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

[Coconut Flan]

Some days it's fun to live in California.  It's going to cause me no problem to join the Walgreen's boycott.  My mom hated them anyway.  

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[fraurosena]

9 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Keep going, DeSantis! Keep up these extremist bills you’re shoving down Floridians throats at breakneck speed. With your ‘don’t say gay’ and book bans, your insidious interference with education, misogynistic anti-abortion laws, and so-called anti-wokeness (whatever that means) you are showing the world precisely who you are and where you stand. Your electability for Republicans may rise (somewhat), but you’ll never win over Trump’s base so you won’t win the primaries. And even if, against all odds, you actually do, by far the majority of the voting public will choose the Democratic candidate over you. The past midterms should have shown you where the American public’s opinions lie, and they are very much not aligned with what you stand for.

[Ozlsn]

"The legality of abortion in Texas in July 2022 is murky. The state’s trigger law, which makes performing abortion a crime punishable by up to life in prison, did not go into effect until August. But conservative state leaders, including Cain and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have claimed that the state’s pre-Roe abortion bans, which punish anyone who performs or “furnishes the means” for an abortion by up to five years in prison, went back into effect the day Roe v. Wade was overturned in June."

I hope this case gets tossed, but it's purpose will have been served - to make people afraid to seek or give help.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Women who have abortions may be headed to prison — or worse"

Quote

When Iranian activist Mahsa Amini died mysteriously six months ago in police custody, Iran erupted in protests that have resulted in at least 522 deaths, including 70 children, and nearly 20,000 arrests.

Amini, you may recall, was detained in Tehran for “improper” hijab — that is, refusing to correctly wear the headscarf mandated by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his fellow clerics after the 1979 revolution. Enforcers, who operate under the auspices of the Guidance Patrol, or “morality police,” have been busy since Amini’s death in September, beating and torturing women and girls as young as 12, according to a report by Amnesty International.

Even so, brave Iranian women have continued to rip off their hijabs and burn them in a symbolic display reminiscent of American women’s bra-burnings in the 1960s and ’70s. Fortunately for us, there were no laws (at the time) requiring women to harness their breasts.

Reading about the six-month anniversary of Amini’s death this week, I was struck by the consistencies in Iran’s crackdown on women and recent developments in a budding theocracy of our own, known as South Carolina. My beloved state continues to outperform others in all the worst ways. Now, it wants to treat abortion as murder and apply penalties accordingly.

The South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act (H.3549) would “afford equal protection of the laws to all preborn children from the moment of fertilization,” and reclassify any act that ends a pregnancy as “wilful prenatal homicide.” This means that an abortion could be punished like any murder, with sentences at a minimum of years in prison to, conceivably, the death penalty, though the latter isn’t spelled out in the bill. As with other state abortion laws, there are no exceptions for rape or incest, though the bill does allow one if a woman “was compelled to do so by the threat of imminent death or great bodily injury.”

I wonder who gets to critique that decision — the Guidance Patrol, or perhaps the South Carolina Freedom Caucus? More than half of said caucus’s members, including three women, have joined State Rep. Rob Harris (R-Spartanburg) as co-sponsors. Though several states have acted to essentially ban abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling reversing Roe v. Wade, South Carolina conservatives seem determined to push the limits.

That said, several other states have tried to define personhood as beginning at fertilization and a few have succeeded. Add South Carolina to the list if this bill flies, but few think it will.

In a telephone interview Thursday, U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) worked hard to restrain her spleen. “It is obscene; it is disgusting; and it’s not representative of the people of South Carolina,” she said of the bill. “It’s not going to go anywhere, and it’s wrong. . . . It’s unbelievable to me that this is where we are.” Mace, who said she was raped at 16, is “deeply passionate” about this issue, though she’s also a pro-life Republican.

“My [pro-life] record is almost 100 percent,” she said. “But this is an American issue. Execute a woman for abortion? No. A nonstarter. It’s also hypocritical. You can’t be pro-life and then kill a woman for having an abortion.”

I asked whether she would support the bill if it included a rape exception, and she said no. I asked whether she was against the death penalty. She said she supported the death penalty only in the most egregious cases. “Dylann Roof is alive,” she said, referring to the white supremacist who murdered nine Black congregants in a Charleston, S.C., church during a Bible study session. “Why is he still alive?”

