Tag Archives: Lynn Paltrow

“Extreme majority:” Impact of the most conservative Supreme Court in a century

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“We have a far-right extreme majority on the Supreme Court,” asserts James Lyall, executive director of the Vermont ACLU. “At no point in our lifetime has the Supreme Court been so far out of step with where most of the country is.”

This week, just days before a national election, the Republican-led Senate confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to be a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. The confirmation was rammed through in record time just four years after Republicans refused to give a hearing to President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, because they insisted that eight months before an election was too soon. Barrett is now part of a 6-3 conservative majority, the most conservative court since the 1930s.

We examine the implications of the new Supreme Court in key areas: reproductive rights, civil liberties and immigrant rights, and how this could affect Vermont.

Lynn Paltrow, executive director, National Advocates for Pregnant Women

Ghita Schwarz, senior attorney, Center for Constitutional Rights

James Lyall, executive director, Vermont ACLU

Can a woman be jailed for a miscarriage?

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Does a fetus have the same rights as a person? That’s at the heart of new laws that are resulting in the prosecution of pregnant women and women who have miscarriages. According to a remarkable 8-part editorial series in the New York Times, “Women who fell down the stairs, who ate a poppy seed bagel and failed a drug test or who took legal drugs during pregnancy — drugs prescribed by their doctors — all have been accused of endangering their children… Such cases illuminate a deep shift in American society…toward the embrace of a relatively new concept: that a fetus in the womb has the same rights as a fully formed person.” Lynn Paltrow, founder and executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, discusses the national landscape of laws that she argues are aimed at restricting and eliminating women’s rights. (February 27, 2017 broadcast)

Lynn Paltrow, executive director, National Advocates for Pregnant Women

Vermont before and after Roe v. Wade, 2/20/2013

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Forty years after the landmark Supreme Court decision Roe v Wade that legalized abortion, we look at abortion in Vermont before and after legalization. We speak with Dr. Emma Ottolenghi, a founding physician for the Vermont Women’s Health Center, which opened in 1972 and was among the first places to offer safe and legal abortions in Vermont; Rep. Jill Krowinski, Vermont State Representative and director of public affairs for Vermont  for Planned Parenthood of Northern New England; and Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women and a senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, who discusses the state of abortion rights today.