She's only doing them for the weekly now. Her work load was getting to be too much and it takes a couple hours a day to do the audio. She wants to be able to write more articles. She put up a survey a few weeks ago about it asking everyone if she should keep doing the audio and every one said to ease up on her workload.
I wanted to quickly share something that may be of interest in connection with the legal history work mentioned above. In May, colleagues and I published a short piece in the Washington Post about of the concept of fetal personhood in the eighteenth-century, and the treatment of pregnant women within the criminal justice system more broadly. We talk specifically about Dobbs and Alito’s misuse of historical sources. I believe it has now been de-paywalled: https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2023/05/17/like-today-18th-century-laws-about-pregnancy-aimed-control-women/
Excellent article. Interesting history. I've been interested in this history particularly in regard to coverture which it seems conservatives are hell bent on reviving. They can't make women legally invisible through their husbands anymore so they're trying to do it by making their uteruses public property of the state. You might find this article interesting in regard to fetal personhood and English common law.
State Abortion Bans: Pregnancy as a New Form of Coverture
Thanks so much for the link--I will have to look up more of Morrison's work! It's interesting (and, like, infuriating, obviously) to think about the arguments made here together with cases where we've seen women who aren't even pregnant targeted by child endangerment laws...
It seems to be the only article I've found of hers. Really interesting stuff. I hope she writes more. And yes it is beyond infuriating that women's bodies are little more than vessels for so-called "wards of the state!" It's literally slavery! Because if fetuses are people, the state is making the claim the pregnant are their chattel. How was slavery perpetuated for another century after the transatlantic slave trade ended if not for Black women's reproductive enslavement? Why are fetuses literally the only people who are entitled to the ownership of other people's bodies? I hope you ladies expand some more on what Morrison wrote because this stuff is really good and may get us out of this in the end!
And if you're interested here's another excellent article. I think this combined with yours and Morrison's would be a slam dunk.
Abortion and authoritarianism: Why women's freedom threatens male supremacy
The notion that men are superior to women is the root of all human inequality. That's why we must fight it
I live in Fairborn, Oh. I voted today. I have a really good feeling this will be voted down. As a taxpayer, I'm mad all this expense was taken for one stupid measure.
The anti-abortion attacks on President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is not surprising. They have a gross obsession with punishing anything related to sex.
When people vote on abortion, we win. Always. The problem has always been when they vote on other things. We'll see what happens next year. Abortion and January 6th are our strongest issues, by far. If they make the election about something else, who knows.
“These future losses to Missouri from loss of population due to abortion are both absolutely certain (fewer citizens definitely means fewer future taxpayers and laborers) and potentially generational and infinite.”
So this clearly admits that these people desire a permanent underclass of poor, uneducated workers to support late stage capitalism. Well, at least they have quit lying about it.
A certain percentage of the population has antisocial personality disorder. 🤷. Idk, I don't understand how people can be so callous either. Although it never surprises me anymore.
Of course. They're also interested in maintaining a permanent underclass of workers with severe disabilities, who can be paid sub-minimum or no wages. (My brother, who was born very prematurely and suffered trauma during delivery and in the days after his birth, was one of those sub-minimum wage workers. Many of them are employed by very profitable companies and have few or no on-the-job protections--no sick leave, no vacations, no medical care, no recourse if they get injured on the job, etc etc. The more kids you have being born with congenital disabilities, the more cases like my brother's exploitation will happen. And just BTW, this exploitation--legally allowed--drags down wages, benefits, job protections, union organizing rights and so on for *everyone*. Which makes abortion rights a disability-rights issue as well.)
True. But of course the other part of the equation is the government support required for people with disabilities, which is expensive and growing. It's all bizarrely flawed logic on the part of those who support this exploitation.
