To get reproductive rights back, we need to keep Trump from becoming president again. A depressing WaPo article today about how so many people think democracy's guardrails will withstand a second Trump presidency. Haven't they heard of Project 2025? But we cannot give up. https://www.focus4democracy.org/ has a plan to educate undecided voters on why they must vote Blue to protect our democracy. They're focused on swing states. F4D is composed of a dozen or so seasoned campaign messaging experts (combined, they have many decades of experience) who can calculate the effects of different campaign messages on voting outcomes. I'm now supporting their programs rather than random Democratic candidates. Even people who can't afford to donate can forward the info to everyone they know. Too many people feel hopeless and aren't doing anything. This is something we CAN do. Please take a look at focus4democracy. We're in an emergency. I've got a list of close to 200 friends, acquaintances, and colleagues I'm emailing about this. Will folks here join me?
Forcing child birth on "doomed pregnancies" is not an entirely anti-abortion effort. The whole notion of birth defects and screening against them is part of accusations of eugenics against Planned Parenthood, a libel that PP has submitted to, including falsely accusing Margaret Sanger as being a eugenicist.
Preventing against doomed pregnancies starts with screening prospective parents, insuring that they themselves are aware that they might be at risk of contributing to a doomed pregnancy. This because of genetic problems or other medical problems. Certainly not because of race or social status.
And doomed pregnancies should include any genetic defects, not just fatal fetal abnormalities, like being born without a head or other bizarre obvious dead ends.
Forced abortion is a fairy tale. More likely, forced pregnancy is the result of an abusive relationship and or pro-life community. Opposing a violent partner is traumatic too and a woman pays no matter what is decided.
I'm still angry at ACOG. They have left most of their members out to dry. They're wishie/washie comment last year that their members may need to "break state law" to give their patients "optimum" care was a complete cop out. They should be ashamed. On another note, we need to go on offense. I'm old enough to remember when they the pro-matricide movement called us "baby killers." We need to call them what they are, Mother Killers!
"The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) is a non-profit organization that advocates for high standards of women's health care."
I was disappointed to hear Sen. Amy Klobuchar advocate for a return to Roe: in the Rachel Maddow interview (at 6:14): "We know it is time to have a national standard which IS Roe v Wade. That will guarantee our freedoms."
Yeah, not with over 1200 abortion restrictions passed under Roe (Guttmacher) thanks to SCOTUS.
I absolutely hate it EVERY TIME anyone says a return of Roe v Wade!!!! 🤬 Roe was not good enough, & the Hyde Amendment needs to be thrown out.
Govt needs to be out of the decision making process regarding abortion & pregnancy other than to assure safety standards.
Denying govt funds to pay for abortions via Medicaid is discriminatory to the poor, the ones least likely to be able to afford to add another child to their family.
Access to abortion under Roe, before the Dobbs decision, was quite restricted in many states & areas. We do not want to go back to that.
In the Casey ruling, the SC mentioned (without defining) a “no undue burden” standard for reproductive rights.
Unfortunately, the Republicans never encountered any burden they considered “undue” and set about passing laws to require medically unnecessary tests, no abortion after X weeks (often 6 weeks which is before most women know they are pregnant), multiple in-person visits (and they must be with the same doctor, this delays getting an abortion and may run out the clock to beyond X weeks), outlawing tele-health medical visits for abortion (which has proven safe and is essential in rural areas without clinics and other healthcare deserts), requiring clinics which provide abortions to be setup like expensive medical-surgical centers (and requires stocking expensive drugs, never used for abortion healthcare, which expire and have to be replace), requiring doctors to have hospital admitting privileges (when lawmakers know hospitals are disinclined to do that and almost no women having an abortion needs a hospital admission and if they do it’s later after they’re at home) and on and on the nonsense goes. None of it made women safer. Safety wasn’t involved, but of course they lied and claimed it was. These laws don’t make abortion safer, but they do make abortion more expensive and time consuming. What’s the word for that? Oh, right: burden. It makes getting an abortion a burden. (IMO, these burdens are in violation of Casey, but I’m not a lawyer.) Nevertheless, women who could afford it, jumped through all the hoops designed to prevent an abortion. They others weee
forced to give birth. Carrying a baby to full term, especially in the U.S. is riskier than having an abortion.
