Go read Anatomy of an Unsafe Abortion. Then visualize Rick Santorum and all the other bastards in the Republican party, and imagine living in his world.
Not at all pretty, is it?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Castration with a rusty nail would be too good for them…
Anti-choice crusaders have collected dozens of deaths caused by abortion–illegal abortion, mostly from the 1800s – 1930s, in other words before antibiotics as well. They are using them to tell everyone how dangerous abortion is. It’s as if I were afraid to go to the dentist and justified my fears by pointing to the state of dentistry in 1860. Can anyone tell how weird that is? They are an unwitting argument for legal abortion–which is how it happened in Canada: one brave coroner, Morton Shulman, started listing abortion gone wrong as a cause of death instead of whitewashing it as a sudden fever. Here’s a little historical perspective from the U.S. before Roe. v. Wade: When there was no choice.
I think many of us find it easier to imagine dying in his world.
It’s really sad what the Republican Party has become. Perhaps this country needs a 3rd political party with conservative ideas (smaller government and lower taxes) but without the morally corrupt religious stupidity. A political party for non-liberals who don’t want to destroy the environment, wipe out endangered species, stick their noses into other people’s private lives, and make America a theocracy.
A quote from last REAL Republican who lost the election for president in 1964. He had no tolerance for Christian assholes.
However, on religious issues there can be little or no compromise. There is no position on which people are so immovable as their religious beliefs. There is no more powerful ally one can claim in a debate than Jesus Christ, or God, or Allah, or whatever one calls this supreme being. But like any powerful weapon, the use of God’s name on one’s behalf should be used sparingly. The religious factions that are growing throughout our land are not using their religious clout with wisdom. They are trying to force government leaders into following their position 100 percent. If you disagree with these religious groups on a particular moral issue, they complain, they threaten you with a loss of money or votes or both. I’m frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in “A,” “B,” “C,” and “D.” Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of “conservatism”.
— Senator Barry Goldwater
The frothy one, along with a whole lot more anti-abortion folks, have the weird idea that if abortion is made illegal then it won’t happen. Instead, back-alley abortions will become even more common.
imagine living in his world.
As feralboy said, it’s easier for me to imagine dying in his world. In more way than one. It would be hard for me to reconcile the ideals of medicine with turning away a woman who needed an abortion. That, I’m sure, would become a death penalty offense pretty quickly.
And the sad truth is that the more illegal you make abortions, the more of them you have.
What both enrages and depresses me is that these people simply do not care if this is the future for desperate women seeking to terminate unintended pregnancies. They just do not care about these consequences for women. Their stance is that “good” women will submit to the physical, emotional and financial toll of unintended pregnancy while “bad” women who seek abortions will get what is coming to them. Deserved “punishment” for the “immorality” of wanting to enjoy healthy, positive sexual lives without being forced to risk pregnancy every single time they have sex.
What can we do to change this situation? This erosion of women’s basic right to bodily autonomy has been ongoing, and has only gained momentum and support from a growing number of evangelized people. I think this is because we continue to argue from the position that if abortion rights are restricted or taken away, horrors like this will happen to women – based upon a belief that the health and safety of women would actually matter to abortion opponents. When you realize that it does not matter to them – that indeed, many of them take a vicious pleasure in imagining the “just punishment” of a woman dying from a botched abortion, it is little wonder that our efforts to stop the steadily building attack on women’s reproductive freedom have failed.
Women who need abortions–women who have had botched abortions and need them fixed–women who have other conditions incompatible with cancer–are all dying in countries like Nicaragua, where the Roman Catholic church has pushed and applauded strict anti-abortion legislation.
Sorry, I mean incompatible with pregnancy: like cancer incompatible with pregnancy, where chemotherapy means risking a fetus.
Enough with the glitterbombing.
Time to break out the blood.
We’re getting killed in a small-scale poll.
Should Catholics have the right to refuse government birth control, etc., etc.?
