It really disgusts me the way politicians are playing stupid P.R. stunts while not caring about the real people they're supposed to be representing. The politics they're enacting are hurting women across this country.
Descheduling of marijuana would create a whole workforce of people experienced in selling weed to their peers who are newly available to sell mifi/miso to their peers. Just consider what a great job decades of War on Drugs have done to make sure that no one has access to controlled substances. However, I'm not sure that organized crime would be interested in one-time sales.
But how do you do it? The justices won't comply on their own; it's an assault on their 'independence' 🙄 So ultimately it's either backed up by armed federal law enforcement, or congress or the executive branch finds a way to cut their funding. Congress won't do it because Republicans have the house, so essentially it's asking the president to unilaterally hold the court accountable, with no real precedent for doing so. We might not have a problem with that, but to the other side it looks exactly like a Trump move, the kind that we rightly criticize. I'm just saying if there were easy answers they'd have been found a long time ago.
I know this is an awful idea, but I'm wondering if we do need to have 2 countries in this huge geographic landscape. A divided country. Then people can choose which country they want to live in.
The partition would be gruelingly difficult, because the divide is pretty much all urban-rural, so you have a sea of red with blue anywhere there's population density. A commenter here suggested city-states, but I'm not sure how that would work in practice, and then the battle would be in the suburbs and exurbs where the red and blue mix.
The suburbs / exurbs have a lot of people and those tend to be split. Within every state the majority rules; some are red, some are blue, depending on the population mix. The country as a whole is pretty close on red vs. blue, or at least it has been. The senate, electoral college, and district lines (because blue areas tend to be bluer than red areas are red) all give a boost to the other side, but if we were winning by more than a couple of points they would be much less likely to matter. Granted a couple points is millions of votes, but it still has been a perfect storm to get to this point. Whether fascism is commanding 48% of the vote or 50%+1 of the vote we've still got a problem.
In Missouri, they're massively outvoted by the rest of the state, unfortunately. Republicans normally win Missouri by double digits. So idk how you physically divide the territory up when the whole country is that way. And those suburban counties are particularly bedeviling.
If the Democrats got off their private parts and demanded some stuff, that would help things immensely. Like requiring the Supreme court to be accountable for one thing.
We can be creative. Italy had city-states for much of their history. We should go back to that. If Republicans want to drag us back to medieval times, then we should call their bluff.
MD here. I love your work. I keep posting this. It is hard to take in. War on women is blending with war on drugs. 3 states have laws that require a subpoena or warrant for full access to all prescription records. Flimsy even then. The other states’ law enforcement, DEA, & any healthcare have open access to what you’re taking & will make of it what they can. They don’t need a reason to look. LE has been documented setting people up for bogus traffic stop & search & then arrest based on legal substances. If your zip code is different than your physician’s zip code or pharmacy, that’s suspicious, and you will likely be fired as a patient so the physician or pharmacist isn’t arrested. Rural residents automatically fail that screening. This has resulted not only in the deaths of patients from withdrawal of substances used to treat their seizures (and everything else you can imagine), but also heart failure from untreated pain (yes, that happens), and the list goes on. All prescriptions, not just controlled. This invasion of privacy is allowed based on the lie that overdoses are caused by prescribed medications to patients and policing them will stop overdoses. It violates human rights. Physicians have had all assets seized before trial, been imprisoned for years, and later exonerated and released, but they get nothing back including their license. The thought leader in pain treatment (actually a dirty psychiatrist paid by legal firms) says pain is a spiritual problem. Everything that requires a stimulant (narcolepsy, ADHD, etc.) will be next, along with hormones (endometriosis, birth control, menopause, pregnancy, fertility, abortion). Unless we get educated and demand this shit stop. There will always be some people harmed by medications and those who abuse systems. We need to address that of course. Currently, the war on drugs is ignoring cartels because they can make a lot of money safely off docs, patients, and drug companies. They can even involuntarily commit pain patients for long term inpatient substance abuse care. I don’t want to think where this goes for women.
Thank you for this information. I am take a controlled substance for a neurological condition since childhood and now have better understanding why the pharmacy takes my license information. I knew the state or DEA or both now require me to see my physician twice a year when years ago it was just once. Now the doctor can call in a refill if it is within the 6 month mark. Before I had to have a written prescription. I wont bore you with if the supply chain is not making the exact dosage. A hassle.
