Two replies I'm not making

[minoanmiss]

To the people whose statements inspired them, anyway. Politics as ever. Also icky medical details.

1) I see what you did there Dr Asshole. In your explanation of your topic statement "in 30 years of Ob/Gyn practice I have never performed an abortion to save the life of the mother" it becomes clear that you are defining abortion as "killing a viable pregnancy" and "necessary procedures" as "removing a non-viable pregnancy". This, Dr. Asshole, is a distinction without a difference. The procedure, tools, and techniques are the same for removing a pregnancy whether the tissue is live or dead. And if medical schools stop teaching D&Cs so doctors can't perform abortions, they won't be able to remove dead pregnancies either.

But you've told us more than you realize. For your "never" to be true you must have had some of your patients with septic pregnancies, toxaemia, etc, sit around in pain and illness waiting for their pregnancies to die before you would remove the suppurating tissues. I wouldn't be surprised if I went through your records and found a couple of patients who died waiting, in agony. All for your conviction that your patients don't matter as much as their pregnancies.

Go to Hell, sir. Hippocrates would be ashamed.

(I don't know if it's new or just gathering steam, but a counterargument I've seen recently is "there doesn't need to be a life of the mother exception because pregnancies never kill the pregnant person" and/or "if it's killing the pregnant person removing it doesn't count as an abortion and won't be prohibited" which are both such fucking lies I cannot even. I only have a bachelor's in biology but it happens to be from a decent school so I can go on at length how untrue these are, and an honest doctor who took a civics class could say so much more.)

2) Dear person advocating against voting: Are you a Russian psy op or just have concrete between your ears? "The Supreme Court waited till Biden was in office to overturn Roe so this shows that voting for Democrats is worthless." I can't believe I have to actually spell this out for you: their timing is deliberate in order to evoke this actual reaction. Are you going to let them succeed?

Comments

[ex_flameandsong751]

a counterargument I've seen recently is "there doesn't need to be a life of the mother exception because pregnancies never kill the pregnant person" and/or "if it's killing the pregnant person removing it doesn't count as an abortion and won't be prohibited" which are both such fucking lies I cannot even.

Yeah, I've also seen that and... that is not how biology even works.

[Or the idea that in the case of rape, a pregnancy won't happen because of trauma. Um, no, that's also not how biology works.]


Dear person advocating against voting: Are you a Russian psy op or just have concrete between your ears? "The Supreme Court waited till Biden was in office to overturn Roe so this shows that voting for Democrats is worthless."

Oh noooooo.

In disclosure, I'm not thrilled with how Biden and many of the Democrats are handling... this. Like, there's more they could be doing and they're not doing it and that displeases me. I'm also not optimistic about Biden's chance of re-election come 2024.

Having said that, I will still vote blue, because both parties are not "exactly the same" [as I've seen other people say too many times to count]. The Republicans actively want me and people I care about to die, now, with as much suffering as possible on the way there. The Democrats at least pretend they don't want this. [OK, some of them do more than pretend - I like Stacey Abrams, for example.]

If we all don't vote because "it doesn't matter", we've already lost. We have to fight like hell. It's one of the few things left within our power.

And they would have overturned Roe if Trump got a second term, IMO. Things would... probably be even worse than they are right now if Cheeto Mussolini got a second term and that's... saying a lot. That is saying. A Lot.

So yeah, whether someone thinks Dems are "worthless" are not, "worthless" is better than evil. And evil is what the Republicans are. We have to try. Treat this like we're fighting Sauron, y'all. Nobody is too small, we all have to do something.

[bikergeek]

their timing is deliberate in order to evoke this actual reaction.

More like, Barrett wasn't confirmed until right before the election, and these cases take time to get to SCOTUS.

Roberts isn't a reliably conservative vote; he's tended more toward the middle in recent years. They didn't want to risk a 5-4 decision with Roberts as the deciding vote, they wanted to wait until it was a firm 6-3.

But the point about going out to vote still stands. Dobbs would have happened no matter who was in office. And at least with a Democrat as POTUS and Democratic control of both houses we MIGHT get something done federally.

[amaebi]

After Justice ACB was installed, it also took time for Mississippi, under the name of Dr. Thomas Dobbs, its top health officer, to make the extremely unusual move of asking the Supes to change their request from "let our major restriction on abortion stand" to "Hey, just take down Roe, okay?" and for the Supremes to take the unprecedented step of permitting that.

[sabotabby]

*endless screaming*

Also, I have a friend who went from "abortion should be legal but I don't think I could ever get one" to "fuuuuuuck everyone needs access to one if they need it and it is 1000% a moral good" and the journey from Point A to Point B was med school.

[dhampyresa]

Hippocrates would be ashamed.

HE FUCKING WOULD

(CF section 74 of Hippocrates' Diseases Of Women Book 1 called "To draw down the menses" and section 78 contains a bunch of purgatives for various uses from placenta to "Expulsion of the
foetus from the uterus".)

[sovay]

Go to Hell, sir. Hippocrates would be ashamed.

