What the zealots actually want is no abortions at all, ever. When they see a woman at risk of death with pregnancy complications. they see a sly little jezebel who's trying to get away with something.
I woke up afraid this morning. This is not good, because I can tell myself that I am not directly under attack. I can tell myself that I am not to try and make myself feel better, but the truth is that Trump and his Republican friends, and the MAGA people really are out to do all of us some real damage. I am not a woman, trans, black, hispanic, asian, gay, or other marginalized variety, but I feel this fear in my very being as an American.
As a baby boomer raised in the 1950's in very good circumstances I have always believed in my country's ability to withstand attacks from without. We are now under attack from within and it is right in our face - our faces - it is Trump every time he opens his mouth. He attacks anybody and everybody who can least afford to defend him or herself - all of us. He has to be stopped next week and shut up in jail for a very long time and his political party denied their attack on our way of life.
The incarnation of devil walks among us - literally. It is him, Donald J. Trump. Deny him.
The person who represents my district in Congress, Marianette Miller-Meeks, said last week, debating Christine Bohannon, her challenger, that there was absolutely no connection between the unacceptable dearth of OB-GYN practitioners in Iowa and the strict abortion ban in Iowa, with its alleged exceptions that contain absolutely no mechanism for determining whether doctors and nurses and patients will be able to avail themselves of the alleged exceptions without being second-guessed after having performed an abortion. Here's a shock: no one is performing abortions. The Emma Goldman Clinic in Iowa City said at the time the Iowa Supreme Court decided to let the "fetal heartbeat" law stand that they would perform abortions when no heartbeat was detected and would counsel people to go to other states, specifically Minnesota, otherwise. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2024/06/28/planned-parenthood-emma-goldman-clinic-provide-abortion-care-in-iowa-under-six-week-ban-limits/74248626007/
Ta, Robyn. I. Just. Can't. Even. Thus, I early voted for Harris-Walz, Gillibrand, Goldman, judges, and ballot measures. GOTV and VOTE so this shit never becomes a nationwide problem.
I’ve always said this: fuck the idea that we need exceptions to make abortion “palatable” to the masses. The masses can suck my ass. And I am a cis man who dislikes abortion in general, but knows IT’S NOT MY FUCKING ISSUE.
What is disappointing is that women haven't risen to the moment and shut this problem down. Women, more than men, have everything to lose (literally!), and yet for all their power, unless the hand that rocks the cradle no longer rules the world just give that power to men as if men have some magic formula for living, which we do not - we are real good at killing though and this debate and the number of women dying should prove it. In earlier years women died in childbirth because we did not have all the medical knowledge we needed. Now women die in childbirth because people like the governor of Texas (as one example) say they need to, to keep the lie about pregnancy afloat. People: Fetuses are not babies, not for 9 months, if that, considering how many things can go wrong in the intervening months.
Reproduction is the major function of every species on earth. Turning it into a political and religious football denigrates its function. If we do not honor and protect women, then life's purpose is a joke. Why else do we raise nurture children and families?? Killing and maiming women in the name of some misguided belief that all pregnancies are trouble free and then blaming women for when biology takes over is perverse and outright wrong.
An atheist who has read the Bible more than once, the assertion that "God" is against non-procreative sex, and gives even the procreative type that a certain amount of side-eye, seems to me made out of whole cloth. I do not find this prohibition anywhere in "Holy Writ". Yes, Augustine and other monkish writers were seriously down on it, but that is a whole weird subculture, the flagellants and the mortification of the flesh crowd, which is a later, cultural (man-made, and hence optional) plugin to the basic model. And we all know how well prohibiting any acts that people REALLY want works, Prohibition was not a big success, in practice, was it? And befuddling your senses with alcohol is not even a fundamental animal drive, unless you have inherited a bad gene that makes you an addictive personality. So this puritanism, which they claim is demanded by "God", is just a choice they have made and demanding that everyone else make, too, without sanction from the "Divine". Where in the Pentateuch is it written "Thou shalt not fuck, thou naughty heathen"? And "God Junior" didn't have a word to say on the subject, either. So whence cometh the holy prohibition, and the sanction for punishing people who really cannot help themselves anyway? I call shenanigans on the whole bogus argument. Some theologians way back when thought it would be meet and fitting for each of us to go out in the wilderness, all alone, begging for forgiveness for being alive. What made those long-dead metaphysicians' words for us to live by? And the hypocrisy of the whole thing is always and forever being exposed by the almost daily scandals among the "shepherds", who seem no more able to live the anchorite life than any of us.
