In Winston-Salem North Carolina a fake clinic told me "DO NOT TAKE BIRTH CONTROL BC BREASTFEEDING WOMEN CANNOT GET PREGNANT. " When I did become pregnant they told me i had become pregnant with my current child while I was in my third trimester. I recorded them. They called themselves medical professionals providing accurate medical information. Can I sue them?
Interesting podcast (38 min) re Sex Ed (focusing on abstinence & fear of STDs vs birth control, which per foundation head leads to promiscuity & risky behavior), Hybrid schools that teach “classic education,” a public school experiment in NJ (which proves that $ spent on one on one tutoring kids in disadvantaged areas is worthy).
The latest podcast is interesting, informative. Some disinformation and difference of opinion and provides some insights worthy to be aware of as “it expands.” Didn’t listen to others.
Found while doing a deep dive on United We Pledge after seeing the latest commercial on MSNBC today. Have you seen the vegetable vitamin Balance of Nature commercial that is played multiple times a night? (No I don’t take it. I don’t recommend it either.) Now they are asking for money for their latest project in Utah. Glen Beck is helping with a fundraiser this week. They want your dollars “to save the Republic.”
A different rabbit hole, but the above podcast is interesting because some young ones are going to have sex even if you scare them not to, and excluding birth control information from them just seems crazy to me.
The teen pregnancy rate in the fifties was obscenely high like at 88 per 1,000 women. Today it's only 13 per 1,000. A lot of that is due to birth control. You'd think these people would be celebrating but are instead seething at the fact women are having sex without "consequences" aka babies. It seems they're only concerned with punishing women's sexual behavior using motherhood as their justice system to enact "consequences."
I find it interesting that because most of their work is in disadvantaged areas (which is not a bad thing in & of itself, the academic help is actually helpful & needed), the assumptions about behavior come across as only affecting this class, when in reality humans are humans regarding sex, no matter the caste level. It will be interesting to see the teen #s in a year or 2 in areas where planned parenthood has been closed down & local/state governments do not replace access to care.
It’s also interesting that they don’t at minimum promote condom use for those who don’t follow their advice… since STDs are real. I’m ok with them saying abstinence is 100% efficient to teens, it just seems wise to afford them the knowledge of all birth control as well. Further, there’s an underlying assumption that getting married always equates to having desired babies because they are teaching “birth control leads to risky behavior beyond sex” meanwhile one can get an STD from a partner who had sex prior to marriage. So teaching fear of STDs without teaching how to deal with STDs is not truly Sex Ed.
They don't discuss STD's at all. They barely mention pregnancy results from sex. They don't want people discussing sex at all or it would encourage "bad behavior". They don't seem to care much about the actual impact of these policies since it's only evidence of the consequences they want: people being punished with STDs, poverty and unwanted children.
I haven’t seen the Foundation lady’s Sex Ed curriculum, but listening to her, I inferred it includes STD talking points. Honestly, it sounded similar to what my children reported Re their public sex ed film. I should have gone to the school & watched it. I don’t disagree that some do not discuss, but per the podcast hers seems to.
Jessica, thanks for posting about Tuberville, who I have much disdain for since I spent over 30 years as a military spouse & currently have a Marine son-in-law. This article is informative on the abortion front. There’s also one by another conservative source that I’m looking for to post that explains they are going after any of the mil members up for promotion who publicly espoused DEI. Insane. Infuriating. Awful way to treat our military members and their families, including their children!
Btw, Vote Vets has a petition against Tuberville and in support of the policy. Military is no longer the sure R vote they counted on for many years. They are pawns.
"Pro-choice states are having to proactively protect citizens from anti-abortion states from their own governments." - Yes, this is the same as with free states and slave states before the civil war.
"Many believe the South is a lost cause." - Again, see the civil war.
Send troops into the streets in the South, and this time they don't leave until Reconstruction is finished.
