Tag: Coercion

Hand holding glass ball with inverted image of surroundings reflected in ball.

Flipping the Script: Adoption and Reproductive Justice

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Kimberly McKee

Adoption is a reproductive justice issue. Pretending otherwise ignores how adoption is used as a red herring in anti-abortion arguments. A recent invocation of this faulty logic occurred in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s questions during the November 2021 oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Coney Barrett’s statements implied that the option to relinquish infants vis-à-vis adoption rendered abortion availability unnecessary. This line of thinking is one with which I am familiar, as both a Korean international, transracial adoptee, and a critical adoption studies scholar. 

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Maintenance of Effort in Maine

koutterson Leave a comment

After the NFIB decision in June, Maine tried to expand Justice Roberts’ remedy to also make the “maintenance of effort” provision optional for states. Maine was unsuccessful in the First Circuit with the argument, for procedural reasons.  Prior coverage here.

The Obama Administration is sticking to the letter of the law, and announced Tuesday that it is refusing to allow cuts for Medicaid beneficiaries at or below 133% (138% after the 5% income disregard) of FPL in Maine.

Maine has not yet announced whether it will take the case back to the First Circuit. With Huberfeld & Leonard, we’ve argued at length (see esp. pp. 75-83) that Maine does not have the winning argument, in an article to be published in the BU Law Review later this month. SSRN version here. The short version is that MOE is a common tool to lock-in states during transition to a new program, was discussed in the briefing, but was not part of the coercion analysis in Justice Roberts’ plurality. The key provision was 42 USC 1396c, the Secretary’s authority to reduce some or all of the funding to non-compliant states. But we will see if Maine wants to argue the substance of this point at the First Circuit.

@koutterson