I have a jesus-fapping acquaintance who wants to be a theologian. I just have to shake my head in wonderment at how somebody could aspire to such inane uselessness.
You can see theoretical physics and the more abstruse kind of higher mathematics, but spending your time trying to make sense of other peoples' wild surmises about the (by definition) unknowable is not a seemly way for an adult to spend it's brief time on earth. And making your own guesses is no better, at bottom it amounts to the jejune "if Batman and Rorschach got into a fight who would win?" or T-Rex vs Gojira. I suppose it beats roaming the back roads and shooting up mailboxes and road signs.
I saw on FB yesterday a letter from some pastor somewhere worried about evangelical support for the rapist waning out of fear that HE MIGHT FLIP-FLOP ON ABORTION. Because he was being too reassuring, for their liking, about not wanting a full ban. And you know what Melania said. Apparently a sliver of his base is threatening to stay home because they believe his panicky lies.
With the Roe decision abortion during the first two trimester should have had the weight of a constitutional right. But beginning in the 1990s some states started placing restrictions like ultrasounds and two clinic visits before a woman could get an abortion. Restrictions that increased to banning abortions well within the second trimester and even putting building code restrictions on a medical procedure safer than having your wisdom teeth pulled. All approved by the Supreme Court as not substantial limitations on a constitutional right. Until they finally reversed Roe.
So it's not surprising these same red states make rape or a woman's life or health abortion exemptions impossible to use. These states will likely use their Republican top state courts to do the same with right to abortion amendments in those states. Saying it's only to protect women's health since they don't know what's best for them. So the state has to protect them from the mistake of abortion. The only way to assure abortion rights is to get evangelical and MAGA politicians out of office and replace right wing judges at every level with women's rights advocates. Because Republicans don't care what voters want, they have their own oppressive religious fundamentalism agenda. And will not stop until we enter the Dark Ages again unless we vote them out in numbers they cannot deny.
I also wonder why there's been no concern on the other side about a rape exception leading to vast numbers of hoors accusing men of rape when an unwanted pregnancy occurs.
I hate the entire exceptions argument. Oh, you were raped? Prove it. And do so in time to meet their precious deadline. Also, identify your rapist. You'd better have fought back, and you'd better have the injuries to show for it.
Ludicrous. When the bottom line is it's no one's fucking business how you got pregnant.
It really is just re-traumatizing rape victims to force them to jump through all of these hoops to obtain an abortion. Maybe that's the point for these sick fucks passing all of these bans.
It is no one's business how a woman became pregnant, unless to friends and family if she wants to share. But the entity with the least fucking entitlement to someone's business is the government in these fascist states.
I hope at least a single idiot that fell for "exceptions are reasonable compromise" has a come to jebus moment and realizes they got fucking clowned by the GOP. They were NEVER going to honor the exceptions they agreed to. This was the plan all along.
Any one that believed that sincerely got fucking played like the morons the forced-birthers think they are. Gullible votes and nothing more.
So that was interesting...for months now having AI insert itself into all my searches has been annoying at the very least. But suddenly when looking for rape statistics by state, google informs me an AI Overview is not available. Huh.
Also (too) according to some strange looking 1990 website (world population review?) there were 747 rapes in Mississippi in 2024.
Gotta point out that the anti-abortion crowd are the same people who believe it's unpossible for a husband to rape his wife.
What the zealots actually want is no abortions at all, ever. When they see a woman at risk of death with pregnancy complications. they see a sly little jezebel who's trying to get away with something.
I believe Stephen King predicted this in his book "The Stand."
