A new bill working its way through the Missouri house:
That last line is something else. They want to make it a felony to perform or induce an abortion of an ectopic pregnancy.
Don’t you know women are supposed to suffer excruciating pain and die in agony if they fail to procreate?
(To answer the question in the title, both.)
Both.
What the fuck?
Ectopic pregnancies can be fatal. This is with abortion and medical care.
This is a bill to make murdering women with an ectopic pregnancy legal.
Because if you can’t randomly murder women, then who can you randomly murder?
Not buying the ignorance excuse.
Anyone can look up ectopic pregnancies on Google and find out what they are and how often they are fatal in a few seconds.
Even the RCC, never a good source of morality, doesn’t flat out prohibit treatment of ectopic pregnancies.
In practice, usually Catholic hospitals won’t treat an ectopic pregnancy but usually they will transfer the patient to a non-Catholic hospital.
Living in the state of Idiocracy there are so many last minute (before end of session) bills of pure evil. Most of these bills won’t have time to complete the process before the current session ends. Hopefully the ectopic pregnancy clause will be the poison pill.
There are also bills for legalize guns on public transportation, remove the ability for public petition for laws and constitutional amendments by raising the bar to Olympian god heights, and allow the legislature to reword those petitions that do get sufficient signatures.
Also a widespread, but hardly unique, effort to pack school boards with church thralls in upcoming Apr elections. At least that is getting some push back in local press.
Missouri politics sucks, but at least we have a complete idiot for a governor for some very dark black humor.
Back in 2019 when Ohio tried a similar stunt, They™ asserted doctors could simply reimplant into the uterus — a procedure which does not exist! Ohio bill orders doctors to or face charges (November 2019). I have no idea if this 2022 Missouri nonsense is based on a similar fantasy, not knowing what an ectopic pregnancy is (apparently also an issue in previous attempts (plural)), misogyny, and/or something else.
Yes, and also that Covid vaccines have killed thousands of people, Russia isn’t invading nazi-controlled Ukraine, the former President won the election and is still the President, and alien beings taught the ancient Egyptians how to build pyramids. Your point is…?
If ignorance is involved, it’s a willful ignorance.
As if it weren’t bad enough to have your own state ban basic health care options, red states are now trying to prohibit their residents from traveling to other places to access procedures Republicans don’t like.
@10.
Hmmm, where have we seen restrictions on the free movement of people.
That just turns the Red states into prison camps.
They can call it the New Gulag Archipelago or the New Xian Gulag Archipelago to be more accurate.
Of course, they will have to build some sturdy walls and fences around those Red States. With barbed wire, razor wire, armed guards, and land mines.
They could call it, the Iron Curtain and pretend that it is to keep Blue Democrats out rather than to keep Red State slaves in.
@10
That’s an own goal. Consider this: Most abortion/trans etc. laws succeed in keeping the gullible happy, BUT the funds flowing because the rich know they can go to the nearest blue state and get an abortion/treatment etc. Once the rich & powerful realize they can be criminally liable for what is common sense care, the funds will dry up.
Though I keep wondering what is the end game of GOP. Once they have converted the entire United States into a big slum of semi-ilterate idiots, then what? What do they gain after that?
So many times I have wondered about how it feels to be a trillionaire in a country that has terrible infrastructure, unreliable electiricty, intermittent gasoline supply and barely edible food. If you cannot travel, stay, dine, recreate freely in your country or around the World, what is the point of that trillion dollars? What morons!
Christians are creepy.
Malice. I could buy it as ignorance if they didn’t mention ectopic pregnancy, but since they clearly know what an ectopic pregnancy is, it has to be deliberate attempted murder.
@13: The goal of the GOP politicians is to keep themselves in power. How many examples of hypocrisy do we need to see before we conclude that most of them don’t believe what they are forcing on others? I don’t think they have thought things through to any kind of end state, let alone anything beyond the next election.
Ask the Russians how well that is working out for them.
Ask the Russian oligarchies.
Most of them, most of the time don’t set foot in Russia.
It is very dangerous for them. No one gets rich without Putin’s permission and anyone can be killed without warning or trial at any time.
Including Vladimir Putin’s family. His wife and children right now are in Switzerland.
A lot of the Latin American oligarchies spend most of their time in Miami, Florida.
The Arab middle east oil magnates spend a lot of time in the UK, the EU, and the USA.
When the US invaded Afghanistan, they looked around for local war lords to use as allies. They were all living in their mansions in Europe except for a few who had mansions in the middle east.
It’s ironic that the ignorant fools that ramble on endlessly about “freedumb” spend most of their time looking for small vulnerable groups of people so that they…can take their freedoms and rights away.
