Posts tagged Abortion
Here there be dragons.
Don’t get tired of it. Don’t drop the subject. As long as their soggy fucking sandwiches support anti-gay, anti-woman bigotry I am not giving up on taking them down.
Kansas Doctor May Lose License For Refusing To Force 10-Year-Old To Birth
The Kansas State Board of Healing Arts, the governing body that regulates the practice of medicine in the state, stripped the medical license of a woman who refused to force a mentally-ill 10 year old to give birth.
As Robin Marty reports, Dr. Ann Neuhaus became the target of domestic terror group Operation Rescue after her colleague, Dr. George Tiller, was murdered. Neuhaus assisted Tiller by providing second opinions for mental health exceptions for late-term abortions.
Operation Rescue filed a negligence complaint against Neuhaus alleging that her exams were not thorough enough to support her medical conclusions and her follow-up care was inadequate because she did not recommend counseling or hospitalization after each procedure.
Neuhaus offered a rebuttal of her own. “To even claim that isn’t medically necessary qualifies as gross incompetence,” said Neuhaus. “Someone’s 10 years old, and they were raped by their uncle and they understand that they’ve got a baby growing in their stomach and they don’t want that. You’re going to send this girl for a brain scan and some blood work and put her in a hospital?”
Like other states Kansas has made recent attempts to stack their medical review board with anti-choice advocates like former Operation Rescue attorney Richard Macias. When hearing the case against Dr. Neuhaus, the board offered up their own expert to determine if any breach of the standard of care occurred. Not surprisingly, the witness insisted that in no cases is abortion a treatment that could be seen as beneficial to a patient’s mental health, further clouding the waters as to the kind of care girls and women can expect in the state of Kansas.
Nuehaus will appeal the ruling. If she loses she will have her license permanently revoked.
Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/kansas-doctor-may-lose-license-for-refusing-to-force-10-year-old-to-birth.html#ixzz22iU5g992Operation Rescue is a domestic terrorist organization that we allow to operate all over the USA. This part: “the witness insisted that in no cases is abortion a treatment that could be seen as beneficial to a patient’s mental health.” Scary ass shit. Fuck every single pro-lifer out there for upholding a mindset that would force a mentally ill 10-year-old incest and rape victim to have a baby against her will.
As if today’s food poisoning wasn’t enough, now I’m literally sick to my stomach. Republicans: This is what you voted for.
TL;DR - Don’t be an ignorant dick.
Republican: I know! I know! It’s the chick, right?
Humans are overcrowding the earth and running out of resources. This bizarre notion to keep breeding when we’re all out of money and many of us are living in total poverty is nonsense. Comparing the abortion of a potential member of an overcrowded species to the destruction of an endangered species’ egg is dishonest or, at best, stupid.
Let me tell you some things.
I used to investigate child abuse and neglect. I can tell you how to stop the vast majority of abortion in the world.
First, make knowledge and access to contraception widely available. Start teaching kids before they hit puberty. Teach them about domestic violence and coercion, and teach them not to coerce and rape. Create a strong, loving community where women and girls feel safe and supported in times of need. Because guess what? They aren’t. You know what happens to babies born under such circumstances? They get hurt, unnecessarily. They get sick, unnecessarily. They get removed from parents who love them but who are unprepared for the burden of a child. Resources? Honey, we try. There aren’t enough resources anywhere. There are waiting lists, and promises, and maybes. If the government itself can’t hook people up, what makes you think an impoverished single mom can handle it?
Abolish poverty. Do you have any idea how much childcare costs? Daycare can cost as much or more than monthly rent. They may be inadequately staffed. Getting a private nanny is a nice idea, but they don’t come cheap either. Relatives? Do they own a car? Does the bus run at the right times? Do they have jobs of their own they need to work just to keep the lights on? Are they going to stick around until you get off you convenience store shift at 4 AM? Do they have criminal histories that will make them unsuitable as caregivers when CPS pokes around? You gonna pay for that? Who’s going to pay for that?
End rape. I know your type errs on the side of blaming the woman, but I’ve seen little girls who’ve barely gotten their periods pregnant because somebody thought raping preteens was an awesome idea. You want to put a child through that? Or someone with a mental or physical inability for whom pregnancy would be frightening, painful or even life-threatening? I’ve seen nonverbal kids who had their feet sliced up by caregivers for no fucking reason at all, you think sexual abuse doesn’t happen either?
