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justinspoliticalcorner · 4 months

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Tessa Stuart at Rolling Stone:

KRISTA HARDING’S DAUGHTER was eight weeks old when that police cruiser pulled behind her on the interstate and hit the lights in September 2019. She called her boss at the Little Caesars in Pinson, Alabama, where she’d just been promoted to manager: I’m going to be a little late, but I’m coming in! Don’t panic. Harding’s registration tag was expired. She figured the officer would write her a ticket and she’d be on her way, but when he came back after running her driver’s license, he had handcuffs out. There was a felony warrant out for her arrest, he said: “Chemical endangerment of a child.” Harding used her most patient customer-service tone to ask the officer if he’d please check again. But there was no mistake, the cop confirmed: He was taking her to the Etowah County Detention Center, almost an hour’s drive away. “I’m in the back of the cop car just bawling my eyes out, like, ugly-face-snot-bubbles crying,” Harding remembers. She was worried about being away from her newborn, and she was confused: Chemical endangerment of a child? “I think of somebody cooking meth with a baby on their hip,” she says.

She’s right to think that: The Alabama law, passed in 2006, was intended to target those who expose children to toxic chemicals, or worse, explosions, while manufacturing methamphetamine in ad-hoc home labs. Harding says it took at least eight hours to be booked into a cell that night, and it was more than a week before she was finally allowed to see a judge. She was still leaking breast milk, and desperately missing her two daughters. Her family wasn’t allowed to bring her clean underwear, so every day she washed her one pair, saturated with menstrual blood, in the cell sink, then hung them to dry.

Harding says she eventually learned the warrant for her arrest had been issued because of a urine test taken at a doctor’s visit early in her pregnancy. Sitting alone in her cell, she conjured a vague memory of her OB-GYN warning her local authorities had begun to crack down on weed. The comment had struck her as odd at the time: Nine years earlier, when she was pregnant with her first child, the same doctor at the same hospital had told Harding, who’d smoked both pot and cigarettes before she was pregnant, that she’d rather Harding kick the nicotine than the weed. (Studies are unequivocal about the fact that cigarettes contribute to adverse pregnancy outcomes, but the research on weed is less conclusive, with some doctors arguing it at least has therapeutic benefits, like helping with morning sickness.)

But in the years between her first child and her second, something had changed in certain parts of Alabama. In Etowah County, in 2013, the sheriff, the district attorney, and the head of the local child-welfare agency held a press conference to announce they intended to aggressively enforce that 2006 law. Instead of going after the manufacturers of meth, though, they planned to target pregnant women who used virtually any substance they deemed harmful to a developing fetus.

“If a baby is born with a controlled-substance dependency, the mother is going to jail,” then-Sheriff Todd Entrekin said at the time. Police weren’t required to establish that a child was born with a chemical dependency, though — or even that a fetus experienced any harm — a drug test, a confession, or just an accusation of substance use during pregnancy was enough to arrest women for a first offense that carries a maximum sentence of 10 years. One public defender would later call these “unwinnable cases.” Over the following decade, Etowah County imprisoned hundreds of mothers — some of whom were detained, before trial, for the rest of their pregnancies, inside one of the most brutal and inhumane prisons in the country, denied access to prenatal care and adequate nutrition, they say — in the name of protecting their children from harm.

[...]

In the past two decades, Alabama has become the undisputed champion of arresting pregnant women for actions that wouldn’t be considered crimes if they weren’t pregnant: 649 arrests between 2006 and 2022, almost as many arrests as documented in all other states combined, according to advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, which collected the statistics. Across the U.S., the vast majority of women arrested on these charges were too poor to afford a lawyer, and a quarter of cases were based on the use of a legal substance, like prescription medication.

