians in Texas that allows members of the public to sue doctors who perform abortions or anyone facilitating the procedure.

"By allowing a law to go into effect that empowers private citizens in Texas to sue health care providers, family members supporting a woman exercising her right to choose after six weeks, or even a friend who drives her to a hospital or clinic, it unleashes unconstitutional chaos and empowers self-anointed enforcers to have devastating impacts," Mr Biden said.

"Complete strangers will now be empowered to inject themselves in the most private and personal health decisions faced by women," he said.

Mr Biden said he was launching a "whole-of-government effort" to "see what steps the Federal Government can take to ensure that women in Texas have access to safe and legal abortions."

Stephen King buries Susan Collins: 

‘Women in Texas must pay the price for her gullibility’
Bob Brigham
September 02, 2021

Composite image of author Stephen King (screengrab) and Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins, photo by Gage Skidmore.

Famous Bangor resident and bestselling author Stephen King on Thursday slammed his home-state's senior senator after the United States Supreme Court refused to block the controversial anti-abortion law passed by Texas Republicans.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the high court and the vote has haunted her since the court's overnight decision, as she repeatedly insisted that Kavanaugh did not pose a threat to abortion rights.

King slammed Collins for being gullible.

"Remember when Susan Collins said she was convinced that Brett Kavanaugh believed a woman's right to choose was 'settled law?' She was wrong," King wrote.



"Women in Texas must pay the price for her gullibility," he added.

King had previously slammed the Texas law as religious extremism.

"The Taliban would love the Texas abortion law," he wrote.

Minnesota braces for influx of out-of-state abortion patients

The U.S. Supreme Court decision on Texas' 6-week ban means more patients will travel to Minnesota for care.
By Emma Nelson Star Tribune
SEPTEMBER 2, 2021 — 6:58PM

LM OTERO - ASSOCIATED PRESS
A security guard opened the door to the Whole Women’s Health Clinic in Fort Worth, Texas, Wednesday, Sept. 1, 2021.

Minnesota physicians and organizations that help women access abortions are bracing for a spike in demand, days after Texas enacted a law considered the most restrictive abortion ban since Roe v. Wade.

The law prohibits abortions as early as six weeks — before some women know they're pregnant — and is already pushing people in Texas and surrounding states to seek abortions elsewhere. Destinations include Minnesota, where abortion access is constitutionally protected and less restrictive than many states. Meanwhile, in neighboring North Dakota, lawmakers on Thursday signaled that they plan to introduce their own version of the Texas law.

Though reproductive health advocates in Minnesota were anticipating a major challenge to Roe v. Wade, many expected it would come next year, when the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban, said Megumi Rierson, communications manager for Our Justice, a Twin Cities-based organization that helps pay for abortions. The court's decision early Thursday not to block the Texas law changed that calculus.

"Providers and advocates were all preparing for an increase in requests, but we thought that we had a lot longer to develop some infrastructure," she said. "And we don't, because now it's here."

The pressure on Minnesota is only expected to rise if more states follow Texas' lead — something advocates say they predict after the court's decision. Minnesota is home to a handful of abortion clinics in the Twin Cities, Duluth and Rochester, as well as the telemedicine clinic Just the Pill, which provides medication abortions to women in Minnesota and surrounding states.

Dr. Julie Amaon, Just the Pill's medical director, said Thursday she's already hearing from patients in Texas and other states looking to travel to Minnesota for medication abortions. Just the Pill is not currently providing services to those patients and does not provide direct referrals for patients in Texas, according to a statement.

The availability of medication abortions via telemedicine helped lower some barriers to abortion that the pandemic created, and it is seen as a potential solution as state restrictions increase. But "it is not the answer to everything," said Dr. Sarah Traxler, chief medical officer with Planned Parenthood North Central States, which serves Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Patients may need or prefer surgical abortions, Traxler said. And though the pandemic prompted the Food and Drug Administration to temporarily allow doctors to mail the drugs to patients, most states surrounding Minnesota restrict telemedicine abortion, she said. Telemedicine laws apply to the state where the patient is, not the provider, so patients in other states would still need to travel to Minnesota to access it.

