Anti-Abortion States ALL IN On Forcing People To Carry Dying Fetuses To Term
And more reproductive rights news!
There are currently 14 states where abortion is illegal and even more states where it is heavily restricted. As those of us with psychic powers/an ounce of sense predicted ... things are not going well!
Florida Woman Forced To Watch Baby Die In Her Arms — Thanks, Pro-Lifers!
At 24 weeks pregnant, Deborah Dorbert was told that her much-wanted child was not going to survive. Milo, as she named him, had underdeveloped lungs and was missing both kidneys — the result of Potter Syndrome, an anomaly doctors consider "incompatible with life." She was told that should she give birth, the child would either be stillborn or live anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours before dying a painful death.
Under normal circumstances, Dorbert would have had an induced labor, mourned for her lost child and done what she could to move on.
But these were not normal circumstances, because Deborah Dorbert lives in Florida.
Florida currently bans abortions after 15 weeks. There are supposed to be exceptions for cases of fatal fetal abnormalities or the life of the mother but doctors, afraid for their own lives and licenses, are afraid to approve these exceptions. They are better off, personally, forcing people to go through with a pregnancy regardless of their situation — and legislators know and count on this.
In order to get an abortion, Dorbert would have had to have two doctors sign off, saying that the fetus would not survive to term. After a monthlong debate, Dorbert's physician said that she would not approve the abortion — partly because one child in the history of the world, the child of a Republican legislator, had survived Potter Syndrome.
So Deborah Dorbert was forced to carry the child to term, which was a special kind of torture. She had to spend 13 weeks carrying a baby she knew was not going to survive.
“I just got very depressed, and the anxiety was horrible. I just didn’t want to get out of bed most days. I would just break down crying,” Dorbert told CNN. “[I] just didn’t want to do anything but sit on the couch and cry."
The sick thing is, the reason these states are doing things this way is without question because the people who support these laws love the idea of a miracle. They want the opportunity to witness a "miracle," to get to hear about babies with fatal fetal abnormalities actually surviving, they want to give their God the opportunity to make that happen. They prioritize that extremely unlikely opportunity over the well-being of the person actually carrying the baby — and of the baby itself — because they think it is more important.
This is why they get so upset when doctors (or doctors who are also state governors) explain that when babies who are not going to survive outside of the womb are "born," the doctors just do what they can to make them comfortable until they pass. These people who are purportedly "pro-life" don't want palliative care, they want extreme life-saving measures to be taken, regardless of how painful those measures are for the child, regardless of how unlikely they are to work, because they want the opportunity to get to say "Look what God did! Isn't it incredible? Looks like we did a good job of putting our faith in the right deity!"
It is worth it for them for people like Deborah Dorbert to suffer so that they can have that opportunity. They don't care and they never will.
Alabama, Too!
In Alabama, a woman named Kelly Shannon was told that not only did her much-wanted baby have Down Syndrome, but that "there was evidence of swelling in the baby's head and body wall, a heart defect and a tumor on the baby's abdomen that was about one-third the size of the baby and growing." The combination of conditions, specialists said, was not survivable.
She, too, was denied an abortion. A committee at the one hospital left in Alabama that performs abortions in emergency cases determined that because each of the conditions by themselves was possibly survivable (despite the unlikelihood of any quality of life), they could not terminate her pregnancy.
Shannon ended up having to drive all the way to Richmond, Virginia, 11 hours away, to get the abortion she needed.
Shocking: Guy Suing Women Over Helping His Wife Get An Abortion Allegedly An Abusive Jackass
Another thing we said was going to happen was that rapists and abusive husbands would use these new laws to their advantage, to be able to exercise control over their victims. That seems to be what is happening in Texas, as a man who is currently suing three of his ex-wife's friends for helping her obtain abortion pills is now being accused of being an emotionally abusive and manipulative creep who just wanted to be able to control his ex-wife and keep her under his thumb and punish her for leaving him.
Via AP:
Marcus Silva had found the first pill that begins a medication abortion while secretly going through his then-wife’s purse last summer but instead of talking to her about it or throwing it away, he took photos of text messages on her phone between her and two of her friends, according to a document filed Monday on behalf of those friends, who are two of the defendants in Silva’s lawsuit.