Today, Marshall is the attorney general of Alabama, and just a few months ago, the state’s Supreme Court used the same logic — that life begins at conception, therefore an embryo is legally indistinguishable from a living child — in a decision that was responsible for shutting down IVF clinics across the state. The ruling was a triumph for the fetal-personhood movement, a nationwide crusade to endow fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses with constitutional rights. Personhood has been the Holy Grail for the anti-abortion movement since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, but outlawing abortion — at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason — is just the start of what legal recognition of embryos’ rights could mean for anyone who can get pregnant. Experts have long warned that elevating an embryo’s legal status effectively strips the person whose body that embryo occupies of her own rights the moment she becomes pregnant.

Across the country, this theory has led to situations like in Texas, where a hospital kept a brain-dead woman alive for almost two months — against her own advanced directive and the wishes of her family — in deference to a state law that prevents doctors from removing a pregnant person from life support. (The hospital only relented after the woman’s husband sued for “cruel and obscene mutilation of a corpse.”) Or in New Hampshire, where a court allowed a woman who was hit by a car while seven months pregnant to be sued by her future child for negligence because she failed to use “a designated crosswalk.” Or in Washington, D.C., where a terminally ill cancer patient, 26 weeks pregnant, requested palliative care, but was instead subjected to court-ordered cesarean section. Her baby survived for just two hours; she died two days later.

Or in Alabama, where, in 2019, Marshae Jones walked into the Pleasant Grove Police Department with her six-year-old daughter expecting to be interviewed for a police investigation. Months earlier, Jones, four and a half months pregnant at the time, had been shot by her co-worker during a dispute. In the hospital after the shooting, Jones underwent an emergency C-section; her baby, whom she’d named Malaysia, did not survive. Rather than indicting the shooter, though, a grand jury indicted Jones, who they decided “intentionally” caused the death of her “unborn baby” because she allegedly picked a fight “knowing she was five months pregnant.” The charges were ultimately dismissed, but Jones’ lawyer says her record still shows the arrest, and Jones, who lost her job after the incident, struggled to find work after her case attracted national attention.

The threat this ideology poses to American women is not contained to Alabama: Recognition of fetal personhood is an explicit policy goal of the national Republican Party, and it has been since the 1980s. The GOP platform calls for amending the U.S. Constitution to recognize the rights of embryos, and representatives in Congress have introduced legislation that would recognize life begins at conception hundreds of times — as recently as this current session, when the Life at Conception Act attracted the co-sponsorship of 127 sitting Republican members of Congress.

[...]

Taking inspiration from Black Americans’ fight for equal rights, the anti-abortion movement began thinking of its own crusade as a fight for equality. “The argument that the unborn was the ultimate victim of discrimination in America was really resonant with a lot of white Americans, a lot of socially conservative Americans — and it was vague enough that people who disagreed about stuff like feminism, the welfare state, children born outside of marriage, the Civil Rights Movement” could find common ground, Ziegler says. By the time the Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade in 1973, the idea that a fetus was entitled to constitutional protections was mainstream enough to be a central piece of Texas’ argument that “Jane Roe” did not have a right to get an abortion.

The justices rejected that idea. “The word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn,” Justice Harry Blackmun wrote. But he gave the movement a cause to rally behind for the next half-century by adding: “If this suggestion of personhood is established, [Roe’s] case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.” Making that happen became the anti-abortion movement’s primary focus from that moment on. One week after Roe was decided, a U.S. congressman first proposed amending the Constitution to guarantee “the right to life to the unborn, the ill, the aged, or the incapacitated.” It was called the Human Life Amendment, and though it failed to make it to a floor vote that session, it would be reproposed more than 300 times in the following decades. By 1980, the idea had been fully embraced by the Republican Party: Ronald Reagan’s GOP adopted it into the party platform — where it remains to this day — and in 1983, the Republican-majority Congress voted, for the first and only time, on the idea of adding a personhood amendment to the U.S. Constitution. That vote failed.

