Thank you so much for sharing your terrifying experience. I still find it hard to believe that truly religious people are eager to sacrifice the health and lives of wives, moms and other women in the name of 'protecting' the viability of a potential person. That religion is inherently a religion of cruelty.
Layla -- Thank you for sharing your story. It is absolutely awful what you endured (and you had the "advantages"). It's unfortunate that all of these horror stories are only coming out now and that it takes people reliving their trauma in order to get people to understand how draconian it all is (see Kentucky Governor's race).
Clearly Roe was not enough. Still allowed states to impose ridiculous restrictions on abortion just to make it as unpleasant as it could be. Need a constitutional amendment.
I hope to see that in my lifetime. For now, I desperately want to see Democrats be half as audacious as the forced birthers who want us to be disposable broodmares.
I remember visiting a periodontists in my 20s, not long after a young woman—younger than me, I believe—had died undergoing a similar dental procedure. I believe the evidence shows that dental surgeries are more dangerous and lethal than abortions, yet I’ll never forget about the bill that shut down so many abortion clinics in Texas which included widening corridors. I recently returned for more dental surgery last January (glutton for punishment, I guess) and the corridors were not wide at all.
Frida Kahlo, the legendary self portrait painter from Mexico City, suffered from unimaginable illness and injuries. From polio at a young age, and a freak bus collision that left many dead and left Frida with a metal bar that impaled her entire body and severely damaged her uterus. It was a medical miracle that she lived. After marrying Diego Rivera, she very much wanted children. She ended up with several miscarriages and several medical abortions. In the 1920s and 30s. If you have ever seen her paintings on this tragedy, I urge you to take the time. These are some of her darkest images, but no doubt they reveal the trauma she experienced and ultimately shared with the world. (Her paintings are auctioned today in the $ 20-30 million . ) There is no other artist who has ever illustrated such intimate and vulnerable loss so boldly and literally. And this is at a time when women were able to get the care they needed, including abortion. One can only imagine what she would have painted if today's patriarchal barbarism were the law 100 years ago. The trauma from the losses and another near death experience from spontaneous miscarriage was free from the trauma of government rule and still almost unbearable. I do wish these paintings could be leveraged in some way to help others understand through imagery the suffering women endure and honor the artist without politicizing her story. Although I do imagine having prints made and mailing them to every extremist from courts to dark money groups ---and a special clockwork orange style for certain Supreme Court justices and their sponsors!!!!
The Jaunita McNeely painting and commentary are so moving, thank you. And thank you again so much for sharing your traumatic experience and ongoing struggle in life due to denial of care in pregnancy.
Maybe we're going about this all wrong. Clearly, they don't give a flying F**K about women's lives and health so maybe we should talk about economics. It costs society a lot of money to raise a person to adulthood. If you allow that human to die then there is a big cost to society. Think of the monetary savings of keeping women alive and healthy. And that's not counting the doctors who might go to prison. How are we going to recover the cost and time it takes to replace them? Money, money.
Not to mention abortion by pill, or D &C, is way cheaper for the insurance companies, assuming they have one, or the human involved. than doing an invasive, medically unnecessary, (worst medical practice) C-section for an embryo that has no chance of life outside the uterus.
As somebody on the business side of healthcare, this is where my head goes, too. I am appalled that health insurance companies have not pushed back - here, economic self-interest aligns with the correct moral position. I am stunned that they reimburse Catholic hospitals performing unnecessary salpingectomies (or worse, C-sections) instead of administering methotrexate for ectopic pregnancies ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21353977/ ). It should infuriate us all that Catholic hospitals have a long history of making miscarriage patients suffer longer than they need to ( https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/opinion/sunday/roe-dobbs-miscarriage-abortion.html ).
I’m surprised Catholic hospitals offer any procedure for ectopic pregnancy. The certainly didn’t when my second pregnancy was ectopic. They turned me away and it took me more than a WEEK to get the life-saving abortion I needed. Because of that experience, I chose to never be pregnant again. That was when both Roe and EMTALA were law.
