Pleasantly surprised about Planned parenthood’s decision to start providing abortions in Wisconsin. And admire the courage of Phillips of bringing the lawsuit against Tennessee. Maybe it will have an impact in the Virginia elections if people realize how horrific a 15 week abortion ban can be. Sad that the bar is so low in Louisiana that only one candidate for governor does not want to force rape victims to have their rapists babies.
If Republicans get away with impeaching a popularly elected judge and firing their elections person for no cause (other than clinging to their own ill-gotten power), other states will follow. It’s beyond time for us to take proactive steps like WI Planned Parenthood. I wish the entire medical establishment in these states would basically say, “Fuck you,” but I understand their fear.
I know, the stakes in Wisconsin are so high. Idk if it's better or worse for someone with my kind of anxiety to be so close to the action! I'd like to say I believe in my neighbors, but if I ever had that kind of confidence I'd be a completely different person.
I tend towards catastrophizing, so I have some understanding of anxiety. I need to know *everything.* My imagination can always make things worse than the reality if it’s left info free to play by itself.
Feeling a little home state pride for Wisconsin but of course there's the chance everything will blow up in our faces. I'm hoping not - the voters were pretty clear - but we're right at the tipping point of today's America so it feels like there's extra pressure to get it right; it feels like what happens here will be decisive.
I've mentioned before that I'm disabled with multiple invisible illnesses and that, while it happened way later than I needed, I finally got sterilized last year. The article about disabled people really hit me hard. I need to vent about how anti-abortion extremists talk about people with disabilities like it's a monolith. It isn't. "We want to force children to be born with disabilities because of course that's the right thing to do" makes me absolutely enraged. Choice is critical, period.
Every disabled person is different, but since puberty I've been depressed, have ADHD, am constantly in enormous amounts of pain, have a ton of difficulty standing, and extreme hypertension is currently shaving years off my life. I have always known that I would kill myself before potentially inflicting this on another human being. People sometimes tell me that sounds monstrous or misguided or ableist, or doctors whine platitudes at me about how my feelings are so tragic and I want to tell all of them to fuck off. I am a person who does their best to change their mind based on new information (a trait I thought was a lot more common, tbh), but my situation is not new, nor will it change. My sterilization surgery came 10 years late, but it was one of the best days of my life. My bloodline curse will end with me, whether extremists like it or not. However, I was able to afford care because I got married to someone who could take care of me, and I'm privileged now. That part still haunts me and that's why I'll always care about expanding access and countering the bullshit narrative about what you're 'supposed' to do and how you're 'supposed' to feel.
The issue of the prochoice community making room for disabled voices is important. Part of the reason our voices are missing is that we are overlooked in most communities that aren’t specifically devoted to disability rights. Part of it is that a lot of people assume disabled people aren’t sexual beings, and the idea that we are is uncomfortable for a lot of people, no matter how progressive their politics are.
I suspect, too, that there’s an underlying sense that if they allow those voices to be heard, the forced birthers will jump on that, and claim the “poor crippled ladies” are being taken advantage of, and brainwashed. And they aren’t necessarily wrong about that.
One of the reasons that some in the forced birth world are ok with punishing doctors, but not women, is that they don’t really believe women have agency. They assume that any woman who aborts a pregnancy is acting under some sort of compulsion - the abortion clinic talked us into it (that was there excuse for all those state mandated speeches doctors are forced to give about the “dangers” of abortion and all the other options to termination). Or the man involved talked us into it - see Ron DeSantis’s recent bit on having men pay prenatal child support. He claimed women don’t really want to have abortions, it’s just that we’ve been abandoned by men. Women are considered not to have the agency to make this decision on their own. (Plus, of course, every women really wants to “fulfill her intended destiny of motherhood, even if she doesn’t realize that.)
When that is the underlying philosophy, and you add preconceptions about disabled people on top of that, it’s not hard to assume that those forced birthers think disabled people would never decide to end a pregnancy unless someone had pressured them into the decision.
