Artwork by #AnneLesniak pic.twitter.com/N75Aq86P33
— Frances Fisher (@Frances_Fisher) May 16, 2019
Women constantly have to publicly relive the worst moments of their lives – their miscarriages, abortions, rapes – just to be heard, to remind lawmakers & voters that they’re also human.
It’s so fundamentally unfair it makes you want to set fucking everything on fire.
— Rita Konaev (@RitaKonaev) May 15, 2019
The only tiny sliver of consolation is that the GOP may have ham-fisted themselves firmly into ‘Be Careful What You Wish For’ territory. Dahlia Lithwick, at Slate — “SCOTUS was all teed up to quietly gut America’s abortion rights. Then Alabama happened”:
… There are easy and near invisible ways for the high court to end Roe. That has always been, and remains, the logical trajectory. As Mark Joseph Stern has shown, when Brett Kavanaugh came onto the court, with his dog whistles and signaling around reproductive rights, it became clear that he would guide the court to simply allow states to erect more and more barriers to abortion access (dolphin-skin window coverings on every clinic!). The five justices in the majority would do it all while finding ways to say that such regulations were not an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to choose. The courts and state legislatures could continue their lilting love songs to the need for the states to protect maternal health and to help confused mommies make good choices, and nobody need dirty their hands by acknowledging that the three decades’ worth of cumbersome clinic regulations and admitting privileges laws were just pretexts for closing clinics and ending abortion altogether.
But the state of Alabama runs now to the Supreme Court with its mask of tender solicitude for women and their health askew. The briefest look at the debate as Alabama on Tuesday passed the cruelest and most punitive abortion regulation in modern American history shows exactly how much concern they have for the health of pregnant women or the suffering of future children…
Why, then, do I feel sorry for John Roberts? Because what keeps the Supreme Court in business is often the polite subterfuge of complex legal doctrine. We don’t so much suppress minority votes as protect the dignity of the states. We don’t so much enable dark money to corrupt elections as invite free speech. And we don’t so much punish women for bearing children as celebrate God and babies. This is all the kind of democracy-suppressive language the justices can get behind. It’s why Americans don’t riot on the streets…
Just as President Obama’s election exacerbated, and exposed, the ugliest racist undercurrents of modern America, Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote in 2016 unleashed the never-very-hidden misogyny and sexual terrors of entirely too many of our fellow citizens. Sunlight is not the swiftest disinfectant, but we can’t cure the rot until we can see how deeply it’s embedded.
Have you considered abortion was front and center for many people in 2016 https://t.co/cfwrS7Fhls
— King’s Landing Fire Safety Captain (@agraybee) May 16, 2019
Today a Louisiana House committee moved forward with a 6 week abortion ban
Testifying in support was Jennifer McCoy, who was convicted of conspiring to bomb 2 abortion clinics & who has close ties to the man that assassinated an abortion provider in 2009https://t.co/ulEZLRVN1w pic.twitter.com/j92Ae8WQed
— Feminist Majority (@MajoritySpeaks) May 15, 2019
sometimes i see something so dumb—so brain poisoned—that i have to just sit down and think for awhile pic.twitter.com/JD9LCsqYzM
— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) May 15, 2019
Enslaved women would often abort their children rather than doom their children to a life in bondage. They were often severely punished for depriving slavers of future earnings, and that's when they didn't die in the attempt.
You people are brain-poisoned. https://t.co/RYF1JWFAYA
— Andray (@andraydomise) May 16, 2019
Support the fighters on the frontlines of Alabama’s war on reproductive choice.
Yellowhammer Fund provides financial support and travel assistance to anyone seeking care at Alabama's three remaining abortion clinics.
Follow: @yellowfund
Donate: https://t.co/vopBN6697o— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) May 16, 2019
stinger
Not a lawyer, but is the testimony of the victim not evidence?
Duane
If men could get pregnant, you could get an abortion at any hospital and birth control at any c-store.
joel hanes
@stinger:
Matt Walsh is not really interested in reality — his mental model of the world is much more to his liking.
.
Cckids
@stinger: You’re thinking of her as though she were a person, whose rights, memories and feelings have some value. You’ll never be a a Republican.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@stinger: How much we believe the victim of incest or rape is a good question. Kay pointed out how hard it would be just to allow the commonly named exception for rape. Would R legislators take the woman’s word? Does the rapist have to be tried and convicted? How long does that take? We’re up against a clock here.
But even talking about that gives up ground from saying it’s the woman’s choice and no one else’s. I hope Lithwick’s right and this backfires on them.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I appear to be in moderation. I don’t know why. A bad word?
