Hillman judge Harold Meyerson explains what’s at stake in this week’s historic unionization vote at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

[Photo credit: A VW plant in Germany, by roger4336, Creative Commons.]

The Best of the Week’s News

• If they look like decrepit relics from the 19th Century, that’s because they are! New York City’s rustic-looking rooftop water towers are unregulated vats of filth.

• In a historic vote, Volkswagen workers in Tennessee will decide next week whether to join the United Auto Workers.

• 1 million Texans have fallen into the Medicare coverage gap because their state refused to expand the program under Obamacare.

• How a substandard abortion provider exploited his patients and endangered their health.

• The Koch Brothers left a confidential document at their last donor confab, now Mother Jones has it.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Social justice journalist Beth Schwartzapfel has an important piece on juveniles sentence to life without parole (LWOP) and the legal fight to eliminate LWOP for young offenders:

A common perception is that these kids are “the worst of the worst,” and indeed, many juveniles sentenced to life have done terrible things. But HRW estimates that a quarter of them were, like Jennifer, convicted of “aiding and abetting” or of felony murders. Almost 60 percent had no prior criminal convictions. More than 70 juveniles were just 13 or 14 years old at the time of their crime — some so small when they arrived in prison that all the uniforms were too big for them. Anecdotally, many, like Jennifer, had been subjected to abuse and neglect, their childhoods marred by instability, poverty and violent or criminal behavior by the adults in their life. [AJAM]

The Supreme Court has already declared mandatory LWOP for juveniles to be unconstitutional and a handful of states have eliminated it as a punishment for young offenders. 

[Photo credit: shingst, Creative Commons.]

Texas’s draconian new abortion law has left the 1.2 million women of the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas without an abortion provider. While pro-choice groups challenge some parts of the law in court, Valley women are forced to travel hundreds of miles for a clinic abortion. The Valley is one of the poorest regions in the United States and extended journeys to abortion clinics are beyond the reach of many poor valley women who have to budget not only for the procedure itself but for transportation, lodging, lost work hours, and often, the cost of childcare. 

One Valley abortion provider reinvented himself as a miscarriage management consultant after the new law prohibited him from performing abortions this fall. He examines his patients and subtly steers them towards self-abortion with misoprostol if he thinks it’s safe for them to do so. He can’t tell them to go out and get the drugs, but he doesn’t have to, misoprostol miscarriages are already part of the culture. If the drugs don’t work all the way, he tells them they can always come back for surgery to finish the process. 

Miscarriage management is a flashback to the pre-Roe days when sympathetic doctors would tell women to hurt themselves or visit back alley abortion providers in order to get a miscarriage started. Once a woman began bleeding, the doctor could legally perform surgery to resolve the miscarriage and end the pregnancy. 

The Texas law hasn’t stopped abortions in the Valley, it has just made them more difficult and dangerous.