Democracy Now! Daily Digest ~ A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González ~ Wednesday, 30 October 2013
STORIES:
As we continue our conversation on slavery, we are joined by a woman who uncovered that her ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Katrina Browne documented her roots in the film, "Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North," which revealed how her family, based in Rhode Island, was once the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. After the film aired on PBS in 2008, Browne went on to found the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery. We speak to Browne and Craig Steven Wilder, author of the new book, "Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our conversation on slavery, we’re joined by a woman who uncovered that her ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Katrina Browne is with us. She documented her roots in the film Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North.
KATRINA BROWNE: One day my grandmother traced back. I was in seminary when I got a booklet in the mail that she wrote for all her grandchildren. She shared our family history—all the happy days. She also explained that the first DeWolf, Mark Anthony, came to Bristol as a sailor in 1744. And then she wrote, "I haven’t stomach enough to describe the ensuing slave trade!"
What hit me hard was the realization that I already knew this—knew, but somehow buried it along the way. What no one in my family realized was that the DeWolfs were with the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. They brought over 10,000 Africans to the Americas in chains. Half a million of their descendants could be alive today.
AMY GOODMAN: A clip from Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, narrated, produced and directed by Katrina Browne. After the film aired on PBS’s POV in 2008, she went on to found the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery to inspire dialogue and active response to this history and its many legacies. Katrina Browne now joins us from Washington, D.C. And still with us, MIT Professor Craig Steven Wilder, author of the new book, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.
Katrina, take us from there. You discover, though you say you knew, some kind of primal secret, what your family—how significant the DeWolfs were in slave trading.
KATRINA BROWNE: It’s—in our family case, it’s a bit of a stand-in for the region as a whole, because I heard things as a child, but I didn’t allow them to sink in, because it’s so—it’s basically cognitive dissonance, I would say, for white Northerners to think that we have any relationship to slavery, because we’re so much—I think all of us— raised and educated in our schools to believe the South were the bad guys and the North were the—Northerners were the heroes. So, it was hard to comprehend and shocking to discover as I dug more into it.
And because of this larger untold story of the role of the North, I decided to produce a documentary. And what we did was basically I invited relatives to join me on a journey to retrace the triangle trade of our ancestors. And nine brave cousins came with me, and we went to Rhode Island and then Ghana and Cuba, where the DeWolfs owned plantations, in that pattern that Professor Wilder was talking about of, even after slavery was abolished in the North, even after the slave trade itself was abolished in the North, folks like the DeWolfs continued to be invested in slavery through actual plantations in the Caribbean—in their case, Cuba—as well as through that carrying trade of provisioning the islands and the American South.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to another clip of Traces of the Trade. You and your relatives, as you said, go to Ghana. You’ve just visited the dark, dank rooms where Africans were kept until they were sold and loaded onto ships. This is your relative, Tom DeWolf, describing his reaction.
TOM DEWOLF: The thing that I guess strikes me more than anything right now is that we’ve talked, when we were in Bristol and we were in Providence and were listening to historians and scholars, and we’ve heard people talk about, you know, "You’ve got to place it in the context of the times," and, "This is the way things were done," and "This is how, you know, life was." And I just—I sit in that dungeon, and I say, "[bleep]. It was an evil thing, and they knew it was an evil thing, and they did it anyway." And I couldn’t have said that before—before tonight.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to another clip from Traces of the Trade, when you and your relatives visit Bristol, Rhode Island, where the DeWolf family lived and operated their slave trade. In this scene, you’re visiting with local historians.
KATRINA BROWNE: The more historians we talk to, the more sobering it got.
KEVIN JORDAN: The slave trade, you’ve got to remember, is not just a few people taking a boat and sending it out. Everyone in town lived off slavery—the boat makers, the ironworkers who made the shackles, the coopers who made the barrels to hold the rum, the distillers who took the molasses and sugar and made it into rum. So, literally the whole town was dependent on the slave trade.
JOANNE POPE MELISH: All of the North was involved. All these cities and towns along the coast—Salem, Boston, Providence, New London, New Haven, New York, and the rural areas around them—either traded slaves or manufactured goods or raised farm products for the slave trade.
AMY GOODMAN: That was historian Joanne Pope Melish in a clip from Traces of the Trade. Katrina Browne, some members of your family went on this journey with you. You were also shunned by others. Where has this taken you? I mean, this is not, as you point out, just any family involved with slavery, although that’s unbelievable to say in itself, it’s the—your family is the largest slave-trading family in the United States, and it’s in the North.
KATRINA BROWNE: Yeah, so, you know, it wouldn’t shock you or listeners to hear that there was obviously a great deal of anxiety and discomfort and nervousness about the idea of publicizing our family history. And I think one of the things I’ve come to appreciate is the depth of the emotions that get in the way for white Americans more broadly, not just our family. We’re an extreme case, but I think it’s a—it’s a sort of an example of a larger pattern, which is that defensiveness, fear, guilt, shame, those emotions get in our way both from really confronting the history and coming to appreciate the vast extent of sort of the tentacles of the institution of slavery and how fundamental it was to the birth and success of our nation and to paving the way for the waves of immigrants that came subsequently.
