RFK Jr. is Stupid as Hell

 

RFK Jr on measles: "The MMR vaccine contains a lot of aborted fetus debris." pic.twitter.com/wq7S3xssl7

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 1, 2025

No, it does the fuck not.  Not a lot. Not any. 

Literally none.

He could look this shit up, you know. He could ask somebody competent who works with viruses. He could realize there's just some stuff he doesn't know, leave it the hell be, and call it a day. There's a lot of things I don't understand. I can't split the fucking atom, okay? 

But then there's Bobby Big Britches, with a big dumb crazy-eyed straight face:

"Don't take the vaccines! They're full of DEAD BABY!" (PS--it's very QAnon-friendly.)

This is the kind of fear-and horror-invoking nonsense you get from the kind of pud-whittling midwit who truly believes there's a grand conspiracy to make planes shit health-altering chemicals out of their backends because he can't comprehend a simple concept like "Planes high, air cold." 

Honest to God we're in the fucking ENDARKENMENT over here. And what's worse is--I don't know that he's that stupid because there are just rotten-souled propagandists who will say ANYTHING no matter how screwed up for attention and political influence. 

What do we do with the dark folks?  Grab a goddamn torch. 

The Deaths We Could Have Prevented

 

Vice President Harris: We now know that women have died because of Trump Abortion Bans. That includes a healthy 28-year-old woman in Georgia. Her name was Amber Nicole Thurman. She died of sepsis, and experts have determined that her death was preventable pic.twitter.com/loBJDsbY9Z

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) September 20, 2024

I have seen on social media how angry some "pro-lifers" are at the idea that abortion care saves lives. You can't EVER terminate a pregnancy--it's MURDER!  These stories that humanize and normalize the procedure that can save women's lives appalls them, because they can't accept that the God they profess to love and believe in would make babies ("before you were in the womb I knew you") with gross congenital defects, tumors, or other difficulties "incompatible with life".

Something else other than the lack of abortion care "must have" killed these women. They took abortion drugs. They were sin-minded. This had to be their own fault. 

It wasn't. 

Kristi Noem, Dog Assassin

 

SD Gov. Kristi Noem is getting a roasting over her depiction of killing a backwards "untrainable" puppy as well as a smelly goat that came from her political memoir No Going Back: Descriptive Stuff After the Colon. A lot of people on social media are posting pictures of their own good doggos--and that's great. But to give her her due, sometimes a dog just is either traumatized or dimwitted, or for some other reason has misplaced aggression issues, and they aren't fit to their environment. You could try rehoming them with a family--hopefully in a "single pet, no small children" situation, but once they have demonstrated they will kill livestock, like a neighbor's chickens, there's a real chance they aren't "fixable". She may have simply made a pragmatic choice with the dog because she didn't want to see it turn and attack a human--especially not a little one. 

There's more humane ways to put down an animal, though--we aren't living in Little House on the Prairie times. And also killing (poorly) a goat because it is smelly and misbehaved just feels gratuitous, because what do you expect from adult goat? And wasn't she responsible for how the dog was trained and controlled (crated or fenced?) Feels like she might have set that pup up by not preparing it for success.

And When There is No State to Go To?

 

Simone: If you had to travel to another state to get an abortion, it’s not the worst thing in the world. Hopefully this is very rare occurrence in your life… Buying a bus ticket to go somewhere to get it is not the worst thing in the world. pic.twitter.com/EmaCoft18T

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2024

This is the glib, dismissive way that abortion bans are spoken about by people who have simply never had to think about reproductive health care in a personal, urgent way. 

A bus ticket? Well, across how many states? How long would that journey take? How soon/when/for how much time will one be able to get off work for? Will one also have to pay for lodgings, depending on the distance? Does one's state have a law that limits travel (this is proposed in several states) Will one need someone else's assistance in obtaining travel? Will the patient and/or the accomplice face felony charges for trying to get abortion services? 

Will these circumstances open up one's private, personal business to other people's investigation and judgment? (Depending upon one's community, it can be hard to schedule a sudden trip without some people speculating why one left.) 

The Republican Future for Women

 

This is the future the GOP wants for women across America.

Make sure everyone sees this. pic.twitter.com/uE869ct5cg

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) December 18, 2023

This reminds me of the wonderful film icon Debbie Reynolds, Carrie Fisher's mom, who talked on Joan Rivers' show about having to carry her dead baby because it was illegal for the doctors to abort until she was septic. And because she looked pregnant and people knew she had been, they asked her "How's the baby? What are you going to name the baby?" The grief of that seems so unbelievably cruel to inflict on someone--it's like having one's loss rubbed in one's face. 

