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Planned Parenthood Withdraws From Title X Federal Funds. Here’s What That Means


Planned Parenthood has announced that it will withdraw from Title X, a federal program that helps make birth control, pregnancy tests, and screenings for sexually transmitted diseases accessible and affordable. The decision is due to the Trump administration’s new “gag rule,” which restricts what health providers can tell patients about abortion. Under this rule, if Planned Parenthood wanted to continue to receive funds through the program, it would no longer be able to offer abortion referrals or even suggest where a patient could get an abortion.

The Trump administration first introduced the new Title X rules in May, but it wasn’t until last week, when a federal court failed to halt them, that Planned Parenthood decided to pull out of the program.

Planned Parenthood has received Title X funds since the 1970s, but these federal dollars have never been used to fund abortions. And according to the New York Times, “Planned Parenthood receives about $60 million of the $286 million given annually by Title X to about 4,000 health centers providing reproductive health care, as well as screenings for breast cancer and cervical cancer, to about 4 million patients.” Without these resources, more than 1.5 million low-income women who rely on Planned Parenthood for pregnancy tests, birth control, STI screenings, and other services through Title X support could be affected. The organization has shared that one of their programs, a mobile health center in Cleveland, will have to close and that other clinics will feel similar pressure from the cuts.

“By forcing Planned Parenthood out of the Title X program, Trump is fulfilling his debt to the anti-choice movement—a vocal, extreme minority in this country—for their work to put him in the White House,” NARAL Pro-Choice America president Ilyse Hogue shared in a statement. “Millions of women and families who rely on Planned Parenthood for a full range of reproductive health care will be forced to pay the price for political payback by the Trump administration and their reckless Title X gag rule. The decision about when and with whom to have a family is one of the most personal and important decisions a person will ever make, and it’s definitely one that should be free from political interference.”

Christina Reynolds, vice president of communications at Emily’s List, echoed Hogue’s sentiments. “Since day one, Trump and his Republican cronies have tried to defund Planned Parenthood and strip valuable reproductive care from millions of women. Today, those efforts have real and dangerous consequences for too many women in America. The Trump administration is using one of the largest and most valuable programs for providing affordable birth control and reproductive health care to bully providers, like Planned Parenthood, into withholding information on abortion. As the gag rule takes effect, millions of women will be left with nowhere to turn for essential health care like affordable birth control, cancer screenings, maternal care, and more,” she wrote in a statement.

Supporters of Planned Parenthood have also taken to Twitter to share their outrage. Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke wrote, “Trump is taking tens of millions of dollars away from Planned Parenthood—jeopardizing the health of more than a million people across our country. Please donate to @PPFA today, so Trump can’t stop patients from receiving the care they need.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted, “Trump’s gag rule is forcing Planned Parenthood to withdraw from Title X. Last year alone 53,000 Minnesotans relied on Title X-funded clinics for cancer screenings, well person visits, birth control, and more. Losing access to this care puts lives at risk. Period.”





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Ivanka Trump Opposes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Federal Jobs Guarantee


“I don’t think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something,” Ivanka Trump told Fox News’ Steve Hilton in an interview about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal proposal earlier this week. “I’ve spent a lot of time traveling around this country over the last four years. People want to work for what they get.” (In addition to an outline on how to achieve net-zero emissions in the next decade, the Green New Deal proposal would also create millions of new jobs and offer a guaranteed federal job at a livable wage; one recent poll found 71 percent of Americans supported a hike in the federal minimum wage. But OK, Ivanka.)

It’s a rich observation from a woman who has quite literally been given not just “something,” but much, much more wealth and privilege than most Americans will ever see. On Fox, Trump went on: “I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want. They want the ability to be able to secure a job. They want the ability to live in a country where there’s the potential for upward mobility.”

It was a comical, if tragic picture: Trump after all has a guaranteed job (working for her father’s real estate empire and in his White House) and a rather maximum wage (she and her husband Jared Kushner have made at least $82 million in outside income as they serve in the White House). What qualifies her to speculate about what Americans in desperate financial situations with which she has zero experience do and do not want?