So, you know, discomfort looking at that history, but then also, obviously, discomfort around grappling with the implications for today and really coming to grips with that. And I hear so many black Americans say, you know, "We’re not trying to guilt-trip you. Quit taking it so personally. We just want you white folks to show up for the work, together with us, of repairing those harms that, you know, continue to plague this country." So, I’ve noticed how I’ve gone from, like, you know, extreme kind of major guilt reaction upon learning this about my family and my region to a more grounded and, I would say, mature and calmer ability to take stock of the inheritance that I think—you know, we’re an extreme case, again, but it provides a view into what I think all white Americans need to look at in terms of those legacies of white privilege and whatnot.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Katrina, what is your family’s, the DeWolf family’s, relation to Brown? Of course, your last name is Browne. But Brown University, of course, they’re based in Rhode Island. I know the DeWolf—one of the DeWolfs wrote the alma mater of Brown.
KATRINA BROWNE: The—so, I’m Browne with an E, so it is a different Brown. But, yeah, James DeWolf, who was one of the more prominent slave traders in the DeWolf family, apprenticed with John Brown, who was a slave trader, and they both ended up in Congress and worked together to help preserve the slave trade, to help protect the Rhode Island slave trade and all kind of—you know, in cahoots even with President Thomas Jefferson around some of that. It’s a longer story. But in any case, the economy of Rhode Island was steeped in the slave trade. It was actually—it usually shocks people to hear that Rhode Island was the leading slave-trading state in the country, you know, not South Carolina or Virginia. So—and that leads to the founding of the university and some of the early funds for Brown University.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting that Ruth Simmons, who was the former president of Brown, great-granddaughter of slaves, first African-American president of any Ivy League university, also—and I want to bring Craig Wilder back into this conversation—commissioned the first Ivy League study of her university—
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Mm-hmm, right.
AMY GOODMAN: —Brown University’s connection to slavery. Professor Wilder?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think this is actually a critical moment in American history. And throughout the process of sort of talking about the book, one of the things I’ve constantly returned to is her decision in 2003 to commission a study of Brown’s relationship to the slave trade. And this happened for a number of reasons. You know, there was a blow-up at Yale at its 300th anniversary about Yale’s relationship to the slave trade, which became quite controversial. That also helped spark rumors about other institutions. And the public secret of Brown’s relationship became even more pronounced and lively when she became president, when the first non-white president of an Ivy League institution took office. It was tremendous—it took tremendous courage to make that decision. The report in 2006 is an extraordinary example of moral leadership, of how we actually get this conversation happening.
And as Ms. Browne was saying about the documentary, one of the things I think is fascinating about both President Simmons’ decision, the subsequent report and the public reaction to it is that much of the hostility and fear that people had anticipated, the problems that they had anticipated when the report and the commission were first announced, actually didn’t really materialize. And if you look at the recent history of the way in which we have engaged with the question of slavery in America’s past—the Brown report, documentaries like Traces of the Trade, the New York Historical Society’s exhibit on slavery in New York, the anniversary of the end of the slave trade in England—one of the things I found fascinating is that it provides extraordinary evidence that the public is ready for a difficult conversation, that in many ways we tend to underestimate the capacity of people to really deal with, and their desire to deal with, these problems.
When her cousin, I believe it is, in the documentary was saying that—you know, reacting to the slave-trading port and this material culture of the slave trade that’s surrounding him, one of the things I like to remember—remind people is that the things that white Americans find difficult and horrific, that generate feelings of guilt and fear, are also actually troubling and horrific and difficult for black Americans. And in that very fact, there’s the possibility of a real, genuine and useful conversation about slavery and American society. I think we’re moving toward that. We’re moving there slowly, but we are getting there. And I think the public is actually ahead of the rest of us at times. I think the media tends to be more conservative and afraid of these discussions than the public are. And if you look at the tremendous, you know, crowds that showed up for those exhibits, you actually see evidence of that.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Craig Steven Wilder, his new book is Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. He’s a professor of American history at MIT. I also want to thank Katrina Browne, producer and director of the documentary, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North.
~~~
Filmmaker Uncovers Her Family's Shocking Slave-Trading History, Urges Americans to Explore Own Roots
As we continue our conversation on slavery, we are joined by a woman who uncovered that her ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Katrina Browne documented her roots in the film, "Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North," which revealed how her family, based in Rhode Island, was once the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. After the film aired on PBS in 2008, Browne went on to found the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery. We speak to Browne and Craig Steven Wilder, author of the new book, "Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our conversation on slavery, we’re joined by a woman who uncovered that her ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. Katrina Browne is with us. She documented her roots in the film Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North.
