Health and Human Services chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr. orders review of abortion pill

CNA Staff, Jul 10, 2020 / 12:10 pm (CNA).- The Trump administration announced Thursday that it is putting travel and asset sanctions on several senior officials of the Chinese Communist Party for their role in the mass internment of Uyghurs.

An estimated 1 million Uyghurs, members of a Muslim ethnoreligious group, have been detained in re-education camps in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Inside the camps they are reportedly subjected to forced labor, torture, and political indoctrination. Outside the camps, Uyghurs are monitored by pervasive police forces and facial recognition technology.

“The United States will not stand idly by as the CCP carries out human rights abuses targeting Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and members of other minority groups in Xinjiang, to include forced labor, arbitrary mass detention, and forced population control, snd attempts to erase their culture and Muslim faith,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced July 9.

“The United States is taking action today against the horrific and systematic abuses in Xinjiang and calls on all nations who share our concerns about the CCP’s attacks on human rights and fundamental freedoms to join us in condemning this behavior,” he added.

Chen Quanguo, Communist Party Secretary of Xinjiang, and two other party officials of the region, Zhu Hailun and Wang Mingshan, as well as their immediate family members, will be unable to attain visas to enter the US.

Other CCP officals “believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, the unjust detention or abuse of Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and members of other minority groups in Xinjiang” are also being sanctioned with visa restrictions.

Chen, Zhu, Wang, and Huo Liujun, a former police official in Xinjiang, are being sanctioned by the US Treasury Department, as is the Xinjiang Public Security Bureau.

Their assets and entities in the US are blocked, and US persons may not do business with them.

“The United States is committed to using the full breadth of its financial powers to hold human rights abusers accountable in Xinjiang and across the world,” commented Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin.

Chen is also a member of the Politburo, a group of 25 who oversee the CCP, and he was Communist Party Secretary of Tibet from 2011-16. He is the highest-ranking Chinese official to have been sanctioned by the US.

Nury Turkel, a Uyghur human rights advocates who is a commissioner at the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, had told CNA June 24 that the commission “is disappointed that the U.S. government has not yet enacted targeted sanctions against Chinese officials responsible for the mass detention of Uyghur and other Muslims.”

President Donald Trump had on June 17 signed legislation that would impose financial and visa sanctions on individuals complicit in abuses in Xinjiang. The Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act directs the president to impose sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act, one of several laws authorizing the president to sanction human rights abusers.

The statements explaining the new sanctions from both the State and Treasury Departments referred to the Magnitsky Act.

The Chinese government has defended its policy of mass detention and re-education as an appropriate measure against terrorism.

The government at one time denied the camps even existed, but has since shifted to defending its actions as a reasonable response to a national security threat.

Government officials from the region said in July 2019 that the area’s re-education camps for Muslims have been successful, with most of those held having been reintegrated into Chinese society.

Uyghurs can be arrested and detained under vague anti-terrorism laws. Violence in the region escalated in the 1990s and again in 2008.

The US Commerce Department in October 2019 added 28 Chinese organizations to a blacklist barring them from buying products from US companies, saying they cooperate in the detention and repression of the Uyghurs.

A 2019 document from a Xinjiang county leaked to western media earlier this year gave violation of birth control policies as the most common reason for the “re-education” of some 3,000 Uyghurs, often alongside other reasons.

Last week an AP investigation found a systematic campaign by the CCP of pregnancy checks and forced abortions, sterilizations, and implantations of IUDs on Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.

The birth rate in the region plunged by 24% in 2019, the AP said, and in certain parts of the province birth rates had fallen by more than 60% from 2015 to 2018. 

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Jefferson City, Mo., May 16, 2019 / 04:15 pm (CNA).- The Missouri Senate has passed a bill that would immeaditly ban most abortions after eight weeks of pregnancy. Legislators responsible for the measure have said that, unlike recent measures in other states, the bill is specifically designed to pass scrutiny under legal appeal.

After passing a senate vote on May 16, the measure now moves to the state House of Representatives.

