“When I was doing my residency in New York, a patient came in 18 weeks pregnant and very, very sick. The only way to save her was to terminate the pregnancy. We were in a Catholic hospital … I vividly recall my director of obstetrics and the chairman arguing with the nuns. They said, “Well, the baby’s only 18 weeks, it’s going to die.” They felt very strongly that we could not do anything, but they would be okay with us transferring her to get care elsewhere. The director rode with the patient in the ambulance because he was afraid that she would have seizures. She was in her early 20s, and she already had a kid. That really got to me. How could we let this mom die and leave her child behind when we have the means to take care of her? I said to myself: “I never want my hands tied behind my back like that again.” I used to travel; these days I’m mostly in Georgia and I’m a backup physician in Alabama. In Alabama, my patients tend to be poor and young. The youngest was barely 12. She went to play with a classmate, and there were older boys over … When her guardians brought her in, I was reluctant to take care of her in an outpatient setting because we couldn’t sedate her. I went to the local hospital and said, “She’s just a baby. She’s suffered enough. Please, can we put her to sleep.” Everybody was onboard. Things have changed so much I don’t know if I would be able to get away with that now. The most frustrating thing for me, especially in the Southeast, is seeing so many women who are not empowered to take care of themselves. Especially women of color. You hear things like “I was told I’m too young for an IUD” when we know that’s not true. They need to know what their options are. I’m Haitian-American, and the part of me that is extremely cynical wants to say, Well, it’s because these are black women. But I really think it’s a matter of poverty. It just so happens that the face of poverty may be black. A few weeks ago, a woman came in for a medical abortion. As she was about to take the pill, she asked, “Do you think God hates me?” And I said, “No, he doesn’t hate you.” She said to me: “I tried so hard not to get pregnant. I told my boyfriend to use a condom, but he refused and forced himself on me.” If you overturn Roe v. Wade, what’s going to happen is we’ll go back to the way it was before. Every state for themselves. And best believe that the conservative states are going to try to outdo each other. Poor women will suffer. Poor women will die. There’s a generation of abortion providers who are more willing to be vocal about the impact of these different legislative measures. I tell my learners, “I don’t expect you to provide abortion care, but I want you to support your co-worker if they say, ‘Hey, we need a piece of legislation.’ I want you to stand behind us. But most importantly, I want you to be able to counsel and educate your patient in a way that respects her decision.” If I can train 500 providers who are compassionate and willing to respect and help their patients, I’ve done my job.”
if roe v wade gets overturned make no mistake, the women who are going to be most hurt by it are working-class women who more often than not might be against abortion and birth control in concept and will find themselves absolutely abandoned and without a place to turn when they need help!! the lack of educational resources about abortion (and even just basic female health!) and the allowance of “crisis” pregnancy centers that spread misinformation is one of the things that keeps women in working class conservative communities under the heel of the patriarchy and also in a state of financial insecurity! women who have children before they’re ready or who they cannot support become so financially insecure so fucking quickly! and I know it’s a weird thing to talk about them specifically right now but I’m going to anyways because while I do have love and sympathy for all my fellow middle class urban-living liberal/leftist women on my twitter timeline who are freaking out right now at the end of the day the biggest victims of reproductive health rollbacks are the ones who know the absolute least about their choices and options!!
I want to be really clear about something: Planned Parenthood has done more to prevent abortion than the pro-life movement ever has.
Yup, preventing abortion by giving abortions. Makes sense!
No you fucking crusty nutsack giving people the education and the tools to not become pregnant in the first fucking place
One of my Christian friends made a Facebook post about how PP gave her tons of resources when she was trying to get pregnant and people were actually genuinely shocked that they provided such resources; they had fully bought into the idea that PP is just an “abortion factory”. The misinformation that’s been spread about PP is unreal.
gosh it’s almost like Planned Parenthood will help you plan for parenthood
My great-grandmother was pregnant for over a decade of her life.
She was pregnant at least fifteen times, had over a dozen children. Raised all of them in a big rambling farmhouse in central Pennsylvania.
And I thought about her this afternoon, lying in bed with my spouse after my lazy weekend nap, snuggling him and burying my nose in his hair, taking deep breaths of the scent of his skin. This man who is the center of my universe, my best friend, one of two reasons why I literally decided I had to live and kept fighting through the pain after surgery when I really wanted to just let go and die: I held him closer and I thought of her.
I thought of how family myth tells us that after a decade of being pregnant pretty much constantly, she kicked my great-grandfather out of their house. How she made him go live in his workshop, and he came to the house for meals and to check in.
But he slept in his workshop.
Not because she didn’t love him, but because she did.
She loved him, and if they slept in the same bed together, these two people who had crossed an ocean together, had built a life together after getting out of Poland together, they’d have sex. And because cheap, reliable, universal birth control wasn’t available then, and she was terribly fecund, apparently, she’d become pregnant again, inevitably.
My great-grandmother was TIRED of being pregnant.
So she kicked her love out of the house, and he went. He lived in his workshop, on their farm, and they stopped sleeping together, in every sense of the word. My father tells me he remembers as a child his grandfather sitting outside his workshop, leaning back on his chair, and looking up at the house in which he couldn’t sleep anymore, just… sad.
