Gilead Is Real: The War On Abortion And Women's Rights 2

[Coconut Flan]

1 hour ago, church_of_dog said:

Also people consider moving from place to place and then change their minds.  I once spent less than a week (with most of my belongings moved) in a new town before changing my mind and moving everything back to where I lived before.

Did you post on FJ about that?  I remember you or someone else telling that and going that took guts, but great on figuring it out.

[dramallama]

https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-nominating-anti-abortion-republican-chad-meredith-federal-judge-reports-2022-6?fbclid=IwAR2nje4fRDa5_DnDPquF5zO9Z8IUOKJWIFeag0jjqtcCkjCc2pnB-RUt1oU

Thanks Joe really appreciate the solidarity just great so awesome

Glad the KY governor is calling him out on it though

[47of74]

Yeah, Randy is just as awful as Steve King was.

Quote

Western Iowa Congressman Randy Feenstra says he would support a nationwide abortion ban, should Republicans take back Congress.

The Republican’s remarks came after his second annual “family picnic” in Sioux Center. High-ranking Republicans stumped for Feenstra, including potential 2024 presidential candidate Nikki Haley.

Feenstra pulled out all the stops Thursday, inviting Iowa’s ag secretary, governor and a fellow congresswoman to promote his campaign in Sioux Center. During his speech, Feenstra made clear Republicans lacked a solid plan for governing the country the last time they held a majority in Congress in 2018. But he says Republicans are already laying plans if they take Congress back this fall.

“When we take over Jan. 1, that we have a plan, that we make a difference. That we will make sure that we are conservative agenda gets passed to make this country prosperous again, and that we can be respected on the world stage,” said Feenstra.

 

[Smash!]

 

Edit: There‘s a good chance this Twitter post is sarcasm. Heather Cox Richardson retweeted it, I thought it was legit without checking sources. My bad, sorry. @Destiny can’t find a source and I didn‘t find anything either. The guy didn’t post sources despite multiple requests from users. 

Edited July 1, 2022 by Smash!

[Jana814]

20 minutes ago, Smash! said:

 

 

That’s horrible!  

[Destiny]

23 minutes ago, Smash! said:

 

 

Before I absolutely lose my shit, is anyone familiar with this guy to know if this is real or satire? I ask because a google search doesn't find a news story about this, and he's a comedian.

Edited July 1, 2022 by Destiny
ETA the comedian bit.

[Smash!]

14 minutes ago, Destiny said:

Before I absolutely lose my shit, is anyone familiar with this guy to know if this is real or satire? I ask because a google search doesn't find a news story about this, and he's a comedian.

Heather Cox Richardson retweeted it, I thought it was legit without checking sources. My bad, sorry. I can’t find anything either and the guy didn’t post sources despite multiple requests from users. 

[meep]

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/30/politics/biden-federal-judgeship-kentucky-conservative-anti-abortion-lawyer/index.html

Don't worry guys, I'm sure everything will be fine if we just stay calm. /s 😵

[Destiny]

29 minutes ago, Smash! said:

Heather Cox Richardson retweeted it, I thought it was legit without checking sources. My bad, sorry. I can’t find anything either and the guy didn’t post sources despite multiple requests from users. 

It’s definitely proof that poe’s law is true. I could ABSOLUTELY see Mississippi doing this! I’m glad they aren’t … yet. I hope this isn’t giving them ideas!

[Destiny]

35 minutes ago, meep said:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/30/politics/biden-federal-judgeship-kentucky-conservative-anti-abortion-lawyer/index.html

Don't worry guys, I'm sure everything will be fine if we just stay calm. /s 😵

I want to say he can’t be that stupid, but the Dems are way too concerned with being nice and following norms and it’s both literally and figuratively killing us. 

 

[dramallama]

Why anyone would make a deal with Mitch McConnell and ever expect him to keep up his end of it, I have no idea.  The time for "they go low we go high" is over. 

