And the Arizona GOP is now taking panty-snifffing to an entirely new level, demanding that “the gestational age of the fetus should be ‘calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman.'” So in order to get an abortion, you now have to provide a bunch of old perverts a calendar with your menstrual cycle highlighted.
These people are sick and evil. We’re seriously one or two bills away before women will be required to go to the well of the Arizona Senate and tell these old white perverts their favorite sexual position and how old they were when they lost their virginity.
gogol's wife
Are you really just trying deliberately and with malice aforethought to ruin my weekend?
Chet
Douchebags.
dr. bloor
…and The State will be creating positions to canvass neighborhoods, checking bed sheets for evidence of menses.
JOB CREATION, BITCHEZ!
wrb
You know those women will just lie.
They have their periods monitored by the state from puberty onward so that we may know the real date of their last period when one comes wanting an abortion.
middlewest
Government so small you could drown in a bathtub.
wrb
@middlewest:
Government so small it is waiting in your bathtub.
Julie
I don’t understand this at all. That’s the general rule of thumb doctors use to determine the age of the fetus *anyway*. Why precisely does it need to be a law?
Or am I just trying to apply logic in a logic-free zone (e.g. Arizona)?
Insomniac
How will they know? Whose word will they take on this? The woman’s? Well, she can say whatever she wants…how will they know? Or am I missing something here? ‘cos the accumulation of things these people are trying to do to women and their health is doing my head in.
Thoughtcrime
@wrb:
“Fatwa in the Bathtub” by Little Fetus
YoohooCthulhu
Why don’t they pass a bill doing what they really want: regulating whether or not a woman can get an abortion based on what position she conceived in. That’s the best way to filter out the dirty slutz.
Linnaeus
Hurry up, climate change.
jon
@Julie: R-O-N-G Wrong!
That’s a useful clue for the maximum possible age, but to “determine the age of the fetus”? Not even close. Unless every instance of intercourse is known, it’s just not that likely that anything can determine the age of the fetus with the accuracy this absurd bill requires. And even then, there’s still a range of possibilities.
kth
In the 40 years I’ve been aware of political affairs, from my coming of age during Watergate to the present day, I can’t remember it ever being as crazy as it is now.
piratedan
it’s only a matter of time before an aggrieved woman enters the Arizona legislature and guns down an entire chamber, with a 31 bullet clip on her glock semi-automatic and then uses the newly appointed state hand gun on any survivors and then cites the “stand your ground” law as her only recourse when it came to the protection of her person.
ruemara
pleaseopleaseopleaseoplease be a fucking joke. please. be. a. FUCKING. JOKE. FUCK! Fuckityfuckfuckfuck.
Litlebritdifrnt
My sister continued to have periods well into her pregnancy. To the point that by the time she realized she was pregnant it was pretty much too late. So if someone who is 28 weeks tells the doctor that her last period was “yesterday” does that work? Do these fuckers know so little about how a woman’s body works that they think that the magical “last period” is written in stone as “yup she must be pregnant as of now” when in reality she could have been pregnant for months.
cdmarine
@Julie: Yeah, that’s what I don’t get about this. I’m a bajingo-American, and I’ve had to deal with fertility-related foo in some form or another many times, and it has always been the case since I started this bleeding journey (ha) that cycles of all kind, including pregnancy, are counted from Day 1 of last period. It does lead to some weird philosophical pretzels. At the moment of fertilization, the little critter is already two weeks old (and dancing with angels on the heads of pins, presumably).
Robert
That’s actually how “gestational age” is calculated. When we say that the average gestational length in humans is 40 weeks, that’s what they’re talking about. Currently, in the US, around 2% of all abortions occur after 20 weeks of “gestational age.”
TooManyJens
There are a couple of different ways that gestation is commonly expressed. One is in weeks after the start of the last menstrual period (LMP), the other is in weeks after conception. This really isn’t unusual. When you are talking about something happening at ‘x weeks of gestation’ you have to know which dating system you’re talking about, or you could be two weeks off. The other way that this bill could have been written would be to ban abortions later than 18 weeks after conception, but the date of conception is guesswork. LMP is less so, since women generally know when that was.
TooManyJens
Since I can’t edit the previous comment, I’ll add that it is pretty common to have bleeding in pregnancy, but those bleeds aren’t really considered ‘periods’ per se.
wrb
@Thoughtcrime:
brilliant
Phyllis
Once again, The Handmaid’s Tale was intended as cautionary, not a reference manual.