The republican party has declared war on women and girls. We need to have a massive walkout and shut down the country. You know what I'm really sick to death of? Whiny republican male politicians who are upset that women are taking their jobs and women who are having success outside of homelife. So those asshole republican politicians act petulantly, and angrily pass ugly and dangerous laws against women and girls. Mean-assed little men. We may not be able to stop the peacefully. Our laws are not protecting us. Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated peace. Peace may not work in the atmosphere of present day bans on women. We must stop these cruel politicians.
As a Marylander - Hogan really burned through a lot of good will in his second term amongst independents and dems who felt he was moderate (never me!) He showed his true Republican colors by blocked infrastructure projects to hurt Baltimore, vetoing abortion access measures, etc. I’m hoping this will help us beat him. There’s a lot of enthusiasm around Alsobrooks so I think we can get this done! 🤞🗳️
Jessica deserves a major award for her reporting, and for somehow not going absolutely insane while doing it. Something like a Pulitzer Prize “for coverage of a topic no one else wants to write about” but it also occurs to me that the most important prize —for all of us!— will be if we can turn out a national Democratic landslide in November.
Speaking as a family doc and former member of California's medical licensing board, controlled substance data bases are very important for public health. At the time Purdue was pushing oxycontin, they did not do it in Texas and California, the only states that had controlled substance data bases. Because of this and docs knowing every controlled substance RX goes into a data base, the drug abuse mortality epidemic has been less severe in these states.
I believe only the federal FDA can classify pharmaceuticals, as you saw in the recent initiative to change marihuana from Class I to Class III. In any case it would be absurd to classify the abortion pills as controlled substances because they are not used repeatedly, have no addiction potential, and are very safe when used as directed. Thus a "controlled substance data base" is very unlikely to be used to compile the users of mifepristone.
Dear Dr Gordon, I can’t argue with the correctness of the stats you quote about mortality rates being lower in the first 2 states to have those drug data bases. I will tell you from personal experience that they have some terrible consequences built into them.
I am on opioids & when my regular Dr went on vacation & I needed my monthly refill authorization, of course it would have the name of the Dr who filled in during his vacay. So there is 1 red flagon my data base. Then the pain management Dr I was seeing left that practice & I had to get a new PM Dr, there’s red flag #2 on my data base. I’m now flagged as “Dr shopping” because there are 3 different MD names on the opioids I’ve been Rx’d.
Walgreens kept being out of stock when I would need my monthly refill, so one time when they weren’t going to get it in for at least 5 days, I asked them to hand my Rx back & I took it to a small local pharmacy to get it filled.
There’s red flag #3 on my data base.
Now it appears that I’m pharmacy shopping. None of those strikes on my record are due to anything I’m doing wrong. That makes me extremely angry, especially since I’m a retired ICU nurse who has handled& given opioids to my pts for over 40 yrs.
By the way, the facts are: the extreme crackdown on opioid prescribing has caused massive harm to people who live with chronic pain conditions & even increased suicides of those patients who have been denied the opioids they had been stable on for years, & YET overdose deaths have only continued to rise!!!
I am so sorry. I believe and understand your sad story, full of personal harm and struggles. I can only reflect that the medical system and its attention and caring is always vulnerable to out side influences. In this case, drug dealers making money, pharma companies making money, and folks needing to psychologically to escape the world. From a big picture society, institutions try to balance goods and harms. This is always a blunt tool and never really effective. Personally I can only say I got in trouble with a few of my professional colleagues while prescribing pain pills consistently though the squeeze to those patients I had where I could document real pain and attention to paper medication management. I would admit that in this effort I was hustled by a couple of druggies. BUT I kept quite a few people functional.
Jeffrey Gordon’s post is inaccurate and dangerous Vs incompetent, ill-intentioned, take your pick. Everything is compiled, and a contract for a national datamining system that looks past firewalls to access all prescription records is years underway. DEA sets schedule. Some hormones are controlled, not that it matters. TX & CA did not have a less severe OD problem because they had a PDMP; all states have them; it’s a longer exercise to explain why prescription drugs for patients were never the primary driver of ODs, but CA follows every doc and if 1 patient has a substance in them at death, they become an OD, and they get a threatening letter from the board that they killed the patient, even if it was years before the guidelines came out, leading to the doc abandoning their patients. It’s sick.