And the enormity of forcing someone to not only be emotionally rendered by living with that death in life inside, but physically threatened by a potential septic pregnancy is sheer brutality, and I would even call it uncivilized. It seems monstrous to inflict that suffering on another person when it could be prevented--the very opposite of moral. 

People who want to call this pro-life are anti-woman. There is no reason behind it but equating female reproduction with "the sin of Eve" and thinking we should bodily suffer not for something we've even done, but because of a folktale from long ago explaining why labor pains exist.

No one who uses religion to justify punishing people for conceiving and not being able to carry that fetus should be allowed to use that horrific personal religious viewpoint to impose upon others' health and wellbeing. It's a choice a religious person so minded might make for themselves, but they should not insist on it for others. 

Fleeing the Texas Death Panel

 

Kate Cox, the 31-year-old Texas mother whose fetus has a fatal diagnosis, has left the state to obtain an abortion after a battle with Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) over whether she can legally terminate her pregnancy. pic.twitter.com/WN2P9qWrX9

— The Recount (@therecount) December 11, 2023

The decision to leave Texas to obtain an abortion was correct: the Texas Supreme Court denied her right to an abortion under the state laws medical exception:

The court ruled that the lower court made a mistake in ruling that the woman, Kate Cox, who is more than 20 weeks pregnant, was entitled to a medical exception. 

In its seven-page ruling, the Supreme Court found that Ms. Cox’s doctor, Damla Karsan, “asked a court to pre-authorize the abortion yet she could not, or at least did not, attest to the court that Ms. Cox’s condition poses the risks the exception requires.” Texas’ overlapping bans allow for abortions only when a pregnancy seriously threatens the health or life of the woman. 

“These laws reflect the policy choice that the Legislature has made, and the courts must respect that choice,” the court wrote.

There's a kind of "damned if you do, damned if you don't" catch for doctors, here. They can make "good faith" emergency decisions, but it has to be an emergency-emergency (death's door, apparently) in order to avoid professional penalties. This was the clarification sought, and per Texas Hold'em in the Uterus rules, she wasn't nearly close to death enough. Based on the arguments of state lawyers, you just can't believe dumb old doctors or dumb old women about these things, because they will just use the exception not in good faith, but to get an abortion anyway. (You know, claiming they have a real emergency in the same way women make claims about having been raped--subject to being told they are making it up. In other words, subject to how misogynistic the system wants to be: and given this law even exists, you pretty much know how it is.)

I am glad that Mrs. Cox did not wait around for the Texas death panel to see if she would die or not, but I fear for what real harassment might be in her future in this kind of culture and for what all this means for women in similar physical jeopardy who do not have the means to leave. Also, I fear that for anti-abortion zealots, this will only increase their resolve to enforce "fugitive womb" laws and create penalties for women seeking abortions--even if for their own lives and health. 

Texas Placing Bets on Whether a Woman Will Die

 

The Texas Supreme Court put a lower court's decision on hold regarding whether Karen Cox could receive what might be a life-saving abortion of an almost-certainly doomed fetus, following on AG Ken Paxton's claim that any doctor or hospital that performed that procedure would be prosecuted. This woman is the stake in a fucking card game. It seems to me that the elected zealots involved, like Justice John Devine:

John Devine, an anti-abortion activist and self-styled “Ten Commandments Judge,” will become one of Texas’s nine Supreme Court justices early next year, as the Democrats are not fielding a candidate for the seat in the November election.

....

Devine has long been a staunch anti-abortion activist. At a June rally in Fort Worth, Devine told the crowd he had been arrested 37 times while protesting abortion clinics in the 1980s, Smith reported. Though, in a more recent interview, “he said he had been arrested during peaceful protests several times in the 1980s but did not remember how many,” Smith reported. Despite this history of activism, Devine insisted he “is still able to interpret the law impartially.”

In 2008, Devine and his wife, Nubia, showed everyone just how committed they were to the pro-life position when her seventh pregnancy endangered her life and that of the baby. The Texas Observer‘s Emily DePrang wrote about a video his campaign put out called “Elizabeth’s story.”

Like that bet. 