Texas doesn’t have mask mandates so you can be a Plague Rat and spread a sometimes lethal virus. At the same time it also has multiple anti-Trans laws, made abortion illegal, and cannabis is illegal with a 6 month jail sentence for possession.
A friend died from an ectopic pregnancy. Are there words strong enough with which to condemn these cretinous monsters?
Someone needs to counter-sue the legislature for practicing medicine without a license, and for wrongful death as soon as someone inevitably dies due to this bill.
With a country that has a largely uneducated and willfully ignorant voter base and political class composed mostly of grifters, you shouldn’t expect better. The US is becoming less humane, more brutal, and more cretinous by the day. I just wonder when this will all come to a head.
@12
hahahaha!
do you really think the laws are always equally and impartially applied?
Not in this country and not now.
Putting on my super-cynical hat, this could be them pushing the Overton Window further than they know is reasonable, so once they walk this specific part back they can push the still-disgusting rest of the bill through. And when that happens, they can claim they made concessions, and worked across the aisle, and now the bill represents “a reasonable middle ground” of the left/right positions, and anyone on the left who is still unhappy must clearly be an extremist who is unwilling to compromise.
barf
Well, that put my wife, one of the sweetest women in the world, straight on the warpath.
“So, they’re telling women to die. Fuck them!”, she’ll be irritated for the rest of the evening about it, as she had an abortion for an ectopic pregnancy that did nearly kill her while I was away on military duty.
Here’s to hoping that the sponsor(s) to that bill fall down the elevator shaft of a single story building and expire there.
As an escort at a women’s clinic, I witnessed cases where patients had informed their partners that they had ectopic pregnancies.
(No idea how the clinic handled such situations inside.)
We might possibly consider that the author(s) of this bill had fallen for some similar ruse, but that would require stretching the benefit of the doubt further than my experiences with anti-choicers could justify.
I note that the bill increases the penalty if the pregnancy is past 10 weeks OR ectopic. In other words, abortion at, say, 6 weeks carries a higher penalty if it is ectopic. They aren’t even pretending to be pro-life or even pro-fetus anymore. This is flat out murder with no attempt to hide its intent.
25 @Pierce R. Butler: As a patient escort, how did you get access to their medical records to know they were lying?
When I did escort service we never even went inside the building, nor did we have extensive personal conversations with the patients. Too noisy from assholes yelling at them for that.
@ 10. mastmaker :
The line from Orwell’s 1984 springs to mind here – their boot pushing down on the faces of all other people without end.
Power, control and to get their sadism enforced on the unwilling other as much as they like for as long as they like – without end.
Ridana @ # 27 – I already knew that clinic did not do anything about ectopic pregnancies but refer them elsewhere, at least on regularly scheduled “procedure” days. The subject came up in dialog between the partner and one or another of the “sidewalk counselors” whom I had the job of getting the patients past; I would just make sure the patient’s name was on the list and unlock the door, and give the antis an earful to block them from further harassment or manipulation.
@ 23. karellen : Yes. sadly that makes a lot of sense and the Overton window has already been deliberately pushed far out of the house and down the next street into the sewer. Things getting worse and worse and harder and harder to fix seems their goal. Time that pendulum was pushed back and really fought.
@19. anthonybarcellos :
No. No there aren’t.
@27. Ridana : Umm, huh? I don’t think #25 Pierce R. Butler: wrote what you think they wrote. Nothing there about accessing medical records merely cases which I’d guess was from talking directly to the patients. Yes, I imagine douchebags yelling in the background would make it hard to hear but not impossible esp if inside the clinic breifly. No, I don’t have any experience of doing escort for women seeking abortions – and huge respect for those who do. Thankyou for your service.
And just what is our “hero” Fightin’ Joe and the Democrats going to do to stop these laws? Not just this, but the anti-trans bills, the “don’t say gay” bills, the anti-CRT bills…
Nothing.
Our outdated constitution, which the libs don’t have the guts to ignore, doesn’t give them their precious legal authority. If they really cared about a woman’s right to choose, they shouldn’t let a scrap of James Madison’s toilet paper stop them.
Our Supreme Court, packed with Cat-lick theocrats, will rule on the states side, while Fightin’ Joe renegade on his pledge to reform the court.
Electoralism won’t stop them. These are Christo-fascist strongholds, so hoping their fascist majorities can be persuaded to vote otherwise is as delusional as any other kind of prayer.
The libs don’t have the guts to break away and create a new nation, free of the redneck garbage people who stand in the way of progress. They cling to this notion that we must live together with Bible-fucking, gun-nut, uneducated slobs for the sake of “unity.”
