60 Comments
Jan 25·edited Jan 25

Truthfully, I don't think the GOP is "betting" on Crisis Pregnancy Centers, sure they think they can spin them for the "hey look at all the good we're doing" PR, but I fully believe the GOP funneling state money to Crisis Pregnancy Centers is quid pro quo for the years/decades of financial support and millions, if not billions, of dollars that the religious right has 'paid-in' to politicians. The church likes being on the tax-payer tit.

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Jan 24·edited Jan 24

"Maternity homes". My god, this phrase sends shivers down my spine. I'm an adoptee from the Baby Scoop Era, when unmarried girls and young women across the country were sent to these places and heavily pressured or forced to give their babies up adoption. They were often made to perform manual labor for free up to the day of childbirth in order to "pay for" their room and board. The organizations.running these reproductive workhouses would then turn around and charge adoptive families large fees for their new babies. In other words, the agencies running these "homes" committed human trafficking on massive scale, and profited from it. Anyone who wants to know what these places were really like should read "The Girls Who Went Away", and see the bio-pics "The Magdalene Sisters" and "Philomena" (both based on real events, places and people in Ireland).

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The GOP and anti-abortionists have created the conditions for "crises pregnancies" - thus they want to create centers for their dovotees - pity the poor pregnant women trapped in one.

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Jan 23·edited Jan 24

Pregnancy is not a crisis. Your centers are political traps for women who want health care. Require pro-lifers to receive counseling about having a child adopted by themselves or a member of their family. Prove pro-lifers are really actively supporting a live child who was not genetically theirs before they support centers that force women to think they do not control their own bodies.

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I watched the video of North Carolina Sen. Natasha Marcus breaking down the $20 million in state funding that was being sent to people’s homes and empty lots. I was so angry that the Rs actually put into their budget money for this. Did that budget pass with that money in it?

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If these centres really were an “oasis of love, sympathy, care, blah, blah, blah and (gag) respect,” then they would love and care about people enough to respect them and their decisions. Lying to people, restricting their access to basic needs and communication and forcing them to do something which they do not want to do or which is potentially life-threatening is the ultimate sign of disrespect.

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I’ve been watching Call the Midwife on Netflix. I highly recommend it. The series is set in London’s East End starting right after World War II. It is based on the memoirs of a woman who was a midwife. It is especially prescient right now. In some ways, care was better—women were seen regularly by district nurses in their homes both pre and post natal. But, the last episode I watched was horrifying. A woman had 8 children and was pregnant with her 9th. They lived in a two room flat. She has an illegal abortion and nearly dies. When the midwife and the nun who is also a nurse find her, the nurse wonders what to do since she has broken the law. The nun tells her, “we tell them she had a miscarriage”. Yep, they had to lie to protect her. And, condoms were not covered by National Health, so they could not afford them. We are going back to this situation. Too bad we won’t have the extraordinary care these nurses/midwifes provided to go with it.

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Your comment is worth reading and repeating. Great points!

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“These groups often control women’s movements, their phones, and make them ‘earn’ things like diapers by going to Bible classes.”

Crisis Pregnancy Center = Christian Programming Cell.

So dangerous, sick, and wrong. Anyone who makes people “earn” basic rights like family contact or diapers isn’t ready to help others, they need help. That’s gross.

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Jan 23·edited Jan 23

It's time for our SAT analogies practice, kids.

"Directing tax dollars to school vouchers" IS TO "starving public education"

AS

"Directing tax dollars to CPCs" IS TO ?

Answer: "failing to provide adequate healthcare and public assistance to pregnant people and infants"

It's all part of the same plan to redirect our taxes to private religious institutions that answer to no one for what they do with them, while shrinking actual public institutions that operate under oversight and provide impartial aid to all.

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👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻

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If you search for "abortion" you get results for CPCs. You can and we all should submit a complaint to Google and Bing and wherever that these results are not just wrong but dangerous. I'm doing it in Idaho and working to mobilize some locals to help have multiple complaints filed.

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Great idea! I wish we could get State University political science departments to run “data research projects” monitoring the tax $ going to CPCs, the oversight or lack of, the religious component, the internal regulations, the administrative pay, the profit mechanisms for these “non-profits,” the “medical” records they produce, the success they portend to have, the services they advertise versus the services they actually provide in house, the number of medically certified physicians and nurses they employ in house. Who wrote the funding bill and who signed on as co-sponsors coupled with campaign funding they received from anyone involved with the CPC & the anti-abortion groups.

