Announcements 




Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.



Thank you for donating

If you've made a donation and wish to receive thank you gifts for your donation, be sure to send us your mailing address via our Contact form.

See our thank you gifts for your donation.



The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement



SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris




SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018



SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017






SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven



2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.


Subscribe to our Weekly Summary & receive our FREE Resist Trump window cling


resist (Car window cling)

Email us with your mailing address at contact@btlonline.org to receive our "Resist Trump/Resist Hate" car window cling!

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.


Between The Lines on Stitcher

stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

inequality
"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.





Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.


JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

Between The Lines Blog  BTL Blog

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Special Programming Special Programming

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Between The Lines Progressive Resources

A compilation of activist and news sites with a progressive point of view

Share this content:

|

Podcasts Subscribe to BTL

Podcasts:  direct  or  via iTunes

Subscribe to Program Summaries, Interview Transcripts or Counterpoint via email or RSS feed

If you have other questions regarding subscriptions, feeds or podcasts/mp3s go to our Audio Help page.

Between The Lines Blog

Stay connected to BTL

RSS feed  twitter  facebook

donate  Learn how to support our efforts!

Despite Setbacks, Pro-Choice Groups Continue to Challenge Texas Anti-Abortion Law

Real Audio  RealAudio MP3  MP3

Posted Nov. 6, 2013

Interview with Gretchen Borchelt, director of state reproductive health policy at the National Women's Law Center, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

prochoice

During the most recent legislative session in Texas, a serious fight erupted over an omnibus anti-abortion bill that included many restrictions that would make it almost impossible for many women in the state to get an abortion. Despite protests by thousands of Texans, supporting pro-choice legislators like state Sen. Wendy Davis, the bill passed in a special session and was signed by GOP Gov. Rick Perry. Two of the provisions were challenged in court by Planned Parenthood and other groups. One measure in the law requires that doctors performing abortions get admitting privileges at a local hospital. Another measure mandates doctors use an outdated protocol when performing drug-induced abortions with RU-486, the so-called abortion pill. Initially, federal district court Judge Lee Yeakel struck down the admitting privileges requirement as unconstitutional, and partially struck down the medication protocol. But last week, a three-judge panel at the Appeals Court level – all women judges appointed by President George W. Bush – overturned the lower court ruling and permitted the controversial Texas law to go into effect. Now Planned Parenthood and other pro-choice groups have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate the earlier injunction blocking portions of the law concerning doctor’s admitting privileges.

Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Gretchen Borchelt, director of state reproductive health policy at the National Women's Law Center, about what happens next in Texas. She also provides an overview of the many anti-abortion laws across the country and her group’s efforts to challenge them.

GRETCHEN BORCHELT: And so that was a good outcome from the district court. And the state immediately appealed that decision to the Appellate Court, the next court up. And a very hostile, anti-choice judge, unfortunately, was the judge who was reviewing – as part of the panel that was reviewing this. And so they rejected the district court decision and said the law could go into effect. And what it means, basically, in that one in three Texas women will no longer have access to safe abortion services in the state of Texas. And we just learned this morning that Planned Parenthood has sent an emergency petition to the Supreme Court to try to stop that law from going into effect, again.

BETWEEN THE LINES: So, an abortion doctor needing admitting privileges does sort of make sense on the face of it. But any woman needing emergency care would be admitted to a nearby hospital in any case, right?

GRETCHEN BORCHELT: That's right. If a woman had a complication – and I should underscore how rare that is; abortion is a very safe procedure – but if a woman were to have a complication and needed to go to an emergency room, she would get cared for. Hospitals have to take patients who are having an emergency, and they have to care for them. And that is appropriate; we want those women to get care. The problem is that these kinds of requirements are extremely difficult for a provider – especially one who doesn't need to use the emergency room often – to meet. So they may require that doctors meet a certain number of admittances, and an abortion provider, again, who has safe procedures and doesn't have to admit women, wouldn't be able to meet those. And we also know that there are a lot of Catholic hospitals who won't grant a provider admitting privileges if that provider performs abortions. So we've seen them come up in a number of other states, including Mississippi, which only has one abortion clinic. And we know that every single provider who works for that clinic was denied admitting privileges at every hospital to which they applied. So it really is a back-door ban on abortion. It's a way for politicians to drive abortion providers out of practice.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Gretchen Borchelt, are you aware of any documented cases where women have either tried to self-abort or maybe had major medical problems or even died due to lack of access to abortion care?

GRETCHEN BORCHELT: Well, we've heard some stories, actually in Texas, which, as we know is already challenging because of the geography there, of women who, when they aren't able to access abortion from a provider who's doing it safely and legally, we've heard stories of women crossing the border into Mexico and getting drugs, and taking them without medical supervision and oversight, and some very serious consequences to their health, and there may even have been a case where a woman died. So certainly, based on this decision in Texas and the fact that one-third of abortion providers are going to have to stop performing abortions if this law goes into effect, we're very concerned about the women there turning to these unsafe measures.

BETWEEN THE LINES: There are similar attacks on women's reproductive rights going on in many other states. Can you tell us where these restrictions have gone into effect and where they're still in litigation and not in effect?

GRETCHEN BORCHELT: Sure, yeah. So, we've kind of seen this tidal wave of abortion restrictions going on in the states this year. In the beginning of the legislative session, we saw a lot of these outright attacks on abortion, just extreme abortion measures where they're trying to ban abortion outright. North Dakota was one of those states that banned abortion at six weeks of pregnancy; Arkansas also banned abortion at 12 weeks of pregnancy; very, very early in women's pregnancy – six weeks is often before most women know they're pregnant. Both of those have been struck down, and I think when we see those kind of blatant attempts to overturn Roe versus Wade and a woman's constitutional right to an abortion, we see judges say, "No, you've gone too far."

What's more worrisome is that these other kinds of restrictions, these restrictions on abortion providers, these interferences with the doctor-patient relationship – these are working their way through the courts in a lot of states and we're seeing decisions come out different ways, and so the regulations that are targeting abortion providers – the ones that force providers to have a hallway of a certain size, or make sure there's a water fountain in the waiting room – which are just medically unnecessary and very burdensome to providers and force them to shut down – those have been upheld in some states, so we now have 28 states that have some kind of requirement on providers that is more than what is medically necessary.

Now I will say that Texas so far is an outlier in this admitting privileges fight. I mentioned earlier Mississippi has this kind of requirement, and it's not the only one that's passed it in the last few years. Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota and Wisconsin have all passed these kinds of requirements that are meant to drive abortion providers out of practice. And in those four states, they have been challenged and blocked so far. But there are a couple of other states where they're in effect. So what we have right now is really a patchwork across the country, where it seems to be that a woman's constitutional right to abortion depends on where she lives. And that's certainly not the promise of our Constitution and the way we understand rights to exist, so we're very, very concerned about that.

For more information on the National Women's Law Center, visit nwlc.org

Related Links: