Thank you for highlighting the way the Biden campaign narrative is actually further stigmatizing abortion. The way they have focused so much on solely "medically necessary abortion" rhetoric is damaging. I also find it frustrating because abortion is not a sad and tough choice for everyone, it can be freeing and empowering. A wide range of emotions can be tied to this procedure. This is a slam dunk issue for Dems and they're still managing to fumble SMH
I don’t agree. I think for many women who don’t embrace Feminism, that is the way to reach them. We can fight among ourselves about the “best” way to focus our efforts, or we can understand that we need different people to use multiple platforms and approaches to reach the widest range of American voters on this issue.
Debra the majority of American voters are already in agreement that abortion should be available to all. The Biden campaigns choice to focus heavily on medically necessary abortion, further stigmatizes abortion. This does not benefit the movement as a whole and it is ok to want/demand more from Dem leadership in the year 2024.
Rozlyn, I agree; they need to also maybe have an ad about a mother of 2 or 3 who is barely getting by & her birth control fails. She needs the abortion for financial reasons, she can’t afford another mouth to feed, that extra child will cause her child care (if she has any besides a relative) to take her entire paycheck making it unprofitable for her to work. She’ll just have to quit her job & go on welfare if she’s forced to carry to term.
The only abortions they have really highlighted so far are white, middle to upper middle class having a serious fetal abnormality. The focus only on those abortions makes it seem like those are the only acceptable abortions.
I also don’t like that they almost always use healthcare. Yes, it IS healthcare, but fcs learn to say the word abortion!
I have called the WH & left that message for President Biden, stand in front of a mirror & say the word
ABORTION, ABORTION until you get comfortable with it!! It’s not a dirty word, it’s a medical procedure.
This. We have been talking openly about abortion lately, and it's no less popular than it was in the past. We keep allowing shame and stigma to permeate women's decisions and we will never be free of these trolls.
I'm also not enamored with Biden/Harris's use of the "trust women" slogan, first used by murdered abortion doctor George Tiller in a different, non-self-serving way. Harris keeps repeating: “But we are not going to let [banning all abortions] happen, because we trust women. We trust women to know what is in their own best interest. And women trust all of us to fight to protect their most fundamental freedom.”
The thing is: Trump and his neo-fascist supporters like the Heritage Foundation, white Christian nationalists and rabid anti-abortion fanatics also “trust women to know what is in their own best interest.” They trust that women will do what’s best for themselves and their families, they trust that we will make sacrifices to help the children we already have, they trust us to want to control our own bodies and our futures and to want to be free, self-actualizing human beings and to be comprehended that way by others.
Women are not facing a lack of trust; we are facing an all-out campaign to thwart our desire—and our human right—to self-determination and freedom.
The women’s movement, like the Black Civil Rights movement from which the women’s movement sprang, has shown the world that they can “trust women” and all those who are oppressed to fight for human rights, for equality and for freedom.
So perhaps Harris and Biden could stop talking about their great trust in women—since that is clearly about wanting to trust women to vote for them—and actually get into the horrific fact that this is a struggle against fascism, against those that want to track women’s periods so they can find out who is pregnant. It’s a struggle against forced pregnancy and a world where always, always the “life” of a fetus would trump that of a woman—even if it is nothing more than a few cells. This is a fight to keep birth control legal and accessible, for women to stop being a slave to biology, for our health and lives to be valued. This is a fight for the freedom to travel, to not be stopped and forced to pee on a stick by the side of the road in the presence of a leering cop.
The Women’s Movement started with the Suffragettes push for Women’s right to vote, predating the 1960s Civil Rights movement. And of course, Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others fighting for abortion access goes back to the late 1800s, when the Comstock Act and its enforcer was targeting abortion providers like Madam Restell of NYC and hounding them literally to death or jail. This has been a long and separate fight. And the Republicans and Christian Nationalists dont trust women to make ANY decisions. The Democratic Party does. So I am in favor of what Biden, Harris, and our Democratic governors have done to get the word out.