You say there’s lots of couples who want to adopt. Kiddo, what they want to adopt are healthy white babies, preferably untainted by the wombs and genetics of women with alcohol or drug dependencies. I’ve seen the kids they don’t want, who almost no one wants. You people focus only on the happy pink babies, the gigglers, the ones who grow and grow with no trouble. Those are not the kids who linger in foster care. Those are certainly not the older kids and teenagers who age out of foster care and then are thrown out in the streets, usually with an array of medical and mental health issues. Are they too old to count?
And yeah, I’ve seen the babies, little hand-sized things barely clinging to life. There’s no glory, no wonder there. There is no wonder in a pregnant woman with five dollars to her name, so deep in depression you wonder if she’ll be alive in a week. Therapy costs money. Medicine costs money. Food, clothes, electricity cost money. Government assistance is a pittance; poverty drives women and girls into situations where they are forced to rely on people who abuse them to survive. (I’ve been up in more hospitals than I can count.)
In each and every dark pit of desperation, I have never seen a pro-lifer. I ain’t never seen them babysitting, scrubbing floors, bringing over goods, handing mom $50 bucks a month or driving her to the pediatrician. I ain’t never seen them sitting up for hours with an autistic child who screams and rages so his mother can get some sleep while she rests up from working 14-hour days. I don’t see them fixing leaks in rundown houses or playing with a kid while the police prepare to interview her about her sexual abuse. They’re not paying for the funerals of babies and children who died after birth, when they truly do become independent organisms. And the crazy thing is they think they’ve already done their job, because the child was born!
Aphids give birth, girl. It’s no miracle. You want to speak for the weak? Get off your high horse and get your hands dirty helping the poor, the isolated, the ill and mentally ill women and mothers and their children who already breathe the dirty air. You are doing nothing, absolutely nothing, for children. You don’t have a flea’s comprehension of injustice. You are not doing shit for life until you get in there and fight that darkness. Until you understand that abortion is salvation in a world like ours. Does that sound too hard? Do you really think suffering post-birth is more permissible, less worthy of outrage?
“Pro-life” is simply a philosophy in which the only life worth saving is the one that can be saved by punishing a woman.
Some Thoughts On Abortion
One of my neighbors was having a drunken argument over abortion on her balcony last night with her friend. I listened to it through the window as I fell asleep. This morning I was thinking about the standard pro-choice argumentation and talking points that my neighbor sloshed through and why it failed to reach the tequila-soaked Christian woman sputtering Bible verses. In trying to counter-act the idiotic label the conservatives put to their side of the debate, pro-life, liberals have called their argument pro-choice. The entire field of argumentation is set up on those terms, which are both dishonest, and either side can be easily toppled in those terms but neither side can gain further ground. We’ve framed the debate to be an eternal stalemate.
In the car this morning I thought of a different way to present the issue. I propose that neither a conservative or a liberal is pro-life and that both people, even if the liberal is a hardcore naturalist capital-A Atheist, both people are pro-spirit.
Neither of us is pro-life.
You (the hypothetical “you” that protests at Planned Parenthood every Sunday after church) believe that from the moment a husband’s sperm touches his (notice the possessives) wife’s egg, that spermy little egg is alive and a human. I believe that while that egg and that sperm are both technically “alive” even before they meet, they are not the type of life that has rights trumping those of the mother. You believe that any method of preventing sperm from reaching an egg is morally wrong and that any sexual act whose end-goal is not to make a baby is a terrible sin. I believe that everyone should take every measure to prevent children born into inhospitable environments or constant pain, and that people should use their sexy parts for whatever non-rapey purpose they deem appropriate. Yet neither of us is any better at protecting life than the other one.