They missed each other desperately from across the yard.
I listen to @adhocavenger sleep, to the sound of his breathing, a sound that’s as familiar to me as my own heartbeat, and I can’t imagine having to sleep away from him for long. To have to separate myself from my spouse or to have to completely eschew having the kind of sex they obviously enjoyed having. To not have him close enough at night that I can curl up to him and breathe in the scent of his skin.
And that, I think, is the sort of thing that I think maybe I take for granted. That I know I can be secure in the knowledge that I can have sex with my spouse when I want to, and not have a baby.
The personal is political. I do not want our country to continue to slide backward on reproductive freedom. I do not want us to lose our freedom, threatened and small as it may be.
There are a thousand small tragedies that we talk about from the Olde Days. The unwanted baby of the unmarried lass, of course.
But my heart breaks tonight for the story I was told as a child, of the lovingly married couple who had to sleep apart because she was just damn tired of being pregnant.
Because she’d been pregnant for a DECADE of her life.
Thank you for sharing this. I had never considered that aspect of the birth control revolution.
“Personal is pollitical”, agreed, whole heartedly.
pro life ppl: we wanna protect lives also pro life ppl: let’s rape and ruin a woman’s life just bc of her profession
Within weeks, though, Hales began to see her attacker’s face in the crowd of protesters outside the Raleigh clinic. At first, she thought she was being paranoid. But then, she says, the protesters began to yell things they hadn’t yelled before, echoing words said to her during the assault.
“The protesters outside started calling me a jezebel a lot more,” Hales said. “And I got letters in the mail saying that I deserved it.”
They also said things they could have known only from talking to her attacker or seeing her rape kit. Hales has a tattoo of a serotonin molecule on her left rib and one day, a protester asked what molecule her tattoo was of.
Hales received a barrage of anonymous text messages, phone calls, and voicemails. She’d pick up the phone and hear someone breathing heavily. She’d get voicemails that said, “Do you remember it?” Some days, she received hundreds of blank text messages. One night while at dinner with friends, she got a text from an unknown number that said, “That shirt looks pretty on you.”
This wasn’t a “lone wolf” – this was a fully accepted member of the local “pro-life” community and instead of being horrified or disgusted by his actions they cheered him on and celebrated what he did.
Let that sink in: these “protesters” are supporting this rapist. They know the graphic details of the rape and they are giddy about being able to traumatize her further through stalking and harassment.
Well, misogyny is the driving force behind the “pro-life” movement. And to anyone who wants to say “but a lot of women are pro-life”—so? Systemic misogyny involves a contrast between “bad” women and “good” women, and the “good” women are the ones who buy into the system and help enforce the sanctions it imposes on “bad” women. Women slut-shame other women; women perpetuate the fetishization and essentialization of motherhood and shame other women for failing to live up to its impossible standards. Women can absolutely be misogynistic and suffer no cognitive dissonance because they assume that they are among “the good ones,” the ones rewarded by the system, and it is only the bad women who step out of their place whom they despise.
““Die mad about it” is my favorite shade ever. Now stop making women justify wanting birth control coverage because of all the other health care benefits the Pill has.”
This Tuesday, The Satanic Temple will be arguing their case in front of the Missouri Supreme Court after convincing an appeals court that the state’s mandatory 72-hour waiting period before having an abortion violates their religious freedom.
The Temple is taking up the case of a member they refer to as “Mary Doe,” who claims the law goes against her religious beliefs. The woman contends that back in May of 2015, she was forced to view an ultrasound of her fetus and required to read a booklet that stated life “begins at conception.”
All of this was forced upon her despite the fact that she “adheres to principles of the Satanic temple and has sincerely held religious beliefs different from the information in the informed consent booklet,” according to her case summary.
“Specifically, her letter advised she has deeply held religious beliefs that a nonviable fetus is not a separate human being but is part of her body and that abortion of a nonviable fetus does not terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being,” the case summary stated according to NBC News.
The Satanic Temple’s Jex Blackmore says Mary Doe’s religious freedom is being trampled upon.
“The State has essentially established a religious indoctrination program intended to push a single ideological viewpoint,” Blackmore said in a statement. “The law is intended to punish women who disagree with this opinion.”
“Missouri’s state-mandated informed consent booklets explicitly say that life begins at conception, which is a nonmedical religious viewpoint that many people disagree with,” his statement continued. “Forcing women to read this information and then wait 72-hours to consider the State’s opinion is a clear violation of the Establishment Clause.”
Although the state disagreed with the Temple’s assessment, a Missouri appeals court found merit in the Temple’s argument and agreed to let the case go the Missouri Supreme Court and even commented on the urgency of the case’s constitutional implications.
*starts handing out bags of popcorn* Oooooh, this gonna eat up the pro-lifers…
Satanists hold the line
There was an update:
Update, 1/25/18: A local CBS affiliate is reporting that the Temple has prevailed in its showdown with the state of Missouri over its abortion restrictions.
According to 9News, Missouri’s Solicitor General D. John Sauer declared ultrasounds are not required to obtain an abortion in the state.
Loki is the Philosopher King 