The same group of people cheering on the destruction of families at the border are also calling for an end to late term abortions — force those women to bring damaged babies to term, even if it kills them both! Pious politicians are crying over the fact that a woman and her doctor might decide to terminate a pregnancy even shortly before it is due, or during labor, as if they just want to kill babies on a whim. That is not the reality, of course. Read this story of a woman who was 35 weeks pregnant when she got terrible news.
The neurologist delivered more bad news: additional brain anomalies. My little daughter would likely never walk, talk, swallow, or support the weight of her head. She would require brain surgery to extend her life, but no surgery could ever cure her.
“What can she do?” I asked. “Does a child like mine just sleep all day?”
He winced at the question. “Children like yours are not generally comfortable enough to sleep.”
She didn’t have much choice.
Why was she offering me these choices? Didn’t she know how deeply I loved my baby? I tried to respond, but could only manage a question, “There are abortions for women like me?” I was 35 weeks pregnant. I wondered if there had been a mistake.
“We don’t know.” She said. “We used to send women to Kansas. But we can’t anymore.”
I understood. The doctor who performed abortions for women 35 weeks pregnant had been shot by a man who followed him to his church. Somewhere in my brain, the memory of that news story revealed itself along with the stark understanding that I was entering a world in which people might want to shoot me, too, depending on my choice.
There was only one clinic that could take care of her, it was 2000 miles away, and she had to pay $25,000 up front to get it done. That’s the situation we’re in right now, where essential health care is locked up and hidden away by controlling men and Christian bible-wallopers.
But hey, you want a little good news? The city of Minneapolis has approved the construction of a new Planned Parenthood facility.
The commission approved two land-use applications for the three-story building, which will replace Planned Parenthood’s existing Uptown clinic, located at Lagoon & Emerson. The project will allow Planned Parenthood to triple its annual patient capacity in Uptown, according to Jen Aulwes, communications director of Planned Parenthood North Central States.
The organization will provide all of the same services in the new building that are available in the existing building, including OB-GYN exams and pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease testing, according to Aulwes. The center’s services will include medication abortion.
It looks like a lovely building.
I notice the rendering left out the mob of ignorant assholes with signs screaming at patients trying to get in. That makes it much prettier.
Even in these moral black-and-white times, late-term abortions are one of the most crystal clear indicators of morality.
Pregnancy isn’t a fucking carnival ride. It wrecks your body. From extreme nausea to literally tearing muscles apart, it’s dangerous and often fatal. Nobody goes through 9 months of HELL and decides to have an abortion at the last minute for shits and giggles.
Every one is a wanted pregnancy. Every one is an grieving mother, who suddenly got the devastating news that her baby had died, or had severe abnormalities, or would kill them both. And these…”people”, they see a grieving mother, and you decide to bash her in her agony. They call her murderer, the scream and berate her, hold her up as a degenerate whore who should be stopped by law, they want to throw her in jail and kill her, a mother who has lost her child, because that’s what makes them feel morally “superior”.
Those people are MONSTERS. And nobody should want the support of MONSTERS.
~That’s the kind of thing I wish an elected would say at a debate or town hall or something.
As long as we’re on this subject, ya’ll have heard of VA Governor Northam’s racism thing, right?
So he needs to go, but you should understand the full context.
Delegate Kathy Tran introduced a bill easing restrictions on late-term abortions. The GOP, as usual got into gear calling her advocating for infanticide, etc.They even went further this time, saying she wanted to knife delivered full-term babies on the operating table. (Side note, but very important: They hardly ever even mention the bill. they go after Tran, personally. The Racist Party doesn’t care that much about social policy; their only real political will is hate and spite toward Democrats/The Left, personally. So they don’t attack the bill, they attack the person behind it.)
Northam got in and supported Tran. So a racist-wing group released the now infamous photos of Northam, in retaliation, and to destroy Northam (see what I just wrote in parenthesis).
Northam, of course, needs to fuck off, and he’s really fucking this up and fuck him. But it’s also true that this was a racist-wing hit job. This is important context.
Presumably it is blast and arson proof.
And also terrorist attack resistant.
Because it is inevitable that the fundie xians will attack it sooner or later.
My impression is that new family planning clinics are always designed this way.
According to Iowa Democratic state senator Jack Hatch, abortions are either “medically needed” or “recreational“.
You have to wonder just what these people do for fun…
Mea culpa, to the max, for htmlfail @ # 3.