<Trump and his neo-fascist supporters like the Heritage Foundation, white Christian nationalists and rabid anti-abortion fanatics also “trust women to know what is in their own best interest.”>
But the reality is that a lot of people DON'T trust women. Religious conservatives are indoctrinated that women are childlike, deceitful, and in need of male guidance and leadership. My conservative relatives really DO believe that women don't know what is in our own best interest and that we are emotional and unable to make rational and moral decisions on our own about our own lives. I agree that Trust Women shouldn't be the ONLY message, but it is an important one for reaching conservative leaning women who are uncomfortable with the idea of abortion. The Trust Women message makes the issue larger than just abortion and is meant to prod women to think about themselves and their sisters and daughters and question why they can't be trusted to make decisions for themselves. We need everyone and every vote we can get and that means reaching as many people as possible with the messages that will most resonate with them.
I don't think there's anything in republican rhetoric that suggests that they trust women. Over and over again they tell us that they don't see women as fully actualized humans.
They "trust us" to fight for our rights which is one reason they are destroying democracy as a way to stop women and others having ways to do that. While you are right that they do not see us as fully actualized human beings, they trust that we see ourselves that way and will fight for our freedom. In the same way racists don't see people of color as actualized human beings, they do trust--and in fact know, because of history--that they will fight for freedom. What they do not trust is that we will do their bidding and take what they see as our rightful subordinate state. So they have to force us.
The language in Katie Britt's bill starts off with talking about the decline in the fertility rate in the US. If that doesn't show that their services are for forcing women to give birth rather than abort, I don't know what does. It specifically states that no funding would go to organizations that perform abortion. Organizations like planned parenthood are the ones that already have resources and networks and information that pregnant women need, so it would be a waste to not provide funding for the services they provide that aren't related to abortion. The bill also does not state that organizations that receive funds need to be actual certified health care organizations staff by actual clinicians. They want crisis pregnancy centers to be the clearinghouse where pregnant women get their info. If you know you want to terminate your pregnancy, you should not have to deal with these organizations at all, nor be put in a database.
Guzi He (mentioned early in this column) is probably a citizen of China, not the US. What I can read online in his bio is that he came to the US for education, so is probably on a student visa and not a US citizen. If he likes autocratic rule and a society where women have fewer rights than the men, he should return home to China, where he will find comfort.
We created this interactive map to track and report new incidents of abortion bans. The goal is to crowdsource details of incidents - from articles and local events. The map can be filtered by type of incident and links to more details. Check it out and submit incidents. The map includes a few from Jessica's posts already.
I went there for you, Jessica. Here's RFK's statement on abortion from The Hill:
"Kennedy said he supports the 'emerging consensus' that abortion should be unrestricted until a certain point, which he believes should be when a baby is 'viable outside the womb.' "
What a bunch of idiots -- him and the reporter. (Article lets him get away with "full term abortion" lie, too. ) And no mention by him of gee, I believe Roe was right, so why did we undo it? (We want stronger than Roe, of course, but when these people advocate for something similar, my blood boils.)
The attack on shield laws is so upsetting. How can a state restrict a federally legal drug? On what grounds? They can't just reclassify it! What kind of crap is that? It's outrageous. And it's for miscarriage care. Now it's a "controlled substance?" They'll do ANYTHING to subjugate us. When one line of stupid reasoning doesn't work, they try another.
I'd like my state, NJ, to reclassify Viagra if Comstock passes. It's "lewd" right?
Unfortunately, Viagra is here to stay- probably. Erectile disfunction cure was just a bonus to the drug's intended effect. I'd imagine that on that basis, it would be considered an exception. Fuck them!!! For this, exceptions would be real☹☹☹.
Regarding the shield laws and anti-abortion groups claiming they are unconstitutional and Mary Ziggler's comment:
I need a lawyer to explain to me then how a prosecutor from the state of Texas can sue a doctor in Colorado for performing a legal abortion on a 25-year-old woman from Texas who voluntarily drove to Colorado for an abortion?
There are a lot of reasons why people want abortions, but many of the reasons are financial. KFF has a new health tracker, "Medical debt among new mothers," https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/medical-debt-among-new-mothers reporting that while 40% of births are covered by Medicaid, so the mother does not have financial cost-sharing obligations, about half of births are covered by private insurance, where copayment responsibilities can be substantial. Average out of pocket spending for childbirth for insured people giving birth was $3,000--an amount that about 1/3 of families and 1/2 of single-person households do not have assets to cover. Of women 18-35 14.3% of those who had a baby in the previous 18 months had medical debt of $250 or more, versus 7.6% of women in that age group who did not have a baby in that time frame. 11% of women in that age group who had babies in the previous 18 months had at least $1,000 in medical debt versus 4.8% of age-mates who did not have a baby. Those figures are only for the care of the person who gave birth--not health costs for the baby.