That means more pressure on brick-and-mortar clinics, which already face hurdles of their own. Though abortion access is constitutionally protected in Minnesota, there are restrictions including a 24-hour waiting period, mandated counseling and a requirement that minors notify both parents.

"If Minnesota ends up having to take care of a large number of women who come from outside of the state, that may create a further access-to-care problem," said Rep. Kelly Morrison, DFL-Deephaven, an obstetrician-gynecologist who has introduced legislation to strengthen reproductive rights. "This is an American problem, but because it's being fought in state legislatures across the country right now, some of the burden is falling disproportionately on certain areas."

In 2019, the legal and policy advocacy organization Gender Justice sued the state on behalf of a group of plaintiffs to challenge Minnesota's abortion restrictions, arguing that they are unconstitutional. The case is expected to go to trial in Ramsey County District Court in June, said Gender Justice Executive Director Megan Peterson.

Meanwhile, Peterson and other advocates said, abortion access in Minnesota remains unchanged.

"A lot of people, including people who maybe need abortion care, will see the news and be really worried about, what does it mean?" Peterson said. "This is very much worth freaking out over, but we don't want to have people think abortion is illegal in Minnesota — it's not."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Are women people? Why the Supreme Court just signed off on a Texas law that denies women's humanity

Amanda Marcotte, Salon
September 02, 2021

A distraught woman in the waiting room of a doctor's office (Shutterstock.com)

In 1915, the suffragist Alice Duer Miller wrote a delightful book of satirical poetry titled "Are Women People? A Book of Rhymes for Suffrage Times." Here we are, 106 years later, and Texas and the Supreme Court have weighed in with their opinion, which is very much no, women are not people. They are human-shaped, but they cannot be regarded as full people, capable of making very basic decisions about their own bodies and lives. After a full day of the Supreme Court not yet deciding whether to enjoin a Texas law banning all abortions two weeks after the first missed period, the court finally made a decision late Wednesday night. In full violation of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court is allowing Texas to ban abortion.

This is not, as the mansplainers will let you know, an official overturn of Roe. That is still coming, in the form of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a case looking at another abortion ban in Mississippi that has been explicitly held out as an opportunity for the court to simply overturn the 1973 case that legalized abortion. Still, as Jessica Mason Pieklo, a legal expert at Rewire News Group writes, "Let's just get this out of the way: We can stop debating about whether the Court overturned Roe v. Wade. They did. So what if it's on a technicality? It's not a technicality to the people forced to carry pregnancies to term against their will."

The human cost of this last minute abortion ban can be felt in this piece at The 19th that details the scene at a clinic in Fort Worth at 8PM on Tuesday, when providers realized they only had four hours to help "two dozen people [who] were still waiting for the procedure," before the ban went into effect at midnight. It was a nightmare race against the clock, as the "staff worked without stopping to eat, shifting patients in and out of rooms." One woman "dropped to her knees on the cold tile floor," begging to get a place in line before the ban came down. All while a crowd of Christian fundamentalists, drunk on misogyny and their own victory, screamed at top volume outside.

As a writer, I've been covering the religious right over 15 years now. As a person who grew up in Texas, I've known these kinds of broken souls who support this law my whole life. They are small people, who spend their time trying to dominate the lives of others, rather than face up to the fears that prevent them from embracing full lives of their own. Donald Trump spoke to them, despite his barely concealed contempt for their religion, because they saw themselves in him: A man so poisoned by hate that his only real pleasure in life is bullying others. So, I get it, intellectually. On a deeper, emotional level, though, understanding will always elude me. How can so many give up their one precious life to cruelty, rather than just take the easier and humane path of "live and let live?"

At this point, these sadists will try to defend themselves by claiming this is all about "life." It's a lie that worked for decades to give cover to their malice. It's collapsed in the age of a deadly pandemic that conservatives are doing everything in their power to spread, a pandemic that is especially dangerous for the fetal life they only care for when it can be weaponized against women's rights.

No, the Texas law — and the Supreme Court endorsement of it — is about one thing and one thing only: Denying the humanity of women, and, of course, denying the humanity of those who don't neatly fit in that category of "woman," but can get pregnant anyway. This is about reducing these people to mere vessels, and rejecting the idea that they are autonomous human beings who have sovereignty over their bodies and their lives. On the contrary, having a uterus renders you as little more than human livestock in the eyes of conservatives.

