#reproductive systems

[schar-aac]

"endometriosis"

a simply drawn pink and white uterine system with red uterine lining and red splotches on other parts of it.

--

requested by anonymous

[smorgasbordinvitation]

Smorgasbord Medicine Woman’s Treasure Chest Rewind– #Aromatherapy, #Frankincense - Immune, reproductive systems, Anti-aging, Antiseptic by Sally Cronin

Welcome to the repeat of the 2018 series about essential oils and aromatherapy and I hope those new to the blog will enjoy. Twenty-four years ago I ran a health food shop and diet advisory centre here in Ireland and we sold essential oils for aromatherapy. I thought that I should learn more about it and took a course on the subject. I am looking forward to sharing this relaxing therapy with…

[thoughtportal]

stop telling people to ‘just move’

[chronurgy]

Reading forgotten realms lore is just like [standard fantasy worldbuilding] [standard fantasy worldbuilding] [standard fantasy worldbuilding] [something really unique and interesting] [standard fantasy worldbuilding] [standard fantasy worldbuilding] [EXTREMELY WEIRD SEX THING] [standard fantasy worldbuilding] [standard fantasy worldbuilding]

Except for when it's like [standard fantasy worldbuilding] [EXTREMELY WEIRD SEX THING] [EXTREMELY WEIRD SEX THING] [EXTREMELY WEIRD SEX THING] [EXTREMELY WEIRD SEX THING] [EXTREMELY WEIRD SEX THING] [standard fantasy worldbuilding] [EXTREMELY WEIRD SEX THING]

[redditreceipts]

how trans activism and feminism contradict each other, example #30 570:

yeah, why have woman-centered health facilities? doesn't help anyone, right? so stupid, right? must be a result of patriarchy to have a care unit specifically for women, right??

but yeah, go on and tell me how the sex binary is just a social construct and how actually, there is no need for a differenciation in female- and male-specific care

(source)

[nicollekidman]

me three days ago: do you think. do you think when they make out her nose would go inside of his nose hole

the official amazon prime fallout twitter account for some reason:

[transingthoseformers]

I need something sentimental and sexy at the same time, so bots getting more emotional during heats. Not that they all get whiny, but some may secretly crave cuddles badly, some spend their heats alone in fear of appearing weak, and some genuinely just cry while self-servicing.

Thinking about Megop in this scenario. Megatron crying for the first time in millions of years because his stupid frame decided that hey, the war is over, time to crave a spike and most embarrassing and sappy love gestures.

NOO BECAUSE YES

Yes

I'm thinking about the concept of nesting in heatfics and adding that idea to this

Several continuities this can work for

Plus, with how heats are depicted in some fics, some heats must just suck. Like, they cross over into sickfic territory too.

The idea of bots suddenly getting hit with heats after the end of the war or a lull in the fighting is such an idea for me, and makes me wonder if there'll be a cultural impact from that time period even.

Nooo because imagine Megatron was incredibly hesitant about the idea of spending his heat with Optimus because he didn't want to seem "weak", but he ended up deciding to spend it with Optimus because spending a heat alone possibly fucking sucks

[yiga-hellhole]

"Good to become acquainted."

a long-overdue tribute to @orfeoarte 's BEAUTIFUL fanfic, Shrine Beneath the Skin! not for the squeamish at all, but very much for you if you like intimacy so deep you gotta stick your hands in your lover's guts about it. give it a try! verbose ghirazant fics are my lifeblood, after all!

the twilit alphabet i used here was made by UndyingNephalim! its translatableeeee... have fun!

[moontyger]

It was a tip that brought a dog to the main post office in downtown Jackson, Mississippi. An employee there had reported seeing someone in the lobby putting pills into hot pink envelopes.

Hours later, Ed Steed, a police officer from the small city of Richland, just south of Jackson, walked into a back room at the post office where one of the envelopes had been set aside. Steed, a K-9 handler, arrived with Rip, his narcotics sniffer dog. Rip strode around and, when he got to the pink envelope, sat down. According to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Steed said this meant the dog had smelled narcotics. That claim became evidence to get a warrant to open the envelope.

This, though, was no ordinary drug bust. As it turned out, there were pills inside the package, but they were not the kind that Rip or other police K-9s are trained to detect. The envelope contained five pills labeled “AntiPreg Kit.” They were made in India, and their medical purpose is to induce abortion. Dwayne Martin, at the time the head of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in Jackson, told me this was exactly what the initial tipster had suspected.

...

What will happen to abortion-pills-by-mail and the people who use them if Donald Trump is elected in November? As the accounts of the regional USPIS head and FOIA documents show, a piecemeal crackdown is already underway during a Democratic administration. Under a Trump regime, things might go much further.

Whoever is in power, the incident in Jackson provides a potential window into the future — one in which freelancing local Postal Service employees and officials can call on local cops to halt women from accessing reproductive care and potentially charge and arrest those providing or using abortion medication.