Ksmiami
Abort the GOP. The whole party is just a terrorist organization.
Mike in NC
Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr.: “Republican Party wants to repeal the 20th century”. Pretty much captures our Neo-Confederates.
MattF
@Duane: An ex-Catholic friend of mine used to say (if he was sufficiently drunk) that if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
Louise B.
@joel hanes: none of them are interested in reality. They don’t care about women, clearly, but they don’t care about babies or fetuses, either. They care, to the exclusion of almost everything else, about the symbolic effect of the law, and conforming the law to their religious views.
Adam L Silverman
@Dorothy A. Winsor: You know what you did!//
I’ve freed you from moderation.
I’m also going to be heading offline shortly, so don’t do it again as I won’t be around to help.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Adam L Silverman: Discussing this appears to trigger FYWP! Snowflake.
Kay
Also, just so you know, the woman will be called as a witness to prosecute the doctor. Obviously. This idea that they’re going to send doctors to prison for 50 years without involving the woman is complete and utter nonsense, it’s a flat-out lie.
The truth is they don’t know how any of these laws will be applied and they don’t care. As many of them have said, they’re using the laws as a vehicle to overturn Roe – there was no concern for how they might affect actual women or the broader public at all.
They’re already completely disregarding women. They jammed through sloppy garbage laws as a litigation tool to get the ideological result they want. This is how much they care about your life.
Letting these religious zealots go snooping around into every pregnancy is going to be a disaster.
Gelfling 545
Resting before round3 of my daughter’s law school graduation – 9am clinical practice cording, 11am honor ceremony & reception, 230 pm graduation. Im exhausted already along with being as proud as I can be.
It’s 85 degrees – the season only day in May expected to get above 70.
laura
A dear friend in graphic arts made a pocket full of the dont tread on my ut stickers as shown above. I scored two.
This last week has left me feeling stabby about white men and women even though I am one and married to one.
leeleeFL
@MattF: That was from a pre-insanity Dennis Miller. He used to be sane. I quote this all the time! It is still true.
IMHO the exception for frozen embryos tips their hand completely. They know an embryo is not viable life. They are just reactionary bastards. Females should be barefoot, pregnant, poor, beaten, abused or dead.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Gelfling 545: Congrats to her! As for you, stay hydrated.
J R in WV
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
“I appear to be in moderation. I don’t know why. A bad word?”
I suspect perhaps the technical term for relations between relations may have been added to the banned language list by someone at Word-Press HQ.
One way to have a banned term show up is to inject the code for italic begin and end together in the middle of the word, like i-n-c e-s-t without the spaces or hyphens. Incext was typed in that manner.
The ’em’ command (with pointy brackets instead of quotes) begins italics and the ‘/em’ command ends italics — but with no text between the two commands, no italic text appears. Thus the banned word detector doesn’t see the banned word for the HTML commands embedded in it.
Trying to demonstrate HTML commands inside an HTML document is tricky… there’s a standard which I don’t remember well enough, and if you don’t also know the standard it doesn’t work anyway.
Kay
Can someone explain the logic behind the rape and incest exceptions? The GOP position is life begins at conception. A 6 week embroyo is the legal equivalent of a child. If that’s true than all abortions must be prosecuted as murders with an analysis of all miscarriages to determine if they were unintended. Why would they exempt rape and incest?
I’ll tell you why. Because the thinking is the pregnancy as a result of rape or incest isn’t the woman’s fault, so she shouldn’t be punished with being forced to carry the child. The “exemption” people are actually WORSE than the most extreme religious fanatics- they clearly see denying an abortion as punishing the woman. That’s why they let you off the hook if it’s rape and incest- because the intent is to punish the rest by forcing them to remain pregnant. That’s the distinction- it isn’t “the child” because they’re already redefined “child”- it’s whether the woman is at fault or not.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@laura:
Ditto, and ditto, although it’s more like this last half-century for me.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@J R in WV: Thank you for pointing me to the problematic word. I honestly couldn’t even guess.
tobie
The last I heard, Louisiana’s Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards was planning on signing the forced birth bill. Is this still the case? Many of us gave money to his campaign because he promised to expand Medicaid, but his abortion position is unacceptable.
tybee
@Duane:
while you got your oil changed.
Citizen Alan
@Duane:
This isn’t just a male-female issue though, is it? For the last few weeks, I’ve been increasingly horrified by the extent to which the forced birth lobby is driven by deranged, self-loathing women. Yeah, you can make the argument that they’ve been “brainwashed by the Patriarchy,” but conservative women have agency too, and by and large, they have /chosen/ Patriarchy because they think they’ll have more power as Aunt Lydia.,
But her emails!!!