We see this attitude in the enforcement mechanism of the law.

The law allows any person – even a complete stranger to the person getting an abortion — to sue an abortion provider or any other person who helps with the abortion. The right to control a pregnant person's body, in this Texas law, belongs quite literally to anyone but the woman herself: Her father, her husband, her ex, her neighbor, some random misogynist who just wants to ruin a life because he spends too much time on incel forums. Just so long as it's not the person actually living in that body.

This rejection of women as autonomous beings is also baked into the parameters of who can be sued. The abortion bounty hunters are permitted to go after health care providers or any other person who helps a woman get an abortion, but they cannot sue the person who wants an abortion. She is viewed simply as an empty vessel, not as a thinking, feeling person who is making a decision. And so the responsibility for the abortion decision is assumed to belong to another person, because conservatives simply cannot admit that women are capable of making such decisions.

This rejection of female autonomy is generally presented as chivalrous in anti-choice rhetoric, as if they are trying to "protect" women from abortion. The Texas Right to Life site defends the law as supposedly saving women "whose lives are irrevocably altered by the death of their children." They even use condescending memes like this, which erase the fact that it's women themselves choosing abortion.

Needless to say, there's piles of research showing that women's main feelings after abortion are relief, not grief. But even without that research, it's clear how offensive it is to pretend that women don't actively choose abortion. It's treating women like dumb animals, refusing to believe they have any more capacity to make reproductive decisions than a feral cat. It's ugly, dehumanizing rhetoric, no matter how much anti-choicers try to pass it off as "compassion."

That some of the people who are behind these kinds of laws are women themselves doesn't change this fact. Justice Amy Coney Barrett voted to uphold the Texas law, but she is also quite famously a religious fundamentalist, a status that reassures the religious right that she's simply upholding beliefs handed down to her by a patriarchal faith. As for the motivations of the female misogynists themselves, well, that's why Aunt Lydia of "The Handmaid's Tale" was such a good character. For women committed to living with, instead of resisting, male dominance, being an enforcer gives them power over other women. It's not quite as good as being a man, but hey, at least it gives you someone else to control and look down on.

Sadly, the misogyny baked into the Texas law is about to spread like wildfire across red America. The Supreme Court will not issue a formal ruling on whether Roe stands until next summer, but this support for the Texas law is an open invitation to every state legislature run by woman-hating Bible thumpers to pass versions of their own. Accompanying the law will be more dehumanizing rhetoric, treating women as livestock who can't be trusted to make decisions, or even acknowledged as capable of making decisions. Because debasing women has always been what the anti-choice movement is about. Now Americans will start to see the real life damage such hatred can wreak in women's lives.

Analysis: Texas legislators, with an assist from the U.S. Supreme Court, open a Pandora’s Box

The country just noticed what Texas was doing, and although Texans have been watching the debate over this anti-abortion law all year, even some of them were surprised at how quickly the legally protected right to abortion disappeared.

BY ROSS RAMSEY 

SEPT. 2, 2021

The Texas Tribune 

Protesters outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 2019. Credit: Stefani Reynolds/CNP/ABACAPRESS.COM via REUTERS

The state of Texas has figured out, at least for now, how to do unconstitutional things in a way that doesn’t raise a majority of the eyebrows in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court turned back a legal effort by abortion providers to stop the state’s new ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy while that new law is being litigated. It means most abortions are illegal in Texas and will remain so unless the courts eventually find the new law unconstitutional. Some justices already have said as much.

The peculiar enforcement built into the law seemed to baffle the judges, as it was intended to do. Instead of the state enforcing the law — the normal way these things work — the state’s anti-abortion measure leaves that to private citizens, who are empowered to sue anyone who “aids or abets” someone seeking an abortion — from the doctors who perform abortions to someone who drives a woman to a clinic. It includes a “bounty hunter” provision that allows someone who successfully files a suit to collect $10,000 on top of legal fees.

