Workers *Choose* To Not Work For Anti-Choice Ohio Restaurant

Your weekly abortion round-up!

An Ohio restaurant announced this week on Facebook that they would have to close for a few days because most of their 30 employees walked out after the owner, Brian Arlinghaus, put a sign in the window announcing his opposition to the ballot measure that would enshrine the right to abortion in the state’s constitution.

“We will be temporarily closed for a few days beginning Oct. 19, 2023,” read an image emblazoned with the restaurant’s name, Copper Blue, and pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. “We have chosen NOT to support Ohio Issue I, which has left us with staffing issues.”

The post has attracted thousands of responses so far, from both supporters and those who swear they will never go to his restaurant again.

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Arlinghouse told WCPO, an ABC affiliate, that he thanked the staff that left for their service but told them that he just doesn’t think abortion is “good for women,” and that he believes this is a “battle between good and evil."

He’s not wrong about that, but he is wrong about what side he’s on. He’s also pretty wrong about what constitutes the “oppression of woman.”

"As a Catholic, there's sins that cry out to heaven for vengeance, and one of them is the oppression of woman and children," he said.

The servers, however, are not just annoyed by his stance, but by the fact that his insistence upon the sign is going to result in a hostile work environment, both in terms of their relationship with other employees and conversations no one wants to have with customers.

Via Local 12:

“It’s not about what it represents, it’s about just how he’s putting us at risk, our safety, our comfort for a point that only he appears to want to make,” said Will Prescott, who had worked at the restaurant for nine years until Wednesday.

“It’s harassment basically, because now I’ve got such and such who is against it and I’m for it and then now we’re butting heads. Now we can’t work together,” said Jessika Lambert, who served as Copper Blue’s assistant general manager.

Arlinghaus may now actually have trouble getting people to work for his restaurant regardless of their stance on abortion, given how often the new crowd will likely leave tracts like this instead of tips.

And just as a reminder, for those living in Ohio — GET OUT AND VOTE NOW!!!

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Britney Spears Reveals She Aborted Justin Timberlake’s Baby

In her soon-to-be-released memoir, The Woman in Me, Britney Spears reveals that she had an abortion when she was with Justin Timberlake — not because she wanted to, but because he wasn’t ready.

“It was a surprise, but for me, it wasn’t a tragedy. I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated,” Spears wrote in the book. “But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young."

She adds: "If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father."

In retrospect, not being eternally attached to Timberlake, whom we all now realize was the villain all along — both for the grotesque way he treated and talked about Spears in the aftermath of their relationship and they way he threw Janet Jackson under the bus — was probably for the best. But given what has happened to Spears in her life and the way she’s been controlled by practically everyone in it since she was a child, the idea of something like that not being purely her decision is deeply disturbing.

Anti-abortion creeps are now trying to exploit Spears’s abortion the same way they exploited her as a World Famous Christian Teen Virgin Who Loves George W. Bush back in the day — because they don’t understand that reproductive justice is about women and others who can have children making these decisions for themselves, not being pressured one way or another.

Leave Britney alone!

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Colorado Judge To Decide If Christian Doctors Should Be Allowed To Pretend Abortion Pills Can Be Reversed

In May of this year, Colorado became the first state to ban advocating so-called “abortion pill reversal,” on the grounds that there is absolutely no proof that a dose of progesterone taken after ingesting mifepristone can actually reverse a medical abortion.

However, a Christian ob-gyn clinic has filed a lawsuit challenging that law on the grounds that the law infringes on their religious freedom. This, to be clear, is fucking insane. It is one thing for a patient to refuse a kind of treatment for religious reasons — say, Jehovah’s Witnesses refusing blood transfusions or Christian Scientists refusing any treatment at all or evangelicals choosing faith healing (for themselves, not their children) over actual medical care, or New Age kooks … also choosing what amounts to faith healing over actual medical care. It is another for doctors to claim their own religious beliefs require them to recommend a course of care to patients that is known not to work. Especially when it involves actual medicine.

The judge in the case is US District Court Judge Daniel D. Domenico, a Trump appointee who after hearing two hours of legal arguments on Tuesday has decided that the actual science of whether or not this works should not be the issue, but what standard should be applied.

Via Colorado Sun:

“Let me save everyone some time,” Domenico said at one point while questioning Assistant Attorney General Brian Urankar, who was representing the state Medical Board in defending the law. “If we’re applying rational basis, you’re going to win. If we’re applying strict scrutiny, you’re going to lose.”

Those terms — rational basis vs strict scrutiny — reflect the standards of judicial review that the opposing sides argue Domenico should take. The state wants Domenico to use the more lenient rational basis standard, arguing that the law is not discriminatory and so should be allowed to stand. The plaintiff, a Catholic health care clinic based in Englewood called Bella Health and Wellness, wants Domenico to apply the more stringent strict scrutiny standard, arguing that the law infringes on their religious freedom and so should be blocked.

In order to decide what standard should be applied, Domenico must decide if the law is religiously neutral or not. While it applies to everyone and not just Christians, and he acknowledges that the state did not implement it to discriminate against Christians, he said “it does seem that they saw an activity that they understood on the other side to be religiously motivated and they banned that.”

Mark Rienzi, the president and CEO of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the attorney representing the clinic, argued that “This is a religious exercise and they have now banned the plaintiffs’ religious exercise.”

Is a medical treatment a religious exercise? I don’t know — can priests without medical licenses prescribe progesterone? If they can (they cannot), then sure. It can be part of their religion. Doctors, however, have an obligation to their patients, not their own personal religious beliefs — and telling a patient that they can do something they actually cannot do is a violation of that obligation. We wouldn’t allow a doctor to tell an amputee he can grow his leg back regardless of that doctor’s personal religious beliefs, because doctors are legally required to get patients’ informed consent. Lying to a patient and telling them you can reverse an abortion when you can’t, or that you are Jesus and can heal their leprosy with a mere touch, is malpractice.

(We’d like to take a moment here to wrack our brains once again on why anti-abortion activists would choose to tell people that medication abortions are reversible, since it seems that would cause more people to have more medication abortions; “no big deal, I can always undo it later.” But if they’re conceiving of it as a religious ritual, it begins to perhaps make somewhat — ? — more sense.)

Michigan Senate Repeals A Bunch Of Stupid Anti-Abortion Laws; House In Limbo

On Thursday, the Michigan Senate voted to repeal a number of backwards anti-abortion laws, including an entirely nonsensical regulation requiring patients to get an appointment for an abortion and then wait 24 hours before they can actually have it. This is particularly inconvenient for those who have to drive a long way to get said abortion and is also pretty freaking insulting given that this is not a requirement for literally any other medical procedure. Like, I could go out tomorrow to a plastic surgeon and say “Give me the full Jocelyn Wildenstein” and there are no laws on the books requiring me to have to wait any amount of time to rethink that decision. There aren’t even any laws requiring waiting periods for procedures far more likely to go wrong than abortions … which is pretty much all other medical procedures and certainly most medispa procedures. (I mean, have you heard about what happened to Linda Evangelista?)

Unfortunately, there is a Democrat in the state House, Rep. Karen Whitsett of Detroit, who loves the 24-hour waiting ban and thinks it is great, and who may end up blocking it from going through. Hopefully she will come to her senses, because it is a very stupid law and should be repealed.