"Required" support for people with disabilities is often not. I don't know any state where such support is straightforward to get (ie, takes less than a couple of years after initial application). It's mostly very restrictive, and not nearly enough to keep people above the poverty line. Sure, if you have a disability, you can apply for other state or federal aid for the poor (food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, and the like), but the paperwork is completely insane to keep up with and lots of people fall through the cracks. I live in California, where support for people with disabilities is, er, relatively generous, but people here regularly end up unable to pay for normal needs like housing, utilities, food, and so on. That plus the regular shaming and outright accusations that one is lying about being disabled. I know. That's been me. It's worse--much worse--in many other states. So, even though feds have weak sort-of-requirements for people with disabilities to be financially supported, the states often don't. The federal gov't puts very strict limits on what assets you can have, and if you work, for every dollar you make on the job, your disability gets docked a dollar. Instead you get people like my brother exploited as workers, and it's assumed they brought their disabilities on themselves. At almost 71, the whole thing just makes me tired to think about.
Yes, this is all true. I was only pointing out that as meager as the safety net is, it still seems to be a significant budget item for governments. I suppose those who have enough work credits to get significant Social Security disability benefits, as opposed to those who were more or less always disabled and rely on SSI and Medicaid, account for more of the costs. And a lot of it is probably health care expenditures. I've seen how much my clomipramine costs the government, and that's a generic drug that's been around forever. But yes, most still need other support besides the benefits, and yes you have to make sure that doesn't count against the benefits.
To the original point, about societies as a whole, I would say that because resources are finite, wealth can only be maximized (regardless of how it is distributed) by maximizing efficiency. The trick is figuring out what's most efficient and how to get there. In the cases in which economic arguments aren't about plain old greed and self-interest, they tend to be about this. For example I don't think high levels of inequality tend to lead to efficiency, but then I don't think if everyone was exactly equal that would be the most efficient either.
But one thing I am pretty confident in saying, from personal experience, is that being disabled is not efficient. I would say that I am rather very inefficient. And so it can't possibly be a good thing for a society to have more disabled people. And likewise in a broader sense I don't think it can be good to have a large permanent class of the poor and uneducated, to the point at the beginning of this thread. And so the claim that anti-abortion is trying to make about total population being the only thing that matters is quite daft.
Even Social Security benefits for the disabled with a work history are far from generous.
As you know, I have Multiple Sclerosis. I had to go on disability at 52, when I was making a low six figure salary, plus bonus. My disability application went through the first time, and quite a bit faster than most, because my company insisted that I apply through Allsup, a company that handles these applications. They insisted on this because I also had private disability insurance through my employer. That private insurance, which they claim will pay 50 or 60% of your salary? Well. It turns out that’s not really true. They are allowed to deduct any payments you get from Social Security from what they owe you. So when your Social Security application is approved, they get to keep that lump sum of back payments you are due as payback for what they have paid to Allsup, and for the benefits they paid you. And they stop those payments when you turn 65. Depending on your age and your disability, you have to go through the recertification process every X years. Because I was older, and even the government recognizes that it’s a permanent condition, I had to recertify after 7 years. (I had to recertify for the private disability insurance every year.)
Social Security Disability itself doesn’t pay much. I lose my private disability in September when I turn 65. While I get more from Social Security than most, it’s still only about $2200/month. I don’t qualify for Medicaid because I own my home, so in addition to having the cost of Medicare deducted from my SSDI payment, I also have to buy a supplemental insurance policy, because Medicare itself covers damned little. I also have to purchase a prescription policy. The cost of all that insurance, plus my small mortgage (way less than I’d pay for rent) eats up all of my SSDI payment.
My cat may have to get used to sharing his food with me. If you have any savings at all, or own any assets, you have to sell them and spend down all of it before you qualify for any other assistance. The government doesn’t take into account the life you’ve established for yourself over decades of work - if you are disabled, you must remain dirt poor. If I was able to work a consistent part time job, I’d lose a dollar for every two dollars I earned.
There’s something about that which doesn’t sit particularly well with me. I understand the government doesn’t want to support the wealthy with taxpayer funds, but I wasn’t wealthy, I was comfortably middle class.
I have a disabled son who was disabled too young to have an established work history, so he only receives SSI, which is less than $800/month. He does get Medicaid. But if I send him money for a birthday present, he loses his coverage. If at anytime he has over $2,000, he loses coverage.