Amen.

Dear person advocating against voting: Are you a Russian psy op or just have concrete between your ears?

You, rebuking this person, are a delight.

[amaebi]

1. Last week I heard an NPR interviewer permitting the CEO of the American Association of Pro-life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, Dr. Donna Harrison, to say over and over that elective abortion is defined by the desire to produce a dead baby. The interviewer did stop her "partial birth abortion," but not that other grotesque and repulsive assertion.

Such terrible, terrible people.

And when they go on about life, I wonder how sacred they hold germs and caner cells and even mice and rats and insects.

2. There's the blackballing you note.

And there are the Democrat-voting people who complain that any criticism of elected Dem conduct is a discouragement from voting. is blackballing, incorrectly.

For both reasons I find myself slapping on the tag #VoteAnd.

[minoanmiss]

VoteANd is BRILLIANT. will remember this.

(And NPR, really? WTF?)

[adrian_turtle]

"if it's killing the pregnant person removing it doesn't count as an abortion and won't be prohibited" which are both such fucking lies I cannot even

I don't think this one is always a lie, so much as an indication of staggering privilege. Of course anyone writing the laws or considering them in court is lying, if they say something like this. But I think there are some honest suckers who think, "of course reasonable people will make exceptions for extreme circumstances." Sure, there's a speed limit, but if you're driving to the ER it's obviously ok. Sure, there are laws against breaking into your neighbor's house, but if it's on fire and someone inside is screaming, you should obviously break in anyway. You can talk to the manager later and explain the extreme circumstances and it will all be ok. *eyeroll* It's hard for people at that level of privilege to recognize that:
1) reasonable people aren't running this show
2) If anyone is making exceptions for extreme circumstances, they will not do so reliably. They will not do so for everyone who needs an exception made. They MIGHT be able to do it for their friends and relatives, quietly. Want to bet your life they can do it for you in time?

[amaebi]

You remind me that I meant to say that Dr. Donna Harrison kept saying that the law was perfectly clear, that no doctor would hesitate to provide a necessary therapeutic abortion. And I thought, infuriated, "So you think that police officers and courts can read that law and read the therapeutic situation and never question or detain doctors who follow the guidelines you find so pellucid, and that doctors should feel quite sure that this is the case."

And that was before I heard a discussion of the time element in assessing the pregnant person's risk.

She did not address cases that are now occurring, and cases that have long occurred as a matter of Roman Catholic Church policy at hospitals, by which pregnant people have to be actively dying to be granted a therapeutic abotion.

[lilysea]

You remind me that I meant to say that Dr. Donna Harrison kept saying that the law was perfectly clear, that no doctor would hesitate to provide a necessary therapeutic abortion

Some US doctors are already declining to provide Methotrexate to !not-pregnant! women who desperately need it to prevent serious illness and/or death from Rheumatoid Arthritis, Lupus and other autoimmune disorders because Methotrexate can end pregnancies.

*SOME OF THE WOMEN WHO HAVE BEEN REFUSED METHOTREXATE HAVE ALREADY HAD THEIR UTERUS REMOVED AND ARE STILL BEING REFUSED VITAL METHOTREXATE*

[amaebi]

Yes, well, they're *faulty* vessels, now, but still vessels. And consider the Magick of ectopic pregnancy!

[hitchhiker]

fuck everything about this :(

[or_midnight]

"there doesn't need to be a life of the mother exception because pregnancies never kill the pregnant person"

*low whistle of wtf* I admit: I haven't seen that yet, but it's useful to know I need to be mentally prepared to whack my shins on it I guess?? Christ.

[minoanmiss]

That's why I decided to write this rant down in public, yeah.

[amaebi]

I was also curious about that assertion, which is also new to me. For curiosity, where are you seeing it? And do they think that women who are reported as dying in childbirth or.due to pre-eclampsia or whatever are just skipping off to spite them?

I'm thinking it's analogous to my former mother-in-law saying CONSTANTLY when then-husband and I had mononucleosis, that there must be a treatment we should be pursuing, because Medical Science is So Advanced?

[minoanmiss]

I probably should have kept the links rather than noping out of there. While researching "life of the mother" situatiins I found a sleek official-looking site which claimed that never happened. Later when looking at the Tumblr of a jerk to block them I saw that their current first post was the twitter thread from the doctor I yelled at in this post. Since then I've noticed 3 or 4 commenters make the claim.

I wonder what would happen if we asked them about specific diagnosses. Probably nothing sensible. smirk

[amaebi]

Thanks!

[librarygeek]

I had two pregnancies going septic, before I had the necessary dilation and evacuation surgeries to preserve my life and my ability and opportunity for my single live birth.

Thank you for your rant. I'm still at inarticulate screaming.

[minoanmiss]

You are absolutely welcome. It is jsst so horrifying to watch people deny reality in such a murderous manner.

[xenacryst]

"If it's a legitimate rape non-viable pregnancy, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

[minoanmiss]

My own mother told me that one years before the shithead politician. I just stared at her.