Horrified for you. I am so sorry. I would bet that these hospitals have been violating EMTALA for years, but patients were unaware of their rights. We have put up with this nonsense for too long.
Yeah, just because they're supposed to doesn't mean it's any kind of guarantee. My second ectopic was surgically treated, but by the time I went to the ER, I was "within hours of death," and I was told I could get a second opinion by the surgeon, but she didn't think I'd live long enough. By the time they opened me up, the left side of my innards was perforated, I guess, and my abdomen was full of blood and fluid. However, that was 20 years ago. I've heard increasingly since then that they wait until the ectopic has ruptured, especially nowadays.
As I posted, I’m a retired Surgical Assistant, I take all this fuckery very personally, because I know there is no medical validity to any of it. I cannot figure out why there is not massive pushback from our medical experts. Other people’s theology (to me it is superstition) has no place in the surgical suite.
Because the physicians share the religious ideology and stigma. And many are, sorry, deranged. Most can hide it at least partially unless you find yourself in such a situation with them. There’s a higher incidence of personality disorders, psychopathy, sociopathy, and sadism amongst physicians, who set the guidelines for care and do the care. I apologize deeply for being direct and offensive. I am a physician and I care deeply for all living things. It has been a painful journey for me to accept this truth. The bad ones disproportionately are in positions of power. We should keep fighting of course. If you experience cognitive dissonance, this may be why. This is also why climate change is being allowed to destroy us-sociopaths control the world and old ones know they’ll survive it. My faith/hope comes from knowing something else will evolve after we are gone. Maybe it won’t be intelligent. We can hope.
I live in the south and noted the number of overly religious male surgeons, especially in the GYN specializations. Far too may were republicans. Once a surgeon asked me who I was voting for, and I said “Gore”. he came back at me with” Why? You’re not black.” I replied “no, but I’m a woman. I’m not voting for a party that has planks against gay people, and reproductive rights”. I had hoped they were mostly in the south. As that is the only geographic area I have worked in.
Dear Layla, What you were made to endure is inhumane. The losses you experienced have been incredibly painful both physically and emotionally. Your recounting of your pregnancy is very powerful. You give sound reasons about why simply reinstating Roe is insufficient. Thank you for sharing this with us. I hope you will have the opportunity to spread your message far and wide. Your message is important and must be heard.
Pregnancy is a risk that requires continuous consent of the pregnant person. This is what must be enshrined in law. I had two risky pregnancies, the second a multiple. Healthy outcomes for all, but I was lucky. Lucky isn't a system. We deserve better.
Despite all the wealth and medical resources available, the United States has one of the highest Maternal and infant mortality rates in the developed world. One reason is the huge resistance to federal funding of equitable healthcare and hospital services. As Layla H’s story clearly shows, the other reason is that the wrong people have assumed the authority to make religious rather than medical decisions on behalf of pregnant people. If anything, in this age of medical advances, the situation has become worse as fundamentalist religious dogma has infected government decisions. In the 70s a pregnant relative told me her mother’s terrifying story of her delivery in a hospital run by nuns. The nursing sisters had held her legs together to prevent birth until the doctor arrived. Not much has changed, people are still being tortured by the very people who are being paid to care for them.
This story makes it clear that the problem runs much deeper than the law. It's a mindset about which 'life' matters, and whose does not, that persists throughout human populations. The grotesque myths about motherhood and 'virtue'.
This is what happens when citizens elect zealots to run our country. This is what happens when rigid, myopic followers of a warped interpretation of religious dogma anoint themselves as the only ones who know the Truth. They are dangerous, intransigent and not any different in practice than the Taliban or Putin. No one owns the Truth. If ever there was a reason to agitate for change from school board elections to presidential elections, this is it.