Hi! I appreciate your response and the heat of your passion (which I share). In many regards you are correct. I agree strongly with the possibility the current legal and technical restraints on controlled substance RX registries could be overcome and perverted, either by law or regulation (and perhaps by commercial data mining) to include abortion drugs. and the women who took them. In fact, for years big Pharma and Insurance companies (probably in violation of HIPPA) have kept non-public records of most RX prescribing for marketing purposes. I only meant to point out that using the existing controlled substance Prescription Drug Monitoring System (PDMS) would have significant secondary effect of harmfully degrading an important public health response to the drug overdose epidemic and that the FDA, the DEA and their legal framework may well have a basis to fight, prevent or stop this anti-abortion tactic.
BTW The DEA and the FDA collaborate on scheduling drugs. The hormone testosterone (and some similars) are scheduled because they are drugs of abuse (in athletics) and can cause severe physical harms. While now 49 of 50 states have a PDMS, back in the day California and Texas were the only states to have one and it did retard the prescription narcotic overdose epidemic.
Thanks for your passion and involvement. We all need to keep it up, LOUDLY!
Law enforcement doesn’t belong in medicine. They aren’t trained to use the data. Baseline overdoses due to prescription medications were from people using them without a prescription, so PDMP does not affect that. It’s a minority of the cases at around 16000, pretty stable. The diversion was occurring prior to arrival at pharmacies, something the DEA could have acted on, but chose instead to support cutting off patients and making the problem much worse. Drug dealers shoot at you.
Their point is that patients with severe pain can no longer get effective treatment because of government policy, so they're very strongly against said policy.
Exactly they are going to make their own version of the rules. STATE RULES...These people disregard the value of a pregnant person's life. They dismiss suffering, quality of life and suppress the dignity of pregnant people. I
It's a daily tsunami of battles with the faux Christians and other misogynists, fascists and anti women groups from rolling over any ounce left of women's reproductive health rights. I am grateful for Jessica and the rest of the truth tellers who are out there fighting the front lines. It is indeed a war on women. It's a war against the constitution (the bits and pieces we can hope to rely on). Meanwhile, I'll keep wearing my "regulate dick, not Jane " T shirt and hope the majority of people can get us over the finish line in November so we can stamp out these hateful idiots and give women and girls ( which makes me sick to need to include) the protection we have long deserved since the country started . When Greg Abbott unearthed fugitive slave law language with SB8 encouraged vigilantes to report women on a Middle Ages website that put a bounty on the head of abortion seeking women incentivizing anyone anywhere with $10,000 for "finding " a pregnant woman seeking abortion , hoards of people filled it with hilarious fake names and stories so fast it froze up-( I gladly participated) ....guerrilla tactics for good.... and ultimately it was shut down. This is the type of thing that gives me hope. That people will not tolerate what is happening and vote accordingly. We need it because this is gestapo level madness by republicans .
The same thing happened in Utah, they had a form on the State website to fill out if anybody saw a transgender person use the "wrong" bathroom. Not just a form but you could upload a picture..... so the first week they got something crazy like 4,000 memes uploaded. Lol.
In your face you fucking fascist Utah and every Republican out there......big middle finger.
Speaking of Harrison Butker’s misogynist speech, did you see that even the nuns of Mt. St. Scolastica, the religious order that founded the college, denounced him and said he didn’t represent their values? They made a pretty strong statement.
WTF Maine??? A Democratic state for nearly 17 years, they have the trifecta in the governor's office, the House and the Senate, they have one of the countries most protected abortion laws currently already, the selling of sex is also legal - and they can't get 2/3 vote to put an abortion rights amendment forward???
Complete proof that the Republican party has gone off the fucking rails, corrupt, incompetent, completely partisan!
Their current abortion law has been in place for quite a while, before Roe fell - that means the Republicans in Maine legislature ALREADY helped pass this prior to Roe fall ..... the amendment in discussion should be easy peasy at this point. Now all of a sudden enough Republicans won't vote in favor of an abortion rights amendment.
I was really surprised by that, too. Having grown up in New Hampshire, I've poked fun at Mainers plenty ;), but they are generally decent and reasonable people, if more conservative than suits me.