RosiesDad
Requirement waived if you show up for your abortion with a container of fresh Santorum.
cdmarine
@jon: Of course it can’t determine the actual age of the fetus, but because nothing really can (absent IVF), that is what they have always used. It’s what Planned Parenthood uses to schedule abortions. It’s what OBGYN’s use when they describe how far along you are in weeks. This isn’t new. This is one of the biggest reasons why people are freaking the fuck out about bills that propose banning abortion at the point where the heartbeat can be detected. That usually happens at about 6 weeks, and when they say “6 weeks,” they mean 6 weeks after last menstrual period, which is generally only 1-2 weeks after a woman discovers she’s pregnant.
This strikes me as yet another example of these people not knowing what the fuck they’re talking about when they’re making laws. They’re so hell-bent on the “running out the clock” strategy to prevent women from getting an abortion that they don’t even realize they’ve already pushed it back to the point of absurdity. They don’t even realize how much the situation is already weighted in their goddamned favor.
David Koch
Sluts
Warren Terra
The answer is simple: once women are permitted only to have sex once a month, figuring out the age of the fetus will be no problem.
kindness
No John, they want to see footage of the conception.
Rush was the norm not the outlier.
YoohooCthulhu
Although to be fair, John, this IS one of the standard ways for calculating gestational age, and the woman CAN pretty much say whatever she wants. The woman would provide her info to her doctor, who would calculate gestational age, not to the bureaucrats.
I think the only difference between this and other laws is that it specifies how to calculate gestational age where the others likely leave it up to the doctor. It’s still an attempt to make it more restrictive, but not really worthy of the extra anger that’s coming out over this.
Litlebritdifrnt
@TooManyJens:
By whom? I know my sister, who always had very light periods anyway, certainly considered the bleeding she had to be a “period”, right up until she found out she was pregnant.
When I was in the Navy they changed my birth control pills for some reason and my periods stopped altogether. My Doctor told me it wasn’t a problem (strangely enough he was a Catholic) and it wasn’t until I changed duty stations and told my next doc that I hadn’t had a period in a year that he went ballistic and changed my prescription. So at that point would I have been considered to be 52 weeks pregnant by these morons?
Julie
@jon: Totally. I’m actually pretty well acquainted with how not-accurate it is, since I’m currently the proud carrier of my very own Fetus-American. It just sort of boggles me because, flaws and all, that’s the shortcut doctors use to determine things like expected delivery date (with all sorts of caveats, of course).
@cdmarine: It’s just so weird. I don’t see what or how they benefit by this. It doesn’t necessarily put restrictions on abortions by gestational age, because some women continue to have cycles even after they are already pregnant… It just makes my head hurt with the stupid.
dr. luba
@TooManyJens: What TMJ says. This is just medical terminology, not panty-sniffing per se. You need to know how you’re defining gestational age. They’re using the standard definition used in the medical literature.
Gestational age is often adjusted based on early ultrasound–not every woman has 28 day cycles, and not everyone conceives at the same point in their cycle–but the result is correction of the due date (EDC or EDD) so that it matches the size of the fetus/embryo based on the theoretical LMP two weeks prior to conception and a 38 week pregnancy/gestation.
Based on this excerpt of the law, this is just technical language. Let’s move on to the real injustices, outrages and stupidities–there’s enough of them to keep us busy.
Note: 29 years in the OB business, FACOG, pro-choice.
Alison
Damn, I’m starting to get seriously happy to be celibate with amenorrhea.
TMI?
Sorry. All this constant talk of uteri and periods is making me lose my filter a little :P
ETA: Of course, not producing babies makes me awful, too, I guess. But I wouldn’t even if I could. Plus they’d be Jewish liberal commie babies, anyway.
Joseph Nobles
Another entry in the chicken game currently surrounding Roe v. Wade. Right-wingers pass draconian laws daring left-wingers to sue so that right-wingers can appeal all the way to the Roberts Court. It will get worse until somebody sues.
eemom
OT, but no post on the latest crise de Olbermann? WTF?
Paddy
Sigh. Unfortunately, this graphic says it all- Elections Matter.
Ilia
@Julie: Doctors do it because most women easily recall their last menstrual period (LMP), but obviously have no way of knowing exactly which day fertilization occurred. General rule of thumb is that gestational age of fetus = time since LMP minus 2 weeks (since ovulation generally occurs about two weeks after the period). I doubt even the Republicans are douche-y (no pun intended) enough to ask women to provide evidence of their last period.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ilia:
Give them time. At the rate they are going, they should be there by Tuesday.
MobiusKlein
Wait, so if you get pregnant and haven’t had a period before that for a year, the fetus is 52 weeks old before it’s born?