As a retired surgical Assistant, I had to go to school for years to learn best medical practices, and specialized knowledge of my profession, before I was allowed to ever assist with a patient. And these yoyos just pronounce total effluent, and get to override best medical practice? WTF?
Are women equal to men or not? A man can choose to be an organ donor - or not. A dead woman (who has signed for organ donation previous to death) has [had] the choice too. But living women? No, they have no right. They MUST donate their organs - their whole body - to an embryo. Conclusion: women are not equal to men.
This to me is the ultimate point. I don’t understand why it isn’t more widely expressed. No Americans are forced to give their health, their life, their organs to another in any other circumstances. Whatever rights protect Americans against that should also protect pregnant people against forced birth.
The privacy of one's body is generally considered sacrosanct by American courts, which have upheld a competent adult's right to refuse medical procedures, even in cases when they are necessary to save the life of another
Uniform Anatomical Gift Acts. The United States operates its organ donation system under an “opt-in” model in which the individual while alive or the next of kin or surrogate after the individual's death must explicitly choose to donate organs.
Ms. Muñoz is hardly unique; what happened to her has actually been going on for quite some time. If you haven't heard about this, it's because it's about women, and therefore, nobody is allowed to care.
Thank you so much for sharing your terrifying experience. I still find it hard to believe that truly religious people are eager to sacrifice the health and lives of wives, moms and other women in the name of 'protecting' the viability of a potential person. That religion is inherently a religion of cruelty.
Layla -- Thank you for sharing your story. It is absolutely awful what you endured (and you had the "advantages"). It's unfortunate that all of these horror stories are only coming out now and that it takes people reliving their trauma in order to get people to understand how draconian it all is (see Kentucky Governor's race).
Clearly Roe was not enough. Still allowed states to impose ridiculous restrictions on abortion just to make it as unpleasant as it could be. Need a constitutional amendment.
I hope to see that in my lifetime. For now, I desperately want to see Democrats be half as audacious as the forced birthers who want us to be disposable broodmares.
I remember visiting a periodontists in my 20s, not long after a young woman—younger than me, I believe—had died undergoing a similar dental procedure. I believe the evidence shows that dental surgeries are more dangerous and lethal than abortions, yet I’ll never forget about the bill that shut down so many abortion clinics in Texas which included widening corridors. I recently returned for more dental surgery last January (glutton for punishment, I guess) and the corridors were not wide at all.
Frida Kahlo, the legendary self portrait painter from Mexico City, suffered from unimaginable illness and injuries. From polio at a young age, and a freak bus collision that left many dead and left Frida with a metal bar that impaled her entire body and severely damaged her uterus. It was a medical miracle that she lived. After marrying Diego Rivera, she very much wanted children. She ended up with several miscarriages and several medical abortions. In the 1920s and 30s. If you have ever seen her paintings on this tragedy, I urge you to take the time. These are some of her darkest images, but no doubt they reveal the trauma she experienced and ultimately shared with the world. (Her paintings are auctioned today in the $ 20-30 million . ) There is no other artist who has ever illustrated such intimate and vulnerable loss so boldly and literally. And this is at a time when women were able to get the care they needed, including abortion. One can only imagine what she would have painted if today's patriarchal barbarism were the law 100 years ago. The trauma from the losses and another near death experience from spontaneous miscarriage was free from the trauma of government rule and still almost unbearable. I do wish these paintings could be leveraged in some way to help others understand through imagery the suffering women endure and honor the artist without politicizing her story. Although I do imagine having prints made and mailing them to every extremist from courts to dark money groups ---and a special clockwork orange style for certain Supreme Court justices and their sponsors!!!!
Love Kahlo
You might appreciate Juanita McNeely's 1969 painting, "Is it Real? Yes, It Is!"
https://whitney.org/media/56139
The Jaunita McNeely painting and commentary are so moving, thank you. And thank you again so much for sharing your traumatic experience and ongoing struggle in life due to denial of care in pregnancy.