Then again, they keep electing Susan Collins, so they're clearly not firing on all cylinders.
If this really is the report for May 17th, 2026, that's (mostly) a good thing, because it means Biden won and we're continuing to fight state by state, measure by measure. (Yes it would be better if we get 50 in the senate and pass a bill protecting reproductive health care, but that's still a long shot [and the courts might reject it which would raise the question of what to do next]).
Because the alternative in two years is that no reproductive health care, including contraception, is legal, and JV is writing this report from an undisclosed location in a foreign country, while readers rely on the dark web or some other way to bypass government censorship to be able to read it. Or a worse scenario. (Unless we've already somehow overthrown and deposed the regime by then.)
(If this comment makes no sense then she's probably fixed the article header).
Are there particular tech companies consulting with anti-abortion groups when drafting these bills? Right-wing think tanks? I’ve heard about the Human Coalition but who else is behind this?
The 100+ Republican organizations that are working hand-in-hand with the Heritage Foundation to construct Project 2025. Many internet sources collect and sell our data every day. What good is it to have us sign privacy statements when we see a physician, only to have said physician input our data for collection by numerous bad actors who grift that information? What good is HIPPA?
Why do people vote for these a@#holes?
because they are also assholes.
It really disgusts me the way politicians are playing stupid P.R. stunts while not caring about the real people they're supposed to be representing. The politics they're enacting are hurting women across this country.
Descheduling of marijuana would create a whole workforce of people experienced in selling weed to their peers who are newly available to sell mifi/miso to their peers. Just consider what a great job decades of War on Drugs have done to make sure that no one has access to controlled substances. However, I'm not sure that organized crime would be interested in one-time sales.
But how do you do it? The justices won't comply on their own; it's an assault on their 'independence' 🙄 So ultimately it's either backed up by armed federal law enforcement, or congress or the executive branch finds a way to cut their funding. Congress won't do it because Republicans have the house, so essentially it's asking the president to unilaterally hold the court accountable, with no real precedent for doing so. We might not have a problem with that, but to the other side it looks exactly like a Trump move, the kind that we rightly criticize. I'm just saying if there were easy answers they'd have been found a long time ago.
The democrats can call for a vote. At least it will put them on record.
We can raise support for the many, many people who will choose to migrate to the country of freedom.
I know this is an awful idea, but I'm wondering if we do need to have 2 countries in this huge geographic landscape. A divided country. Then people can choose which country they want to live in.
The partition would be gruelingly difficult, because the divide is pretty much all urban-rural, so you have a sea of red with blue anywhere there's population density. A commenter here suggested city-states, but I'm not sure how that would work in practice, and then the battle would be in the suburbs and exurbs where the red and blue mix.
More people live in cities than rurally, no? Then we need to fix the system so that the majority rules.
The suburbs / exurbs have a lot of people and those tend to be split. Within every state the majority rules; some are red, some are blue, depending on the population mix. The country as a whole is pretty close on red vs. blue, or at least it has been. The senate, electoral college, and district lines (because blue areas tend to be bluer than red areas are red) all give a boost to the other side, but if we were winning by more than a couple of points they would be much less likely to matter. Granted a couple points is millions of votes, but it still has been a perfect storm to get to this point. Whether fascism is commanding 48% of the vote or 50%+1 of the vote we've still got a problem.
Ask the Missourians in Kanas City and St. Louis if they're being properly represented. I'd bet they'd say they aren't.
In Missouri, they're massively outvoted by the rest of the state, unfortunately. Republicans normally win Missouri by double digits. So idk how you physically divide the territory up when the whole country is that way. And those suburban counties are particularly bedeviling.
If the Democrats got off their private parts and demanded some stuff, that would help things immensely. Like requiring the Supreme court to be accountable for one thing.
We can be creative. Italy had city-states for much of their history. We should go back to that. If Republicans want to drag us back to medieval times, then we should call their bluff.