Sgaile-beairt
Nicolae Ceausescu is smiling in hell…
Silver
The post title (it’s amazing how often this happens here) is a thing of genius.
cdmarine
If you haven’t had a period in 52 weeks, it’s pretty unlikely that you’re going to get pregnant.
That said, I can definitely see why mandating this method of counting in law would cause an awful lot of nervousness for women with irregular periods. It’s not unusual for women with PCOS to go a couple months without a period, and while it’s difficult to get pregnant in that situation (because of the underlying hormone and ovary problems), it’s not impossible. This would be one of those situations in which a transvaginal ultrasound would be medically indicated.
Loneoak
The length of human gestation can be measured several different ways. The most common way of estimating a ‘due date,’ which is a surprisingly inaccurate stab in the dark, is to count 40 weeks from the start of the last menstruation. Then, if the woman desires to have the kid and is doing all the Ob/Gyn stuff with sonar dildos and whatnot, they correlate that estimate with measurements of the fetus’ development. Our due date changed by 4 days after they did the correlation.
f you’re going to pass a stupid law about making later-term abortion a crime, then you’ll have to define gestational age somehow. The panty sniffing is the banning part, not the defining part.
g
calculated from the first day of the last menstrual period of the pregnant woman.’”
Um, even if one were to assume a woman’s menstrual period would be a good marker of when a pregnancy started, the only way biologically it COULD be accurate would be if you took the first day following the last day of the period.
Ovulation and fertilization doesn’t occur during a period, it occurs following a period.
JCT
@piratedan: Too bad our fellow blog denizens do not realize that this is indeed possible. Can’t wait to see what our feeble-minded gov will do with this one.
Are you really sure this scenario is a “bad thing”?
cdmarine
@g: Technically, ovulation and fertilization actually can happen during your period. It’s just really, really, really unlikely. But, in any case, that’s not the purpose of counting from LMP. They count from LMP because it’s a definable entity. Day of conception almost always isn’t.
iriedc
Come now, all a girl has to do is hang her bedsheets in the window….
gex
@kth: Straight white Christian conservative male id unleashed. I wish more people would realize that when they talk about “taking back the country” that is closely related to when black people and women were property and gay people didn’t exist. They literally think they are the only truly human beings, and everything else is property.
@Litlebritdifrnt: Everything they know about the reproductive process they learned from the Bible, the ultimate inerrant source of truth. If reality on the ground does not match the book, reality is wrong.
ETA: They obviously won’t take the woman’s word of course. The man who owns her and the fetus will have to certify when the last menstrual date was.
Tone in DC
@piratedan:
LULz.
Tone in DC
@kindness:
Moar LULz.
gex
If these people are so against homosexuality, they’d be doing a lot less to make me so super happy I’m gay and wish that my straight friends had a choice in the matter.
TenguPhule
I find your lack of faith…disturbing.
Frankensteinbeck
@Litlebritdifrnt:
Your new doctor was very old-fashioned if it actively upset him. It is an only slightly debated issue in the medical field. Birth control pills actually remove your period, and they have to be rigged to keep the period. (I believe this is done with two fake pills per month? I don’t recall the mechanism offhand, since I don’t deal with it directly much.) Removing your period is if anything beneficial to your health, but before there was any evidence doctors worried it meant they were screwing up the whole reproductive system permanently. Oddly, a lot of women complained as well. The change scared them.
It is still standard to leave the pills rigged to keep the period, because tradition overturns sluggishly in medicine without clear evidence to change it. There is a movement to let women choose to go without periods, it just hasn’t dominated accepted practice yet.
Tone in DC
@TenguPhule:
Star Wars FTW.
I need to read some more Philip K. Dick. I already saw “Handmaid’s Tale”. The way this shit is going, Pris ends up with Deckard and Rachel immolates herself.
gene108
This is important to know, in order to determine, if the slut should be viewed with a certain amount of sympathy or if it’s O.K. to deal with her with the full contempt and hostility her slutty behavior demands.
Also, too if she says it is to anybody but her husband, I think we can all agree the age doesn’t matter. She deserves what she gets for flaunting herself out for men.
Gary Fuckett and the Mindless Gap
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntpjE23EWTY
Of course, the women must submit.
farmette
Legislation of menstruation otherwise known as the Rhythm Method of Law. I recently picked up a 1934 book at a garage sale entitled “The Rhythm” by Leo Latz, MD. The introduction starts…”Someone has remarked that the Church is in danger of disruption because of the heresy of contraception. No other heresy was more generally, more cleverly, more effectively propagated by men and women in authority than contraception; none affects the members of the church more directly, and more intimately. It has the support of scientists, sociologists, and even of large religious bodies. The advances it has made within a decade are terrifying”. And so it goes.
