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Dianne Marie Leonard's avatar

I'm really looking forward to the book. Just checked and Amazon says it will be delivered on Oct 7. (My 72nd birthday is Oct 25, so this will be a nice self-gift.) Re: deaths of women due to abortion bans: everything old is new again. Back pre-Roe, septic abortion was the leading cause of death for women of childbearing age. Every hospital had an "abortion ward", even in California, which had relatively "liberal" abortion laws. I saw one of those wards in 1972, and still can't get the sight of those 30+ dying women out of my memory. I also hear again the voice of the doctor I was working for at the time, one of the only docs who would bother to care for women in that ward. He said, after leaving the bedside of one of his patients, "She'll be dead by nightfall." A few months later, Roe was decided and the carnage stopped. Jessica, you're right, in more ways than any of us really understand: they want us dead. Just like in the Before Times.

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Bailey S's avatar

I am increasingly convinced that as part of our movement we must include a national education campaign on the reality of pregnancy and miscarriage. As Jessica notes, the reporting acts like miscarrying into a toilet is a sign of wrongdoing. What do people think happens when you miscarry??? Do they imagine that the tissues and blood magically evaporates or that women have a sacred box waiting to squat over if they miscarry? That every miscarriage exists in a medical setting? That your body pushes out blood and clots and fetal tissue but somehow not any poop (even though it’s all in the same vicinity and women regularly poop during childbirth)? All of it and particularly the sensationalizing of fecal matter being involved - it reflects systemic ignorance about how our bodies work. Also a systemic shaming of natural bodily processes.

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