In the light of day today, the political fallout from Texas’s anti-abortion S.B. 8 law and the Supreme Court’s acceptance of that law continues to become clear. By 1:00 this afternoon, the Fox News Channel had mentioned the decision only in a 20-second news brief in the 5 am hour. In political terms, it seems the dog has caught the car.
My wife and I attended Syracuse University in the late 1960s during the Vietnam War. I was draft age, making the war a constant cloud over me and all of my male classmates. It was also a time when social issues were coming to our attention daily. We were all ready to deal with them, as well as attend and work at our classes for our education and grades. The first Earth Day was a campus wide event filling our quad with displays of respect and solutions for our planet. Hendrix Chapel was both my nondenominational church and our near weekly national speakers forum. It was there that the student body turned out to hear a relatively unknown Bill Baird talk about women across the nation dying from coat hanger abortions. We already knew a some female students who had "back ally" abortions. One of my highschool classmates at SU had dropped out as a freshman when she got pregnant. Bill Baird made a tremendous impression on all of us on how brutal anti abortion laws were to women and families who for so many economic, health, age and family reasons could not carry a pregnancy to term and were seeking deadly and debilitating alternatives.
Planned Parenthood became my wife's first healthcare provider when we got married. Their family planning and birth control assistance were attractive as primary and preventive care services. We have supported Planned Parenthood ever since.
When I was less than 9 years old, my mother who was pregnant gave me instructions not to let anyone take her to the Catholic hospital in our community because she feared they would save the baby over her life if there were a problem. She explained that she had three children at home who needed a mother.
New York State legalized first trimester abortions in 1970, a few years after Bill Baird's talk at Hendrix Chapel, and three years before Roe v. Wade.
My wife bought a first edition of "Our Bodies Ourselves" a women's paper back health guide and referred to it frequently. Women's health had been a mystery even to many women until the abortion rights movement that focused as much on women's health as "pro choice" with the idea that knowing your body and your health choices make you a more healthy, productive and happier person for a better society. Certainly the cruelty of most "Pro Life" measures and many of their advocates are not pro life.
It will not end with Texas—other “red states” are set to follow suit, including South Dakota and Florida. Abortion is about to be criminalized in a huge section of the country. Of course, this will have little impact on wealthier, white residents of Texas (or the other states which enact similar laws)—they’ll still be able to fly/drive to states where the procedure remains legal. That option will not be available to poorer residents of those same states.
One other thing: Rush Limbaugh’s despicable use of the term “Feminazi”‘always used to infuriate me. My mother’s entire family was wiped out by the Nazis in the Holocaust. To trivialize how truly evil that regime was by comparing Feminists to it demonstrated both historical ignorance and how deceitful and evil Limbaugh actually was. I hated him when he was alive, shed not a single tear when he died, and continue to curse his malign impact on the country.
My favorite graphic so far on the Texas abortion law is one showing Sponge Bob with cowboy hat on a stick pony. The caption is Texas: where a virus has reproductive right ... and a woman doesn't. Love the double whammy with the mask mandates. The WSJ had an oped that supports what Heather is saying -- that Texas Abortion Law is a Blunder. Very glad to hear that!
The understanding of the relationship between religion and abortion is complex. At least some Islamic interpretations of the Koran suggest that abortion is permitted before 120 days of pregnancy. Christian positions vary but generally, like the Koran, allow abortion to save the life of the mother. I remember a Jesuit article long ago citing that it takes "seven days" for the sperm to successfully unite with the egg. So, at least in that interpretation, the morning after pill would be allowed. Also in the acceptance of the "natural" rhythm method it seems sex without the "possibility" of insemination is acceptable.
It seems that Roe v Wade was a threading the needle effort between these religious views. Then along came medical science that said that the sign of a heartbeat indicated full human life.
All of this religious, political, medical and judicial threading of the needle seems to all be for the purpose of taking away from women of their right to chose.