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Congratulations and oh my gosh what an honor and a responsibility to give Congressional testimony! How did you achieve that, if I may? That’s a big question, and if you don’t have the time or bandwidth, I understand. No one I know who is a subject matter expert and trying hard can get anywhere near it on other healthcare related matters and I am genuinely in awe. I don’t hope to be able to do it myself, but perhaps I can pass something helpful along. Bless you if you do take the time to explain and bless you anyway for doing all this.

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Jessica has become an expert and respected go to source for candidates for an issue they will campaign on. If one wants to speak in front of a Congressional committee, it begins with building a relationship with someone on a Representative’s staff or with the legislator. Having experience, holding a high level (often elected) position within an association or organization that deals with the subject or published material that proves high level competent & factual knowledge about a subject is helpful in gaining the respect from the legislative affairs staff and the legislator.

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Thank you that is helpful. I don’t know anyone else who has made that happen and wanted to take the opportunity to at least ask. I have pushed past my limits and done all I am capable of doing and suspect it can never be enough. This is a real problem for seriously impaired people. Just a reality. If you don’t have family, life becomes

more dangerous. As a physician, I managed to arrange some meetings with state legislators, but I’m losing function. I will continue to try.

Jessica IS an expert but there are subjects in which people make themselves experts in curious ways. Again thank you.

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I went to a cpc in the late 90’s. I didn’t know what it was. Their yellow pages ad said they had abortion information. I was 19, pregnant, & didn’t want to be. They showed me fake fetal development dolls. The kind that show a fully formed baby as early as 2 weeks. They took glee in telling me the local planned parenthood didn’t perform abortions. And they were big mad that I kept insisting I needed & wanted an abortion. Cpc’s aren’t about helping women. They’re about manipulating & guilting women into having children they don’t want.

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How awful. I hope you weren’t coerced. These centers are unconstitutional infringements of religion in an area of women’s right to privacy. Women’s right to privacy hasn’t been officially eliminated, it being the foundation of Roe.

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They definitely tried to coerce me. That’s why they showed me the fake fetal development dolls, tried to convince me my partner would step up & be a doting father, & took joy in telling me the local pp didn’t perform abortions.

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Where are the physician's societies and the Public Health Departments? This seems like such a no brainer to me it makes me apoplectic. Doing ultrasounds and missing ectopics, running std tests with no discussion of condom use, no site visits to check on expiration dates of sterilization products and equipment and protocols????? None of this has anything to do with free speech.

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I left an earlier inappropriate comment in anger, not at anyone here. Every specialty has its own organization, plus the AMA, to which a number of practicing physicians still pay dues for lobbyists although they’re smaller than in the past. The organizations exist on a state and federal level. Some physicians belong to several. They don’t have as much power as they used to, but they still have power, and funds, to push back on patient care matters. They could somewhat shield individual physicians and related individual professionals from harm who choose to stand up for patient care. They could hypothetically protect those choosing to speak up; instead we saw death threats to public health officials during COVID just for doing their job. I don’t know if you recall the FL epidemiologist who continued to post COVID information in the public’s interest and state agents with semi-automatic weapons raided her HOME. I apologize for not having that link at hand, and I’m betting it might be vanished now anyway. A number of physicians are the first in their family, and that means starting with a couple hundred thousand dollars debt minimum, possibly much more. We have a lot of excellent foreign medical graduates here on VISAS hoop jumping and repeating all their training to get to stay, keeping their heads down. We have a lot of docs who are employees with “fire at will” clauses and not enough time for bathroom breaks because Wall Street is far into hostile takeovers of private practices and hospitals. We have the remaining mega-capitalist docs, who probably won’t do anything that they feel compromises their bottom line. And we have the true believers of the prosperity gospel-bad things happen if you deserve it.

Public health is woefully underfunded.

