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March 15, 2022

Comments

KC

(Did you catch the MO "we'll make abortion even *more* of a felony if it's specifically an ectopic [unviable; the fallopian tube is not large enough to allow a child to come to term inside it] pregnancy and therefore saving the woman's life" thing? https://www.house.mo.gov/billtracking/bills221/hlrbillspdf/5798H.01I.pdf I'm feeling a bit salty, possibly like your skull...)

Is the smaller skull still a soap dish?

TheQueen

KC - yep, still a brain soap dish, the label just started looking a little ratty. I just wish we could figure this out like other countries do. We're so preachy and moralizing. Damn Puritans.

KC

I don't think it's the Puritans; I think it's that some people figured out they could gain political and social and financial power by convincing other people to amalgamate into a political entity united in a Single Issue thing against abortion (and communism, and then any other bogeyman they could scare up, i.e. CRT more recently). It's really bad, but not the Puritans' jam. (I'm reading Jesus and John Wayne, and it is creepy.)

(you can blame tons of things on the Puritans! But even before there was a giant movement to convince Christians in the US to be against abortion, Victorianism had more of an impact on this than Puritanism did, in the US, I think; the idea that it was necessary for public morals for women to be uninformed and therefore afraid of sex is... really something, especially given the shapes of those restrictions [didn't matter whether you were married or unmarried, but rich women could get information on birth control and poor women couldn't, *yet* the poor women were supposed to be having fewer kids somehow *while* also keeping their husbands "satisfied" so that they didn't abandon them and/or go off and get drunk and...] I mean, basically, there are Men Like This in every century, probably, it's just that sometimes they manage to get a platform - or worse, their views like this get them a platform - and sometimes they're the cranky guy who mutters to himself as he walks around the park once a day and that's it.)

TheQueen

KC - Heck, my married Mom couldn't get information on the Pill when it came out. I think men and women are equally controlling when it comes to the abortion issue.

KC

I know two women who are vehemently anti-abortion, and both had traumatic miscarriages of very, very wanted pregnancies, so, like, okay, fine.

But the things specifically aimed at somehow punishing women (transvaginal ultrasound being a requirement for every abortion! *That'll* teach them!) seem to have been put forward mostly by gleefully vindictive men. (maybe there are women behind them somewhere, also gleefully vindictive? Maybe it's just that this slice of ugly conservative power has been mostly male-visible in both political seats and public pundits?)

(but the bulk of anti-abortion women I have met have been focused on Saving The Potential Babies, whereas a slightly larger portion of anti-abortion men have been focused on women-shouldn't-have-gotten-pregnant-if-they-didn't-want-the-consequences, which is fundamentally a different question with different implications.)

(single-mother-shaming is done vindictively by both sexes, though. But on the specific topic of abortion, the "punish the women" texts seem to be largely from men?)

What loony suggested that women who have ectopic pregnancies should be forced to just die of them, though, I don't know, because that's just plain weird - ectopic pregnancies happen with planned pregnancies nearly as often as unplanned pregnancies. (a friend almost died from one, after having her first child, and then she went on to have a second child after she had recovered from the nearly dying and all that. And if you do not medically intervene, death from internal bleeding, etc. is basically guaranteed.) So. Like, That bit seems super-weird to me, unless they were throwing that in to take out later so as to make the final bill look more reasonable? Or unless some dude had a weird idea of what ectopic pregnancies are? (which: many of these bills are *very* clearly not written by people who have medical knowledge, so maybe?) Or maybe someone thought that leaving ectopic pregnancies out of abortion bans would leave a "loophole" of sorts? But any way you slice it, it's bad.

TheQueen

KC - with the ectopic pregnancies, I think they must be starting negotiations from an unreasonable position so they can seem reasonable when they let women live in certain circumstances.

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