[Destiny]

Why anyone would make a deal with Mitch McConnell and ever expect him to keep up his end of it, I have no idea.  The time for "they go low we go high" is over. 

Exactly. I get that some compromises have to be made to govern, but this issue can’t be one of them IMHO.

[church_of_dog]

11 hours ago, Coconut Flan said:

Did you post on FJ about that?  I remember you or someone else telling that and going that took guts, but great on figuring it out.

Entirely possible.  It happened in 2010 and I think I joined FJ in 2012, so it was relatively recent at the time I joined, and something I wouldn't have hesitated to share about.  

I still shake my head when I think about it.  The relationship had been going most of a year, and nothing dramatic or violent happened during that week after I moved, but subtle stuff that just hadn't been apparent during visits, and somehow I knew "nah, not getting a good feeling about this, I think I'd rather go back."

 

[Ozlsn]

6 hours ago, dramallama said:

Why anyone would make a deal with Mitch McConnell and ever expect him to keep up his end of it, I have no idea.  The time for "they go low we go high" is over. 

Yeah I'm currently for the "they go low we knee them in the chin" approach.

[fraurosena]

You can’t win by playing by the rules when the other side is ignoring them left, right and center. Not when there are no judges (or now justices!) who will hold them to account.

[fraurosena]

Poor, poor baby. She’s only 10 years old…

 

[dramallama]

I miss the days when Ohio was a swing state.  We've gone hard right, and FAST. 

[Destiny]

I miss the days when Ohio was a swing state.  We've gone hard right, and FAST. 

I’m not going to lie, i found that story coming Ohio shocking because I still think of it as a purple state. Clearly, signs are pointing to nope on that one.

[dramallama]

4 minutes ago, Destiny said:

I’m not going to lie, i found that story coming Ohio shocking because I still think of it as a purple state. Clearly, signs are pointing to nope on that one.

It's definitely not.   Ohio voted for Obama twice and now....I honestly have no idea what happened.   Until 2020 I had hoped 2016 was a fluke and we'd come to our senses, but Trump's margin of victory in Ohio was larger in 2020 than it was in 2016.  There appears to have been some kind of shift in the counties along Lake Erie and the PA border.   We're a solid red state now and I don't think that's changing for the foreseeable future.

[47of74]

CNN had this article up analyzing how far women will have to go for abortions.

Quote

People living in states with bans bear the greatest difficulty making it to clinics. Average drive times in states with bans are over 5.3 hours compared to 30 minutes or less in states where abortion is legal. Household incomes are lower in states with bans as well, meaning the risk of sending families further into poverty is higher when there's an unwanted pregnancy.

In total, the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit that tracks abortion access across the country and supports abortion access, estimates that 26 states are likely to ban or severely restrict abortion in the coming months. Once abortion is illegal in these states, abortion clinics will have to stop providing the procedure and many will close altogether. People seeking to terminate their pregnancies will have to travel to the nearest state with an abortion clinic — often hundreds of miles away, seek other methods of receiving an abortion, or carry their pregnancies to term.

Places like the Twin Cities most women would not need to drive that far for care and Minnesota has clinics spread out throughout the state.  But there are still parts of Minnesota where women would have to travel some distance.

Even before the supreme catholic court decided access was already uneven in this country - with those most in need of care facing insurmountable barriers to obtain the care they needed.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Abortion rights should be law, not a corporate perk"

Quote

Almost as soon as it became clear the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade, a number of the United States’ largest corporations began to announce they would pay for employees and their dependents in states that would lose abortion access to travel and obtain one. Starbucks stepped up. Amazon. Citigroup, too. That number increased last week, after the decision was announced, with companies including Bank of America and Dick’s Sporting Goods announcing they would join others already offering the benefit.

It’s a veritable cavalcade of companies supporting reproductive rights, and yes, it’s well meant. But there’s less here than meets the eye, and it’s a reminder of why corporate generosity is not an adequate substitute for a government guarantee of rights.