Also see Noam N. Levey, "Their First Baby Came With Medical Debt. These Illinois Parents Won't Have Another," https://www.kffhealthnews.org/newsarticle/babies-come-with-medical-debt[...], profiling Heather Crivilare, who had an emergency C-section because of pre-eclampsia. After two weeks in the neonatal ICU, the baby was healthy--but Ms. Crivilare and her husband had close to $5,000 in debt for the birth. KFF found that about one-eighth of the 100 million people in the US who have health care debts trace all or some of it to pregnancy and childbirth.
Abortion bans don't pay for prenatal care, or delivery, or medical care for the baby. They don't provide housing for homeless pregnant people, or people who can't fit another child into their existing housing, or food for hungry pregnant people, or jobs for people who need to support a baby or child care for people who need child care to keep a job to support the new baby and their older children.
The only reason we argue about why women should or shouldn't get abortions is because of those who argue that abortion is murder, no other reason. It's not the same everywhere on the planet. In both Russia and China there are arguments that these countries need the bodies, that women represent a kind of productivity that they are unpatriotically resisting. China still has a family planning policy, even though they have loosened the restriction beyond one child recently. And there have been arguments from some Russian clerics who have expressed agreement with gestational personhood.
But for us, here in the US and Western Europe, especially from Catholic political power, it's about "murdering babies", and not any kind of practical issue. The "right to life".
And it doesn't pay for daycare either which is already a huge problem in this country. Not only is there not enough daycares but it is extremely expensive, no sliding scale, the low income pays the same as anybody else... that is not fair. The fascist want us to have all these babies that we can't afford and do not want and will not love, but they won't help pay the associated cost that comes along with them......because it's our fault we got pregnant to begin with, we must suffer, we brought sin to the world, suffering will bring us closer to god, suffering is repentance........plus, ultimately, the forced birth agenda groups don't really care about babies or children, this is very much about keeping people in their place, a caste system. And misogyny. There are so many horrible dark agendas behind abortion bans. Many rural communities ( especially in the south) are captive communities, these people have nowhere to go, very few jobs available.....the state knows it, they don't give a shit.
Thanks for the link! Although child care workers are paid very poorly, people who care for the elderly (at the other end of life!) are also paid very poorly. Just goes to show what is valued in this society.
It's sad that so many things reflect and reinforce our value
as minimal at best. For example, it's not just bad luck that you're likely to be killed as a pedestrian from a slowish car impact, but due to SUV bumper height, it's almost a guarantee.
When those OBGYNS leave town, it means clinics close and maternity wards are understaffed or even closed. Even if we lifted all restrictions tomorrow (if only!), it would still take time to build back that medical infrastructure. There’s not an on/off switch. I’m heartbroken for the red states especially. And downright terrified of a national ban.
If every Democrat running in every district and every state would lean hard into this issue they would win most if not all of those elections. Why is this not a thing?!?
I didn’t see anything about Louisiana and mifepristone in the times. The post had a great piece. It’s pretty disappointing sometimes how some of the most galling stories don’t even make it to the times.
The NYT have a hard-on for Joe Biden, because he won't give them an interview, so they are trying to tank him with voters and are against anything he is for.
Please don’t encourage people to destroy one of the few decent papers left in this country because they dont cover issues. They do cover a tremendous amount of issues that are cited in lots of other substack reporters rely on. They could be doing better. The way to influence their coverage is to contact their editors and their reporters. As a reporter for 20 years, I am concerned we are going to destroy our entire remaining legitimate newspapers instead of lobbying them to do better.
The Wapo recently hired a former Murdoch tabloid boss for their publisher, (Will Lewis), he is in court in the UK, because in the dead child- phone hacking scandal, he deleted a huge number of emails about the case.The WaPo have been leaning right since Bezos hired Sally Busbee as executive editor.
"Now, nearly a decade after he bought the Post, Bezos has a leadership team at the company that is entirely his own. Bezos hired a new publisher early on, in 2014, picking Fred Ryan, a former Reagan administration official, chairman of the board of trustees for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, and a cofounder of Politico.
For years, however, the Post’s newsroom and opinion pages continued to be run by traditionalists held over from the Graham era: Marty Baron, the executive editor, and Fred Hiatt, who had already been editorial page editor for thirteen years when Bezos took over.
