The Georgia legislature passed a law making abortion after six weeks of pregnancy illegal. I won’t go into all the details of the law. The theory is that a fetal heartbeat can be detected at that time. This is nonsense, because the embryo (it isn’t a fetus until nine weeks after conception) doesn’t have a heart at that point, although it does have a group of cells that, with luck, will become a heart and pulse together.
Pregnancies are defined from the last period, so six weeks is about when a period is late enough (for most women) that the woman starts thinking that maybe she’s pregnant. So the law bans all abortions. It also, and I haven’t dug into these details, makes it likely that women who have miscarriages can be convicted and imprisoned. Some asshole also said that it applies to ectopic pregnancies too, because the embryo/fetus should be removed from its unfortunate implantation outside the uterus and gently placed into that uterus. This is also nonsense – no such procedure has been developed.
Ohio wants to ban insurance coverage for abortion and most types of contraception. (Thanks, debbie!)
Alabama has also indulged in some sort of fuckery around a forced pregnancy law, but they haven’t gotten to voting on it yet.
The ACLU and others are challenging the Georgia law. At least two movie production companies are withdrawing from making movies in Georgia.
The responses on Twitter have been great. Here are some.
It is hard to imagine how much men hate and fear women to write those abortion laws.
— Cheryl Rofer (@CherylRofer) May 10, 2019
Great thread here – women will identify, and men should think about this.
If you didn't bleed through every pair of pants you had in 7th grade, you can't write laws about reproductive rights.
— Megan Gailey (@megangailey) May 8, 2019
My mother was big in the abortion rights movement. In the early 1960s, when abortion was still illegal, she had a miscarriage at around six months. So she's covered in blood, with a dead fetus between her legs, and the doctor told her she couldn't be cleaned up yet. GUESS WHY? 1/ https://t.co/AyUjp4sNeS
— David Avallone (@DAvallone) May 9, 2019
Hi @BeckerGOP, I’m a practicing ob-gyn and researcher on abortion and contraception, and thought you might want some help understanding ectopic pregnancy since your bill (HB182) gets some things wrong. I’ll clear up a few things in this thread. https://t.co/BdXYHnCAtI
— Dr. Daniel Grossman (@DrDGrossman) May 8, 2019
Something that I don't think most people really get is that we've never really seen abortion laws this draconian in the history of the United States, even pre-"Roe v. Wade." https://t.co/oIzaYzKxZT
— David Walsh (@DavidAstinWalsh) May 8, 2019
At six weeks, the embryo is microscopic. A late and difficult period may well be an early miscarriage. Will the legislators want to examine menstrual fluid for those microscopic people?
liz chances are you’ve flushed one of these down the toilet without noticing https://t.co/fPedwV1kw5
— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) May 8, 2019
https://twitter.com/noboa/status/1126192158481035264
You can donate to Planned Parenthood here. (thanks joel haines)
I think it’s cool that so many women are talking so candidly about menstruation and related matters.
Over to you all.
Cheryl Rofer
Of course the point of these laws, besides telling women what they’re good for, is for them to be appealed to the Supreme Court to destroy Roe v. Wade.
khead
I know you meant this is as a rhetorical question, but I’m not so sure it’s that laughable nowadays.
Cheryl Rofer
debbie
In case anyone missed my link on the last thread, Ohio is moving to make far greater changes than a mere heartbeat bill. The governor is very pro-life and there aren’t nearly enough Dems to stop this.
Harbison
That (((David Avallone))) thread was fantastic. Thanks for posting
debbie
@Cheryl Rofer:
Here’s the thing: If they really and truly cared about the child, they would criminalize the behavior of the $#@! men who could not keep their pants zipped.
Aleta
test
SiubhanDuinne
I promise you, Governor Stacey Abrams would never in a thousand years have signed this horrendous piece of legislation.
Cheryl Rofer
Of course, none of these “pro-life” people are proposing legislation for supporting women’s or children’s health.
