People changing their patterns of sexual behaviour because of COVID has led to a staggering drop in new HIV diagnoses, according to UK government data.
On World AIDS Day 2021 (1 December), the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) released data about HIV testing, new diagnoses and the ability to access HIV services in 2020.
This new data revealed that the total number of new HIV diagnoses in England dropped by 33 per cent. According to the data, there were 2,630 new diagnoses in 2020 compared to 3,950 in 2019.
Among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men, the number of new HIV diagnoses made in England decreased by 41 per cent from 1,500 in 2019 to 890 in 2020. The UKHSA reported 1,010 people who probably acquired HIV through heterosexual contact were diagnosed with HIV in England in 2020, a 23 per cent decrease from 1,320 in 2019.
The government agency attributed the drop in new diagnoses to COVID-19changing patterns of sexual behaviour, testing and access to sexual health and HIV services.
Dr Valerie Delpech, head of HIV surveillance at UKHSA, said that the decline in HIV diagnoses is “encouraging”. But Dr Delpech warned that the data should be “considered in the context” of the pandemic which “saw prolonged and unprecedented public health restrictions, coupled with intense pressure on health services resulting in a decline in HIV testing overall”.
“It is now crucial that we continue to ramp up testing and start people on treatment at the earliest possible opportunity,” she added. “We must address inequalities and find creative ways to achieve a reduction in transmission across all populations.”
Deborah Gold, chief executive of National AIDS Trust, described the continued decreases in HIV transmissions – driven by regular testing, access to PrEP and increases in those diagnosed having access to HIV treatment – “rays of light in the UK’s response to HIV”.
But Gold said the pandemic has had a “catastrophic impact” on testing and treatment services in the UK, and “we now need an urgent plan for their recovery”.
“HIV testing must increase markedly, and the HIV prevention drug PrEP must reach all communities,” Gold said. “The government has committed to report annually on progress towards 2030, it is vital these reports identify what progress is being made in all population groups in the UK.”
According to the UKHSA data, there had also been a big decrease in HIV testing as the number of people tested at sexual health services decreased by 30 per cent from 1,320,510 in 2019 to 927,760 in 2020.
There was a seven per cent decrease (from 157,710 in 2019 to 146,900 in 2020) in the number of gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men having an HIV test at sexual health services.
In contrast, the number of heterosexual people tested fell by 33 per cent from 1,142,950 in 2019 to 760,260 in 2020.
Debbie Laycock, head of policy at Terrence Higgins Trust (THT), told PinkNews that the charity welcomed the fall in diagnoses in gay and bisexual men, but she said “we need to see this same level of progress across the board”.
“There has been a steep decline in HIV testing among heterosexual men and women compared to previous years – this drop is a concern given that heterosexual men and women accounted for the majority of diagnosis, and rates of late diagnosis were highest in this group,” Laycock said.
In 2020, almost half (42 per cent or 640 out of the 1,540) of people first diagnosed in England were diagnosed late, an increase from 40 per cent in 2019. The UKHSA reported rates of late diagnosis were highest for heterosexual men and women at 55 per cent and 51 per cent respectively, compared with 29 per cent in gay and bisexual men.
Laycock told PinkNews that COVID-19 has had a “significant impact” on HIV services and testing, and she said there needed to be urgent action from the government to ensure the pandemic doesn’t “hinder efforts to end new cases of HIV by 2030”.
She added that testing the provision of PrEP – Pre-exposure Prophylaxis, a medicine taken to prevent getting HIV – “must be expanded to ensure that progress is felt in all communities” because “progress that isn’t felt by everyone isn’t progress at all”.
The data comes as the UK government unveiled its HIV Action Plan, which sets out how England can end new HIV transmission by 2030. The government pledged to invest £20 million to expand opt-out testing in emergency departments in areas that have the highest prevalence of HIV in England.
The plan aims to reach an 80 per cent reduction in transmissions by 2025 as well as a commitment to reach zero new transmissions by 2030.
But the government acknowledged such goals can only be met if people are diagnosed early and provided with antiretroviral treatment to reduce the viral load in a person’s bloodstream to an undetectable level.
Ian Green, chief executive at THT, welcomed the government’s plan. He said the £20 million investment for opt-out testing “keeps alive” the government’s commitment to end transmission by 2030.
But he cautioned there is “still so much more to do to make it a reality”.
“To really get on track, we need to see opt-out testing scaled up across the country to ensure equitable progress in more areas, alongside training for those involved,” Green explained.
He continued: “Ramping up HIV testing isn’t just about numbers – it’s about addressing the inequalities that continue to exacerbate the HIV epidemic and ensure we see progress across all groups, including those traditionally most impacted by HIV.
“That’s why we strongly welcome the action plan’s signal of intent to ensure free HIV test kits to do at home are available across the country – this needs to be available all year round and accessible to all who could benefit.”
LGBTQ youths who are also intersex — an umbrella term that describes those whose reproductive or sexual anatomy does not fit the typical definitions of “male” or “female” — have a higher risk of suicide when compared to LGBTQ youths who are not intersex, according to a new report.
But researchers say there is hope, because the data also show that one thing can help significantly reduce the risk: acceptance.
The Trevor Project, a national youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention group, released the research Friday in a report that explores the mental health and well-being of intersex LGBTQ youths.
It found that the intersex respondents face disproportionately high rates of mental health challenges. For example, 48 percent of LGBTQ intersex youths surveyed as part of the Trevor Project’s 2021 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health reported that they seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months, compared to 41 percent of LGBTQ youths who are not intersex.
Nearly one-fifth (19 percent) of LGBTQ intersex youths reported that they had attempted suicide in the previous 12 months, compared to 14 percent of LGBTQ youths who are not intersex. That rate was even higher for younger LGBTQ intersex youths: Nearly 1 in 4 (24 percent) youths 13 to 17 years old reported having attempted suicide in the previous 12 months, compared to 14 percent of LGBTQ intersex youth ages 18 to 24.
“We already know that the rates of mental health challenges are higher for LGBTQ youth compared to cisgender, straight youth, so when we compare intersex youth to the already high rates among LGBTQ youth, we know that they’re increasingly high,” said Myeshia Price, a senior research scientist at the Trevor Project.