I don’t know how we fix this problem. We can’t force people not to be assholes. This is the result of generations of flawed teaching, celebration of bigotry and racism, etc. We are having this moment in part because of the left’s push for political correctness (which was well meant, but again we cannot force or shame people not to be assholes.) Now the right is beating us with the same stick, ie “We’ll force all kinds of things you don’t want and see how you like it.”
We haven’t solved this problem with bloodshed yet. I know Germany is having its own far-right resurgence, as is most of Europe, but I think Germany is the model for how to handle this here. I have never met a German or someone who was educated in Germany who denied what Hitler did. They are required, starting in elementary school, to take religion (Unitarian as far as I can tell, not endorsing one faith) or if they object to that, ethics classes. They teach how the Nazis rose to power and what they did, and they show how regular Germans aided it by, in many cases, looking the other way.
Teaching Critical Race Theory was a start toward this kind of education here. But I don’t even know if we can educate people to not be assholes. If you’ve never lived in the south, you don’t know how deeply embedded this shit is. I’ll be deprogramming and deconstructing for the rest of my life.
And yes I guess I put most of my hope in generational change. People don't change much, but they die and are replaced by different people. Which is why the conservatives are so worried about the schools I suppose. Except that I'm not sure it's the schools; I think/hope it's the kids that are in them. 🤞
Yes to all of this. And without that personal experience of the South, I can only imagine. I do think it's true that the culture, and I feel like particularly Generation Z, is changing, and I think it's in mostly good ways, and it's made this huge monster crawl out from under the rock where it's always been and show itself in the light. I guess the good thing is the monster is feeling more challenged than it has since the civil war, which probably means we're doing something right. We just absolutely have to hold the middle, or else the German analogy comes true. The worst thing we can do now is anything to drive people away from us to end up on the other side.
New policy: Anyone who voted Republican will no longer be permitted to see a medical doctor. For any health issues which may arise, they will be sent to a minister, pastor, priest, or other religious authority, for treatment. Any doctor treating a Republican, or any person who aids or abets a Republican to receive treatment from a doctor, may be sued by any citizen for damages, as well as face heavy fines, jail time, loss of licenses, etc. Because we want this to be a consensus policy, I think we can all agree to not impose capital punishment on a Republican for seeing a doctor.
This newsletter is very valuable to a lot of people in its current form. I read faster than I listen, and I can grab a pull quote and post it on social media this way. I can also click on embedded links, and read those sources. You can’t do that with a podcast.
A podcast also requires that I not do anything else while I listen, or I’ll miss something.
Wow. What a read! Thanks for posting! This, along with the article about the Corpus Christie anti abortion “clinic” near the Univ. really provides insight as to where so many states are headed. And I think of VA/NC/SC/WV/GA every time I read these articles because I’m in SE VA. There’s so much to unpack, but a few things stand out.
1) clinic/organization name changes. These anti groups change names often it seems.
2) some women who had abortions become so determined from preventing others to, often based on religious “born again” principles. Like they are trying to make up for their “perceived sin” versus except their choice & be grateful for the life they got to lead because of it.
3) state contracts, state oversight & mainly lack of often determined by who one knows, not experience one has.
4) grants, especially federal!! This is an area that really needs watched, dissected, reported on… in every state.
5) brilliant article, written & researched very well. Although, from 2019, still very pertinent to today. There was so much chaos during T Pres. There will continue to be chaos during the R Presidential primary & the many lawsuits to come regarding J6, classified documents, state “alternate, aka fake elector” scheme, Dominion, Smartmatic. The msm coverage drowns out & leaves little to no room for this type of important info. “Local” newspapers are being purchased by conglomerates that are decreasing local news coverage.
6) the future of abortion care truly needs the public educated about “consequences” of relying on religious, non medical, decision makers taking over women’s health.
I can definitely confirm this happens. I gave abortion related testimony during MT‘s past legislative session and there was a woman who after hearing my testimony wanted to talk to me because she was a “safe person” to confide in. I pass on the offer and later learned that she had had her own abortion and deeply regretted it. I was absolutely floored that she was trying to get me to ride the guilt train with her.