KATRINA BROWNE: One day my grandmother traced back. I was in seminary when I got a booklet in the mail that she wrote for all her grandchildren. She shared our family history—all the happy days. She also explained that the first DeWolf, Mark Anthony, came to Bristol as a sailor in 1744. And then she wrote, "I haven’t stomach enough to describe the ensuing slave trade!"
What hit me hard was the realization that I already knew this—knew, but somehow buried it along the way. What no one in my family realized was that the DeWolfs were with the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. They brought over 10,000 Africans to the Americas in chains. Half a million of their descendants could be alive today.
AMY GOODMAN: A clip from Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North, narrated, produced and directed by Katrina Browne. After the film aired on PBS’s POV in 2008, she went on to found the Tracing Center on Histories and Legacies of Slavery to inspire dialogue and active response to this history and its many legacies. Katrina Browne now joins us from Washington, D.C. And still with us, MIT Professor Craig Steven Wilder, author of the new book, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities.
Katrina, take us from there. You discover, though you say you knew, some kind of primal secret, what your family—how significant the DeWolfs were in slave trading.
KATRINA BROWNE: It’s—in our family case, it’s a bit of a stand-in for the region as a whole, because I heard things as a child, but I didn’t allow them to sink in, because it’s so—it’s basically cognitive dissonance, I would say, for white Northerners to think that we have any relationship to slavery, because we’re so much—I think all of us— raised and educated in our schools to believe the South were the bad guys and the North were the—Northerners were the heroes. So, it was hard to comprehend and shocking to discover as I dug more into it.
And because of this larger untold story of the role of the North, I decided to produce a documentary. And what we did was basically I invited relatives to join me on a journey to retrace the triangle trade of our ancestors. And nine brave cousins came with me, and we went to Rhode Island and then Ghana and Cuba, where the DeWolfs owned plantations, in that pattern that Professor Wilder was talking about of, even after slavery was abolished in the North, even after the slave trade itself was abolished in the North, folks like the DeWolfs continued to be invested in slavery through actual plantations in the Caribbean—in their case, Cuba—as well as through that carrying trade of provisioning the islands and the American South.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to another clip of Traces of the Trade. You and your relatives, as you said, go to Ghana. You’ve just visited the dark, dank rooms where Africans were kept until they were sold and loaded onto ships. This is your relative, Tom DeWolf, describing his reaction.
TOM DEWOLF: The thing that I guess strikes me more than anything right now is that we’ve talked, when we were in Bristol and we were in Providence and were listening to historians and scholars, and we’ve heard people talk about, you know, "You’ve got to place it in the context of the times," and, "This is the way things were done," and "This is how, you know, life was." And I just—I sit in that dungeon, and I say, "[bleep]. It was an evil thing, and they knew it was an evil thing, and they did it anyway." And I couldn’t have said that before—before tonight.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to another clip from Traces of the Trade, when you and your relatives visit Bristol, Rhode Island, where the DeWolf family lived and operated their slave trade. In this scene, you’re visiting with local historians.
KATRINA BROWNE: The more historians we talk to, the more sobering it got.
KEVIN JORDAN: The slave trade, you’ve got to remember, is not just a few people taking a boat and sending it out. Everyone in town lived off slavery—the boat makers, the ironworkers who made the shackles, the coopers who made the barrels to hold the rum, the distillers who took the molasses and sugar and made it into rum. So, literally the whole town was dependent on the slave trade.
JOANNE POPE MELISH: All of the North was involved. All these cities and towns along the coast—Salem, Boston, Providence, New London, New Haven, New York, and the rural areas around them—either traded slaves or manufactured goods or raised farm products for the slave trade.
AMY GOODMAN: That was historian Joanne Pope Melish in a clip from Traces of the Trade. Katrina Browne, some members of your family went on this journey with you. You were also shunned by others. Where has this taken you? I mean, this is not, as you point out, just any family involved with slavery, although that’s unbelievable to say in itself, it’s the—your family is the largest slave-trading family in the United States, and it’s in the North.
KATRINA BROWNE: Yeah, so, you know, it wouldn’t shock you or listeners to hear that there was obviously a great deal of anxiety and discomfort and nervousness about the idea of publicizing our family history. And I think one of the things I’ve come to appreciate is the depth of the emotions that get in the way for white Americans more broadly, not just our family. We’re an extreme case, but I think it’s a—it’s a sort of an example of a larger pattern, which is that defensiveness, fear, guilt, shame, those emotions get in our way both from really confronting the history and coming to appreciate the vast extent of sort of the tentacles of the institution of slavery and how fundamental it was to the birth and success of our nation and to paving the way for the waves of immigrants that came subsequently.