Yes, I definitely wouldn't argue that disability benefits in this country are good. I think if your son lives with you and pays you a certain amount per month for what they call room and board, he's considered his own household and not to be getting any support from you, even though the room and board required is much much much less than a market rate, and his benefits should remain intact. That's how it works for me, at least, and they've never asked me to itemize expenses or anything. But yes I agree with your last sentence and it's a problem with benefits in this country that there's no ladder out because you lose them if you have anything at all.
The original point was just the cold economic fact that the disabled produce fewer goods and services than they consume, and that this applies to other groups of people too, so that it can't possibly be true that increasing the population necessarily makes a society better off, especially when you achieve that increase by forcing people to have children they don't want to have. It was a rebuttal to that argument in Missouri about the supposed "costs" of abortion.
They will try to make any and every argument for being anti-abortion, but none of them hold up under examination, so it always comes back to wanting to control women. I guess the question is to what extent we ought to be demonstrating that by discrediting their other arguments, versus to what extent that's a distraction. When we assert that they are misogynist theocrat totalitarians, do we need to provide the evidence for that claim, so as not to be accused of name calling? 🤷
Social Security Disability payments currently constitute 2% of the federal budget. (https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-security-disability-insurance). I was listening to a program where they described a study where conservatives were asked what percent of the federal budget they thought should go to welfare. The answers ranged from 10-25%. After learning how small the actual amount is, they increased their support for social spending measurably.
Yes, I suppose it depends if one counts Social Security and Medicare for retirees as welfare. I would say it should, but the word 'welfare' has such a negative connotation in this country. By that standard most of the budget is three things: 'welfare', military, and interest payments.
I feel so fortunate to be a veteran. Can't imagine going through this process as a civilian. But it's messed up that our government is basically based off of star ship troopers where you have to go to war to get basic citizenship rights.
Preach it! You do know, of course, that those of us non-veterans with disabilities who are on Medicaid are really envious of veterans with VA healthcare. Every time I hear about "Medicare for All" I mentally amend that to "VA-style healthcare for all." Minus the privatization--which (at least here in Calif) we went through more than a decade ago. It's all a mess, to say the least.
I’m on Medicare, and disabled. Medicare covers hospitalization, and that’s about it. Medicaid covers considerably more, including some dental, IIIRC.
If you have Medicare, you have to purchase a supplemental insurance policy, plus a prescription policy to have actual coverage - and then the copays for prescriptions, if you’re disabled like I am, are a huge cost on their own. I’m paying about 50% of my SSDI to cover insurance and prescription copays. Medicare for all is really not remotely good enough.
Yeah. It's hard to put that in a sound bite, but yeah. And I don't even think the numbers could make sense. An underclass of poor, uneducated workers is a net drain on a society and its economy, not a net benefit. There's more to economic success than cheap labor, a lot more. The wealthiest may imagine it benefits them (so long as they can stay cordoned off in their castles), but for the vast vast majority of conservatives it does not. Some of them even realized it, for a while at least. In the early days Trump's populist economics were not aligned with the interests of the top 1%. Of course like everything else about Trump that was a fraud.
They just want to reinstate a gender-segregated society where women have no choice but to compete with each other for the "prize" of devoting our lives to serving men sexually, domestically, and reproductively. If they really cared about population growth, giving birth would be free and parenthood would be compensated as any other necessary job.
Exactly. Everything else they say is just a cover for that. Whether they want that for its own sake or because they believe it was ordained by "God" shouldn't really matter.
is Jessica not recording anymore? or is something wrong with my subscription?
She's only doing them for the weekly now. Her work load was getting to be too much and it takes a couple hours a day to do the audio. She wants to be able to write more articles. She put up a survey a few weeks ago about it asking everyone if she should keep doing the audio and every one said to ease up on her workload.
I wanted to quickly share something that may be of interest in connection with the legal history work mentioned above. In May, colleagues and I published a short piece in the Washington Post about of the concept of fetal personhood in the eighteenth-century, and the treatment of pregnant women within the criminal justice system more broadly. We talk specifically about Dobbs and Alito’s misuse of historical sources. I believe it has now been de-paywalled: https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2023/05/17/like-today-18th-century-laws-about-pregnancy-aimed-control-women/
Also: CONGRATULATIONS OHIO!!!!!