And now, on soon-to-be-Governor Fairfax:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/va-lt-gov-justin-fairfax-denies-sex-assault-allegation-from-2004/2019/02/04/05fb0f6c-272b-11e9-ad53-824486280311_story.html?utm_term=.3f6d53397950
This allegation is released by the same group that did the Northam hit job.
…Hm. I give a vast amount of credibility to accusers from the get-go. but in this case, after reading that and the context,I’m skeptical.
You know, it ought to give them pause that there is not a single mention of abortion anywhere in the Bible, Old Testament or New, with the possible exception of a passage in the Torah which some people interpret as a ceremony for inducing abortion. But most Christians are largely unfamiliar with the Bible.
If heaven is real, shouldn’t christians be promoting and funding these clinics with joy and enthusiasm? Who are they to stand in the way of paradise?
You’re right that no one is likely to say ‘Ooo let’s fuck so we can have an abortion’.
Women had to have them even when it was illegal. I’m certain that it’s the least bad choice in a really bad situation,
The only way to cut down on the number abortions is with contraception and education.
Guess which two things those absolute bastards* are also against.
Apologies to those whose parents aren’t married, I can’t think of anything else to call them.
I wish there was a way of transplanting fetuses from women who, for whatever reason, have to abort them and place them in these anti-choice arseholes. If these arseholes think an unborn life should be preserved let them be the ones to do so.
My mother’s life was saved in 1955 by a late-term abortion. The aborted fetus was grossly hydocephalic and would have died shortly after delivery…and after killing my mom.
I was born in 1958; I owe my entire existence to the fact of my mother’s abortion. I cannot fucking believe this is still in any way controversial. Reminder to self: never underestimate conservative venality, mendacity, and misogyny.
I am a freelance interpreter in the UK. Quite a lot of my work is medical and I get to know patients and doctors fairly well as I am the only interpreter for my working languages in my area, and the community that needs my services is not very large. I have had to interpret in cases of fetal death, miscarriage and abortions. All of these are harrowing for the women and the medical staff. Nobody ever wakes up in the morning and says to herself “I fancy wearing my skinny jeans today, oops, let’s get rid of it, I wonder if the clinic can do a quicky this morning.”
I find it easier to translate “the tumor has started growing again, it’s time to think about your last few weeks” than sit through abortion counseling, pre-op and the procedure. But it is the woman’s body, it is her life, and her decision. Not mine. Not the doctors’. Not anybody else’s and most of all not any religious busybody’s.
We are relatively lucky in the UK. Except for Northern Ireland, abortion on demand is more or less freely available everywhere, and there is little stigma. There are a couple of places where groups of bigots harass patients, but that is relatively unusual.
I would say that any interpreter working in my field has to have a great deal of empathy. Nevertheless I simply cannot understand the people who think they are doing some kind of good by screaming at women about to undergo a difficult and often painful operation; nor the mentality of legislators who forbid or obstruct abortion. I sometimes think we need a licensing scheme for human beings – like a driving license, with penalty points for being an arsehole.
The “pro-life” pious fanatics don’t even know their Bible, which clearly defines life as “having breath.”
http://www.thechristianleftblog.org/blog-home/the-bible-tells-us-when-a-fetus-becomes-a-living-being
Abortion wasn’t even a political issue for anyone besides Catholics until the Civil Rights Movement. The conservative Evangelical groups that began opposing it after Roe V Wade had up until that point been focused on keeping public schools segregated. They only took up the anti-abortion banner after that particular cause was no longer politically viable and they needed something new.
the problem with that is it would require a far amount of judgeing other people and those who would be willing to do that are probably the least qualified to do it.
uncle frogy
The other thing these fools don’t grasp is that there’s a perfectly common and acceptable option to induce labor when a late-term pregnancy hits a problem. That’s how you “terminate” a pregnancy at, say, 39 weeks: you just hurry up the birth – except in the tiny minority of cases where the problems are so severe that that isn’t appropriate. The accusation that women and their doctors are blithely killing off babies because they can’t cope with the end stage of pregnancy, when there’s a standard procedure in those circumstances, isn’t just morally repellent, it’s completely illogical.
eleanor, perhaps you’re trying to express that late-term abortions are sometimes a necessity, but you actually wrote something entirely different.
Once they have been born (however prematurely), they’re babies, not fetuses. So abortion is no longer an applicable concept.