So, you know, discomfort looking at that history, but then also, obviously, discomfort around grappling with the implications for today and really coming to grips with that. And I hear so many black Americans say, you know, "We’re not trying to guilt-trip you. Quit taking it so personally. We just want you white folks to show up for the work, together with us, of repairing those harms that, you know, continue to plague this country." So, I’ve noticed how I’ve gone from, like, you know, extreme kind of major guilt reaction upon learning this about my family and my region to a more grounded and, I would say, mature and calmer ability to take stock of the inheritance that I think—you know, we’re an extreme case, again, but it provides a view into what I think all white Americans need to look at in terms of those legacies of white privilege and whatnot.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Katrina, what is your family’s, the DeWolf family’s, relation to Brown? Of course, your last name is Browne. But Brown University, of course, they’re based in Rhode Island. I know the DeWolf—one of the DeWolfs wrote the alma mater of Brown.
KATRINA BROWNE: The—so, I’m Browne with an E, so it is a different Brown. But, yeah, James DeWolf, who was one of the more prominent slave traders in the DeWolf family, apprenticed with John Brown, who was a slave trader, and they both ended up in Congress and worked together to help preserve the slave trade, to help protect the Rhode Island slave trade and all kind of—you know, in cahoots even with President Thomas Jefferson around some of that. It’s a longer story. But in any case, the economy of Rhode Island was steeped in the slave trade. It was actually—it usually shocks people to hear that Rhode Island was the leading slave-trading state in the country, you know, not South Carolina or Virginia. So—and that leads to the founding of the university and some of the early funds for Brown University.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting that Ruth Simmons, who was the former president of Brown, great-granddaughter of slaves, first African-American president of any Ivy League university, also—and I want to bring Craig Wilder back into this conversation—commissioned the first Ivy League study of her university—
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Mm-hmm, right.
AMY GOODMAN: —Brown University’s connection to slavery. Professor Wilder?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: I think this is actually a critical moment in American history. And throughout the process of sort of talking about the book, one of the things I’ve constantly returned to is her decision in 2003 to commission a study of Brown’s relationship to the slave trade. And this happened for a number of reasons. You know, there was a blow-up at Yale at its 300th anniversary about Yale’s relationship to the slave trade, which became quite controversial. That also helped spark rumors about other institutions. And the public secret of Brown’s relationship became even more pronounced and lively when she became president, when the first non-white president of an Ivy League institution took office. It was tremendous—it took tremendous courage to make that decision. The report in 2006 is an extraordinary example of moral leadership, of how we actually get this conversation happening.
And as Ms. Browne was saying about the documentary, one of the things I think is fascinating about both President Simmons’ decision, the subsequent report and the public reaction to it is that much of the hostility and fear that people had anticipated, the problems that they had anticipated when the report and the commission were first announced, actually didn’t really materialize. And if you look at the recent history of the way in which we have engaged with the question of slavery in America’s past—the Brown report, documentaries like Traces of the Trade, the New York Historical Society’s exhibit on slavery in New York, the anniversary of the end of the slave trade in England—one of the things I found fascinating is that it provides extraordinary evidence that the public is ready for a difficult conversation, that in many ways we tend to underestimate the capacity of people to really deal with, and their desire to deal with, these problems.
When her cousin, I believe it is, in the documentary was saying that—you know, reacting to the slave-trading port and this material culture of the slave trade that’s surrounding him, one of the things I like to remember—remind people is that the things that white Americans find difficult and horrific, that generate feelings of guilt and fear, are also actually troubling and horrific and difficult for black Americans. And in that very fact, there’s the possibility of a real, genuine and useful conversation about slavery and American society. I think we’re moving toward that. We’re moving there slowly, but we are getting there. And I think the public is actually ahead of the rest of us at times. I think the media tends to be more conservative and afraid of these discussions than the public are. And if you look at the tremendous, you know, crowds that showed up for those exhibits, you actually see evidence of that.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Craig Steven Wilder, his new book is Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. He’s a professor of American history at MIT. I also want to thank Katrina Browne, producer and director of the documentary, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North.
~~~
A legal battle is being waged in Texas over the controversial new anti-choice law that inspired a people’s filibuster over the summer. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has asked a federal appeals court judge to immediately reinstate a key part of the new law a day after it was ruled unconstitutional by a lower court judge. On Monday, District Judge Lee Yeakel struck down the provision requiring onerous hospital admitting privileges for abortion doctors. But Yeakel upheld another provision of the law that requires doctors to use a specific protocol for non-surgical, pill-induced abortions — a protocol even the judge himself acknowledged is "assuredly more imposing" and "clearly more burdensome" to women. That provision, and the law’s ban on abortion at 20 weeks post-fertilization, both went into effect on Tuesday. We discuss the impact of the Texas law and the national landscape of abortion access with RH Reality Check legal analyst Jessica Mason Pieklo, author of "Crow After Roe: How 'Separate But Equal' Has Become the New Standard in Women’s Health and How We Can Change That."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn to Texas, where a legal battle is being waged over the future of abortion access. On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott asked a federal appeals court judge to immediately reinstate a key part of the state’s new anti-choice law a day after it was ruled unconstitutional by a lower court judge.