Cheryl Rofer
@debbie: Or, if every sperm is sacred, they should be criminalizing male masturbation.
Ian R
@debbie: Of course they don’t care about the “child” at all. They care about subjugating women, and hurting liberals. Maybe in that order, maybe not.
Cheryl Rofer
AliceBlue
In Georgia it’s not just men. GA state senator Renee Untermann–who is A NURSE for fuck’s sake–has voted for every anti abortion bill the legislature has horked up.
I’m 65 years old now, so this bill won’t affect me personally But I take it personally because I had an abortion when I was 23. Thanks to Roe v. Wade it was safe and legal. This makes me so furious I can’t see straight.
hotshoe
No man should be allowed to vote on reproductive rights unless he can prove he’s been surgically castrated.
No, I’m serious.
That’s closer to a sane humane option than the one I really want to suggest.
But I don’t want to shame BJ by getting any more graphic than that, sorry.
Harbison
@Cheryl Rofer:
That, too, was an amazing thread.
I can’t believe this hasn’t been getting more media attention.
Major Major Major Major
@Cheryl Rofer: sweet mother of god
Zelma
Isn’t Pepsico based in Georgia? How about boycotting their products. What other big companies are based there? Any big conventions planning to meet in Atlanta? Make them hurt because they are hurting women.
Cheryl Rofer
chris
Can’t think of anything good to say. The hoarse Whisperer has an interesting and nonviolent thought:
John Revolta
@Cheryl Rofer:
Yeah this might be my “favorite” part. “You can’t have an abortion after you’re six weeks pregnant, and we get to say when you got pregnant.”
Mary G
Mood:
Omnes Omnibus
@Cheryl Rofer: NOT GUILTY DOES NOT MEAN INNOCENT!!!!!! Sorry, but that;s about the only part of this on which I have anything to offer. The rest should be between a woman and her doctor.
romeo24
@Cheryl Rofer: I think that’s a really important point. At the moment, the forced-birthers are defining “life” as starting at conception, but an embryo and fetus up to viability are really just potential life, in the same way as a sperm and egg. So it’s a very small slip down the slope until we reach the Catholic position of “every sperm is sacred.” In fact, with the talk in the Ohio legislation about the pill being an abortificant (which of course it isn’t, it’s an ovulation suppressant), it seems we’re already there.
Mathguy
@Zelma: Coca Cola is based in GA.
John Revolta
@Cheryl Rofer:
Damn, it just keeps getting better!
And isn’t giving false testimony ALREADY a crime? Are they allowed to charge you if you don’t get a conviction? Or would this be a special thing just for rape cases? WTeverlovinF??
smintheus
FALSW!!!11 Zoos re-implanted Dieohneyesus in his own thigh so Christ can stick these innocent babies in his wrist or his buttocks or eyelasses or wherever you want, libs!
smintheus
@romeo24: Is every fingernail sacred too?
Nelle
As a child who went to three church services every Sunday and one on Wednesday, at a minimum, until I was 18, I puzzled over many Bible verses. What did it mean that God forbade men from spilling their seed on the ground? Why isn’t that act penalized by law? It is more biblically based than arguments against abortion.
And if pregnancy is God’s will, so are limp dicks and Viagra is going against the will of the Almighty. Yes, indeed.
So now, a pregnant rape victim must carry the embryo, then fetus to term. Such as the 11 year old rape victim in Ohio.
If there is a God, I’d like to see her get busy with some smiting.
Joe Falco
@Zelma:
Dragon*Con is around Labor Day weekend. Since it’s one of the biggest conventions in the Southeast, a boycott would be noticeable.
Aleta
How Georgia and Kansas Reveal the Future Battleground for Abortion Rights, Jessica Mason Pieklo & Imani Gandy
(Podcast and transcript from today)
Ian R
@Zelma: PepsiCo is headquartered in Harrison, NY. You’re thinking of Coca Cola, whose headquarters is in Atlanta.
chopper
@Nelle:
it meant “use a tissue, fellas”.
i dunno that’s all i got by way of humor, this shit is enraging.
