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Mar 22, 2023·edited Mar 22, 2023

One way that I have challenged these right wing extremists is by asking them what a woman gets for her gestation, labor and delivery that a non-pregnant person doesn't also get. What is the actual value of pregnancy and delivery? The pregnant person doesn't get anything for her work. Society expects a woman to carry the fetus, pay for her own medical, take unpaid leave from her job, risk guaranteed physical damage and possible death, abstain from activities and consumables that might endanger the fetus even when they are normally legal (like smoking, drinking, athletics or taking medications), and absorb the setbacks to career promotions all out of love. Society teaches us that being a mother has no actual value. Her work is not counted in GDP. There are no museums or monuments to motherhood and those who have died bringing life. Businesses often don't want to hire a mom because her dedication to her family might actually come first so they would rather hire a man. What women do is clearly valueless and yet when the right wants to explain what's wrong with society today, they point to that valueless, unpaid work of the mom and how she is choosing to work for actual pay rather than raising future citizens for free and become later unemployable because all she has been is a "housewife". Such a deal. My ethics class taught me that those with the greatest responsibility have the greatest associated rights. What rights do pregnant people have that non-pregnant people don't also have? I hate to sound bitter, but I am bitter. It makes me angry that something I worked hard at in raising my two sons, fine young men, could be so dismissed with a "you can always drop the child off at a safe haven" as though surrendering your hard work was like dropping off used clothing. How dare they?

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From WaPo tonight: Idaho hospital to stop delivering babies, partly due to ‘political climate’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/21/idaho-hospital-baby-delivery-abortion/

"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.”

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I do not want to live in a Christian theocracy, yet that is seemingly what these anti-abortion zealots view as being an ideal society.

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I went to look at the Ohio lawsuit to see why they argue that abortion is different...

So, how do they know abortion is "inherently different'? Well, the Supreme Court said so! Where? Why, in Roe v. Wade and in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. (Paragraph 44 of the lawsuit):

"As developed below, the United States Supreme Court has: (i) recognized that abortion

is “inherently different” than other intimate, personal rights (such as procreation or

contraception), see Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 159 (1973); and (ii) described abortion as a

“unique act”, see Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992). Thus, the effort

within the Proposed Constitutional Amendment to include abortion, as well as a right of deciding

whether to continue one’s own pregnancy, with other rights under the rubric of “one’s own

reproductive decisions” does not and cannot relate to a single general object or purpose."

Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The cases they have spent decades saying are completely wrong. The cases that Alito's opinion in Dobbs specifically declared overruled. The cases they celebrated when Dobbs came down, because they are no longer good law.

Except that they *are* good law if you can quote them to throw roadblocks?

Even now, the hypocrisy is stunning...

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