It’s why I keep saying that the lawmakers who passed abortion bans (mostly white, male Republicans) cannot be trusted to protect women. They know all this. They had their chance to do it right and blew it.
The Rs ignored medical experts when they passed the abortion bans. The Rs wrote exceptions which are designed to prevent any woman from actually getting an abortion, so essentially there are no exceptions.
When the Rs heard the real-life horror stories women were sharing,
• first they denied it was happening (they said 10 year olds don’t get pregnant),
• then the Rs said these things don’t happen often (query: how many women’s deaths ARE acceptable when doctors know how to save them without suffering and risk of permanent impairment?)
• then the Rs declined to fix the mess they made and, worse, the forced birthers told us the abortion bans are working “as intended”. And they’re not done. They’re coming after IVF, birth control, travel on public roads to seek an abortion in another state.
So, that’s why I keep hammering the point that lawmakers have shown they can’t be trusted AND women can.
We trust women to raise children. We must trust women to decide when, and if, we have children. Women are the ones to be trusted to make our own reproductive healthcare decisions.
Turns out letting women suffer, risk permanent impairment, and even death is fine with Republican lawmakers, even when state-by-state men and women have voted to keep access to abortion. It’s not fine with me.
It’s why we need Roe 2.0: A law with teeth that protects pregnant women from the reach of the extremists who would rather see women dead than let them have an abortion — even denying her an abortion when no surviving baby will result from a doomed and dangerous pregnancy. They’re Pro-matricide. It’s cruel.
Gestational personhood is the problem and the target. How to deconstruct the law regarding a woman's pregnancy existing as being protected as an individual human being.
I suspect a lot of women may never have thought about abortion and, if they did, they knew they wouldn’t have one. This is human nature. No one expects to get sick or their fetus to have fatal abnormalities. Then real life intervenes and deals them a blow. Shit happens.
Just like one of the women (sorry, I don’t recall her name) who recently shared her story about her doomed and dangerous pregnancy. She said she’d never given much thought to abortion; she didn’t plan to ever have one, she didn’t believe she’d ever need one. To me she seemed ambivalent about something theoretical and far away. (I suggest this describes most women: not me; it’ll never happen to me.)
She got married and they wanted to have a child. She was happily expecting her baby’s arrival and then something went horribly wrong. Her doctor said her baby could not survive and had become a threat to her life. IOW, her pregnancy was doomed and dangerous. She needed to end it safely, but abortion is illegal in her state and she wasn’t close enough to death to meet an exception to the ban. She survived to tell her story, but no thanks to the lawmakers who carelessly denied abortion healthcare to the women in their state.
By passing laws to deny women abortion healthcare, the lawmakers (mostly white, male Republicans) have proven their complete and total disregard for the well-being of pregnant women. They passed abortion bans after disregarding medical experts’ warnings that women would be harmed by the bans. Then we started hearing the women’s real-life horror stories and lawmakers then proved they cannot be trusted (to protect women) when they refused to fix the mess made by their bans.
Forced birthers who wanted the abortion bans see nothing wrong with the cruel and horrifying results and claim the bans are working “as intended” — forced birthers are NOT done, they vow to enact a national ban.
Medical professionals shouldn’t be threatened with prosecution for providing standard medical care to save lives. But the forced birthers want doctors to turn away pregnant women without ever saying the word “abortion” and never telling the women they may die without one. If they don’t die, they may be permanently impaired and all will suffer needlessly; it takes long to recover when treatment is foolishly withheld.
This is why I say women, not lawmakers, can be trusted to decide when, and if, they need an abortion.
This is why I say reinstating Roe isn’t good enough. We trust women to raise children. We need to trust women to decide when, and if, they have an abortion at any time during their pregnancy.
Abortion on demand and without apology. It just works.
Every woman who practices reliable birth control has considered what to do if she gets pregnant accidentally. And every woman who practices reliable birth control would want to get an abortion if she got pregnant accidentally. And every woman who practices reliable birth control has no moral objections to abortion.
And so why do women practice reliable birth control? Women who do not consider abortion as a potential in their future either are not sexually active outside of reproduction or they are utterly ignorant about what it means to be pregnant. But certainly this is not a women's problem alone. There is too much ignorance and sexual suppression from men as well.