First, many of these very same companies gave serious money to the political action committees and politicians who brought us to this pass. According to data compiled by the Center for Political Accountability, Citigroup gave $75,000 last year to the Republican State Leadership Committee, and the same sum in 2020 to the Republican Attorneys General Association, the group that’s considered to be one of the masterminds of the legal strategy that did away with the right to an abortion. Other companies that gave money to these two groups: Amazon, Bank of America, Lyft and Uber.

This political spending “undercuts any statement or any policy that they have because they are enabling the opposite,” Bruce Freed, president of the Center for Political Accountability, told me. “They’ve been enabling the enactment of this legislation. They’ve been enabling the lawsuits.”

True, this isn’t quite the equivalent of offing your parents and pleading to the court that you’re an orphan. But it is the equivalent of helping fund the purchase of the murder weapon, then tossing a few bucks at the local orphanage.

If that’s not enough, these new corporate benefits come with enormous caveats that seem to ensure the most advantaged employees receive aid, while those with more uncertain incomes do not. In many cases, the recipients are limited to employees already receiving health insurance from the employer, meaning salaried corporate executives and full-time employees. But low-paid retail workers with hours that float from week to week? Temporary hires? Maybe yes and maybe no.

Uber and Lyft say they will cover their drivers — whom they deny are employees — for both the costs of abortion-related travel and any legal bills they rack up if sued for assisting in the termination of a pregnancy through their ride-hailing services. Other offers, however, are less all-encompassing than they may sound to the sometimes credulous business press. There are, to be blunt, loopholes you could drive a delivery truck through.

Take Dick’s Sporting Goods, which, according to employee benefits it posted online, offers health insurance only to salaried and full-time hourly employees. When I reached out to the company for comment and clarification, it quickly wrote back to say, “We are not doing any media at this time.”

Or take Starbucks, which is offering the benefit only to employees who work at least 20 hours a week and thereby receive health insurance from the company. The issue? Not all Starbucks baristas work that many hours. Starbucks has also said it can’t “promise” workers at its union locations will receive the assistance going forward, saying it would possibly be subject to negotiation.

As for Amazon, its announcement also specified it was for employees covered by its workplace health insurance plans, which would appear to leave out many independent contractors, including some delivery drivers. (Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Post and founder of Amazon.)

Moreover, in some cases, the companies take pains to say they aren’t doing this because they believe what the red-state Republicans are doing in rolling back the right to an abortion is morally wrong. Citigroup, for example, issued a mealy-mouthed statement in April on its position, saying it was only about ensuring all employees received equal benefits. It isn’t, says Citigroup Chief Executive Jane Fraser, “intended to be a statement about ‘a very sensitive issue’.” (Good luck with that. In Texas, a Republican politician responded by threatening Citi’s bond underwriting business in the state.)

Anyway, these are the good guys. Many, many other companies have said … nothing at all. Walmart is America’s largest private employer: not a word, despite my request for comment. There’s barely a statement from the fast-food giants, either. It points to the fact that this is all voluntary, a benefit that can be given and taken away, or not offered at all. And it’s worth noting that this benefit is being offered at a time of extremely low unemployment, when companies are aggressively bidding for workers. It may not last when labor demand falls again.

That’s a huge difference from Roe v. Wade, which, for 49 years, offered Americans a promise of bodily autonomy we no longer possess. There’s no corporate perk, no bit of generosity, that can make up for that loss.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Because of course they did: "Texas Supreme Court blocks order that allowed abortions to resume"

Quote

Legal wrangling over abortions in Texas took a further twist late Friday, after the state Supreme Court blocked a lower court order issued just days earlier that had temporarily allowed the procedures to resume.

The Texas Supreme Court in Austin granted an “emergency motion for temporary relief” that was filed Wednesday by the state’s attorney general, Republican Ken Paxton, staying a temporary restraining order that had been granted earlier this week by a judge in Harris County. A further state Supreme Court hearing is scheduled for later this month.