On Monday, District Judge Lee Yeakel struck down the provision requiring onerous hospital admitting privileges for abortion doctors. The measure could have forced at least a dozen of the state’s abortion clinics to close. Judge Yeakel ruled the admitting privileges requirement, quote, "lacks a rational basis and places an undue burden on a woman seeking an abortion." Texas Governor Rick Perry has vowed to appeal that decision.
Monday’s ruling came in response to a legal challenge from groups including the ACLU and Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas. Their lawsuit did not challenge two other controversial provisions of the law: a ban on abortion at 20 weeks post-fertilization, which went into effect Tuesday, and a requirement that all abortion clinics meet costly, hospital-style building standards by September 2014.
The initial bill inspired a people’s filibuster and a marathon stand from Texas State Senator Wendy Davis that thwarted state lawmakers’ first attempt to pass it over the summer.
SEN. WENDY DAVIS: It’s important in order for me to describe the impact of this particular bill. And that’s what I’m clearly talking about, is the impact of this particular bill. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to talk about it in the context of what women in Texas today will face if this provision goes in place.
AMY GOODMAN: State Senator Wendy Davis is now running for governor of Texas after that 11-hour filibuster helped rocket her onto the national stage.
Well, in his ruling, Judge Yeakel upheld yet another provision of the Texas law, which could have a major impact on the way abortions are delivered. The measure requires doctors to use a specific protocol for non-surgical, pill-induced abortions. Doctors say the protocol is outdated. And Judge Yeakel acknowledged the protocol is, quote, "assuredly more imposing and unpleasant" and "clearly more burdensome" to women. But he allowed the provision mandating that protocol to stand.
Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Supreme Court definitively ruled Tuesday that a similar restriction on medication abortion in that state is unconstitutional, saying it, quote, "restricts the long-respected medical discretion of physicians." The Supreme Court has indicated it’s interested in taking up that case.
Well, for more, we go to Minneapolis, Minnesota, where we’re joined by Jessica Mason Pieklo. She’s senior legal analyst at RH Reality Check, co-author with Robin Marty of the new book Crow After Roe: How "Separate But Equal" Has Become the New Standard in Women’s Health and How We Can Change That. She’s also a law professor at Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Jessica Mason Pieklo, welcome back to Democracy Now! Talk about the significance of the judge’s ruling this week as the rest of the law in Texas goes into effect.
JESSICA MASON PIEKLO: Good morning. Thank you for having me back.
Yes, so, the ruling is significant. It really sets the stage for the future battle of abortion access in Texas, which is a battle over geographic access and clinic access. As you mentioned, the 20-week ban that is included in the omnibus bill has not yet been challenged, and so that’s been effect in—that’s in effect. And so, the focus really now is on how the Texas Legislature is attempting to restrict geographic access and, with the medication abortion, as well, access to specific abortion procedures in the state.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what that medication abortion is about. What are the restrictions on it in Texas?
JESSICA MASON PIEKLO: Sure. So, as part of this omnibus abortion bill, the Legislature enacted a requirement that physicians who administer medication abortions follow a specific protocol developed by the FDA in 2000. And as Judge Yeakel acknowledged in his opinion, that protocol is not actually the standard of care in delivering medication abortions. The standard of care is actually physicians using off-label uses of various drugs, including RU-486, which is one of the two-drug protocol. And we use—doctors use off-label uses in medications all the time. I mean, that is how the medical practice develops. And—but the Texas restriction and similar medication abortion restrictions in other places like Oklahoma and North Dakota, for example, they require doctors to follow only the labeling protocol developed in 2000, which, as the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday, effectively bans the use of medication abortions across the board. And so, we’ll see that—we’ll see that impact in Texas.
Judge Yeakel defended his decision by saying that because the FDA protocol is in place and is one alternative for doctors to use, there’s not a ban. And even though it may be burdensome and difficult for patients who need the procedure, and in some cases cut off access earlier to some patients, that it is still an acceptable burden for those patients to bear.
AMY GOODMAN: And in Oklahoma, the ruling, Jessica?
JESSICA MASON PIEKLO: And in Oklahoma, the Supreme Court ruled essentially the opposite, which was that the state law there was unconstitutional because it took away the discretion of physicians in treating their patients and place that, those medical decisions, within the ambit of the state Legislature, and, as a result of it, created a system of unnecessary burdens that became unconstitutional. The language in the Oklahoma bill is slightly different, but both Oklahoma and Texas get to the same goal, which is trying to make medication abortion if not impossible to access, so difficult that women will give up.
AMY GOODMAN: Jessica, your article suggests that this RU-486 ruling in Oklahoma sets a new precedent—
JESSICA MASON PIEKLO: Well, the Supreme—
AMY GOODMAN: —in Texas.