Baron retired last year, allowing Bezos and Ryan to hire their own new executive editor. They chose Sally Buzbee, the top editor at the Associated Press. Those who saw her as a potential champion of journalistic values have been disappointed; she has kept a low profile in the newsroom.
And in early September—nine months after Hiatt unexpectedly died—the Post installed a new editorial page editor, David Shipley, a journalist closely tied to another oligarch, Mike Bloomberg.
Most notably—given Bezos’s views about Biden and inflation—Post news coverage of Biden’s domestic policy has consistently been more negative than its competitors’. The Post doesn’t hesitate to identify inflation as a Biden problem, often while ignoring that it’s a global problem. Its political reporters have frequently declared inflation to be the central issue of the midterm elections (which it is not)...
The New York Times has similar issues, but comparing their coverage of positive job reports, for example, one finds the Post almost always casting the news in a worse light for Biden than other mainstream publications.
The NYT has gone too pro-Trump & anti Biden. They only publish stories about how he’s too old. They are pissed at him for not granting them a sit down long-form interview.
Thank you for highlighting the way the Biden campaign narrative is actually further stigmatizing abortion. The way they have focused so much on solely "medically necessary abortion" rhetoric is damaging. I also find it frustrating because abortion is not a sad and tough choice for everyone, it can be freeing and empowering. A wide range of emotions can be tied to this procedure. This is a slam dunk issue for Dems and they're still managing to fumble SMH
I don’t agree. I think for many women who don’t embrace Feminism, that is the way to reach them. We can fight among ourselves about the “best” way to focus our efforts, or we can understand that we need different people to use multiple platforms and approaches to reach the widest range of American voters on this issue.
Debra the majority of American voters are already in agreement that abortion should be available to all. The Biden campaigns choice to focus heavily on medically necessary abortion, further stigmatizes abortion. This does not benefit the movement as a whole and it is ok to want/demand more from Dem leadership in the year 2024.
Rozlyn, I agree; they need to also maybe have an ad about a mother of 2 or 3 who is barely getting by & her birth control fails. She needs the abortion for financial reasons, she can’t afford another mouth to feed, that extra child will cause her child care (if she has any besides a relative) to take her entire paycheck making it unprofitable for her to work. She’ll just have to quit her job & go on welfare if she’s forced to carry to term.
The only abortions they have really highlighted so far are white, middle to upper middle class having a serious fetal abnormality. The focus only on those abortions makes it seem like those are the only acceptable abortions.
I also don’t like that they almost always use healthcare. Yes, it IS healthcare, but fcs learn to say the word abortion!
I have called the WH & left that message for President Biden, stand in front of a mirror & say the word
ABORTION, ABORTION until you get comfortable with it!! It’s not a dirty word, it’s a medical procedure.
This. We have been talking openly about abortion lately, and it's no less popular than it was in the past. We keep allowing shame and stigma to permeate women's decisions and we will never be free of these trolls.
I'm also not enamored with Biden/Harris's use of the "trust women" slogan, first used by murdered abortion doctor George Tiller in a different, non-self-serving way. Harris keeps repeating: “But we are not going to let [banning all abortions] happen, because we trust women. We trust women to know what is in their own best interest. And women trust all of us to fight to protect their most fundamental freedom.”
The thing is: Trump and his neo-fascist supporters like the Heritage Foundation, white Christian nationalists and rabid anti-abortion fanatics also “trust women to know what is in their own best interest.” They trust that women will do what’s best for themselves and their families, they trust that we will make sacrifices to help the children we already have, they trust us to want to control our own bodies and our futures and to want to be free, self-actualizing human beings and to be comprehended that way by others.
Women are not facing a lack of trust; we are facing an all-out campaign to thwart our desire—and our human right—to self-determination and freedom.
The women’s movement, like the Black Civil Rights movement from which the women’s movement sprang, has shown the world that they can “trust women” and all those who are oppressed to fight for human rights, for equality and for freedom.
So perhaps Harris and Biden could stop talking about their great trust in women—since that is clearly about wanting to trust women to vote for them—and actually get into the horrific fact that this is a struggle against fascism, against those that want to track women’s periods so they can find out who is pregnant. It’s a struggle against forced pregnancy and a world where always, always the “life” of a fetus would trump that of a woman—even if it is nothing more than a few cells. This is a fight to keep birth control legal and accessible, for women to stop being a slave to biology, for our health and lives to be valued. This is a fight for the freedom to travel, to not be stopped and forced to pee on a stick by the side of the road in the presence of a leering cop.