After their 1983 defeat, activists turned their attention away from the U.S. Capitol and toward the states, where they sought to insert the idea of fetal personhood into as many state laws as possible: everything from legislation creating tax deductions for fetuses or declaring them people for census-taking purposes, to expanding child-endangerment and -neglect laws. Activists pursued this agenda everywhere, but they were most successful at advancing it in states that share certain qualities. “You could draw a Venn diagram of American slavery and see that what’s happening today is in common in those states,” says Michele Goodwin, a Georgetown University law professor and author of the book Policing the Womb. “Some would say, ‘Well, OK, how is that relevant?’ Slavery itself was explicitly about denying personal autonomy, denying the humanity of Black people. Now, clearly, these laws affect women of all ethnicities. But the point is: If you’re in a constitutional democracy and you found a way to avoid recognizing the constitutional humanity of a particular group of people, it’s something that’s not lost in the muscle memory of those who legislate and of the courts in that state.”

Rolling Stone has a solid in-depth report on the war on women and reproductive health in Alabama, going into detail the fetal personhood movement.

#Alabama #War On Women #Reproductive Health #Abortion #IVF #In Vitro Fertilization #Fetal Personhood #Pregnancy Discrimination #Pregnancy #Criminalization of Abortion #Etowah County Alabama #Marshae Jones #Human Life Amendment #Pregnancy Justice #Roe v. Wade #Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

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sylvanas-girlkisser · 1 year

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Anyone remember how in Mass Effect 2 it's revealed that Miranda hooks up with random men from dating apps, with the explicit purpose of getting pregnant and never seeing them again?

The Doylist explanation for this is obviously that this is Mass Effect and the writers either didn't know, or didn't think about artificial insermination. Like Miri babe, you can entirely skip paying for tinder gold and just use your exorbitant salary as an unethical scientist/assassin working for the proud boys, to have a licensed professional get you pregnant in the sort of strictly business relationship you're looking for.

However, for a Watsonian explanation, I think it's much more funny to imagine Miranda just has a huge breeding kink she refuses to acknowledge as such; and the reason you never see her drink is because she knows she will start rambling about how every woman secretly desires to spend her whole life pregnant and make everyone uncomfortable.

#valk yelling at clouds #I feel like the mass effect team didnt know much about womens reproductive health #see also Miris magical benign tumor that in the year 42069 is entirely incurable #we can do ovary transplants today why is that not an option for her???#what is up with the fertility clinic just going 'we're sorry you're gonna die alone and unloved you barren hag'

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tomorrowusa · 7 months

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^^^ Be careful how you word things in Alabama!

Be even more careful how you vote. The only way to protect reproductive freedom is to Vote Democratic.

Spending all your rent money at a casino is a better bet than voting for a third party. At least at the casino you have a remote chance of success.

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willowreader · 3 months

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This thread lists 20 articles along with a great explanation of the consequences of Covid on women's reproductive health. I have seen posts of women who were concerned the vaccines would damage their reproductive systems. These studies show evidence that Covid certainly can.

Click on View on Twitter to see the full post.

#covid #sars cov 2 #long covid #reproductive health #women's health #fertility

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dailybehbeh · 7 months

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Behbeh

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dracofeathers · 7 months

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I Am Only Going to Say This Once

NOTE: I do not intend to post these sorts of things often, but this especially pissed me off today and this needs to be said. This is a more political post I suppose, so if you do not want to be involved with such topics, please move on. But this is an important topic and I implore you to at least take a quick read, especially for women in the US. Even if not from the US, this can still be a very real danger to other women in other countries.

With that out of the way, let's spread a little education, shall we?

"The ovaries are two small organs, about the size of your thumb, that are located in the female pelvis. They are attached to the uterus, one on each side, near the opening of the fallopian tube. The ovaries contain the female gamete cell, called the oocyte. In non medical terms, the oocyte is called the “egg”.