Your story was great, though so sad 😞.
Cool 😎 painting! The commentary was great too.
Maybe we're going about this all wrong. Clearly, they don't give a flying F**K about women's lives and health so maybe we should talk about economics. It costs society a lot of money to raise a person to adulthood. If you allow that human to die then there is a big cost to society. Think of the monetary savings of keeping women alive and healthy. And that's not counting the doctors who might go to prison. How are we going to recover the cost and time it takes to replace them? Money, money.
Not to mention abortion by pill, or D &C, is way cheaper for the insurance companies, assuming they have one, or the human involved. than doing an invasive, medically unnecessary, (worst medical practice) C-section for an embryo that has no chance of life outside the uterus.
As somebody on the business side of healthcare, this is where my head goes, too. I am appalled that health insurance companies have not pushed back - here, economic self-interest aligns with the correct moral position. I am stunned that they reimburse Catholic hospitals performing unnecessary salpingectomies (or worse, C-sections) instead of administering methotrexate for ectopic pregnancies ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21353977/ ). It should infuriate us all that Catholic hospitals have a long history of making miscarriage patients suffer longer than they need to ( https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/25/opinion/sunday/roe-dobbs-miscarriage-abortion.html ).
I’m surprised Catholic hospitals offer any procedure for ectopic pregnancy. The certainly didn’t when my second pregnancy was ectopic. They turned me away and it took me more than a WEEK to get the life-saving abortion I needed. Because of that experience, I chose to never be pregnant again. That was when both Roe and EMTALA were law.
Horrified for you. I am so sorry. I would bet that these hospitals have been violating EMTALA for years, but patients were unaware of their rights. We have put up with this nonsense for too long.
EMTALA requires them to do so. (Technically.)
Not in my case. Maybe only me? I doubt it…
Yeah, just because they're supposed to doesn't mean it's any kind of guarantee. My second ectopic was surgically treated, but by the time I went to the ER, I was "within hours of death," and I was told I could get a second opinion by the surgeon, but she didn't think I'd live long enough. By the time they opened me up, the left side of my innards was perforated, I guess, and my abdomen was full of blood and fluid. However, that was 20 years ago. I've heard increasingly since then that they wait until the ectopic has ruptured, especially nowadays.
As I posted, I’m a retired Surgical Assistant, I take all this fuckery very personally, because I know there is no medical validity to any of it. I cannot figure out why there is not massive pushback from our medical experts. Other people’s theology (to me it is superstition) has no place in the surgical suite.
Because the physicians share the religious ideology and stigma. And many are, sorry, deranged. Most can hide it at least partially unless you find yourself in such a situation with them. There’s a higher incidence of personality disorders, psychopathy, sociopathy, and sadism amongst physicians, who set the guidelines for care and do the care. I apologize deeply for being direct and offensive. I am a physician and I care deeply for all living things. It has been a painful journey for me to accept this truth. The bad ones disproportionately are in positions of power. We should keep fighting of course. If you experience cognitive dissonance, this may be why. This is also why climate change is being allowed to destroy us-sociopaths control the world and old ones know they’ll survive it. My faith/hope comes from knowing something else will evolve after we are gone. Maybe it won’t be intelligent. We can hope.
I live in the south and noted the number of overly religious male surgeons, especially in the GYN specializations. Far too may were republicans. Once a surgeon asked me who I was voting for, and I said “Gore”. he came back at me with” Why? You’re not black.” I replied “no, but I’m a woman. I’m not voting for a party that has planks against gay people, and reproductive rights”. I had hoped they were mostly in the south. As that is the only geographic area I have worked in.
I think south is worse but it’s ubiquitous.
Thank you sharing this. It is so important to hear.
Dear Layla, What you were made to endure is inhumane. The losses you experienced have been incredibly painful both physically and emotionally. Your recounting of your pregnancy is very powerful. You give sound reasons about why simply reinstating Roe is insufficient. Thank you for sharing this with us. I hope you will have the opportunity to spread your message far and wide. Your message is important and must be heard.