I know just how rose-colored her vision must be. Early in my own career, I had an obvious leg up. My mother is a famous writer, and so when I decided to write, too, I began miles ahead of the usual start line. I sold my first novel at 19 for way more than I would have if my mother weren’t Erica Jong. I knew better than to believe that talent alone got me to where I am now. Nepotism is deeply unfair, and anyone who says otherwise is blinded by their own delusions.

Someone who did not benefit from nepotism? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who wasted no time and minced no words in her response to Trump on Twitter. During her now-famous primary campaign, she wore actual holes into her shoes as she and her staff knocked on 120,000 doors. The contrast could not be starker: Ivanka Trump has worn glass Manolo Blahniks since birth, but somehow convinced herself she pulled each up with (custom, probably) bootstraps. Ocasio-Cortez was so determined to walk in her constituents’ shoes—to understand their needs and dreams—that she shredded her own.

Unlike Trump, AOC wasn’t gifted a cushy job in her father’s real estate business. Before she was elected, she worked as a waitress and a bartender. One has to imagine that the woman who knocked on all those doors and worked late shifts might know a little more about what the average American wants than the daughter of real estate impresario who married the heir to another real estate fortune does.

Wealth can insulate a person from the real world, but alas no rich person has figured out how to make it fend off negative press. In Vanity Fair, Bess Levin wrote, “Ivanka Trump comes from a long line of assholes who confuse inheriting money with hard work.” In the Daily Beast, Erin Gloria Ryan wrote, “Ivanka, like her father and siblings, was born on third base and thinks she invented baseball.” The critiques were written, retweeted, and amplified far and wide.





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A Federal Judge Ruled That Donald Trump Can't Block Users on Twitter—and of Course Chrissy Teigen Has Thoughts


A federal judge in New York ruled Wednesday that Donald Trump is in violation of the Constitution when he blocks users on Twitter, as he so often does.

In making her ruling, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald wrote that “no government official—including the President—is above the law, and all government officials are presumed to follow the law as has been declared.” She continued, “While we must recognize, and are sensitive to, the President’s personal First Amendment rights, he cannot exercise those rights in a way that infringes the corresponding First Amendment rights of those who have criticized him.”

In short, Buchwald holds that the “interactive space” where users can engage with the President’s tweets should be considered a public forum and blocking people based on their political viewpoints is a violation of their First Amendment rights.

At least one celebrity critic of Trump is looking forward to interacting with POTUS once more. Chrissy Teigen tweeted a video of herself watching news coverage of the decision with the caption, “Well well well we meet again @realdonaldtrump”.

Trump infamously blocked Teigen last July after a fairly innocuous tweet in which she said, “No one likes you.”

At the time she said, “It’s been a long time coming. I have been very anti-Trump since The Apprentice, like when it first started, so it didn’t start during the presidency like everyone thinks. This goes pretty deep.” But it’s not like she was all that bothered. “I don’t even follow him [on Twitter], so I’m definitely fine being blocked,” she continued. “There’s just this part of me that’s so happy that he had to actually do that. It’s just funny.”

The case that resulted in Wednesday’s ruling was brought to court by the Knight First Amendment Rights Institute of Columbia University on behalf of seven individuals who had been blocked by the @RealDonaldTrump account. “We’re pleased with the court’s decision, which reflects a careful application of core First Amendment principles to government censorship on a new communications platform,” Jameel Jaffer, the Knight Institute’s executive director, said in a statement on their site.

“The President’s practice of blocking critics on Twitter is pernicious and unconstitutional, and we hope this ruling will bring it to an end.”

It’s not clear at this moment when or how users once blocked will become unblocked. Will it be en masse? One at a time? Is there a prioritized list? We shall have to wait and see.





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A Federal Judge Just Blocked Donald Trump's Transgender Military Ban


In an order-by-tweet that caught many people—including some preeminent members of the Department of Defense—by surprise, President Donald Trump announced in July that transgender men and women would no longer be allowed to serve in the military, reversing an Obama-era policy that allowed transgender recruits to openly serve.