The filing, which asks for Silva’s claims to be dismissed, says Silva broke the law by accessing his wife’s phone without her consent, and invaded her friends’ privacy by reading her text exchanges with them.
“He wasn’t interested in stopping her from terminating a possible pregnancy,” the filing said. “Instead, he wanted to obtain evidence he could use against her if she refused to stay under his control, which is precisely what he tried to do.”
Yeah, this was never going to end well.
In Other Abortion News ...
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed a bunch of anti-abortion legislation this week.
The North Carolina House passed a bill that would outlaw abortion after 12 weeks.
Ob-gyns are fleeing Idaho in fear of draconian anti-abortion policies, causing a "crisis of care" for all pregnant people in the state — not just the ones who want to terminate their pregnancies.
Oregon Republicans are having a hissy fit and refusing to show up for work to vote on bills related to abortion rights, gender- affirming care, and gun control.
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Biden Refuses To Listen To Helpful New York Times, Keeps Kamala Harris On Ticket
What a big jerk.
If you watched the video announcing Joe Biden's 2024 reelection campaign (we will give you the opportunity in a moment), you may have noticed something a little bit unusual: Vice President Kamala Harris is shown again and again (I counted at least 15 times and probably missed a couple jump cuts) in the video clips and still shots, usually with Biden or in group shots, but sometimes by herself. The video also includes quite a few solo images of First Lady Jill Biden, and one brief image of Harris and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff. Do more of those; they're a cute couple!
Harris's frequent appearances in the video are no coincidence, as NBC News reports, since the Biden campaign is actively seeking to increase Harris's profile as the campaign gets rolling. That's partly to overcome the inevitable curse of vice presidential invisibility — FDR's first veep John Nance Garner infamously said the office was "not worth a bucket of warm piss" — but also as part of a conscious strategy to call attention to her "role in the administration" and to push back on GOP efforts (helped along by the New York Times) to "turn her into a liability." And of course, making sure Harris is seen frequently in a positive light, it's hoped, may help reassure voters that the Age Thing (Joe Biden, it turns out, is fairly old!) isn't anything to panic about.
The NBC News piece notes that Harris's many appearances in the video mark a big contrast from Barack Obama's video announcing his 2012 reelection bid, which didn't mention or show Biden at all, not that Joe minded since it gave him more time to hang out on the White House roof listening to classic rock, grilling some steaks, and sharing a few brews with friends. It would appear that the 2024 campaign decided not to try to persuade The Onion to depict Harris as a loveable stoner doofus.
White House and campaign insiders were happy to tell NBC News that the goal here isn't simply to reassure voters that there's a qualified veep ready to step in if God Forbid, but also to give Harris her due as a central part of the administration:
“I know that the president sees the vice president as not only a historic leader, but a true partner to him, and she’s really been at the forefront of a lot of the work that we’ve done politically,” said Jaime Harrison, the chair of Democratic National Committee. “I really do believe that she’s going to be at the forefront and a crucial component of the re-election process.”
Asked about the plans to elevate Harris’ work, a senior White House official said: “What would be more accurate is that the vice president’s team and the West Wing have worked collaboratively around her leadership on women’s reproductive health care, her foreign policy leadership and other issues. She was a huge asset in the 2020 campaign, and West Wing advisers see her as a huge asset again.”
Honestly, we'd like to see more of that, since one of the things we liked about the Obama White House was his close working relationship with Biden. When Biden announced Harris would be his running mate in 2020, that was what he said he had in mind as a model for how he'd rely on his vice president for advice and feedback.
The GOP and rightwing media have made it their weird mission to attack Harris for anything they can make up, like that time Fox News pretended to be outraged at — yes really — her "French sounding" pronunciation of the word "the." Also, we regret to inform you, one time Kamala Harris bought a fancy pot. Then there are their constant insinuations that because she's Black and a woman, she's really an incompetent "affirmative action" hire who can barely string two coherent words together. No one's going to accuse them of subtlety.
Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch's New York Postgot in on that racist act this week, suggesting that the campaign announcement video had "muzzled" Harris, as if it would have been disastrous to let her speak. The only voice heard in the ad is Biden's, but the story didn't suggest that the campaign had "muzzled" Jill Biden, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, or the many (very photogenic) ordinary Americans shown in the ad. Still, the New York Post got one thing semi-right, if you don't mind sloppy writing: Harris is indeed the "administration’s foremost spokesman [sic] on the issue of abortion" since the Supreme Court overturned Roe; it's just that most of America doesn't see that as a liability.
So hell yes, let's see more Kamala Harris. As the NBC News story points out, she's quite adept at communicating the administration's message. At Howard University in DC, her alma mater, Harris on Tuesday "delivered a fiery speech" making the case for sticking with her and her boss:
“Now I stand here, proud to run for re-election with President Joe Biden as vice president of the United States of America, so we can finish the job,” Harris told a cheering crowd. “And I will say to everyone here that we are living, I do believe, in a moment in time where so many of our hard-won freedoms are under attack. And this is a moment for us to stand and fight.” [...]
“There is a national agenda at play by these extremist so-called leaders. And understand when you look at what they are up to: Their agenda is not only about attacking a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body; this agenda includes attacking your very right and freedom to express your voice through your vote at the ballot box,” Harris said.
Well hell yes. More of that, please.
[NBC News / The Onion / NYP / Photo: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons License 2.0]
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Steven Crowder Is An Abusive Piece Of Shit, Big Surprise.
The political is personal.
If there is any idea the Right truly hates, it is the idea that the political is personal. It's why they claim to hate "identity politics" —ultimately, they feel like it's "cheating" for those whose lives are directly affected by laws and political decisions to vote for better outcomes for themselves and to be able to do so vocally, without looking like selfish or oppressive assholes. They too, vote for politicians who are going to do things that will directly benefit them, but "Hey, fellow rich people! We must band together against an estate tax, in order to ensure that our great, great grandchildren never need to get an actual job!" is not a particularly compelling rallying cry. They have to pretend that the things they want will benefit everyone (who will someday be a billionaire). They have to pretend that they are detached, objective observers who just want to do what is best for society.
But the personal is political, and in more ways than one. While we can all agree that it's very possible to have great politics and not be a great person, people with truly shitty politics are almost universally going to be truly shitty people. Someone who is hateful politically is going to be pretty hateful personally. Someone who makes a living being a misogynistic bag of dicks is not, in secret, going to be really awesome to women. You just don't work up that kind of viciousness in a vacuum.
Far-right vlogger Steven Crowder did not work up his viciousness or his hatred of women in a vacuum. The kind of person who claims that only "blue-haired-would-be-lesbian-feminists" are raped is someone who hates women. All women.
\u201cSteven Crowder: "It's always the blue haired would-be lesbian feminist who claimed they're raped. As far as I know, not one Victoria Secret model has been raped"\u201d— Jason Campbell (@Jason Campbell) 1664203500
Someone who demands women thank "the patriarchy" for giving them the right to vote hates women. Someone who says "as women's share of household duties has consistently gone down, so has their happiness" hates women. Someone who calls women who have had sex before marriage "whores" hates women.
That is not the kind of sentiment one leaves at work when the day is done, or leaves on social media or at the ballot box. It's not a hatred that conveniently only applies to liberal women or "blue-haired feminists" like that Marge Simpson.
Earlier this week, Crowder announced to the whole wide world that he was getting a divorce — viscerally angry about the fact that some of his fellow wingnuts were supposedly "extorting" him and holding it over his head somehow, as well as about the fact that the state of Texas dared allow his wife to divorce him.
It has now come out that Steven Crowder was — shockingly — pretty fucking horrible to his ex-wife, Hilary Crowder. In a Ring surveillance video obtained by journalist Yashar Ali, Crowder can be seen sitting on a divan, smoking a cigar while berating his wife — at the time, eight months pregnant with twins — for wanting to use the one car they share for grocery shopping, and not wanting to personally handle dog medication she feared could be harmful to the fetuses. You know, the fetuses they love so very much when they're railing against abortion?