The ovaries are filled with follicles. Follicles are fluid-filled structures in which the oocyte (also called egg) grows to maturity. Current knowledge indicates that females are born with their entire lifetime supply of gametes. At birth, the normal female ovary contains about 1-2 million/oocytes (eggs). Females are not capable of making new eggs, and in fact, there is a continuous decline in the total number of eggs each month. By the time a girl enters puberty, only about 25% of her lifetime total egg pool remains, around 300,000. Over the next 30-40 years of a female's reproductive life, the entire egg supply will be depleted. Although no one can know with absolute certainty the number of eggs remaining within the ovaries at any given time, most women begin to experience a significant decrease in fertility (the ability to conceive a child) around the age of 37. At the time of menopause, virtually no eggs remain.

The large supplies of eggs within each ovary are immature, or primordial, and must undergo growth and maturation each month. The eggs are stored within follicles in the ovary. Within a woman's lifespan, large numbers of follicles and oocytes will be recruited to begin the growth and maturation process. The large majority, however, will not reach full maturity. Most will die off in a process called atresia. Thus, only about 300-500 of these eggs will mature over a women's life span."

Source: Rogel Cancer Center - University of Michigan

(https://www.rogelcancercenter.org/fertility-preservation/for-female-patients/normal-ovarian-function)

Also:

"Women are born with approximately two million eggs in their ovaries, but about eleven thousand of them die every month prior to puberty."

Source: Infertility Center of St. Louis (https://www.infertile.com/infertility-101/female-infertility/beating-biological/)

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But "eggs are people".

Uh-huh...

Going by that logic, EVERY WOMAN EVER WOULD BE A MURDERER A MILLION TIMES OVER, YOU DUMB FUCKERS.

Fuck all you who think this way.

Mind your own damn business and leave your backwards, neanderthal level intelligence bullshit between your own cult members, thank you. Its people like you that make me hate Christianity and religion in general. Bunch of hateful fakers. (and yes I know not all Christians are horrible. Just most)

Please block me if you believe eggs are people. Go educate yourself and leave women alone to do what they want with their own bodies.

#womens health #fertility #roe v wade #womens rights #pro choice #reproductive rights #please help me add tags

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vamptastic · 1 month

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saw a post of someone unironically claiming there is some large conspiracy of cis women with PCOS identifying as transfeminine... so out of touch. ime the vast majority of people with PCOS are cis women who are offended to even be considered intersex. online spaces focused on PCOS are kinda transphobic and mostly focus on weight loss and restoring your natural (read: female) hormonal balance and whatnot. like sorry but the vast vast majority are not doing that. and i trust the few ones who do to have a legitimate connection to the term.

#hell every doctor ive seen about it has said that every other PCOS patient they have has been a cis woman #the most common reason ppl get diagnosed is investigating fertility issues #like it's partially a consequence of nobody giving a shit about ' women's ' health but like #the community is not uhhhh in touch with trans issues enough for this to be a big thing #the most you'll see is in the more progressive spaces someone might say they can RELATE to trans women bc of their symptoms #but it's mostly only ppl that already consider themselves queer for other reasons that would also #say they're transfem bc of their PCOS #and also it's a pretty broad spectrum of symptoms- you don't even need hyperandrogenism to be diagnosed #so like the people who consider themselves transfem are probably on the far end of that spectrum and have obvious intersex traits #unlike for instance myself who just had a bit of a mustache and more body hair than normal pre-T #idk man it's just such an out there strawman #like that shrimply is Not Happening. there's gotta be less than a thousand people doing that

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femmefatalevibe · 1 year

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i wanna get in2 feminism. where should i start?

Music to my ears! So excited for you to begin this pivotal journey in your life. I suggest starting out with my Essential Feminist Texts Booklist. Also, I would check out Melanie Hamlett on TikTok/Youtube and Jessica Valenti's TikTok page (@auntiekilljoy) in addition to her amazing books.