Thank you so much, you've excellently put into words a force that I've railed against my entire life. From my father, from some boyfriends, a girlfriend, from my horde of doctors (male and female), from employers, from random people. For healthy people it's bad, but for disabled people it's so much worse. We end up having to harness our rage in order to see clearly. To harness our pain in order to understand people better. We have to train our own friends. It's so much easier to see the cracks in society when you live inside one. That's why I totally agree with you and why the forced birthers make me so damned angry.
The infantilization of women explains a lot: the denial of agency to women, the belief that women don't make good choices, the desire to control women. It's grossly offensive and there ought to be a way we can message that.
I am so sorry that rather than listening to you and respecting your needs, you were forced to wait so long for what is necessary for your peace. (I have chronic migraines and have lost count of the people who think it can be controlled by drinking water or cutting out aged cheese.) No one has the right to decide what is best for you except you. This shouldn’t be a difficult concept yet it is. We know when we are full. We know when we are hungry. It should be acknowledged that we know what we can endure, especially regarding pain. I’m so glad you found someone who honors your choices. Good luck with your future challenges.
Wow. That is really moving. Thank you for sharing that. It sounds like you at least feel you're personally in a safe place right now? so that's good. What you wrote here is really raw, in a good way, and that makes it valuable. I think your argument is very enlightened and I think it's pretty obvious that people who tell you otherwise have absolutely no idea what it's like to be you. I hope whatever treatments you can get can help enough so you can get some joy out of life, and also a person certainly doesn't need to reproduce to have a positive influence on the next generation. Best wishes!
Thank you for your kind words! I've finally accepted that you don't need to work or reproduce in order to contribute to society. Having a place to talk about this kind of thing is absolutely beneficial and I can't thank you enough for listening.
Having been a very “type A” person before I was disabled, I still struggle mightily with this. I feel utterly useless most of the time. I don’t judge other people that way, it’s just me I feel needs to be making a contribution to justify my existence.
The overwhelming judgement externally and the internalized judgement can be crippling! I started getting sick when I was 12 so I started deteriorating in my teens. The older you are, the harder it is to adjust, but going from straight As to missing half my school days, with nothing visibly wrong with me, was extremely unfun. I only graduated high school on time because my Aunt was a big deal in the school district and threw her weight around to get my absences excused (I was still passing all my classes.) Our society is just so overwhelmingly "you work until you die". The underlying message I always heard was "if you can't work you should die". I know that's bullshit now, but it took about 20 years.
You're most welcome. I have a lot in common with your second sentence so even though I don't know what it's like to be you I do know what it's like to be different.
I'm disabled too (service connected) and I totally agree. The extraordinary paternalism of these people is beyond enraging. Kristen Hawkins, the president of "students" for life (I put students in quotations because they're not students) had not one but TWO children with cystic fibrosis who have a high chance of likelihood of suffocating to death before the age of thirty. I can understand not wanting to abort the first time but then to purposely get pregnant AGAIN with the condition? And she has two other kids she decided to roll the dice with who were lucky enough not to get it. These people are total psychopaths.
With probably way too much honesty, I'll say that I have moments where I actually resent my mother a bit for not stopping after 4 lost pregnancies. (Two late-term miscarriages, two died within hours of being born). I know that's completely unfair, but I think about it every time someone says anything like "if my mom had aborted me I wouldn't be alive!" It's like uh... and? I would assert that before birth, hopes and dreams are the province of the pregnant person, to have or to not have. I think a lot more people need to remember that the opportunity to live doesn't guarantee a good experience. Conservatives are so narrow minded towards the concept of life that they don't even acknowledge quality of life.
I think it's almost impossible for humans to grasp, because if I never existed, how can I say what I would or wouldn't want or choose. I either exist or I don't, and to be able to ponder that, I have to exist, and thus the decision has already been made. I don't know if that makes sense :) but I would say that if I don't exist, there's nothing lost; I didn't have anything to lose yet. Conservatives believe (or at least say they do) that everything is already in that fertilized egg, so there's a loss there. The thing is when we look at the actual biology and to be quite blunt the cruelty of nature, or at least that nature can't be demonstrated to care, I think that idea of every fertilized egg being precious breaks down pretty fast. But then I'm also not trying to reconcile the idea of a god who knows each of us personally and cares. That's a bridge too far for me, but I would say that if there is such an entity They would understand us and accept whatever choices we make. Anyway I hope that most of the time you're okay with the fact that you do indeed exist! (Even as you're absolutely correct that there is no need to bring into existence a life which we know would suffer greatly; I think both can be true).