In its 5-4 ruling, the court didn’t rule on the law itself. The unsigned majority opinion wrestled with the enforcement scheme, saying “it is unclear whether the named defendants in this lawsuit can or will seek to enforce the Texas law against the applicants in a manner that might permit our intervention.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, in his dissent, called the law “not only unusual, but unprecedented.” He wrote the first of the four dissents: “The State defendants argue that they cannot be restrained from enforcing their rules because they do not enforce them in the first place. I would grant preliminary relief to preserve the status quo ante — before the law went into effect — so that the courts may consider whether a state can avoid responsibility for its laws in such a manner.”

Justice Steven Breyer said it this way: “Texas’s law delegates to private individuals the power to prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion during the first stage of pregnancy. But a woman has a federal constitutional right to obtain an abortion during that first stage.”

Citing a previous opinion, he added: “we have made clear that ‘since the State cannot regulate or proscribe abortion during the first stage… the State cannot delegate authority to any particular person… to prevent abortion during that same period.’ The applicants persuasively argue that Texas’s law does precisely that.”

Here’s a question: If you can impede someone’s constitutional rights with an odd citizen enforcement strategy, what’s the limit? Abortion is in that category because the Supreme Court has ruled that women have such a right. If it can be undermined, other rights, like voting and speech and all the others, are subject to the same risk.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor said it like this: “The Court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand… In effect, the Texas Legislature has deputized the State’s citizens as bounty hunters, offering them cash prizes for civilly prosecuting their neighbors’ medical procedures.”

Put the state’s new voting law through that logic, and the worst scenes from the 2020 elections start to look like a good day at Six Flags Over Texas.

Here’s Justice Elena Kagan: “Without full briefing or argument, and after less than 72 hours’ thought, this Court greenlights the operation of Texas’s patently unconstitutional law banning most abortions. The Court thus rewards Texas’s scheme to insulate its law from judicial review by deputizing private parties to carry out unconstitutional restrictions on the State’s behalf.”

The country just noticed Texas, and although Texans have been watching the debate over this law all year, even some of them are surprised at how quickly the legally protected right to abortion disappeared.

Republican voters in Texas (74%) strongly support making abortion illegal after six weeks of pregnancy — a restriction that eliminates an estimated 85% of all abortions in the state. Among Democrats, 67% oppose that idea, but they’re not in power in state government. Those differences are no surprise to anyone who follows Texas politics.

That enforcement idea, though — bounty-financed citizen brigades in place of law enforcement — is a new twist. The courts will figure it out in time, and if the law remains in place, so will all those fine folks you see on social media. The same kind of crowd-sourcing that makes social media so toxic could do the same for some kinds of law enforcement. Creative lawmakers will use it again, the better to get around investigators and prosecutors they don’t like.

The mob can decide instead.

“It’s Just Unbelievably Cruel”: Texas’s New Abortion Law Is Already Impacting People

“It creates all these hurdles that people have to jump over just to access basic, essential time-sensitive healthcare," one advocate said.

Clarissa-Jan Lim

BuzzFeed News Reporter
Posted on September 1, 2021, 

Sergio Flores / Getty Images
A protester outside the Texas state Capitol in Austin after Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill into law on May 29, 2021.

Hours after Texas’s latest and most draconian abortion law went into effect, the few clinics left in the state opened their doors on Wednesday under a drastically different reality in which patients face a whole new set of challenges.

“It's hard enough yesterday for a person living in rural Texas to make it to one of the very few clinics we have serving our state,” Cristina Parker with the Lilith Fund told BuzzFeed News. “It creates all these hurdles that people have to jump over just to access basic, essential time-sensitive healthcare. It's just unbelievably cruel.”

The law, SB 8, went into effect at the stroke of midnight after the Supreme Court failed to take action on an emergency appeal, effectively outlawing the vast majority of abortion procedures overnight. It bans abortions as soon as cardiac activity is detected in the fetus, which could be as early as 6 weeks, or a single missed period. It also enables members of the public to enforce the law, allowing them to sue anyone involved in the abortion — from abortion providers to the person who drives a patient to the clinic or lends them money for the procedure.

