Gilead is Real - The War on Women and Abortion Part 3

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

@GreyhoundFan, angry reaction is not directed at you and I am sorry if it causes you to take some kind of negative mark but the disgust wasn’t strong enough this time. I think you’re the bee’s knees so it would take a lot for me to direct an angry reaction at you. Like a lot a lot. 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

Another Prince. /s

[GreyhoundFan]

So very true

 

[Evil Feminist]

A Missouri woman had to travel to Illinois for an abortion after being denied care when her water broke at 17 weeks. She's now sharing her story in a campaign ad for Trudy Busch Valentine who is running against Eric Schmitt.  https://jezebel.com/missouri-woman-denied-emergency-abortion-called-a-state-1849672223

https://fb.watch/ghG00UEOmO/

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[Xan]

There's an excellent piece on Salon.com (free) about abortion and authoritarianism and why women's freedom threatens male supremacy.  Excerpt:

Quote

This deep history explains why the issue in Dobbs v. Jackson is seen by many anxious males as monumental. If male dominance is to be maintained, women's reproductive freedom must be curtailed. It isn't really about choice, as such, but about denying women the right to make the choice. Ancient Romans, for example, were "pro-choice," but the choice was solely that of the man. His supposed creations were his, not hers. Farmland has no say in whether crops planted in it will be allowed to grow or be pulled out or plowed under. The patria potestas, the authority of the father, was absolute.

Thou shalt not pull up what man has planted. That sentence sums up the position of many churches today — and, alas, the radical right-wing majority on the Supreme Court.

In the decades since women began moving toward equality, male supremacists have intensified their efforts to put them back "in their place," accurately described by Atwood in "The Handmaid's Tale" as "two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices." As George Carlin put it in a 1996 routine, "Pro-Life Is Anti-Woman," those who oppose women's control over their own bodies "believe a woman's primary role is to function as a brood mare for the state."

It's worth going over and reading the whole thing.  The entire premise of authoritarianism starts with male supremacy.  From that, they move on to feeling that white men are better than other groups of men.

Link:

Spoiler

https://www.salon.com/2022/10/23/abortion-and-authoritarianism-why-womens-freedom-threatens-male-supremacy/

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

17 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Some of my local politicians don’t know how to distinguish between the clitoris, the uterus, a fetus, and their cousin Cletus. Many of them also think everything can be fixed with one or a combination of: duct tape, jumper cables, a circular saw, a Phillips screwdriver, beer, his penis, waiting “until she’s off the rag”,  whining to Mommy, Velveeta, getting a truck, and/or buying more tools. Feel free to add on to my list. 

[church_of_dog]

7 minutes ago, AlmostSavedAtTacoBell said:

Some of my local politicians don’t know how to distinguish between the clitoris, the uterus, a fetus, and their cousin Cletus. Many of them also think everything can be fixed with one or a combination of: duct tape, jumper cables, a circular saw, a Phillips screwdriver, beer, his penis, waiting “until she’s off the rag”,  whining to Mommy, Velveeta, getting a truck, and/or buying more tools. Feel free to add on to my list. 

Don't forget the WD-40.

[Ali]

Prop 3 passed in Michigan which will protect women's right to have an abortion. It will also protect the right to receive care for miscarriages, be sterilized, etc. It specifies that the woman's life and mental well-being takes precedent over any laws the legislature might pass for after fetal viability.

The right campaigned against it by saying it was too confusing.

[Destiny]

Yay Michigan!

[Audrey2]

10 minutes ago, Destiny said:

Yay Michigan!

And, being born in and having grown up in Ohio I never thought I'd say those words! Although after they came through for Biden 2 years ago I have cut back on my Michigan jokes.

[EyesOpen]

Thankful to see this outcome in Michigan!

[Coconut Flan]

California and Vermont would have been expected, but it's always nice to codify these things.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/us/abortion-rights-ballot-proposals.html

[Maggie Mae]

It appears that Ballot Measure 1 in Alaska (should we hold a constitutional convention)  has failed, Thank Diety of Your Choice or Whatever. The Alaska Family Council and Family Research Council was pumping money into a "Yes" vote so they could remove our Constitutional right to abortion. The "full pfd" people were also getting involved and it seemed likely to pass. 

[Ali]

7 hours ago, Audrey2 said:

And, being born in and having grown up in Ohio I never thought I'd say those words! Although after they came through for Biden 2 years ago I have cut back on my Michigan jokes.