MD here. I love your work. I keep posting this. It is hard to take in. War on women is blending with war on drugs. 3 states have laws that require a subpoena or warrant for full access to all prescription records. Flimsy even then. The other states’ law enforcement, DEA, & any healthcare have open access to what you’re taking & will make of it what they can. They don’t need a reason to look. LE has been documented setting people up for bogus traffic stop & search & then arrest based on legal substances. If your zip code is different than your physician’s zip code or pharmacy, that’s suspicious, and you will likely be fired as a patient so the physician or pharmacist isn’t arrested. Rural residents automatically fail that screening. This has resulted not only in the deaths of patients from withdrawal of substances used to treat their seizures (and everything else you can imagine), but also heart failure from untreated pain (yes, that happens), and the list goes on. All prescriptions, not just controlled. This invasion of privacy is allowed based on the lie that overdoses are caused by prescribed medications to patients and policing them will stop overdoses. It violates human rights. Physicians have had all assets seized before trial, been imprisoned for years, and later exonerated and released, but they get nothing back including their license. The thought leader in pain treatment (actually a dirty psychiatrist paid by legal firms) says pain is a spiritual problem. Everything that requires a stimulant (narcolepsy, ADHD, etc.) will be next, along with hormones (endometriosis, birth control, menopause, pregnancy, fertility, abortion). Unless we get educated and demand this shit stop. There will always be some people harmed by medications and those who abuse systems. We need to address that of course. Currently, the war on drugs is ignoring cartels because they can make a lot of money safely off docs, patients, and drug companies. They can even involuntarily commit pain patients for long term inpatient substance abuse care. I don’t want to think where this goes for women.
Thank you for this information. I am take a controlled substance for a neurological condition since childhood and now have better understanding why the pharmacy takes my license information. I knew the state or DEA or both now require me to see my physician twice a year when years ago it was just once. Now the doctor can call in a refill if it is within the 6 month mark. Before I had to have a written prescription. I wont bore you with if the supply chain is not making the exact dosage. A hassle.
The republican party has declared war on women and girls. We need to have a massive walkout and shut down the country. You know what I'm really sick to death of? Whiny republican male politicians who are upset that women are taking their jobs and women who are having success outside of homelife. So those asshole republican politicians act petulantly, and angrily pass ugly and dangerous laws against women and girls. Mean-assed little men. We may not be able to stop the peacefully. Our laws are not protecting us. Martin Luther King, Jr. advocated peace. Peace may not work in the atmosphere of present day bans on women. We must stop these cruel politicians.
Cathy Wray, there is a date set for what you suggest- a women’s strike, an absolute no work day, June 24
I’m not sure who is organizing it, I looked on the website for The Women’s March when I first heard about it, but didn’t see it mentioned
Thanks!! I'll look!!
Wherever this ends up going, I think it's going to take millions of Americans in the streets to stop it and fix it.
agreed we need to stand up and take to the streets!!! There is a Women's Strike June 24th Nationwide. https://action.womensmarch.com/events/women-s-strike-2024
Oh, thank you Marcy!! I didn’t see your reply before I answered Cathy. Glad to see that it is now on the Women’s March website
I agree, we cannot just sit around.
As a Marylander - Hogan really burned through a lot of good will in his second term amongst independents and dems who felt he was moderate (never me!) He showed his true Republican colors by blocked infrastructure projects to hurt Baltimore, vetoing abortion access measures, etc. I’m hoping this will help us beat him. There’s a lot of enthusiasm around Alsobrooks so I think we can get this done! 🤞🗳️
Jessica deserves a major award for her reporting, and for somehow not going absolutely insane while doing it. Something like a Pulitzer Prize “for coverage of a topic no one else wants to write about” but it also occurs to me that the most important prize —for all of us!— will be if we can turn out a national Democratic landslide in November.
Speaking as a family doc and former member of California's medical licensing board, controlled substance data bases are very important for public health. At the time Purdue was pushing oxycontin, they did not do it in Texas and California, the only states that had controlled substance data bases. Because of this and docs knowing every controlled substance RX goes into a data base, the drug abuse mortality epidemic has been less severe in these states.
I believe only the federal FDA can classify pharmaceuticals, as you saw in the recent initiative to change marihuana from Class I to Class III. In any case it would be absurd to classify the abortion pills as controlled substances because they are not used repeatedly, have no addiction potential, and are very safe when used as directed. Thus a "controlled substance data base" is very unlikely to be used to compile the users of mifepristone.
Dear Dr Gordon, I can’t argue with the correctness of the stats you quote about mortality rates being lower in the first 2 states to have those drug data bases. I will tell you from personal experience that they have some terrible consequences built into them.