JESSICA MASON PIEKLO: Yes, well, so, you know, this is a fight that is going on across the country. And the Supreme Court has indicated an interest in taking a look at the issue of whether or not states can effectively ban the use of medication abortion by dictating that they follow—that doctors follow the FDA protocol or similar type of restrictions. And so, the Oklahoma Supreme Court had ruled earlier in the year that the Oklahoma law was unconstitutional. That ruling was petitioned to the Roberts Court, and they indicated their interest in it but sent it back down to the Oklahoma Court to answer a couple questions of state law. That ruling came in yesterday. And so now it’s a question of whether or not the U.S. Supreme Court wants to move forward in taking a look at that.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to a clip of Carly Fiorina. She was speaking on ABC News. The former Republican Senate candidate, Carly Fiorina, said that Texas’s anti-abortion law is far from a particularly extreme position.
CARLY FIORINA: Not everyone in the Republican Party is pro-life. I happen to be pro-life, but there are many pro-choice Republicans. But example: When Governor Perry pushed forward legislation in Texas to ban abortion after 20 weeks, it was labeled as an extreme move. That’s five months. Five months. There are only four countries in the world that have—that legalize abortion after five months: China, North Korea, Canada and the U.S. It’s actually not a particularly extreme position to say a woman needs to have a choice up to five months, and then there really has to be a medical reason. But it got cast as a very extreme point. I would be willing to wager that there are many, many single women who are pro-choice who say, "You know what? Five months sounds reasonable to me." So I think part of the Republican Party’s challenge is to not fall into the trap of having issues cast the way our political opponents want them cast, and be willing and courageous enough to actually have the debate.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Carly Fiorina on ABC. She was a former California Senate candidate. Jessica Mason Pieklo, your response?
JESSICA MASON PIEKLO: Well, you know, the extreme position is, I think, an accurate one, because what we’re talking about here are bans that still exist pre-viability and prior to the time when a degree of prenatal testing can indicate fatal fetal anomalies or other problems in pregnancy that means that pregnancy is not compatible with life. And so, those—the reasons we allow later-term abortions to take place is because things happen in pregnancies, and those—those events can be tragic for the pregnant person. And we’ve decided that the best option is to let that be a decision that happens between the pregnant person and their doctor. And the Supreme Court has made this very clear, not only just in Roe v. Wade, but in the precedent that follows, that up to the point of fetal viability, there is this zone where the patient and the doctor should have the ability to make those decisions on their own. A 20-week ban is still a pre-viability ban. And to characterize a pre-viability ban as extreme is to misstate the nature of the law and the true intentions behind those bans.
AMY GOODMAN: Jessica, earlier this month, Texas Governor Rick Perry claimed his wife misspoke when she referred to abortion as a woman’s right. This was at a public event last month. Perry says his wife used the wrong word in the wrong place. This is what the first lady of Texas, Anita Perry, said.
EVAN SMITH: So, when women say to you, "Mrs. Perry, you’re the first lady. You understand that this is an important issue and that women’s rights are an important issue. And, you know, we hope that you’ll stand with us," your view is governor has got it right, the administration has it wrong?
ANITA PERRY: Well, it is—it is a—that’s really difficult for me, Evan, because I see it as a woman’s right, as, you know, if they want to do that, that is their decision. They have to live with that decision.
EVAN SMITH: Mrs. Perry, I want to be sure that you didn’t just inadvertently make news. Are you saying that you believe that—
ANITA PERRY: No.
EVAN SMITH: —that abortion is a woman’s right to make that choice?
ANITA PERRY: It is not mine. It is not something that I would say for them.
EVAN SMITH: Do you believe that the state is attempting to say for them, and that if the governor and his administration had its way, it would say for women that it was not their right?
ANITA PERRY: I think it goes back to the states.
EVAN SMITH: Yeah.
ANITA PERRY: And Texas has decided that, no, that is not what we want in the state.
EVAN SMITH: Right, but your personal point of view is that it’s a person’s decision within the law to make that choice?
ANITA PERRY: Well, I don’t really think that’s making news. I mean, I think that’s—you know, yeah, that could be a woman’s right, you know, just like it’s a man’s right if he wants to have some kind of procedure.
AMY GOODMAN: That is the first lady of Texas, Anita Perry. Her husband, Governor Rick Perry, said she misspoke, though it sounds like she was very clear about what she felt. Jessica Mason Pieklo, she sounds a little like Laura Bush, right? President Bush was opposed to abortion, and Laura Bush had expressed her support for Roe v. Wade. What’s the significance of this? Is there any? And also, just give us a last national picture of where abortion rights stands in this country.
JESSICA MASON PIEKLO: Sure. I mean, I think Anita Perry’s statement is significant, and I think the comparison to Laura Bush is apt, as well, because what we see is that we have male lawmakers making decisions as to fundamental rights of women. And while Mrs. Perry also said that, you know, this is a matter that should be left up to a state, the reality is, when we’re talking about fundamental rights, those are not something that states vote on. We do not have a fundamental right to vote in one state that does not exist in another. And abortion access and abortion rights is a fundamental right up to pre-viability on question. The Supreme Court has said that time and time again. And so, this is not a matter of law that should be intentionally clouded the way anti-choice activists have.