We could and should have events, social media and media campaigns, maybe even strikes, but the system is corrupt and deteriorating and the few good ones are very afraid. The DEA is using our prescription data to pick off the docs still prescribing controlled substances, seize their assets so they can’t hire an attorney, ruin them in the press, and imprison them, and those physician organizations are not intervening. These are not pill mill docs. Hospitals are doing double mastectomies, giving women Tylenol IV in hospital, and telling women to take Tylenol at discharge. Tylenol doesn’t do anything. In a way I’m not surprised physician orgs aren’t showing up for this either. Watch, they won’t stop the first arrest of a physician; physicians know it, that’s why they’re letting patients come close to death with miscarriages. I’m not defending it, just providing context. They are supposed to put the patient first, but they know they’ll go to jail and no one will defend them. I suggest calling every physician organization you can every five minutes and telling them what you think about this. They have lobbyists and money and infrastructure. I don’t know why they aren’t doing anything. My guess is corruption but I don’t know. They need to step up on a number of fronts.

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Ah yes Rebekah Jones The data scientist DeathSantis had her jailed on trumped-up charges where she caught Covid. No publication covered the whole story I had to find updates piecemeal about her.

"Rebekah Jones’ unlikely notoriety as a coronavirus whistleblower stemmed from her ground-breaking work at the Florida Department of Health, where she led data and surveillance during the pandemic.

Praised by the White House for her innovation and creativity in data communication, visualization and management, Jones fought for transparency and accessibility of COVID-19 data across the country. Her work became the standard for states nation-wide.

In May 2020, when asked to manipulate data in support of a premature plan to reopen the state, Jones refused, was fired, defamed and harassed by her own government. After leaving DOH, Jones built her own system to monitor the pandemic and launched a nationwide initiative to track cases in schools.

In September 2020, Jones was named one of Fortune Magazine’s 40 under 40 and one of Medium’s 50 experts to trust during a pandemic.

In December, her home was raided with guns drawn on her family by state police on the orders of Governor Ron DeSantis. "

https://whistleblowersblog.org/nwd/rebekah-jones-tells-her-whistleblower-story/

Thank you for explaining this, I have wondered why the situation has gotten so dire and the non-medical assholes so bold. I've been retired for well over a decade so I had no idea. (I was a Surgical assistant.)

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Thank you so much for the wonderful update on Rebekah Jones. I’m so happy she is running. I’m disabled now; I pieced that and more together following a series of health disasters in family some of which were unnecessary. It happens. My comment was a screed I apologize for; I have lots of info I would like to be useful but nothing I can do with it. When I can get it out.

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You are very welcome! I followed her case closely as I live in Florida, and I have to say the local papers covered it more, but no one source told the whole tale.

The reason they raided her house was to get her devices with which she was keeping up with the actual Covid numbers, as best she could with all the under-reporting going on. Once he had her devices, he never filed any charges, thus proving he only wanted to shut her down.

"Jones, who has maintained she was not responsible for sending the message over the state health network, has not been charged in the hacking case."

"The suit states that IP addresses are commonly “spoofed” and references news articles that found that the username and password for the system of the message that triggered the investigation were publicly available on the health department’s website.

https://www.wusf.org/courts-law/2021-01-14/judge-defers-ordering-return-of-computers-phone-to-rebekah-jones-self-described-covid-whistleblower

"On Saturday, Jones said via Twitter that the state's allegation against her "was issued the day after a Tallahassee judge told police that if they're not investigating a crime, they had to return my equipment."

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/01/18/957914495/data-scientist-rebekah-jones-facing-arrest-turns-herself-in-to-florida-authoriti

When a judge ruled he had to give her devices back, then he trumped up some charges and had her arrested where she caught Covid in jail. he is a vicious piece of work who, I'm glad failed so spectacturally in his bid to become Fuhrer of the Us.

"Jones walked out of the jail Monday afternoon after posting bail. Wearing a mask, she told reporters outside the jail she had just tested positive for Covid-19."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/18/us/rebekah-jones-data-scientist-surrender/index.html

https://www.tallahassee.com/story/news/2021/01/14/judge-puts-off-decision-fired-analyst-rebekah-jones-property/4164680001/

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Where are the legislators who should be putting forth bills to regulate and monitor these CPCs?? For every single funding bill Rs put forth to fund CPCs a D legislator should add a rider for oversight to be part of the bill. Then local state media should produce articles about Rs voting for no oversight.

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Taxpayer funded Magdalen laundries

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The classic abuses never go out of style with the evil people.

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