The research found that there are a few risk factors for poor mental health among LGBTQ intersex youths. For example, 18 percent reported having been subjected to conversion therapy, a discredited practice that seeks to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, with 12 percent reporting that the efforts were aimed at changing their gender identities.
LGBTQ intersex youths who said someone had tried to persuade them to change their sexual orientations or gender identities reported more than twice the rate of previous-year suicide attempts (22 percent) compared to intersex youths who did not (9 percent).
The report noted, however, that the recommended “treatment” for intersex people often includes medical procedures and socialization from a young age that could be considered conversion therapy.
“For intersex people, this may happen in such a systemic way, involving every person in the youth’s life, and starting from birth, that intersex youth may not even be aware that it is happening,” the report says. “This may lead intersex youth to under-report their experiences with conversion therapy and other change efforts by adults in their lives.”
Price said part of the reason the Trevor Project focused the research on mental health is that intersex youths are often medicalized from birth and that as a result most of the available research focuses on how medical procedures affect them.
“I think it’s important to understand that intersex youth are so much more than their bodies,” Price said. “By understanding them as individuals and as people we believe that this report gives more attention to things that may be more important to them than the sort of medicalized approach to looking at who they are.”
The report found that other risk factors for poor mental health include discrimination, housing instability and food insecurity. More LGBTQ intersex youths reported having experienced discrimination based on their sexual orientation or gender identities (64 percent) in the previous year compared to LGBTQ youth who are not intersex (59 percent). Those who reported having experienced discrimination reported twice the rate of attempting suicide (22 percent) compared to LGBTQ intersex youth who had not experienced it (11 percent).
More LGBTQ intersex youths reported having faced food insecurities in the previous year and/or homelessness, including from being kicked out or having run away, when compared to LGBTQ youths who are not intersex. Those who reported food insecurities and/or homelessness reported nearly three times the rate of previous-year suicide attempts, at 30 percent and 34 percent, respectively, compared to those who did not report food insecurities or facing homelessness, at 12 percent and 10 percent.
The report recommends policies, both in schools and for government-issued identification, that are not built on the sex or gender binary of male and female, because both intersex and many transgender youths do not fit into those categories.
“We talk about gendered bathrooms and locker rooms and the sports-participation binary and documents that only allow for male or female sex or markers, and these are all sort of inherently excluding the reality that intersex people exist in the first place,” Price said. Sports policies that allow anyone to participate, gender-neutral bathrooms and inclusive sex-education curriculums that recognize intersex people signal to youths “that we see you, we know you’re here and we accept you for who you are,” Price said.
Price added that the report offers hope, because it found that acceptance and affirmation significantly reduce the risk of suicide for LGBTQ intersex youths. Those who had at least one parent who was accepting of their sexual orientations or gender identities had 55 percent and 45 percent lower odds, respectively, of having attempted suicide in the previous year. Transgender and nonbinary intersex youths whose pronouns were respected by all of the people they live with had 64 percent lower odds of reporting suicide attempts.
“The best thing that we could do for intersex youth is to be accepting and provide that protective and supportive environment for them,” she said.
As Covid-19 brought nearly every corner of the Earth to a halt early last year, researchers around the world scrambled to develop a vaccine to fend off the deadly respiratory coronavirus. And just several months later — in a process that normally takes years — several vaccines were ready for worldwide distribution.
In comparison, about 40 years since the earliest reports of what became known as AIDS, scientists are still scratching their heads to develop a vaccine against the virus that causes the life-threatening disease — HIV.
But as the anniversary of the first Covid-19 vaccine shots approaches, experts say the brisk development of the lifesaving and highly effective coronavirus vaccines may have brought researchers closer to cracking the code to develop an HIV vaccine.
“There’s a lot of new energy and buzz among scientists looking at how quickly some of the Covid science got done,” said Rowena Johnston, the vice president and director of research at amfAR, an international nonprofit AIDS research group. “I think there’s been a lot of soul-searching about how the scientific enterprise can be improved so that we can better serve the people we’re trying to help.”
Before the coronavirus vaccines, the most rapidly developed vaccine ever created — from sampling to deployment — was for the mumps in the 1960s. The process took about four years.
The federal government has conducted five large-scale Phase 3 HIV vaccine trials, all of which have failed. Its third Phase 3 trial was notable for increasing the likelihood of HIV infection among those who were vaccinated.
Scientists largely blame HIV’s unrelenting evolution inside the body.
“The scale of mutations that HIV produces are beyond anything that’s even in the same realm of what coronavirus does,” Johnston said. “If you mapped out a genetic tree of all the different variants of HIV inside the body of one person, it’s about as equivalent of all the genetic variations of all the influenza virus of all people around the world during one year.”
Therefore, HIV is always one step ahead of the antibody response that failed vaccines trigger in the body, said Dr. Ronald Desrosiers, a professor at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, who was one of the first scientists to study SIV — the monkey disease from which HIV is thought to have originated.
“The antibodies that’s present in a person can neutralize the virus that was present three months ago, but it can’t neutralize the virus that’s replicating at the current time,” Desrosiers said. “It would be predicted to make development of a vaccine very, very difficult, and those predictions have come true.”
But however elusive an HIV vaccine may be, scientists — including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical adviser to the president — say it is “likely” that one could develop from the pioneering technology used to make coronavirus vaccines.
Two of the coronavirus vaccines, those made by the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, were the first vaccines ever to successfully trigger immune responses using messenger RNA, or mRNA, a genetic material that our cells read to make proteins. The mRNA coronavirus vaccines have proven to be more effective at fending off the virus than the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which resembles more traditional influenza vaccines and does not use mRNA.
Moderna announced in August that it would soon launch a Phase 1 clinical trial for two new mRNA-based HIV vaccines, giving scientists fresh hope.
“If it were just another way to deliver the vaccine ingredients, I would say it would probably have no chance of succeeding where others have failed,” Johnston said.
However, what has piqued Johnston’s interest is that the mRNA coronavirus vaccine is delivered in the body through its lipid nanoparticles. Johnston said the lipid nanoparticles not only help deliver the drug but also act as an adjuvant, a substance that helps strengthen a drug’s effect. And in this case, the adjuvant stimulation effect is working at “a greater extent than any conventional vaccine,” she said.
“When I learned that, it really did give me some hope that finally we have a really, truly a new concept to test in HIV,” she said. “So let’s put our optimistic hats on and hope that this might be the thing that gets us over the finish line.”