So-called pro-life people love to say that a woman's life isn't really jeopardized by a pregnancy. They love to act like they did something special by allowing a fetus to be born if it survives even briefly. And they will claim victory of anything short of this young mother of two just dying right now. Trisomy-18 isn't always fatal: kids with Edwards syndrome can live--see former Senator Rick Santorum's youngest child, Bella, for a story of a child with a way better than expected outcome. But keep in mind this is a former senator with a shit-ton more access to the best care for his kid, and whose wife did not have Cox's unique set of pregnancy complications.

Texas and the Empty Cradle

 

My heart leapt up when I heard that Kate Cox would be allowed to terminate her genetically ill-fated pregnancy, but I knew she better have a surgical theater in her living room, because the AG of TX, Ken Paxton, impeached, indicted, self-anointed protector of the fruit of the Texan wombs, has nothing better to do than threaten doctors who engage in a court-sanctioned medical procedure. He would ruin this woman's health and future fertility, and the careers and lives of the doctors who help this woman, because?

Because he's so pro-life? Because Texas isn't pro-life. Not when it comes to the death penalty.  The strict abortion ban isn't necessarily saving lives. But it would be better to make an example of this woman, and force her to give birth to a child that might exist just to die, because?

I've long felt that while life doesn't necessarily begin at conception, mothering does. You can decide to eat right or not drink or smoke and maybe figure out how to get pre-natal care. But sometimes even basic ability to take care of your body and your baby's body isn't in your means. You can't afford to eat right. You have an addiction. You don't have access to health care. And sometimes, you just get a bad genetic draw. Nothing you do will ever make you carry a wanted child to term, because that isn't what was in the cards. 

An Alibi, A Shovel-Buddy and a Surveillance System Walked into a Bar

 

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson admitted that he and his son monitored each other’s porn intake in a resurfaced clip from 2022 https://t.co/THNyCkttcw

— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) November 5, 2023

I'm just a normal basic human, and I don't care to know anything about my parents' porn habits. I did learn that adult humans had down-there hair because my dad used to hide his skin mags under the bathroom sink when I was like, five, but he corrected that.  And I never really had to think about that again. Much. 

But anyway, this news is freaky to me: that's some serious boundary issues they've got there, in my humble estimation. But why is the father in this situation entrusting his browser history to his son? I can appreciate a parent having some level of curiosity about what their kids are up to online, that they aren't becoming white supremacists or bullying other kids for being gay or joining a cult, but the screwed-up thing for me this is like co-opting your kid to be able to vouch for your own version of No-Nut-November-October. They are an alibi. You can say your kid is not viewing porn. And as far as they know, your kid can say the same about you, for some reason? 

James Ho's Very Unaesthetic Decision

 

I guess there was no reason at all to expect a better comment in the mifepristone case from James Ho, seen in the picture above being sworn in by Justice Clarence Thomas at billionaire Harlan Crow's house because why the heck not?  

But while the overall decision is mixed (the abortion pill remains available with some notable restrictions, such as ordering it by mail) I just need to point to the language of Judge Ho's creepy dissent:

In his concurrent opinion, Ho wrote that the doctors will also suffer an “aesthetic injury” if the pills remain on the market.

“Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them,” he wrote. “Expectant parents eagerly share ultrasound photos with loved ones. Friends and family cheer at the sight of an unborn child. Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients — and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”

Prego fetishists love to see the rounded bellies of pregnant women--do they have standing? I experience an aesthetic injury when I see pregnant people's human rights to make health care choices for themselves violated as a person who theoretically (although probably requiring a late-life miracle like Sarah in the Bible) could still get pregnant myself. Where's my consideration? I experience profound discomfort when I see people forced to experience labor at unwanted pregnancies or to carry pregnancies that will negatively affect their well-being. (Should I go looking for some pro-cancer motherfuckers who find tumors beautiful to go ruin oncology? Of course not. Should a lover of gigantic breasts have veto power over breast reductions--"aesthetic injury!" I mean, why not mandate implants for their sake? If we're imposing upon people, after all.) 

Are we just giving every SOB with an opinion credit for it these days? I consider the poor baby-lover who is sad about abortions as being like the dingus white-supremacist child's opinion of being "traumatized" by diversity: tough actual shit. You live on a planet where people have actual lives that ain't yours, buddy--cope. 

