Republicans seem to be proud of their ‘solution’ for abortion: they’ll just devolve everything to the states and local authorities, so they don’t have their callousness and brutality thrown into their faces on the national level anymore. As far as I’m concerned, this is the worst possible solution. It puts women under the thumb of the town busybodies and church-goers (pretty much the same thing). The pettiness of small-minded locals knows no bounds.
Here’s a story illustrating what I’m talking about.
Patience Frazier was the kind of person who was a scapegoat for all the problems of rural America. She was poor, sometimes living out of her broken down car, was taking drugs. She got pregnant. Her child was stillborn, and Frazier buried it in her yard, marked with a cross. The story should have ended there.
She was, unfortunately, reported to a self-righteous sheriff’s deputy named Jacqueline Mitcham. Mitcham decided that Frazier must have “killed her baby” and went on a crusade to get her convicted of murder. They dug up the baby’s corpse, finding no evidence of foul play, and then went fishing for a charge that might stick.
While Frazier was tangled up with the law, Mitcham took the baby’s corpse, kept it, and put it in a wooden box near her front door. Already, I smell an obsessive sicko. Frazier, meanwhile, spent two years in jail while the case dragged on. She was finally released.
The judge who ruled in 2021 that she should be released wrote: “Patience has been portrayed as an antichrist, but this Judge thinks she is, instead, just a mother caught hopelessly in the web of poverty with a lack of any support system.”
As for Mitcham taking custody of the fetal remains, Diaz-Tello noted that Frazier only came to the attention of law enforcement because of how she memorialized her loss, which she called “deeply tinged with pain and respect.” Diaz-Tello said it was morally repulsive for the police officer who personally saw to it that Frazier was put in prison to then take those remains, create a memorial, and say to a reporter that it was her baby. “Essentially she’s doing the exact same thing that Patience tried to do [with the remains],” she said, “but Patience should go to prison for it, and this police officer should get to keep this as a trophy.”
That’s what we can expect with an administration that refuses to support the reproductive rights of women.
We have more than just horrifying anecdotes to let us know what to expect. Look to Texas.
The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds.
From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.
“There’s only one explanation for this staggering difference in maternal mortality,” said Nancy L. Cohen, president of the GEPI. “All the research points to Texas’ abortion ban as the primary driver of this alarming increase.”
Remember this on Tuesday: A vote for Trump is a vote for more dead babies and mothers.
Mano also writes about benighted Texas.
And yet, I still hear variations on
‘Why do the left get outraged by stuff?’
‘Lamestream told ’em to’
One bit of good news is that, even in MAGA Missouri, Amendment 3, which overturns Missouri’s abortion ban, is likely to pass. The last I heard, it’s polling about 58% yes. We’ll likely know Tuesday night.
IMO, a vote for ANY Republican, even a moderate (if there are any left) is a vote for more dead babies and mothers.
Why? Because even a moderate Republican caucuses with the extremists in a legislative body, bringing the party closer to control. Thus moderate R’s are the enablers of extremist Rs. And they give the extremists political cover.
I had to track down where the first atrocity occurred.
Winnemucca, Nevada.
Which is the middle of nowhere.
and
I’ve been there many times.
It’s a small town (pop. 8,262) halfway between SF and Salt Lake City on I-80 and you have to stop there after hundreds of miles of desert.
It has 5 legal houses of commercial sex and at least 12 casinos.
It is hardly what anyone would call a shining example of a morally superior American small town.
Isolated with a population of 8,261, you know that most people will know most of the people.
France 24 news had this – When abortion is a crime: Texas, a symbol of post-Roe America • FRANCE 24 English segment on last night (Aussie time.) on this issue FWIW.12 mins 58 secs.
If anyone is interested in going to Winnemucca, Amtrak’s California Zephyr stops there, currently scheduled for 6:01am westbound, 6:26pm eastbound. 8-)
And don’t forget, a vote for Harris is a vote for Genocide. Also, she was a historically unpopular VP and pulled out of the primary because her polling dropped to single digits the more she campaigned.
We truly are an empire in rapid decline.
Lying Russian troll detected.
And a vote for Trump is a vote for two genocides (Gaza and Ukraine), because Putin will eliminate Ukraine every bit as thoroughly as Netanyahu wants to eliminate Gaza.
Harris is not as committed to Israel as Biden is, and there is definitely a chance of a better policy in that regard with Harris than currently, even if you don’t believe it.
Trump has already signaled that he is willing to recognize the West Bank as part of Israel to Sheldon Adelson’s widow, so I have no clue what you hope to achieve by making it easier for Trump to win — a faster, more efficient and complete genocide?
What the Fuck?!
What gave him the rightand permission todo that & could he be charged with desecrationof a corpse?
Local abuses of power are every bit as harmful as those on a state or national scale, and are typically much more insidious since they tend to fly under the radar much more often.
All it takes is for a small town police chief to get pissed by a local blogger posting about some relatively minor shenanigans going on in his department, and after a quick word his buddy, the local judge, a search warrant is signed and the police are seizing all the blogger’s electronic devices and trawling through everything looking for any excuse to pin a crime on him.
And even if they don’t find anything (which is unlikely) the weeks or months of disruption and intimidation are more than enough to silence all but the most courageous journalists and bloggers.
The police chief doesn’t have to be the target — any local bigwig — a councillor, pastor, or landowner who is part of the “good old boys network” can expect the same service against anyone who threatens to disrupt their comfortably corrupt lifestyle.
“If your face don’t fit, prepare for eat shit.”