I don't understand this doublethink fundamentalists have about contraception and so-called "traditional values" as much as they rant about out-of-wedlock births. Do they think forcing women to give birth out-of-wedlock by banning contraception is somehow helping their cause? Or is this solely about using children as a justice system to punish sexual behavior? Clearly this is about the latter.
Far-right Christians need broken lives to feed their system. Yes, it’s about punishing all women because Eve and putting women “in their rightful place.” (Their words, not mine.) But they desperately need broken lives for what they’re selling.
Laura, they don’t believe women should be having sex at all outside of marriage. Lack of contraception and abortion is simply a way to scare women into celibacy.
That’s how it was in years past, prior to the Griswold & Eisenstadt decisions. It didn’t work back then, either, on all women, but enough so they could single out the women who got “caught” by getting pregnant as dirty, dirty sluts - and enough so that teens who got pregnant could be coerced into going to live at a maternity home, and into giving up their child. Otherwise, they would not be able to finish school (if it was known you were pregnant, you were kicked out of public school), would be the town pariah, and would never, ever find a “good husband.” Which, of course, was the only way for most women to access enough financial support to exist.
I have an older sister who turned 71 this past spring. In February of 1968, she got pregnant at the age of 15 by her then 21 or 22 year old boyfriend. We were a middle class white family living in the suburbs of Boston. Because tent dresses were in that year, she managed to hide the pregnancy until school let out at the end of June. My parents were utterly mortified. My father took her boyfriend out to talk. (And here is where things get muddy. According to my sister, he told the boyfriend that he *would* be marrying my sister, toot suite. According to my mother, the boyfriend was told that he should only marry her if he truly loved her; that my parents would manage things if he didn’t. Being 10 at the time, I wasn’t aware of all these details back then.)
In any event, they got married, because if you were not sent away to see your fictional aunt, that’s what nice white middle class pregnant teenagers did then. They “eloped,” which means they drove to a state where she could legally marry at 16, since she’d passed her birthday by then. My mother told everyone that they’d eloped on February 10. The baby was due nine months and 5 days later, on November 15. (Even at 10, I could count, so I knew there was something very fishy going on. My sister clued me in.) Everyone in town pretended this was true, and all perfectly normal.
She had the baby on November 15, and promptly got pregnant again, because she didn’t know Jack about birth control. The kids were 13 months apart. She had a very sever post partum depression after the second baby, but no one knew what that was back then, and there was a huge split between my sister and my mom as a result that took a long time to heal.
This is what the right wing wants us to return to - forced birth, force marriages, shame, fear, truncated opportunities for women. My sister has a genius level IQ. She eventually earned her GED, but was never able to get further education, or build a career. Fortunately for her, she loves being a mom and grandmother. Surprisingly, she and her husband are still married. But there were a lot of times that it was very, very hard.
Quite a story. Times sure have changed. No doubt they want to go back to those days but they are evidently unaware this isn't the fifties anymore. Women who have unintended pregnancies are much more likely to be adults and not teens parents can force into maternity homes or to marry. They're extremely unlikely to either give up their babies or marry. 50% of babies are born out-of-wedlock in Latin America and the OECD (excluding Asia). The only thing this will accomplish is speed up the final demise of the institution of marriage. That's been the outcome in Latin America thus far as a result of draconian abortion laws and anti-contraception.
Oh, I don’t disagree - 60% of women having abortions are already parents.
But if the right is able to impair access to contraception, that may change. A 27 year old pregnant single woman might decide to keep her baby, because she has an income of her own. Teens will be in a different situation. BTW, my sister was pregnant in 1968, not the fifties. The time when we had few rights isn’t as far in the past as most people think. It wasn’t until 1974 that we could get credit in our own names, and the last state criminalized marital rape only in the 90s.
