"Of course they want us dead"
10 January 2024
The antiabortion movement, supported by almost all Republican public officials and candidates and opposed by almost all Democratic public officials and candidates, is intentionally hostile to women, girls and their physicians. It wants to:
Force women and girls to carry doomed pregnancies to term.
Prohibit physicians from treating pregnant women and girls with recommended abortions until they are near death. Even then, physicians may deny needed care for fear that they may be prosecuted or sued.
Prohibit others from helping women or girls get abortions or abortion related advice.
Prosecute women and girls who get abortions with the death penalty as a possible punishment.
Harass physicians who promote abortion rights.
These essays are particularly informative:
Of Course They Want Us Dead, by Jessica Valenti, 3 January 2024
Yesterday, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas doesn’t have to adhere to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), the federal law requiring emergency rooms to give patients life-saving and stabilizing care. Law Dork explains the legal nitty gritty, but the short version is that the judges unanimously ruled that the EMTALA doesn’t require abortions and doesn’t preempt Texas law.
What’s more, the judges ruled that when emergency room doctors are faced with a patient who has a dangerous or life-threatening pregnancy, they have a responsibility to “stabilize both the pregnant woman and her unborn child.” That means a 6-week embryo would warrant as much emergency treatment as you do.
….
How many more ways can they make it clear that they want us dead? And I mean that literally. As I wrote in 2022, it’s not just that Republican lawmakers and the anti-abortion movement see women dying as an unfortunate but acceptable consequence of making abortion illegal. To them, the most noble thing a pregnant woman can do is die so that a fetus can live.
There’s a reason that anti-choice groups have spent the last year and a half valorizing pregnant women who decline cancer treatment or other medical care. In part, they’re spreading these stories because they know maternal death rates are rising in the wake of Roe’s demise—they want to turn horror stories into martyrdom success stories. They need to make our deaths more palatable.
But this goes beyond political strategy: To them, women dying in pregnancy isn’t collateral damage—it’s just our job. If we were good mothers, we’d give up anything for our fetus, including our lives. Those who don’t fulfill that role deserve disdain and punishment. Think back to that 5th Circuit ruling, which said a law meant to protect a person’s life in an emergency situation “does not provide an unqualified right for the pregnant mother to abort her child.”
Heather Cox Richardson, 3 January 2023
The decision of the right-wing Fifth Circuit today illustrated what the Trump leadership of the MAGA party means for the majority of the country. Three Republican judges, two appointed by Trump, ruled that hospital emergency rooms don’t have to perform life-saving abortions in states that have passed antiabortion laws.
After the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services reminded hospitals that accept Medicare money that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), they had to provide care to stabilize patients in a medical emergency, including abortion care, regardless of state law.
Texas sued, and the Fifth Circuit has agreed, saying that the EMTALA does not preempt Texas law.
Why are families and physicians are moving to or staying in Texas, a state that repeatedly demonstrates its indifference to the deaths of women and girls? Doesn’t this override other factors that might make Texas desirable?
The cruelty is the point, by Jessica Valenti, 22 December 2023
The Fort-Worth Star Telegram, for example, ran two columns in the last week that epitomize anti-choice cruelty. In the first, Mark Davis writes that “one can objectively understand” why [Kate] Cox would want an abortion, but that “what is lacking in the coverage, and thus the public understanding, is why the answer had to be no.”
Who is Mark Davis, you may ask, to dictate that Cox be forced to carry a doomed pregnancy to term, risking her own life and health in the process? He’s a morning radio host.
The second column comes from Cynthia Allen, member of the Star-Telegram Editorial Board. Like Davis, Allen writes as if she knows more and better than Cox about her own pregnancy: “[H]er child’s diagnosis, while tragic, had no direct impact on her health.” Allen continues by dismissing the dangers to Cox’s health—like uterine rupture—as simply the normal risks of pregnancy. She writes, “If Cox were obese, older than 40, or had heart disease, her risks would also rise. But her desire to end her child’s life in such cases probably would not.”
“[S]uffering is part of life. It’s most assuredly part of motherhood. The notion that we, as mothers, have agency over the circumstances of our pregnancies, births and even our children, is pure folly. We don’t. We’re just along for the ride. Our calling is to carry our children through it.”
And there it is. Women are born to suffer, and not having control of our bodies is actually just the natural state of things. (It never ceases to amaze me how many of women’s ‘natural’ roles need to be forcibly enshrined in law.)
What’s amazing about the above statements is not just that they are outrageous but that their proponents believe they are entitled to force their beliefs on all women and girls in the US.
It is time to get more involved in this issue. Voting to protect the reproductive rights and health of women and girls is obviously important but we must also support the organizations and candidates promoting these policies.
The Index to my blog lists my essays on abortion rights, including:
Michigan's Reproductive Health Act, 21 December 2023
Texas physicians, women and girls: it's time to consider moving, 13 December 2023
How red states are torturing pregnant women, 25 October 2023
The war against birth control, 20 October 2023
September 2023 update on Dr. Caitlin Bernard and related issues, 20 September 2023
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