I well appreciate that many people do believe that life begins at conception, which, in fact, is a biological certainty. But is that little zygote a “person” who ought to be treated as equal under the law to a grown woman — or a raped teenager? And should a woman be sentenced to 30 years or death for deciding to terminate a pregnancy for reasons that are none of my or anyone else’s business?

An awful lot of angels dance on the head of this pin, but the answer is an unequivocal no. (I can’t believe I need to say this.)

My hope for women facing an unwanted pregnancy has always been that they would see other options as preferable to abortion. Mostly, this is because I know how damaging abortion can be for many women, not all, especially once they have a baby and realize that he or she was once also a mere zygote. This revelation was a lightning bolt to the soul when I, a previously heel-clicking, pro-abortion feminist, gave birth to a baby of my own. Damn. My zygote was my baby boy.

But such insights are better discovered than imposed by guidance police. Our politicians should have more faith in the basic decency of women guided by their own moral compasses. Considering a preborn a person is the thinking of saints; treating abortion as murder is the thinking of ayatollahs.

Mahsa Amini died for defying the dress code of her country. Given Republicans’ apparent views of women, their bodies and the punishments owed them for sins that were never theirs alone, one almost wonders how long before freedom caucuses turn their attention to female modesty. Immodesty breeds rape, don’t you know, and it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to “she asked for it.”

 

[Ozlsn]

Wyoming outlaws use of pills for abortion.

Quote from article:

"Under the Wyoming Constitution, residents have the right to make their own health care decisions. So the new law stipulates: “Instead of being health care, abortion is the intentional termination of the life of an unborn baby.”"

Amazing how Constitutions can be got around when needed. 

"Earlier versions of the medication abortion bill had named specific drugs: mifepristone and two brand-name versions of it as well as misoprostol, the second drug used in the medication abortion regimen.

But doctors testified in objection, pointing out that misoprostol, in particular, had many other medical uses, including helping pregnant patients successfully give birth. The doctors raised concerns that pharmacists would be fearful of stocking any of the drugs, and some Republicans said names of abortion medications could simply be changed to get around the law. As a result, the final language was broadened to outlaw using any medication for abortion without mentioning specific drugs."

 

[Ozlsn]

Texas abortion law means woman must continue pregnancy despite foetus being unable to survive.

Putting in spoiler because sad and about infant death.

Spoiler

Basically the foetus is currently at 28 weeks. A brain anomaly was detected, where the two halves of the brain fail to separate, at the 20 week scan. There is no way this child can survive without intervention, and at most it would be a year. To quote the article:

The brain splitting into two hemispheres is a "critical stage in the development" and can impact the development of the nose, mouth and throat, Dr. Katie McHugh, an Indiana OB-GYN and abortion provider, told ABC News. The condition can result in a very painful life and death for the fetus, McHugh said.

The baby's head is growing at a faster rate than the rest of it, probably due to fluid filling the cavity where the brain would go. This makes delivery significantly more risky, both vaginally and via c-section, to the mother. The longer they wait the higher the risk.

There is literally no chance this child can survive, and any life outside the womb is likely to involve pain and very high levels of medical intervention.

And of course they're in Texas, where absolutely everything has been banned, and where this family are finding out that "medical exemption" means "when you're near death, and not before" for the mother. To quote the mother:

She said the specialist told her he could not do anything to end the pregnancy unless Beaton developed a severe health issue or if the fetus dies in the womb.

...

The couple said the law has left them feeling helpless and frustrated over not being able to make a humane decision for their baby.

"I mean, for them to say, 'Well, you need to wait until you're in a health crisis, a health issue to where your life's in jeopardy, then that's when we can take it.' Well, then why do we have doctors?" Kylie Beaton said.

"Why are we taking medications for things like high blood pressure? Why don't you wait until you have a heart attack? Or until you have, you know, the signs that you're having a stroke to be on medication? All those things? It's kind of the same way, if you look at it from our perspective," she added.

Before this pregnancy, Beaton said she never would have considered getting an abortion. Now, she believes abortions should be allowed in cases like hers and for women with other health conditions to get the care they need.

I realise this falls into the "the only moral abortion is mine" line of thinking, but I still am incredibly sorry for this family, and all the others, who are going through an absolutely horrific time which has been made exponentially worse by having to go through this - and by simultaneously discovering that they were sold a lie, and that the politicians and religious leaders they trusted never valued their life - or the life of a wanted child with no hope of survival - at all.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

You couldn't make this up: "Idaho hospital to stop delivering babies, partly due to ‘political climate’"

Quote

Brooke Macumber planned to have her fourth child in the same small hospital where two of her older children were born — the same place her husband had been delivered decades earlier.