Texas has left a nearly century-old abortion ban on the statute books for the past 50 years while Roe v. Wade was in place. With Roe struck down, Paxton had advised that prosecutors could now enforce the 1925 law, which he called a “100% good law” on Twitter. However, the claimants have argued that it should be interpreted as repealed and unenforceable.

On Tuesday, a Harris County judge granted a temporary restraining order until at least July 12 to allow clinics to offer abortions for at least two weeks without criminal prosecution, days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade to end a constitutional right to abortion.

Clinics that had sued the state stopped their abortion procedures after the ruling but raced to take advantage of a fleeting reprieve Tuesday after elected Judge Christine Weems (D) ruled that a pre-Roe ban enforced by Paxton and prosecutors would “inevitably and irreparably chill the provision of abortions in the vital last weeks in which safer abortion care remains available and lawful in Texas.”

Paxton then asked the state’s highest court, which is stocked with nine Republican justices, to temporarily put the lower court order on hold, which they did in Friday’s decision. The state Supreme Court order allows civil, but not criminal, enforcement of the ban.

The flurry of litigation has thrown abortion clinics and patients in Texas into disarray, with many people rebooking and canceling appointments and travel plans as they scramble to navigate the new legal landscape.

“These laws are confusing, unnecessary, and cruel,” Marc Hearron, senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights advocacy group, said in a statement following Friday’s ruling. The American Civil Liberties Union, also a party to the legal proceedings, said it “won’t stop fighting to ensure that as many people as possible, for as long as possible, can access the essential reproductive health care they need,” according to staff attorney Julia Kaye.

Texas had strict abortion laws in place even before Roe v. Wade was overturned. Last year, Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed into law Texas Senate Bill 8, also known as the Texas Heartbeat Act, which bans abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy — before many people even know they’re pregnant — with no exceptions for victims of rape, sexual abuse or incest. It also employed a novel legal strategy that empowered ordinary people to enforce the law by suing anyone who may have helped facilitate the abortion.

Tuesday’s temporary restraining order was seen by many reproductive rights advocates as a last chance for clinics to offer abortions, as Texas is one of 13 states in the country with a “trigger ban” in place. The “trigger ban,” which was preemptively designed to be enforced in the event Roe was struck down, is scheduled to take effect in the coming weeks.

 

 

[47of74]

Some of the larger law firms are pledging to cover costs if their employees or employee dependents need an abortion. 

Quote

Several larger law firms plan to cover the cost of travel for employees' abortions following the U.S. Supreme Court's June 24 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

Law firms are acting as litigation over abortion rights moves to the states, where restrictions vary. Trigger laws in 13 states ban abortion if a Supreme Court decision was to allow it, although some of the laws don’t take effect immediately, according to NPR. Other states have long-dormant laws banning abortions or newer restrictions on the procedure.

Reuters and Law.com learned of law firms’ plans after contacting them or obtaining memos with the details.

Included in the list is the firm I'm currently on assignment at.  It didn't surprise me they offered that.  They are really progressive on social issues such as LGBTQ, reproductive rights, and civil rights.

39 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Abortion rights should be law, not a corporate perk"

Yeah, I totally agree.  Access to abortion - and for that matter access to all health care procedures - should not be dependent on where one works.  But it is in our fornicated up health care system in this country.  Not just abortion but for other procedures as well where waiting can make a condition worse then the insurance company winds up paying more anyways.  When I have interviews now, when they have ask if I have any questions or ask what I'm expecting for salary I try to find out about their health benefits because having a decent health care plan is almost more important than salary at this point.

And while it's good that some companies are planning to help employees, what about those employees who are working for the likes of Mikey MeinPillow who won't support their employees?  Or small to mid-sized companies that would help their employees if they could but aren't in a position to do so?  Or working in governments where people like shitweasel Gov. Abattoir are in charge and won't help?  

[GreyhoundFan]

"As a teen, I parted with my baby, but adoption wasn’t the end of my story"

Quote

My secret attempt to get an abortion at a local Planned Parenthood was unsuccessful — I needed parental permission in Ohio, and I was not going to get it from my devout Christian parents. My search for an adoptive family was swift — my mom’s friend from church knew a couple who couldn’t conceive. I took the SAT and kept up with my classes. I smiled when strangers talked to me and laughed at their jokes.