Aside from the scientific advancements it sparked, some experts say, the coronavirus pandemic may also indirectly help the HIV vaccine effort by generating more interest in science.
“The world has now increased its scientific literacy. I think the opportunity to build on that in HIV and make people more vaccine-aware and engage in vaccine research and introduction has grown exponentially,” said Mitchell Warren, the executive director of AVAC, a nonprofit organization promoting global HIV treatment.
But others worry that the enthusiasm to stave off the coronavirus pandemic may have come at a cost to HIV research.
When the pandemic pummeled the globe last year, many of the world’s leading HIV researchers shifted gears to the coronavirus. For instance, Johnson & Johnson tapped Dr. Dan Barouch of Harvard Medical School, who has studied HIV for over 15 years, to help develop its coronavirus vaccine.
Overall, scientists who did not pursue Covid-19-related research initiated 36 percent fewer new projects last year compared to 2019, according to a study by Northwestern University that was published in October.
“Sometimes people chase the exciting new thing, they follow the dollars. But we need to get people back to HIV, or there will be a price,” said the director of the Infectious Diseases Initiative at Georgetown University, Jeffrey S. Crowley, a former director of the White House Office of National AIDS Policy.
Regardless of whether the coronavirus will lead to scientific improvements or setbacks, some scientists say defeating HIV will rely more heavily on commonsense global health practices.
“Any pandemic is a day away, and we sort of learned that initially with HIV, but this pandemic has brought that home in an extremely strong way,” said Dr. Kenneth Mayer, a Harvard Medical School professor who is the medical research director of Fenway Health. “What happens in one part of the world doesn’t stay in that part of the world.”
The Florida Department of Education has removed an anti-bullying portal from its website, including links to LGBTQ advocacy groups. The removal comes following changes to the DOE webpage for the Office of Safe Schools, created under the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act.
According to the Florida Capital Star, DOE removed the anti-bullying page after the news site inquired about the LGBTQ resources listed on the site.
When pulling the bullying portal, the department removed links to state anti-bullying policy, LGBTQ advocacy groups and other bullying prevention resources. The Capital Staron Friday reported that DOE officials said the content on the bullying page was under review. Officials did not immediately return Florida Politics’ request for comment.
Read the full article. The Florida Capital Star is part of a flotilla of Bannon-linked pro-Trump right wing news sites. NPR published an exposé of the outfit back in July.
Chile’s Congress passed a law to legalize same-sex marriage on Tuesday, in a milestone for the conservative South American nation after a decade-long legal battle and with the country delicately poised ahead of a crossroads election this month.
“Today is a historic day, our country has approved same-sex marriage, one more step forward in terms of justice, in terms of equality, recognizing that love is love,” Minister of Social Development Karla Rubilar said after the vote.
Chile’s Senate and lower house of parliament both voted heavily in favor of the bill on Tuesday, which had previously been partially approved in November before the Senate sent it back to a committee to clarify ambiguities.
Current President Sebastian Pinera, who will leave office in March, has backed the bill and is expected to sign it into law.
The vote culminates a process that began in 2007, when then-President Michelle Bachelet pushed Congress to pass a same-sex law. Chile is now poised to join 30 other countries where same-sex marriage is legal — including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica and Uruguay in Latin America — according to the Human Rights Campaign.
“It is hard to believe that today we are taking this step,” said Rolando Jimenez from LGBTQ rights group Movilh, one of the major backers of the bill and which helped spearhead Chile’s push to legalize same sex marriage for more than a decade.
Chile will elect a new president on Dec. 19, choosing between progressive Gabriel Boric and social conservative Jose Antonio Kast, a practicing Catholic. The two offer wildly different visions for the country’s future.
While Kast disagrees with same-sex marriage, he had said he would have signed the bill into law anyway had it been passed by Congress during a potential presidency of his.
Chile has long had a conservative reputation even compared with its deeply Catholic Latin American peers. Still, a strong majority of Chileans now support same-sex marriage and Chileans have shown signs of moving left on social and cultural issues in recent years.
Civil unions have been permitted in Chile since 2015, which affords same-sex partners many but not all the benefits of married couples, like the right to adoption.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) complained about the new coronavirus variant making global headlines by comparing it to what he called the “overhyped” AIDS crisis while appearing on a Fox News host’s podcast Wednesday.
Wednesday was World AIDS Day. Without a wisp of tact, Johnson likened the way Dr. Anthony Fauci has issued warnings about the omnicron variant of COVID-19 to the way Fauci warned about the threat of AIDS.
“Fauci did the exact same thing with AIDS. He overhyped it,” Johnson told “Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade.
There has been an alarming surge in the number of homophobic and transphobic hate crimes recorded by UK police forces since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
According to new figures, after lockdown restrictions were eased this summer, anti-LGBT+ hate crime numbers soared to the highest level since the beginning of the pandemic.
Between January and August this year, at least 14,670 homophobic hate crimes were recorded in the UK. During the same period in 2020, there were 11,841, and the first six months of 2019 saw 10,817.
The third national lockdown began in January, 2021, and from January to April there were an average of 1,456 homophobic hate crimes reported per month, and 208 transphobic hate crimes.
As lockdown restrictions eased, this figure soared to 2,211 homophobic incidents per month from May to August, and 324 transphobic ones.
This year, reports of violent anti-LGBT+ hate crimes in the UK have felt endless.
Manchester and Liverpool have faced waves of homophobic attacks over the last year.
Stonewall told LBC that even these shocking figures do not show the terrifying full picture of UK hate crimes because of under-reporting.
Stonewall’s associate director of policy and research, Eloise Stonborough, added: “LGBT+ people have struggled throughout the pandemic, with many not having access to vital support networks and spaces during lockdowns.
“It’s always worrying to see an increase in anti-LGBT+ hate crime, particularly at a time when our communities were more isolated than ever.”
Leni Morris, the chief executive of the LGBT anti-violence charity Galop, told The Guardian: “What we saw in the pandemic was LGBT+ people experiencing forms of abuse and violence that were either exacerbated by the pandemic itself or caused by it.
“We have some people who were victims of abuse and attacks because of being blamed for the pandemic itself, either because perpetrators thought the pandemic was an act of God – because of the existence of LGBT+ people – or because of the community’s association with the last major pandemic in people’s minds, and that’s the HIV/AIDS pandemic.”