I've written more about this, which you can find here: https://newsandletters.org/woman-as-reason-trust-women-is-not-the-needed-rallying-cry/
The Women’s Movement started with the Suffragettes push for Women’s right to vote, predating the 1960s Civil Rights movement. And of course, Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others fighting for abortion access goes back to the late 1800s, when the Comstock Act and its enforcer was targeting abortion providers like Madam Restell of NYC and hounding them literally to death or jail. This has been a long and separate fight. And the Republicans and Christian Nationalists dont trust women to make ANY decisions. The Democratic Party does. So I am in favor of what Biden, Harris, and our Democratic governors have done to get the word out.
<Trump and his neo-fascist supporters like the Heritage Foundation, white Christian nationalists and rabid anti-abortion fanatics also “trust women to know what is in their own best interest.”>
But the reality is that a lot of people DON'T trust women. Religious conservatives are indoctrinated that women are childlike, deceitful, and in need of male guidance and leadership. My conservative relatives really DO believe that women don't know what is in our own best interest and that we are emotional and unable to make rational and moral decisions on our own about our own lives. I agree that Trust Women shouldn't be the ONLY message, but it is an important one for reaching conservative leaning women who are uncomfortable with the idea of abortion. The Trust Women message makes the issue larger than just abortion and is meant to prod women to think about themselves and their sisters and daughters and question why they can't be trusted to make decisions for themselves. We need everyone and every vote we can get and that means reaching as many people as possible with the messages that will most resonate with them.
I don't think there's anything in republican rhetoric that suggests that they trust women. Over and over again they tell us that they don't see women as fully actualized humans.
You are only basing that on the fact that, they say just that. They've never trusted us.
They "trust us" to fight for our rights which is one reason they are destroying democracy as a way to stop women and others having ways to do that. While you are right that they do not see us as fully actualized human beings, they trust that we see ourselves that way and will fight for our freedom. In the same way racists don't see people of color as actualized human beings, they do trust--and in fact know, because of history--that they will fight for freedom. What they do not trust is that we will do their bidding and take what they see as our rightful subordinate state. So they have to force us.
The language in Katie Britt's bill starts off with talking about the decline in the fertility rate in the US. If that doesn't show that their services are for forcing women to give birth rather than abort, I don't know what does. It specifically states that no funding would go to organizations that perform abortion. Organizations like planned parenthood are the ones that already have resources and networks and information that pregnant women need, so it would be a waste to not provide funding for the services they provide that aren't related to abortion. The bill also does not state that organizations that receive funds need to be actual certified health care organizations staff by actual clinicians. They want crisis pregnancy centers to be the clearinghouse where pregnant women get their info. If you know you want to terminate your pregnancy, you should not have to deal with these organizations at all, nor be put in a database.
Guzi He (mentioned early in this column) is probably a citizen of China, not the US. What I can read online in his bio is that he came to the US for education, so is probably on a student visa and not a US citizen. If he likes autocratic rule and a society where women have fewer rights than the men, he should return home to China, where he will find comfort.
Sadly, immigrants from such societies often wind up trying to create that repressive regime in their adopted home, because it is all they know.
We created this interactive map to track and report new incidents of abortion bans. The goal is to crowdsource details of incidents - from articles and local events. The map can be filtered by type of incident and links to more details. Check it out and submit incidents. The map includes a few from Jessica's posts already.
https://arcg.is/1aWejv1
I hope people will cover this map with multi-colored pins. I'm excited to be involved in this project.
Excellent project Andra, glad you are involved.
I went there for you, Jessica. Here's RFK's statement on abortion from The Hill:
"Kennedy said he supports the 'emerging consensus' that abortion should be unrestricted until a certain point, which he believes should be when a baby is 'viable outside the womb.' "
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4658344-rfk-jr-clarifies-abortion-stance-after-backlash/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Sounds a little like Roe to me.
What a bunch of idiots -- him and the reporter. (Article lets him get away with "full term abortion" lie, too. ) And no mention by him of gee, I believe Roe was right, so why did we undo it? (We want stronger than Roe, of course, but when these people advocate for something similar, my blood boils.)
The attack on shield laws is so upsetting. How can a state restrict a federally legal drug? On what grounds? They can't just reclassify it! What kind of crap is that? It's outrageous. And it's for miscarriage care. Now it's a "controlled substance?" They'll do ANYTHING to subjugate us. When one line of stupid reasoning doesn't work, they try another.