While I agree with you about abortion on demand and without apology, I think that 'reinstate Roe' is the winning message for the 2024 election and that it really works politically for the abortion access movement to have Catholic Joe Biden making the pitch. When the Women's Health Protection Act is passed at the federal level, it will wipe out all of the restrictions that went into law under Casey.
I understand you and I don’t disagree. Roe 2.0 makes more sense. Women shouldn’t have to compromise on being allowed to live just because they are pregnant.
If the woman doesn’t live it is almost certain the fetus will die.
I don’t know if you saw Sen Kennedy in a recent hearing asking a hypothetical about a woman who suddenly decides in her third trimester she doesn’t want to be pregnant — it’s the basis for denying all women an abortion after X weeks. It’s stupid. No woman who wants to be pregnant, stays pregnant for months on end, then ends it on a whim. But he wouldn’t accept that answer, because he’s an arrogant asshole with an agenda. He said that’s what people always say when he asks the question. So he knows the answer and won’t accept it.
No way. RvW was what got us the current situation. That and years of terrorism and increasing restriction. There is no substitute to confronting and overturning the mythology of gestational personhood, in the law and in the culture. The world is round, the Earth is not the center of the universe and a zygote, a blastocyst, an embryo and a fetus is not a human being.
I'm on board and you and I are of like mind, but I think we can do those things with WHPA underpinning it. R v. W was a wise decision in 1973. Casey was the load of crap that led to the absolute diarrhea that is Dobbs.
I agree. I always make a distinction between a sentient being (a pregnant person) and a non-sentient being. A sentient being should ALWAYS take precedent over a non-sentient being unless the sentient being specifies otherwise. It’s simple. The anti-abortion people always come out with this stupid idea that the fetus takes precedent because it is “innocent”. They describe
The abortion as punishing the innocent when it is nothing of the sort. How infuriating! The pregnant woman or girl is not innocent? Is that because she has felt a penis penetrating her so now she is filthy? They even use that word to distinguish the fetus when a pre-teen girl has been raped. Let’s clarify that innocence is not relevant and sentience is.
If women in Idaho cannot easily get routine OB-Gyn care, that is unfortunate, but Idaho women either didn't bother to vote, or chose to vote for authoritarian zealots.
Do these women believe that only sinful, or irresponsible women get pregnant? Do thry believe that women should be lied to, or forced to carry doomed pregnancies to term?
I'm not losing sleep about red states that are becoming medical deserts, because that is the choice of these states.
Yeah that's why we can't subject human rights and civil liberties to the whim of the voters. It didn't work in the 1850s and it won't work now. But it's what we've done and we're going to pay dearly for it. As bad as it is now, it's going to be far far worse next year.
As a Democrat in Kansas, let me tell you there are plenty of Democrats out here working hard in red states to roll back bans. We're getting help from Republican women, too.
How do you think Kansas shot down the legislature's attempt to ban abortion in Kansas 58 to 42? Because Republicans voted to save abortion too.
Stop painting red states as a monolith, because we're not.
I’d like to see Democrats raise the issue of chaos in the workplace coming from
“states’ rights”. Should women between puberty and menopause be exempted from traveling to the misogynist states? What is a person expected to do if their water breaks at 13 weeks and they happen to be at a conference in FL?Would their Worker’s Comp airlift her out? What if a woman lives in NM and commutes into the TX panhandle every day? Can she work from home until she delivers? Republicans don’t really have a hard time prioritizing money over religion.
My husband was recently part of a committee planning a week long in-person seminar and they unanimously agreed not to consider any venue in a state with a ban.
I think more of us should speak with our money when we can. I live in a blood-red state (SC), and I openly tell people not to visit. Don't spend your tourist dollars there. Don't go to Myrtle Beach or Charleston or Kiawah or Hilton Head. I know others have a different opinion, that doing this punishes the people on our side who are fighting. Those people exist, even in places like SC and ID. But the only thing that seems to get legislators' attention is money. I know how much the SC ones pay attention to tourism dollars. So vacation in blue states and make a big deal out of the fact that you're doing so.
This doesn't solve the problem of having to travel to a red state for work. But if I were pregnant, I'd refuse to attend a conference in Florida or Texas or Tennessee, etc. Because our healthcare system is a shit show to navigate at home; it's a nightmare to deal with while traveling. Especially in a state that may not have doctors because so many have left these states.