Being anti-abortion is a lot like being antigay. It’s a way to feel self righteous while not having to actually do anything.
randy khan
The thought of a 5-4 decision overturning the Alabama law, with Roberts in the majority, is pretty hilarious. I’m not counting on it, though. If you thought he caught flack from the right after the ACA decision, just imagine what would happen if he upheld Roe.
Betty Cracker
@tobie: Yep, it’s true. He’s consistent about it, at least — he’s been anti-abortion for all of his career.
stinger
@joel hanes:
True — and very, very disturbing.
stinger
@Cckids:
For which I thank dog daily.
Citizen Alan
@But her emails!!!:
I have actually argued for years that the reason fundamentalists are so anti-gay and anti-abortion is because those are two “sins” (in their eyes, at least) that they will never commit. Or at the very least, they think they will never get caught in sinning. Consequently, by pretending that those two “sins” are worse than any other sins, they have the luxury of thinking “yeah, I cheat on my wife and my taxes both, and I down a bottle of scotch ever day, but at least I’ve never had either gay sex or an abortion, so Jesus still loves me.”
stinger
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Agree 100%.
I was going to write more in response to your comment, but I don’t want to propose, even in imagination, a world other than one where abortion is safe, free, and on-demand.
Ruckus
@Louise B.:
.
I think it’s more than symbolism. I think they believe that if everyone else doesn’t live up to their view of the world and obey their religious beliefs, they will be forever damned. They are looking for not only support for their views, but validation as well. People have done this for centuries, and it’s only been in the last few decades that even we, a country that put religion in the background at our founding, have attempted to live up to that at all. We talk about how conservatives don’t respect our country but they see us as not respecting their religious views, which they give, at the very least, lip service to above all other ideals. They don’t want a democratic country because at the very least, our democracy gives every one the right to follow any or no religious directions, because those directions aren’t rights, they are only limitations.
Baud
@tobie:
Inherent problem in 50 state strategy.
rikyrah
@Gelfling 545:
Awe?????
Congratulations to her??
stinger
@Gelfling 545: Congratulations to her and you! Now tell her to get out there and fight for choice! :-)
HeleninEire
@MattF: He stole that from Gloria Steinem and/or Flo Kennedy. How ironic. It is generally attributed to either one. Steinem says that in fact she and Kennedy were in a taxi in Boston and their old, female, Irish taxi driver said it.
Cacti
Don’t let any cultist forget:
Their dear leader wanted his second daughter aborted.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I think we need to put a total and complete ban on Catholics on the Supreme Court until we figure out what the hell is going on.
/raised Catholic, attended Catholic grade school, high school, and college. Only partly snarking.
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
Sotomayor is Catholic.
But her emails!!!
@Citizen Alan: Definitely. It’s all very convenient. They stress abortion and homosexuality way out of proportion to that placed on them by Christ, while denying the things whicht were actually emphasized.
Cacti
@But her emails!!!:
Like bearing false witness.
Baud
Via Reddit.
https://i.redd.it/ubn1bci195z21.jpg
Baud
@Cacti:
Can you imagine if Jesus actually enforced that one?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Baud: Except for her
schrodingers_cat (HectoringBully)
Welcome to my world. Since T became President and before that the R nominee, immigrants have been non-persons to the R party hierarchy. Now they have extended that courtesy to all women of child bearing age. I understand your rage. Rage on. It gives you fuel to fight.
pat
Has anyone else noticed that these bills are passing with a 3-or 4-to 1 margin?
In Wisconsin the repubs have gerrymandered so that even if dems get 50% of the vote, they end up with just 30% of the seats in the assembly. I suspect the same thing is happening in these other states.
stinger
@Cacti: And caring for the poor.
Baud
@But her emails!!!:
As someone recently said in another context
Aleta
Padma Lakshmi @PadmaLakshmi
The thinking is: if you take away a woman’s right to choose there is little chance of upward mobility so not only are they disadvantaged personally, they also can’t come for your seat in the State Senate.
Joanna @JoannaConn3lly
And then they change the laws so abortions are felonies, and felons can’t vote
Starfish
We do need our centrist Democrats, but I hope the Democrats supporting this nonsense get booted. Women did not vote for them to pull this nonsense.
Also, I think at this point, we might want to use the opportunity to go after the whole Hyde Amendment which stops women from getting proper OB/GYN care under any public health plan. Dan Lipinski needs to go and the DCCC needs to quit protecting him in his seat. Better people that John Bel Edwards should run. Someone needs to go for Jay Hughes’s seat in Mississippi. All of these folks need to be gone.
Duane
@Citizen Alan: Conservative women belong to a cult. No dissension is tolerated. You’ll be tossed out if you do, and the hypocrites would lose their power. Everything consevatives support hurts people. They don’t care. Stupid and evil rules.
Louise B.
@Ruckus: I don’t know – I am not sensing any concern from these people about the state of my immortal soul. When you push them, tell them these laws won’t reduce abortion rates, have never done so in any of the countries that have enacted them, the response is usually – “it doesn’t matter, abortion needs to be illegal.”
Baud
@Starfish:
FWIW, that was part of the platform in 2016.
Barbara
@randy khan: Nothing would happen. He is wealthy as all get out and he isn’t supposed to socialize with people who have business in front of the court. I worked for a judge. He said that a lot of judges aren’t prepared for how lonely it can be but he never asked for sympathy on that score.
AM in NC
@leeleeFL: Exactly. And that’s what I have been bringing up when commenting online (I know, useless, but I gotta vent the stabby feeling somewhere). If life begins at conception, then IVF is the real holocaust, and you should be banning it before banning abortion. I also ask them to do a thought experiment: A day old baby and a box of 1,000 embryos is sitting in a room. The room catches on fire, and the box is so big that you can either carry the baby to safety or the embryos to safety. If you truly believe life begins at conception, then you must grab the box and leave the newborn to burn to death, right? Because, according to your deeply-held beliefs, you’d be saving 1,000 people, not just one. I’d also suspect that doing so would make you a monster in the eyes of 99.99% of the people in our country. Because you would be a monster, and you know it. So tell me again, when does life begin?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Butter emails.
Ruckus
@Louise B.:
It isn’t your soul they are worried about, it’s theirs was my point. They believe that them not stopping you is as wrong as them doing whatever it is. The evangelical tilt is that everyone and everything is controlled by the bible, well actually by their warped, absolutest view of the bible. My point that they have no democratic ideals is that no one in their world has any level of agency except their god.
Mary Ellen Sandahl
@MattF: I had always heard it was Gloria Steinem’s phrase, but googled it, and found this in the Wikipedia article about Flo Kennedy, the great Black activist, feminist and lawyer, who travelled on joint lecture tours in the 70s with Steinem:
“The phrase “If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament” is sometimes attributed to Kennedy, although Gloria Steinem attributed it to “an old Irish woman taxi driver in Boston” whom she said she and Kennedy met.”
Brachiator
Trump is responsible for setting the stage for this. He is all about the naked assertion of raw, ignorant power, the open assertion of his will. Philosophy and doctrine and precedent, all pretence of applying reason or subtle argument is stripped away.
The red states have picked up on Trump’s cue as they attack women’s rights. Some Supreme Court watchers noted that a recent decision by Clarence Thomas abandoned any pretence of originalism or respect for precedent.
Every act of malice by conservatives makes winning back the presidency and the Congress by the Democrats critical.
joel hanes
@Barbara:
he isn’t supposed to socialize with people who have business in front of the court.
Ginnie Thomas, Republican activist and late-night drunk dialer, is married to Clarence Thomas.
Much of the Court’s caseload concerns issues on which she gets paid to busy herself.
Justice Thomas does not recuse himself.
different-church-lady
Well sure, they could have done it quietly, but as many people have pointed out, cruelty is now the only point, and how cruel can it be to just skulk in the shadows?
I mean, it’s not just cruelty, it’s performance cruelty.
J R in WV
@joel hanes:
Well, of course not, because Clarence has no inherent ethics whatsoever. Nor does his wife Ginnie Thomas. They should take their RV motor-home, head out on the road, and never come back!!
John Revolta
@Citizen Alan: I done some hard time in prison
Twenty years in the can
I was rightly convicted
For killin’ a man
In dark solitary
I never lost hope
I know the Lord loves me
‘Cause I don’t take dope
I don’t take dope!
Hell,nope!
I won’t fill my lungs with that Communist smoke!
It’s there in the Bible
That’s where it’s wrote
That I’ll go to Heaven
‘Cause I don’t take dope!
low-tech cyclist
@Citizen Alan: Fred ‘Slacktivist;’ Clark, who grew up in the evangelical milieu, remembers when abortion was still A-OK in their world. This would have been during the 1970s but after Roe. But sometime between the late 1970s and early 1980s, the evangelical world did a 180 with respect to abortion, and it became The World’s Greatest Evil almost overnight.