No one will disagree with me that people are alive as well as horses, pigs, cats, mice, fleas, mites, E. coli, rhinovirus, sea cucumbers, English cucumbers, oak trees, and dandelions are alive. All of these things are living things and they can all be classified taxonomically, or on the Tree of Life. Even the most hardcore vegan kills 99.999% of the life I kill to survive on a daily basis. They wash their hands, flea-bomb their apartments, and eat broccoli, so they destroy life. They’ve only stopped killing the tiny percent of a percent of the life the rest of us kill that we would consider large and mobile. We all kill billions of bacteria and dozens of plants and animals a day to keep ourselves alive. Anyone who claims a pro-life stance is an idiot, neither one of us is an idiot, and so neither one of us can reasonably make that claim.
Now, if not life, what are we trying to save? What are we in favor of? I think we can borrow the word spirit to describe what that is.
We are both pro-spirit.
What distinguishes us from most other animals, plants, and bacteria? Why are we one of the only types of terrestrial life capable of formulating the concept of defining life and protecting it? We have the intellectual capacity to learn, experience reality, feel emotions and pain, and form relationships and bonds. I think it is perfectly reasonable to co-opt the word spirit for this since our vocabulary mostly predates the study of neurology and psychology and it fits the term well. Basically, it means that which makes you, you. (In that you are intelligent enough to have a concept of “I”.) I think it is entirely appropriate for me to call my wealth of experiences and thought, and the relationships I’ve formed with other people, my spirit. We are not the only species that have this kind of spirit, and I think our protection of spirit should extend to these species as well. This would include some primates and possibly other mammals, but I’m not yet convinced.
You believe in the original definition of spirit, the one that derives from the Bronze Age. It still means that which makes you you, but you believe that is it relates (although people with your belief are always fuzzy on what this relation is) to something outside of yourself and even outside of nature. You probably believe that your spirit is given to you by your god and that only humans (or, with some people, that only some humans) have one. Your definition of spirit is supernatural and metaphysical. Your definition hinges on not only the existence of a higher power but a higher creator who formed the universe and has ongoing creative powers over all new individuals. (Or at least those who have the ability to fathom “I”.)
With my definition, I can’t semantically prove that the word spirit is the best choice, but I can prove that all of the components of that definition are true. We know enough about neurology to understand how humans learn and experience reality. We can study the stuff of thought and we know how humans and other intelligent creatures can create relationships and bonds. These components of a naturalistic spirit are well documented and testable, and most of our modern achievements in philosophy, psychology, and medicine depend on our having certain amounts of knowledge of this spirit. Spirit, being in large part cognition and relationship building, is not something a spermy egg cell can have. It is not something a blastocyst can have. It is not something a fetus with an open neural tube can have. It is something a baby begins developing the moment it looks out at the world and reacts to its mother’s face, the doctor’s hand, and the dazzling roar of light and sound of the world it has just entered. A newborn child is beginning its first relationships and soaking in its first prototypical perceptions of reality. The child now has a spirit.
Your definition does not rest on testable hypotheses, nor does it have ramifications in the real world. No branch of science depends on your definition of spirit and no branch of science has been able to test and prove your hypotheses, although there have been many failures and the successful tests work as if there is nothing real which is supernatural. The onus is on you to prove that there is a spirit, whether it be a connection to things that exists outside of nature or a part of your mind that is capable of surviving death and walking with angels. The onus is on you to also prove the mechanism from which this spirit comes. If it’s a god, it is your responsibility to prove that this god exists. If it’s a part of some universal consciousness, it is up to you to show that this consciousness is real. Until these things happen, your definition of spirit is an untestable hypothesis and has no business intruding into politics and law, branches of human knowledge that are predicated on using the scientific method to determine and legislate what is real and proven. We do not pass laws to protect things that can’t be proven to exist.
quod erat demonstrandum
I also have a working definition of soul:
Women: Not people.
5 Ways the GOP’s War on Women Is Fueling Rape Culture
It’s been an explosively successful year for anti-choice legislators, lobbyists, and supporters. It seems every day there’s news of a new abortion (or birth control) restriction being introduced or passed in some state legislature, each story containing painfully ignorant quotations from the legislator who authored the bill. Here are five ways that recently introduced and enacted GOP policies have nothing to do with life, and everything to do with rape culture.