Excellent article. Interesting history. I've been interested in this history particularly in regard to coverture which it seems conservatives are hell bent on reviving. They can't make women legally invisible through their husbands anymore so they're trying to do it by making their uteruses public property of the state. You might find this article interesting in regard to fetal personhood and English common law.
State Abortion Bans: Pregnancy as a New Form of Coverture
https://virginialawreview.org/articles/state-abortion-bans-pregnancy-as-a-new-form-of-coverture/
Thanks so much for the link--I will have to look up more of Morrison's work! It's interesting (and, like, infuriating, obviously) to think about the arguments made here together with cases where we've seen women who aren't even pregnant targeted by child endangerment laws...
PS - I'm so glad you found our piece interesting!
It seems to be the only article I've found of hers. Really interesting stuff. I hope she writes more. And yes it is beyond infuriating that women's bodies are little more than vessels for so-called "wards of the state!" It's literally slavery! Because if fetuses are people, the state is making the claim the pregnant are their chattel. How was slavery perpetuated for another century after the transatlantic slave trade ended if not for Black women's reproductive enslavement? Why are fetuses literally the only people who are entitled to the ownership of other people's bodies? I hope you ladies expand some more on what Morrison wrote because this stuff is really good and may get us out of this in the end!
And if you're interested here's another excellent article. I think this combined with yours and Morrison's would be a slam dunk.
Abortion and authoritarianism: Why women's freedom threatens male supremacy
The notion that men are superior to women is the root of all human inequality. That's why we must fight it
https://www.salon.com/2022/10/23/abortion-and-authoritarianism-why-womens-freedom-threatens-male-supremacy/
57% said No to Issue 1!!! Woohoo! ♥️
In the immortal words of Drew Carey from the Drew Carey Show “OHIO!!!!!!” 🥰
Woo ho!
Returns in Ohio look terrific so far for the pro democracy / anti gop side.
I live in Fairborn, Oh. I voted today. I have a really good feeling this will be voted down. As a taxpayer, I'm mad all this expense was taken for one stupid measure.
Yes, and I bet a lot of Ohioans feel that way. It's bad politics for Republicans even beyond the issue of reproductive rights.
These "conservatives" want a Christian theocracy. Nothing more and nothing less.
Yep. They are the Christian Taliban.
A line I like is to say that I miss when Republicans wanted to fight the Taliban, rather than imitate them.
The anti-abortion attacks on President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) is not surprising. They have a gross obsession with punishing anything related to sex.
When people vote on abortion, we win. Always. The problem has always been when they vote on other things. We'll see what happens next year. Abortion and January 6th are our strongest issues, by far. If they make the election about something else, who knows.
“These future losses to Missouri from loss of population due to abortion are both absolutely certain (fewer citizens definitely means fewer future taxpayers and laborers) and potentially generational and infinite.”
So this clearly admits that these people desire a permanent underclass of poor, uneducated workers to support late stage capitalism. Well, at least they have quit lying about it.
My jaw dropped after I read that quote and I still haven't recovered. Where do these people come from ????
A certain percentage of the population has antisocial personality disorder. 🤷. Idk, I don't understand how people can be so callous either. Although it never surprises me anymore.
Of course. They're also interested in maintaining a permanent underclass of workers with severe disabilities, who can be paid sub-minimum or no wages. (My brother, who was born very prematurely and suffered trauma during delivery and in the days after his birth, was one of those sub-minimum wage workers. Many of them are employed by very profitable companies and have few or no on-the-job protections--no sick leave, no vacations, no medical care, no recourse if they get injured on the job, etc etc. The more kids you have being born with congenital disabilities, the more cases like my brother's exploitation will happen. And just BTW, this exploitation--legally allowed--drags down wages, benefits, job protections, union organizing rights and so on for *everyone*. Which makes abortion rights a disability-rights issue as well.)
