Another part of the GOP’s obsession with banning abortion was on display last summer when the GOP passed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), ostensibly a way to protect kids online, but in reality just another tool to curtail information about and access to abortion:
This summer, the U.S. Senate passed the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill that would grant the federal government and state attorneys general the power to restrict online speech they find objectionable in a misguided and ineffective attempt to protect kids online. A number of organizations have already sounded the alarm on KOSA’s danger to online LGBTQ+ content, but the hazards of the bill don’t stop there.
KOSA puts abortion seekers at risk. It could easily lead to censorship of vital and potentially life-saving information about sexual and reproductive healthcare. And by age-gating the internet, it could result in websites requiring users to submit identification, undermining the ability to remain anonymous while searching for abortion information online.
It’s a bad bill:
It’s important to remember that KOSA’s “duty of care” provision would be defined and enforced by the presidential administration in charge, including any future administration that is hostile to reproductive rights. The bill grants the Federal Trade Commission, majority-controlled by the President’s party, the power to develop guidelines and to investigate or sue any websites or platforms that don’t comply. It also grants the Executive Branch the power to form a Kids Online Safety Council to further identify “emerging or current risks of harms to minors associated with online platforms.”
Meanwhile, KOSA gives state attorneys general, including those in abortion-restrictive states, the power to sue under its other provisions, many of which intersect with the “duty of care.” As EFF has argued, this gives state officials a back door to target and censor content they don’t like, including abortion information.
It’s also directly foreseeable that anti-abortion officials would use KOSA in this way. One of the bill’s co-sponsors, Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), has touted KOSA as a way to censor online content on social issues, claiming that children are being “indoctrinated” online. The Heritage Foundation, a politically powerful organization that espouses anti-choice views, also has its eyes on KOSA. It has been lobbying lawmakers to pass the bill and suggesting that a future administration could fill the Kids Online Safety Council with “representatives who share pro-life values.”
The message is clear: no one should be ending pregnancies, and the GOP is willing to step on civil and privacy rights to make that happen.
So Tuesday the dingbat serving as the Secretary of Health and Human Services made a stupid announcement:
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Tuesday that he has unilaterally struck the recommendation that healthy children and healthy pregnant people get Covid-19 booster shots — a move that experts say is unprecedented.
Kennedy made the announcement on the social media site X, flanked by Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Marty Makary, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
“It’s common sense, and it’s good science,” said Bhattacharya, whose agency has no involvement in the regulation of vaccines, or in decisions on who should get them.
Absent from the video was anyone from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which sets policy for who should get approved vaccines on the advice of its expert panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. The CDC is currently without an acting director.
I like the shade from the author.
And not only is it a stupid change of policy, but it’s a policy that ends pregnancies, which is something the GOP constantly tells us must never be done:
A pathologist who works in rural Ohio, Odronic leaned forward to examine tissue from the placenta of a woman who had recently given birth. She increased the magnification on the microscope. Never had she seen so many tiny, congealed reservoirs of blood or such severe inflammation of the tissue, a sign the placenta had been fighting an infection.
“Right away, I knew it wasn’t compatible with life,” Odronic said.
She asked her secretary to print out the patient’s chart. In dark letters were the words “fetal demise.” A stillbirth, the death of a fetus a t 20 weeks or more of pregnancy. But that didn’t solve the mystery. Odronic had examined many placentas from pregnancies that ended in stillbirth. None looked like this — withered and scarred.
[deletia]
Then, buried in the middle of the report, she spotted something. Seven days before the stillbirth, the mother had tested positive for COVID-19. Odronic wondered if the virus could explain the damage to the placenta. In the world of placenta pathology, a new affliction is unusual, especially one so dramatic in presentation and so devastating in effect.
[deletia}
Heerema-McKenney was in her office when the phone rang. As she listened, she knew that what Odronic was describing was what she and her colleagues had observed repeatedly over the past several months: a patient positive for the coronavirus, a placenta destroyed by COVID-19, a baby stillborn.
Their next discovery was equally stunning. None of the stillbirths they studied involved a pregnant person who had been fully vaccinated. The doctors checked with colleagues across the country and around the world. The fatal pattern held.
Do as I day, not as I do if you’re a Republican.
Taylor’s got it from here: