70 Comments

I will give Mr. Moreno this: he is completely right about my stance on abortion. Of course, the reason I support a person’s ability to have an abortion whenever they want is because that’s how medical care is supposed to work.

Expand full comment

The venn diagram of republicans who don’t want kids learning about abuse, sexual assault, consent, etc & the republicans who refuse to end child marriage is a fucking circle.

Expand full comment

Just got a message that my copy of JV’s book will be on my doorstep on Oct 1! The joys of pre-ordering!

Cant wait to give it a read!

Expand full comment

I just ordered her book too!

Expand full comment

Re: Amber Thurman— I’m wondering if her mother can sue. The forced birth crowd has a first amendment right to lie about the effect of abortion pills, but I don’t know if they have a right to lie about an individual— that either is or borders on defamation.

Re: Bernie Moreno, Republican Senate candidate from Ohio- he’s just another example of what I’ve always said about Republicans— they simply do not have the capability of imagining that anyone could care about other people. If you’re a Republican, if it isn’t happening to you or someone close to you, it doesn’t matter. That is why they are so completely incapable of empathy and capable of so much cruelty. See also J.D. Vance’s assumption that people can’t care about children who are not their biological children. Once you start looking at Republican behavior through this lens, you see it everywhere.

Expand full comment

This is true. Honest, kind people assume everyone else is too. Evil, mean, people assume everyone is trying to do them harm. My friend calls this "viewing others through the lens of your own malice."

Expand full comment

I was a resident of one of those maternity homes in the 1960s. Florence Crittendon didn't force their religion and there was no such things as cell phones, but most of the rest was true. Maybe with the best intentions, but the experience was traumatic and contributed to my difficulty ever recovering from the loss.

Expand full comment

I'm so sorry you had to endure that, these people are jailers! Much love and healing to you.

Expand full comment

Did those single moms get to keep their babies?

Or did the homes sell them?

Who could forget Georgia Tann? One among many.

Do any of the women who work for these prolife groups have children?

And if they do who is at home taking care of them?

Or is this Phyllis Schlafly all over again.

I think women who are anti woman are worse than anti woman men.

Expand full comment

The goal, of course is to essentially keep them captive until the birth, then guilt them into giving up the baby, to them, and they will sell it through adoption, Basically human trafficking.

Expand full comment

I find it impossible to believe Trump’s assertion that under his reign women will be so much better off and will all be so very happy all the time. How unlikely given the conditions under which they would suffer. What exactly does he have planned for women and girls? Then it occurred to me that the only way he could be so assured is if he was planning that all women would be required to take happy pills. No really, what Trump wants is for women to be “happy” despite their lives, not that women have the power to be happy because of their lives.

Expand full comment

I'm not sure if people here have heard this, but it looks as if TX is exempt from EMTALA: https://www.cms.gov/medicare/regulations-guidance/legislation/emergency-medical-treatment-labor-act

I really hope the Feds get ahead of this. Women will continue to die in TX.

I still can't believe what I'm seeing, this makes me even more angry than I was about all this.

If the anti abortion people and Republicans wonder why the birthrate is falling, and why women don't want to or are afraid to have children...they should consider the rising maternal mortality in this state.

No way in hell would I A) Practice nursing in TX or any state with Trump abortion bans, or B) Have a child if I was younger. Even when reproductive care was accessible, I still got my tubes tied in the 90's, I knew I didn't want children.

Women should have the same choices I did today. It really burns me that this isn't the case.

Expand full comment

regarding EMTALA SCOTUS declined to take the case and sent it back to the 9th Circuit. It was specifically about Idaho. I am not able to comment on the 2022 document you referenced

Expand full comment

I hear ya......I'm a childless dog lady with no regrets. That's right fucker Vance, I'm talking to you.

Women should have more rights than I did in the late '80s in high school - but they have less, this country is regressing into the Taliban...... the Christian Taliban.

Expand full comment

"...wait for voters anger to calm down..."

To All Anti Abortion groups: Sooner or later you and all your cronies will figure out that voters are PISSED and we aren't going to calm down until your efforts are stopped and women are able to get reproductive justice. Abortion is healthcare. Doctors are trained to deal with a variety of situations, situations that sometimes require a D+C. You people are NOT qualified to make decisions for anyone that isn't you, including every woman. You are not qualified to even say what is, and isn't, healthcare; and to separate abortion and healthcare is not only incorrect, but is an attempt to practice medicine without a license. You, and legislators, are not doctors and are not qualified to make statements on reproductive care, full stop.

Let's vote accordingly in November, in the meantime, we will stay LOUD/NOT CALM/ANGRY/RESOLVED about calling out the truth about people that deny women reproductive rights, causing complications, distress, persecution, and deaths of women.

"...wait till voters calm down..." Tone deaf, grossly uninformed, disgusting, and makes us want to continue to get under their skin all the more.

There is nothing worse than someone telling women to "calm down". Sticks in my craw and stinks to high heaven.