We also reelected a Whitmer (a Democrat) and both the house and the senate flipped to a Democrat majority.

If Ohio starts electing more Democrats, I will cut back on my Ohio jokes.

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

I know we were all upset at the Dobbs ruling (as we should have been and should continue to be) but it definitely created momentum for states to start codifying reproductive rights and get people out to vote. The red wave was more like a dribble  and there are some Rs who have Congressional seats who are hesitant to support a federal ban on abortion. It’s not as good as Dobbs going the other way but it’s something. 

[Audrey2]

2 hours ago, Ali said:

We also reelected a Whitmer (a Democrat) and both the house and the senate flipped to a Democrat majority.

If Ohio starts electing more Democrats, I will cut back on my Ohio jokes.

Sadly I think you'll get to continue your Ohio jokes for a while. Ohio seems to be getting more and more ruby red and I don't see that changing. They lost the solid blue union jobs that I grew up with and those voters switched over to Fox News watching, Trump supporting Republicans. They also lost a lot of people in my generation (Generation X) who grew up there, got a good education at one of the many colleges and universities then either chose to leave Ohio or had to leave Ohio to look for good professional jobs.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Judge overturns Georgia’s six-week abortion ban"

Quote

A Fulton County judge has overturned Georgia’s six-week abortion ban, ruling that two key parts of the law “were plainly unconstitutional when drafted, voted upon, and enacted” and writing that the law cannot be enforced.

The ruling Tuesday by Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney stemmed from a lawsuit that argued the state’s “heartbeat bill” violated pregnant people’s rights to liberty and privacy rights under the state constitution.

Georgia’s ban has been in effect since July. Kara Richardson, a spokeswoman for Georgia’s attorney general, told Axios that the state will “pursue an immediate appeal and will continue to fulfill our duty to defend the laws of our state in court.”

Georgia’s abortion law was among the strictest in the country when Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed it into law in 2019. The law bans abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected, at roughly six weeks. It had been blocked from taking effect until this summer, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade’s decades-old protections, allowing restrictions on the procedure in states with trigger laws to be implemented across the country.

In his 15-page ruling, McBurney said that when the law took effect, “everywhere in America, including Georgia, it was unequivocally unconstitutional for governments — federal, state, or local — to ban abortions before viability.”

The decision adds new pressure on lawmakers from both sides of the aisle to advance abortion measures — either restrictions or protections.

Kemp, who won reelection last week, could face pressure from antiabortion advocates to further restrict the procedure in the state once legislative sessions reconvene. He beat Democrat Stacey Abrams, who had pledged to roll back restrictions on the procedure.

Meanwhile, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr (R) also won reelection last week, beating back a challenge from Jen Jordan, a Democratic state senator. Carr had moved to enact the state’s ban on abortion after fetal cardiac activity is detected after the nation’s highest court overturned Roe.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Pregnant and desperate in post-Roe America"

Quote

It’s a moment of panic that has played out again and again for people in more than a dozen states since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.

Once they find out they’re pregnant, there isn’t much time to act. The closest open abortion clinics that once offered next-day appointments are now often fully booked three, four, even five weeks in advance. Pills purchased online can take up to a month to arrive.

Every day, the fetus gets a little bigger — and the anxiety builds.

In polarized, post-Roe America, the experiences that draw widespread attention are often the most harrowing: a 10-year-old rape victim forced to leave her state to end her pregnancy, or a woman denied an abortion for a fetus without a skull.

Often lost in the discussion are the more routine stories. The mother of two who can’t afford a third child. The teenager who can’t tell her parents she’s pregnant. The 25-year-old who isn’t ready to be a mom.

Over the next decade, if recent trends hold, more than a million people with unwanted pregnancies are likely to run up against an abortion ban. Some will find a way, traveling hundreds of miles or securing illegal pills through the mail. Others will resign themselves to parenthood.

The Washington Post made contact with three pregnant women who were seeking abortions while living in states with strict abortion bans. These women, reached early in their pregnancies, communicated regularly with The Post, sharing their experiences through calls, text messages and other documentation that supported their accounts. They participated on the condition that only their first names be used to protect their privacy.

Here are their stories, from the minute the two pink lines appeared.

Lillith, 17, Oklahoma:

Lillith rolled into the emergency room in a wheelchair, her cramps so bad she could no longer stand up.

The pain had been building for a few weeks, mild at first, then suddenly sharp enough to wake her up every day at 5 a.m. Weighing just 95 pounds, Lillith assumed it was some kind of nutrition issue: Maybe she wasn’t eating the right foods, or enough of them.

Then a nurse pressed an ultrasound probe into her stomach and informed her that she was almost 20 weeks pregnant.

“You can put this in your baby book,” the doctor said as he handed her the results of the pregnancy test.

Lillith burst into tears.

She knew all about the recent Supreme Court decision that had banned abortion across much of the South. As a teenage girl in Oklahoma — where abortion is now almost entirely illegal — you had to keep track of these things, she said.

Lillith looked at her dad in the chair next to her, his eyes wide. As comfortable as they were with each other, with just the two of them living at home, she could tell this news had thrown him. Still, he reached out to hold her hand.

“I’m not mad,” her dad recalled saying once they got in the car. While he would need some time to process — he wanted to take a close look at the ultrasound of the fetus and learn the gender — he promised he would support whatever decision his daughter made.

Before the positive test, Lillith hadn’t even considered the possibility that she could be pregnant. She’d been on birth control until a few months earlier, when her prescription lapsed and she hadn’t prioritized going back to the doctor. She only had sex once every few months — casual hook ups with a friend — so birth control hadn’t seemed that important, she recalled thinking.

Lillith waited until her dad went to sleep that night to start researching abortion clinics. She would have to drive three hours to Kansas or eight hours to New Mexico, the closest states where abortion was legal. At 20 weeks along, a surgical procedure would cost over $1,000, on top of the price of gas and a hotel.

Her job at a sandwich shop paid $9.25 an hour.

Just after midnight, Lillith texted her best friend. Their messages were usually silly and low-stakes, easy banter about their next TikTok video or which shade of orange would look best in Lillith’s hair. Nothing like the news she was about to share.

Lillith started to panic even more the next morning, once she started making calls. Kansas wasn’t an option: Lillith couldn’t find an appointment there for another two or three weeks, which would put her beyond the state’s 22-week limit.

The wait in New Mexico would be long, too. When one clinic told her they would have to induce labor and deliver a stillborn — their standard practice for someone 23 weeks along — Lillith said she started hyperventilating. She could not imagine pushing a fully formed baby out of her tiny body. Childbirth scared her so much, she said, she’d always planned to adopt.

Lillith couldn’t stop fixating on the fetus inside her. Roughly the size of a mango, it kept growing as she spent her nights at home, knowing her friends were out drinking until 4 a.m., thoroughly enjoying the summer after their senior year.

She finally got good news a few days after her first round of calls, when a New Mexico clinic reached out with an open appointment the following week.

Once she started looking, she couldn’t believe how easy it was to find the money. A quick internet search led her to the National Abortion Federation and its Hotline Fund, a nonprofit backed largely by billionaire Warren Buffett, which agreed to cover the full cost of her $2,400 procedure, she said. She just had to get herself to New Mexico.

Lillith and her dad started the eight-hour drive at 5 a.m., a cooler in the back seat stocked with Pringles and pudding cups. In her comfiest sweatpants and Crocs, Lillith recalled, she closed her eyes right around the one-hour mark, drifting off to Bon Jovi and AC/DC, a soothing mix of what she liked to call “dad rock.”

The procedure itself took two days. Because Lillith was further along in her pregnancy, the doctor had to insert dilation sticks to soften and open the cervix, before starting the abortion about 24 hours later.

When Lillith woke up after the procedure, she said later, her dad was there waiting for her. One day, she thought she might ask him whether the little thing inside her had been a boy or a girl.

But for now, she decided, she didn’t need to know.

 

Kae, 24, Ohio:

Kae drove to her ultrasound appointment with one question on her mind: Did her fetus have a heartbeat?

She’d scheduled her scan at a facility that offered “abortion consultations” as soon as she found out she was pregnant, well aware that she was up against a deadline. An Ohio law, which took effect when Roe fell and would later be blocked at least temporarily in the courts, banned abortion as soon as an ultrasound could detect cardiac activity, around six weeks of pregnancy.

If she’d been tracking her period correctly, she only had a few days to get an abortion.

When Kae pulled into the parking lot for her appointment, she was surprised to find it free of protesters. While the place she’d selected didn’t actually provide abortions, its website advertised free ultrasounds and other services for women seeking the procedure. With the Supreme Court decision so fresh and emotions raw, Kae figured any kind of abortion-friendly place would be a target.

Right away, Kae said, a few things seemed a little off. One counselor gave her a bottle of prenatal vitamins. Another offered to pray for her. Then the sonographer said the vaginal ultrasound wasn’t clear enough to date the pregnancy: Kae would have to come back in a week.

“You can’t give me an estimate?” Kae asked, fairly sure she was at least five weeks along. “Nothing?”

At Kae’s next appointment — seven days after her first — the sonographer played a sound she identified as a heartbeat.

“You’re measuring at approximately six weeks and three days,” Kae recalled the sonographer saying as Kae lay flat on the exam table.

Kae couldn't believe what she was hearing.

“Do you want a picture to take home?” Kae recalled the sonographer asking.

No, Kae thought to herself: All she wanted was to put her pants back on and leave. She stared up at the ceiling, trying to tune out the sound and keep her breath steady. How could this be happening, she wondered? How had the fetus developed so quickly?

A one week delay was the difference between a legal and an illegal abortion.

By that point, Kae said, she’d started to suspect that the clinic was not an abortion-friendly place at all. She’d heard people talk about crisis pregnancy centers, often religiously-affiliated organizations that try to talk women out of abortions.

A sonographer can see a gestational sac with a vaginal ultrasound around the four to five weeks of pregnancy, according to a spokesperson for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which means they can roughly identify the pregnancy one to two weeks before cardiac activity is detected.

When Kae told her boyfriend the news, he was immediately suspicious, pointing to the pregnancy center’s clear antiabortion stance. “To go from seeing nothing to being too far in a week, it just didn’t make sense,” he told The Post.

There had been a moment, right after the pregnancy test, when Kae briefly considered keeping the baby. She’d been with her boyfriend for almost a year. He owned a home. She had no doubt he was the guy she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. But Kae had just gone back for her college degree, still a few years away from launching her dream career.

When she sat down to write her list of pros and cons, she could only think of one “pro”: the chance to start a family with her boyfriend. Meanwhile, the “cons” quickly filled a whole page in her notebook.

Kae felt even more sure of her decision after hearing what the counselors called the “heartbeat.” She didn’t feel at all attached to the sound, she said. Angry that the pregnancy center may have tried to thwart her plans, she informed the counselors that she still planned to have an abortion. She would take pills from Aid Access, she told them, a Europe-based online service that supplies abortion pills illegally to women in states where abortion is banned.

“You have no idea what’s in them,” Kae recalls one of the counselors saying before she fled the building. (Aid Access is widely regarded in the medical community as a safe resource for medication abortion.)

Kae heard the counselor’s voice in her head when the abortion pills arrived in the mail a week later. Some of the pills were small and hexagonal, she said, while others were more circular.

“I don’t know why they’re different,” she told her boyfriend. “I’m worried.”

He said he reminded her that she’d done her homework: She’d read a bunch of articles about Aid Access before she paid $105 to place her order. The organization had been around for years. If these were the pills that arrived, he told Kae, they should trust them.

The next few hours played out exactly as the internet had led Kae to expect. The cramps came, sharp and fast, as she curled up on the couch with her golden retriever, trying to concentrate on an episode of Breaking Bad. She threw up a few times, then turned on the shower, the hot water dulling the ache in her back.

When Kae imagined all she might lose by having a baby, she thought about roller coasters and the kind of reckless freedom they represented. She loved the feeling of the wind in her hair and her hands in the sky, screaming as she plummeted 300 feet at 100 miles an hour.

She’d already planned a post-abortion amusement park trip with her friends, where they would ride one of the tallest, fastest coasters in the state.

“Suck it up,” she said out loud to herself, fixating on the dips and drops she could experience once she was no longer pregnant. “Just a few more hours to go.”

 

Taylor, 27, Georgia:

Taylor checked the time as soon as she woke up on the morning of her abortion appointment. It was 6 a.m. The clinic expected her at 8:10 a.m.

She had just over two hours to decide whether she wanted to become a mom.

When Taylor first found out she was pregnant, she had not even considered keeping the baby. Her boyfriend of two months had just moved 600 miles away. She had no savings. After working as a greeter in a fancy downtown office building, she’d finally scored an entry-level job in finance making $50,000 a year. But she had to pass an exam to stay on the payroll, and the studying had not been going well.