Cheryl Rofer
It looks like that 11-year-old rape victim will be able to end the pregnancy. But later victims may not be able to.
Ohio Mom
@Cheryl Rofer: “If the girl decides to end her pregnancy?” She’s her own guardian? If she had cancer, would it be up to her to decide whether or not to have chemo? If her appendix had burst, whether or not to have surgery?
Yutsano
@Cheryl Rofer: She would need parental/guardian permission to do so if my understanding of Ohio law is correct. One would hope that they would be understanding enough to allow her to make that choice, Although what a horrifying choice to have to make at her age! I hope the sperm donor is rotting in jail.
Chetan Murthy
@Cheryl Rofer:
I’d write “Oh God” but clearly there isn’t any, what with this sort of bullshit. It’s a shonda for all of us. All of us. If there’d been a Jesus, he’d weep. The poor child.
Jay
Forced Birthing is grounds for a refugee claim in Canada.
Just’s saying.
I’m sure that nobody would complain very much if y’all women decided to come North as a preventive measure.
I’m sure that most Canadian Men and more than a few Canadian women would welcome the sudden and massive gender imballence.
Cheryl Rofer
Ohio Mom
@John Revolta: Doctors count pregnancies from tne first day of the last menstrual period because it’s the only consistent landmark they have.
It’s those rotten Republicans that are taking advantage of lay people’s confusion (well, they appear to be mighty confused themselves) about exactly what “six weeks” means.
Aleta
@Aleta:
Cheryl Rofer
@Ohio Mom: Presumably, as Yutsano points out, her parents will be involved in the decision. But I would hope that she has something to say about it too.
Aleta
@Aleta:
comment in moderation — is the ab or word, used 2000 times?
or just too many quotes ?
Cheryl Rofer
@Aleta: Approved
Cheryl Rofer
Okay y’all. I’m going to bed. Will check back in the morning.
Jay
“Pakistan
Asia Bibi arrives in Canada after leaving Pakistan
Christian woman freed last year after spending eight years on death row for blasphemy”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/08/asia-bibi-arrives-in-canada-after-leaving-pakistan
Just saying,……
Patricia Kayden
We talk about how men who pass these awful forced birther laws hate women. How much more do women who keep voting for these men hate women? That’s the issue.
eemom
@debbie: @chris:
You lose me when you comment on this issue and use the phrase “pro-life” without irony.
Words matter, folks. Wake the fuck up.
jl
@Aleta: Thanks for posting that. I have no clue how corrupt the Ohio Supreme Court is though. If the Ohio legislature goes ahead, I guess only good thing is that it will publicize the fact that these vicious nuts plan to after almost all contraception as well as abortion.
Oh… another good thing is that apparently, from AL’s link, the Ohio legislature has a miracle cure for ectopic pregnancy. These reactionary GOPers are geniuses. Their law says there is an easy peasy to turn that into a normal birth…. they are scientific geniuses, geniuses I tell you.
joel hanes
So when you say banning abortion is for the sake of “religious liberty,” be damn sure to clarify you’re talking about Christianity.
Should put “Christianity” in scare quotes, because opposition to abortion cannot be found in Jesus’s teachings, and was not a tenet of evangelical Protestants in the US until the late 1970s. Prior to that, even the Southern Baptists recognized that a first-trimester fetus was not a human being with rights. Opposition to abortion was adopted as a _political_ strategy to weld evangelicals and Catholics into a voting bloc that would support Republicanism. This was an explicit deal between Republican operative and money man Paul Weyrich and televangelist Jerry Falwell when the two of them founded the so-called Moral Majority in 1979, as a political organization.
Roman Catholicism went through a similiar doctrinal change.