Ultimately, a pair of new parents walked out of my family’s living room with a baby, and I went back to high school. The end!

Now I have a job, a cat and a husband. I’m aggressively normal, except that sometimes when I stub my toe or miss a bus or read something sad, I’m hit by a wave of indescribable panic and pain: My baby is gone.

Women who relinquish children experience chronic, unresolved grief, research shows. It’s a reason so few women choose adoption when faced with unwanted pregnancies — one study published in 2017 in the journal Women’s Health Issues found that 14 percent of women who were denied an abortion were even considering adoption a week later. Birthmothers take on medical risk, social punishment and years of silence and secret-keeping. Some studies have found that losing a child to relinquishment produces feelings similar to those from losing a child to death.

But the way we talk about adoption doesn’t reflect that reality. Birthmothers’ grief makes us uncomfortable and challenges our easy stories about adoption, so we tamp it down with cruelty or cutesiness. Just last week, smiling couples stood outside the Supreme Court holding signs that read, “We will adopt your baby!”

I want to ask them: Do you really believe, contrary to data, that a lack of willing adoptive parents is the problem? Or was the real problem too nuanced to fit on a sandwich board?

In my decade as a birthmother, I’ve acclimated to well-intentioned people doing ridiculous things. During my pregnancy, adults loved to tell me how “brave” I was moments before saying something scary.

“You’ll change your mind about adoption the moment you see that baby’s face,” a woman told me in the Kroger checkout line.

“I had my first son out of wedlock,” a church lady whispered, apropos of nothing.

“I’m sure the couple is glad to be getting a White baby,” my dental hygienist offered.

Teachers gossiped, and neighbors weighed in. Former friends shared theories, and new acquaintances listed every person they’d ever known who got pregnant by accident.

The people most confident in their helpfulness also tended to be the most destructive. My pastor asked me to get onstage at church and share my “testimony” — how God was working in my life despite my mistake — while I was still pregnant. The question of whether it is kind to ask a teenager to process that in front of a crowd was never raised. Pregnant teenagers were a spectacle to be pitied, advised, discussed and, over all, enjoyed.

It wasn’t until college that I came across firsthand accounts from other birthmothers in online forums and chatrooms. Their anger and bitterness shocked me. These women felt exploited by their parents, medical providers, adoptive families, the whole world. But the adults in my life wouldn’t subject me to trauma to serve their own interests — right?

For the first time, I questioned whether my choice had been a real one. How could I have chosen adoption when abortion and parenting were never legitimate options? Who was I: Someone who had fought through something difficult, or someone who had smiled through something horrible? I buried the experience deeper, hiding it from almost everyone in my life and swallowing a hot fury anytime a family announced an adoption on social media.

“That baby is so lucky to be getting a home with you,” the comments inevitably said, as if the baby had materialized on the doorstep or floated by in a basket on the river.

When I did tell people my story, I often regretted it. “Does your boyfriend know?” they’d ask immediately, concerned I hadn’t disclosed relevant vaginal information. Had I been using protection when I got pregnant? Did I ever miss the baby?

Eventually, I hit a wall. I could keep hurting alone, or I could start talking about my adoption on my own terms and risk blowing up my connection with my son and his family.

At 27, I started writing about my experience and sharing it publicly. My inbox filled with notes from strangers, co-workers and even relatives. (I got pregnant when I was 16. When I was 25. When I was 30. I lost the baby. I got an abortion. I kept it. I kept it secret. I feel so lonely.) These women showed me that the cruelty I experienced during an unplanned pregnancy wasn’t an accident; it was a sport, and everyone knows the rules.

My son’s mother wrote a long message: She was proud of me. She was sorry.