Nope, it’s definitional. Categories. Babies ain’t fetuses, fetuses ain’t babies.
Your appeal to “logic” is purely based on that conflation.
(Worse, it may be extended to adults if one is consistent. And, being an adult, I object to that)
John, thanks for engaging but I think you’ve misunderstood, possibly through reading too quickly and missing some of what I said.
eleanor, what is it that you imagine I misunderstood?
(You’ve stated the claim itself, but adduced no basis)
John Morales, the point eleanor was making was that inducing childbirth is the most common method for terminating a pregnancy in late stages. Right-wingers want to imagine some butchering of fetuses, but they are simply induced to be born some weeks ahead of time.
Induction of labor (at a point too early for the fetus to survive outside the womb) when abnormalities incompatible with life are detected, is something most people don’t want to think about but if you are more than 14 or 15 weeks along it is quite possibly an option that maybe offered. There are a million things that can go wrong that you don’t find out about until your 20 week anatomy scan. Does the fetus have functioning kidneys, does the heart have 4 chambers, are the abdominal organs inside the body, are there spinal malformations, does the fetus have broken bones (osteogenesis imperfecta type 2). Many of these abnormalities mean that if the fetus survives delivery, they will have a very short, very very painful life.
As to reasons people get an abortion there are lots of reasons, including birth control failure, not wanting kids, etc. I think abortion should be free, on demand and no one’s business but the person getting the abortion, of course I also feel that way about getting ones tubes tied/getting a vasectomy. You are allowed to feel ambivalent about a pregnancy and you’re allowed to decide that bearing a child is not what you want, you’re allowed to decide that bearing a child with serious deficits, who will rely on you for the rest of your life for their care is more than you can handle.
Yep. At the 20 something weeks ultrasound the doctors looked at my baby to be and wrinkled their forehead. Something was odd with the kidneys. They couldn’t really say yet, because the kidneys are the last organs to fully form. Were there kidney abnormalities in the family? Fuck yes. Please come back again in 4 weeks. We’ll schedule a Doppler for then as well. Having suffered a miscarriage, my world was at the brink of crashing all around me. A quick google search revealed the worst case scenario would be no kidneys and that would mean incompatible with life. For me it would have meant having an abortion, because carrying a fetus for three more months just to watch the baby suffocate was not an option. It would have meant stopping the heart in utero first and then inducing labour.
Thankfully, the story has a happy ending. 4 weeks later we could see one healthy looking kidney that was getting all the blood it needed and that produced enough water (fetal kidneys don’t clean the blood but produce the water. This is necessary for the fetus to develop its lungs as it “breathes” the water. Without enough water the lungs can’t develop and the baby suffocates long before kidney failure could do any harm).
As for eleanor’s point, many maternal conditions make early delivery necessary. I know at least three women who suffered from HELLP syndrome at different stages in their pregnancy. The only treatment is to end the pregnancy as quickly as possible or the pregnant person dies. The results will vary, in those cases from healthy almost term baby over premie to dead.
@ Jörg
The “pro-life” pious fanatics don’t even know their Bible
From some reports and videos I have seen, it is not just the “pro-life” pious fanatics. It seems that most evangelicals in Canada and the USA really don’t know much about the bible. They seem to know a few catchphrases and very selective quotes but that is it. It seems that very few evangelicals actually read the bible.
The journalist and author, Chris Hedges, has said that when researching his latest book, America, The Final Tour , that when he was interviewing evangelical pastors of some of the US mega-churches no one wanted to talk about the bible once they discovered that he is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and an ordained Presbyterian minister.
@jrkrideau #21
Yup, as a former Catholic and Lutheran, I know more of the Bible than the average Christian of any faith. Nobody wants to discuss the actual Bible when you know what you’re talking about.
it has nothing to do with the bible it is us and our folk tales, as told to us by out pastors (priests) against everyone who thinks differently, and especially anyone who just thinks rationally.
uncle frogy
I am an astrophysicist – not a biologist – so I won’t talk about anything scientific here. I do understand the reasons for and against having an abortion and I am in favor of freedom to choose and I don’t think the government should limit this freedom. However, there are plenty of peer-reviewed journals out there – many of which come to the conclusion to be pro-life and many come to the conclusion of being pro-choice – about when life actually begins and you can look at all the evidence yourself and decide how you feel about it for yourself. The thing I’m going to talk about is how funny it is that people in religious positions will fear-monger about how you’ll burn in hell if you have this procedure and starts citing passages from the bible. That’s funny, because this passage from Numbers 3:15 – 3:22 proves that the Abrahamic god (referred to in this passage as ‘Jehovah’) does not care about any child younger than a month. So anyone who uses religion as an excuse to be in favor of being pro-life has not properly read the Bible, or is just cherry picking nice moral-telling stories and the morals they want to instill on their children.