But as I’ve noted elsewhere, limiting women’s access to contraception and abortion will have a very chilling impact on our careers. A company isn’t going to invest in the career development of women on managerial, executive, or even professional tracks if they can be trapped into pregnancy every couple of years by any passing sperm. The disruption to their business is too great if women need frequent maternity leave. They’ll hire just enough women to stay on the right side of the law, and the glass ceiling will turn to iron. Without the right to determine if, and when, and how many time we reproduce, the rest of our rights are moot - they become theoretical.
Agreed. They know our rights are determined by our ability to control our reproduction which is why it's #1 on their list. I think as long as women have control over property, we won't go back. In Latin America where abortion and contraception have been banned or severely limited for a long time, women still made strides. They still have a long way to go but they're still a long ways ahead of where they were.
Women and girls died as well. I'll be 71 in October this year. In 7th grade (1964-65) a girl I knew well simply disappeared from junior high school one day. After a while, the news leaked back: she had gotten pregnant and her mom had driven her to Tijuana for an illegal abortion. No happy ending: she died. A few weeks afterwards a group of faculty lowered the school flag to half-mast in her memory. The school custodian was sent out about 15 minutes later to shoo those brave teachers away and deal with the flag. Yes, this 13-year-old girl was well-liked by pretty much everybody in that working class school. Arlene! Presente!
Oh, I know my sister was *very* lucky in some ways. Too many women and girls did die, or were rendered sterile by back alley abortions. I shared my sister’s story because, while everyone knows that women died, we rarely talk about the other outcomes, and how, in even the “best” of situations, that lack of contraception and abortion access is soul crushing and life altering for women.
Our suffering seems not to register. I wish they could do brain studies to better understand why sexism seems so hard-wired into our species. I have been listening to 'The Retrievals,' which tells the stories of women who underwent the torturous egg retrieval process at the Yale reproductive medicine clinic without pain relief. The fentanyl that they should have been given had been stolen and replaced with saline. The fact that their pain was so utterly dismissed is heartbreaking.
I was surprised when the Dallas Morning News printed another of my letters to the editor (two so far) in response to an essay they published from a regular contributor (an Anglican) challenging those who did the ‘hard work” of banning abortion to continue the ‘hard work’ of actually providing support for children and families. Hold up, I said.
You left out the hard truth that there is no basis for your being against abortion in the first place. And you’re deluded if you think the state of Texas is going to do anything of the sort--they are
slapping themselves on the back about expanding post-partum Medicaid for only one year.
I’m going to continue to beat the drum that the anti-abortion movement’s rationale for being against abortion is based on nothing (but suppression of women). And if they want to oppose emergency contraception, someone needs to ask them why they’re not reducing those ‘post conception unborn babies’ that wash down the
In Winston-Salem North Carolina a fake clinic told me "DO NOT TAKE BIRTH CONTROL BC BREASTFEEDING WOMEN CANNOT GET PREGNANT. " When I did become pregnant they told me i had become pregnant with my current child while I was in my third trimester. I recorded them. They called themselves medical professionals providing accurate medical information. Can I sue them?
Interesting podcast (38 min) re Sex Ed (focusing on abstinence & fear of STDs vs birth control, which per foundation head leads to promiscuity & risky behavior), Hybrid schools that teach “classic education,” a public school experiment in NJ (which proves that $ spent on one on one tutoring kids in disadvantaged areas is worthy).
https://unitedwepledge.org/podcast/
The latest podcast is interesting, informative. Some disinformation and difference of opinion and provides some insights worthy to be aware of as “it expands.” Didn’t listen to others.
Found while doing a deep dive on United We Pledge after seeing the latest commercial on MSNBC today. Have you seen the vegetable vitamin Balance of Nature commercial that is played multiple times a night? (No I don’t take it. I don’t recommend it either.) Now they are asking for money for their latest project in Utah. Glen Beck is helping with a fundraiser this week. They want your dollars “to save the Republic.”