My company had a conference in FL recently. It’s a good progressive firm that pays for abortions including interstate travel but they weren’t smart enough to break their contract. It’s time that we employees make it non-negotiable. I did put plan C stickers in the airport and convention center bathrooms!
It’s life-and-death. Definitely non-negotiable. And companies like yours need to tell these conference event salespeople, “We did not choose your location because of your abortion bans. Our pregnant employees would not be safe in your state.”
The Guardian published an article in their 6/25 edition about conservative GOP legislators who want to end no-fault divorce-they claim it is unfair to.. guess who?...husbands.
These people are coming for all of our rights. They want women barefoot, pregnant, and abused.
Oh yes, no fault divorce, marriage to underage girls, kill red flag laws that protect abused from abusers, ban contraception, ban same sex marriage, etc.
Republicans would make Gilead look good at this rate.
Quote: That’s because there’s a big difference between talking about how glad you are that your kid exists, and insisting other women should have no choice.
My comment: Wow. What would that sound like if someone wanted an abortion and was
talked out of it, then REGRETTED giving birth? Would you really expect them to publicly say some variant of:
“My child is a monster. It was a huge mistake to let my child be born. I hate my child and don’t care if s/he knows it. If I could do it over, I’d have had an abortion.”
Of course, for the women with a doomed and dangerous pregnancy they don’t have a choice to give birth to a baby that will survive. If they live in a state with an abortion ban, their choice is to cross their fingers and hope they don’t die or leave the state for life-saving medical care. Some choice.
The whole “leave it up to the states” premise, when applied to receiving healthcare, was absurdly unjust from the get-go. We’re a nation, not a loose affiliation of despotic clans.
The travel bans highlight how even *IF* you were willing to accept the premise of leaving it to the states, that position was always a bullshit smokescreen in itself. If a state effectively holds pregnant people hostage, then the fact neighboring states have liberal abortion policies doesn’t really matter.
I really worry about what happens if a state is able to get legal fetal personhood enacted. Then the fetus becomes a “minor” citizen of that state just like an actual child. A pregnant woman could literally be charged with a whole raft of crimes including kidnapping for traveling across state lines against the father’s wishes. What a weapon abusers could make of that.
I’m curious if there is state or federal data on how often prenatal test results are incorrect? It seems like so much of what these morons are saying is refutable with actual facts…
I’m sure you noticed, but I’ll say it anyway: they don’t care about the facts.
It’s where a term like “post-birth abortion” comes from — they make it up. It may be the result of hearing that a baby born with no chance of survival is given comfort care and allowed to die peacefully (no heroic measures) so the baby doesn’t suffer. It’s called compassion, something forced birthers don’t believe in.
The forced birthers are great at messaging. They talk about fetal “heart beat” at a time when the fetus has no heart! What is being heard is an electrical pulse that causes a rhythmic beat, so they called it a “heart beat” (to give the impression it was a fully developed baby with a heart, instead of a growing clump of cells). They talk about the pain a fetus feels — at a time when the fetus has no nervous system and medical experts say there cannot be paid without paid receptors.
As I said, facts are not important to the forced birth crowd.
Accurate! They don’t care. However, I’d still love to see these people being challenged in real time to prove their bs with data. Like during a debate it would be great to rebut with “can you give me a real life example of that?”
Ultrasound tests are the least accurate, though they are accurate over 80% of the time.That's why additional testing is always recommended. Genetic testing is inaccurate in less than 1 in a million tests.
Very rarely, they are using the latest technology.
"Certain diagnostic tests are procedures that can determine with greater than 99.9 percent accuracy whether or not a developing baby has a chromosomal difference. The two types of diagnostic tests are chorionic villus sampling (CVS) and amniocentesis."
I wouldn't believe those science denying assholes about anything.
To get reproductive rights back, we need to keep Trump from becoming president again. A depressing WaPo article today about how so many people think democracy's guardrails will withstand a second Trump presidency. Haven't they heard of Project 2025? But we cannot give up. https://www.focus4democracy.org/ has a plan to educate undecided voters on why they must vote Blue to protect our democracy. They're focused on swing states. F4D is composed of a dozen or so seasoned campaign messaging experts (combined, they have many decades of experience) who can calculate the effects of different campaign messages on voting outcomes. I'm now supporting their programs rather than random Democratic candidates. Even people who can't afford to donate can forward the info to everyone they know. Too many people feel hopeless and aren't doing anything. This is something we CAN do. Please take a look at focus4democracy. We're in an emergency. I've got a list of close to 200 friends, acquaintances, and colleagues I'm emailing about this. Will folks here join me?