If you stacked my experience next to that of other birthparents, it would probably be one of the easiest and best. I didn’t relinquish my child because of financial hardship or illness. No one pried him from my arms. No one served me adoption papers while I lay medicated in a hospital bed. I visited my son in October, and I danced with his wonderful mom at my wedding.

But my experience doesn’t need to be tragic to be instructive. It shows that the rosy “pro-life” view of adoption relies on giant, purposeful deletions — namely, of birthmothers and their experiences. It shows that a pregnant teenager can do everything right and still get kicked around by adults eager to do some kicking.

Lately more than usual, I’m thinking about my fellow birthparents. Our ranks could soon swell, and every story will be different. But each birthmother will walk away with a painful understanding that kindness and cruelty, grief and joy, aren’t easy to distinguish. I’m thinking of us this week, moving smartly and stealthily through church services and family dinners. When our pastors and relatives wax poetic, I’m grieving. And when smiling couples hold up signs offering to adopt our babies, I’m laughing.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"My miscarriage looked like an abortion. Today, I would be a suspect."  TW: graphic miscarriage info

Quote

What does a miscarriage look like? What does an abortion look like? What secrets are known only to a woman and her toilet? Apologies to the squeamish, but let me tell you a tale of a miscarriage — of how similar it can look to an abortion. And how dangerous both can be when a woman doesn’t have safe access to medical care.

I sat in my sunny bathroom above a toilet full of urine and stared at the object in my right hand in denial. This couldn’t be happening. This was going to ruin my life. Or at least the near-term plans I’d made for it.

You’d be forgiven if you think I’m describing the day I found out I had an unwanted pregnancy. I’m not. In that same spot, about two months earlier, I’d been overjoyed when I’d peed on a stick and gotten a positive pregnancy test. Which is why, on this afternoon, what I held filled me with horror.

There was blood on the toilet paper.

I called my husband in a panic. I called my doctor in an even bigger panic. She reassured me that it was probably nothing. I’d had an ultrasound just two days earlier, and everything looked perfect. My husband and I had been giddy at the sight of the dancing little fetus on the screen. And we were comforted by the conventional wisdom that a good ultrasound after 10 weeks is almost as good as holding a baby, since the risk of losing a pregnancy drops to the low single digits once you’ve passed this milestone.

But as the day went on, events worsened. By bedtime, I was cramping and passing clots. We called the doctor again. The after-hours nurse told us the best we could do was go to the ER.

By the time we arrived, I knew in my heart that my pregnancy was ending. As we walked through the sliding doors, I pulled my baseball cap low over my eyes to hide my tears from the roomful of strangers and stepped up to the triage counter. I leaned forward and said in a flat, husky whisper, barely holding back the sobs, “I think I’m having a miscarriage.”

Unfortunately for everyone that night, at that same moment a pedestrian who had been hit by a truck arrived in the ER, and we were sent to the orange plastic chairs to wait. Realizing that the woman sure sounded as if she was going to live, I angrily blurted to my husband that I hated her for cutting the line. (Please consider: I didn’t really mean it, and I wasn’t at my best.) By the time they called my name, it felt as if a taloned beast had taken a firm hold of my womb and was pulling it floorward. And just as I stood up, I felt a sudden gush and watched in terror as blood soaked my jeans from my hips to my knees.

I remember the next half-hour in a nightmarish series of clips. The nurse hustling me into the room and closing the door as I screamed and strangers gawked. My husband helping her yank my blood-soaked jeans off my legs as they lay me back on the exam table. The doctor bustling in and saying that she couldn’t diagnose a miscarriage until they found a fetus outside my body. The nurse and doctor poking around the clots of gore that surrounded me on the bed until I heard the nurse say quietly, “I found it.” The doctor holding up a little pink blob the size of half my pinkie and dropping it in a plastic specimen cup.

For most women, what comes next is that you clean yourself up, get dressed and go home to sort out your grief. But my miscarriage wasn’t typical. When we got to the clean-yourself-up-and-get-dressed part, I discovered that I was so drenched in blood that the hospital rags they gave me were utterly useless. As soon as I wiped the blood away, more took its place. And it just kept coming. We called the nurse back in. She took one look at the bed, left the room and returned rapidly with the doctor. I was experiencing an incomplete miscarriage, bleeding uncontrollably.