It makes perfect sense! Even if fetus-me had the audacity to, I don't know, weigh in on my mother's choices, I would like to think that fetus-me would respect whatever choice my mother made in regards to my existence. Why would I want her to be miserable or to put her own health at risk? Even if I could be convinced that fetii had feelings, I don't think they would be offended like grown me would be if I got legit murdered.
As to when life begins it's like I always say- if life begins at fertilization, then the Christian God is a serial killer. As a devout pagan, I'm baffled as to why more people aren't concerned about *that*!
Oh yeah, their God is a nasty, nasty being! I'm not a believer, at least not in a supreme being, but if you're going to have God, They are going to be very different from what most people say. There are probably people who are spiritual who get this, but then they're not the ones making their faith political.
I…haven’t had an easy life, let’s say, and when I finally got clear of most of the wreckage - I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Less than two years later, I had to stop working. It turned out all those complaints I had that doctors ignored over the years were MS. First symptoms were 26 years before I was diagnosed - I was transitioning to Secondary Progressive when I was finally diagnosed. MS isn’t the only invisible illness I have, of course. Autoimmune diseases do tend to cluster.
I’m not sure I’d have had my son if I’d known I had this back then. It isn’t directly heritable, but there are genetic components. It runs in families - plus, if you name any autoimmune disease, someone in my family has it.
If my mother had been able to ask me, back when I was a fetus, and I’d had any idea of what was ahead of me, honestly? I’d have asked her to end the pregnancy.
(FTR, I was raised as a witch (non-Wiccan), but consider myself an apatheist. I just have no effs to give about whether or not deities exist. I just don’t care.)
Oh that's so rough! I have hereditary POTS and fibromyalgia with a lot of overlapping symptoms with MS. It's just a horror show and let's face it, western medicine and the American healthcare system is terrible at chronic issues. I feel like most people with depression get pretty confused by the argument that life is this... perfect sacred thing. I spent some time as a crisis counselor and I can absolutely say "you can't kill yourself because life is sacred and we should all be grateful for it" is one of the least persuasive things to say to someone in crisis. The response tends to be something to the effect of "but you don't have to live my life!"
It's interesting that the Republican party has over the past seven years purged itself of independent thinking so successfully that we're not hearing what you would expect to be hearing: stories of dissent and rage at the faction that's sinking their party. It's actually quite unsettling. They're not (yet) doing the normal thing, which would be to tear each other apart. I'd feel better if they were. They're behaving like very well disciplined robot Nazis.
I'm a lunatic with a lot of time on my hands, so I've been eating popcorn and watching the Ken Paxton impeachment trial. As far as I know, it's the only place where Establishment republicans are actually putting up a half decent fight.
I like that description! Yes I haven't really been paying attention to Paxton (I think on the substack notes I've seen Andrea Grimes has been covering and enjoying it?) I think it's because it seems primed to me to be a false win; let's watch Republicans fight and maybe get rid of the truly horrific Paxton and feel good about it, even though we know every other Republican in Texas (and most other places too) will support the same policies. Now if it were the start of some kind of rebellion in the Republican party that might be different. But they don't just need to get rid of all their dirtbag members, they need to change some policies too. Mike Pence scares me just as much as Donald Trump, and what scares me even more is people who think the problem with the Republican party is mostly limited to Trump and his influence. They're mistaking symptom for cause and I think it's very dangerous.
It is really rich anti-abortion claims to care about "fetal pain" in later abortions but will force babies to be born without lungs or brains or kidneys to suffocate to death shortly after birth. These people *do not give a flying fuck* about babies in pain.
I’d *like* to think that anyone reading the politico article would put two and two together about how anti-family these bans are, but I strongly suspect that the GOP response will just be to double-down on banning birth control.