It’s oddly worded, but the answer is “no.”
http://www.news-sentinel.com/section/OPINION
If just a couple hundred of you do your part, we can come out ahead.
I’m holding a gun to a cute puppy’s head. Vote or the puppy dies.
There’s a whole history of women like this and many more of those women who did survive an illegal abortion. Abortion won’t go away and neither will the need for it.
feralboy12:
Yes. I do.
@humanape:
I’m telling this from memory, so some of the details might be wrong.
After Barry made those comments, someone asked Jerry Falwell for his reaction. Falwell said, “I think every good Christian should pray for the soul of Senator Goldwater.”
Goldwater was made aware of this and asked for a response. He said,”I think every good Christian should kick Jerry Falwell in the ass.”
I would never vote Republican, but I have loved the Senator ever since.
So just the a/immorality of libertarianism? Great.
@Sili #11 has the right idea. I would be more than happy to collect my copious menstrual blood to throw in that bigot Santorum’s smug face. Thank the fates I live in Canada, and the abortion I had was in a fantastic clinic staffed with brilliant doctors and neither the procedure, the clinic visit, the fentanyl, nor the antibiotics cost me a penny. And nobody forced me look at the ultrasound that they perform to ensure that the pregnancy is within the uterus (I did look at it though, to compare it to other ultrasound images I’ve seen of my uterus, because I was curious).
It’s been rumored that he actually said “nuts” rather than “ass,” and that the quote got sanitized by the reporters.
Yes, Barry had some awesome things to say about separation of church and state, gays in the military, and other subjects; he definitely did not deserve the tar & feathering he got in the 1964 election, especially not from a guy who sold himself as the peace candidate only to send the marines to invade Vietnam a few months later.
Ugh, I think my uterus just curled up into a ball inside of me after reading that.
Anti-choice people should be forced to undergo a back-alley abortion as a requirement to spew their bile.
One of the old aunts died from an illegal abortion.
The very old people in the family are starting to die off. And some family secrets are coming out.
She was always a shadowy figure that no one talked about much. Dead young and way before I was even born.
It turns out she died from an illegal abortion in her 20’s. She started hemorrhaging and was taken to a Catholic hospital because she was Catholic herself. The claim from a cousin is that they knew what had happened and just let her bleed to death.
Fuck the female slavers and the forced birthers.
BTW, there is already an underground abortion network.
They provide medical abortions on a DIY pill basis, RU-486 + prostaglandin*.
Some women live hundreds of miles from the nearest abortion clinic, in states with a zillion hoops to jump through, or just don’t have the money.
I know it exists. I don’t know much about it. The underground just hasn’t been my scene for a lot of decades.
This is a trend that is likely to increase. If the christofascist toads get their way, we are on our way back to the early 20th century. I don’t know what to tell anyone except to get out and vote against these guys.
*For anyone who wants to know the trade names.
The RU 486/Cytotec prostaglandin (“RU 486”) abortion technique is … RU 486 ( generic name: mifepristone) plus Cytotec (a prostaglandin generic name: misoprostol). …
Needless to say, outlawing abortion would only effect poor women.
The rich would fly to Europe and then do some shopping.
The middle class would fly to Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean and do some shopping.
The poor would apply for welfare for their new baby.
What welfare?
An important plot element in The Cider House Rules is the death of a young woman from a botched back-alley abortion. (And the clear implication is that a goodly proportion of the orphanage’s cemetery is given over to the victims of similar tragedies.) Sensitively handled and quite moving.
I ♥ John Irving.
That said, Canada doesn’t exactly have fantastic access to abortion. In New Brunswick, for example, unless you could get two doctors (keeping in mind a doctor shortage that meant I and my parents were the only ones I knew who even had a family doctor) to sign off that it was medically necessary, it wouldn’t be done in a hospital. Of which, only two in the province provided abortions. Otherwise, you could go to the clinic in my hometown, open one day a week. That’s it. Same thing in Newfoundland and Manitoba. And that’s not counting the province and territories with zero abortion access at all.