In terms of the national picture of where things stand right now, we are really in a battle state by state. We have several potential cases that are working their way up to the Supreme Court, one including a challenge to a Ninth Circuit ruling that struck Arizona’s 20-week ban. The attorneys for Arizona just filed their petition with the Roberts Court to have them take a look at that, to challenge directly the standard in Roe that viability is where we draw the line in terms of regulating state power. In terms of abortion access, we have the medication abortion bans popping up across the country that we’ve talked about. And we’ve seen TRAP regulations, which are targeted regulations of abortion providers, architectural and other requirements that are designed to close clinics or make it prohibitively expensive for them to operate.
So what we’re seeing nationally is a vise grip on clinics and abortion access. To the extent that we have states that are held by conservative legislatures and governors, those restrictions have advanced rapidly, like Texas is an excellent example, Arkansas, North Carolina, Mississippi, places where access was already under threat, and now there is a window, and they are taking that opportunity and off to the races with it.
AMY GOODMAN: Jessica Mason Pieklo, thanks so much for being with us, senior legal analyst at RH Reality Check. She co-authored the book, Crow After Roe: How "Separate But Equal" Has Become the New Standard in Women’s Health and How We Can Change That, also a professor of Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. When we come back, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. Stay with us.
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HEADLINES:
White House Claims Unspecified Surveillance Reforms
The White House is claiming it has already reformed some surveillance practices in the wake of the revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden. On Tuesday, administration officials said an internal review has led to specific changes, without disclosing details. It is rumored President Obama will order an end to the National Security Agency’s spying on foreign leaders, yet no formal announcement has been made. At the White House, Press Secretary Jay Carney said the administration is awaiting the findings of a separate review.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney: "What we’ve made clear is that we are undertaking a review of our activities around the world, with a special emphasis on examining whether we have the appropriate posture when it comes to heads of state, examining how we coordinate with our closest allies and partners, and examining what further guiding principles or constraints might be appropriate for our efforts."
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Intel Chiefs Defend NSA Surveillance Before House Panel
As the White House signaled a willingness to re-examine U.S. surveillance, the nation’s top intelligence officials defended their operations in an appearance on Capitol Hill. Speaking before the House Intelligence Committee, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said spying on foreign leaders is a standard practice.
James Clapper: "It’s one of the first things I learned in intel school in 1963, that this is a fundamental given in the intelligence business, is leadership intentions, no matter what level you’re talking about. That can be military leaders, as well."
In his testimony, Clapper said the White House was regularly briefed on National Security Agency surveillance overseas, though he did not say if President Obama was personally informed. Obama has denied knowing the NSA tapped the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Appearing alongside Clapper, the NSA’s director, General Keith Alexander, denied reports of collecting data on millions of Europeans.
Gen. Keith Alexander: "Chairman, the assertions by reporters in France, Le Monde, Spain, El Mundo, and Italy, L’Espresso, that NSA collected tens of millions of phone calls are completely false. This not information that we collected on European citizens. It represents information that we and our NATO allies have collected in defense of our countries and in support of military operations."
As Clapper and Alexander issued a defiant stance, a bipartisan group of House lawmakers introduced a measure that would rein in several NSA practices, including the bulk collection of U.S. phone records.
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Health Official Apologizes for Obamacare Site; GOP Takes Up Lost Insurance Plans
The top official in charge of the new healthcare exchanges has apologized for the technology problems that have slowed online enrollment. Marilyn Tavenner, the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, spoke Tuesday before the House Ways and Means Committee.
Marilyn Tavenner: "We know that consumers are eager to purchase this coverage. And to the millions of Americans who have attempted to use healthcare.gov to shop and enroll in healthcare coverage, I want to apologize to you that the website has not worked as well as it should. We know how desperately you need affordable coverage. I want to assure you that healthcare.gov can and will be fixed, and we are working around the clock to deliver the shopping experience that you deserve. We are seeing improvements each week, and, as we’ve said publicly, by the end of November, the experience on the site will be smooth for the vast majority of users."
Tavenner says the federal and state exchanges have received nearly 700,000 applications for health insurance. But she failed to say how many have actually enrolled, saying those figures will be available next month. During Wednesday’s hearing, Tavenner also faced Republican complaints that the new healthcare law is forcing the cancellation of many existing insurance plans. Hundreds of thousands of people who have purchased their own insurance have reportedly begun receiving notices that their plans will be cancelled or changed because they no longer meet the law’s coverage requirements.
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Israel Frees 26 Palestinian Prisoners, Announces New Settlements
Israel has freed 26 Palestinian prisoners as part of the agreement that reopened U.S.-backed peace talks earlier this year. It is the second wave of the releases that will ultimately free 104 of the thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. As jubilant crowds greeted the freed prisoners in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel announced today it plans to construct 1,500 new homes in an East Jerusalem settlement.