Thank you, Sue.
Pregnancy is a risk that requires continuous consent of the pregnant person. This is what must be enshrined in law. I had two risky pregnancies, the second a multiple. Healthy outcomes for all, but I was lucky. Lucky isn't a system. We deserve better.
Thank you for sharing your story. Abortion on demand is the only way forward, Roe was never enough.
Thank you. On demand, without apology: the same way we get flu shots, the same way we get broken bones fixed. It's just healthcare.
Despite all the wealth and medical resources available, the United States has one of the highest Maternal and infant mortality rates in the developed world. One reason is the huge resistance to federal funding of equitable healthcare and hospital services. As Layla H’s story clearly shows, the other reason is that the wrong people have assumed the authority to make religious rather than medical decisions on behalf of pregnant people. If anything, in this age of medical advances, the situation has become worse as fundamentalist religious dogma has infected government decisions. In the 70s a pregnant relative told me her mother’s terrifying story of her delivery in a hospital run by nuns. The nursing sisters had held her legs together to prevent birth until the doctor arrived. Not much has changed, people are still being tortured by the very people who are being paid to care for them.
This story makes it clear that the problem runs much deeper than the law. It's a mindset about which 'life' matters, and whose does not, that persists throughout human populations. The grotesque myths about motherhood and 'virtue'.
This!
This is what happens when citizens elect zealots to run our country. This is what happens when rigid, myopic followers of a warped interpretation of religious dogma anoint themselves as the only ones who know the Truth. They are dangerous, intransigent and not any different in practice than the Taliban or Putin. No one owns the Truth. If ever there was a reason to agitate for change from school board elections to presidential elections, this is it.
As a retired surgical Assistant, I had to go to school for years to learn best medical practices, and specialized knowledge of my profession, before I was allowed to ever assist with a patient. And these yoyos just pronounce total effluent, and get to override best medical practice? WTF?
Are women equal to men or not? A man can choose to be an organ donor - or not. A dead woman (who has signed for organ donation previous to death) has [had] the choice too. But living women? No, they have no right. They MUST donate their organs - their whole body - to an embryo. Conclusion: women are not equal to men.
This to me is the ultimate point. I don’t understand why it isn’t more widely expressed. No Americans are forced to give their health, their life, their organs to another in any other circumstances. Whatever rights protect Americans against that should also protect pregnant people against forced birth.
The privacy of one's body is generally considered sacrosanct by American courts, which have upheld a competent adult's right to refuse medical procedures, even in cases when they are necessary to save the life of another
There it is!
Sacrosanct EVEN when it may NECESSARY to save the life of another.
But why isn’t using this basis to argue against forced birth used more often in the courts? That’s what I don’t understand.
Elie Mystal agrees with you. https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5021654/user-clip-constitution-protect-abortion-elie-mystal-answers
Uniform Anatomical Gift Acts. The United States operates its organ donation system under an “opt-in” model in which the individual while alive or the next of kin or surrogate after the individual's death must explicitly choose to donate organs.
We need a brave lawyer to begin a massive class action suit and challenge the 'exception' that women are for forced donation.
Absolutely. There is no legal basis for forced donation. So why are living women (and girls) the one exception?
Meanwhile, this used to be a thing:
https://www.military.com/history/how-ruth-bader-ginsburg-helped-end-militarys-policy-of-forced-abortion.html
And pregnant people are less than a dead non-pregnant woman. Don't forget the case of Marlise Munoz in Texas.
Ms. Muñoz is hardly unique; what happened to her has actually been going on for quite some time. If you haven't heard about this, it's because it's about women, and therefore, nobody is allowed to care.
https://www.pregnancyjusticeus.org/
Sickens me
Thanks for sharing that. Put it so concisely for me to repeat the messaging. Sad story.