I'd like my state, NJ, to reclassify Viagra if Comstock passes. It's "lewd" right?
Unfortunately, Viagra is here to stay- probably. Erectile disfunction cure was just a bonus to the drug's intended effect. I'd imagine that on that basis, it would be considered an exception. Fuck them!!! For this, exceptions would be real☹☹☹.
Regarding the shield laws and anti-abortion groups claiming they are unconstitutional and Mary Ziggler's comment:
I need a lawyer to explain to me then how a prosecutor from the state of Texas can sue a doctor in Colorado for performing a legal abortion on a 25-year-old woman from Texas who voluntarily drove to Colorado for an abortion?
Right! They better start hauling all the Utah natives in who go to gamble in Vegas!
Oh, natives🙂. Kristi Noem is barred from 20 percent of her state 😳 by native Americans
She should also be barred from every animal shelter / pet adoption place.
(Natives wasn't a great word choice by me, sigh...)
Our designation of native Americans sucks to me. People from the plains are nothing like those along the coast, much less people from Alaska 🥶.
I think those people prefer to be referred to as Indigenous Peoples
Shame on Axios!
"United for Life—one of the nation’s most powerful anti-abortion groups—argues at The Federalist that shield laws are unconstitutional"
Shield laws are unconstitutional??????
But yet preventing women from traveling out of state isn't?
But yet allowing citizens to sue you for driving from Texas to Colorado isn't?
The fascists have it all backwards.
There are a lot of reasons why people want abortions, but many of the reasons are financial. KFF has a new health tracker, "Medical debt among new mothers," https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/medical-debt-among-new-mothers reporting that while 40% of births are covered by Medicaid, so the mother does not have financial cost-sharing obligations, about half of births are covered by private insurance, where copayment responsibilities can be substantial. Average out of pocket spending for childbirth for insured people giving birth was $3,000--an amount that about 1/3 of families and 1/2 of single-person households do not have assets to cover. Of women 18-35 14.3% of those who had a baby in the previous 18 months had medical debt of $250 or more, versus 7.6% of women in that age group who did not have a baby in that time frame. 11% of women in that age group who had babies in the previous 18 months had at least $1,000 in medical debt versus 4.8% of age-mates who did not have a baby. Those figures are only for the care of the person who gave birth--not health costs for the baby.
Also see Noam N. Levey, "Their First Baby Came With Medical Debt. These Illinois Parents Won't Have Another," https://www.kffhealthnews.org/newsarticle/babies-come-with-medical-debt[...], profiling Heather Crivilare, who had an emergency C-section because of pre-eclampsia. After two weeks in the neonatal ICU, the baby was healthy--but Ms. Crivilare and her husband had close to $5,000 in debt for the birth. KFF found that about one-eighth of the 100 million people in the US who have health care debts trace all or some of it to pregnancy and childbirth.
Abortion bans don't pay for prenatal care, or delivery, or medical care for the baby. They don't provide housing for homeless pregnant people, or people who can't fit another child into their existing housing, or food for hungry pregnant people, or jobs for people who need to support a baby or child care for people who need child care to keep a job to support the new baby and their older children.
The only reason we argue about why women should or shouldn't get abortions is because of those who argue that abortion is murder, no other reason. It's not the same everywhere on the planet. In both Russia and China there are arguments that these countries need the bodies, that women represent a kind of productivity that they are unpatriotically resisting. China still has a family planning policy, even though they have loosened the restriction beyond one child recently. And there have been arguments from some Russian clerics who have expressed agreement with gestational personhood.
But for us, here in the US and Western Europe, especially from Catholic political power, it's about "murdering babies", and not any kind of practical issue. The "right to life".
Exactly.
And it doesn't pay for daycare either which is already a huge problem in this country. Not only is there not enough daycares but it is extremely expensive, no sliding scale, the low income pays the same as anybody else... that is not fair. The fascist want us to have all these babies that we can't afford and do not want and will not love, but they won't help pay the associated cost that comes along with them......because it's our fault we got pregnant to begin with, we must suffer, we brought sin to the world, suffering will bring us closer to god, suffering is repentance........plus, ultimately, the forced birth agenda groups don't really care about babies or children, this is very much about keeping people in their place, a caste system. And misogyny. There are so many horrible dark agendas behind abortion bans. Many rural communities ( especially in the south) are captive communities, these people have nowhere to go, very few jobs available.....the state knows it, they don't give a shit.