“Number the sons of Levi by the house of their fathers, by their families; every male from a son of a month and upward thou dost number them. And Moses numbereth them according to the command of Jehovah, as he hath been commanded. And these are sons of Levi by their names: Gershon, and Kohath, and Merari. And these are the names of the sons of Gershon by their families: Libni and Shimei. And the sons of Kohath, by their families, are Amram and Izhar, Hebron and Uzziel. And the sons of Merari by their families are Mahli and Mushi; these are the families of the Levites, by the house of their fathers. Of Gershon is the family of the Libnite, and the family of the Shimite; these are the families of the Gershonite. Their numbered ones, in number, every male from a son of a month and upward, their numbered ones are seven thousand and five hundred.”
That’s about all I have to contribute to a topic on a biological argument; don’t wanna go out of my depth.
Adam #24
What was your point?
I am neither an astrophysicist nor a biologist.
I don’t grok the point of the bible quote.
The whole “when does life begin” is nothing but a sneaky tactic to exploit people’s emotions and make them lean towards anti-choice. It doesn’t matter what the consensus is about when life begins. For the anti-choice crowd, the abortion issue isn’t about the sperm/egg/blastocyst/fetus/baby. It’s about controlling women. It’s about whether people lose their bodily autonomy and their right to make their own medical decisions about their own bodies once they become pregnant.
@chigau:
I think that the point was that anyone using the Christian religion generally or the bible specifically to justify an anti-abortion position cannot simultaneously hold the position that “life begins at conception” without hypocrisy.
It’s kinda weird and limited, though, I should add.
I mean, you can insist that life begins at conception without using the bible to justify that.
You can be against abortion without taking the simplistic “life begins at conception” position.
For those anti-choice folks who argue from religious positions, they may not believe in the literal truth and/or inerrancy of the bible even as they use metaphorical or other readings to justify their anti-abortion position.
and, finally,
I don’t think they care if they’re being hypocritical. Even if you could convince them that their position was, in fact, in conflict with some portion of the bible, I bet they think that being hypocritical is a lesser sin than killing babies. If they’re convinced abortion is baby-murder, “you don’t want to be a hypocrite, do you?” is almost certainly going to be less than persuasive.
Don’t forget about the other passage in the Book Of Numbers, the Ordeal Of The Bitter Water. The only time that the Christian Bible explicitly mentions abortion is to describe how it shall be done (at least in certain circumstances).
Life began once, probably 3.5-4 billion years ago. Arguments about when an individual’s life begins are political, not scientific. Editors of any peer-reviewed journal hosting any such articles as you mention should be ashamed of themselves.
“life” begins long before conception. Ova are alive and so are sperm.
And you know what they say about sperm.
Adam
You’re missing the point. It’s pretty irrelevant to me whether “life starts at conception”. I also don’t care about “fetal personhood”. It’s about whether somebody gets to use my body. No born and very alive person gets to use my body for their survival. A father will not be forced to donate a pint of blood even if that means that mother (or other pregnant person) and the baby die during birth. Yet my body is supposed to become public property because of some peer reviewed paper whether life starts at conception? Nah.
I’d really like to know some specific details here. What peer-reviewed journals “come to the conclusion to be pro-life”? That would be a very strange thing, for a journal to have a pre-defined position like that. Especially on such a nebulous issue where the anti-choice position is largely political and religious.
there is an article that was published in jezebel some years ago in which jia tolentino interviews an anonymous woman who had a very late-term abortion. it goes into much more detail than the elle article and is much more personal, and traumatic (i found it hard to get through without crying); so of course content warning for anybody for whom this particular kind of topic might be difficult. i’m not sure if simply posting the url here will actually create a link, but i will leave it at the end of my comment and you can copy-and-paste it if not. the clinic in colorado that the author of the elle article references is the same one that the anonymous interviewee used; there are only a handful of doctors in the country that perform these procedures (i also highly recommend the documentary “after tiller” which has interviews with most if not all of them.) https://jezebel.com/interview-with-a-woman-who-recently-had-an-abortion-at-1781972395