Where is the "religious" caring for the born fully alive human? It seems it is alive in the Democratic party. Child care, education support, Medicaid for pregnant women and their children. Let's show love and care for the children born either in or outside of marriage and for their single or married poor mother. When the anti-abortionists show care for the child and mother after birth they might be able to somehow justify their concern prior to birth.
Wish I was younger and healthier. The Democrats badly need a mega shot of energy. We should all be in the streets, and should have been for every chipping away of our Democracy. The party itself should be mobilized at each one of these affronts. It’s on us that things have gotten so out of hand. We let them happen. We “talk”. Republicans strategize and do.
This latest is truly dystopian. Friends and neighbors turning in their friends and neighbors for a chance at $10,000. A bounty on catching women. Chilling doesn't come close to saying it.
Republicans will find the have unleashed the Furies of Greek mythology. An existing gender gap in the American electorate is only likely to widen as women push back on restriction on reproductive freedom. My own personal belief is abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. There is hard data that shows there are policies and programs that can reduce the number of abortions. Unfortunately, Republicans oppose those programs including - informed sex education for children and teens, free and easy access to all forms of birth control, improved access to affordable healthcare and Medicaid expansion, affordable child and dependent care, refundable child tax credits. There is hard data showing all of these have a powerful influence on reducing the number of abortions, but Republicans oppose each of them. The truth is Republicans are not a pro-life party, they are an anti-science, anti-fact, anti-compassion party. I believe the most likely result of this decision will be electoral defeats for Republicans, federal legislation that modified Roe v. Wade in law, and the successful expansion of the number of Supreme Court Justices, and the death of the filibuster. Republicans will regret unleashing the Furies.
From The Guardian: TikTokers flood Texas abortion whistleblower site with Shrek memes, fake reports and porn ... Critics of Texas’ new law have been filing hundreds of fake reports to the whistleblowing website in hopes of crashing it.
Pro-choice users on TikTok and Reddit have launched a guerrilla effort to thwart Texas’s extreme new abortion law, flooding an online tip website that encourages people to report violators of the law with false reports, Shrek memes, and porn.
In recent years, it has become public that the catholic orphanage here in Burlington VT was, for years and years, sheer hell for the children that lived there. The stories are hard to hear and the pain is still apparent on the grown up faces of the survivors who called the orphanage home a long time ago. It makes you wonder about all of the other orphanages and other programs run by the church in the name of God. And is just another example of how the catholic church says one thing yet does another. How is an abortion worse than deliberate pain inflicted on helpless children, day in and day out, year after year? The hypocrisy is astounding.
I am astonished by the richness of Heather’s daily, middle-of-the-night essays crafted with such cadenced scholarship. I was a history/economics professor from age 58 to 80. If I had ventured to write midnight essays, my readers would have been reminded of Ur’s Tower of Babel. A few years ago I twirled my three-wheeled walker doing the Zumba with the Princeton Precision Dance Team but, as the raven saith ‘nevermore.’ (Edgar Allen Poe for Google fact checkers)
We're seeing play out what McConnell and Trump bestowed upon the nation. The damage is just beginning unless the court is expanded, which appears highly unlikely. In my long life, I've never seen the credibility of the court at such a low ebb.
Texas is the state that persists in falling near to last in child health and welfare—cruelly failing the tiny beating hearts already under its jurisdiction. Their incompetent governance has no business reforming abortion law.
The moral differences in humans will always be utilized as a political divide to manipulate the masses.. Does anyone believe that a single Republican Senator truly gives a flip about fetuses?
Also how is a court defined as one that abstains from listening?
Three items on the to-do list: end/radically limit the filibuster so that the Despicables cannot block the legislation; ratify ERA (it technically has enough state votes to be ratified, I think); pass voters' rights legislation. Until women become fully persons under law--included their uteruses--women will be subject to the whims of white men who want unfettered access to them.
I am grateful that I never became pregnant and had to confront such a terrible choice. I think the decision SHOULD be private. Even from the often considered obligatory doctor. I come to this as a matter of not only ‘choice’ but of responsibility. The world’s population is so immense. Finally, I believe ‘with all my heart’ that no male person should have any ‘say’ about abortion. You can support, but never decide.