A different rabbit hole, but the above podcast is interesting because some young ones are going to have sex even if you scare them not to, and excluding birth control information from them just seems crazy to me.
The teen pregnancy rate in the fifties was obscenely high like at 88 per 1,000 women. Today it's only 13 per 1,000. A lot of that is due to birth control. You'd think these people would be celebrating but are instead seething at the fact women are having sex without "consequences" aka babies. It seems they're only concerned with punishing women's sexual behavior using motherhood as their justice system to enact "consequences."
I find it interesting that because most of their work is in disadvantaged areas (which is not a bad thing in & of itself, the academic help is actually helpful & needed), the assumptions about behavior come across as only affecting this class, when in reality humans are humans regarding sex, no matter the caste level. It will be interesting to see the teen #s in a year or 2 in areas where planned parenthood has been closed down & local/state governments do not replace access to care.
It’s also interesting that they don’t at minimum promote condom use for those who don’t follow their advice… since STDs are real. I’m ok with them saying abstinence is 100% efficient to teens, it just seems wise to afford them the knowledge of all birth control as well. Further, there’s an underlying assumption that getting married always equates to having desired babies because they are teaching “birth control leads to risky behavior beyond sex” meanwhile one can get an STD from a partner who had sex prior to marriage. So teaching fear of STDs without teaching how to deal with STDs is not truly Sex Ed.
They don't discuss STD's at all. They barely mention pregnancy results from sex. They don't want people discussing sex at all or it would encourage "bad behavior". They don't seem to care much about the actual impact of these policies since it's only evidence of the consequences they want: people being punished with STDs, poverty and unwanted children.
I haven’t seen the Foundation lady’s Sex Ed curriculum, but listening to her, I inferred it includes STD talking points. Honestly, it sounded similar to what my children reported Re their public sex ed film. I should have gone to the school & watched it. I don’t disagree that some do not discuss, but per the podcast hers seems to.
That would be unusual since it seems conservatives are resistant to teaching about anything about sex.
Jessica, thanks for posting about Tuberville, who I have much disdain for since I spent over 30 years as a military spouse & currently have a Marine son-in-law. This article is informative on the abortion front. There’s also one by another conservative source that I’m looking for to post that explains they are going after any of the mil members up for promotion who publicly espoused DEI. Insane. Infuriating. Awful way to treat our military members and their families, including their children!
https://www.al.com/news/2023/05/conservative-group-to-install-billboards-in-alabama-thanking-tuberville-for-abortion-stance.html?outputType=amp
Will Thibeau (Heritage employee) article in The American Conservative is the other article.
Heritage & Federalists dark money funding multi pronged anti abortion, anti LGBTQ, wrapped up as anti woke campaigns.
Btw, Vote Vets has a petition against Tuberville and in support of the policy. Military is no longer the sure R vote they counted on for many years. They are pawns.
"Pro-choice states are having to proactively protect citizens from anti-abortion states from their own governments." - Yes, this is the same as with free states and slave states before the civil war.
"Many believe the South is a lost cause." - Again, see the civil war.
Send troops into the streets in the South, and this time they don't leave until Reconstruction is finished.
I don’t know how we fix this problem. We can’t force people not to be assholes. This is the result of generations of flawed teaching, celebration of bigotry and racism, etc. We are having this moment in part because of the left’s push for political correctness (which was well meant, but again we cannot force or shame people not to be assholes.) Now the right is beating us with the same stick, ie “We’ll force all kinds of things you don’t want and see how you like it.”
We haven’t solved this problem with bloodshed yet. I know Germany is having its own far-right resurgence, as is most of Europe, but I think Germany is the model for how to handle this here. I have never met a German or someone who was educated in Germany who denied what Hitler did. They are required, starting in elementary school, to take religion (Unitarian as far as I can tell, not endorsing one faith) or if they object to that, ethics classes. They teach how the Nazis rose to power and what they did, and they show how regular Germans aided it by, in many cases, looking the other way.