We are now at the mercy of the Right, and let me assure you, they have none.
Then again, I’m still certain the Dems will quietly celebrate the end of Roe and other social advancements. Abortion, LGBTQ rights, church/state separation, etc. always put them in the position of have to “defend the indefensible” in the eye of our nations’s Christian knuckle-draggers. Now maybe they can woo back the white working class folks they lost to Reagan. Sure all it cost us some rights, but sometimes you have to take a few steps back to maybe someday–if it’s politically expedient and not too controversial–take a baby step forward. Right?
The Catholic Church doesn’t allow the abortion of ectopic pregnancies, but what they do allow is for the woman to have surgery to correct her life threatening condition — i.e. to remove the affected body part of the woman, typically the fallopian tube, with the fetus still inside.
Hence the death of the fetus becomes the unfortunate result of life-saving surgery for the woman and not the result of an abortion.
The fact that they had to unnecessarily mutilate the woman to allow the Catholic doctors to achieve their end-around to conducting an abortion on a flimsy technicality is the most appalling aspect of the whole thing. How they square this with the Hippocratic Oath… well, it doesn’t surprise me at all, to be honest.
The end part of 188. 090. 1. apparently says it’s about abortions that are “in violation of any state or federal law”.
Also, the language about “trafficking” abortion-related products seems to suggest the bill is targeting any people who’d assist illegal or DIY abortions performed in Missouri. I figure these are people who otherwise often wouldn’t be criminalized, at least at the same level, by the abovementioned “state or federal” law, due to not being directly performing the abortion in question.
I gather this bill (the quoted part) wouldn’t criminalize all abortion in Missouri as such, assuming abortion is still legally available in Missouri. Of course, that might change if Missouri eventually manages to criminalize all abortion (especially if it stands in Supreme Court) or just harass abortion providers out of state. In any case, this seems to be aggressively clamping down on under the counter abortions, DIY abortion support and mail-in abortion drugs.
Still, the specific classification of ectopic pregnancy is bizarre indeed. I strongly suspect it’s intended as a bargaining chip, as proposed by karellen at 23. Possibly, this particular bit of nonsense was inspired or influenced by the fringe anti-abortion myth that ectopic pregnancies can be medically salvaged, as noted by blf at 7. It still doesn’t really make sense in the light of that myth, but then again the drafters were probably just looking up ideas for random anti-abortion spaghetti to throw on the wall.
Missouri politicians remind me of the German film “Look Who Is Back” (“Er ist wieder da”).
Akira MacKenzie@31, Blue states seek to protect abortion rights before supreme court decision, and Republicans and Joe Manchin block Senate bill to secure abortion rights; both articles this month (March 2022). “Fightin’ Joe and the Democrats” are trying to codify the rights, both at state and federal levels.
And… You really do want a civil war, civilians killed, homes and roads and who-knows-what-else bombed (“We are now at the mercy of the Right, and let me assure you, they have none”). Even if such a could be achieved without a war, how is defined and what are such people who happen to wind up in this hypothetical asked to do? Are they “three-fifths of other persons” — presumably not, but you are advocating for discrimination or exclusion… generally not a “libs” position.
@32 tacitus and they barely allow that. My sister had an ectopic cyst that looked like a pregnancy (messed up her hormones etc) and she was at a RCC hospital (no others available in a major metro area) bleeding badly. They told her they couldn’t do anything for her until she had finished “miscarrying” because the rules from the church were that if there was a fetus there they couldn’t operate. Mind you, she could have bled out when they sent her home, she very nearly did.
Even her OB/Gyn and the emergency doc were saying she needed a hysterectomy immediately but she was refused because there might have been a fetus. Even though, at that point if there had been one it would have already been unviable.
Typical misogynistic conservative male politicians in Missouri though. The GOP is all about hating women.
Ectopic Pregnancy
A pregnancy in which the fertilized egg implants outside the uterus.
The fertilized egg can’t survive outside the uterus. If left to grow, it may damage nearby organs and cause life-threatening loss of blood.
Yup, sounds about right for Republicans, protect the egg, screw the human.
@31. Akira MacKenzie : “And just what is our “hero” Fightin’ Joe and the Democrats going to do to stop these laws?”
Well, Biden is NOT my hero or the hero of many here, PZ included. See among other places :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2021/05/21/the-only-reason-i-voted-for-him-is-because-the-alternative-was-even-worse/
&
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/10/20/are-you-ready-for-disappointment-and-betrayal/
&
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/03/09/something-i-wish-democrats-would-stop-doing/
So no, Biden isn’t our “hero” here.
