Hobby Lobby : Birth Control is Now Your Boss's Business

I was not going to comment on the recent US Supreme Court's deeply disappointing decision.  But then I read Penelope's piece, and although it too is long-winded, I stuck with it, because she argues what I've been thinking: People who don't actually experience what you're experiencing should refrain from giving set-in-stone decrees on how to manage your experience. No judgements, no armchair advice. Certainly no legal rulings with far-reaching negative effects.

Enter the US Supreme Court Hobby Lobby decision. Is it justly conceivable that five male Justices weighed the balance accepting corporate entities to deny coverage of all forms of birth control - a ruling that will affect mainly women?

The Hobby Lobby case is the first time that a Court has allowed a corporate entity to deny employees a federal benefit, entitled to by law, (birth control - in all its forms) because of its owner's religious beliefs, embodying corporations with personhood. The ruling is steeped in a gendered outcome: negatively affecting mainly women (with men being a secondary casualty, and economic progression and access a viable third) and, as usual, will most severely affect poor and minority women. Women, who, it is widely argued, need the easiest access to consistent birth control if they are to enjoy the very basics of our first world society: access to the workplace and reproductive control. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote exactly this, powerful dissenting to a ruling she viewed as denying women their reproductive freedom and allowing commercial enterprises to "opt out of laws (saving only tax laws) they judge incompatible with their sincerely held religious beliefs."

Bill C-36 and Prostitution in Canada: Moral Criminalization of Sex Workers

The Canadian government established The Royal Commission on the Relations of Labour and Capital in 1889 to face the growing criticism on security in the labour force. Too many workers were being hurt, too many oppressive working conditions were still in place, but the federal government refused to act, saying it would overstep into provincial jurisdiction.

In 1914, Ontario is the first province to institute the Workmen's Compensation Act for workers injured on the job. In 1972, Saskatchewan follows with a first of its kind Occupational Health Act, which makes both health and safety the joint responsibility of management and workers. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted in 1982, but following mass protests around the country over the next decades, the Supreme Court, in 2007, overturned more than twenty years of Charter of workplace jurisprudence by allowing for unionized healthcare and social services for workers.

Then, in December of 2013, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down Canada's major prostitution laws, stating unequivocally that Parliament's restrictive measures had infringed on the constitutional rights and security of prostitutes. Ruling on the Bedford Case, the Court gave the Minister of Justice Peter MacKay one year to revise the laws in favour of more protective measures.

Roe v. Wade At 40: The Struggle to Save a Woman's Right to Choose

In 1973, the United States Supreme Court declared that privacy as defined under the due process clause of 14th Amendment of the US Constitution extended to a woman's right over her own body and her decision whether or not to have an abortion. Basically, it disallowed many State and Federal actions against abortion, and tied the procedure to viability.

40 years on, despite being a constitutionally protected right, a woman's choice is still vehemently attacked by State law and physical violence that roams the scale from intimidation to murder. From South Dakota where a federal appeals court upheld a law requiring doctors to state that abortion cause a rise in suicide attempts (which John Hopkins has stated is absolutely bogus), to North Dakota where medication-indcued abortions have been banned despite medical testimony to their safety, to Kansas where Dr. Tiller was shot and the doctors who attempted to take over his practise where physically harassed into quitting, to Mississippi where the last abortion clinic is closing because hospitals won't grant obligatory admitting privileges to it's doctors, to Virginia where abortion clinics now have to abide by architectural zoning laws for their patient's safety (though no previous reports suggested the clinics were unsafe), and I could go on: abortion providers have been physically harassed into oblivion.