Teaching Critical Race Theory was a start toward this kind of education here. But I don’t even know if we can educate people to not be assholes. If you’ve never lived in the south, you don’t know how deeply embedded this shit is. I’ll be deprogramming and deconstructing for the rest of my life.
And yes I guess I put most of my hope in generational change. People don't change much, but they die and are replaced by different people. Which is why the conservatives are so worried about the schools I suppose. Except that I'm not sure it's the schools; I think/hope it's the kids that are in them. 🤞
Yes to all of this. And without that personal experience of the South, I can only imagine. I do think it's true that the culture, and I feel like particularly Generation Z, is changing, and I think it's in mostly good ways, and it's made this huge monster crawl out from under the rock where it's always been and show itself in the light. I guess the good thing is the monster is feeling more challenged than it has since the civil war, which probably means we're doing something right. We just absolutely have to hold the middle, or else the German analogy comes true. The worst thing we can do now is anything to drive people away from us to end up on the other side.
New policy: Anyone who voted Republican will no longer be permitted to see a medical doctor. For any health issues which may arise, they will be sent to a minister, pastor, priest, or other religious authority, for treatment. Any doctor treating a Republican, or any person who aids or abets a Republican to receive treatment from a doctor, may be sued by any citizen for damages, as well as face heavy fines, jail time, loss of licenses, etc. Because we want this to be a consensus policy, I think we can all agree to not impose capital punishment on a Republican for seeing a doctor.
side note why not make it an actual podcast?
edit: I didn't mean instead of the newsletter, i meant in addition. putting the podcast on a pod platform, maybe getting sponsorship, etc...
This newsletter is very valuable to a lot of people in its current form. I read faster than I listen, and I can grab a pull quote and post it on social media this way. I can also click on embedded links, and read those sources. You can’t do that with a podcast.
A podcast also requires that I not do anything else while I listen, or I’ll miss something.
My state, Texas, is another that waste precious tax dollars on those bogus CPCs. Texas kicked Planned Parenthood out of the Medicaid program and replaced it with a ineffectual program. https://www.texasobserver.org/inside-texas-failed-experiment-to-replace-planned-parenthood-with-an-anti-abortion-group/
Wow. What a read! Thanks for posting! This, along with the article about the Corpus Christie anti abortion “clinic” near the Univ. really provides insight as to where so many states are headed. And I think of VA/NC/SC/WV/GA every time I read these articles because I’m in SE VA. There’s so much to unpack, but a few things stand out.
1) clinic/organization name changes. These anti groups change names often it seems.
2) some women who had abortions become so determined from preventing others to, often based on religious “born again” principles. Like they are trying to make up for their “perceived sin” versus except their choice & be grateful for the life they got to lead because of it.
3) state contracts, state oversight & mainly lack of often determined by who one knows, not experience one has.
4) grants, especially federal!! This is an area that really needs watched, dissected, reported on… in every state.
5) brilliant article, written & researched very well. Although, from 2019, still very pertinent to today. There was so much chaos during T Pres. There will continue to be chaos during the R Presidential primary & the many lawsuits to come regarding J6, classified documents, state “alternate, aka fake elector” scheme, Dominion, Smartmatic. The msm coverage drowns out & leaves little to no room for this type of important info. “Local” newspapers are being purchased by conglomerates that are decreasing local news coverage.
6) the future of abortion care truly needs the public educated about “consequences” of relying on religious, non medical, decision makers taking over women’s health.
"some women who had abortions become so determined from preventing others to, often based on religious “born again” principles"
This confounds me. Such extraordinary hypocrisy. And a lot of ex-clinic workers do this too.
I can definitely confirm this happens. I gave abortion related testimony during MT‘s past legislative session and there was a woman who after hearing my testimony wanted to talk to me because she was a “safe person” to confide in. I pass on the offer and later learned that she had had her own abortion and deeply regretted it. I was absolutely floored that she was trying to get me to ride the guilt train with her.