I woke up afraid this morning. This is not good, because I can tell myself that I am not directly under attack. I can tell myself that I am not to try and make myself feel better, but the truth is that Trump and his Republican friends, and the MAGA people really are out to do all of us some real damage. I am not a woman, trans, black, hispanic, asian, gay, or other marginalized variety, but I feel this fear in my very being as an American.
As a baby boomer raised in the 1950's in very good circumstances I have always believed in my country's ability to withstand attacks from without. We are now under attack from within and it is right in our face - our faces - it is Trump every time he opens his mouth. He attacks anybody and everybody who can least afford to defend him or herself - all of us. He has to be stopped next week and shut up in jail for a very long time and his political party denied their attack on our way of life.
The incarnation of devil walks among us - literally. It is him, Donald J. Trump. Deny him.
The person who represents my district in Congress, Marianette Miller-Meeks, said last week, debating Christine Bohannon, her challenger, that there was absolutely no connection between the unacceptable dearth of OB-GYN practitioners in Iowa and the strict abortion ban in Iowa, with its alleged exceptions that contain absolutely no mechanism for determining whether doctors and nurses and patients will be able to avail themselves of the alleged exceptions without being second-guessed after having performed an abortion. Here's a shock: no one is performing abortions. The Emma Goldman Clinic in Iowa City said at the time the Iowa Supreme Court decided to let the "fetal heartbeat" law stand that they would perform abortions when no heartbeat was detected and would counsel people to go to other states, specifically Minnesota, otherwise. https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/2024/06/28/planned-parenthood-emma-goldman-clinic-provide-abortion-care-in-iowa-under-six-week-ban-limits/74248626007/
Ta, Robyn. I. Just. Can't. Even. Thus, I early voted for Harris-Walz, Gillibrand, Goldman, judges, and ballot measures. GOTV and VOTE so this shit never becomes a nationwide problem.
I’ve always said this: fuck the idea that we need exceptions to make abortion “palatable” to the masses. The masses can suck my ass. And I am a cis man who dislikes abortion in general, but knows IT’S NOT MY FUCKING ISSUE.
What is disappointing is that women haven't risen to the moment and shut this problem down. Women, more than men, have everything to lose (literally!), and yet for all their power, unless the hand that rocks the cradle no longer rules the world just give that power to men as if men have some magic formula for living, which we do not - we are real good at killing though and this debate and the number of women dying should prove it. In earlier years women died in childbirth because we did not have all the medical knowledge we needed. Now women die in childbirth because people like the governor of Texas (as one example) say they need to, to keep the lie about pregnancy afloat. People: Fetuses are not babies, not for 9 months, if that, considering how many things can go wrong in the intervening months.
Reproduction is the major function of every species on earth. Turning it into a political and religious football denigrates its function. If we do not honor and protect women, then life's purpose is a joke. Why else do we raise nurture children and families?? Killing and maiming women in the name of some misguided belief that all pregnancies are trouble free and then blaming women for when biology takes over is perverse and outright wrong.
An atheist who has read the Bible more than once, the assertion that "God" is against non-procreative sex, and gives even the procreative type that a certain amount of side-eye, seems to me made out of whole cloth. I do not find this prohibition anywhere in "Holy Writ". Yes, Augustine and other monkish writers were seriously down on it, but that is a whole weird subculture, the flagellants and the mortification of the flesh crowd, which is a later, cultural (man-made, and hence optional) plugin to the basic model. And we all know how well prohibiting any acts that people REALLY want works, Prohibition was not a big success, in practice, was it? And befuddling your senses with alcohol is not even a fundamental animal drive, unless you have inherited a bad gene that makes you an addictive personality. So this puritanism, which they claim is demanded by "God", is just a choice they have made and demanding that everyone else make, too, without sanction from the "Divine". Where in the Pentateuch is it written "Thou shalt not fuck, thou naughty heathen"? And "God Junior" didn't have a word to say on the subject, either. So whence cometh the holy prohibition, and the sanction for punishing people who really cannot help themselves anyway? I call shenanigans on the whole bogus argument. Some theologians way back when thought it would be meet and fitting for each of us to go out in the wilderness, all alone, begging for forgiveness for being alive. What made those long-dead metaphysicians' words for us to live by? And the hypocrisy of the whole thing is always and forever being exposed by the almost daily scandals among the "shepherds", who seem no more able to live the anchorite life than any of us.