And yeah, a lot of doctors love those unborn babies, but also know very well why abortions are necessary and should stay safe and available. Wanted children are a joy. But we know that pregnant people are discriminated against, that they are targeted for violence and murder by partners, that they may have pre-existing conditions including substance abuse and mental illness that make safely carrying a child (and not running afoul of laws that make murderers of women for activities that could harm fetuses) very difficult. Some patients are prone to miscarriage and fetal abnormalities. Sometimes pregnancies are not a joy. It is possible to celebrate both choices, to honor a patients' will in all cases. 

Zealots and ideologues are poor judges. I think that really, a safe and easily available method for ending a pregnancy is something that should remain lawful with little restriction. And no one should have standing over what happens with a pregnancy until viability but the pregnant person. 

(Nota bene--Josh Hawley's wife Erin of the ADF was counsel in this lawsuit. She is what I would call a "sister-shafter"--she does not give one fuck about female-bodied human rights.)

Texas Isn't Here for the Children

 

At seven months pregnant, prison officer Salia Issa reported contraction-like pains at work but wasn’t allowed to leave for hours. She later delivered a stillborn.

Texas is fighting her lawsuit, in part by saying her fetus didn’t clearly have rights.https://t.co/Spn5mi6HVo

— Texas Tribune (@TexasTribune) August 13, 2023

So, I feel like I just posted about how Texas isn't really pro-life, just pro-punishing female-bodied people. It feels like I just talked about how Governor Abbott turned the Rio Grande into a death moat--which had already taken life. And here we are, talking about how a pregnant person working for the state was told she doesn't have any rights as a worker as to the safety of her pregnancy and her fetus (a wanted child) didn't have any rights, when rights of the fetus was the exact reason why a healthy woman had to carry death in her womb--a fetus that would never be viable. Here we are, talking about a dead baby on a migrant bus on the way from Texas to Chicago, driven like a longhorn from ranch to packing lot. 

I'm not here to say Ms. Issa's fetus had rights--I'm going to say she had rights as a human being who had a wanted pregnancy and whose life could have been in the balance over a problematic delivery.  I'm not here to say Greg Abbott personally caused the death of the migrant baby that he sent on that final leg of their mortal journey--I'm saying he's oblivious to the value of that child, alive, and the value of that child's parents as workers, and migrants as being not a problem, but a community of souls. 

I'm saying that a person who dreams of saw blades or razor wire greeting people who mostly walked over a thousand miles to find safety is a sadist of the worst kind--the kind with the power to practice his sadism on especially vulnerable people. 

I don't know what it takes to get people like him out of office--the people had a more caring human being in his opponent in the last election. But if Democrats cannot demonstrate the examples of El Paso, Uvalde, the death moat, the migrant buses, and all the ways Texas GOP make the state more terrible and less secure for humans to have bodies in--what hope for humanity is there? Not that Texas would listen to me. But from where I am, what a government! When does it change!

Texas and the Cruelty of "Pro-Life" People

 

Texas women are telling their stories about their troubled and forced pregnancies under their state's strict anti-abortion laws, through tears and even vomit. They are testifying that they do not feel safe to be mothers in Texas, because it is not a safe state to be pregnant if abortion care does not exist there. It is a brutality that they have to tell these deeply personal stories under derisive and uncaring questioning under the assumption that the state's penalizing of fertile women for the heartbreak of reproductive mishap is not responsible for their misery is appalling, but worse is that they did undergo unnecessary injury, expenses, pain and suffering, because surgical options they could have had were made inoperable for them. 

Texas has a shitty record for maternal mortality. Let's get that upfront. Infant mortality as well. An actual pro-life position might well include trying to improve these stats with better health care access. But the rate of uninsured, access to hospitals for rural folks, and cost of getting medical care in Texas isn't a priority. I mean, not for the supposedly pro-life psychopaths in charge like Abbott, Patrick and Paxton. 

Figuring out ways to punish women and doctors for even having abortion as an option, apparently is. 

Abortion is Medical Care not a Fucking Spa Vacation

 

TOM COTTON: The military should not be paying for abortion tourism

SHANNON BREAM: So what should women who are in uniform in a place where they cannot access an abortion because they are there on orders, what should they do?