After telling your TFMR testimony on top of that? Outrageous!
This kind of crap makes me want to scream.
“"If we bring [a woman with an unwanted pregnancy] to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, we’re saving two lives,” she said in a 2009 interview."
The creepy Christian cult stuff at these places really pisses me off.
Ugh.
That program was discontinued but now we have these kind of places. https://wapo.st/3pqk7gN
Thanks for posting. Are there any privacy laws that these centers have to follow, since they are not medical facilities?
Evidently not going by everything I've read about them.
That is a huge issue with very negative long term consequences for many who step foot in there.
Especially when they can be reported in anti-abortion states.
I don't understand this doublethink fundamentalists have about contraception and so-called "traditional values" as much as they rant about out-of-wedlock births. Do they think forcing women to give birth out-of-wedlock by banning contraception is somehow helping their cause? Or is this solely about using children as a justice system to punish sexual behavior? Clearly this is about the latter.
If women have sex out of wedlock, they have to be punished. Men can’t help themselves, bless their little hearts.
Far-right Christians need broken lives to feed their system. Yes, it’s about punishing all women because Eve and putting women “in their rightful place.” (Their words, not mine.) But they desperately need broken lives for what they’re selling.
YES. THIS.
It why I say it's using motherhood as a justice system.
Laura, they don’t believe women should be having sex at all outside of marriage. Lack of contraception and abortion is simply a way to scare women into celibacy.
That’s how it was in years past, prior to the Griswold & Eisenstadt decisions. It didn’t work back then, either, on all women, but enough so they could single out the women who got “caught” by getting pregnant as dirty, dirty sluts - and enough so that teens who got pregnant could be coerced into going to live at a maternity home, and into giving up their child. Otherwise, they would not be able to finish school (if it was known you were pregnant, you were kicked out of public school), would be the town pariah, and would never, ever find a “good husband.” Which, of course, was the only way for most women to access enough financial support to exist.
I have an older sister who turned 71 this past spring. In February of 1968, she got pregnant at the age of 15 by her then 21 or 22 year old boyfriend. We were a middle class white family living in the suburbs of Boston. Because tent dresses were in that year, she managed to hide the pregnancy until school let out at the end of June. My parents were utterly mortified. My father took her boyfriend out to talk. (And here is where things get muddy. According to my sister, he told the boyfriend that he *would* be marrying my sister, toot suite. According to my mother, the boyfriend was told that he should only marry her if he truly loved her; that my parents would manage things if he didn’t. Being 10 at the time, I wasn’t aware of all these details back then.)
In any event, they got married, because if you were not sent away to see your fictional aunt, that’s what nice white middle class pregnant teenagers did then. They “eloped,” which means they drove to a state where she could legally marry at 16, since she’d passed her birthday by then. My mother told everyone that they’d eloped on February 10. The baby was due nine months and 5 days later, on November 15. (Even at 10, I could count, so I knew there was something very fishy going on. My sister clued me in.) Everyone in town pretended this was true, and all perfectly normal.
She had the baby on November 15, and promptly got pregnant again, because she didn’t know Jack about birth control. The kids were 13 months apart. She had a very sever post partum depression after the second baby, but no one knew what that was back then, and there was a huge split between my sister and my mom as a result that took a long time to heal.
This is what the right wing wants us to return to - forced birth, force marriages, shame, fear, truncated opportunities for women. My sister has a genius level IQ. She eventually earned her GED, but was never able to get further education, or build a career. Fortunately for her, she loves being a mom and grandmother. Surprisingly, she and her husband are still married. But there were a lot of times that it was very, very hard.
Quite a story. Times sure have changed. No doubt they want to go back to those days but they are evidently unaware this isn't the fifties anymore. Women who have unintended pregnancies are much more likely to be adults and not teens parents can force into maternity homes or to marry. They're extremely unlikely to either give up their babies or marry. 50% of babies are born out-of-wedlock in Latin America and the OECD (excluding Asia). The only thing this will accomplish is speed up the final demise of the institution of marriage. That's been the outcome in Latin America thus far as a result of draconian abortion laws and anti-contraception.
