Creepy ghouls

Lauren Handy is the Director of Activism for a group called Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising. She’s a fanatic. She is currently under investigation for federal civil rights offenses after blocking access to a reproductive health center, a terribly common tactic used by anti-choicers — it’s nice to see that in some places these people are being prosecuted. As part of the investigation, Handy’s home was raided, where an unpleasant surprise was uncovered.

DC Police discovered five fetuses at the home of an anti-abortion activist in Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the department has confirmed to WUSA9.

Officers responded shortly after noon to a home on the 400 block of 6th Street SE to investigate a tip about potential bio-hazard material in the residence. Once inside, they located the fetuses. The remains were collected by the D.C. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

The home was occupied by Lauren Handy, an anti-abortion activist who was indicted along with nine others Wednesday by a federal grand jury. Handy is accused of felony conspiracy against rights for a blockade inside a D.C. abortion clinic in October 2020.

WUSA9’s camera was outside as DC Police homicide and forensic services detectives took evidence out in red biohazard bags and coolers from the rowhouse’s basement.

Two questions: where did they get the fetuses, and why? They were either rifling through the organic waste at a hospital or clinic, or they had an insider who was stealing such material. Both are illegal, and are going to lead to more people getting fired.

But why? These activists rely entirely on shock tactics to trigger disgust in citizens…but everything that is a product of surgical procedures in hospitals is going to be repulsive to ordinary people. Cancer surgery is going to produce blood and bits of excised material that no one in their right mind is going to want on display in their home, and likewise for any necessary health procedure.

You know what’s grosser than flaunting surgical byproducts in public? Being a sensationalistic professional liar who wants to make women suffer.

You knew it was going to come down to this

Goddamn Texas Republicans. Now they’re saying it out loud.

Should Texas punish abortions by putting teenage girls and women to death? Or not? That’s the current debate in the Republican Party of Texas, where outlawing abortion is no longer a question of “if” or “when” but a question of whether to kill women for getting one.

They’re trying to pass a heinous bill.

A Texas lawmaker has filed a bill that would abolish and criminalize abortions, leaving women and physicians who perform the procedure to face criminal charges that could carry the death penalty.

The legislation, filed Tuesday by state Rep. Bryan Slaton, does not include exceptions for rape or incest. It does exempt ectopic pregnancies that seriously threaten the life of the woman “when a reasonable alternative to save the lives of both the mother and the unborn child is unavailable.”

“It is time for Texas to protect the natural right to life for the tiniest and most innocent Texans, and this bill does just that,” Slaton said. “It’s time Republicans make it clear that we actually think abortion is murder. … Unborn children are dying at a faster rate in Texas than COVID patients, but Texas isn’t taking the abortion crisis seriously.”

The only abortion crisis is that these assholes want to ban it. Would you be surprised to learn that this same representative wants to roll back all of the pandemic prevention measures in the state? He thinks no one is dying of COVID, but that more “unborn children” (there is no such thing) are dying than…zero.

This bozo is eager to start killing adult women, though. Gotta get the body count up somehow.

Despair

We had another mass shooting in a school in Michigan. It was carried out with premeditation by a dumb kid with gun nut parents; he got his gun from his father. This keeps happening, again and again.

There isn’t a plan by politicians to change our gun laws. This one isn’t even on the radar.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have learned an important lesson from the last election: cheat more. They’re gerrymandering districts aggressively. In Wisconsin, for instance, they’re working hard to finagle the next vote in advance to lock them into guaranteed victories.

All is quiet in the Democratic party while they watch themselves get maneuvered into extinction. Some Democrats are just trying to gerrymander their own districts.

Meanwhile, our disgraced ex-president, the criminal and con man, is getting ready to run for the presidency in 2024. The coup isn’t over, it’s just getting started.

Hey, why isn’t the traitor who fomented an insurrection at least indicted, if not held in jail? I don’t know. There’s a strange lack of urgency or concern in the halls of power.

Meanwhile, the Republican plan to pack the courts is paying off. The Supreme Court was stuffed with right wing ideologues by the aforementioned criminal president, and now they’re poised to overthrow Roe v. Wade. Remember when there were all those hearings to review their appointment to the court, and they were all asked if they were planning to tear down a woman’s right to choose, and they all said “No sir, I’d never do that”? They lied.

The court shouldn’t have even heard that Mississippi case; that they did tells us all we need to know about their intent. What are the Democrats going to do? Nothing. The senate rules are stacked against them, but they’ll do nothing to change those rules.