Forcing child birth on "doomed pregnancies" is not an entirely anti-abortion effort. The whole notion of birth defects and screening against them is part of accusations of eugenics against Planned Parenthood, a libel that PP has submitted to, including falsely accusing Margaret Sanger as being a eugenicist.
Preventing against doomed pregnancies starts with screening prospective parents, insuring that they themselves are aware that they might be at risk of contributing to a doomed pregnancy. This because of genetic problems or other medical problems. Certainly not because of race or social status.
And doomed pregnancies should include any genetic defects, not just fatal fetal abnormalities, like being born without a head or other bizarre obvious dead ends.
Forced abortion is a fairy tale. More likely, forced pregnancy is the result of an abusive relationship and or pro-life community. Opposing a violent partner is traumatic too and a woman pays no matter what is decided.
I'm still angry at ACOG. They have left most of their members out to dry. They're wishie/washie comment last year that their members may need to "break state law" to give their patients "optimum" care was a complete cop out. They should be ashamed. On another note, we need to go on offense. I'm old enough to remember when they the pro-matricide movement called us "baby killers." We need to call them what they are, Mother Killers!
Pro-matricide. Excellent description. I haven’t heard that before.
From Google,
"The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) is a non-profit organization that advocates for high standards of women's health care."
I was disappointed to hear Sen. Amy Klobuchar advocate for a return to Roe: in the Rachel Maddow interview (at 6:14): "We know it is time to have a national standard which IS Roe v Wade. That will guarantee our freedoms."
Yeah, not with over 1200 abortion restrictions passed under Roe (Guttmacher) thanks to SCOTUS.
I absolutely hate it EVERY TIME anyone says a return of Roe v Wade!!!! 🤬 Roe was not good enough, & the Hyde Amendment needs to be thrown out.
Govt needs to be out of the decision making process regarding abortion & pregnancy other than to assure safety standards.
Denying govt funds to pay for abortions via Medicaid is discriminatory to the poor, the ones least likely to be able to afford to add another child to their family.
Access to abortion under Roe, before the Dobbs decision, was quite restricted in many states & areas. We do not want to go back to that.
In the Casey ruling, the SC mentioned (without defining) a “no undue burden” standard for reproductive rights.
Unfortunately, the Republicans never encountered any burden they considered “undue” and set about passing laws to require medically unnecessary tests, no abortion after X weeks (often 6 weeks which is before most women know they are pregnant), multiple in-person visits (and they must be with the same doctor, this delays getting an abortion and may run out the clock to beyond X weeks), outlawing tele-health medical visits for abortion (which has proven safe and is essential in rural areas without clinics and other healthcare deserts), requiring clinics which provide abortions to be setup like expensive medical-surgical centers (and requires stocking expensive drugs, never used for abortion healthcare, which expire and have to be replace), requiring doctors to have hospital admitting privileges (when lawmakers know hospitals are disinclined to do that and almost no women having an abortion needs a hospital admission and if they do it’s later after they’re at home) and on and on the nonsense goes. None of it made women safer. Safety wasn’t involved, but of course they lied and claimed it was. These laws don’t make abortion safer, but they do make abortion more expensive and time consuming. What’s the word for that? Oh, right: burden. It makes getting an abortion a burden. (IMO, these burdens are in violation of Casey, but I’m not a lawyer.) Nevertheless, women who could afford it, jumped through all the hoops designed to prevent an abortion. They others weee
forced to give birth. Carrying a baby to full term, especially in the U.S. is riskier than having an abortion.
It’s why I keep saying that the lawmakers who passed abortion bans (mostly white, male Republicans) cannot be trusted to protect women. They know all this. They had their chance to do it right and blew it.
The Rs ignored medical experts when they passed the abortion bans. The Rs wrote exceptions which are designed to prevent any woman from actually getting an abortion, so essentially there are no exceptions.
When the Rs heard the real-life horror stories women were sharing,
• first they denied it was happening (they said 10 year olds don’t get pregnant),
• then the Rs said these things don’t happen often (query: how many women’s deaths ARE acceptable when doctors know how to save them without suffering and risk of permanent impairment?)