The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) has promised that police will “always pursue action against perpetrators of hate crime where there is the evidence to do so”, but admitted that as many hate crime offences move online, prosecution has become increasingly difficult.
Allyship, an old noun made new again, is Dictionary.com’s word of the year.
The look up site with 70 million monthly users took the unusual step of anointing a word it added just last month, though “allyship” first surfaced in the mid-1800s, said one of the company’s content overseers, John Kelly.
“It might be a surprising choice for some,” he told The Associated Press ahead of Tuesday’s unveiling. “In the past few decades, the term has evolved to take on a more nuanced and specific meaning. It is continuing to evolve and we saw that in many ways.”
The site offers two definitions for allyship: The role of a person who advocates for inclusion of a “marginalized or politicized group” in solidarity but not as a member, and the more traditional relationship of “persons, groups or nations associating and cooperating with one another for a common cause or purpose.”
The word is set apart from “alliance,” which Dictionary.com defines in one sense as a “merging of efforts or interests by persons, families, states or organizations.”
It’s the first definition that took off most recently in the mid-2000s and has continued to churn. Following the summer of 2020 and the death of George Floyd, white allies — and the word allyship — proliferated as racial justice demonstrations spread. Before that, straight allies joined the causes of LGBTQ oppression, discrimination and marginalization.
“This year, we saw a lot of businesses and organizations very prominently, publicly, beginning efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Allyship is tied to that. In the classroom, there is a flashpoint around the term critical race theory. Allyship connects with this as well,” Kelly said.
In addition, teachers, frontline workers and mothers who juggled jobs, home duties and child care in lockdown gained allies as the pandemic took hold last year.
Without an entry for “allyship,” Kelly said the site saw a steep rise in lookups for “ally” in 2020 and large spikes in 2021. It was in the top 850 searches out of thousands and thousands of words this year. Dictionary.com broadened the definition of “ally” to include the more nuanced meaning. The terms “DEI” and “critical race theory” made their debuts as entries on the site with “allyship” this year.
What it means to be an authentic ally has taken on fresh significance as buzz around the word has grown louder. One of the aspects of allyship, as it has emerged, is how badly it can go.
Among the example’s of how to use the word in a sentence cited by Merriam-Webster is this one written by Native activist Hallie Sebastian: “Poor allyship is speaking over marginalized people by taking credit and receiving recognition for arguments that the unprivileged have been making for their entire lives.”
As global diversity, equity and inclusion executive Sheree Atcheson wrote in Forbes, allyship is a “lifelong process of building relationships based on trust, consistency and accountability with marginalized individuals and/or groups of people.” It’s not, she said, “self-defined — work and efforts must be recognized by those you are seeking to ally with.”
Allyship should be an “opportunity to grow and learn about ourselves, whilst building confidence in others,” Atcheson added.
Among the earliest evidence of the word “allyship,” in its original sense of “alliance,” is the 1849, two-volume work, “The Lord of the Manor, or, Lights and Shades of Country Life” by British novelist Thomas Hall: “Under these considerations, it is possible, he might have heard of Miss Clough’s allyship with the Lady Bourgoin.”
Kelly did some additional digging into the history of allyship in its social justice sense. While the Oxford English Dictionary dates that use of the word to the 1970s, Kelly found a text, “The Allies of the Negro” by Albert W. Hamilton, published in 1943. It discusses extensively the potential allies of Black people in the struggle for racial equality:
“What some white liberals are beginning to realize is that they better begin to seek the Negro as an ally,” he wrote. “The new way of life sought by the liberal will be a sham without the racial equality the Negro seeks. And the inclusion of the Negro in the day-to-day work, in the organization, the leadership and the rallying of the support necessary to win a better world, can only be done on the basis of equality.”
On the other side of allyship, Kelly said, “is a feeling of division, of polarization. That was Jan. 6.” Allyship, he said, became a powerful prism in terms of the dichotomy at a chaotic cultural time during the last two years.
Other dictionary companies in the word of the year game focused on the pandemic and its fallout for their picks. Oxford Languages, which oversees the Oxford English Dictionary, went for “vax” and Merriam-Webster chose “vaccine.” The Glasgow, Scotland-based Collins Dictionary, meanwhile, plucked “NFT,” the digital tokens that sell for millions.
While Merriam-Webster relies solely on site search data to choose a word of the year, Dictionary.com takes a broader approach. It scours search engines, a broad range of text and taps into cultural influences to choose its word of the year.
The South African government has taken important steps but did not provide adequate funding for shelters and other services for gender-based violence survivors during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many survivors have been made more vulnerable in the context of Covid-19.
The South African government has acknowledgedhigh rates of gender-based violence both during and before the pandemic. But South African experts told Human Rights Watch that despite promises – including in a National Strategic Plan – to address gender-based violence and femicide, the government has still failed to provide necessary funding for shelters and other services. Efforts should be made to improve access for marginalized people, including sex workers; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people; and undocumented survivors.
“South Africa is facing a situation in which survivors have been locked down with abusers, and they need economic security to free themselves from their abusers, all during a very tight job market and a period of food insecurity,” said Wendy Isaack, LGBT researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Key services such as shelters have been under huge stress for months because of pandemic-related problems and costs and long-standing difficulties like late payment of funds in some places and patchy government support.”
Human Rights Watch interviewed staff at seven shelters spread across the country and six other frontline organizations working directly with victims to prevent gender-based violence or provide emergency support to survivors. Human Rights Watch also interviewed activists and other experts from 12 organizations working to end this violence. Human Rights Watch made unsuccessful attempts to interview or obtain feedback from South Africa’s Department of Social Development (DSD), which oversees shelter services.
Those interviewed said that the biggest problem was a lack of adequate government funding to help overwhelmed nongovernmental organizations providing direct support to victims, including shelters, cope with the pandemic.
The DSD should finalize its draft Intersectoral Shelter Policy as a matter of urgency, and all government agencies involved should carry out planned improvements.
Immediate-, medium- and long-term impacts from South Africa’s Covid-19 lockdowns have increased the risk for women and girls of domestic violence and other forms of gender-based violence. Human Rights Watch research with frontline workers in South Africa suggests that this risk may be greater for additionally marginalized people like black lesbians, transgender men and women, sex workers, and older women, as well as refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants.