This is all an awful, terrible trend, a slow-motion destruction of the country engineered by conservatives backed by billionaires. It’s being carried out in the absence of any significant, principled opposition by the other party. It’s the Senate Democrats who filled me with the most despair, though, with this insipid tweet:

Yeah? We did. What did you accomplish? Why should we vote for you again when you do so little?

There’s a point where being slightly less toxic than the other party is not good enough, and the Democrats seem to be happy enough to ride that line.

You, too, can report gynecologists…and profit!

This is some horrifying dystopian bullshit. Already, Texans are lining up to commit economic terrorism on doctors at the Pro-Life Whistleblower site. Report a doctor! Make beaucoup bucks!

The Texas Heartbeat Act is unique because it calls upon private citizens to hold abortion providers and their enablers accountable. Any person can sue any abortion provider who kills an unborn child after six weeks of gestation—and any person can sue anyone who aids or abets these illegal abortions. All of these individuals must pay damages to the person who sued them of at least $10,000 for each illegal abortion that they perform or assist.

Any person can sue any abortion provider, and just reporting them grants you $10,000 dollars.

And our Supreme Court just let this slide.

Here’s one possible solution:

Honest biologists can’t tell you when human life begins

Honest biologists like Sahotra Sarkar, that is. Unfortunately, the people that pushed the Texas anti-choice law are liars for Jesus, not biologists at all.

A recent friend-of-the-court filing in that case implicitly claims that biology – and therefore biologists – can tell when human life begins. The filing then goes on to claim explicitly that a vast majority of biologists agree on which particular point in fetal development actually marks the beginning of a human life.

Neither of those claims is true.

There is no definitive single marker for the moment when a zygote becomes “human” — we can’t even define satisfactorily what humanity means, but one thing for sure, it’s not going to be discovered by molecular biologists. Maybe by philosophers or artists or writers or something, but I suspect that if you asked them, they’d all shrug and say they don’t know either.

As a developmental biologist, I’m satisfied with the idea that a human being emerges gradually from progressive interactions between cells and environment — it is not a unitary thing, and therefore doesn’t have a single discrete point of appearance. That’s been the position of informed scientists since roughly Aristotle.

That doesn’t stop the liars for Jesus from pretending that biology supports their claim.

The most recent high-profile example of this claim is in that amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court in the Mississippi case.

The brief, coordinated by a University of Chicago graduate student in comparative human development, Steven Andrew Jacobs, is based on a problematic piece of research Jacobs conducted. He now seeks to enter it into the public record to influence U.S. law.

First, Jacobs carried out a survey, supposedly representative of all Americans, by seeking potential participants on the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace and accepting all 2,979 respondents who agreed to participate. He found that most of these respondents trust biologists over others – including religious leaders, voters, philosophers and Supreme Court justices – to determine when human life begins.

Then, he sent 62,469 biologists who could be identified from institutional faculty and researcher lists a separate survey, offering several options for when, biologically, human life might begin. He got 5,502 responses; 95% of those self-selected respondents said that life began at fertilization, when a sperm and egg merge to form a single-celled zygote.

That result is not a proper survey method and does not carry any statistical or scientific weight. It is like asking 100 people about their favorite sport, finding out that only the 37 football fans bothered to answer, and declaring that 100% of Americans love football.

In the end, just 70 of those 60,000-plus biologists supported Jacobs’ legal argument enough to sign the amicus brief, which makes a companion argument to the main case. That may well be because there is neither scientific consensus on the matter of when human life actually begins nor agreement that it is a question that biologists can answer using their science.

That is methodologically a terrible survey. I’d like to know the details of the question: the summary implies that they were given “options”…a multiple choice question? Was “This question is bullshit” one of the options? I think probably not. Just the idea of putting the question in the form of multiple choices or true/false limits the potential accuracy of the answer.

The bottom line is that ideas are being misrepresented by these supporters of abortion bans, and no, biologists cannot answer, or have a significantly more nuanced answer, than they want, so they are intentionally lying to the courts. Can we get ’em for perjury?

The overall point is that biology does not determine when human life begins. It is a question that can only be answered by appealing to our values, examining what we take to be human.

Perhaps biologists of the future will learn more. Until then, when human life begins during fetal developments is a question for philosophers and theologians. And policies based on an answer to that question will remain up to politicians – and judges.

Except, please, keep the theologians out of it. They’ve only got dogma, not evidence.

You know Abby Johnson is a liar, right?

Johnson spoke at the Republican National Convention, which is no surprise, given that all the speakers had the prerequisite of being a liar and fraud in order to get a slot. I first dug into her history when her life “story” was told in the Christian propaganda film, Unplanned.