Expand full comment

Well said!

Expand full comment

^^^Ever so much this.

Expand full comment

Persecution is the right word. I haven’t heard that used before but it gets to the crux of the issue. Republicans are persecuting us.

Expand full comment

Withholding care, abortion healthcare is violence.

Expand full comment

All while screaming they are the persecuted ones!

Expand full comment

WOW… i just can’t… what is happening..

Expand full comment

And, regarding SBA-PLA lobbying in Tennessee: they also lobbied to NOT include rape as an exception.

The Christian Taliban in the Tennessee legislature agreed!! These fuckers are all so brained washed in their toxic religion.

Expand full comment

“You know, because of our dusty uteruses.” Thank you for this line. Made my day and it’s hard for that to happen the closer and closer we get to November. It appears they truly do not understand the level of rage their actions have caused. We are just supposed to be “good little girls” and “nice old ladies” and let the men take care of it because they know best. Ahhh…no. This old woman and her dried up uterus is voting and taking her friends to the polls too!

Expand full comment

*fistbump* Indeed. This older woman + uterus is voting and speaking out, and will continue to speak out, against these people, until women have reproductive justice.

Rage? Yes. Resolved and Focused? Yes as well.

Expand full comment

SBA comment: "abortion bans protect women"

Total gaslighting!!! Not even do they really-really believe this......no matter how many times they say it. The US has millions of trail blazing women from the 1950's/60's/70's who knew very well bans kill women.

If women had access to safe and legal abortions and medical care from hospitals, these 2 GA women would be alive today.

Expand full comment

God they are hideous. They're also stupid.

We are not fools.

They're going to find out what we know very soon.

Expand full comment

I just don't understand the "no exceptions even for the life of the mother". If the mother dies, so does the baby. Emergency abortions to save the life of a mother are always pre-viability. That means the embryo/fetus can't survive outside its mother, and if the embryo/fetus is not removed, the mother will die (think ectopic pregnancy or premature rupture of membranes). If the fetus is post-viability (somewhere around 24 weeks, plus or minus), the emergency treatment is delivery!

Expand full comment

I almost got in an argument with a pro-lifer at her booth at the state fair because she was telling me viable 24 week old fetuses were being aborted. I was like, “No, if they’re viable, they go to the NICU.”

Expand full comment

That's because they are so stupid they reject science and 'believe' in miracles, not reality.

Expand full comment

Perhaps they believe God could never make a mistake, so if there is a medical emergency that means a fetus will die, it must somehow be the woman’s fault and she deserves punishment. While babies are blessed things, pregnancy and childbirth is the punishment for the transgression in the Garden of Eden.

Expand full comment

You are probably correct. I have no idea what their delusions are, I try to keep that kind of insanity at arms length.

Expand full comment

That’s because it was never about saving babies. They do not care about babies. And we should call them on it.

Expand full comment

Not true. It is all. All. All about saving "babies", "unborn babies", "unborn children". It is the weird fantasy that as soon as that ova merges with a sperm cell, it is a person, deserving all the legal protection and moral consideration of an infant or anything older than that. Some of us are old enough to remember the winners of this current political front are the heirs of a terrorist front. For them, and these, it all about "saving the babies". "Don't kill your baby!" The notion of "fetal viability" is another artifact of this cult belief.

Expand full comment

"Almost as if we were criminals ". That is exactly how misogynists and religious zealots view all women, all the time.

After all it's because women are temptresesses luring godly men to have sex with them, women refusing to stay in their divinely ordained roles as wives/mothers/housemaids, women daring to believe that WE are human and have the ability to make our own decisions.

They hate us. That's the bottom line.

Expand full comment

🎯🎯🎯

Expand full comment

No matter what a woman does, she will not be able to earn the love of a misogynistic fucking religious zealot. He subscribes purely to the Old Testament. Eve is the root of all evil.

A very astute comment from Val on a different substack related to this exact topic:

*** Women living in these toxic environments are never taught that they have a right to say no. And yet women are expected to be the gatekeepers of sex - a system setup for women's failure. We must be feminine and pretty, but yet modest and do not tempt men. But yet our existence temps men, even completely covered from head to toe women are attacked and then blamed for it. We cannot refuse a man, but when we acquiesce we are sluts. ***

Gee, we have to have sex in order to get pregnant, but as soon as we do that we are no longer part of the purity culture in their fucked up religions.

Expand full comment

We can say NO rather easily. They don't like it.

Too bad. We don't have to please them, in fact, they do not deserve us.

Expand full comment

St. Augustine and the early church fathers have a LOT to answer for.

Expand full comment

And that misogynist dick Paul, in whose image the church was formed.

Expand full comment

100% correct

Expand full comment

Bernie Moreno’s quote makes sense if you, like him, only care about yourself. Being over 50, I care because when other people are discriminated against and oppressed it hurts me, even if it doesn’t affect me directly. It’s this crazy thing called empathy.

Expand full comment