“This law doesn't do anything to prevent unplanned pregnancies, to support people, to build families, and to [give] them resources. It doesn't do anything to comfort people or provide healthcare,” Amy Hagstrom Miller of Whole Woman’s Health, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit to block SB 8, told BuzzFeed News. “It's blocking people who need safe and legal abortion care from getting that care with trained professionals like us.”

Already a state with some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, Texas requires patients to undergo a sonogram, where an abortion provider must display and explain the image; receive a state-mandated booklet about the fetus’s development and adoption alternatives that contains false information; and then wait 24 hours before the procedure can be performed. Dozens of abortion clinics in Texas have closed down in the past decade, forcing patients to travel hours to reach a provider. State law also forbids health insurance companies from covering abortion except in extreme situations where the pregnant person’s life is at risk.

Advocates who spoke to BuzzFeed News said the latest restriction will send more people out of state for abortions, but realistically, that option is simply out of reach for many people who do not have the resources to travel and who will be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

The law also further complicates things for minors who want to get an abortion without parental consent, said Rosann Mariappuram, the executive director of Jane’s Due Process, a group that helps Texas teenagers under 18 access abortion, including obtaining a court order that allows a minor to bypass parental consent or notification for an abortion.

“It’s incredibly hard because they are minors. They just don't have the resources, or in some cases, the privacy to leave the state, because leaving would then basically reveal they're pregnant,” Mariappuram told BuzzFeed News. “So for our clients, we're concerned that this law is a total abortion ban.”

The Supreme Court’s silence on the case has left Texas abortion rights in limbo. Abortion providers are complying with the new law while waiting for a possible injunction that would provide immediate, though temporary, relief for patients further along than 6 weeks in their pregnancy. But that also forces patients to decide between two difficult options: Do they try to travel out of state for an abortion as soon as they can, or do they wait and hope the Supreme Court blocks the law before they reach the state’s previous limit at 20 weeks gestation?

“Someone who maybe is more able to travel is probably looking at travel as a more viable option, but someone who's not is probably just sitting and hoping that the Supreme Court does the right thing for Texans,” Parker said.

Advocacy groups say they are frustrated that the law essentially happened overnight because of the Supreme Court’s inaction.

“This is basically taking away the right to abortion in Texas — is that not an emergency? Why has the court not intervened?” Mariappuram said.

Many fear that the law will have a chilling effect on Texans who want an abortion. A “haunting quietness” set on the Lilith Fund hotline on Wednesday morning, Parker said, though she hopes it will pick up as people start scheduling appointments out of state.

In the days leading up to the midnight deadline, Fund Texas Choice, a fund that helps Texans pay for travel expenses to go to an abortion clinic, fielded calls from multiple people asking about SB 8, said co-executive director Anna Rupani.

Rupani told BuzzFeed News that Fund Texas Choice has had to stress to patients that abortion, though severely limited, is not totally outlawed in the state.

“People think that it's completely illegal and they're not going to get any access to services, period, from here on out,” she said. “So just reminding folks that, even though it's harder to access, Texas organizations on the ground are willing and able to support you. And if you reach out, we will be there.”

Here's How The Supreme Court Can Rule In A Major Abortion Case In The Dead Of Night

It usually takes the Supreme Court months to rule in a case. But there’s a back door, and it’s getting a lot of use.

Zoe TillmanBuzzFeed News Reporter

Reporting From

Washington, DC

Posted on September 2, 2021Co

Pool / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Shortly before midnight, the US Supreme Court released a brief order on a hot-button subject of national importance with potentially massive ripple effects.

That could describe last night’s order explaining the court’s 5–4 decision to let Texas’s 6-week abortion ban take effect while a constitutional challenge works through the lower courts. Or it could describe the order from April pulling back restrictions that California had imposed on small gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic. Or the one issued just before Thanksgiving last year halting certain COVID-19 rules in New York

The Supreme Court’s handling of the Texas abortion law spurred the latest round of scrutiny — and criticism — over how the justices make consequential decisions via the “shadow docket.” The term refers to emergency petitions that ask for a swift ruling on time-sensitive issues, often while a case is still being litigated in the lower courts, without going through the usual monthslong process that involves rounds of briefing, public argument, and, ultimately, an opinion that explains the court’s reasoning and sets precedent for the rest of the country.