MadHatter @36 And many Americans still believe they have the best health system in the world :-(
Also to answer your question FWIW see :
https://www.hrc.org/resources/president-bidens-pro-lgbtq-timeline
&
https://bioedge.org/gender/biden-backs-abortion-rights-and-transgender-treatment-for-minors-in-his-state-of-the-union-address/
&
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article259054623.html
Also, Akira MacKenzie, what do you want Biden and the Democrats to do here and what are you doing toencourage him to do that?
@31. Akira MacKenzie,:
You think they should just ignore the Constitution?
Amend it, sure, just ignore it? Erm, where will that lead?
I agree with you here. The SCOTUS should be reformed and at least Trump’s last two picks not only kicked off but arrested. The handmaid Of Barrett for lying to Congress and attempting to pervert the course of Justice, the rapist Kavanaugh for well, rape. Plus lying.
I agree and also wish Biden would be far stronger here and drop the delusion of getting any bipartisanship from the party that’s been hijacked by the Trump cult.
Maybe? A lot of the Christofascists self-destructed with covid and killed themselves. Are they stil really “majorities” when they are so dependent on voter suppression measures and gerrymandering? The fact that they go to so much trouble to stop people voting suggests, maybe, at least in large parts, they’re already not majorities and know it? I dunno.
Ohhhh-kaaaaay. So a break away new nation. Out of the current USA.
You know that was tried once right? You know how that went right?
This time round this would be done how exactly and the likely consequences would be ..?
The fate of the Bible-fucking, gun-nut, uneducated slobs then here would be? What would what you suggest look like? How would it be carried out? Who would carry it and how would it affect them? What exactly are you proposing here and how would it work?
So they have a weakness. Mercy is a strength. Biden is POTUS, the Democratic party by admittedly the slenderest possible margin just about holds Congress. Its not over. Its tough. Its awful, its shit but its not actual the end of the world and the Democratic party and progressives are NOT powerless.This hateful, bigoted, unconstituitional, maliciously willfully ignorant bill has NOT passed yet and may never do so if enough people work to make sure it doesn’t.
Dunno. I doubt it. I really hope not.
I guess a lot depends on which Dems you’re talking about. Manchin maybe? Biden? I don’t think so. Or AOC and the Squad and Warren and Bernie – if he counts as a Dem or is he independent?
Cinema, I gather, is bisexual and unlikely to be onboard with “quietly celebrating” Christian Supremaciast triumphs surely?
But .. if so, then what? Resign to Defeatism and cynically sit back and let it happen? Nope. Reform the democrtaic party, work to primary its worst and empower its best and keep it improving? Hopefully? Split formthe Democrats and create a new progressive party, that’s better, well, perhaps but remember the worst of the worst of the Repugs are waiting totake over ifand in politics disunity is often death.
I dunno. I’m a distant Aussie bystander here which, Iknow, is luckty for me.Iwish I knew some easy obvious answer, something better than make teh best of abd options pickiong leats worse and trying to make them better. I’m open to suggestions and corrections. But I don’t think the Democratic party is as bad as you say it is and really hope I’m right about that.. and if I’m wrong, then what will work to make things better? How to determine that and what can you do to make better things ahppen here?
Civil war? Outright ignoring the Constitution? I don’t think so.
Typos fix for clarity :
I’m a distant Aussie bystander here which, I know, is lucky for me.I wish I knew some easy, obvious answer, something better than make the best of bad options picking least worse and trying to make them better.
Sorry sure I’ve missed a few more, hope y’all get the gist anyhow. ‘Bout 3 /5ths asleep already here now.
Intentionally cruel or criminally ignorant? Why not both, Katy?
( sigh) I’m being selfish but I’m glad I’m not a fertile woman anymore. There was another bill that wanted to restrict or ban birth control. WtF there’s already too many humans . Everywhere except Africa we’re basically an invasive species.
Didn’t finish my thought. This is full on crazy !!!!
StevoR@42, About @31’s , observes “You know that was tried once right? You know how that went right? …”
Apropos of nothing much, there’s been more than one armed revolt against the State’s federal constitutional government. The first(?) was the so-called Whiskey Rebellion, during George Washington’s presidency.
I’m just wondering, if we go all @31 and split the country, who gets the nukes? The merciless ones or the merciful ones?
And a followup, how many nukes are to be used in enforcing the newly divided new nations borders?
But hey, we’ll certainly show the Russians how to level cities!
Well, back to watching The Hunt, which suddenly sounds a hell of a lot less absurd.