Apologies for the Canadian threadjack, just saying that we’re not exactly going so great either. And the *series of expletives* Harper government is allowing more and more anti-choicers to start yelling about what little access there is.
If I got pregnant, by some bizarre series of technical and chemical failures, the result would be almost certainly ectopic. When I learned that, it weighed on me even more how much the Religious Reich would be happy to let me die.
Azkyroth @ #23: Also a very good point. That kid can eat bootstraps.
*reads linked article*
*curls up in a ball and weeps*
OK
Where can I get a “Let them eat bootstraps.” t-shirt?
Not to minimize the importance of the matter at hand, I like to point out that Santorum et al has already made clear that they have contraception in their cross-hairs too. For decades the anti-abortion liars have stated that they have no interest in going after contraception. Yeah, right. As soon as they had W. in office they started in on limiting access to contraception and now the attack has come out in the open.
Santorum stated his opposition to contraception last October. Although the sound on this is poor you can still hear him. I actually transcribed this, the following starts at about the 17:40 mark [Emphsis mine]:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN7WfIZh690
See, he’s God’s own expert on the way things are supposed to be.
I love Jen’s writing, and I genuinely feel her rage on this issue – I live in a country where abortion is illegal. In fact, it was illegal to even DISCUSS abortion until 1992. The country in question is not some backwater third world nation – it’s Ireland, a place where reproductive rights are on par with progessive, enlightened regimes like Iran.
Currently it’s a hot topic over here again due to the anniversary of a very troubling case where the Irish state tried to stop a preteen rape victim from getting an abortion ( my write up on it is here if you’re interested http://goo.gl/JeO5e ), and sadly the ultra hardline Catholics are crawling out of the wood work to strangle any discussion on the topic, repeating their unthinking mantra of “abortion is MURDER” like a bunch of borg with rosary beads.
Now, I have friends who are on the fence, and I understand that it is not a clear cut argument and there is room for a spectrum of views. Curiously, I find the most vicious anti-choice arguments cast things in purely emotive terms, using loaded terminology to stifle discourse on the subject. That’s why powerful writing like this is so important – it shows the side we need to see, and the side which needs to be understood if people wish to engage in measured discussion on what can be a hard topic.
Denying choice and supressing someone’s right to choose has devastating consequences that the religious right either lack the compassion to take into consideration or simply feel their understanding of ancient desert texts is more important that someone’s right to choose what is right for them.
Congrats to Jen again.
Jesus fuck.
Would it be crass of me to say that I do not want to read this article because I know enough about the history before Roe v Wade. If this happens, only women with money and connections will be able to afford a hushed up safe abortion. All the other women will be forced to play a dangerous blood game.
I really hate Santorum-for-brains, he truly wants to make life more dangerous for more then half the population, he thinks that it is righteous.
One question for the forced birth brigade I have never had answered is life begins at conception and all abortions are murder. So why aren’t the Raping Children Cult putting all the money they can into medical research to prevent miscarriage?
feralboy12
I certainly find it easier to imagine wanting to die rather than live in it.
andrewbrown:
For the same reason that they oppose any sort of legislation that would allow for doctor assisted suicide:
It’s God’s will.
It’s God’s will if a woman miscarries. It’s God’s will for you to suffer from a terminal disease.
*spits!*
Cannot track down a source, but remember reading a long time ago that when abortion was made legal, the female suicide rate dropped by one-third.
@ 36
Ah yes I’d forgotten the whole Natural Moral Law thing which means gowd ain’t subject to the same rules as the rest of us, he can abort to his heart’s content, but we shouldn’t try to be like him in this instance.
In other areas though, we have to take god/Jesus as the ultimate example to follow (cog dis straining neurons!!!)