Those interviewed said that domestic violence victims living under lockdown were cut off from others who might help them, giving them no respite from partners or family members beating, raping, or psychologically or verbally abusing them.
Government support to shelters during the Covid-19 pandemic appeared to vary enormously among provinces. Some shelters described firm relationships and public health guidance and other support from the provincial DSD staff. Shelters in the Western Cape, for example, said that the agency provided guidance, solidarity, and personal protective equipment (PPE) and that funding for shelters arrived on time.
In other places, though, funding was late. The National Shelter Movement of South Africa, a nonprofit organization with about 78 shelters under its umbrella, said that some staff even had to take personal loans to pay expenses. The South African government did promote a hotline for victims it had set up in 2014, but civil society members said it sometimes provided confusing or out-of-date information and that it was hard for some victims to use because they were afraid their abuser would hear them.
Commentators have said that the South African government worked to keep services open for the survivors. But experts criticized the South African government, saying it was too late to acknowledge the impact of strict lockdowns and had not provided adequate public information about shelters and services to make clear that domestic violence victims could leave their homes to get help.
Frontline workers said that many people, perhaps especially among vulnerable populations, were further endangered by the sudden loss of jobs, incomes, or housing. Sex workers, in particular, were forced to leave brothels and to take greater risks to make ends meet as the work dried up, sex worker rights groups said. Research by Human Rights Watch in 2018 found that female sex workers are especially vulnerable to violence in South Africa, in part because their work is criminalized.
Frontline workers also said that loss of income and lack of food security made undocumented migrants even more dependent on abusive partners and less likely to leave them. Human Rights Watch researchfound that the government’s Covid-19 aid programs, including food parcels during national lockdown, overlooked people with disabilities, refugees and asylum seekers, and many LGBT people.
Shelters vary in whether they accept undocumented migrant survivors. South African law prohibits sheltering immigrants without documentation but allows for emergency humanitarian support for undocumented people. The exception is not clearly defined, and some shelters fear liability for violating the law. South Africa has one shelter designed for LGBT survivors, the Pride Shelter in Cape Town. Though other shelters accept them in theory, experts said that more funding, training, and skills building is needed to counter discrimination and bias in the shelter space, provide tailored services, and raise awareness about availability of shelter services among marginalized populations.
The pandemic and lockdowns temporarily affected or made impossible some important in-house services in shelters, such as some forms of counseling and job training, Human Rights Watch found. Job opportunities for clients evaporated. Shelters were unable to carry out normal in-person outreach activities to raise awareness about their services as well as fundraising activities to support themselves or supplement government grants.
Perhaps because of uncertainty and isolation, several shelter workers said they felt that anxiety and depression among clients increased. Staff also had to make significant changes to how they worked, they and experts said, for example, working week-long shifts rather than going home every day, and there were many reports of burnout among shelter staff.
Inconsistent government support for the shelters is not a new problem. The Heinrich Böll Foundationfor example, together with the National Shelter Movement, has long noted that shelters are “chronically underfunded,” and that funding is also highly variable between and within provinces. A 2019 report on the state of shelters by the Commission for Gender Equality, an independent government watchdog body, found “grossly inadequate and misaligned” funding for shelters from the agency and late payments in some provinces.
Ongoing sensitization and skills training for shelter staff to prevent discrimination against LGBT people, sex workers, or undocumented African non-nationals and to ensure tailored services are available is important, Human Rights Watch said. The DSD should also ensure that all shelters accept undocumented survivors and know how to assist them with immigration procedures.
“The government of South Africa has been addressing gender-based violence during the crisis over the past year,” Isaack said. “But a large-scale and fully resourced effort will be needed to ensure the Covid-19 crisis and its fallout over the next years doesn’t result in South Africa’s rates for gender-based violence worsening further.”
For more information about gender-based violence in South Africa and the impact on shelter services, please see below.
Gender-Based Violence in South Africa
South Africa’s president has characterized gender-based violence in South Africa as a “second pandemic,” after the coronavirus. Statistics, including police reports, are worrying but incomplete, both because of problems with data collection and because victims often do not report abuse. Despite the lack of accurate statistics, it is evident that the rates are high, both for women and for LGBT people.
It is also not yet clear to what extent gender-based violence increased during the Covid-19 lockdowns. An analysis by the Heinrich Böll Foundation released in August 2021 found that various data, including police reporting, a government helpline, and hospitals, did not provide a clear indication that rates had increased, but said that more research was needed. Several people interviewed said that they thought rates increased, and experts and frontline workers widely agreed that the pandemic created additional vulnerabilities.
In September 2021 parliament passed three linked bills amending relevant laws. One, the Domestic Violence Amendment Act, should make it easier for victims to get protection orders.
There is political will to address the crisis, but adequate funding has long been a problem, Human Rights Watch found. The National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide attributed the high rates of gender-based violence to South Africa’s history of violence and apartheid, but also to government underinvestment in solving the problem. Others have also concluded that budgetary constraints and lack of cooperation among government departments have undermined progress. Victims lack support when attempting to report violence and lack adequate access to courts and to shelters. The experts interviewed said that the pandemic worsened these problems.
The Commission on Gender Equality’s March 2020 submission to the United Nations committee that oversees states’ compliance with Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women detailed the situation just prior to the pandemic and lockdown. It said that while there was “political willingness to lead national efforts to deal with gender-based violence”, in practice, funding and implementation of a pre-Covid-19-era Emergency Response Action Plan was “still unfolding.” Despite promises of more support, the commission said that even before the pandemic, a lack of government funding had meant the shelters were forced to close, police were undertrained, and medical services for rape survivors were lacking.
The National Strategic Plan is the result of years of activism by South African civil society, including demonstrations in August 2018 that triggered a Presidential Summit Against Gender-Based Violence. Drafted by government and activists, the South African cabinet has also approved the plan. However, it is difficult to track how the plan is being funded. In February 2021 in response to government efforts, the private sector pledged a total of 128 million South African Rand (R, about US$8.1 million) to fight gender-based violence.
Government financial support to shelters and services for survivors is an important part of meeting human rights obligations to address gender-based violence. The National Plan’s Pillar 4, “Response, Care Support and Healing,” and Pillar 5, “Economic Empowerment” tasks the DSD with increasing funding for shelters and services at shelters, and to increase access to shelters and interim housing for all victims, including LGBT people, sex workers, undocumented immigrants, older women, and women with older children.