- Most anti-choice activists, lobbying groups, and politicians don’t support exceptions for rape and incest. That means that anyone who happens to be impregnated by the same person who rapes them is out of luck – or rights, more accurately – when it comes to reclaiming their body should they want to do that through not having to carry their pregnancy to term. According to some politicians, bills that exist without rape exceptions need to remain draconian in order to weed out the liars from the truly assaulted. This unfounded claim that victims of rape and incest are likely to lie – as well as the creation of a hierarchy of victims – sure looks like rape culture. But give Indiana Republican Eric Turner a break – he was trying to be careful to not “disparage in any way someone who has gone through the experience of a rape or incest”. He was just voting in favor of a bill that strips them of their right to bodily autonomy. At least he was nice about it!
- The GOP is dehumanizing an entire class of people in the same way rapists do. If there’s one thing anti-choicers are ironically good at, it’s completely dehumanizing a particular class of people – folks capable of becoming pregnant. You might recall the recent comparison of women to livestock, as made by Georgia Republican Terry England – livestock farmer?, legislator, and human rights aficionado – during a debate on a bill that would have restricted abortion access in the state to before 20 weeks gestation. It really breaks Mr. England’s heart to see baby cows and pigs not make it. So why can’t we legislate that human livestock be forced to use their bodies against their will to make sure all human babies make it? This type of comparison is literal dehumanization, and as most folks know, it’s much easier to commit human rights abuses on folks when they’re not considered human. For further examples, Rush Limbaugh’s recent foray into the world of calling young women “sluts” for wanting birth control.
- Anti-choice politicians are completely unconcerned with consent.What’s interesting about anti-choice politicians is that, as much as they like to think of pregnant folks as piggies on the farm about to pop with a new profitable litter, they still like to paint themselves as ultra-concerned with informed consent. This claim is made – ironically – as they continue to push through forced-ultrasound, mandatory waiting periods for obtaining a legal abortion, and fetal pain bills. Apparently, the only consent that matters is that which these (predominantly male and white) legislators deem important.
The basis for these bills aimed at providing “informed consent” to women seeking abortions is not scientifically informed itself. Take, for example, the fetal pain bill fad that’s these wily kids are trying to bring into vogue this season. These bills are passed on the basis that a fetus is capable of feeling pain at 20 weeks, even though medical experts have repeatedly proven that to be false. It seems that the strategy for fetal pain legislation includes the “lying for the Lord” tactic that the religious right has become so fond of.
And speaking of informed consent, where do Republicans stand on allowing doctors to lie to pregnant women about birth defects and genetic disorders their fetus may have? They’re perfectly fine with that – as long as it’s all in the name of preventing abortions.
Transvaginal ultrasounds are another anti-choice flavor of the month. Virginia’s controversial law requires these ultrasounds before any pregnant person can obtain an abortion. Several other states require other forms of ultrasounds before getting an abortion, and Texas has implemented the transvaginal ultrasound requirement for 45 days now. These unnecessary procedures are performed regardless of whether the person in question is a victim of rape or incest. They are another invasion of the patient’s body, and if the patient looks away, they must still be subjected to the spoken description of the fetus whether they want to be or not. All of these attacks are a blatant disrespect for the concept of consent – outrageously under the very guise of “informed consent”!
- Shame and misinformation is central in the GOP’s discussion of sex.Another favorite facet of the anti-choice movement is the spectacular failure that is abstinence-only education. The basis of abstinence only sex ed is that there are zero choices regarding sexuality outside of “NO” and “BABIES”. Incredibly, the same people who are so adamant about saying “no” don’t seem to understand – or perhaps care – that there are other people out there who simply won’t take that response for an answer. Sharing lollipops as a means of demonstrating that people (with an emphasis on girls) who have sex before marriage are used up and covered in spit is also no way of training young people on assertiveness and sexual negotiation.
Not only does abstinence-only education completely erase and forget about people who become pregnant as a result of rape, but they don’t even shed any light on sexual assault as a thing that exists in the real world, or something that can possibly be assuaged by clear, concise, and assertive sexual communication. Essentially, they are helping to create a culture of sexual ignorance – something that is a huge contributor to rape culture. If a person is never taught about sex, consent, and communication beyond “no” or “yes”, they are more likely to commit sexual assault.