Augustine believed that an early abortion is not murder because, according to the Aristotelian concept of delayed ensoulment, the soul of a fetus at an early stage is not present, a belief that passed into canon law. Nonetheless, he harshly condemned the procedure: “Sometimes, indeed, this lustful cruelty, or if you please, cruel lust, resorts to such extravagant methods as to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness; or else, if unsuccessful in this, to destroy the conceived seed by some means previous to birth, preferring that its offspring should rather perish than receive vitality; or if it was advancing to life within the womb, should be slain before it was born.”(De Nube et Concupiscentia 1.17
Thomas Aquinas, Pope Innocent III, and Pope Gregory XIV also believed that a fetus does not have a soul until “quickening,” or when the fetus begins to kick and move, and therefore early abortion was not murder, though later abortion was
John Revolta
@Ohio Mom: Okay. But this brings up another question: how do they know
(legally) when your last period was unless you tell them?
Glidwrith
@John Revolta: Because the nice doctor will pat the oven on the head and assure it that they know when the oven was turned on.
romeo24
@smintheus: Exactly. Every one of our cells holds the potential of life. It’s a ridiculous argument.
Dan B
Horrible legislation. And these kids will be born into a world where climate chaos is their everyday experience. Fixing the wrong (non) problem.
Question: If the Supremes rule against Roe will make it illegal in states that maintain legal rights to abortion?
Cacti
Looks like we’re dividing back into free states and slave states.
Next, you’ll see right wing theocrats try to criminalize out of state travel to obtain an abortion.
romeo24
@Cacti: Looks like the Georgia legislation has that covered…
TS (the original)
@debbie:
I would rewrite that as the governor is very anti-choice for women. Pro life means you care about people. The governor only cares about life, pre birth.
Jay
@Cacti:
@romeo24:
The trick is to come up to Canada, the abortion and medical care is free,
And the forced birtherism gives them lots of grounds for an asylum claim.
Send us your women, yearning to be free,…..
Jackie
Back in “my day,” Dr’s didn’t even test for potential pregnancy until we missed two periods – and, then it was iffy. The rabbit had to die to be sure.
Cacti
@romeo24:
I just saw that. Wow.
But if this law actually takes effect, I think the odds of women in those circumstances returning to Georgia for prosecution would be about as likely as runaway slaves coming back to the plantation in the early 1800s.
Sally
Perhaps when any man’s sexual activity results in the fertilisation of an ovum, he immediately becomes responsible for 50% of all costs of that pregnancy and the care of any resulting person/s. With concomitant conditions on rights of access depending on the situation and the wishes of the person carrying the fertilised ovum. If it doesn’t suit a man to be responsible for a pregnancy, keep your pants on. Party of Personal Responsibility should be in complete agreement.
Bonnie
If you are going to punish people for an abortion, it is only right that the man be held equally responsible as the woman. After all, it’s been a long time since there was immaculate conception. My experience in the 60s and 70s was that the majority of the women I knew who had abortions were doing so because the father of the baby told the woman that it was her problem. Get along best you can; but, leave me out–they would say. Thus, if a woman is charged with whatever for having an abortion; so should the father of that baby. In these days of DNA, it can be determined easily who the father is.
romeo24
@Jackie: It seems that many clinics won’t even see you before 8 weeks. So 2 weeks after you can no longer get an abortion if these laws come into effect.
Cacti
The Slate article did raise some thorny Constitutional issues for the Georgia law, apart from the abortion issue.
By making every fetus a legal person with independent rights, that means the fetus of any pregnant female inmate is being imprisoned by the state without due process of law.
John Revolta
@Dan B: Pre-Roe, it was up to the individual states to decide.
I presume it would go back to that. For awhile anyway.
Jackie
@romeo24: I know. It’s crazy. If only the laws would change to include the sperm being co-responsible.
SFAW
@eemom:
No shit. I’m tired of hearing those evil fucks referred to as “pro-life.” They’re anti-choice, they’re pro-slavery (which I expect a goodly number are A-OK with), they’re forced birthers, but they ain’t “pro-life.”