• then the Rs declined to fix the mess they made and, worse, the forced birthers told us the abortion bans are working “as intended”. And they’re not done. They’re coming after IVF, birth control, travel on public roads to seek an abortion in another state.
So, that’s why I keep hammering the point that lawmakers have shown they can’t be trusted AND women can.
We trust women to raise children. We must trust women to decide when, and if, we have children. Women are the ones to be trusted to make our own reproductive healthcare decisions.
Turns out letting women suffer, risk permanent impairment, and even death is fine with Republican lawmakers, even when state-by-state men and women have voted to keep access to abortion. It’s not fine with me.
It’s why we need Roe 2.0: A law with teeth that protects pregnant women from the reach of the extremists who would rather see women dead than let them have an abortion — even denying her an abortion when no surviving baby will result from a doomed and dangerous pregnancy. They’re Pro-matricide. It’s cruel.
Gestational personhood is the problem and the target. How to deconstruct the law regarding a woman's pregnancy existing as being protected as an individual human being.
I suspect a lot of women may never have thought about abortion and, if they did, they knew they wouldn’t have one. This is human nature. No one expects to get sick or their fetus to have fatal abnormalities. Then real life intervenes and deals them a blow. Shit happens.
Just like one of the women (sorry, I don’t recall her name) who recently shared her story about her doomed and dangerous pregnancy. She said she’d never given much thought to abortion; she didn’t plan to ever have one, she didn’t believe she’d ever need one. To me she seemed ambivalent about something theoretical and far away. (I suggest this describes most women: not me; it’ll never happen to me.)
She got married and they wanted to have a child. She was happily expecting her baby’s arrival and then something went horribly wrong. Her doctor said her baby could not survive and had become a threat to her life. IOW, her pregnancy was doomed and dangerous. She needed to end it safely, but abortion is illegal in her state and she wasn’t close enough to death to meet an exception to the ban. She survived to tell her story, but no thanks to the lawmakers who carelessly denied abortion healthcare to the women in their state.
By passing laws to deny women abortion healthcare, the lawmakers (mostly white, male Republicans) have proven their complete and total disregard for the well-being of pregnant women. They passed abortion bans after disregarding medical experts’ warnings that women would be harmed by the bans. Then we started hearing the women’s real-life horror stories and lawmakers then proved they cannot be trusted (to protect women) when they refused to fix the mess made by their bans.
Forced birthers who wanted the abortion bans see nothing wrong with the cruel and horrifying results and claim the bans are working “as intended” — forced birthers are NOT done, they vow to enact a national ban.
Medical professionals shouldn’t be threatened with prosecution for providing standard medical care to save lives. But the forced birthers want doctors to turn away pregnant women without ever saying the word “abortion” and never telling the women they may die without one. If they don’t die, they may be permanently impaired and all will suffer needlessly; it takes long to recover when treatment is foolishly withheld.
This is why I say women, not lawmakers, can be trusted to decide when, and if, they need an abortion.
This is why I say reinstating Roe isn’t good enough. We trust women to raise children. We need to trust women to decide when, and if, they have an abortion at any time during their pregnancy.
Abortion on demand and without apology. It just works.
Every woman who practices reliable birth control has considered what to do if she gets pregnant accidentally. And every woman who practices reliable birth control would want to get an abortion if she got pregnant accidentally. And every woman who practices reliable birth control has no moral objections to abortion.
And so why do women practice reliable birth control? Women who do not consider abortion as a potential in their future either are not sexually active outside of reproduction or they are utterly ignorant about what it means to be pregnant. But certainly this is not a women's problem alone. There is too much ignorance and sexual suppression from men as well.
While I agree with you about abortion on demand and without apology, I think that 'reinstate Roe' is the winning message for the 2024 election and that it really works politically for the abortion access movement to have Catholic Joe Biden making the pitch. When the Women's Health Protection Act is passed at the federal level, it will wipe out all of the restrictions that went into law under Casey.
I understand you and I don’t disagree. Roe 2.0 makes more sense. Women shouldn’t have to compromise on being allowed to live just because they are pregnant.
If the woman doesn’t live it is almost certain the fetus will die.