The whole thing, I warn you, is extremely disturbing. He rails at his wife in the same mocking, dismissive tone we have come to expect from Steven Crowder, but which no one should expect or accept from their husband or someone who is supposed to love them.
Via Yashar Ali:
Steven Crowder insists that Hilary not take their one car to run errands as it would keep him housebound and that she, at nearly eight months pregnant, should take an UBER.
He also berates her for not doing her "wifely duties," like grocery shopping, in a way that pleases him.
Tensions rise as Steven Crowder gets more agitated.
"Feeling some constraint?" Crowder said to his wife.
Crowder gets irritated and says that if Hilary, his very pregnant wife, takes the car, he can't go to the gym, see his parents, or see his friends.
"The only way out of it is discipline and respect," Crowder said to his wife.
Hilary Crowder, in an attempt to leave, tells her husband that she loves him and that she's committed to the marriage.
Steven Crowder gets angrier and suggests that if she is committed to their marriage, she should put on gloves to give his dogs the medicine that his wife was concerned was toxic for pregnant women and walk their dogs.
As they headed inside, Crowder got angrier and angrier and was, by his admission (via audio I reviewed) yelling angrily and said, "I will fuck you up." According to both Crowders, Steven immediately pulled back and realized what he said. But by that point, Hilary was frightened and left the house.
According to her family, who sent the video in to Yashar, this has been going on for a very long time. For years, really.
They also say that he underwent elective surgery (which he presented to the world as an emergency heart surgery to save his life) the week she was to give birth. He refused to be with her while she was giving birth, and after she had their twins, he moved into a townhouse, hired a divorce lawyer behind her back, and looked into cutting her off financially. So much for "poor me, my wife is divorcing me against my will."
The political is personal.
This is why these men are obsessed with marrying virgins. This is why they want to be able to force us to give birth against our will, why they get so mad about feminists, why they are angry about no-fault divorce, why they sit around railing against the disintegration of beauty standards, why they push for young marriage and indeed fight for the rights of adult men to marry 12-year-old girls.
What they want are trapped women with low self-esteem who don’t know any better, so that they can behave this way without worrying that their wives will leave them. There is no larger point to any of it.
I am glad that Hilary Crowder is getting out of a terrible marriage, because no one deserves that treatment. I do hope, however, that other women will look at this and realize that these men hate them just as much as they hate the bad feminist ladies. That the reason they hate feminism isn't because they, as detached, objective observers, feel that it is "bad for society," but because they are fucking nuts who want to be able to scream at their 8-months-pregnant wife for wanting to go to the grocery store without consequences.
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Trump Is On Trial For Sexual Assault Today, And We Just Feel Tired
Trigger warning, for real.
Writer E. Jean Carroll, who's suing Donald Trump in federal court in New York for defamation and battery, began her testimony today with a straightforward declaration of what the trial is about: "I’m here because Trump raped me. He lied and shattered my reputation and I’m trying to get my life back."
Carroll sued Trump because after she wrote a book mentioning the alleged 1996 rape in a Bergdorf Goodman changing room, Trump called her claims a hoax, said that he'd never met her (of course, she'd been photographed with him), and, disgustingly, that he never would rape her since she wasn't his "type." Carroll also filed a second case against Trump after he was no longer "president," when he again claimed on social media that the entire case was false; that case includes a sexual battery claim against Trump under New York's Adult Survivors Act. More background on the lawsuits here:
In Case You Missed It!
E Jean Carroll Is Not F*cking Around
Trump's Lawyers Continue Pattern Of Bad Faith F*ckery In E. Jean Carroll Defamation Case
During her testimony today, Carroll, who acknowledges she's not certain of the exact date, said she was fairly certain it happened in the spring of 1996, because a friend, Lisa Birnbach, whom she told about the rape contemporaneously, had published an article about visiting Trump's Florida trash palace, Mar-a-Lago, in February of 1996.