Fred argues, and I think he’s got a good case, that this was southern white evangelicals’ response to having had their history exposed of having fought for decades against equal rights for persons of color. The argument is that they needed something to turn the tables, to place themselves in the right and everyone else in the wrong. So abortion became murder, so that they could claim to be righteous again, and be able to accuse all those stinkin’ liberals of being child-murderers.
rikyrah
Black Billionaire Robert Smith’s gave the commencement address at Morehouse College. He told the class of 2019 that he would pay off their student loan debt.
I don’t think people fully grasp how life changing this is…and why Warren’s student loan forgiveness is so revolutionary.
A Twitter thread about Robert Smith’s gift to Morehouse students. Here is one story:
https://twitter.com/emarvelous/status/1130170928338472960
Ladyraxterinok
@joel hanes: She worked for W’s transition team. Thomas didn’t recuse himself in W’s 5 to 4 ‘win’,
1 Scalia son worked for law firm arguing for W before FL court, 1 son worked for law firm arguing for W before SCOTUS. Scalia didn’t recuse himself.
GOPers on SCOTUS have zero respect for law!!!
ALL GOPers have zero respect for law!!!
Brachiator
@rikyrah:
Wow. That is impressive.
John Revolta
@rikyrah: I just read about that!
Video footage of Smith’s remarks show mouths falling agape before students rise to their feet to cheer and applaud as the pledge is made.
Mine too! (Mouth and feet) More billionaires like this please!
Baud
I hate to credit the NYT, but they got the scoop.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/business/deutsche-bank-trump-kushner.html
bg
AL.com today has 200 Alabama women speaking out about what it means to be a woman in Alabama https://topics.al.com/tag/Reckon%20Voices%20of%20Women/
bg
@Baud: @Baud: Totally unsurprising. Also unsurprising that an African American woman spoke up about it and was told to shut up
Melusine
@But her emails!!!:
Jesus said nothing about homosexuality or abortion, though the Old Testament had some pro-forced-abortion and infanticide passages. Jesus did have quite a bit to say about hypocrites who parade their piety for worldly approval instead of actually living lives of service and humility.
It isn’t about exceptions for rape or in-cest. It’s about whether women are actual human beings, and do human beings have the right to bodily autonomy. Full stop.
If women aren’t human then republicans need to define exactly what they think we are (scientifically speaking, that is. “Sex holes” and “incubators” don’t count.) And why as a potentially different species they should have any say in our development at all.
And if women are humans, but humans don’t have the right to full bodily autonomy, then men also are subject to mandatory organ donation to preserve the “sacredness” of life, and a mandatory national registry needs to be created so they can’t skip out on their responsibilities. And this needs to be a national campaign and introduced in every state that promotes stripping women of their right to full bodily autonomy.
If life is sacred, then LIFE is sacred, whether a 10 week clump of cells or a 30 yr old kidney patient. If one is obligated to preserve a life because your organs allow you to do so, it doesn’t make any moral difference whether that life is inside your body or outside of it. The location of that life has no bearing on its sacredness. The sacredness is inherent to the being itself. So if life is sacred, and humans lose their right to bodily autonomy if sacrificing it can preserve another’s life, then men need prepare to sacrifice at least their blood, bone marrow, kidneys, bits of liver, at any moment whenever required…..and if artificial wombs become possible, maybe even their whole bodies, just like they want to force women to. Enforce Mandatory Organ Donation Now.
Or admit that however you may personally feel about an unintended pregnancy, it is not your place to force another human being to donate an organ, much less their entire body, against their will. It’s no different than having the government break down your door and forcibly remove your kidney for a child or a relative you have chosen not to donate to and may not even have contact with, and then jail you for refusing to donate voluntarily. There are a million reasons someone may choose not to give up an organ for someone they actually know, let alone a clump of cells that may or may not develop into someone, and no one else has the right to override that choice.
There isn’t enough vodka to get through the next two years….???
debbie
@Baud:
There needs to be legislation that holds accountable those who see but do nothing. And not just in finance. It turns out that Ohio State administration knew as far back as 1979 that Dr. Strauss was diddling wrestlers and other sports teams. 1979!
Matt
Wait till Ms. Enriquez finds out about sacrifice zones. Or do the fetuses stop counting as soon as they pop out?
tokyokie
@AM in NC: I can get to your end point even quicker. Ask, “When’s your birthday?” Then follow with: “When’s your conception day? Do you even know when it is?”
If life begins at conception, then birthday celebrations are commemorating the wrong event.
Villago Delenda Est
@Matt: Yes, they do, and they always have. It’s never been about children. It’s about denying agency to women, punishing sluts, and reinforcing patriarchy.