Bmaccnm
@cdmarine: You can detect heart tones @ 6 weeks? You’re a way better midwife than I am. What technique do you use? I can get them at 8 weeks on very slender women. 10-12 on fluffy types. And many women don’t know when their last period was, or they are too young or too old to have regular cycles, or they mistake implantation bleeding for a period,or they are the unfortunate folks who get pregnant while using some method of contraception, or their lives are to erratic to really keep track. I truly wish that folks would stick to what they know when they talk, or when they make laws.
gene108
@Frankensteinbeck:
Read somewhere menstruation is what allows women to have lower rates of heart disease then men.
Guess, I’m not alone. The Serious People are trying to figure this out, as well.
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01546454
Bmaccnm
@cdmarine: Women 39-55 years of age comprise the 2nd largest cohort of women seeking abortion, i.e., women who thought they were done with all that ovulation business, but who still had random surges of follicular activity. Most of these women are married,their children don’t need 24/7 supervision anymore, and they are looking forward to a new phase of their lives. I see them in my office frequently, sobbing, saying, “I can’t. I just can’t do it again.” Are these women sluts?
Frankensteinbeck
@gene108:
Then you get into ‘is it causative’ and ‘does it justify the medical complaints menstruation causes’. Note that the study you mentioned specifically brings up the issue that when your basis is premenopausal and postmenopausal rates, attributing the difference to the menses itself is a giant leap.
Ella in New Mexico
Then you should know that this law is way more than technical language.
If you calculate the GESTATIONAL age of a pregnancy from the first day of the last menstrual period, you add at least two weeks to the age of not only the fetus, but the entire pregnancy.
Which means, if there is a statutoril limit on the number of weeks pregnant you can be to receive a a particular form of abortion, you just lost two weeks of time under this law.
Because I had a completely normal period after conceiving, I didn’t know I was even pregnant with my first until well into my 10th (actual) week of pregnancy. I was concerned about the health of the fetus due to medication I was taking, and in the process of deciding my options, I discovered that in the state I lived the cut-off for an outpatient abortion was 12 weeks. Being a broke college student at the time, coughing up the $600 bucks for the procedure might have taken me enough time to push me past that window. I quickly determined there was no need for one, thankfully. So yes, this would be yet another restriction of my right to choose.
Mother of four, 50 years in the business, Registered Nurse and really, really pro-choice.
joeyess
@Chet:
No, that will be in the next bill.
Polish the Guillotines
I think some crafty Dem in the AZ state house needs to submit a bill to officially move Christmas to April 1st. After all, that’s clearly when the holy ghost knocked up the virgin Mary.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Frankensteinbeck:
I did not know that, however, missing a period is still the best indicator of being pregnant, if you never have one how the hell are you supposed to know? (Other than putting on weight and getting a belly?)
Comrade Javamanphil
@Silver: My thought exactly. Can’t believe it took 40 comments to get there.
Mike in NC
This has to be ALEC in action again. Krugman had a very good piece about them this week.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Bmaccnm:
A friend of mine had two kids, a 21 year old boy and a four year old girl. She SO thought she was done until she found out she was pregnant with the four year old. She told the doctor that after the four year old was delivered “if I don’t need it to pee, take it out”.
cdmarine
@Bmaccnm: Transvaginal ultrasound. Your talking to a woman with recent personal experience in this matter, not an idiot. I also don’t know what you’re getting at with your “slut” remarks. I think you are assuming something about my motivations that you have no reason to assume, which is odd, as I’ve said very little, and what little I have said would indicate to most sane people that I am on your side.
Roger Moore
@middlewest:
Government so small it will fit in a woman’s uterus.
quannlace
Next they’ll pass the ‘Limbaugh Law’, where every woman of child bearing age will be required to videotape any and all acts of sexual intercourse. All for the better calculation of when a particular pregnancy was conceived. It will require, of course, for all these law makers to watch said videos…
cdmarine
And before anyone else says it, I’m aware of the hilarity of misspelling “you’re” in this sentence:
Missed my edit window.
Punchy
Wow, that’s a LONG time to be gestating a kid.
burnspbesq
To quote one of my favorite lines from one of my favorite films, “What’ll those assholes think of next”?
And no, I don’t think a shitload of dimes will solve this.
Bruce S
Any number of current news stories are reminding me that people who are unashamed of their aggressive pathologies and/or blatantly contemptuous dishonesty have a real advantage over the rest of us when it comes to politics.