The out-of-wedlock birth rates will explode and then they'll really lose their minds. Just look at Latin America where more children are born out-of-wedlock than in because of their draconian reproductive policies.
It makes sense though when you consider that anyone who believes in science left the Republican party a long time ago. So they don't even see the hypocrisy, they're just saying whatever gets them their way. I could imagine our side doing something similar if we were to try to make religious arguments for something. We might cherry pick and it wouldn't really bother us because to us it's all nonsense anyway, it's just that some people are convinced by that stuff. I think that's what they're doing?
What I hate about this is having to compare science to religion as if there's any equivalence. One is the search for truth, and the other is... storytelling. They might say the same thing only reverse which is which. That's what we're up against. The education gap between the two cultural halves of America is stark. This is about whether we can keep a country or whether the morons have to win and destroy everything first before we can rebuild and secure a future.
What I can’t seem to understand about Evangelicals is if women are so untrustworthy, why did an omniscient god put the future production of humanity in her care? Seems like a dumb thing to do.
🤔 Honestly I don't care if people want to believe in God. But all of the evidence clearly demonstrates that God is nothing like what they say. The question is if faith did not support the traditional power structures already in place (and let's remember, early Christianity did not; it was rather revolutionary), would people still have a use for a belief in God? It's why it's hard for me to see it as anything other than a tool of power.
I’ve said this for years on end. I’ve also asked, if women are so incapable of making moral and rational decisions about their own bodies, why do we entrust them with the care and feeding of infants, the elderly, and the sick? In fact, society not only trusts women with these tasks, it tells women that it’s their duty! So much so that women are trusted to do this work without receiving any sort of renumeration.
Why the heart? Why not the spleen or the lungs or the kidneys that determine when life begins? It's entirely arbitrary. Whatever is convenient to control and punish pregnant people.
It’s emotional. Prospective parents hear the electrical impulses that sound like a heartbeat and picture that “storm” on the ultrasound as a baby. My children were born before ultrasounds were done for pregnancy, but I would imagine that I would have had the same reaction. It isn’t rational. You cannot have a heartbeat without a heart.
Exactly. And a heart makes no difference if you don’t have lungs, some of the last organs to develop. Also, when a baby is born they check if it’s breathing. And a born baby with a heartbeat who forgets to breathe dies. SIDS
Yes! It should be so easy to debunk their nonsense. And we have a Christian reader here who reminds us that life is said to begin with breath, so it's completely compatible with faith too. But none of that will ever matter if the real goal is to control women.
Yeah I like it better when they're stupid than when they're clever evil. I was thinking, well as we've been told here their bible says it's breath, but they decided that didn't suit their purposes, so they looked for what else would sell, and then she said it better than I ever could. It's about the story, the narrative - who cares if it's true. That's actually one thing that Donald Trump is very very good at, and it's why anti-abortion and Trumpism are such a match made in hell. They came from very different places but they are oh so alike.
Well abortion rights are certainly starting to win the narrative wars now with all the horror stories coming out. It is about story telling and we need to tell a better story.
Names and faces. It'll do it every time over the generic. Every time - even when it shouldn't; personal anecdotes often (or maybe usually) have more power than data too.
Pleasantly surprised about Planned parenthood’s decision to start providing abortions in Wisconsin. And admire the courage of Phillips of bringing the lawsuit against Tennessee. Maybe it will have an impact in the Virginia elections if people realize how horrific a 15 week abortion ban can be. Sad that the bar is so low in Louisiana that only one candidate for governor does not want to force rape victims to have their rapists babies.
If Republicans get away with impeaching a popularly elected judge and firing their elections person for no cause (other than clinging to their own ill-gotten power), other states will follow. It’s beyond time for us to take proactive steps like WI Planned Parenthood. I wish the entire medical establishment in these states would basically say, “Fuck you,” but I understand their fear.
I know, the stakes in Wisconsin are so high. Idk if it's better or worse for someone with my kind of anxiety to be so close to the action! I'd like to say I believe in my neighbors, but if I ever had that kind of confidence I'd be a completely different person.