I don’t know if you saw Sen Kennedy in a recent hearing asking a hypothetical about a woman who suddenly decides in her third trimester she doesn’t want to be pregnant — it’s the basis for denying all women an abortion after X weeks. It’s stupid. No woman who wants to be pregnant, stays pregnant for months on end, then ends it on a whim. But he wouldn’t accept that answer, because he’s an arrogant asshole with an agenda. He said that’s what people always say when he asks the question. So he knows the answer and won’t accept it.
I loathe that Rhodes Scholar douchebag.
No way. RvW was what got us the current situation. That and years of terrorism and increasing restriction. There is no substitute to confronting and overturning the mythology of gestational personhood, in the law and in the culture. The world is round, the Earth is not the center of the universe and a zygote, a blastocyst, an embryo and a fetus is not a human being.
I'm on board and you and I are of like mind, but I think we can do those things with WHPA underpinning it. R v. W was a wise decision in 1973. Casey was the load of crap that led to the absolute diarrhea that is Dobbs.
WHPA is the Women’s Health Protection Act
https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/3755/text
https://reproductiverights.org/the-womens-health-protection-act-federal-legislation-to-protect-the-right-to-access-abortion-care/
https://actforwomen.org/the-womens-health-protection-act/
I don't have the patience to wade through WHPC to figure out where gestational personhood fits in there, but that to me is the hill to die on.
I agree. I always make a distinction between a sentient being (a pregnant person) and a non-sentient being. A sentient being should ALWAYS take precedent over a non-sentient being unless the sentient being specifies otherwise. It’s simple. The anti-abortion people always come out with this stupid idea that the fetus takes precedent because it is “innocent”. They describe
The abortion as punishing the innocent when it is nothing of the sort. How infuriating! The pregnant woman or girl is not innocent? Is that because she has felt a penis penetrating her so now she is filthy? They even use that word to distinguish the fetus when a pre-teen girl has been raped. Let’s clarify that innocence is not relevant and sentience is.
Thank you for posting that link.
Even in the red states, there are children under voting age being impregnated.
If women in Idaho cannot easily get routine OB-Gyn care, that is unfortunate, but Idaho women either didn't bother to vote, or chose to vote for authoritarian zealots.
Do these women believe that only sinful, or irresponsible women get pregnant? Do thry believe that women should be lied to, or forced to carry doomed pregnancies to term?
I'm not losing sleep about red states that are becoming medical deserts, because that is the choice of these states.
Yeah that's why we can't subject human rights and civil liberties to the whim of the voters. It didn't work in the 1850s and it won't work now. But it's what we've done and we're going to pay dearly for it. As bad as it is now, it's going to be far far worse next year.
As a Democrat in Kansas, let me tell you there are plenty of Democrats out here working hard in red states to roll back bans. We're getting help from Republican women, too.
How do you think Kansas shot down the legislature's attempt to ban abortion in Kansas 58 to 42? Because Republicans voted to save abortion too.
Stop painting red states as a monolith, because we're not.
Women and the people who love us need to vote against republican politicians in EVERY state!!
Thank you for stating my opinion so well. For good or ill, we get the government we ask for
I’d like to see Democrats raise the issue of chaos in the workplace coming from
“states’ rights”. Should women between puberty and menopause be exempted from traveling to the misogynist states? What is a person expected to do if their water breaks at 13 weeks and they happen to be at a conference in FL?Would their Worker’s Comp airlift her out? What if a woman lives in NM and commutes into the TX panhandle every day? Can she work from home until she delivers? Republicans don’t really have a hard time prioritizing money over religion.
My husband was recently part of a committee planning a week long in-person seminar and they unanimously agreed not to consider any venue in a state with a ban.
I think more of us should speak with our money when we can. I live in a blood-red state (SC), and I openly tell people not to visit. Don't spend your tourist dollars there. Don't go to Myrtle Beach or Charleston or Kiawah or Hilton Head. I know others have a different opinion, that doing this punishes the people on our side who are fighting. Those people exist, even in places like SC and ID. But the only thing that seems to get legislators' attention is money. I know how much the SC ones pay attention to tourism dollars. So vacation in blue states and make a big deal out of the fact that you're doing so.
This doesn't solve the problem of having to travel to a red state for work. But if I were pregnant, I'd refuse to attend a conference in Florida or Texas or Tennessee, etc. Because our healthcare system is a shit show to navigate at home; it's a nightmare to deal with while traveling. Especially in a state that may not have doctors because so many have left these states.