Raven:
From what I understand, that happened quite often. Medicine was still dominated by men, and quite a few of them were misogynist fuckstains.
They are consistent in that they don’t put money behind solving any natural cause of death be it miscarriage, cancer, heart attack, etc.
andrewbrown:
Bingo. The “God works in mysterious ways” canard.
Abortion, suicide, etc. are going against God’s will! And if God has proven anything, it’s that he is totally and utterly unable to prevent someone from breaking his rules.
@40 desoto
And yet we had the whole Terri Schiavo three ring circus where a woman was not allowed to be peacefully let go when I would have thought it painfully obvious that it was god’s will that she die?
Really can’t understand this mindset!
@42
Exactly. Contradictions abound.
and hipocrisy
duh hYpocrisy
I`d like to have a chat about Terri Schiavo.
But not here.
Can we take it to TET?
Ok apologies, was not trying to threadjack, merely highlight inconsistencies in the Catlick mindset!
andrewbrown
I`d like to have a chat about Terri Schiavo.
But not here.
Can we take it to TET?
—–
I`ll be right there.
Maybe.
My netbook is having a stroke.
I always ask the woman-hating anti-abortion pieces of shit scumbags how they’ll feel supporting the huge uptick in the need for orphanages–which I expect for them to be taxed for, not I. Or that they must be on the government-mandated list to adopt all the unwanted children who will crop up–without any tax deductions at all for taking on the care of those children. They will also be on the task force to clean up the mess from illegal abortions with their bare hands–no anti-septics for them, and the costs of burying those women.
And the woman-hating, children-hating scumbags actually think none of that will happen, that “the sluts” will stop having sex, poof! like that! as soon as abortion is illegal.
Words cannot convey my contempt for ignorant, inhumane scumbags like these.
@ 49 Aquaria
I think it’s from Hitch’s documentary where someone is being shown round the child warehouse in Calcutta run by “Mother” Theresa and she says to the visitor “This is how we solve the problem of abortion”
Great, so feeding kids just enough to keep them from starving, giving them almost no individual love and care, basically a return to the Victorian workhouse. Oliver Twist wasn’t a bloody instruction manual!!! GRRRRRRR!!!
Guy’s an insult to frothy mixtures.
@51 christophburschka
Immediate follow up question should be (but of course it won’t be asked)
“What evidence do you have to support that statement which is based in reality rather than religious wishthinking?”
Has anyone ever thought of this? Why don’t we make it illegal to make and sell alcohol? Bingo. Alcoholism problem solved. Oh, and drugs too.
@53 Cowalker
You may be on to something, I mean Chicago in the ’30s was the very model of a peaceful and law abiding town. It had no problems with criminality at all!!
Rick Santorum is a sack of shit.
The world he would create would be hellish.
I’m glad to say he has no chance whatsoever of making it happen.
I’m not a violent person – but if I ever saw him in real life I’d be so tempted to deck the shitpile.
cowalker,
there is actually a parallel to unsafe illegal abortion deaths from the Prohibition Era:
according to the Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, by Deborah Blum, there was a lot of cheap illegally concocted alcohol in circulation, with sometimes lethal doses of methyl alcohol (“wood alcohol”). This affected the poor disproportionately, as the rich were able to afford the expensive smuggled quality liquor.
Because of this, the forensic examiner advocated time and again for an end to Prohibition, and indeed when the Amendment to repeal was passed in Congress, NY State (or perhaps NYC only, I don’t remember) ceased enforcement of the prohibition laws immediately.
@cowalker says:
Yeah, they thought of it. Didn’t work – & I raise my beer to that FAILure – google or wiki Prohibition.
Also see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvaEJzoaYZk&ob=av2e
Guess you’re doing a Poe right?
(why does it not surprise me that StevoR also seems incapable of understanding sarcasm?)
@56
Indeed, and the problem is still going on.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-16958993
which can be compared with
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7041048.stm
They won’t be satisfied until every poor person is dead!