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Palestinian Negotiator: Israel Taking Most Hard-Line Stance in Decades
The United States-brokered Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are continuing behind closed doors. In a statement ahead of the prisoners’ release, top Palestinian negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo said Israel’s current stance in the talks is its most hard-line in more than 20 years. Abed Rabbo says Israel is seeking to hold onto major parts of the occupied West Bank, "undermining the possibility of establishing a sovereign Palestinian state."
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U.N. General Assembly Votes Overwhelmingly Against U.S. Embargo of Cuba
The United Nations General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to condemn the U.S. embargo against Cuba for the 22nd year in a row. The final vote was 188 to 2, with only Israel joining the United States. Just three countries abstained: Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands. U.S. envoy Ronald Godard claimed Cuba’s record on human rights justifies the embargo.
Ronald Godard: "The international community cannot be — cannot in good conscience ignore the ease and frequency with which the Cuban regime silences critics, disrupts peaceful assembly, impedes independent journalism and, despite positive reforms, continues to prevent some Cubans from leaving or returning to the island. The Cuban government continues its tactics of politically motivated detentions, harassment and police violence against Cuban citizens."
Speaking for the Cuban government, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla said the embargo violates international law while hurting the Cuban people.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla: "The blockade is aggressively extraterritorial and a violation of international law, which lacerates the sovereignty of other states. It’s a transgression of the international rules that govern foreign trade and freedom of navigation. The cruel inclusion of medicines and foodstuffs is a violation of national humanitarian law. It is a hostile and unilateral act that should cease unilaterally."
In his remarks, Parrilla singled out President Obama for tightening financial restrictions on Cuba instead of using his presidential authority to loosen the U.S. grip. Cuba says the embargo has cost it more than $1.1 trillion since President John F. Kennedy imposed it in 1962.
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Survivors of U.S. Drone Strike in Pakistan Tell Congress of Ordeal
A Pakistani family who survived a U.S. drone strike has appeared before Congress in a historic hearing. On Tuesday, Rafiq Rehman and his two children told the story of the attack that killed Rafiq’s 68-year-old mother. Nine-year-old Nabila Rehman described watching her grandmother blown to pieces. Her brother, 13-year-old Zubair, who was injured with shrapnel wounds in the strike, said: "My grandmother was nobody’s enemy." It was the first time ever Congress has heard directly from drone strike victims. Just five lawmakers, all Democrats, chose to attend.
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Shootings in Texas, South Carolina Leave 11 Dead
Eleven people are dead following two multiple shootings on Tuesday. In South Carolina, six people were shot dead in what police called a murder-suicide involving a family. The victims included two children. Meanwhile, in Texas a shooting spree in the town of Terrell killed five people. The alleged gunman was captured after a door-to-door manhunt.
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Alabama Lifts Controversial Anti-Immigrant Law
Alabama has agreed to withdraw several provisions in its controversial immigration law from 2011. In a settlement with civil rights groups, Alabama pledged to strike down measures in H.B. 56, including preventing courts from enforcing contracts involving undocumented immigrants and allowing public schools to determine the immigration status of enrolled students. A federal appeals court initially blocked enforcement of parts of the law, but not before thousands of Latinos fled the state. In a statement, the Southern Poverty Law Center called the settlement a "significant victory."
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New York Probes Major Retailers for Racial Profiling
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has launched a probe of the retailers Macy’s and Barneys following complaints from black customers of racial profiling. Four shoppers say the stores’ employees alerted the police based on the racially biased suspicion they could not afford their expensive purchases. At a news conference with the National Action Network in Harlem, Barneys CEO Mark Lee denied the allegations.
Mark Lee: "Our preliminary investigation has concluded that in both of these instances no one from Barneys New York raised any issue with these purchases, no one from Barneys brought them to the attention of our internal security, and no one from Barneys reached out to external authorities."
New York City tabloids have dubbed the episode "shop-and-frisk," a riff on the "stop-and-frisk" tactics of the New York City Police Department.
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Hundreds Protest Fatal Police Shooting of Boy With Replica Gun
Hundreds of people marched in Santa Rosa, California, on Tuesday to protest the fatal police shooting of a 13-year-old boy. Andy Lopez was shot dead after police mistook the pellet gun he was carrying for an assault rifle. Police say the replica was missing the plastic orange piece usually placed on toy guns.
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East Coast Marks First Anniversary of Superstorm Sandy
Commemorations were held Tuesday to mark the first anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, which flooded the East Coast and left 159 people dead. People lined up along the New Jersey coastline holding flashlights to light up the sky. On Staten Island, hundreds of people gathered at a beachside park to mark the time the storm made landfall. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the city is being rebuilt to better handle future storms.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg: "If another storm like Sandy ever approaches our shores, it will find a far different city from the one that Sandy left behind — a city much more able to withstand the kind of surging sea waters and punishing winds that Sandy brought. We are building New York City back stronger and smarter so that we’ll be resilient to a broad range of extreme weather events in the future, including big coastal storms."
Thousands of people remain homeless from Sandy one year after the storm.
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