I tend towards catastrophizing, so I have some understanding of anxiety. I need to know *everything.* My imagination can always make things worse than the reality if it’s left info free to play by itself.
I know. It’s far past time to go on the offense!
Feeling a little home state pride for Wisconsin but of course there's the chance everything will blow up in our faces. I'm hoping not - the voters were pretty clear - but we're right at the tipping point of today's America so it feels like there's extra pressure to get it right; it feels like what happens here will be decisive.
I've mentioned before that I'm disabled with multiple invisible illnesses and that, while it happened way later than I needed, I finally got sterilized last year. The article about disabled people really hit me hard. I need to vent about how anti-abortion extremists talk about people with disabilities like it's a monolith. It isn't. "We want to force children to be born with disabilities because of course that's the right thing to do" makes me absolutely enraged. Choice is critical, period.
Every disabled person is different, but since puberty I've been depressed, have ADHD, am constantly in enormous amounts of pain, have a ton of difficulty standing, and extreme hypertension is currently shaving years off my life. I have always known that I would kill myself before potentially inflicting this on another human being. People sometimes tell me that sounds monstrous or misguided or ableist, or doctors whine platitudes at me about how my feelings are so tragic and I want to tell all of them to fuck off. I am a person who does their best to change their mind based on new information (a trait I thought was a lot more common, tbh), but my situation is not new, nor will it change. My sterilization surgery came 10 years late, but it was one of the best days of my life. My bloodline curse will end with me, whether extremists like it or not. However, I was able to afford care because I got married to someone who could take care of me, and I'm privileged now. That part still haunts me and that's why I'll always care about expanding access and countering the bullshit narrative about what you're 'supposed' to do and how you're 'supposed' to feel.
The issue of the prochoice community making room for disabled voices is important. Part of the reason our voices are missing is that we are overlooked in most communities that aren’t specifically devoted to disability rights. Part of it is that a lot of people assume disabled people aren’t sexual beings, and the idea that we are is uncomfortable for a lot of people, no matter how progressive their politics are.
I suspect, too, that there’s an underlying sense that if they allow those voices to be heard, the forced birthers will jump on that, and claim the “poor crippled ladies” are being taken advantage of, and brainwashed. And they aren’t necessarily wrong about that.
One of the reasons that some in the forced birth world are ok with punishing doctors, but not women, is that they don’t really believe women have agency. They assume that any woman who aborts a pregnancy is acting under some sort of compulsion - the abortion clinic talked us into it (that was there excuse for all those state mandated speeches doctors are forced to give about the “dangers” of abortion and all the other options to termination). Or the man involved talked us into it - see Ron DeSantis’s recent bit on having men pay prenatal child support. He claimed women don’t really want to have abortions, it’s just that we’ve been abandoned by men. Women are considered not to have the agency to make this decision on their own. (Plus, of course, every women really wants to “fulfill her intended destiny of motherhood, even if she doesn’t realize that.)
When that is the underlying philosophy, and you add preconceptions about disabled people on top of that, it’s not hard to assume that those forced birthers think disabled people would never decide to end a pregnancy unless someone had pressured them into the decision.
Thank you so much, you've excellently put into words a force that I've railed against my entire life. From my father, from some boyfriends, a girlfriend, from my horde of doctors (male and female), from employers, from random people. For healthy people it's bad, but for disabled people it's so much worse. We end up having to harness our rage in order to see clearly. To harness our pain in order to understand people better. We have to train our own friends. It's so much easier to see the cracks in society when you live inside one. That's why I totally agree with you and why the forced birthers make me so damned angry.
Victoria,
Have you lost count of the times you’ve told friends “Ask me what I need. Don’t assume what I need?”
The infantilization of women explains a lot: the denial of agency to women, the belief that women don't make good choices, the desire to control women. It's grossly offensive and there ought to be a way we can message that.