This is a harrowing tale, but one that wouldn’t be uncommon were abortion to become illegal. The data show that abortions will occur regardless of the prevailing laws; the real difference is in the number of maternal deaths. As a family doctor committed to providing safe abortions, I hope stories such as this get widely read.
BBC recently announced that the income disparity in England has reached the largest level since Victorian England. Which,by the way, is exactly what Santorum and crew want. After all, didn’t little Tiny Tim look so cute in his little hand-me-down hat and the crutch his father made for him ? (excuse me while I go puke.)
Oh, and I read and posted a reply to the article PZ pointed out. good writing, I hope people read it and understand. for some reason I couldn’t help but take a potshot at Santorum and the other extremists.
DLC
The scary thing is that judging by his recent primary results Mr. Frothmeister isn’t that extreme.
It’s jerkwads like these that leave thousands of women up Santorum creek without a paddle. :(
Thanks,
This is totally unrelated, but I get advertisements on this blog that are not exactly in the spirit of rational thinking – among others one from a clairvoyant and one from a local (Dutch) evangelical broadcasting station saying they’re there to spread the Christian word.
I vaguely remember this being discussed before and I know it’s possible for the site owner to cancel out advertisements by category, but I’m unsure if you can opt out on particular ads. I do think you don’t want them here though – is there anywhere we can report them?
Andrewbrown@63 : people who go to caucuses tend to be from the far right of the GOP, according to polls I’ve seen.
So, in the caucus states the very conservative types tend to do much better. Although Paul has been running a stealth campaign to get his people seated.
Duckbilledplatypus @66 : Freethought blogs are aware of the issue and working to fix it, but much of it is from adservers who roll stuff through the blog site depending on topics their sensors pick up, and some of them even depend on what cookies are on your individual computer. For example: I was looking at JC Penny’s (a popular department store in the states) website and today I have ads for their store on my FtB page. annoying, but there it is. I should go download advert blocking software but I’m too lazy and this thing runs too slow as it is, so I put up with it.
“Rick Santorum and all the other bastards in the Republican party”, one of the reasons I like reading Pharyngula. You refer to these assholes as they deserve.
Pelamun: Not just wood alcohol, but tri-ortho-cresyl phosphate. It’s an industrial chemical that was used to dilute Jamaican ginger extract, known as “jake,” which was highly alcoholic but not covered by anti-liquor laws. It’s also a neurotoxin, and it produced a form of partial paralysis known as jake leg.
My mother knew two young women, one age 15 and one age 21, who died from illegal abortions. She wonders how anyone, alive during that era, could possibly support overturning Roe v. Wade. But she also figures that many of them intentionally do not remember. Just as they do not remember lynchings, wife-beating, drunk driving deaths, and other disturbing features of the golden age.
But without the religious aspect, very few poor and middle class voters would support a programme designed to move money from their pockets into the pockets of the very rich. With the religious aspect, it is, sadly, quite easy.
Um, I think you mean ‘is dominated by men, and quite a few of them are misogynist fuckstains.’ See Ron Paul for a good example (do not see him as a patient, though).
Why should anyone think morally corrupt non-religious stupidity is any better? If they were under this delusion, you provide a clear example showing that it is not.
Ogvorbis: Yes, you’re right, the problem of misogyny (and other forms of bigotry) in medicine hasn’t gone away, but I was speaking strictly of the pre-Roe era in that comment.
I do not call these evil beings “pro-life”. I call them “pro-wire-coat-hanger”.
And besides KG, why is he (safe assumption) even wishing for another 3rd party. I thought the official big-L Libertarian Party was nominally non-religious?
[slightly OT]
Anyhow, the evidence speaks for itself, conservative 3rd parties exist, but they do poorly even in small, local elections. That has to mean something. I tried to engage Humanape on the demographics of liberalism before, but didn’t get any traction. (I.e., openly atheist candidates for US elections will be almost certainly and for the foreseeable future Democrats. Atheist conservatism? I’m pretty sure that ship has sailed.)