I am on opioids & when my regular Dr went on vacation & I needed my monthly refill authorization, of course it would have the name of the Dr who filled in during his vacay. So there is 1 red flagon my data base. Then the pain management Dr I was seeing left that practice & I had to get a new PM Dr, there’s red flag #2 on my data base. I’m now flagged as “Dr shopping” because there are 3 different MD names on the opioids I’ve been Rx’d.
Walgreens kept being out of stock when I would need my monthly refill, so one time when they weren’t going to get it in for at least 5 days, I asked them to hand my Rx back & I took it to a small local pharmacy to get it filled.
There’s red flag #3 on my data base.
Now it appears that I’m pharmacy shopping. None of those strikes on my record are due to anything I’m doing wrong. That makes me extremely angry, especially since I’m a retired ICU nurse who has handled& given opioids to my pts for over 40 yrs.
By the way, the facts are: the extreme crackdown on opioid prescribing has caused massive harm to people who live with chronic pain conditions & even increased suicides of those patients who have been denied the opioids they had been stable on for years, & YET overdose deaths have only continued to rise!!!
Not what I would call a successful program.
I am so sorry. I believe and understand your sad story, full of personal harm and struggles. I can only reflect that the medical system and its attention and caring is always vulnerable to out side influences. In this case, drug dealers making money, pharma companies making money, and folks needing to psychologically to escape the world. From a big picture society, institutions try to balance goods and harms. This is always a blunt tool and never really effective. Personally I can only say I got in trouble with a few of my professional colleagues while prescribing pain pills consistently though the squeeze to those patients I had where I could document real pain and attention to paper medication management. I would admit that in this effort I was hustled by a couple of druggies. BUT I kept quite a few people functional.
Jeffrey Gordon’s post is inaccurate and dangerous Vs incompetent, ill-intentioned, take your pick. Everything is compiled, and a contract for a national datamining system that looks past firewalls to access all prescription records is years underway. DEA sets schedule. Some hormones are controlled, not that it matters. TX & CA did not have a less severe OD problem because they had a PDMP; all states have them; it’s a longer exercise to explain why prescription drugs for patients were never the primary driver of ODs, but CA follows every doc and if 1 patient has a substance in them at death, they become an OD, and they get a threatening letter from the board that they killed the patient, even if it was years before the guidelines came out, leading to the doc abandoning their patients. It’s sick.
Hi! I appreciate your response and the heat of your passion (which I share). In many regards you are correct. I agree strongly with the possibility the current legal and technical restraints on controlled substance RX registries could be overcome and perverted, either by law or regulation (and perhaps by commercial data mining) to include abortion drugs. and the women who took them. In fact, for years big Pharma and Insurance companies (probably in violation of HIPPA) have kept non-public records of most RX prescribing for marketing purposes. I only meant to point out that using the existing controlled substance Prescription Drug Monitoring System (PDMS) would have significant secondary effect of harmfully degrading an important public health response to the drug overdose epidemic and that the FDA, the DEA and their legal framework may well have a basis to fight, prevent or stop this anti-abortion tactic.
BTW The DEA and the FDA collaborate on scheduling drugs. The hormone testosterone (and some similars) are scheduled because they are drugs of abuse (in athletics) and can cause severe physical harms. While now 49 of 50 states have a PDMS, back in the day California and Texas were the only states to have one and it did retard the prescription narcotic overdose epidemic.
Thanks for your passion and involvement. We all need to keep it up, LOUDLY!
Law enforcement doesn’t belong in medicine. They aren’t trained to use the data. Baseline overdoses due to prescription medications were from people using them without a prescription, so PDMP does not affect that. It’s a minority of the cases at around 16000, pretty stable. The diversion was occurring prior to arrival at pharmacies, something the DEA could have acted on, but chose instead to support cutting off patients and making the problem much worse. Drug dealers shoot at you.
Their point is that patients with severe pain can no longer get effective treatment because of government policy, so they're very strongly against said policy.
Thank you.
I don’t think those states give a rat’s ass about federal prerogatives. They’re already ignoring the Constitution; why would they care about the FDA?
Exactly they are going to make their own version of the rules. STATE RULES...These people disregard the value of a pregnant person's life. They dismiss suffering, quality of life and suppress the dignity of pregnant people. I
That’s right, Susan. But if trump is elected they intend to dismantle the FDA, along with the EPA and other departments.