But at 23 weeks pregnant, she found out that the facility, Bonner General Health in rural Sandpoint, Idaho, was shuttering its obstetrics unit after almost 75 years. Now, the closest hospital able to deliver her baby is more than an hour’s drive from her home.

“I’ve just had nightmares of making my husband pull off and delivering in the front seat of our car,” said Macumber, 25, who lives on the outskirts of a 500-resident town near the Montana border.

The closure of Bonner’s labor and delivery department follows a national trend that researchers have associated with potentially dangerous out-of-hospital and preterm births. Access to obstetric services has been on the decline for years in rural areas, with at least 89 obstetrics units in rural U.S. hospitals closing their doors between 2015 and 2019, according to the American Hospital Association. More than half of rural counties — home to 2.2 million women of childbearing age — are now maternity-care deserts.

Some obstetricians say the problem has been exacerbated by the recent passage of laws criminalizing abortion, which can make recruiting and retaining physicians all the more difficult.

In a news release announcing the decision on Friday, Bonner General Health officials cited a shortage of pediatricians and decreasing number of deliveries. The release also pointed to the “legal and political climate” in a state where trigger laws banned nearly all abortions after the fall of the constitutional right to an abortion.

“Highly respected, talented physicians are leaving,” it said. “Recruiting replacements will be extraordinarily difficult. In addition, the Idaho Legislature continues to introduce and pass bills that criminalize physicians for medical care nationally recognized as the standard of care.”

Idaho has some of the strictest abortion laws in the nation. A trigger law passed in 2020, which the state Supreme Court allowed to take effect last summer, criminalizes the procedure in almost all cases, with possible defenses if a doctor determines it necessary to save the life of a pregnant woman or if the pregnant woman has reported rape or incest to law enforcement. A medical provider who violates the law can face felony charges punishable by two to five years in prison, along with suspension or revocation of his or her medical license.

The Idaho Republican Party platform — adopted in the summer of 2022, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that allowed states to ban abortion — goes further. It declares that “abortion is murder from the moment of fertilization” and calls for its prevention “regardless of the circumstances of conception, including persons conceived in rape and incest.” The platform says the party supports criminalizing all abortions within the state.

Dorothy Moon, the state’s GOP chairwoman, criticized Bonner General Health’s assertion that Idaho’s political atmosphere contributed to its decision. She said the true culprit was a mismanagement of resources, including an “inability to position the hospital to accommodate declining demographics.” The number of babies delivered in 2022 was not enough to sustain facility and staff costs, she said.

“The real issue here is one facing all of rural America: the failure of large health care entities to provide financially affordable healthcare in a sustainable fashion,” Moon wrote in an email to The Washington Post. “This isn’t about abortion; it’s about making excuses for staffing issues.”

Financial and staffing problems are cited as the main factors affecting the availability of hospital-based care in rural areas, the U.S. Government Accountability Office wrote in an October 2022 report. Delivering babies is costly, requiring round-the-clock coverage by trained doctors and nurses. Obstetrics units often carry the largest financial losses for rural hospitals, according to a care provider association, a research group and others who talked to the Government Accountability Office. As a result, they were the “first to close” when hospitals became cash-strapped.

At Bonner General Health, spokeswoman Erin Binnall said birthrates have declined for years, with a nationwide trend playing a role. The hospital delivered 265 babies in 2022 — a 37.5 percent decrease from 2008, when the number was 424. The challenges mounted when two of three pediatricians who worked with the hospital decided to no longer take calls from it beginning in May.

Bonner “is making all attempts to continue deliveries” through May 19, the statement said. But its ability to do so is dependent on staffing.

Binnall said that while staffing concerns were the main factor leading to the closure, “Idaho’s political and legal climate does pose as a barrier specific to recruitment and retention for OBGYNs.” She noted that Idaho ranks last in the nation for active physicians and that there are 178 OB/GYNs practicing statewide, with just 38 in rural areas.

Caitlin Gustafson, a family-medicine physician in McCall, Idaho, who provides obstetric care and serves as a member of the Idaho Coalition for Safe Reproductive Health Care, said family-medicine doctors often get training in Idaho for rural obstetric care and leave to practice elsewhere. Recruitment became harder after Idaho’s abortion ban went into effect, she said.