Covid-19 and Economic Insecurity
The abrupt change in economic activity caused by the pandemic and response had a profound impact on many South African’s economic security. Interviewees said that certain marginalized populations, in particular, African LGBT asylum seekers, undocumented migrants, and sex workers, already more at risk of violence, experienced a significant drop in food security and loss of income. This compounded their risk, especially for those who were forced into homelessness.
Human Rights Watch analysis showed that the authorities did not take steps to facilitate support, including from donors, for refugees and asylum seekers whose access to food and other basic necessities were limited during the nationwide lockdown. As far as Human Rights Watch has been able to ascertain, the government did not consult with people from vulnerable and marginalized groups, such as people with disabilities, leaving many at serious risk of Covid-19 infection, hunger, and other harm.
“Things were very bad to be honest – migrant sex workers were told to move out of brothels and safe houses,” a sex worker peer advocate said about her efforts to assist sex workers in a small town in Gauteng province. “We intervened and made agreements [with the owners] like [in one place] – as long as the sex workers were able to pay electricity the owner allowed them to stay. In another brothel [the owner] gave them a few days after we intervened, but eventually they had to go.”
Dudu Dlamini, a sex worker activist, said that “Sex workers had no cash, no income, they were chased out of houses by landlords”. She said that the loss of income often affected three or four dependents. “They couldn’t go home without bringing money, (couldn’t) visit their children.”
Sex work remains criminalized in South Africa, and as a result, the South African Police Service in some places perpetuates abuse by profiling and harassing sex workers. “Lockdown amplified the challenges for sex workers,” said Nosipho Vidima, a sex workers’ rights advocate. “You can imagine if you’re trying to work and there’s no one else in the street because of curfew… sex workers were harassed and arrested by police for being out, because they were known to be sex workers.”
A social worker at People Against Suffering, Suppression, Oppression, and Poverty (PASSOP), a community-based organization working to defend the rights of asylum seekers, refugees, and non-nationals in Cape Town, said economic insecurity because of the pandemic made it even less likely that their clients, mostly undocumented immigrant LGBT survivors of gender-based violence, would leave abusive partners or report violence. “The majority [of our clients] have lost their jobs [and the need for food and shelter have been those most faced during Covid-19,” he said, adding that the group’s programming had been replaced by proving food parcels and other emergency relief.
“[Even under better times] our clients can’t get work and struggle because they don’t have documents and so have to rely on partners even if they are ill-treated,” he said. He said that at least nine clients were doing sex work to survive, and some had faced police harassment and others violence, and all were more likely to have unsafe sex.
“We did an announcement about our food parcels on the radio as well as our evacuation services and our line blew up,” the codirector from Rise Up Against Gender-Based Violence said. “[Newly homeless people needed] things like buckets to go get water and plastic bags to keep their things in. Especially during the hard lockdown, we had a lot of LGBTIQ people we needed to assist because their families had thrown them out of homes [and] we also did a lot of parcels for non-nationals because there was no assistance for undocumented people.”
Covid-19 Impacts on Gender-Based Violence Shelters
Human Rights Watch found that the pandemic had a significant impact on gender-based violence shelters. The shelters provide refuge from violence and include safe houses that offer temporary accommodation. Crises centers typically offer accommodation for three to six months, and most interviewed by Human Rights Watch also provide counseling, psychosocial and emotional assistance, and life planning, skills building and job training, as well as connections to courts or other government services such as help with protection orders or divorces.
Human Rights Watch did not receive any reports about major Covid-19 outbreaks in shelters, but protecting clients and staff from Covid-19 infection and managing lockdowns strained shelters in many ways. Several shelter workers said that stress and anxiety were greatly heightened for both clients and staff. “We probably worked harder than ever before,” said a senior social worker from a Durban shelter in KwaZulu-Natal. “We had greater levels of anxiety than before among the clients.”
One social worker said that a client and a worker, a cleaner at her shelter, had died of Covid-19, causing anxiety and distress among both staff and clients. “It was a roller coaster,” she said.
Clients at shelters had to self-isolate, especially new arrivals, meaning they lost out on solidarity and community, made worse by restrictions against visitors or making trips outside of the shelter. At one Gauteng shelter, for example, new clients had to self-isolate for 14 days. “It was a very traumatic time,” said a social worker at the shelter. “I’ve never spoken or debriefed about it, but it was frustrating and depressing and not just for the clients here but also for the staff.”
Two other senior shelter workers said that they and their staff had not had a chance to talk about the impact of the pandemic on their wellbeing, and a few people said that the work and sacrifices of shelter staff had not been acknowledged, and that burnout was increasingly a problem. “Everyone just put their heads down and did the work, but now we’re seeing the impact on staff,” said a senior social worker at a 120-bed shelter, Saartjie Bartman Centre, in Cape Town. At least two shelters moved employees from daily shifts, going home at night, to working a week at a time to reduce exposure.
Protections against Covid-19 also created additional costs. “We spent huge amounts of money on PPE in the first months, some R60,000 [about $3,800],” said a senior social worker at the Saartjie Bartman Centre. Like others, this shelter also spent precious funds on private car services to reduce staff exposure on public transport. Fundraising events were canceled and at least some shelters decided to stop in-kind deliveries of food and other support that they usually depend on to reduce opportunities for virus transmission. In-person outreach work in communities also stopped, potentially reducing people’s access and knowledge about sheltering.
Covid-19 Impacts on Services for Survivors
Shelter workers said that perhaps the most worrying loss for shelter residents from the pandemic has been job opportunities. “Women can’t find jobs now, some have been with us for six months now and have no follow-up plan because of that,” a KwaZulu-Natal social worker at a shelter said in February. “I refuse to send a client back to an abusive situation.”
“Our clients have been disappointed,” said a senior social worker from the Sahara Shelter. “A lot come here unemployed, and we try to work as much as possible with local businesses and people who can give our clients jobs, so they have income, but that’s not been possible under Covid-19.” Another social worker said that “We have 15 women [clients] with us now, and only two are employed – it’s terrible.”