As I’ve been saying for too fucking long: Gilead, here we come.
Cacti
I also can’t imagine that any blue state would honor an extradition request from Georgia for a woman who had terminated her pregnancy outside of its borders.
ETA: On the contrary. I could see blue states passing laws prohibiting any state or local law enforcement agency from cooperating with an extradition request under an anti-abortion statute.
Ruckus
@Sally:
They should, but they won’t. Because if they were that party they would have kept their pants on long ago. How many of them has Michel Cohen gotten out of responsibility for their shitty irresponsibles? They are the party of we get to do whatever the fuck we want, whenever the fuck we want.
Ruckus
@Bonnie:
Men 50% responsible for pregnancy? Now that’s a novel idea. That’s about 2000 yrs over due.
I can’t imagine that there is a conservative alive that would think that is a good idea. I’d bet a number of liberal men wouldn’t approve either.
Which is more proof that it is a great idea.
Raoul
In the 80s at the UU congregation in Westport, CT, the minister preached a sermon about how his wife and he were active in the Clergy Consultation Service, a group of religiously liberal folks risked arrest and jail by helping women in states like Massachusetts get referrals and transportation out of the state for abortions and reproductive care.
Bold people, doing what they believed was just, and breaking unjust laws to do it. It has stuck with me, the stories he told of women trying ‘home remedies’ and seeing ‘providers’ who did little or no sanitation and how often women died or were rendered sterile.
It is really shocking that we are here. But the generations who suffered under highly restrictive laws are aging or gone, and the decades of wearing people down with the anti-abortion (but also anti-care, anti-women, anti-human-agency, anti-freedom) zealots and their all-too-well-funded crusade (note: Jesus never spoke on abortion, that we know of. If said man existed. But I digress).
This is time #4,762 in “It may have to get worse before it gets better.” I don’t like this list at all!
mrmoshpotato
It’s 2019, and whole states need to be punched in the dick.
It’s been said before but bears repeating – If men had any chance of getting pregnant, you wouldn’t be able to spit without hitting an abortion clinic.
*sigh*
*sigh*
Mart
@Cheryl Rofer: They include rape and incest cause the dirty women will otherwise lie about how they were impregnated to get a legal abortion. It is part of their playbook.
cs
Conservative men violently oppose any law which imposes the slightest inconvenience. Even when the inconvenience would save the lives of the children they supposedly value. There’s no doubt they’d never oppose abortion if they themselves could get pregnant.
And apparently the conservatives, once again, didn’t think the legal considerations all the way through…
https://twitter.com/carlissc/status/1126441510063542272
debbie
@eemom:
Fuck you. It’s your problem you can’t see the irony in my words. Believe me, I feel it.
chris
@debbie: Thank you.
Sab
@debbie: Thank you also
Ksmiami
Defund the red states. Lobby Every corporation to abandon them. Play fucking hardball and make Amazon the federal government- technology will cause our aging government to collapse anyway.
J R in WV
@Zelma:
NO… Pepsi is based in New York, Coke is from Atlanta. Don’t boycott the wrong companies!! Do a Google of other web search, it only takes seconds if you already know how to type.
Jess
Here’s good question to ask anti-abortion folks: If it turns out that you are the one perfect potential kidney donor for someone who will otherwise die without it, should it be illegal for you to refuse to give up your kidney? Of course not, because it’s YOUR body, and you get to say how it will be used. Are you a murderer if you refuse to give your kidney? Maybe, but that’s for YOU to decide, not the state. Body autonomy–it’s a thing.
eemom
@debbie:
Fuck you right back, sweetie. Reading is not mind reading. If adding ” ” around the words (as Cheryl did) is too much effort for you, then you are part of the fucking problem.
debbie
@eemom:
Be sure to “alert” me when you publish your autocratic “rules” of writing.