The doctor ordered an emergency dilation and curettage, or D&C, a clean-out procedure that’s essentially the same as an abortion. On the way to the OR, I continued to bleed so heavily that the pre-op nurses couldn’t even discern my external anatomy. The surgeon discovered that a significant amount of tissue had failed to detach from my uterine wall, hence the bleeding. She removed it, the bleeding stopped, and I was allowed to proceed to the go-home-and-grieve step.

In a frustrating epilogue, doctors were never able to determine why my miscarriage happened. Against medical probability, my healthy pregnancy simply tanked. Sometimes, even in our era of modern medicine, these things just happen with no proof of what went wrong.

This story has become a long-buried, sad chapter in my life. I went on to have three healthy babies. But since the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, making real the possibility of fetal-assault laws being applied to women who present at emergency rooms with miscarriage symptoms, I’ve been troubled by a chilling thought: If I had that same miscarriage today in the wrong part of the United States — or if I were poor or a woman of color — would I be under suspicion of ending my own pregnancy?

The fact is that no one can tell a medical abortion (one that is accomplished with prescription medication) from many types of miscarriage. Both generally present with escalating bleeding, cramping and the eventual passing of the products of conception. Currently, there is no empirical way to say whether an expelled pregnancy was medically induced or unfortunate happenstance. All doctors have to go on is the patient’s medical history and the story she tells them herself.

All she has is her word.

As of this moment, at least a half-dozen states either ban self-managed abortion or do not exempt pregnant women from prosecution under fetal harm laws. These laws, enacted with the intention of providing justice for women who lose wanted pregnancies because they are victims of violence, could be perverted to instead make women themselves the criminals.

What would the facts of my miscarriage look like to a not-so-unbiased stranger? Would the triage nurse see my baseball cap-hidden eyes as a sign of despair or deviousness? My hoarse whisper as someone straining to retain her composure or defiant gruffness? Would the staff see my complaints about the traffic-accident victim as exactly the type of selfish coldness that a person indifferent to the health of her pregnancy would display? How about the perfect ultrasound just days earlier? Or the fact that the first time a medical professional saw me, I was already covered in blood? Or the subsequent medical reports that found no clear reason for my pregnancy loss?

My doctor would back me up, surely, I thought. But then I remembered I had left this maternity practice because they could never keep their patients straight. Nobody ever knew me or why I was there. They were so overworked that the official cause of my first miscarriage (this was my second) was still listed as unknown because someone forgot to update my chart. So to a detached observer, it would sure seem as if I’d had two pregnancies suddenly end under similar circumstances. If they looked at my employment history, they’d also see that I’d received a promotion that year. And if they talked to people at a reunion I’d attended shortly before I became pregnant, they’d say that I loudly, drunkenly and repeatedly declared that having kids right now would be a disaster for me.

Would all of this be enough to raise suspicion?

I can’t begin to describe what the days following a miscarriage are like to a couple who desperately wanted that baby. It is abject grieving. It is a roaring hellscape of pain and lost dreams. Imagine having to prove to the law that you didn’t do this to yourself while your ears are still ringing from the explosion. At a time when a woman needs the most compassion, treating her as a suspect would be inhuman.

I am worried for American women when I consider the complications I had from my miscarriage. In rare circumstances, a woman undergoing a medical abortion could experience the same complications. I needed immediate medical help, and so would she. But would she be too afraid of getting in trouble to go to the hospital?

This is how women bleed to death on their bathroom floors.

Today, I am as stunned as most of the world that America has taken this giant step backward. Women should not be put in the position of defending things that their bodies do naturally or fear getting that care because their reproductive decisions began outside current restrictions. Some things should remain between a woman, her doctor and her toilet.

 

Edited July 2, 2022 by GreyhoundFan