It’s good to get a reminder, though. Go read this update from Texas Monthly posted last year. She lied about Planned Parenthood, she lied about the abortion that she claimed motivated her to leave the organization. The truth is that she’s a venal fraud who saw an opportunity for a scandal that would profit her greatly, and has now put her on the national stage.

Is it too much to hope that hitching her star to the criminal grifter Trump will finally bring her down?

Yeesh, but anti-choicers are terrible people

The word from our regional Planned Parenthood is that quacks are using the COVID-19 epidemic as a pretext to shut down abortion services.

This is absurd. A pandemic is not a reason to shut down essential medical services. If I had a heart attack, would they give me a little voucher promising to send an ambulance in 3 weeks, if the stay-at-home orders have ended? (That’s about when Minnesota’s orders are scheduled to expire, although they may be extended further, if circumstances warrant.) Are grieving mothers with a dead fetus just supposed to “hold it” for a while? Are pregnant women with acute pyelonephritis or preeclampsia just supposed to take an aspirin and wait? Are the women who are not ready or capable of dealing with a child expected to hope that their desires change and their circumstances improve at some indefinite time in the future? During a pandemic and economic collapse?

Perhaps the fuckwits behind this lawsuit are hoping that women at the boundary of legal elective abortion are delayed long enough that they can compel them not to abort.

Of course, the clinic that is suing is providing bogus rationalizations.

In the lawsuit, AALFA Family Clinic cites concerns over the shortage of protective equipment during the COVID-19 outbreak as the primary concern. The pro-life group argues that forcing the clinics to use medication rather than surgery would conserve protective gear needed in the pandemic. They argue abortion clinics should be included under Governor Walz’s ban on elective procedures.

But these aren’t elective procedures! There’s a ticking clock at work here.

This is the relevant comment on AALFA Family Clinic.

This lawsuit is based on fantasy, not fact and has been filed by individuals who promote information and services that are medically inaccurate, deceptive and harmful.

That about sums it up. This lawsuit ought to be quickly thrown out…although my experience with lawsuits suggests it will instead drag on.

What do these nine people have in common?

Let’s see…they’re all men.

They’re all white men.

They’re all smiling, and in suits.

Some additional information: they’re all from Pennsylvania.

They’re all politicians.

They’re all Republican politicians.

I wonder what they’re up to?

I don’t think anyone will be surprised if I tell you that all 9 signed an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court to repeal Roe v. Wade.

Obviously these are the best people to control women’s bodies.

That’s how the right-wing mind works

In Ohio, the Republicans tried to get that impractical and impossible “let’s just reimplant ectopic pregnancies in the uterus!” ideas enshrined in a law. The problem with that plan is that implantation is a complex biological process that entangles delicate maternal capillaries with equally delicate capillaries in the embryonic placenta — it’s like proposing to stitch two sponges together in perfect alignment. This isn’t a plumbing problem, where you couple a few pipes together and voila, the flow is restored, and further, interruption of the exchange of nutrients between mother and embryo is fatal to the embryo.

Awareness of the scope of the problem isn’t a concern for Republicans, though. Let’s see how the sausage is made.

An Ohio lawmaker who proposed legislation extending insurance coverage to a procedure considered medically impossible as a way of fighting abortion worked closely on the bill with a conservative lobbyist, according to newly released emails.

State Rep. John Becker, a southwestern Ohio Republican, got help from Barry Sheets, a lobbyist for the Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio, as he crafted a measure that’s since drawn international scrutiny for its questionable medical grounding, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported Wednesday.

The bill prohibits insurers from covering abortion services, but provides an exception for a procedure “intended to reimplant” an ectopic pregnancy in a woman’s uterus.

Becker told the newspaper he never researched whether re-implanting an ectopic pregnancy into a woman’s uterus was a viable medical procedure before including it in the bill. Sheets declined comment.

“I heard about it over the years,” Becker said. “I never questioned it or gave it a lot of thought.”

First step: partner up with a fanatical anti-abortion zealot who writes the bill for you.

Second step: Don’t question what they say. You don’t need to understand what the lobbyist wants, and thinking about it is just awkward.

Presto! You have a law legislating the impossible! It sure makes your ignorant electorate happy, though.

I wish I could say we should require better education in biology, and science in general, before lawmakers are allowed to write laws dictating how reproductive biology works, except that there sure seem to be a lot of anti-choice doctors who run for Republican positions. They ought to know better, but they don’t.