Well, well, well, Thank you, Professor Richardson. As many have come to know, it takes a rendering of history and a snapshot of a particular time to give a background of support to what a person is feeling about a subject whether it be a vote of Yea or Nay. I wondered about the lack of coverage on Fox News and it’s ilk. Now I understand more deeply why.
Knowing the history of things clears up some memory gas.
The saying comes to mind….”you’ve made your bed, now lie in it.” Looks like history shows who is afraid of the truth. Right, Tuckems?
Solidarity of women and men FOR the health, safety, security, and the light of WOMEN.
This piece and today's comments are really good in stirring the mind about this issue. It's a tough one in some ways. No obvious right answer for me. At 17 I got pregnant for the first time, alone and confused in the late '60's at an art school I had not wanted to attend. I was reeling from the chaos of all that was going on in that era and actually wanted to get a job, not go to school. My parents plucked me out of that school and that relationship, seeing that something unfortunate had happened to me possibly because they had forced me into a situation I had not wanted, and hauled me off to Puerto Rico to have an abortion. More confusion. It was a medical procedure with an attached profound, vast dimension. If they had not done that, my life would have been much different than it has turned out to be. I still feel wrenched by the issue- being pregnant by the wrong guy at the wrong time in one's life is a tragedy, but so is having an abortion. Abortion can be seen as the lesser of two evils, certainly when you factor in the dreadful orphanages run by churches or other corrupt organizations. But there are many belief systems that counsel against it. Basically, there is a price to pay for everything we do. I would not wish a back alley abortion on anyone, nor an unwanted child who cannot be cared for properly and whose very existence condemns the parents to a life of hardship. What Texas is doing, what the supreme court is doing, is wrong, in any event, and though I cannot ever celebrate the famous "woman's right to choose," given my own history which had very little choosing on my part, I can say that it seems like cruelty to eliminate options with such callous disregard for those who will suffer.
My wife and I attended Syracuse University in the late 1960s during the Vietnam War. I was draft age, making the war a constant cloud over me and all of my male classmates. It was also a time when social issues were coming to our attention daily. We were all ready to deal with them, as well as attend and work at our classes for our education and grades. The first Earth Day was a campus wide event filling our quad with displays of respect and solutions for our planet. Hendrix Chapel was both my nondenominational church and our near weekly national speakers forum. It was there that the student body turned out to hear a relatively unknown Bill Baird talk about women across the nation dying from coat hanger abortions. We already knew a some female students who had "back ally" abortions. One of my highschool classmates at SU had dropped out as a freshman when she got pregnant. Bill Baird made a tremendous impression on all of us on how brutal anti abortion laws were to women and families who for so many economic, health, age and family reasons could not carry a pregnancy to term and were seeking deadly and debilitating alternatives.
https://www.veteranfeministsofamerica.org/legacy/Bill_Baird.htm
Planned Parenthood became my wife's first healthcare provider when we got married. Their family planning and birth control assistance were attractive as primary and preventive care services. We have supported Planned Parenthood ever since.
When I was less than 9 years old, my mother who was pregnant gave me instructions not to let anyone take her to the Catholic hospital in our community because she feared they would save the baby over her life if there were a problem. She explained that she had three children at home who needed a mother.
New York State legalized first trimester abortions in 1970, a few years after Bill Baird's talk at Hendrix Chapel, and three years before Roe v. Wade.
My wife bought a first edition of "Our Bodies Ourselves" a women's paper back health guide and referred to it frequently. Women's health had been a mystery even to many women until the abortion rights movement that focused as much on women's health as "pro choice" with the idea that knowing your body and your health choices make you a more healthy, productive and happier person for a better society. Certainly the cruelty of most "Pro Life" measures and many of their advocates are not pro life.
