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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regardless of how painful those measures are for the child, regardless of how unlikely they are to work
That's not faith, that's trying to emotionally blackmail God into doing something showy.
Worth repeating: If men carried the pregnancies, abortion would be a sacrament.