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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsKavanaugh Thinks It's OK to Perform Elective Surgery on People Without Consent
BY
Hannah LeibsonRebecca Cokley TalkPoverty.org
PUBLISHED
August 13, 2018
This article was published by TalkPoverty.org.
Right now, Congress is in a deadlock over Brett Kavanaugh, Trumps nominee to the Supreme Court. Senators are reviewing more than 1 million pages of his legal writing which have laid out his stance on womens reproductive rights (opposed), the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (opposed), and the Affordable Care Act (opposed) and members are battling over access to additional documentation that could reveal past experience with torture and wiretapping. While many of Kavanaughs opinions have been controversial in particular his dissent from a decision that allowed an immigrant woman to have an abortion one of his most problematic rulings has gone unreported. As a Judge in DC Circuit Court, Kavanaugh argued that people with disabilities could be forced to undergo elective surgeries, including abortion, without their consent.
In 2001, three intellectually disabled DC residents brought suit against the city in Doe ex rel. Tarlow v. D.C, after they were subjected to at least three involuntary procedures: two abortions and one elective eye surgery. Ultimately, the district court agreed that these womens due process rights had been violated and that constitutionally adequate procedures had not been followed. The District Court ruled for the plaintiffs and held that DC must make documented reasonable efforts to communicate with patients and if unsuccessful, the government had to take into account the totality of circumstances before proceeding to ensure any decision is in the best interest of the patient. This decision codified patients right to self-determination, and struck down the practice of elective
surgeries without consent from the patients at stake.
On appeal, Judge Kavanaugh vacated the District Courts injunction, arguing that accepting the wishes of patients who lack, and have always lacked the mental capacity to make medical decisions does not make logical sense. That stands in contrast to even the most conservative interpretations of the laws that existed at the time, which required two separate health professionals to determine whether a patient had the capacity to make medical decisions before every procedure. The lifetime pass Kavanaugh seems to be arguing for, which would allow doctors to perform any procedures they wanted on a person who was once ruled unfit, does not exist.
One hundred years ago, Kavanaughs ruling would have been at home on the Supreme Court. In the 1920s, in the famous 8-1 ruling of Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court found a Virginia statute that allowed for the sexual sterilization of a third generation, feebleminded women was constitutional because three generations of imbeciles are enough.
https://truthout.org/articles/kavanaugh-thinks-its-ok-to-perform-elective-surgery-on-people-without-consent/
So this Federalists Society asshole basically believes in eugenics.....................and the list of his bull shit keeps getting longer and longer, now what is Grassley and the fucking turtle going to do..................are they for eugenics.................
November 2018 cannot get here fast enough..........................vote
RandySF
(58,888 posts)Matthew28
(1,798 posts)The bastards don't believe in helping the poor or the disabled but believe in shit like this. Sick
unblock
(52,243 posts)handmade34
(22,756 posts)like a sick puppy to me
CrispyQ
(36,478 posts)"...Kavanaugh argued that people with disabilities could be forced to undergo elective surgeries, including abortion, without their consent."
What a despicable POS. These people are genuinely terrifying in their total lack of empathy & sense of superiority.
Matthew28
(1,798 posts)He is pretty much admitting that he wants to perform abortions on disabled people.
volstork
(5,401 posts)If you are able to ban abortion (or anything else, for that matter), then you also have the power to compel it. Who says they won't turn around and compel women they find "inappropriate" to abort...
greymattermom
(5,754 posts)and ask him exactly what IQ you need to keep the government for forcing you to have an abortion against your will.
CrispyQ
(36,478 posts)ck4829
(35,077 posts)Maraya1969
(22,482 posts)Me.
(35,454 posts)C_U_L8R
(45,003 posts)no_hypocrisy
(46,117 posts)In the 1920s, states sterilized people against their will and/or without their knowledge based on eugenics. To keep the wrong kind of people from having children and polluting the population.
Right now, I'm in Amherst County in Virginia where the case started. The woman was in foster care where she was raped and had a child. Social services considered her promiscuous for being single and poor (you know, white trash). Carrie Buck fought for her right NOT to be sterilized all the way up to the Supreme Court where Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. dropped the ball and gave his blessing to state-sponsored sterilization, albeit compulsory.
And my friends, THIS LAW IS STILL VIABLE AND COULD BE USED AGAIN on anyone the federal or state government deems "unhealthy" to have a child. Think of it as reverse abortion.
Here's the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
turbinetree
(24,703 posts)CrispyQ
(36,478 posts)What a tragic story. And again, a group of men making policy/legislation over women's bodies. I am so sick of this shit.
Thank you for posting.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)In Los Angeles 35 years ago now, a conservative neighbor and friend told me she watched in a large medical center while a woman who clearly did not understand (ESL problem) consented to sterilization. Learning that my neighbor watched and did not intervene, or merely claimed to have watched and done nothing (although I did believe her), began the end of our friendship. I'd detected no malice before that, but calm acceptance in an intelligent woman was a literally stunning eye opener.
It really could become institutionalized here. But not if we get control of congress in 83 days.
Link to tweet
kskiska
(27,045 posts)and I knew of a family in town who had members that had been sterilized there.
Honeycombe8
(37,648 posts)I get the point that the person doesn't have the mental capacity to make decisions. But the lower court decided, it sounds like (w/o reading the decision) , that the rules in place for such situations had not been followed.
Did the woman not have family or someone have power of attorney to make such decisions for her? Just as with a child, there is someone appointed to make those decisions for a person who is incapable of making those decisions.
But wow...to decide just to do whatever..blows my mind.
Hekate
(90,714 posts)Fifty years ago I knew a woman it had been done to. Her parents committed her to a mental institution when she was an adolescent (probably behavioral problems, defiance, that kind of thing) and looking back all I can say is she was damn lucky she wasn't lobotomized like Rosemary Kennedy's daughter.
Anyway, some decades later my first mother in law sprang her and found her a job. My first MIL was a state psychologist -- she just recognized that this woman, and a few other people, simply did not belong there. When I met her she was probably in her 50s, had some weird behaviors from being institutionalized, but certainly was sane.
We can do better.
Ilsa
(61,695 posts)Why aren't the anti-choice hypocrites volunteering to manage these pregnancies and adopt these babies?
On a personal note, I don't think childbirth is anything other than terrifying and traumatizing for someone with serious cognitive disabilities.
appalachiablue
(41,142 posts)stuffmatters
(2,574 posts)Zero surprise that Kavanaugh champions eugenics. And the Repug Party has employed, loved, respected this
judicial sociopath for decades.
progressoid
(49,991 posts)That's quite interesting.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)He's only against letting women have a choice over whether or not to give birth. If you are white and healthy then you will be forced to have the child, if you are disabled or "feeble-minded" you are forced into an unwanted abortion. What a hypocrite. He is a sick, sadistic POS.
lostnfound
(16,180 posts)Seems reminiscent of the case in Florida where the state under Jeb Bush was keeping a brain dead woman (Terri Schiavo) alive against the wishes of her spouse.