It's a daily tsunami of battles with the faux Christians and other misogynists, fascists and anti women groups from rolling over any ounce left of women's reproductive health rights. I am grateful for Jessica and the rest of the truth tellers who are out there fighting the front lines. It is indeed a war on women. It's a war against the constitution (the bits and pieces we can hope to rely on). Meanwhile, I'll keep wearing my "regulate dick, not Jane " T shirt and hope the majority of people can get us over the finish line in November so we can stamp out these hateful idiots and give women and girls ( which makes me sick to need to include) the protection we have long deserved since the country started . When Greg Abbott unearthed fugitive slave law language with SB8 encouraged vigilantes to report women on a Middle Ages website that put a bounty on the head of abortion seeking women incentivizing anyone anywhere with $10,000 for "finding " a pregnant woman seeking abortion , hoards of people filled it with hilarious fake names and stories so fast it froze up-( I gladly participated) ....guerrilla tactics for good.... and ultimately it was shut down. This is the type of thing that gives me hope. That people will not tolerate what is happening and vote accordingly. We need it because this is gestapo level madness by republicans .
I wish medicine functioned this way. Bless you.
The same thing happened in Utah, they had a form on the State website to fill out if anybody saw a transgender person use the "wrong" bathroom. Not just a form but you could upload a picture..... so the first week they got something crazy like 4,000 memes uploaded. Lol.
In your face you fucking fascist Utah and every Republican out there......big middle finger.
Speaking of Harrison Butker’s misogynist speech, did you see that even the nuns of Mt. St. Scolastica, the religious order that founded the college, denounced him and said he didn’t represent their values? They made a pretty strong statement.
excellent. thanks for sharing this. Go sisters (literally)
Wow!! I'm impressed with the nuns!!!💙
WTF Maine??? A Democratic state for nearly 17 years, they have the trifecta in the governor's office, the House and the Senate, they have one of the countries most protected abortion laws currently already, the selling of sex is also legal - and they can't get 2/3 vote to put an abortion rights amendment forward???
Complete proof that the Republican party has gone off the fucking rails, corrupt, incompetent, completely partisan!
Their current abortion law has been in place for quite a while, before Roe fell - that means the Republicans in Maine legislature ALREADY helped pass this prior to Roe fall ..... the amendment in discussion should be easy peasy at this point. Now all of a sudden enough Republicans won't vote in favor of an abortion rights amendment.
They don’t want to be banished by women hater brigade.
I was really surprised by that, too. Having grown up in New Hampshire, I've poked fun at Mainers plenty ;), but they are generally decent and reasonable people, if more conservative than suits me.
Then again, they keep electing Susan Collins, so they're clearly not firing on all cylinders.
Yes but that is the fundies in northern maine, Southern Maine is quite sane and live and let live. They have two electoral districts like Nebraska.
If this really is the report for May 17th, 2026, that's (mostly) a good thing, because it means Biden won and we're continuing to fight state by state, measure by measure. (Yes it would be better if we get 50 in the senate and pass a bill protecting reproductive health care, but that's still a long shot [and the courts might reject it which would raise the question of what to do next]).
Because the alternative in two years is that no reproductive health care, including contraception, is legal, and JV is writing this report from an undisclosed location in a foreign country, while readers rely on the dark web or some other way to bypass government censorship to be able to read it. Or a worse scenario. (Unless we've already somehow overthrown and deposed the regime by then.)
(If this comment makes no sense then she's probably fixed the article header).
WOW apparently I need more sleep. Thank you for the heads up! lol
I think the Fast Company link is pointing to the wrong article, too? Unless email is a euphemism I'm not familiar with.
It works for me!
Weird, I think it's maybe taking me to the Fast Company home page? Could be my device, and I found the article easily enough anyways.
Are there particular tech companies consulting with anti-abortion groups when drafting these bills? Right-wing think tanks? I’ve heard about the Human Coalition but who else is behind this?
The 100+ Republican organizations that are working hand-in-hand with the Heritage Foundation to construct Project 2025. Many internet sources collect and sell our data every day. What good is it to have us sign privacy statements when we see a physician, only to have said physician input our data for collection by numerous bad actors who grift that information? What good is HIPPA?