Government services were harder to get, including some lifesaving services. “Some government officials were working from home and it was hard to reach them”, a social worker from a shelter in the Eastern Cape Province said. “[This] led to a delay in service delivery to our clients and also added strain on them with regard to their cases. In the beginning of the lockdown, cases were postponed in court and protection orders could not be granted on the date set.”
“We faced huge problems in getting protection orders,” another social worker said.
Others said that health services were affected, with some hospitals shutting down or canceling normal services their clients depended on, some medications being harder to get, and general anxiety and uncertainty as to when taking a client to a hospital or clinic was worth the risk of exposure to Covid-19. “Access to mental [health services] and other health care has proved to be extremely inaccessible during lockdown, even more so than before,” a domestic violence worker in the Cape Flats said.
Shelters struggled to keep essential services such as psychosocial – mental health – support and counseling ongoing, and these essential services were halted in some places for at least a period. Some shelters lost at least some programming. “We also had to stop all our extra services,” said one social worker.
Organizations like SWEAT, the Sex Workers Education and Advocacy Taskforce, and Mothers for the Future, a SWEAT offshoot, who work to support sex workers including protecting them against gender-based violence, struggled with major programming losses, especially in the early days of the pandemic. “We had to stop support group meetings,” Dlamini said. “We moved over to a WhatsApp group so we could provide a little support.”
“We even saw places that had provided condoms for free had shut down,” said a sex worker activist, Megan Lessing. “Some sex workers were earning R50 a day [about $3.20] and paying R20 [about $1.30] for condoms.”
Access to Shelters for Marginalized Survivors
Human Rights Watch found that shelters differed in whom they accepted as clients. Undocumented migrants, LGBT people, and women with older male children were sometimes excluded, for reasons that range from lack of private family facilities to concern about running afoul of the immigration law, or not being able to pay expenses the government would not reimburse for non-nationals. Older women, people who use drugs, and women with severe illnesses were sometimes excluded as well, with many facilities lacking the resources to provide specialized health or services, such as personal care and other support, to people with disabilities, including older people with disabilities.
While sex workers, transwomen, transmen, and lesbians, were usually accepted in theory, people working with these vulnerable groups said that particular group often did not feel welcome and that more needed to be done to help them access shelters.
“Vulnerable groups struggle to find or use shelters mainly because of stigma,” a shelter social worker said. “They are often discriminated against by the public and by staff at shelters … and they’re coming from a place where there’s a lack of acceptance to start with from family members.”
Citing security concerns, about half of the shelters contacted would not take older boys, usually any male over 12. Two shelters said that they did not take older women, in one case because of fears that they would never find another home for them. “We can’t [discharge] them because other support structures [like [older] people’s homes] are not working,” said one social worker. More commonly shelters said that they would not take women using drugs, because they are not set up to safely provide necessary services.
“Some shelters won’t take foreign nationals, especially undocumented people, [and] we spent a lot of time trying to place foreign nationals,” said one person who had helped more than 50 women leave domestic violence in Johannesburg. “We will assist, we won’t judge them if they’ve got papers and have been referred to us and have a right to be in the country,” one shelter social worker said. Others said that they would take undocumented survivors, but it was “problematic … we then have to refer them to the correct institutions handling their cases.”
The Creighton Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal said that they had recently taken in a transwoman. “It was very hard for her to find a shelter because in her ID she’s still a man,” the manager said. Other shelters said that staff can feel reluctant to accept transwomen in the facility, especially if there are no private rooms and bathrooms, or training for staff. Another shelter manager and National Shelter Movement executive committee member, Bernadine Bachar, said that the shelter serves transwomen, but that generally, “there’s a lot of reluctance to take transwomen. Staff feel that they’re not equipped to deal with issues.”
Sex workers experience barriers to accessing shelters, including assumptions about their drug use, on whether they can remain working and not violate shelter rules, or whether they have immigration documentation. One shelter worker said: “Sex workers are sometimes [dependent on] drugs; we have a zero-tolerance policy on that.” She also said that female sex workers often “disregard” the shelter’s 5 p.m. curfew, along with the government’s Covid-19 regulations.
“Sex workers … often do not stay long because they have to leave to do their work and so they violate the shelter rules as well as Covid lockdown regulation,” another person interviewed said.
“I put one sex worker in a shelter and the staff there saw her working and told us to take her to another shelter,” Dlamini said. “And there was another case where a sex worker tested positive for drugs and so was not allowed to stay.”
Sex workers usually do not even consider a shelter an option, a sex worker peer said. “The general feeling is that without a South African ID you can’t access anything.”
Government Support During the Pandemic
Unlike many other governments in the region, South Africa does provide support to shelters, and the pandemic has placed many strains on government institutions and services, Human Rights Watch said. It is apparently difficult to calculate government spending on gender-based violence, but experts agree that more funding and focus is needed.
Experts said that the government was too slow to publicly note that the pandemic and the stringent lockdowns had increased the risks of gender-based violence. They said that national and local officials have never acknowledged the added dangers to some groups like sex workers, refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants as well as LGBT people. The experts also said that it was not made clear from the beginning that shelters and other services were essential services that would remain open and that survivors could leave their houses to get help even during curfew or the various levels of lockdown. “Women didn’t know what was going on,” Bachar said. “It was unconscionable.”
South African authorities’ enforcement of curfews and lockdowns has been strict, and sometimes violent, which may have affected victims’ ability to seek help. In June 2020 a report by the Atlantic Council noted that, “Since South Africa instituted a country-wide lockdown on March 27, the number of violent incidents by police against civilians has reportedly more than doubled, with poor and vulnerable populations most affected.”
For many shelters, work with local government officials and police continued during the pandemic even if it was bumpy. Some said they got some additional assistance like funds, PPE including masks and sanitizers, and advice from the government, although more commonly from the National Shelter Movement.
A social worker at the Sahara Shelter in Durban said: “we got masks and sanitizer … whenever there was stuff available (DSD) would drop it off and they helped with deep cleaning two or three times.”
“DSD worked with us from the beginning to prepare, even before lockdown, they sent an epidemiologist to consult with shelters,” a senior worker at a large shelter of 120 beds in Cape Town said. Other shelters said that they did not get any additional support from the government and instead were dependent on the National Shelter Movement for PPE and other resources as well as guidance on how to handle social distancing for example.