It will not end with Texas—other “red states” are set to follow suit, including South Dakota and Florida. Abortion is about to be criminalized in a huge section of the country. Of course, this will have little impact on wealthier, white residents of Texas (or the other states which enact similar laws)—they’ll still be able to fly/drive to states where the procedure remains legal. That option will not be available to poorer residents of those same states.
One other thing: Rush Limbaugh’s despicable use of the term “Feminazi”‘always used to infuriate me. My mother’s entire family was wiped out by the Nazis in the Holocaust. To trivialize how truly evil that regime was by comparing Feminists to it demonstrated both historical ignorance and how deceitful and evil Limbaugh actually was. I hated him when he was alive, shed not a single tear when he died, and continue to curse his malign impact on the country.
My favorite graphic so far on the Texas abortion law is one showing Sponge Bob with cowboy hat on a stick pony. The caption is Texas: where a virus has reproductive right ... and a woman doesn't. Love the double whammy with the mask mandates. The WSJ had an oped that supports what Heather is saying -- that Texas Abortion Law is a Blunder. Very glad to hear that!
The understanding of the relationship between religion and abortion is complex. At least some Islamic interpretations of the Koran suggest that abortion is permitted before 120 days of pregnancy. Christian positions vary but generally, like the Koran, allow abortion to save the life of the mother. I remember a Jesuit article long ago citing that it takes "seven days" for the sperm to successfully unite with the egg. So, at least in that interpretation, the morning after pill would be allowed. Also in the acceptance of the "natural" rhythm method it seems sex without the "possibility" of insemination is acceptable.
It seems that Roe v Wade was a threading the needle effort between these religious views. Then along came medical science that said that the sign of a heartbeat indicated full human life.
All of this religious, political, medical and judicial threading of the needle seems to all be for the purpose of taking away from women of their right to chose.
Where is the "religious" caring for the born fully alive human? It seems it is alive in the Democratic party. Child care, education support, Medicaid for pregnant women and their children. Let's show love and care for the children born either in or outside of marriage and for their single or married poor mother. When the anti-abortionists show care for the child and mother after birth they might be able to somehow justify their concern prior to birth.
Wish I was younger and healthier. The Democrats badly need a mega shot of energy. We should all be in the streets, and should have been for every chipping away of our Democracy. The party itself should be mobilized at each one of these affronts. It’s on us that things have gotten so out of hand. We let them happen. We “talk”. Republicans strategize and do.
This latest is truly dystopian. Friends and neighbors turning in their friends and neighbors for a chance at $10,000. A bounty on catching women. Chilling doesn't come close to saying it.
Republicans will find the have unleashed the Furies of Greek mythology. An existing gender gap in the American electorate is only likely to widen as women push back on restriction on reproductive freedom. My own personal belief is abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. There is hard data that shows there are policies and programs that can reduce the number of abortions. Unfortunately, Republicans oppose those programs including - informed sex education for children and teens, free and easy access to all forms of birth control, improved access to affordable healthcare and Medicaid expansion, affordable child and dependent care, refundable child tax credits. There is hard data showing all of these have a powerful influence on reducing the number of abortions, but Republicans oppose each of them. The truth is Republicans are not a pro-life party, they are an anti-science, anti-fact, anti-compassion party. I believe the most likely result of this decision will be electoral defeats for Republicans, federal legislation that modified Roe v. Wade in law, and the successful expansion of the number of Supreme Court Justices, and the death of the filibuster. Republicans will regret unleashing the Furies.
Good trouble!!!
From The Guardian: TikTokers flood Texas abortion whistleblower site with Shrek memes, fake reports and porn ... Critics of Texas’ new law have been filing hundreds of fake reports to the whistleblowing website in hopes of crashing it.