I am so sorry that rather than listening to you and respecting your needs, you were forced to wait so long for what is necessary for your peace. (I have chronic migraines and have lost count of the people who think it can be controlled by drinking water or cutting out aged cheese.) No one has the right to decide what is best for you except you. This shouldn’t be a difficult concept yet it is. We know when we are full. We know when we are hungry. It should be acknowledged that we know what we can endure, especially regarding pain. I’m so glad you found someone who honors your choices. Good luck with your future challenges.
Thank you! To you as well <3 At least no one who values their own life dares recommend I cut out aged cheese!
I know, right? LOL
Wow. That is really moving. Thank you for sharing that. It sounds like you at least feel you're personally in a safe place right now? so that's good. What you wrote here is really raw, in a good way, and that makes it valuable. I think your argument is very enlightened and I think it's pretty obvious that people who tell you otherwise have absolutely no idea what it's like to be you. I hope whatever treatments you can get can help enough so you can get some joy out of life, and also a person certainly doesn't need to reproduce to have a positive influence on the next generation. Best wishes!
Thank you for your kind words! I've finally accepted that you don't need to work or reproduce in order to contribute to society. Having a place to talk about this kind of thing is absolutely beneficial and I can't thank you enough for listening.
Victoria,
Having been a very “type A” person before I was disabled, I still struggle mightily with this. I feel utterly useless most of the time. I don’t judge other people that way, it’s just me I feel needs to be making a contribution to justify my existence.
I’m very glad you made peace with that!
The overwhelming judgement externally and the internalized judgement can be crippling! I started getting sick when I was 12 so I started deteriorating in my teens. The older you are, the harder it is to adjust, but going from straight As to missing half my school days, with nothing visibly wrong with me, was extremely unfun. I only graduated high school on time because my Aunt was a big deal in the school district and threw her weight around to get my absences excused (I was still passing all my classes.) Our society is just so overwhelmingly "you work until you die". The underlying message I always heard was "if you can't work you should die". I know that's bullshit now, but it took about 20 years.
That’s an interesting point - I wasn’t diagnosed until I was 50. I’d had a hard charging career, been a single parent, rock climbed for fun.
I’m not sure I’ll ever entirely adjust, especially since MS is a moving target. You just keep losing things as it progresses. It’s a pain in the ass.
I don't know what else you do but fyi you are definitely making a contribution here!
Thank you, Zach.
You're most welcome. I have a lot in common with your second sentence so even though I don't know what it's like to be you I do know what it's like to be different.
I'm disabled too (service connected) and I totally agree. The extraordinary paternalism of these people is beyond enraging. Kristen Hawkins, the president of "students" for life (I put students in quotations because they're not students) had not one but TWO children with cystic fibrosis who have a high chance of likelihood of suffocating to death before the age of thirty. I can understand not wanting to abort the first time but then to purposely get pregnant AGAIN with the condition? And she has two other kids she decided to roll the dice with who were lucky enough not to get it. These people are total psychopaths.
With probably way too much honesty, I'll say that I have moments where I actually resent my mother a bit for not stopping after 4 lost pregnancies. (Two late-term miscarriages, two died within hours of being born). I know that's completely unfair, but I think about it every time someone says anything like "if my mom had aborted me I wouldn't be alive!" It's like uh... and? I would assert that before birth, hopes and dreams are the province of the pregnant person, to have or to not have. I think a lot more people need to remember that the opportunity to live doesn't guarantee a good experience. Conservatives are so narrow minded towards the concept of life that they don't even acknowledge quality of life.
I think it's almost impossible for humans to grasp, because if I never existed, how can I say what I would or wouldn't want or choose. I either exist or I don't, and to be able to ponder that, I have to exist, and thus the decision has already been made. I don't know if that makes sense :) but I would say that if I don't exist, there's nothing lost; I didn't have anything to lose yet. Conservatives believe (or at least say they do) that everything is already in that fertilized egg, so there's a loss there. The thing is when we look at the actual biology and to be quite blunt the cruelty of nature, or at least that nature can't be demonstrated to care, I think that idea of every fertilized egg being precious breaks down pretty fast. But then I'm also not trying to reconcile the idea of a god who knows each of us personally and cares. That's a bridge too far for me, but I would say that if there is such an entity They would understand us and accept whatever choices we make. Anyway I hope that most of the time you're okay with the fact that you do indeed exist! (Even as you're absolutely correct that there is no need to bring into existence a life which we know would suffer greatly; I think both can be true).
