States that legalized abortion

College students and advocates returning to campus for the first post-Roe school year already are making plans for a counterattack in states where abortion has been banned or severely restricted. They're gearing up with emergency contraceptives , condoms, pregnancy tests, voter registration drives and — where possible — information about abortion access in response to the rollback of the constitutional right to the procedure. “We have to do what we can legally to help people as much as we can,” Nikita Kakkad, a junior at the University of Texas at Austin and an activist for reproductive rights, said. “It’s important to be doing that now more than ever.” Texas is one of more than a dozen states that has banned or severely restricted abortion procedures after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. The state had already passed a law in 2021 that effectively banned abortions around six weeks of pregnancy, and its "trigger law" prohibiting nearly all abortions and … [Read more...] about Students and activists mobilize on campus for reproductive rights in states with abortion bans

A pregnant and parentless 16-year-old in Florida may be forced to give birth after an appeals court ruled she was not “sufficiently mature to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy.” The teenager, who is identified in court papers as Jane Doe 22-B, was appealing a decision by Circuit Judge Jennifer Frydrychowicz on Aug. 10 that blocked her from having an abortion without the consent of a parent or guardian, as required by Florida law. At the time, the teenager was 10 weeks pregnant, the court papers state. But the three-judge panel of the state's 1st District Court of Appeal, which covers northern Florida, sided Monday, for the most part, with Frydrychowicz. The teenager "had not established by clear and convincing evidence that she was sufficiently mature to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy,” the ruling by Judges Harvey Jay, Rachel Nordby and Scott Makar, states. “Having reviewed the record, we affirm the trial court’s decision under the deferential … [Read more...] about Florida court says teen is not ‘mature’ enough to have an abortion

In India, Parliament is the supreme law-making body. With the exceptions of items reserved unto the people — by the virtue of Fundamental Rights — and items reserved unto the States by the virtue of the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution, Parliament can make laws on virtually any subject within India’s territory, and, in exceptional cases, extra-territorially. The Preamble lists the objectives of the Constitution to secure for all citizens justice, liberty, equality, and fraternity. Undeterred by India’s deep-seated inequalities and factionalism before and at the time of Independence, the framers of the Constitution undertook a leap of faith and envisioned a liberal, more egalitarian nation-state in the post-colonial world. Building blocks of the Nehruvian years The first government led by Jawaharlal Nehru inherited a copious body of constitutional, substantive, and procedural laws made between the early 1800s to 1947, and a trained bureaucracy to administer them. In his first … [Read more...] about The spectrum of law-making in independent India