Check this article on affordable Child care.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2024/05/13/child-care-system-statistics/73602963007/?utm_source=usatoday-newsalert-strada&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_term=hero&utm_content=usat-mclean-nletter01
Thanks for the link! Although child care workers are paid very poorly, people who care for the elderly (at the other end of life!) are also paid very poorly. Just goes to show what is valued in this society.
It's sad that so many things reflect and reinforce our value
as minimal at best. For example, it's not just bad luck that you're likely to be killed as a pedestrian from a slowish car impact, but due to SUV bumper height, it's almost a guarantee.
I wonder if they'll start to make those bumpers "womb-compliant" now, like they'd have to be way below or above the "average" woman's womb zone.
That's an idea 💡.
When those OBGYNS leave town, it means clinics close and maternity wards are understaffed or even closed. Even if we lifted all restrictions tomorrow (if only!), it would still take time to build back that medical infrastructure. There’s not an on/off switch. I’m heartbroken for the red states especially. And downright terrified of a national ban.
If every Democrat running in every district and every state would lean hard into this issue they would win most if not all of those elections. Why is this not a thing?!?
I just wish men could become pregnant!
Banish the thought. Our species would cease to exist. They could not even tolerate normal pregnancy 'life.'
I didn’t see anything about Louisiana and mifepristone in the times. The post had a great piece. It’s pretty disappointing sometimes how some of the most galling stories don’t even make it to the times.
The NYT have a hard-on for Joe Biden, because he won't give them an interview, so they are trying to tank him with voters and are against anything he is for.
I no longer read the NYT, and I encourage people not to.
Please don’t encourage people to destroy one of the few decent papers left in this country because they dont cover issues. They do cover a tremendous amount of issues that are cited in lots of other substack reporters rely on. They could be doing better. The way to influence their coverage is to contact their editors and their reporters. As a reporter for 20 years, I am concerned we are going to destroy our entire remaining legitimate newspapers instead of lobbying them to do better.
Do you recommend The Washington Post? I can always change my subscription.
The Wapo recently hired a former Murdoch tabloid boss for their publisher, (Will Lewis), he is in court in the UK, because in the dead child- phone hacking scandal, he deleted a huge number of emails about the case.The WaPo have been leaning right since Bezos hired Sally Busbee as executive editor.
"Now, nearly a decade after he bought the Post, Bezos has a leadership team at the company that is entirely his own. Bezos hired a new publisher early on, in 2014, picking Fred Ryan, a former Reagan administration official, chairman of the board of trustees for the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation, and a cofounder of Politico.
For years, however, the Post’s newsroom and opinion pages continued to be run by traditionalists held over from the Graham era: Marty Baron, the executive editor, and Fred Hiatt, who had already been editorial page editor for thirteen years when Bezos took over.
Baron retired last year, allowing Bezos and Ryan to hire their own new executive editor. They chose Sally Buzbee, the top editor at the Associated Press. Those who saw her as a potential champion of journalistic values have been disappointed; she has kept a low profile in the newsroom.
And in early September—nine months after Hiatt unexpectedly died—the Post installed a new editorial page editor, David Shipley, a journalist closely tied to another oligarch, Mike Bloomberg.
Most notably—given Bezos’s views about Biden and inflation—Post news coverage of Biden’s domestic policy has consistently been more negative than its competitors’. The Post doesn’t hesitate to identify inflation as a Biden problem, often while ignoring that it’s a global problem. Its political reporters have frequently declared inflation to be the central issue of the midterm elections (which it is not)...
The New York Times has similar issues, but comparing their coverage of positive job reports, for example, one finds the Post almost always casting the news in a worse light for Biden than other mainstream publications.
"https://www.cjr.org/special_report/washington-post-jeff-bezos.php
article about the new publisher.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-washington-post-publisher-will-lewis-infuriated-news-corp-staff-during-murdoch-phone-hacking-scandal
thank you
I don’t recommend anything owned by the billionaire behind Amazon.
The NYT has gone too pro-Trump & anti Biden. They only publish stories about how he’s too old. They are pissed at him for not granting them a sit down long-form interview.
Some days it feels so frickin' hopeless. So much misery and death. So much ignorance and malevolence. Sometimes, I can't STAND living in this country.