Ruckus
@middlewest:
Government so small you could drown in a bathtub.
You may have left out the it after drown, but I like your version better.
slag
@gogol’s wife: I posted it already, but this video Obama made to Planned Parenthood supporters may help ease the pain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naP2FbO8_-c&feature=player_embedded. Or at least provide some contrast. Contrast is helpful, I find.
Galen West
why does abortion matter to these people? i don’t get it. i guess i am too liberal for this to be an issue for me.
Ruckus
@Galen West:
That’s a great question. I’m sure there are a few answers but I’m sure none of them make any sense. Conservatives all seem to yell about the size and business of government. How they want the government out of their lives. And yet they want the government to make women third class citizens by controlling everything about her reproductive system. They want government out of health care but scream about their medicare being touched. They scream about their taxes and yet want even better rates for rich bastards who could easily afford paying their fair share instead of theirs being better. They scream about the high level of crime while it in fact has gone down. They scream about, oh hell I give up. They are just fucking crazy.
Thatgaljill
As any woman who has struggled with infertility will tell you, pregnancy does not begin until implantation, and I don’t care what anyone else says. If that cluster of cells doesn’t successfully implant into the wall of the uterus THERE IS NO PREGNANCY – ask any couple who has implanted 4 embryos during in vitro in hopes that ONE will stick and grow.
FURTHER… a heart beat may not be visible until well into the 5th or 6th week of a cycle. GOOD LORD, my OB/GYN was in the freakin’ room when the seeds of man were set loose and we still argued about my due date.
It would be so effin’ nice if people making health care laws actually knew something about the myriad of variants in the average menstrual cycle.
*hops off soap box and throws it across the room*
dr. luba
@Ella in New Mexico:
No, you don’t. What they are expressing is the STANDARD way of defining gestational age in all the medical literature (and in medical practice). All the SCOTUS decisions and laws are also based on standard terminology.
Using any other standard would confuse things. It’s a stupid standard, yes, as you’re not actually pregnant the first two weeks of your pregnancy, but it is what it is. It was established back in the days before hCG and ultrasounds, and was the best we could do then.
And if the GOPers want to change the availability of abortions, this is how they would do it? Really? I don’t think stealth is their style. They’re in your face and proud. I mean, these are the people who just passed a bill making it legal for a woman’s doctor to intentionally keep critical pre-natal health care information about her developing fetus from her if such information would lead to an abortion.
BTW, I’ve delivered thousands of babies and have performed abortions. I think my bona fides on pro-choice are as good as anyone else’s.
But let’s stick to the real stuff, and not get carried away with nonexistent conspiracies and insults. There’s enough real idiocy–and evil–out there.
cdmarine
@Thatgaljill: I get it. I really do. I have infertility issues, and I have had six pregnancies, and not a single live birth to show for it. Nevertheless, pregnancies are counted from Day 1 of LMP. That’s what everyone uses, especially in the first several weeks when the abortion question is most likely to be an issue. This is just not a new concept, and it’s mysterious to me why we’re treating it as if it is something new and dramatic. Like “dr. luba” says above, there are just so many truly fucked up things these guys are pulling with regard to reproductive rights, it seems odd to focus on this one.
Cain
You realize that if the Supremes knock down the health care bill it’s going to be open seasons for every other wingnut law out there. They’ll think the Supremes are all on tehir sides and they have ‘activist judges’ ready to stamp whatever fucked up law they can come up with..
Pamoya
@dr. luba: But if this is standard practice, why does the Arizona legislature even need to come into it? As a doctor, doesn’t it bother you that they are trying to tell you how to do your job by defining gestational age by last menstrual period? And then using that measure to determine how long a woman has to exercise her right to an abortion? In some cases (irregular periods, or if a woman can’t remember the date of her last period) I believe you would want to calculate gestational age in another way, wouldn’t you? Well, it appears that now the legislature is telling you that you can’t do that. So do women who have periods randomly have reduced rights to abortion compared to other women? As an irregularly-menstruating-vaginal-American, (sorry for the TMI, blame the legislature) that bothers me.
Ella in New Mexico
@dr. luba:
At this point in history, anytime a legislature in this country attempts to make any law regarding conception, pregnancy, abortion, birth control, or womens health in general they are up to no good. Show me one example otherwise–this is no conspiracy theory. It’s what’s happening now, in America, to womens right to choose.
And yes, when an ignorant bunch of yahoos in Arizona tries to define what gestational age or pregnancy stage is, they have something else, very, very evil, up their sleeves.