It makes perfect sense! Even if fetus-me had the audacity to, I don't know, weigh in on my mother's choices, I would like to think that fetus-me would respect whatever choice my mother made in regards to my existence. Why would I want her to be miserable or to put her own health at risk? Even if I could be convinced that fetii had feelings, I don't think they would be offended like grown me would be if I got legit murdered.
As to when life begins it's like I always say- if life begins at fertilization, then the Christian God is a serial killer. As a devout pagan, I'm baffled as to why more people aren't concerned about *that*!
Oh yeah, their God is a nasty, nasty being! I'm not a believer, at least not in a supreme being, but if you're going to have God, They are going to be very different from what most people say. There are probably people who are spiritual who get this, but then they're not the ones making their faith political.
Wild applause, Victoria.
I…haven’t had an easy life, let’s say, and when I finally got clear of most of the wreckage - I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Less than two years later, I had to stop working. It turned out all those complaints I had that doctors ignored over the years were MS. First symptoms were 26 years before I was diagnosed - I was transitioning to Secondary Progressive when I was finally diagnosed. MS isn’t the only invisible illness I have, of course. Autoimmune diseases do tend to cluster.
I’m not sure I’d have had my son if I’d known I had this back then. It isn’t directly heritable, but there are genetic components. It runs in families - plus, if you name any autoimmune disease, someone in my family has it.
If my mother had been able to ask me, back when I was a fetus, and I’d had any idea of what was ahead of me, honestly? I’d have asked her to end the pregnancy.
(FTR, I was raised as a witch (non-Wiccan), but consider myself an apatheist. I just have no effs to give about whether or not deities exist. I just don’t care.)
Oh that's so rough! I have hereditary POTS and fibromyalgia with a lot of overlapping symptoms with MS. It's just a horror show and let's face it, western medicine and the American healthcare system is terrible at chronic issues. I feel like most people with depression get pretty confused by the argument that life is this... perfect sacred thing. I spent some time as a crisis counselor and I can absolutely say "you can't kill yourself because life is sacred and we should all be grateful for it" is one of the least persuasive things to say to someone in crisis. The response tends to be something to the effect of "but you don't have to live my life!"
(Blessed be <3)
As we say so often around here, the cruelty is the point. Anti-abortion literally wants people to suffer. It's "holy".
I wouldn't be surprised if women in blue states are declining to get pregnant because of concern of a national ban.
Yup
Poland's birth rates dropped by 8% in a year after they banned abortion in 2021. Imagine what will happen here.
It's interesting that the Republican party has over the past seven years purged itself of independent thinking so successfully that we're not hearing what you would expect to be hearing: stories of dissent and rage at the faction that's sinking their party. It's actually quite unsettling. They're not (yet) doing the normal thing, which would be to tear each other apart. I'd feel better if they were. They're behaving like very well disciplined robot Nazis.
I'm a lunatic with a lot of time on my hands, so I've been eating popcorn and watching the Ken Paxton impeachment trial. As far as I know, it's the only place where Establishment republicans are actually putting up a half decent fight.
I like that description! Yes I haven't really been paying attention to Paxton (I think on the substack notes I've seen Andrea Grimes has been covering and enjoying it?) I think it's because it seems primed to me to be a false win; let's watch Republicans fight and maybe get rid of the truly horrific Paxton and feel good about it, even though we know every other Republican in Texas (and most other places too) will support the same policies. Now if it were the start of some kind of rebellion in the Republican party that might be different. But they don't just need to get rid of all their dirtbag members, they need to change some policies too. Mike Pence scares me just as much as Donald Trump, and what scares me even more is people who think the problem with the Republican party is mostly limited to Trump and his influence. They're mistaking symptom for cause and I think it's very dangerous.
The more names and faces whose stories we have come out for us, the worse it's going to get for them.