Justice Elena Kagan, one of the four justices who disagreed with the majority’s decision to let Texas’s SB 8 go into effect on Wednesday, wrote a short dissent blasting her colleagues for tipping the scales in favor of Texas and dramatically upending the state of abortion law in this way.

“In all these ways, the majority’s decision is emblematic of too much of this Court’s shadow docket decisionmaking — which every day becomes more unreasoned, inconsistent, and impossible to defend,” she wrote.

The fight over SB 8 reached the justices on Aug. 30. A federal appeals court had paused proceedings before a federal judge in Austin — including a request by abortion providers to temporarily pause SB 8 while the case was pending — and the abortion providers filed an emergency application asking the justices to intervene. They asked the Supreme Court to either halt SB 8 directly to allow time for the lower courts to sort the case out or to at least allow the judge in Austin to rule before the Sept. 1 start date.

When the clock struck 12 a.m. Central time on Sept. 1, and there was no word from the justices, SB 8 became law in the state. It bans physicians from performing abortions after around the sixth week of a pregnancy and deputizes private individuals to enforce the law by filing a civil lawsuit against any provider they suspect of performing a now-illegal abortion or anyone else who knowingly helped facilitate an abortion covered by the law, including by paying for it. The law allows plaintiffs who win to collect at least $10,000 in damages per abortion, plus their legal costs; if a case is dismissed, however, the law bars judges from ordering the person who filed an unsuccessful claim to similarly pay up.

At 11:58 p.m. on Sept. 1, nearly 24 hours after the justices’ silence meant the law would take effect, the Supreme Court released an order. It confirmed that a majority of justices intended for SB 8 to go forward; four justices — Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Kagan — dissented.

The court has weighed in on a host of major political fights in recent years via the shadow docket — not always literally at midnight, but sometimes close. An Aug. 26 order halting the Biden administration’s effort at keeping a federal eviction moratorium active during the coronavirus pandemic came in a little before 9:30 p.m. Two days earlier, the court issued a one-paragraph order that mandated the administration resume a Trump-era immigration policy that forced people seeking asylum to wait in Mexico while their case was pending.

A survey of shadow docket activity during former president Donald Trump’s time in office by Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, found that the Justice Department went to the Supreme Court more than three dozen times to halt lower court rulings against the administration; a majority of the justices sided with the government in more than half of those cases

The shadow docket didn’t start under Trump, although it did get more attention given how frequently legal fights over administration policies and practices landed before the justices on that track. These types of emergency actions have been common for years in death penalty cases. People on death row who have lost every other option for halting their execution have petitioned the justices to step in at the last minute; these efforts are usually unsuccessful.

University of Chicago Law School professor William Baude is credited with coming up with the term “shadow docket.” In a 2015 op-ed in the New York Times, he noted that the court had a history of handling politically and socially fraught issues via the shadow docket. For instance, Baude, who had clerked for Roberts, pointed out that there were orders related to whether same-sex couples could get married while constitutional challenges worked their way through the lower courts, ultimately culminating in 2015’s landmark decision that recognized a nationwide right to marriage.

In the months leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the justices weighed in on a string of cases via the shadow docket that dealt with how people could cast their ballot during a deadly global pandemic. There were orders that restricted voting options, including allowing Alabama to ban local officials from offering curbside voting for people with disabilities and reinstating a South Carolina law requiring absentee voters to have someone witness the signing of their ballot. There were orders that permitted some states to extend deadlines for absentee voters — including in Pennsylvania and North Carolina — and an order blocking an extended timeline in Wisconsin

The court generally considers four factors when deciding whether to intervene in a case on an emergency basis: whether there’s a good chance at least four justices would vote to hear the case later when it formally reached the court; whether there’s a “fair prospect” that the justices would reverse whatever decision is before them on an emergency basis; whether a party would face “irreparable harm” absent immediate action from the court; and, finally, who would be hurt most in the meantime.In the Texas case, the dissenting justices wrote that their colleagues had turned the purpose of the shadow docket on its head. Roberts pointed out that there hadn’t been any ruling from a federal appeals court yet on the procedural questions that the majority cited in letting SB 8 take effect, and he wrote that the court shouldn’t upend the status quo — all but halting abortion access in Texas — until those issues could at least get a little more airing below.