Oh, I don’t disagree - 60% of women having abortions are already parents.
But if the right is able to impair access to contraception, that may change. A 27 year old pregnant single woman might decide to keep her baby, because she has an income of her own. Teens will be in a different situation. BTW, my sister was pregnant in 1968, not the fifties. The time when we had few rights isn’t as far in the past as most people think. It wasn’t until 1974 that we could get credit in our own names, and the last state criminalized marital rape only in the 90s.
But as I’ve noted elsewhere, limiting women’s access to contraception and abortion will have a very chilling impact on our careers. A company isn’t going to invest in the career development of women on managerial, executive, or even professional tracks if they can be trapped into pregnancy every couple of years by any passing sperm. The disruption to their business is too great if women need frequent maternity leave. They’ll hire just enough women to stay on the right side of the law, and the glass ceiling will turn to iron. Without the right to determine if, and when, and how many time we reproduce, the rest of our rights are moot - they become theoretical.
Agreed. They know our rights are determined by our ability to control our reproduction which is why it's #1 on their list. I think as long as women have control over property, we won't go back. In Latin America where abortion and contraception have been banned or severely limited for a long time, women still made strides. They still have a long way to go but they're still a long ways ahead of where they were.
Women and girls died as well. I'll be 71 in October this year. In 7th grade (1964-65) a girl I knew well simply disappeared from junior high school one day. After a while, the news leaked back: she had gotten pregnant and her mom had driven her to Tijuana for an illegal abortion. No happy ending: she died. A few weeks afterwards a group of faculty lowered the school flag to half-mast in her memory. The school custodian was sent out about 15 minutes later to shoo those brave teachers away and deal with the flag. Yes, this 13-year-old girl was well-liked by pretty much everybody in that working class school. Arlene! Presente!
So very sad. It seems probable that she had been assaulted.
I honestly did not know then, and do not know to this day. I started crying as I wrote my comment--more than 58 years after the incident.
💔
Oh, I know my sister was *very* lucky in some ways. Too many women and girls did die, or were rendered sterile by back alley abortions. I shared my sister’s story because, while everyone knows that women died, we rarely talk about the other outcomes, and how, in even the “best” of situations, that lack of contraception and abortion access is soul crushing and life altering for women.
Just hard to believe it's come to this in 2023. The suffering these laws have put women through is just appalling.
Our suffering seems not to register. I wish they could do brain studies to better understand why sexism seems so hard-wired into our species. I have been listening to 'The Retrievals,' which tells the stories of women who underwent the torturous egg retrieval process at the Yale reproductive medicine clinic without pain relief. The fentanyl that they should have been given had been stolen and replaced with saline. The fact that their pain was so utterly dismissed is heartbreaking.
That's horrible! Wow! And the gaslighting on top of that!
Yep!
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/podcasts/serial-the-retrievals-yale-fertility-clinic.html
Sadly that's the point.
I was surprised when the Dallas Morning News printed another of my letters to the editor (two so far) in response to an essay they published from a regular contributor (an Anglican) challenging those who did the ‘hard work” of banning abortion to continue the ‘hard work’ of actually providing support for children and families. Hold up, I said.
You left out the hard truth that there is no basis for your being against abortion in the first place. And you’re deluded if you think the state of Texas is going to do anything of the sort--they are
slapping themselves on the back about expanding post-partum Medicaid for only one year.
I’m going to continue to beat the drum that the anti-abortion movement’s rationale for being against abortion is based on nothing (but suppression of women). And if they want to oppose emergency contraception, someone needs to ask them why they’re not reducing those ‘post conception unborn babies’ that wash down the
drains all day every day.
That should be ‘rescuing,’ not ‘reducing.’ Bad thumb work.
Our country has become an insane asylum, and the inmates are currently running the show.