The biggest problem was when funding arrived late, those interviewed said. But the overall lack of funding for shelters, even when on time was also consistently mentioned as a problem. “A lack of funding means many shelter workers earn a minimum wage even though they are essential and the work they do is so important,” said Claudia Lopes from the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Lopes and Kailash Bhana, who are doing research for the Heinrich Böll Foundation on the impact of Covid-19 on shelters, and Lisa Vetten, another expert, said that two shelters in the Eastern Cape had to halt their operations because they could not afford to pay for food as they had not received government funding during the pandemic. They said that at least one shelter in the Northwest province, struggled to feed about 80 clients, some of them children, and came close to collapse because of significantly delayed government funding.
Experts also expressed concerns about the quality of a government hotline set up during the pandemic for victims. “We were shocked by the GBV [gender-based violence] hotline,” the codirector at Rise Up Against Gender-Based Violence said. “[Victims are] trapped in their homes with their abuser and you’re giving them a telephone line. Many people have no phone, and [even if they do] the abuser is within earshot.”
Even when survivors could call, said Lopes, hotline workers were sometimes giving callers inappropriate advice and “deciding for themselves whether someone was eligible for shelters or not” rather than just doing referrals. In one example, she said, “the victim’s partner was a gangster, and she was needing urgent escape from the situation and the community that she lives in, but the command center told her that she was not eligible for sheltering as she could be accommodated elsewhere, essentially with her mom in the same community she had to leave for her own safety. They simply didn’t understand the dynamics.”
Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh seemed to suggest earlier this week that landmark LGBTQ cases could support overturning federal abortion rights.
The Supreme Court heard 90 minutes of oral arguments Wednesday concerning a Mississippi law that would ban almost all abortions in the state after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
A majority of the court’s conservative justices appeared prepared to uphold the law and possibly overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark decision holdingthat women have a constitutional right to have an abortion before fetal viability, usually around 24 weeks.
The crux of Wednesday’s oral arguments centered around whether the justices should preserve or walk back on precedent, a court decision that is considered authority for subsequent cases involving similar or identical circumstances. The court’s liberal justices warned that reversing a decades-old ruling would politicize the country’s highest court.
However, citing two landmark gay rights cases — Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down state laws criminalizing consensual same-sex activity in 2003, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which resulted in the legalization of same-sex marriage across the United States in 2015 — Kavanaugh suggested that overruling the court’s previous opinions was standard procedure.
“If you think about some of the most important cases, the most consequential cases in this court’s history, there’s a string of them where the cases overruled precedent,” Kavanaugh said. “If we think that the prior precedents are seriously wrong, if that, why then doesn’t the history of this court’s practice with respect to those cases tell us that the right answer is actually a return to the position of neutrality and — and not stick with those precedents in the same way that all those other cases didn’t?”
The lawyers who argued in favor of gay rights in the landmark LGBTQ cases offered differing views on the validity of the argument by Kavanaugh, who was appointed in 2018 by then-President Donald Trump.
Mary Bonauto, who argued on behalf of same-sex couples in Obergefell v. Hodges and now serves as the Civil Rights Project director at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, or GLAD, challenged Kavanaugh’s analogy.
“It’s a pretty thin interpretation of a reversal,” she told NBC News. “The reversals that Justice Kavanaugh is citing were about righting wrongs. They were centered on the rights of individuals and expanding constitutional protections to more individuals, not about taking rights away.”
When the court ruled in favor of same-sex couples in Obergefell v. Hodges, it effectively overturned its prior decision in Baker v. Nelson. That ruling centered on Jack Baker and Mike McConnell, who in 1970 were blocked from obtaining a marriage license. The high court rejected the men’s case in 1972 without ever hearing oral arguments.
Bonauto argued against Kavanaugh’s comparison of reversing Baker v. Nelson to the potential reversal of Roe v. Wade.
“There was no briefing, there was no argument. They just essentially utterly dismissed the case for basically: ‘There’s no way same-sex couples seeking to marry have claim under the Constitution.’ The end,” she said.
LGBTQ advocates largely agreed with Bonauto, saying that the landmark gay rights decisions in Obergefell v. Hodges and Lawrence v. Texas “reflected the growing societal understanding of our common humanity.”
“To that we say, NOT IN OUR NAME,” Sharon McGowan, legal director of the LGBTQ advocacy group Lambda Legal, said of Kavanaugh’s argument in a statement Wednesday. “Those landmark LGBTQ decisions EXPANDED individual liberty, not the opposite.”
But Paul Smith, who argued in favor of LGBTQ rights in Lawrence v. Texas — which overruled the court’s 1986 decision in Bowers v. Hardwick — suggested that Kavanaugh’s comparison was valid. Smith said that in order to win Lawrence v. Texas, he also had to bolster the argument for the court overriding precedent.
“We really, actually made those arguments ourselves in Lawrence because that was the whole point — we had to get rid of Bowers v. Hardwick,” Smith, who is now a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said. “It is certainly one of the most prominent examples of an overruling that’s happened in the last 20 years.”
“People talk about stare decisis when they like the prior decision and not when they don’t,” Smith added, referring to the legal term for following what the court has ruled previously.
But during the oral arguments, Justice Sonia Sotomayor raised the question of whether overruling Roe v. Wade could open the floodgates for the court’s 6-3 conservative majority to overrule a broad swath of previous opinions it does not agree with.
“Why do we now say that somehow … Roe and Casey are so unusual that they must be overturned?” Sotomayor said Wednesday, referring to Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 1992 opinion that affirmed Roe v. Wade.
Later, during the oral arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett pressed Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, who was defending the Mississippi abortion limits, to address Sotomayor’s assertion.
Stewart said that several of the other cases Sotomayor cited, including the LGBTQ cases, produced “clear rules that have engendered strong reliance interests and that have not produced negative consequences,” in contrast to Roe v. Wade.
But if the court does overrule the landmark abortion law, some legal experts warn that previous rulings, including the landmark LGBTQ decisions, would be in danger.
“You can be sure that the Alliance Defending Freedom has the lawsuit ready to file the day after the Supreme Court issues an opinion broadly overruling Roe,” Katherine Franke, the director of the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia Law School, said referring to a Christian law firm with a decadeslong track record of litigating against LGBTQ rights. “They will file the next day challenging Obergefell and even Lawrence. I have every confidence that that is what they’reto do.”
The court is expected to decide on the Mississippi abortion law early next summer.