Pro-choice users on TikTok and Reddit have launched a guerrilla effort to thwart Texas’s extreme new abortion law, flooding an online tip website that encourages people to report violators of the law with false reports, Shrek memes, and porn.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/02/texas-abortion-law-tiktok-reddit-whistleblower
In recent years, it has become public that the catholic orphanage here in Burlington VT was, for years and years, sheer hell for the children that lived there. The stories are hard to hear and the pain is still apparent on the grown up faces of the survivors who called the orphanage home a long time ago. It makes you wonder about all of the other orphanages and other programs run by the church in the name of God. And is just another example of how the catholic church says one thing yet does another. How is an abortion worse than deliberate pain inflicted on helpless children, day in and day out, year after year? The hypocrisy is astounding.
I am astonished by the richness of Heather’s daily, middle-of-the-night essays crafted with such cadenced scholarship. I was a history/economics professor from age 58 to 80. If I had ventured to write midnight essays, my readers would have been reminded of Ur’s Tower of Babel. A few years ago I twirled my three-wheeled walker doing the Zumba with the Princeton Precision Dance Team but, as the raven saith ‘nevermore.’ (Edgar Allen Poe for Google fact checkers)
We're seeing play out what McConnell and Trump bestowed upon the nation. The damage is just beginning unless the court is expanded, which appears highly unlikely. In my long life, I've never seen the credibility of the court at such a low ebb.
Texas is the state that persists in falling near to last in child health and welfare—cruelly failing the tiny beating hearts already under its jurisdiction. Their incompetent governance has no business reforming abortion law.
Wash,rinse,repeat
The moral differences in humans will always be utilized as a political divide to manipulate the masses.. Does anyone believe that a single Republican Senator truly gives a flip about fetuses?
Also how is a court defined as one that abstains from listening?
I have a few words and phrases that may apply.
Three items on the to-do list: end/radically limit the filibuster so that the Despicables cannot block the legislation; ratify ERA (it technically has enough state votes to be ratified, I think); pass voters' rights legislation. Until women become fully persons under law--included their uteruses--women will be subject to the whims of white men who want unfettered access to them.
I am grateful that I never became pregnant and had to confront such a terrible choice. I think the decision SHOULD be private. Even from the often considered obligatory doctor. I come to this as a matter of not only ‘choice’ but of responsibility. The world’s population is so immense. Finally, I believe ‘with all my heart’ that no male person should have any ‘say’ about abortion. You can support, but never decide.
Well, well, well, Thank you, Professor Richardson. As many have come to know, it takes a rendering of history and a snapshot of a particular time to give a background of support to what a person is feeling about a subject whether it be a vote of Yea or Nay. I wondered about the lack of coverage on Fox News and it’s ilk. Now I understand more deeply why.
Knowing the history of things clears up some memory gas.
The saying comes to mind….”you’ve made your bed, now lie in it.” Looks like history shows who is afraid of the truth. Right, Tuckems?
Solidarity of women and men FOR the health, safety, security, and the light of WOMEN.
This piece and today's comments are really good in stirring the mind about this issue. It's a tough one in some ways. No obvious right answer for me. At 17 I got pregnant for the first time, alone and confused in the late '60's at an art school I had not wanted to attend. I was reeling from the chaos of all that was going on in that era and actually wanted to get a job, not go to school. My parents plucked me out of that school and that relationship, seeing that something unfortunate had happened to me possibly because they had forced me into a situation I had not wanted, and hauled me off to Puerto Rico to have an abortion. More confusion. It was a medical procedure with an attached profound, vast dimension. If they had not done that, my life would have been much different than it has turned out to be. I still feel wrenched by the issue- being pregnant by the wrong guy at the wrong time in one's life is a tragedy, but so is having an abortion. Abortion can be seen as the lesser of two evils, certainly when you factor in the dreadful orphanages run by churches or other corrupt organizations. But there are many belief systems that counsel against it. Basically, there is a price to pay for everything we do. I would not wish a back alley abortion on anyone, nor an unwanted child who cannot be cared for properly and whose very existence condemns the parents to a life of hardship. What Texas is doing, what the supreme court is doing, is wrong, in any event, and though I cannot ever celebrate the famous "woman's right to choose," given my own history which had very little choosing on my part, I can say that it seems like cruelty to eliminate options with such callous disregard for those who will suffer.