Pope John-Paul II said that people who choose family do well, but people who choose celibacy do better.
I guess he'd know. I never got to talk directly to God.
I’m surprised they never edited out the naughty bits of Psalms.
I have a jesus-fapping acquaintance who wants to be a theologian. I just have to shake my head in wonderment at how somebody could aspire to such inane uselessness.
You can see theoretical physics and the more abstruse kind of higher mathematics, but spending your time trying to make sense of other peoples' wild surmises about the (by definition) unknowable is not a seemly way for an adult to spend it's brief time on earth. And making your own guesses is no better, at bottom it amounts to the jejune "if Batman and Rorschach got into a fight who would win?" or T-Rex vs Gojira. I suppose it beats roaming the back roads and shooting up mailboxes and road signs.
GET THIS:
I saw on FB yesterday a letter from some pastor somewhere worried about evangelical support for the rapist waning out of fear that HE MIGHT FLIP-FLOP ON ABORTION. Because he was being too reassuring, for their liking, about not wanting a full ban. And you know what Melania said. Apparently a sliver of his base is threatening to stay home because they believe his panicky lies.
BE PURE AND MIGHTY AND STAY IN YOUR BASEMENT NOT JERKING OFF TO CHICKS-WITH-DICKS PORN.
Is what I suggest.
I'm sorry. You want Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson. He's the next booth over.
The purity police strike again.
With the Roe decision abortion during the first two trimester should have had the weight of a constitutional right. But beginning in the 1990s some states started placing restrictions like ultrasounds and two clinic visits before a woman could get an abortion. Restrictions that increased to banning abortions well within the second trimester and even putting building code restrictions on a medical procedure safer than having your wisdom teeth pulled. All approved by the Supreme Court as not substantial limitations on a constitutional right. Until they finally reversed Roe.
So it's not surprising these same red states make rape or a woman's life or health abortion exemptions impossible to use. These states will likely use their Republican top state courts to do the same with right to abortion amendments in those states. Saying it's only to protect women's health since they don't know what's best for them. So the state has to protect them from the mistake of abortion. The only way to assure abortion rights is to get evangelical and MAGA politicians out of office and replace right wing judges at every level with women's rights advocates. Because Republicans don't care what voters want, they have their own oppressive religious fundamentalism agenda. And will not stop until we enter the Dark Ages again unless we vote them out in numbers they cannot deny.
I also wonder why there's been no concern on the other side about a rape exception leading to vast numbers of hoors accusing men of rape when an unwanted pregnancy occurs.
I hate the entire exceptions argument. Oh, you were raped? Prove it. And do so in time to meet their precious deadline. Also, identify your rapist. You'd better have fought back, and you'd better have the injuries to show for it.
Ludicrous. When the bottom line is it's no one's fucking business how you got pregnant.
It really is just re-traumatizing rape victims to force them to jump through all of these hoops to obtain an abortion. Maybe that's the point for these sick fucks passing all of these bans.
It is no one's business how a woman became pregnant, unless to friends and family if she wants to share. But the entity with the least fucking entitlement to someone's business is the government in these fascist states.
I hope at least a single idiot that fell for "exceptions are reasonable compromise" has a come to jebus moment and realizes they got fucking clowned by the GOP. They were NEVER going to honor the exceptions they agreed to. This was the plan all along.
Any one that believed that sincerely got fucking played like the morons the forced-birthers think they are. Gullible votes and nothing more.
So that was interesting...for months now having AI insert itself into all my searches has been annoying at the very least. But suddenly when looking for rape statistics by state, google informs me an AI Overview is not available. Huh.
Also (too) according to some strange looking 1990 website (world population review?) there were 747 rapes in Mississippi in 2024.
'Reported rapes'
Restrict abortion, people suffer.