My company had a conference in FL recently. It’s a good progressive firm that pays for abortions including interstate travel but they weren’t smart enough to break their contract. It’s time that we employees make it non-negotiable. I did put plan C stickers in the airport and convention center bathrooms!
It’s life-and-death. Definitely non-negotiable. And companies like yours need to tell these conference event salespeople, “We did not choose your location because of your abortion bans. Our pregnant employees would not be safe in your state.”
The Guardian published an article in their 6/25 edition about conservative GOP legislators who want to end no-fault divorce-they claim it is unfair to.. guess who?...husbands.
These people are coming for all of our rights. They want women barefoot, pregnant, and abused.
Oh yes, no fault divorce, marriage to underage girls, kill red flag laws that protect abused from abusers, ban contraception, ban same sex marriage, etc.
Republicans would make Gilead look good at this rate.
Quote: That’s because there’s a big difference between talking about how glad you are that your kid exists, and insisting other women should have no choice.
My comment: Wow. What would that sound like if someone wanted an abortion and was
talked out of it, then REGRETTED giving birth? Would you really expect them to publicly say some variant of:
“My child is a monster. It was a huge mistake to let my child be born. I hate my child and don’t care if s/he knows it. If I could do it over, I’d have had an abortion.”
Of course, for the women with a doomed and dangerous pregnancy they don’t have a choice to give birth to a baby that will survive. If they live in a state with an abortion ban, their choice is to cross their fingers and hope they don’t die or leave the state for life-saving medical care. Some choice.
The whole “leave it up to the states” premise, when applied to receiving healthcare, was absurdly unjust from the get-go. We’re a nation, not a loose affiliation of despotic clans.
The travel bans highlight how even *IF* you were willing to accept the premise of leaving it to the states, that position was always a bullshit smokescreen in itself. If a state effectively holds pregnant people hostage, then the fact neighboring states have liberal abortion policies doesn’t really matter.
I really worry about what happens if a state is able to get legal fetal personhood enacted. Then the fetus becomes a “minor” citizen of that state just like an actual child. A pregnant woman could literally be charged with a whole raft of crimes including kidnapping for traveling across state lines against the father’s wishes. What a weapon abusers could make of that.
typo - 'if' should be 'when'
Yes, agree we should have bodily autonomy. And your rights should never depend on your zip code.
I’m curious if there is state or federal data on how often prenatal test results are incorrect? It seems like so much of what these morons are saying is refutable with actual facts…
I’m sure you noticed, but I’ll say it anyway: they don’t care about the facts.
It’s where a term like “post-birth abortion” comes from — they make it up. It may be the result of hearing that a baby born with no chance of survival is given comfort care and allowed to die peacefully (no heroic measures) so the baby doesn’t suffer. It’s called compassion, something forced birthers don’t believe in.
The forced birthers are great at messaging. They talk about fetal “heart beat” at a time when the fetus has no heart! What is being heard is an electrical pulse that causes a rhythmic beat, so they called it a “heart beat” (to give the impression it was a fully developed baby with a heart, instead of a growing clump of cells). They talk about the pain a fetus feels — at a time when the fetus has no nervous system and medical experts say there cannot be paid without paid receptors.
As I said, facts are not important to the forced birth crowd.
Accurate! They don’t care. However, I’d still love to see these people being challenged in real time to prove their bs with data. Like during a debate it would be great to rebut with “can you give me a real life example of that?”
Some early genetic screens can be inaccurate, but usually a confirmation from a diagnostic test is required.
Some diseases can't be discovered without amniocentesis, performed somewhere during the 2nd trimester.
What do you mean by "diseases"? Are you referring to gestational problems and/or genetic defects?
Congenital defects.
Ultrasound tests are the least accurate, though they are accurate over 80% of the time.That's why additional testing is always recommended. Genetic testing is inaccurate in less than 1 in a million tests.
Very rarely, they are using the latest technology.
"Certain diagnostic tests are procedures that can determine with greater than 99.9 percent accuracy whether or not a developing baby has a chromosomal difference. The two types of diagnostic tests are chorionic villus sampling (CVS) and amniocentesis."
I wouldn't believe those science denying assholes about anything.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK115544/#:~:text=Certain%20diagnostic%20tests%20are%20procedures,sampling%20(CVS)%20and%20amniocentesis.