Hope this helps xx

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didanawisgi · 2 years

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#pathology #covid-19 vaccine #covid-19 #new holocaust #new dark ages #sperm quality #sperm count #fertility #LINE-1 #reverse transcription #testes #men’s health #women’s health #family planning #sperm

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 5 months

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Calling the Republican Party the “party of fertilization,” former President Trump continues to make false claims in a recent interview with a Detroit TV station, while simultaneously taking credit for the overturning of Roe vs. Wade.

In an interview last week with FOX-2 Detroit following his Wednesday rally in Saginaw County, anchor Roop Raj asked Trump about the issue of abortion and how much it would impact the November election. The former president argued that the erasure of a 50-year precedent that provided women a constitutional right to an abortion was a positive development.

“I say what the people decide, and whatever it is, it’s within the state and what the people decide, and it’s working out,” said Trump. “For many, many years, people have said we’ve gotta bring this back to the states to decide, and that’s now working.”

Trump then outlined how different states were dealing with abortion rights, but appeared unaware that Michigan had already enshrined those rights in its constitution.

“All the states are deciding, and you know, for 53 years, people wanted to be able to get it out, Roe v Wade, get it out so the states can decide,” Trump said. “Your state [Michigan] will decide probably a liberal policy if it hasn’t already done it. … I think Michigan’s gonna actually be very loose. They’re gonna vote on it, and that’s gonna be the law.”

In 2022, Michigan voters overwhelmingly approved securing the right to an abortion and other reproductive rights, less than six months after the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause no longer provided a federal right to an abortion. Three of the six votes in favor of that decision were made by justices appointed to the court by Trump.

Trump also told Raj the GOP was “the party of fertilization because we are for the women,” referencing one of the issues that resulted from the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, namely in vitro fertilization (IVF).

“We wanna help the women because they were gonna end fertilization, which is where when the IVF, where women go to the clinics and they get help in having a baby, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. And we’re for it a 100%. They tried to say that they weren’t for it. They actually weren’t for it and aren’t for it as much as us, but women see that,” said Trump.

The IVF issue came to the forefront in February when the Alabama Supreme Court, citing the Dobbs decision nine times, ruled that embryos had the full legal rights of citizens. That left IVF clinics facing costly litigation, prompting a temporary halt to the procedure in that state until it passed a law extending criminal and civil immunity to IVF providers and patients. But because the measure didn’t declare when life begins, clinics there are still moving away from providing the service out of litigation concerns.

Trump’s claim that “they weren’t for it,” presumably meaning the Democratic Party, is false. In fact, Democrats like U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois — a disabled veteran who used IVF to become a mother — had been warning since at least 2022 that IVF would be the next target of GOP-led legislatures and courts if Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Additionally, Senate Republicans have rejected attempts to protect access to IVF treatments, while a bill sponsored by House Democrats, H.R. 7056, the Access to Family Building Act, which would establish a federal right to access assisted reproductive technology, including IVF, remains bottled up in committee by the Republican-led chamber.

Trump continued to insist in the interview that abortion “was not that big of an issue,” and “should be largely taken off the table.”

He also continued to push the false claim that abortions were routinely being done in the final month of pregnancy, or beyond.

“Nobody wants to see abortions in the ninth month and the eighth month and the seventh month, and nobody wants to see abortions or, in this case, killing after the baby is born,” Trump told Raj. “Right now, that’s what the Democrats can do. They can have it in the seventh, eighth, ninth month, and they can kill the baby. In numerous states, they can kill the baby after the baby is born, and nobody wants that. Nobody.”

Since at least 2016, Trump has been making the claim of abortions in the final days of pregnancy or even killing babies after they are born, and it has been fact-checked time and again as false.

And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than 1% of all abortions are performed after 21 weeks of gestation — in the fifth month of pregnancy.

Raj asked Trump about Florida’s six-week abortion ban that went into effect last week.

“You have to understand, every legal scholar from all over the country, all over the world, they said ‘You have to get abortion out of the federal government, you have to take it away from the federal government, give it to the states’, and now that’s what we’ve been able to do. We’ve given it to the states, and some states have already decided, and people are satisfied with it.”

