From WWW.AXIOS.COM
Representatives for some Indigenous tribes tell Axios they have no plans to set up abortion clinics on their lands and would take offense at any non-Native Americans, including progressives, telling them what to do.
The big picture: The Biden administration has made clear it has no plans to pursue such moves, telling progressives who leaned on them to set up abortion clinics on federal land in red states that they’re underestimating the legal risks and other complications.
* Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN, “It’s not, right now, what we are discussing.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters there are “dangerous ramifications” to providing abortions on federal lands.
* But tribal leaders and legal experts are speaking out as well to ensure their position is clear.
What they’re saying: “It’s an overreach for people to assume, or presume that a tribe would want to do this in the first place,” Stacy Leeds, a professor of law and leadership at Arizona State University Law who previously served as a Cherokee Nation Supreme Court justice, told Axios.
* “We have an arc of historic oppression that’s really undermined a tribal ability to respond,” Lauren van Schilfgaarde, the director of UCLA Law School’s tribal legal development clinic and a member of the Cochiti Pueblo, told Axios. “And so the idea that tribes have some magic balm, it’s just frustrating.”
* Even if tribes did want to set up private abortion clinics, Leeds noted, “It would have to not have any federal money because it would be restricted with the Hyde Amendment. And it would need to involve tribal citizens only.”
It’s also unfair for non-Natives to make safe harbor demands given the U. S.’s history of exploitation, van Schilfgaarde said.
* Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma said in a … (Read more)
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