True. But of course the other part of the equation is the government support required for people with disabilities, which is expensive and growing. It's all bizarrely flawed logic on the part of those who support this exploitation.
"Required" support for people with disabilities is often not. I don't know any state where such support is straightforward to get (ie, takes less than a couple of years after initial application). It's mostly very restrictive, and not nearly enough to keep people above the poverty line. Sure, if you have a disability, you can apply for other state or federal aid for the poor (food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance, and the like), but the paperwork is completely insane to keep up with and lots of people fall through the cracks. I live in California, where support for people with disabilities is, er, relatively generous, but people here regularly end up unable to pay for normal needs like housing, utilities, food, and so on. That plus the regular shaming and outright accusations that one is lying about being disabled. I know. That's been me. It's worse--much worse--in many other states. So, even though feds have weak sort-of-requirements for people with disabilities to be financially supported, the states often don't. The federal gov't puts very strict limits on what assets you can have, and if you work, for every dollar you make on the job, your disability gets docked a dollar. Instead you get people like my brother exploited as workers, and it's assumed they brought their disabilities on themselves. At almost 71, the whole thing just makes me tired to think about.
Yes, this is all true. I was only pointing out that as meager as the safety net is, it still seems to be a significant budget item for governments. I suppose those who have enough work credits to get significant Social Security disability benefits, as opposed to those who were more or less always disabled and rely on SSI and Medicaid, account for more of the costs. And a lot of it is probably health care expenditures. I've seen how much my clomipramine costs the government, and that's a generic drug that's been around forever. But yes, most still need other support besides the benefits, and yes you have to make sure that doesn't count against the benefits.
To the original point, about societies as a whole, I would say that because resources are finite, wealth can only be maximized (regardless of how it is distributed) by maximizing efficiency. The trick is figuring out what's most efficient and how to get there. In the cases in which economic arguments aren't about plain old greed and self-interest, they tend to be about this. For example I don't think high levels of inequality tend to lead to efficiency, but then I don't think if everyone was exactly equal that would be the most efficient either.
But one thing I am pretty confident in saying, from personal experience, is that being disabled is not efficient. I would say that I am rather very inefficient. And so it can't possibly be a good thing for a society to have more disabled people. And likewise in a broader sense I don't think it can be good to have a large permanent class of the poor and uneducated, to the point at the beginning of this thread. And so the claim that anti-abortion is trying to make about total population being the only thing that matters is quite daft.
Zach,
Even Social Security benefits for the disabled with a work history are far from generous.
As you know, I have Multiple Sclerosis. I had to go on disability at 52, when I was making a low six figure salary, plus bonus. My disability application went through the first time, and quite a bit faster than most, because my company insisted that I apply through Allsup, a company that handles these applications. They insisted on this because I also had private disability insurance through my employer. That private insurance, which they claim will pay 50 or 60% of your salary? Well. It turns out that’s not really true. They are allowed to deduct any payments you get from Social Security from what they owe you. So when your Social Security application is approved, they get to keep that lump sum of back payments you are due as payback for what they have paid to Allsup, and for the benefits they paid you. And they stop those payments when you turn 65. Depending on your age and your disability, you have to go through the recertification process every X years. Because I was older, and even the government recognizes that it’s a permanent condition, I had to recertify after 7 years. (I had to recertify for the private disability insurance every year.)
Social Security Disability itself doesn’t pay much. I lose my private disability in September when I turn 65. While I get more from Social Security than most, it’s still only about $2200/month. I don’t qualify for Medicaid because I own my home, so in addition to having the cost of Medicare deducted from my SSDI payment, I also have to buy a supplemental insurance policy, because Medicare itself covers damned little. I also have to purchase a prescription policy. The cost of all that insurance, plus my small mortgage (way less than I’d pay for rent) eats up all of my SSDI payment.
My cat may have to get used to sharing his food with me. If you have any savings at all, or own any assets, you have to sell them and spend down all of it before you qualify for any other assistance. The government doesn’t take into account the life you’ve established for yourself over decades of work - if you are disabled, you must remain dirt poor. If I was able to work a consistent part time job, I’d lose a dollar for every two dollars I earned.