@10:StevoR
Jacqueline Mitcham is a woman, which doesn’t make it any better, of course, and Frazier knew her from sharing the same babysitter for their kids, which makes it worse, since Mitcham had long looked down her nose at her kids.
Also seems like Micham’s mother was a drug user like Frazier, with a series of druggie boyfriends, and had sworn she would be different when she grew up. I guess she forgot where she came from when she dealt with Frazier, or perhaps was still angry at her mother?
Other than that — it sounds like self-righteous anger (she actually attended her sentencing while heavily pregnant herself hoping her pregnant presence would influence the judge to give her a harsher sentence), and a power trip, not exactly unknown in conservative small town America, especially against people who aren’t part of the establishment.
@ jimmyfromdelaware, #7
And don’t forget, not voting for Harris only helps a man who believes that we should do everything in our considerable power to wipe every Palestinian person off of the face of the Earth. A man who will provide the IDF with all the firepower (and even troops, if need be) they need to do exactly that, if Netanyahu calls him strong and brave and smart, because he’s just that easy to manipulate. A man who no doubt already has Palestinian Americans on the long, long list of people he intends to round up and send to the death camps that are his #1 priority, because grievance is the sole animating force in his rotten being.
But please, tell us all about how we should all stay home to teach Democrats a lesson this time, sacrificing:
1.) Palestinians
2.) Women
3.) LGBTQ+ people
4.) “Immigrants,” a category that includes anyone with dark skin
5.) Anyone politically left of Goebbels
6.) Anyone not white, heterosexual, cisgender, and AMAB
7.) Eventually, everyone and everything on the planet because, even if we somehow avoid Trump touching off a full-scale nuclear war in the short term, the environmental damage of the current Republican Party’s policies is not something from which we’ll have any chance of recovery. The escalating famines and water shortages will most likely result in a nuclear war in the medium term, but even if we somehow avoid that, we’ll still be fucked as runaway warming renders the Earth completely uninhabitable.
That’s how it’s going to go if enough people play your stupid fucking game. It’s simple: we will not survive God-King Trump. Act accordingly.
@12. tacitus : Thanks. Yes, I should have read the full story first. (Dóh!)
From whence :
Plus
As well as :
Source : https://www.jezebel.com/cop-who-got-a-woman-arrested-for-her-stillbirth-kept-the-fetal-remains
This was clearly a very personal vendetta by Jacqueline Mitcham against Patience Frazier with some really weird, obsessive behaviours on the part of Mitcham & seems to be something Mitcham should be getting therapy for and dismissed as a LEO for..
@7. jimmyfromdelaware : Wrong thread dude – see this previous thread specifically on that issue :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2024/10/29/id-rather-be-voting-for-bernie/
A;lso note voting for Trump (or anyone other than Kamala which effectively helps Trump) is also even more of a vote for double – at least the genocide in Ukraine as well as Gaza and likely elsewhere too.
As Mehdi Hasan has noted here – Trump was the most “anti-Palestinian President in US History” (5 mins long approx) and Palestinians themselves will tell you :
Source : https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/23/trump-would-be-the-worst-palestinians-react-to-us-presidential-race
If you are pro-Palestinian you need to remember that Kamala is trying to get a ceasefire at least whereas Trump wants Netanyahu to finish the job and get more not less support and so hurting the Democratic party here is chopping off your head to spite your nose to twist an old saying.
And don’t forget, a vote for Harris is a vote for Genocide…
Yeah, right, like Trump has ever promised to do anything decent for Palestinians?
Robotic troll is robotic.
It’s telling that you don’t just stop after the first sentence. If you really believed that, why would you feel the need to go on about how unpopular she was? And how should that unpopularity make anyone decide not to vote for her? A vote for Harris is, above all, a vote against Trump – and the only possibly effective vote against Trump, because either Trump or Harris is going to win. So we can validly conclude that you want Trump to win. Which makes you an enemy of the entire human species – and indeed, of most of the biosphere (there will presumably be some organisms that survive and flourish in the wake of nuclear war andor climate catastrophe).
Remember that jimmyfromdelaware is not called Jimmy, does not come from Delaware and probably isn’t even human but some dumb AI bot. More than repeating what his buyers prompted him to say isn’t part of the package.
There was an interesting youtube vid a few days back. Seems a fair number of women have tried to run for President, all failing for various reasons, but the literal first one was way back during the suffrage movement. You won’t have heard of her, because, among her stances, due to the fact that, at the time, a bloody lot of women, due to not being able to have bank accounts, are very many types of jobs, and thus where prostitutes, and she had a very 1960s “free love” + “we need to make this stuff women are already doing legal”, view, while the even the, “Witch of Wall Street”, and the other two historically remembered leaders of the right for women to vote hated this. Between her supposed allies working with others to denounce her campaign, and her, amazing, but probably poorly chosen (at the time), decision to have an African American man, and ex-slave as her VP, she not only ended up tossed into a jail during the election, never made it even onto the ballots, but was basically all but erased from history of the suffrage movement.
Oh, and unlike the so called, ‘Witch of Wall Street”, who actually merely invested in stocks through it, this virtually unknown person was actually a stockbroker, also unheard of at the time. Her name – Victoria Woodhull
Imagine what the country might have looked like if things had been different… Instead, we, hopefully, will end up with a lawyer, who would, if she where alive back then, would have sided with Woodhull’s detractors. Sigh…
@ ^ Kagehi : Thanks for that. Wikichecked & saw :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Woodhull
Good words and let’s hope the regressive Trumpists trying to turn back history and the world lose today.