If you place something people want outside the law, people will go outside the law to get it. “Enforcement” won’t change that, only make it more of a challenge. Case in point: several thousand years of human activity. What part of reality do these right-wing and left-wing idiots not understand?
*rhetorical question, of course*
@75
They clearly don’t concern themselves with the side effects of their legislation.
True. They concern themselves with the ideological purity of their legislation. How us sinful humans fuck up the ideal is Eve’s fault.
#31 david robertgrimes
The Catholic Church basing their anti-abortion stance using the “abortion is murder” trope (riding on the coat-tails of the prot fundie “abortion is murder” trope) makes me puke.
The Catholic Church has several kinds of “sins” with different severity of consequences. Ferendæ sententiæ (sentence to be passed) are sins for which the church can impose sanctions, including excommunication, when the sin becomes known to it and if the sinner does not repent and seek absolution.
Latæ sententiæ (already passed) are sins that the sanctions come into effect when the sin is committed, i.e. consider yourself sanctioned if you commit the sin.
Ferendæ sententiæ sins are things like rape, murder, theft – all the venial sins.
Most latæ sententiæ sins are acts against the church (like attacking the pope or bishop); misusing priestly authority (a priest forgiving the women he is having an adulterous affair with); debasing a rite; etc. And being a party in obtaining a completed abortion. This is (almost)the only one that is aimed at the laity (being a Freemason makes the list, too).
Remember the case of the barely pubescent girl in South America who was raped by her step-father and the church excommunicated the mother and the doctor for getting her an abortion but not the step-father who raped her? They were merely declaring the fact that these people were already excommunicated; the step-father could be excommunicated, but that would be at the discretion of the church.
So, I have to ask if murder is so foul, why isn’t it a latæ sententiæ sin? If abortion is murder, why isn’t it a ferendæ sententiæ sin?
I suspect the reason is that you cannot baptize someone until after they are born. Abortion is worse than murder because it prevents the church from performing their magic rites before the death.
The Church’s stance against abortion is purely theological. But they know that won’t fly with non-Catholics, so they push the emotional button of “abortion is murder”.
In the few months that I worked as a Med Tech before the Roe v. Wade decision, I saw two teenagers die of botched abortions. Neither girl had “abortion” listed as the cause of death.
One was listed as “kidney failure”. Technically true, but the kidneys only failed because she believed in the rumor that douching with a certain household chemical would end the pregnancy. It did, but it also damaged her kidneys and liver so badly that they shut down and she died of the toxic build up.
The other died of “septicemia” … the real cause was gangrene of her badly damaged uterus that turned into massive septicemia and all sorts of nasty things.
That’s two, seen in one hospital by one person in a period of a few months. How many thousands were there?
I think one ironic thing about this post is all the anti-abortion ads that are on the site. You need to edit your google ad settings (if using such).
@DLC, 67: thanks. I can understand the Dutch ads although I’m slightly puzzled by how on earth all the woo is aimed at me. If it’s based browsing-history based cookies, it’s still strange that I get them only here. They’re Google ads, I should get them anywhere I get Google ads.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that part of the Catholic motivation to bring back the twelve-child family is that back in those days, about the only way a woman could opt out of spending her life crapping out babies was to become a nun. Either way, the Catholic Church wins.
I feel so bad. I am a visual type ,and I almost saw the blood while i was reading. It was always hard to me to read stuff like this. the emotions are owerwhelming. so f×ck you anti-abortion movement, you make people suffer.
@58.pelamun :
I undertand sarcasm.
Do you understand playing along (“straight man” for want of a better comedic term) & expanding on the other comment? Cause that’s what I was doing there. 1
@73. lordshipmayhem says:
Quoted for truth. That’s a far better name for them alright – well said & adopted for future reference.