COTTON: They have 30 days of annual leave pic.twitter.com/18UHQnmWx6

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 16, 2023

He's being disingenuous about how easy it is to just go ahead and get leave depending upon what your unit is up to, and seems to be oblivious to how time-sensitive the mission to get a pregnancy resolved truly is, but I guess what this dead-eyed putz is implying that really set me off is the idea that taking leave and making a trip to where safe, legal reproductive care can be obtained is a FUCKING VACATION! A FUCKING TOUR OF THE WONDERFUL AND LUXURIOUS WORLD OF NOT CARRYING A FETUS. A GODDAMN SIGHTSEEING EXTRAVAGANZA OF YOUR KNEES UP AND WHATNOT IF SURGICAL AND A PHARMACY IF MEDICAL! AND MAYBE YOU WILL WITNESS THE LOCAL ANTI-ABORTION TRIBES PERFORMING THEIR SLUT-SHAMING RITUALS! AND EVEN INVOLVE YOU IN THEM!

I don't know how Tom Cotton was raised, but I guess if it was in Arkansas, land of the Duggars, maybe his early rearing really was as backwards regarding sex ed as a very backwards thing can be. The thing where women who are raped are seen as having been traps for their rapists. The thing where having had sex taints and uses a woman up--makes her less worthy. (Describing the sexual female as "used gum" in Christian abstinence education haunts me. Vaginas, are elastic like gum and self-cleaning like ovens. What the whole fuck?) The thing where her life is nothing compared not only to a viable fetus, but even to a nonviable one. As if she was obliged to go down with the ship because someone else desperately believed in miracles. 

DeSantis is Not Sanitary

 

Ron DeSantis wiped his snot on a man in Iowa pic.twitter.com/1sme5S2c23

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) May 19, 2023

Look, if you can get beyond "pudding fingers"--great and good on ya.  But if you can't draw the line at snot fingers, I don't know where to go with you. Because stunad just wiped his nose on his hands and his hands on a wheelchair. 

Now, that isn't the worst about DeSantis you'll see recently.  There's the utter torture his anti-abortion bullshit is putting pregnant families through. The Washington Post has a story about a lovely family that had to watch their little baby die because they could not mercifully end that pregnancy before their child was born to suffer a horrible death, and you will never, never, never convince me this is pro-life. 

There will be other stories just like this. This asshole's politics is about people suffering for his culture war bona fides. I don't know what he or his conjoined twin wife Casey believes as a Catholic or a Republican, but I know he doesn't give a shit about whether other people suffer for his ambition. They are against public schools, because wow--why sanctify education, right?  If critical thinking makes you less conservative, more liberal, more inclined to dissent--and wow! Does this prickly pants hate dissent! 

(But while he absolutely hates protests outside of homes of officials, he really likes depositing immigrants outside of where liberal officials might be.) 

Suffice it to say--his hands aren't clean.

It Comes Down to Hurting Women

 

A Florida woman, unable to get an abortion in her state, carried to term a baby who had no kidneys. Her son died in her arms shortly after he was born, just as her doctors had predicted he would. https://t.co/f9kwtQ4dBH

— CNN (@CNN) May 3, 2023

The so-called "pro-life" movement isn't that at all. There was no good reason for her to carry this doomed child to this outcome--only a stubborn idea that being born is better than not, even when biology stubbornly also insists, sometimes--no. 

If we look at the snitching-based law in Texas that allows anyone to sue a person who obtains an abortion or aids and abets it--here's where we end up. The worst human ever gets to use this law to further abuse someone who certainly does not owe him offspring. The reality of what anti-abortion legislation is for becomes obvious. 

It's about control. It's about telling someone who is female-bodied they have no rights the state needs to respect. Women are shuttled from pillar to post as lawyers argue whether they are close enough to death to be given reproductive care. The law that says they can seek care to save their lives is disregarded for the sake of the anti-abortionists' imaginary fetal friends. 

We have states where women are told to wait even in a parking lot until they are close to death before they can seek care. 

The reality of their situation needs such careful documentation. Like once again, in Florida, where a rape victim needs a paper trail to prove her situation. Consider a minor child, a victim of incest. How easy is it for that person to document what happened to them? A person economically dependent on their rapist (a situation a groomer/abuser certainly tries to create). A person stalked, threatened with further violence based on their actions? 

There are people who can't easily demonstrate they are raped or even physically imperiled by their pregnancy until their situation is literally them--at death's door. And this is not where someone should be compelled by law to be for their care.  No one should be so compelled to save their own life, or negotiate the euthanasia of their own child, by way of a protracted argument in a biologically time-limited situation. We need to give this space to them. It should not be a debate.