The other three dissenters wrote separately to make clear they believed SB 8 was unconstitutional; Roberts didn’t go that far. Kagan focused on the shadow docket issue, writing that it was a problem for the court to effectively decide a major case like this one in just a few days.

“Without full briefing or argument, and after less than 72 hours’ thought, this Court greenlights the operation of Texas’s patently unconstitutional law banning most abortions,” Kagan wrote.

Sotomayor and Breyer also called out the majority for letting the law take effect under these circumstances and underscored how much it would harm pregnant people in Texas in the meantime. Sotomayor cited a statistic presented by abortion providers that around 85% of abortions performed in the state took place after the 6-week mark.

“The Court’s order is stunning,” Sotomayor wrote. “Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”

HIDING BEHIND MUSK
Defending abortion law, Abbott cites Elon Musk’s support of Texas’ ‘social policies’

By Brendan Case
September 3, 2021

Dallas: Texas Governor Greg Abbott, defending new legislation on elections and abortion, pointed to billionaire Elon Musk as a business leader who likes the state’s “social policies”.

Musk replied with a less-than-ringing endorsement.


Texas Governor Greg Abbott claims Elon Musk is supportive of Texas’ social policies.CREDIT:INTERNET

UTILITARIANISM
“In general, I believe government should rarely impose its will upon the people, and, when doing so, should aspire to maximise their cumulative happiness,” the billionaire tweeted on Thursday after Abbott’s remarks hours earlier on CNBC.

“That said, I would prefer to stay out of politics.”

Abbott claimed Musk’s support in arguing that the movement of companies and people to Texas won’t slow down after the state implemented the nation’s most restrictive abortion law and approved new limits on voting access.

In fact, the Governor said, the shift to Texas will speed up as some people leave “the very liberal state of California” partly because of its policies.

“Elon had to get out of California because, in part, of the social policies in California,” Abbott said, adding that he “frequently” talks to the chief executive officer of Tesla Inc.

“Elon consistently tells me that he likes the social policies in the state of Texas.”
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US politics
‘Unconstitutional chaos’: Biden directs White House lawyers to fight strict Texas abortion law

Tesla is building a new factory in Austin, Texas, to make its Cybertruck pickup.

Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is expanding its launch facilities near the Mexican border to test its futuristic Starship rocket.

SpaceX also tests rocket engines in McGregor, which is located between Dallas and Austin.

Musk’s companies aren’t alone in moving to the state increasingly defined by hard-right Republican political ideology.

Other companies including Apple and Toyota have moved operations and university -educated, creative-class workers to Texas in recent years; enclaves like Austin and Houston’s Montrose neighbourhood felt a little like San Francisco with withering humidity.

Elon Musk has been moving his companies to Texas but he doesn’t want to get involved in the state’s politics.

CREDIT:AP

Those workers find themselves in a state taking far-right stances in a culture war with national ramifications for women’s autonomy and presidential politics.

“Other states are competing for people,” said Tammi Wallace, chief executive officer of the Greater Houston LGBT Chamber of Commerce.

“If you look at what our state is doing, and then you see another state where they’re not doing some of those things, you might say, ‘Well, the money’s good, but where do I want to raise my family?’”

Even outspoken tech companies have been glaringly silent on the Texas abortion ban

Tesla CEO Elon Musk summed up the mood in a tweet, saying ‘I would prefer to stay out of politics.’

In recent years, tech companies and their executive leaders have gotten more political, weighing in on legislation that discriminates against gay and transgender Americans. But the usually more outspoken industry has been notably silent about Texas legislation that prevents a physician from performing an abortion after roughly six weeks into the pregnancy. This week, the Supreme Court denied a petition for injunctive relief on the rule, allowing it to go into effect. In her dissent, Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor called the decision “flagrantly unconstitutional.”