House Bill 126 includes a ban on all abortions past eight weeks of pregnancy except in cases of a medical emergency. Doctors who perform abortions after that point could face a 15 year jail sentence, but women who recieve abortions would not be punished.

“I think we’ve crafted a bill that will win in the courts,” state Senator Andrew Koenig, one of the bill’s sponsors, told CNA after the senate vote on Friday.

According to Koenig, the bill’s provisions are justified by a 98.5% chance of an unborn child  surviving to term after eight weeks, compared to a 24% chance of a natural miscarriage at five weeks and under.

“We believe that the state of Missouri has an interest in protecting that viable pregnancy [after eight weeks],” the sentaor said.

State Representative Nick Schroer, the bill’s sponsor in the House, told CNA in February that he worked with fellow lawyers to craft the bill so that it would stand up to judicial scrutiny.

“We looked at a bunch of case law and worked with attorneys on this,” Schroer said.

Schroer said that should a district court rule against the bill’s eight-week ban coming into force, the law would still include a further ban at 14 weeks. Schroer said roughly two-thirds of abortions in Missouri take place before 10 weeks.

The bill invokes the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution and argues that most abortions performed at 14 weeks gestation invovle in utero dismemberment, which the bill terms “cruel and unusual punishment.”

While the Eight Circuit Court of Appeals has not previously struck down a 14 week ban, Koenig noted, even if it were to do so the bills contains additional bans at 18 and 20 weeks, when doctors are required to certify that the unborn child can feel pain.

“We call it the ‘heartbeat bill,’ but it actually operates a lot differently than any other heartbeat bill that’s passed,” Koenig explained.

Several states, including most recently Georgia, have passed so-called “heartbeat bills” which would prohibit abortion after the detection of a fetal heartbeat as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. Kentucky, Mississippi, Ohio and Georgia currently have “heartbeat” laws waiting to come into force, while courts have struck down similar restrictions in North Dakota and Iowa.

The Missouri bill’s sponsors say they knew that to avoid falling to similar legal challenges, they had to draft a bill not already covered by court precedent.

“We need to give the courts something that doesn’t have precedent behind it, but accomplishes the same goals,” Koenig said.  

“Ultimately I think other states can take our language and start really limiting abortion, because I think our law will, for the most part, get upheld.”

The Missouri vote came hours after Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law a near-total ban on almost in that state. Unlike the Missouri bill, the Alabama law is intended to generate a court battle and challenge the 1073 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade.

“[Our law] is not a piece of legislation that is designed for a challenge,” Missouri House Speaker Elijah Haahr told the Associated Press.

“This is the type of legislation that is designed to withstand a challenge and to actually save lives in our state.”

The Missouri bill also provides for a 70% tax credit for donations Missourians make to pregnancy resource centers on or after January 1, 2021 to foster a “culture of life” in the state, Koenig said.

If passed, the law would also prohibit “selective” abortions following a medical diagnosis or disability such as Down syndrome, or on the basis of the race or sex of a baby.

“For me as a Catholic, for me being pro-life, this is common sense to me,” Schroer said.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that since peaking at more than 20,000 per year in the 1980s, in 2017 the annual number of abortions in Missouri had dropped to fewer than 7,000.

The bill would also require any abortion providers operating in the state to have at least $3 million in insurance to cover women in case of botched abortion procedures.  

“I think that’s actually a huge provision we added in the Senate,” Koenig said. “I think ultimately we’ll be able to eliminate abortion in Missouri because of this bill, but I think also because Planned Parenthood would just say it’s not worth doing business in the state of Missouri.”

Missouri has only one abortion provider in the state, a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis.

A Planned Parenthood clinic in Columbia, MO has been blocked from performing abortions since October 2018, after the facility failed to adhere to state rules and license expired. No abortions have been performed there since.

[…]

When Biden was a senator (pictured with former Rep. Henry Hyde), he consistently supported and voted for the Hyde Amendment, which banned federal spending on abortion. / Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Mar 20, 2024 / 1… […]