Dr. Oz Didn't Stumble When He Said This

 

Holy shit: Oz says his abortion position: should be between "a woman, her doctor, and local political leaders" #PASenDebate pic.twitter.com/UDiJvDYHYo

— Pat Dennis (@patdennis) October 26, 2022

I personally do not think my uterus is any place for a city council meeting, thanks! This wasn't a case of being inarticulate, this candidate is not in any way impaired, but he said this. Out loud where we all could hear.

Local political leaders, Dr. Oz says, belong in your personal business. Playing chicken with the reaper, with your mental or physical health on the line, with your future fertility and economic security on the line, your ability to take care of the children you may already have on the line, having a debate about something as personal to you as your own body and its future. Grandstanding for political points over your well-being. Appealing to local church leaders for future political support over your well-being. Appealing to right-wing donors, or even basic misogyny, over your well-being.

Genocide as Peer Pressure.

 

Parents are stunned by a school board candidate’s comments in an Indiana town:

“All Nazis weren't 'bad' as you specify. They did horrible things … Who is to say if we were both there in the same place and time, that we wouldn't have done the same thing” https://t.co/AzrR4qIUOl

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) October 20, 2022

Loads of people over the years have asked themselves what they would be doing if they were living in Nazi Germany and how they would resist and not go along with genocide or maybe think about how they would sabotage the movement, but Dr. Matt Keefer has a different take: wouldn't you just do a little genocide, because everyone else was into it?  It's not like it makes you a bad person if basically everyone else was into it. 

Sure. Myself, I get that peer pressure makes people smoke, do crack, sleep with everyone they know and vote third party, but I tell you what, I draw the line at genocide. 

A lot of conservatives these days seem genocide-curious. At Meghan McCain's husband's little website, somebody definitely seems into it:

On the transgender question, conservatives will have to repudiate utterly the cowardly position of people like David French, in whose malformed worldview Drag Queen Story Hour at a taxpayer-funded library is a “blessing of liberty.” Conservatives need to get comfortable saying in reply to people like French that Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed; that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.

If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.

What the writer is implying, is that public LGBT identity needs to be erased, and straight allies need to be punished for their support of gay and trans culture. Why? Because the writer is discomfited that these people exist. He is irked. His feelings are deranged. He is a melting snowflake in a warming world. 

But I genuinely do not doubt that his fears of a gay-friendly planet are dangerous--and echoed in the culture. Take Matt Walsh. He too, wants to see people punished for supporting queer culture. He wants people who support queer culture to be treated as child abusers, when the system he wants to impose on queer youth is child abuse, and well-documented as such. So do the jumped-up neo-Nazis who turn up in LGBT -friendly spaces at the exhortation of Libs of TikTok.  

They Want to Ban Abortions Federally!

 

News: @LindseyGrahamSC will introduce a national abortion ban in the Senate tomorrow.

Unless something really unexpected has happened, this will be a 15-week ban. Very interesting that it’s being cast as a “late term abortions act” 👀 pic.twitter.com/WMUVO3ys8l

— Caroline Kitchener (@CAKitchener) September 13, 2022

Fifteen weeks is definitely not a late-term abortion ban; I don't care what language they want to use about it. That's not "very interesting"--that's Republicans lying. Republicans do lie about abortion: would you like to see a big old lie made just today?

The Family Research Council decided to lie and say that "Abortion is never medically necessary to save the life of the mother." This is a big steaming lie. Ectopic pregnancies. fetal hydrocephaly, and the continuations of cancer therapies where the treatment is contraindicated for pregnancy spring to mind. They are vicious liars, but of course, they would be. This is child abuse promoter James Dobson's little corner of the culture war, which can boast George Rekers and Josh Duggar among its more notorious membership. and is fronted by Tony Perkins who somehow counts as a daywalker among these values vampires. 

Lies about things like maternal mortality show that these people don't care about the lives of people who become pregnant. Lies about fetal heartbeats (for a version of "heart" that doesn't yet even have chambers) and "pain-capable" fetuses are gratuitously imposing the qualities of born persons on pregnancies to try to create a separate life for that which depends solely on the body of a whole other, sentient person. 