Abortion remains an untouchable political issue for companies. Though doctors insist that abortion is a health decision that should be made between a doctor and his or her patient, some Americans see it as a choice between the life and death of an unborn child. But anti-abortion regulation inhibits medical choice—not just for women seeking the procedure but also for women experiencing a miscarriage—and forces women to seek care through unconventional and sometimes risky means. For this reason, the Supreme Court’s inaction on the Texas law has elicited public outrage—but not from everyone.
Despite the wave of backlash, Governor Greg Abbott is not the least bit concerned that businesses will pull out of his state. “They are leaving the very liberal state of California,” he said in an interview on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street. “Elon [Musk] had to get out of California because of the social policies in California, and Elon consistently tells me he likes the social policies in the state of Texas.” Musk recently relocated to Texas and announced plans for Tesla to build a new factory there.

In response, Musk, capturing the industry’s general mood on the subject so far, tweeted: “In general, I believe government should rarely impose its will upon the people, and, when doing so, should aspire to maximize their cumulative happiness. That said, I would prefer to stay out of politics.”

Fast Company reached out to several companies including Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google, Dell, PayPal, and Salesforce for their comment because they’ve either been vocal on political issues in the past or have offices in Texas. So far only Microsoft’s publicist has responded to say the company has nothing to share.

Internally, some companies are taking steps to ensure their employees have access to abortion care. Match Group CEO Shar Dubey sent out an email to employees promising that she would personally set up a fund for any staff members who need to travel and obtain abortion care out of state. Similarly, Whitney Wolfe Herd, CEO of dating app Bumble, told employees globally that she would provide financial support to ensure reproductive rights. However, women at these companies likely make enough money and have enough paid time off to travel to another state for reproductive healthcare. Kate Ryder, CEO of Maven Clinic, a company that provides healthcare services to women and families starting at preconception and is now worth more than $1 billion, says that her company has been echoing the message from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which has called the Texas law “a clear attack on the practice of medicine.”

A majority of Americans support keeping abortion legal, according to a 2019 poll from Pew. A more recent poll from YouGov, commissioned by the Tara Health Foundation with support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, suggests that a majority of college-educated professionals don’t want the court to overturn the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which protects a woman’s right to choose whether she wants an abortion. The survey, which went out to 1,800 adults who are either working or looking for work, also indicates that those respondents wouldn’t apply to jobs in states that have laws like Texas’s abortion ban. More than half of respondents want their companies to either make public donations or comment on the issue.

The general quiet on the Texas abortion law is in stark contrast to response on other political issues when companies felt it necessary to throw around their economic weight. In 2015, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke out against Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which could have allowed for discrimination against queer Americans. He wasn’t the only one who took exception to that law and others like it. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff vocally opposed the law and a year later threatened to reduce investments in Georgia over a similar rule. Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell, billionaire Richard Branson, and Microsoft president Brad Smith all voiced public opposition to Georgia’s policy.

In 2016, industry played an important role in dismantling a North Carolina law that forced transgender Americans to use bathrooms according to their gender assigned at birth. PayPal withdrew plans to set up a new facility in the state; Ringo Starr and Bruce Springsteen canceled planned concerts; and both the NBA and the NCAA avoided hosting events there. Deutsche Bank and several major investment firms also made their displeasure known. Target promised that transgender Americans could continue to use the bathroom that comports with their gender identity despite the rule and later faced backlash for it. At the time, CNBC estimated that by the end of 2017 North Carolina would forfeit more than $525 million.

CEOs and companies continue to voice their dismay over laws unrelated to their bottom line. In 2018, Cook vocalized his concern in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes over the repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, saying, “The DACA situation is not an immigration issue, it’s a moral issue.” And this year, a convoy of tech companies came out to wag their fingers at Georgia’s attempts to erect barriers to the ballot box and voiced support for voting rights laws that enable access like the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.

They have also, in the last seven years or so, made moves to ensure that their employees adequately reflect America’s demographic makeup, announcing various diversity initiatives. In particular, some companies have made a show of hiring more women. In 2019, Dell announced that by 2030 half of its workforce would be female. But speaking out on access to women’s reproductive care, it seems, remains too taboo. Technology related to women’s health may garner incredible attention as an opportunity for investment, drawing $1.31 billion in funding so far this year according to Pitchbook data, but women’s health as a moral prerogative has yet to seize the hearts and minds of the tech industry’s luminaries. Maybe next year.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ruth Reader is a writer for Fast Company. She covers the intersection of health and technology.