Now, a federal judge has blocked parts of Trump’s proposed ban saying that transgender service members who have brought litigation forward against Trump “have established that they will be injured by these directives, due both to the inherent inequality they impose, and the risk of discharge and denial of accession that they engender.”

After introducing the ban on Twitter, Trump handed down an official directive outlining the policy in late August. Under his proposal, transgender recruits would be banned from the military, medical treatment funding for current transgender troops would be completely cut off, and Defense Secretary James Mattis would have power to expel transgender service members. In late August, Mattis put a temporary freeze on the ban when he announced that he would wait to put the policy into effect until a team of experts completed a study determining the effects it would have on current service members.

In a ruling handed down on Monday, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly blocked parts of Trump’s ban related to “accession and retention.” In short, the aspects of Trump’s proposal that affected the recruitment and retention of transgender troops were struck down by Kollar-Kotelly’s decision. She did not, however, offer a ruling on the directive prohibiting funding for “sex reassignment surgical procedures,” saying that her court does not have jurisdiction over that aspect of the ban.

With Kollar-Kotelly’s decision, the military will now “revert to the status quo” in regard to transgender service members—meaning former President Obama’s serve-openly policy will live on.

Related: Senator Tammy Duckworth on Trump’s Trans Military Ban: ‘This Man Is Not Fit to Be Commander-in-Chief’



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A Federal Appeals Court Just Ruled That an Undocumented Teen Girl Can Get an Abortion


Following an extensive legal battle, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that an undocumented immigrant teen—who is pregnant and has been held in federally-funded shelter—must be allowed to have an abortion “without delay.”

The 6-3 decision from the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit overturns an earlier ruling from a three-judge panel, and as Judge Patricia A. Millett wrote for the majority, it rights a grave constitutional wrong by the government.”

The 17-year-old girl, known in court documents as “Jane Doe,” found out she was pregnant not long after she crossed the border and was detained. Since September, the teen has been trying to obtain an abortion but has been blocked from doing so by the Trump administration—which has not allowed her to leave the government shelter in which she’s been held in order to obtain the procedure.

But as more time has passed, the more urgent her situation has become. The teen is now over 15 weeks along, and because she entered into Texas upon crossing into the country, she’s been subject to the state’s restrictive abortion laws—which included banning the procedure after 20 weeks and adhering to a mandatory ultrasound and waiting period before a woman can have an abortion. Beyond these measures, Texas also requires minors to obtain parental consent before having an abortion—but a state judge waived this stipulation and gave the girl permission to have the procedure.

However, the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services—the branch that oversees the shelter where the teen has been staying—has a less than progressive stance on abortion rights. As Director Scott Lloyd said in a March email (via The Washington Post), ORR facilities “should not be supporting abortion services pre or post-release; only pregnancy services and life-affirming options counseling.”

The ACLU—who represented the teen—argued that the Trump administration was preventing her from exercising her constitutional rights. Last week, US District Judge Tanya Chutkan asked the administration to grant the teen’s request, saying she was “astounded” that the only choices the teen was being given were to carry her pregnancy to term or return to her home country.

“Just because she’s here illegally doesn’t mean she doesn’t have constitutional rights,” Chutkan said last Wednesday, adding that the girl must be given access to an abortion “promptly and without delay.”

The Department of Justice then filed an appeal last Friday and a three-judge panel decided to give the administration until the end of this month to find an adult sponsor who could assist the teen. The girl’s legal team then asked for a full bench to review the case, saying that time was running out for the girl to have an abortion under Texas state laws and all sponsorship options had been exhausted. On Tuesday, the lower court ruling—dating back to last Wednesday—was reinstated and the girl was given permission to have an abortion.

When the girl will have the procedure is unclear, but many are viewing the ruling as not only a major victory for reproductive rights—but for immigrant rights as well.

“Every step of the way, the Trump administration has shown their true colors in this case,” said Brigitte Amiri, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, in a statement.”It’s clear that their anti-woman, anti-abortion, anti-immigration agenda is unchecked by basic decency or even the bounds of the law. No one should have to go to court to get a safe, legal abortion.”



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