There’s something about that which doesn’t sit particularly well with me. I understand the government doesn’t want to support the wealthy with taxpayer funds, but I wasn’t wealthy, I was comfortably middle class.
I have a disabled son who was disabled too young to have an established work history, so he only receives SSI, which is less than $800/month. He does get Medicaid. But if I send him money for a birthday present, he loses his coverage. If at anytime he has over $2,000, he loses coverage.
This is really no way to treat disabled people.
Yes, I definitely wouldn't argue that disability benefits in this country are good. I think if your son lives with you and pays you a certain amount per month for what they call room and board, he's considered his own household and not to be getting any support from you, even though the room and board required is much much much less than a market rate, and his benefits should remain intact. That's how it works for me, at least, and they've never asked me to itemize expenses or anything. But yes I agree with your last sentence and it's a problem with benefits in this country that there's no ladder out because you lose them if you have anything at all.
The original point was just the cold economic fact that the disabled produce fewer goods and services than they consume, and that this applies to other groups of people too, so that it can't possibly be true that increasing the population necessarily makes a society better off, especially when you achieve that increase by forcing people to have children they don't want to have. It was a rebuttal to that argument in Missouri about the supposed "costs" of abortion.
They will try to make any and every argument for being anti-abortion, but none of them hold up under examination, so it always comes back to wanting to control women. I guess the question is to what extent we ought to be demonstrating that by discrediting their other arguments, versus to what extent that's a distraction. When we assert that they are misogynist theocrat totalitarians, do we need to provide the evidence for that claim, so as not to be accused of name calling? 🤷
Social Security Disability payments currently constitute 2% of the federal budget. (https://www.cbpp.org/research/social-security/social-security-disability-insurance). I was listening to a program where they described a study where conservatives were asked what percent of the federal budget they thought should go to welfare. The answers ranged from 10-25%. After learning how small the actual amount is, they increased their support for social spending measurably.
Yes, I suppose it depends if one counts Social Security and Medicare for retirees as welfare. I would say it should, but the word 'welfare' has such a negative connotation in this country. By that standard most of the budget is three things: 'welfare', military, and interest payments.
I feel so fortunate to be a veteran. Can't imagine going through this process as a civilian. But it's messed up that our government is basically based off of star ship troopers where you have to go to war to get basic citizenship rights.
Yes, that's about right.
Preach it! You do know, of course, that those of us non-veterans with disabilities who are on Medicaid are really envious of veterans with VA healthcare. Every time I hear about "Medicare for All" I mentally amend that to "VA-style healthcare for all." Minus the privatization--which (at least here in Calif) we went through more than a decade ago. It's all a mess, to say the least.
I’m on Medicare, and disabled. Medicare covers hospitalization, and that’s about it. Medicaid covers considerably more, including some dental, IIIRC.
If you have Medicare, you have to purchase a supplemental insurance policy, plus a prescription policy to have actual coverage - and then the copays for prescriptions, if you’re disabled like I am, are a huge cost on their own. I’m paying about 50% of my SSDI to cover insurance and prescription copays. Medicare for all is really not remotely good enough.
Yeah. It's hard to put that in a sound bite, but yeah. And I don't even think the numbers could make sense. An underclass of poor, uneducated workers is a net drain on a society and its economy, not a net benefit. There's more to economic success than cheap labor, a lot more. The wealthiest may imagine it benefits them (so long as they can stay cordoned off in their castles), but for the vast vast majority of conservatives it does not. Some of them even realized it, for a while at least. In the early days Trump's populist economics were not aligned with the interests of the top 1%. Of course like everything else about Trump that was a fraud.
They just want to reinstate a gender-segregated society where women have no choice but to compete with each other for the "prize" of devoting our lives to serving men sexually, domestically, and reproductively. If they really cared about population growth, giving birth would be free and parenthood would be compensated as any other necessary job.
Exactly. Everything else they say is just a cover for that. Whether they want that for its own sake or because they believe it was ordained by "God" shouldn't really matter.
This is beyond critical. We'll all be watching as the votes come in.