Wisconsin always seems to be in the middle of things, for better or worse, and that's especially going to be true over the next 14 months. 🤞
It is really rich anti-abortion claims to care about "fetal pain" in later abortions but will force babies to be born without lungs or brains or kidneys to suffocate to death shortly after birth. These people *do not give a flying fuck* about babies in pain.
Great comment.
No kidding
I’d *like* to think that anyone reading the politico article would put two and two together about how anti-family these bans are, but I strongly suspect that the GOP response will just be to double-down on banning birth control.
The out-of-wedlock birth rates will explode and then they'll really lose their minds. Just look at Latin America where more children are born out-of-wedlock than in because of their draconian reproductive policies.
Which politico article? I couldn't find it.
It’s the one Jessica links to in the paragraph on stats showing the people are foregoing having children in light of the culture post-Roe.
It makes sense though when you consider that anyone who believes in science left the Republican party a long time ago. So they don't even see the hypocrisy, they're just saying whatever gets them their way. I could imagine our side doing something similar if we were to try to make religious arguments for something. We might cherry pick and it wouldn't really bother us because to us it's all nonsense anyway, it's just that some people are convinced by that stuff. I think that's what they're doing?
What I hate about this is having to compare science to religion as if there's any equivalence. One is the search for truth, and the other is... storytelling. They might say the same thing only reverse which is which. That's what we're up against. The education gap between the two cultural halves of America is stark. This is about whether we can keep a country or whether the morons have to win and destroy everything first before we can rebuild and secure a future.
What I can’t seem to understand about Evangelicals is if women are so untrustworthy, why did an omniscient god put the future production of humanity in her care? Seems like a dumb thing to do.
🤔 Honestly I don't care if people want to believe in God. But all of the evidence clearly demonstrates that God is nothing like what they say. The question is if faith did not support the traditional power structures already in place (and let's remember, early Christianity did not; it was rather revolutionary), would people still have a use for a belief in God? It's why it's hard for me to see it as anything other than a tool of power.
Julie,
I’ve said this for years on end. I’ve also asked, if women are so incapable of making moral and rational decisions about their own bodies, why do we entrust them with the care and feeding of infants, the elderly, and the sick? In fact, society not only trusts women with these tasks, it tells women that it’s their duty! So much so that women are trusted to do this work without receiving any sort of renumeration.
The cognitive dissonance is absolutely maddening.
Excellent points! AND what's more, women comply with love (most of the time)! BTW, we're of an age. I'm 64.
I turned 65 last Saturday! Nice not to be the only “elder” around.
Why the heart? Why not the spleen or the lungs or the kidneys that determine when life begins? It's entirely arbitrary. Whatever is convenient to control and punish pregnant people.
It’s emotional. Prospective parents hear the electrical impulses that sound like a heartbeat and picture that “storm” on the ultrasound as a baby. My children were born before ultrasounds were done for pregnancy, but I would imagine that I would have had the same reaction. It isn’t rational. You cannot have a heartbeat without a heart.
Exactly. And a heart makes no difference if you don’t have lungs, some of the last organs to develop. Also, when a baby is born they check if it’s breathing. And a born baby with a heartbeat who forgets to breathe dies. SIDS
Yes! It should be so easy to debunk their nonsense. And we have a Christian reader here who reminds us that life is said to begin with breath, so it's completely compatible with faith too. But none of that will ever matter if the real goal is to control women.
Good points. All anti-abortion has are appeals to emotion.
Yeah I like it better when they're stupid than when they're clever evil. I was thinking, well as we've been told here their bible says it's breath, but they decided that didn't suit their purposes, so they looked for what else would sell, and then she said it better than I ever could. It's about the story, the narrative - who cares if it's true. That's actually one thing that Donald Trump is very very good at, and it's why anti-abortion and Trumpism are such a match made in hell. They came from very different places but they are oh so alike.
Well abortion rights are certainly starting to win the narrative wars now with all the horror stories coming out. It is about story telling and we need to tell a better story.
Names and faces. It'll do it every time over the generic. Every time - even when it shouldn't; personal anecdotes often (or maybe usually) have more power than data too.
This.
Some of the shit that they spew out is truly unbelievable.