Carroll testified, "I believe that Lisa never would have gone down to Mar-a-Lago if she knew what [Trump] had done to me." That drew an objection from Trump's lawyer, Joe Tacopina, but Judge Lewis Kaplan overruled it. Law Crime News editor Adam Klasfeld is live-tweeting the testimony, which he notes "mirrors her deposition" covering the events of that day.
Carroll said that the encounter began when she was leaving the store and Trump raised his hand up, imitating what she called the "universal" signal.
After Trump recognized her as the "advice lady," she replied: "Hey, you're that real estate tycoon," she says.
"You are so old," Carroll quoted him saying, calling his inflection "humorous."
After they went into the store to help Trump find a gift for a woman, Carroll says, Trump picked up a see-through, gray, body suit.
"It looks like a swimsuit, but this was see-through," she says. "It used to be called teddies."
She says Trump said: "Go put this on."
As she said in the deposition, Carroll said Trump's tone was joking, and she told him, "You put it on. It's your color." She considered the encounter at that point to be silly, something out of a Saturday Night Live sketch, and she agreed that she was flirting a bit with Trump, since it felt like a comedy.
Then once Trump got her into the dressing room, things suddenly changed immediately, as Trump "shoved" her up against the wall and she tried to push back. We won't go into the details of the assault here, because they'll be all over the news anyway and you don't want to read it every bit as much as I don't want to write it, even copy pasting. Carroll presented an unsparing, detailed account, testifying that "As I'm sitting here today, I still feel it."
Carroll said that afterward, she told Birnbach about it, thinking her friend might find it funny:
Asked pointedly why she ever would have thought that, Carroll replies: "I had not processed it. I had not processed what was going on."
Asked if she thinks any part of it was funny today, Carroll replies: “No, it was tragic.”
Carroll said that Birnbach, who is an anticipated witness, told her:
“He raped you. He raped you, E. Jean. You should go to the police."
"I said ‘No way.’"
"She said, ‘I’ll go with you.'"
Another friend, Carol Martin, who's also expected to testify, told her to "keep it to yourself" because Trump "has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.”
Carroll also said that she decided to stay silent, in part, because women who've been assaulted are treated as "soiled goods":
"People say, 'You're so brave. You're so brave,'" but also: "I don't know," questioning whether the woman should have been smarter, should have screamed, or shouldn't have flirted so much.
And of course Trump's defense will be that none of this ever happened and that Carroll is just making it all up for the fame and notoriety, although we'd note that most women who accuse famous powerful men of rape tend not to end up rich and famous so much as judged and publicly mocked. Honestly can't recall any rich famous rape victims who didn't get dragged for coming forward, honestly.
Also in court today, Judge Kaplan warned Tacopina that his idiot client should stop posting on social media about the trial, because of course Trump is exactly that stupid. On his pretend Twitter replacement site, Trump this morning mocked the very idea that he would have raped Carroll, who was then "almost 60," and tried to cast doubt on details of her account, insisting that he was so very famous that if anyone had seen him with a woman, it would have made "BIG PRESS."
He also accused Carroll's attorney of being a "political operative," and said that the lawsuit was being funded by a "big political donor that they tried to hide." Returning to a point that was already ruled out of evidence, Trump also pretended that there was something very fishy about Carroll's attorneys not being willing to do a DNA test on the dress she'd worn that day. In reality, Trump refused to supply a DNA sample for years, and then Tacopina only offered to have Trump provide one shortly before the trial started, which would have required a delay of the trial.
NBC News reports that
Judge Kaplan suggested to Trump lawyer Joseph Tacopina that the former president could risk being sued or having sanctions imposed for the Truth Social posts he issued Wednesday morning.
“We are getting into an area in which your client could face a new liability and I think you know what I mean,” Kaplan said.
Judge Kaplan also pointed out to Tacopina that Trump "refused to get DNA sample and now he wants it in the case?” Tacopina said he would have a word with the shithead he represents, and would ask him not to discuss the case on social media. That should go really well, we bet. Get ready for the "Inside the Carroll Trial" reports in six months, in which we'll learn Trump threatened to fire Tacopina, threw ketchup at him, and finally pouted and shut up for a few days.
[NBC News / Adam Klasfeld on Twitter]
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