- The GOP has no regard for bodily autonomy. Forcing someone to carry a pregnancy against their will is a violation of their right to exist as a self-contained and self-realized entity. It is literally forced organ donation. In the same way that a rapist uses their victim’s body for their own ends, so does the state when it seeks to restrict access to legal abortions. The GOP has an agenda that includes all pregnancies being carried to term. They have devoted the last two years to exert force to achieve that end. When the state can use and violate the bodies of its citizens at will, is there even a question that the legislators in favor of such laws are perpetuating rape culture? Restricting abortion devalues the agency of the pregnancy-capable person and thus fosters a culture in which personal agency is devalued on a macro and micro level.
Unfortunately, rape culture is pervasive and multi-faceted. It can be difficult to tackle all of the aspects of it as a means of eradicating rape and other forms of sexual abuse. However, an easy and instantly beneficial way is to curb the anti-choice enthusiasm that’s been bursting onto the political scene ever since Republicans got voted into office on the promise of job creation. The fight for reproductive rights is not just about abortion and access to it. This is about what our culture is going to look like, what is going to be permissible within it, and how it is going to be structured. As long as attacks on reproductive freedom are a major tenet of the Republican platform, every Republican in office is an emblem of the negative effects anti-choice policies and rhetoric wreak on both US culture at large, and for the individuals made victim to it.
I hope someone gifts life to Santy’s bum.
You fail the Smart Enough to Run the Country test, Congressman. Please relinquish your seat to someone who isn’t completely incompetent.
It is for religious ignorants.
These analogies only work if you avoid those pesky “difficult concepts” from science: concepts like fertilization, species classification, and biological development.
Let’s start with the egg. They’re right: it isn’t a chicken, because it hasn’t been fertilized. Hens lay eggs whether or not they’ve conceived; this means that farmers can avoid chicken reproduction by simply keeping the roosters separate from the hens, without hurting egg production. The eggs sold in supermarkets are almost always unfertilized. What you’re eating is the stuff that would have nourished the chick before hatching, had a chick been conceived. (As our dear friend Phil puts it, “Eggs are chicken period. Have fun erasing that mental image.”)
If you were to break open an egg that was fertilized, you’d reveal something rather unfamiliar to your breakfast table:See the beak and the tiny little bird foot? Chicken. Very young chicken, but still chicken.
Let’s move on to the acorn. “An acorn is not a tree” is one of the oldest, easiest-to-refute, unoriginal, nonsense pro-choice statements in the book. It relies on a simple linguistic confusion. The word “tree” can be used in two subtly different ways. One use is to designate species: oak trees, pine trees, etc. Another meaning designates the adult stage of the plant, as in “I planted a sapling last August, and now it’s a tree.” An acorn is not an adult tree. It IS a member of its species: oak, pine, or whatever the case may be. Likewise, unborn children are human, but they are not adults (and obviously, pro-lifers have never claimed that they are).
The silkworm example is just ridiculous. Of course a part of the raw materials used to make a dress is not a dress. But embryos and fetuses are not “raw materials” for making people. The raw materials are the nutrients that we ingest— prenatally through the umbilical cord, in infancy through breast milk or formula, and so on. We don’t “come from” unborn children; we once were unborn children.
This brings us to the final image. It appears that this image depicts a moment just before fertilization; the sperm hasn’t yet gone in to mingle its DNA with the egg’s DNA. So, ironically enough, the pro-choicers are actually right about this— just not for the reasons they think.
But let’s pretend that it were really an image of the moment of fertilization. Human fertilization (also known as conception) creates new members of the human species. Newly conceived human beings are of course not adults yet, but neither are they mere raw materials. They are simply young, and look exactly how they are supposed to at this stage of their lives. At conception, they possess all the genetic information that will guide them through the prenatal period, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. Every person, including you, can trace back his or her existence as an individual to this event.
Pro-lifers are at a disadvantage here. In general, people tend to prefer simplistic ideas to ones that take more time to explain, even if the latter has science on its side. The abortion movement has made very good use of misleading images and language. It’s up to us to improve public understanding, one person at a time. Please share this post with your friends.-From secularprolife
Excellent examples of a form of the Straw Man fallacy! That’s not a difficult concept, either, but folks keep making that mistake.
Care to elaborate, please?
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