“This was a problem before, and now it’s just basically exploding in terms of who we’re going to be able to maintain and recruit in the state to be able to provide this care,” she said.

The loss of labor and delivery services in rural hospitals can be dangerous. An absence of obstetric care is significantly associated with increased preterm births and more births in facilities that lack staffs trained in labor and delivery, according to a 2018 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Some patients who have problems in pregnancy walk into centers without obstetrics departments, leaving emergency-medicine doctors to handle issues that may be beyond their expertise.

Gustafson said she fears that Idaho’s maternal death total — which more than doubled from 2019 to 2020, the most recent year for which data is available — will rise with one fewer unit of doctors trained in labor and delivery. The prospects of a state committee that was formed to study maternal mortality are also up in the air.

“Labor and delivery can be a very safe happy event,” she said, “but pregnancies can be unexpectedly complicated and emergencies can arise quickly.”

Bonner is referring obstetrics patients to six medical facilities in Idaho and in neighboring Montana and Washington. The hospital had been the state’s northernmost facility with an obstetrics department; now, that distinction belongs to several medical centers in Coeur d’Alene, about 45 miles south.

Before reading on Facebook about the closure at Bonner General, Macumber, the expectant mother, thought she had her birthing plan figured out. She was looking forward to delivering at the hospital where she’s gone for prenatal care and is familiar with the doctors and nurses.

Instead, she said, she’ll probably stay at her mother’s house in Coeur d’Alene for the two weeks leading up to her due date. That means being away from her husband, who will have to remain in their hometown for work, in the final stretch of her pregnancy. But she’s grateful to have the option.

“The fear of going into labor without my husband here … it doesn’t outweigh the risks of having to have my baby in the car,” she said.

 

[CTRLZero]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

You couldn't make this up: "Idaho hospital to stop delivering babies, partly due to ‘political climate’"

On a related note - More and more women are crossing from Idaho into Washington state for medical services.  Since a lot of people, including acquaintances of mine, have been migrating to Idaho like it’s the promised land, I was surprised to read that birth rates are going down.  Then I speculated that maybe it’s because the people who are moving there are more likely to attempt home births.  🤷‍♀️  I’d be interested to find out if birth rates, or just hospital birth rates, are actually declining. 

[fraurosena]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

You couldn't make this up: "Idaho hospital to stop delivering babies, partly due to ‘political climate’"

 

It's a good thing I'm way past my childbearing years. If I were to be pregnant now and living in rural Idaho, I'd be forced to have a home birth because I have super fast labors. I delivered my youngest two within two hours after the first contraction. There's no way I'd make it to a hospital in time... 

Edited March 22, 2023 by fraurosena

[Ozlsn]

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Now, the closest hospital able to deliver her baby is more than an hour’s drive from her home.

Both the rural hospital where I was born and the regional town hospital where my siblings were born no longer do births. The closest now to where I was born is 30 minutes drive; to where my siblings were born it's 31 minutes. Both of those hospitals can only take 33-34 weeker babies and older who don't need additional support, and the nearest hospitals with those facilities are over 2 hours away. I spent a lot of time in NICU with parents living at Ronald McDonald House for months. We're fortunate though, obviously it's harder again in remote areas of Australia.

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

The Idaho Republican Party platform — adopted in the summer of 2022, weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that allowed states to ban abortion — goes further. It declares that “abortion is murder from the moment of fertilization” and calls for its prevention “regardless of the circumstances of conception, including persons conceived in rape and incest.” The platform says the party supports criminalizing all abortions within the state.

I support the Idaho Republican Party being financially responsible for all children and vulnerable adults affected by this policy, until they are able to be financially independent.

[Ozlsn]

Judge blocked Wyoming's abortion law due to the state constitutional healthcare provision

This is all Obama's fault.

Spoiler

Last summer, shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision overruling Roe v. Wade, an array of patients, doctors, and nonprofit groups brought a suit arguing that Wyoming’s abortion ban violated the state’s constitutional provision protecting each adult’s right to individual health care decisions. That case is known as Johnson v. Wyoming.

Judge Owens handed down a decision in August halting the law. Among other things, she rejected the state’s argument that the health care amendment was “only adopted to push back against the Affordable Care Act,” and should not be construed to protect abortion rights.