I want to be hopeful about the turnout we saw in Kansas against a deadly stupid abortion ban, and to read into the voter registration numbers that show record female participation as a wholly good thing.  But if this is a real thing Senate Republicans are thinking of doing to turn out their base--

I hope they get good and screwed to the ever-loving wall over it. Because they are telling us that they don't want the Dobbs' ruling's concept of states' rights (itself a dodgy, shitty construction saying some people can just be freer to self-determination based on geography) but want to just deny female-bodied people the right to end a pregnancy based on some arbitrary deadline that politically sounded good to them and had nothing to do with our bodies, needs, economic status, or any of the other things that affect us as people. Because who are mere child-bearers anyways?

This is hostility to people who want to determine their reproductive future. I give them hostility in return. A thousandfold. 

UPDATE: The bill is worse than others Graham has put up before, with a 20-week gestation. The GOP can claim there are exceptions for rape and the life of the mother, but these are worse than useless.  See this part:

I Would Do Anything for Love, But Absolutely Not

 

I am not here to tell Amanda Marcotte what to do with herself, because she is a whole grown person with an entire outlook of her own about what kind of world she wants to live in and so on, but as for me, if it comes down to would I ever vote for Liz Cheney, the answer is no, absolutely not, are you fucking kidding me, and what kind of fucked up monster do you think I became overnight when I started to hate Donald Trump more than I loved my own skin? 

I appreciate what Liz Cheney has done with the 1/6 committee just as I appreciate what Adam Kinzinger has done. And they are both dyed in the wool conservatives who, for any other reason, I would not fuck with. Let me talk about Liz Cheney, who I once characterized as being the parrot for her pirate father, a character entirely driven and drawn by her association with his political engineering. 

She defended torture. I am not over that. She never recanted that that I know of. But more monstrous to me, and unforgiveable, is the sort of culture war Hail Mary she launched as if to signify how much she still hated libs--she called us infanticides and talked about extremely late-term abortion.  She decided to talk over the necessary terminations of pregnancies that would not result in healthy children, she gloated in the face of tragic stillbirth and miscarriage, and pregnancies incompatible with life, to demonize liberals though (who lean towards uplifting the mother, a person in her own right, who deserves love for her experience of genetic tragedy, etc.)

I can't with that. What she is doing regarding 1/6 is entirely necessary and appropriate and has everything to do with national security and still having a democracy. But she is not a Democrat, and that matters to me. 

Her heroism in the face of becoming politically irrelevant is important. But not to the extent that I would give her political importance back. I would simply rather support Democrats. Full stop. The end.

There's Something Right with Kansas

 

I believe the idea was simple enough--put a referendum on altering the Kansas state constitution with respects to abortion on the primary ballot in a red state in a midterm year and let the natural conservatism and low turnout do the rest. 

Yeeeeaaaah, that's not what happened. Instead, there was very strong voter turnout against that measure. The somewhat Orwellian named "Value Them Both" bill (which is more like, "Value them Both but While the Pregnant Person is Pregnant, Value the Fetus Just a Bit More") failed. Despite mushy-sounding language that made the proposition sound like it was affirming rights in the state constitution and preventing the funding of abortions in a way that was not being proposed, activism and clear messaging hammered home the idea that opting for "Yes" meant opening the door to an abortion ban.

In the post-Roe landscape, as people come more and more to look at the stark cost of denying reproductive freedom, these bans are not popular, because the burden of unwanted or unviable pregnancies without the remedy of abortion access is undue. 

Preserving rights, giving people choices, respecting freedom of conscience, and recognizing that laws should be humane because they are made for humans, and not the other way around, should be simple common sense. In a world where anti-abortion figures enthuse that 13 year olds can do "phenomenal" things as parents, it only becomes too clear that so-called pro-life activists are living in a dangerous fantasy that ignores the messiness of human events, where reasonable people understand all too well that children should not have to be phenomenal, and adult humans should be free to make choices that affect them physically, financially, and impact their whole families. 

Social conservatives are in denial that reserving freedom of choice is popular, because most people have not willfully blinded themselves to the realities of a heart-breaking miscarriage, the denial of life-saving care, the economic strain, or the simple need to let people have reproductive freedom because forced labor is wrong. 

To me, this says that anti-abortion extremists are already on the back foot and need to be booted. There's no good reason not to lean in on letting people know: one party respects your rights, and the other party wants to take them away, and make some pastor your private parts policeman. Make it crystal clear that it's abortion rights today, birth control tomorrow. If SCOTUS wanted this in the hands of the people--the people will need to decide--and if it's in the hands of the state, then it must be clear who needs to run the state senates, houses or assemblies as well.