Based on her last period, Taylor estimated that she was at least seven weeks into her pregnancy, too far along to get an abortion in Georgia, which had enacted a “heartbeat ban.”

She would have to go to Florida.

Taylor knew she was in for a long wait. She couldn’t take any time off at her new job, so she could only travel to Florida on weekends. Flooded with patients from states that had banned abortion, the clinic’s earliest available Saturday appointment was two weeks away. Because Florida law requires patients to have an in-state ultrasound at least 24 hours before an abortion — and the clinic wasn’t open on Sundays — Taylor would have to make two trips.

She secured a pair of Saturday time slots at a Florida Planned Parenthood: one for the ultrasound and another, three weeks later, for the abortion. Her boyfriend, who Taylor said advocated for the abortion, agreed to cover half the cost of the $250 round trip flights.

It wasn’t until the ultrasound that Taylor started to wonder whether she was making the right decision. As the nurse walked her through a script of state-mandated information, describing every step of the surgical procedure, Taylor seized on a few of the details.

A tube inserted inside her uterus. A pump. Suction.

Taylor said she had only ever thought about abortion in a vague, abstract kind of way, as a medical procedure central to reproductive health care. Now she couldn’t stop picturing a vacuum cleaner inside her vagina.

The ultrasound photo made her even more anxious. At nine weeks, she said, the fetus “looked like a little person.”

After returning home from her first trip to Florida, Taylor spent hours scouring the internet for information: How much do you bleed in a surgical abortion? Do fetuses feel pain?

Eager for a sympathetic ear, Taylor posted in an antiabortion forum she found online.

“I am pro-choice and I’m weirdly having second thoughts about my appointment next week,” she wrote. “Advice???”

Her post quickly generated over 100 responses.

Money wouldn’t be a problem, promised dozens of people Taylor had never met: There were resources for mothers like her. They told her to call her local crisis pregnancy center. Several users offered to donate to Taylor’s baby registry. One asked for her address so she could send some baby clothes.

“The feelings you have right now is your conscience telling you something isn’t right,” one user wrote. “It is very likely that you will feel worse if you have the abortion.”

Taylor wasn’t sure whether she could rely on these strangers, or the resources they touted. But she was desperate for some kind of support, and she wanted to believe them.

As the appointment neared, Taylor still couldn’t settle on what she should do. She texted her boyfriend at 2:30 a.m. on the morning of her flight to Florida.

Taylor told herself she would make up her mind once she packed her bags. Once she got to the airport. Once she landed.

Then it was 7:30 a.m. on the day of her appointment, and she finally accepted that she wasn’t going to get out of bed.

In a few months, she would become a mom.

As soon as she got back to Georgia, Taylor started to shop. She would swing by Target after work and linger in the baby aisle, picking up wipes or a few packs of diapers, eyeing the other women with rounded bellies as they filled their carts with everything you needed to care for a child.

Taylor felt like she was playing a part. She said she had just started renting her first apartment. She didn’t know how to drive. In a few weeks, she might fail her company’s required exam and lose her job. Still, she thought, maybe if she did the things mothers were supposed to do — bought the things mothers were supposed to buy — she could somehow handle this.

“I don’t really have control of anything right now,” she said. “So it’s nice to know, okay, I have the stuff.”

About two and a half months later, by then 22 weeks into her pregnancy, Taylor sometimes found herself doubting whether she’d made the right decision. In part, she blamed the Georgia law that forced her to leave the state for an abortion. The delay complicated a choice that once might have been simple, she said, leaving her to stew in ultrasound photos and antiabortion talking points.

“Sometimes I just feel like I should have gone to my appointment,” she said.

After every trip to Target, Taylor deposited her new baby purchases in a pile in the middle of her living room. She wanted to make herself look at it: a growing reminder of everything that was coming.

“This is the first adult thing that’s ever happened to me,” she said, taking stock of the pacifiers and baby cream.

“I don’t know if I’m ready to be a mom … But it’s my responsibility now.”

 

[PennySycamore]

A woman in Ohio had a miscarriage over the weekend and, while she went to the ER for extreme blood loss, they said she'd have to wait to get treatment.  Apparently, they weren't sure if she needed to be arrested.  No, what she needed was treatment for her blood loss and some compassion.

[GreyhoundFan]