Regardless of the political circumstances that led to this amendment being written into the state constitution, Owens reasoned that the amendment “unambiguously provides competent Wyoming citizens with the right to make their own health care decisions,” and she was bound by that unambiguous text. “A court,” she wrote, “is not at liberty to assume that the Wyoming voters who adopted” the amendment “did not understand the force of language in the provision.”

So they tried again by clarifying that abortion was specifically not healthcare.

Spoiler

In response to Owens’s August decision blocking the state’s abortion ban, the state legislature enacted a new law decreeing that abortion “is not health care” and thus is not protected by the state constitution. Owens’s Wednesday order blocked that law as well, declaring that “the legislature cannot make an end run around” around a constitutional amendment, and that it is up to the courts to decide whether abortion meets the state constitution’s definition of “health care.”

I am intrigued to see where this goes next.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is horrible:

 

[CTRLZero]

The bill refers to minors (or the people driving the minors) traveling to another state to get an abortion.  Any bets that adults crossing state lines will be next?

Excerpts from the HuffPost article (bolding mine):

The legislation doesn’t actually say anything about crossing state lines, but Republican lawmakers are creative. Most pregnant people in Idaho are not traveling to obtain an abortion elsewhere in the state, since nearly all abortions are illegal in Idaho; they’re traveling to the border with the intent of crossing state lines, likely into Washington, Oregon or Montana, to get an abortion there. 

“Technically, they’re not criminalizing people driving in Washington state with a minor. The crime is the time that someone is driving the minor in Idaho,” said David Cohen, a law professor at Philadelphia’s Drexel University whose work focuses on constitutional law and abortion policy.

“They’re going to say what they’re doing is just criminalizing actions that take place completely within Idaho, but in practice what they’re criminalizing is the person helping the minor,” Cohen, who also litigates abortion-related cases with the Women’s Law Project nonprofit, told HuffPost.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Another Idaho hospital will no longer have a maternity ward:

 

[fraurosena]

Good news for a change! 

 

[Destiny]

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/texas-abortion-pill-mifepristone-ruling/index.html

WHAT THE GOD DAMNED CINNAMON TOAST FUCK IS THIS? Mifepristone is more safe than fucking advil! 

[Ozlsn]

Safer than Viagra, that's for sure.

[GreyhoundFan]

A Washington judge has issued an order to counter the earlier ruling:

 

[Destiny]

Hope in article form: 

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/02/texas-judge-abortion-case-actually-limited-mifepristone.html

Quote

But we would like to offer some clarification here. Because despite the barrage of predictions that this case could ban mifepristone and take it off the market, there are several basic legal principles suggesting that Judge Kacsmaryk’s power is limited and that a ruling for the plaintiffs will not necessarily change much at all with medication abortion.

Also, i can’t believe this jackball cited the god damned Comstock Act. FFS y’all.

[Coconut Flan]

9 minutes ago, Destiny said:

i can’t believe this jackball cited the god damned Comstock Act. FFS y’all.

Sadly from what I've been seeing that part was expected.  

[Destiny]

7 hours ago, Coconut Flan said:

Sadly from what I've been seeing that part was expected.  

I know it was. I’m still just horrified. A law that hasn’t been enforced in 100 or so years is suddenly relevant so we can control women. Just what the fuck?

[Xan]

Good opinion piece up by Jessica Valenti.  

We all know men like this: ridiculous and cruel, convinced of their own superior intelligence against all evidence to the contrary. But instead of simply being the biggest asshole in class or the former boss we recall while grimacing, they’re the judges, politicians and lobbyists who get to decide our futures. It’s humiliating, really.

It’s not a coincidence that these truly awful men have targeted abortion medication, specifically. Our ability to end a pregnancy with just a few pills—safely, privately, at home and without shame—was too much for them to take. At least when we went to clinics they could stand outside and call us ‘sluts’. Abortion medication robbed the men who hate us of their most treasured birthright: The ability to degrade women who do things they don’t like. 

Full article is at:  https://jessica.substack.com/p/the-men-who-ruin-us

[Destiny]

I can’t recommend Jessica Valenti and Jessica Mason Pieklo’s writings enough. 

The latter can be found at https://rewirenewsgroup.com.

ETA: I forgot Imani Gandy! I can’t believe I did that. She can also be found at Rewire News.

Edited April 8, 2023 by Destiny