While there were certainly scholars who believed Roe had been decided incorrectly, they didn’t represent a majority, much less anything close to unanimity.

“Any claim that all legal scholars wanted Roe overturned is mind-numbingly false,” Rutgers Law School professor Kimberly Mutcherson, a legal scholar who supported the preservation of Roe, told CNN, which quoted several other legal experts in fact-checking that assertion as false.

“The people within the states … they seem to be very happy with the way it’s working out,” added Trump.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, since the overturning of Roe, 30 states have enacted abortion policies that range from restrictive to the most restrictive.

Raj also asked Trump about labor policies, unions, immigration and the war against Hamas in Gaza.

When asked about the success of union efforts in southern states, such as the UAW’s historic victory last month with Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., who voted by a nearly 3-1 margin to join the UAW, Trump instead talked about China building car plants in Mexico, insisted the public didn’t want all electric vehicles (EVs) and ended up in a diatribe against President Joe Biden.

“This character that’s destroyed our country, the worst president we’ve ever had, without question,” said Trump. “He’s destroying our country. What he’s doing with cars, he’s forcing the auto industry into China and other countries, and it’s so sad. And, by the way, Mexico is doing things that nobody can believe. They just started, and they’re doing them in conjunction with China, and it’s gotta be stopped. We can’t let that happen.”

Raj restated his question about growing union support in states like Tennessee that have been less than welcoming to organized labor in the past.

“Well, it could be happening,” Trump said. “I mean, it’s gonna be happening, but you gotta be very careful about what’s gonna happen in two years from now when China wants to take all of the jobs. Because frankly, then union or non-union, everybody’s gonna be hurt. Everybody.”

There have been concerns about Chinese automakers looking to avoid U.S. tariffs by building vehicles in Mexico and the Biden administration has addressed the issue. Last month, Reuters reported that under pressure from the U.S., Mexico was refusing to offer Chinese automakers incentives to build factories there such as low-cost public land or tax cuts for investment in EV production.

The report also quoted an official with the Office of the United States Trade Representative as saying the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which was negotiated during the Trump Administration, did not allow “a back door to China and others who may be seeking to access our market without paying … tariffs.”

On the topic of Israeli military attacks against Hamas in Gaza, in which more than 34,000 people have been killed according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza, Trump was asked how he would try and end the hostilities, and indicated he would give Israel a free hand.

“You gotta finish it off fast. You gotta get it done, and then you gotta have peace. And we’ll make peace fast. But you gotta get your work done and you gotta have peace. You know that Oct. 7 was terrible,” Trump said, referring to Hamas’ terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians that killed about 1,200 people.

The interview closed with Raj asking Trump if he would debate Biden on statewide television in Michigan.

“If you can get him, I’m there. I’ll go anywhere he wants to go,” said Trump. “What he’s done to Michigan is so bad. What he’s done to our country is so bad. What other man, what other person, would allow 15, 16 million people right now in our country? They came from prisons and jails. They came from insane asylums and mental institutions, not from South America, from all over the world, they’re pouring into our country at levels that nobody’s ever seen. Drug dealers. One stat before we go, Venezuela was very crime-ridden. They announced the other day 72% reduction in crime in the last year. You know why? They moved all their criminals from Venezuela right into the good old USA, and Biden let them do it. It’s a disgrace.”

“But, sir, where are those numbers coming from?” asked Raj.

“I guess I get them from the papers in this case. I think it’s a federal statement or well, they’re coming actually from Venezuela. They’re coming from Venezuela. That’s where they can’t come from,” said Trump.

Punishing sanctions imposed against Venezuela during the Trump administration have been blamed as at least one cause of the mass migration out of that nation. Trump also didn’t mention that one of his last acts as President was to give Venezuelan exiles in the U.S. illegally protection from deportation.

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