My FOIA request asked for records from past years of investigations of people who’d used the mail to send pills. The documents I got back show how a willing administration might go after distributors. The feds could even lend support to police in states that have criminalized abortion care as they pursue cases under local laws. Pregnant people who order the medications could get caught in the dragnet.

The documents I received after my FOIA request were highly redacted but still reveal many details about a federal investigation that began less than two years ago in Mississippi. Dozens of envelopes with abortion pills were seized. The bust followed on the heels of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, and came after a group of anti-abortion doctors filed a federal lawsuit in Texas, arguing that abortion pills should be banned from the mail.

The Jackson investigation apparently also employed what’s called a mail cover: a little-known Postal Service method for collecting data about people suspected of committing crimes. Using an enormous database of images of the outside of envelopes and packages, postal inspectors can digitally compare names, addresses, and other information on one item to others. And the findings can be freely shared with almost any law enforcement agency that requests them. The return address for the hot pink envelope in Jackson included an unused post office box number, the sort of information postal inspectors can use to correlate parcels to each other.

Reproductive justice activist Laurie Bertram Roberts worries about an anti-abortion regime taking power. They direct the Jackson-based Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, which assists fellow Mississippians with any reproductive decision they make, from having a baby, to leaving the state to go to an abortion clinic, to using pills at home.

In a state where abortion is strictly banned post-Roe, Bertram Roberts is also a doula. Along with other doulas, they have organized help for people at the end of their pregnancies, including those which do not come to term. Whether that end is due miscarriage or to abortion is immaterial. “We don’t ask,” they said.

The pink-envelope investigation came out of a sort of collaboration between the feds’ regional offices and a local official: U.S postal workers and a city K-9 cop. Though no one in Mississippi has yet been arrested for helping carry out an abortion, Bertram Roberts fears that synergy. They leaned forward and tensed their lips as I opened my computer and pulled up images I’d obtained from the FOIA request: photos the USPIS had taken, in a post office parking lot, of vehicles suspected of belonging to the person who mailed the pills. 

Bertram Roberts peered anxiously at the screen. “I don’t recognize them!” they said. Their face relaxed, but they shook their head. “The thing I worry about most is people getting criminalized.

...

Using local dogs creates risk for abortion-seekers. With the post office inviting local law enforcement to assist with federal investigations, local police could theoretically do their own investigations, by copying names and addresses from the mail. And they could pass that information to anti-abortion district attorneys. 

Police dogs, however, are trained to smell only the illegal drugs heroin, marijuana, ecstasy, fentanyl, and cocaine, not the ingredients in abortion pills, which currently remain legal. And the K-9s’ forensic reliability is suspect.

Why would a police dog alert on abortion pills in the first place, when they’re not narcotics?

Martel, the USPIS national spokesperson, speculated that the pills found in Jackson were contaminated in the manufacturing process by trace amounts of a drug such as marijuana, or perhaps someone was handling narcotics when they did the packing and left molecules behind that only canines’ super-sensitive noses can detect.

Theories along these lines are widespread among police, and they’re inherently impossible to disprove. Elisa Wells, a co-founder and co-director of Plan C, is skeptical. She said her group has conducted laboratory analyses of various brands of foreign-made abortion pills. They’ve all been pure, she said, and no one has ever complained about their containing narcotics.

There is another reason why a K-9 can zero in on a package that’s devoid of illicit drugs. Animal researchers call it “cueing.” Canines are exquisitely sensitive to the minutiae of a human’s posture, eye movements, and other subtle behaviors. Handlers wishing to develop probable cause to do intrusive searches for narcotics can coax their dogs into drug-alerting behavior. To get a reward, the dog will alert, even if nothing illegal is present. (Steed, the K-9 handler, declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Cueing can be deliberate, but it’s more often unconscious. In 2011, Lisa Lit, a researcher at the University of California, Davis, published a now-famous study in which she told the handlers of several police dogs that their K-9s would be searching for “target scents” hidden randomly in several containers. She put red tape on some containers and said it marked the targets. In reality, none of the containers had scents. Even so, most of the dogs alerted on containers, especially those with red tape.

[cuties-in-codices]

'male' and 'female' reproductive systems

in a medical manuscript, england, c. 1250–1310

source: Oxford, Boudleian Library, MS. Ashmole 399, fol. 13v and 24v

[crowtoed]

GET IN KIDS, WE'RE WRITING YOUR REPS

Pretty much all of us aren't going to be able to immigrate. Canada's not doing great right now anyway (sorry guys). Legally your best bet is to get your state government to protect you and yours. Why? Because the MAGA Republicans are apeshit about states' rights, so might as well use that against them. If you live in a Blue state, now is a good time to write to your state-level reps about safe haven laws for LGBTQIA people and immigrants and safeguarding steps for reproductive health access.

The past few days, a handful of governors like JB Pritzker of Illinois and Maura Healey of Massachusetts have made bold statements about protecting their constituents. California has called a special assembly to try and hammer these safeguards into law.

I'd recommend writing to your reps and the heads of your state's Democratic party in the legislature about following their example. I know I'll be writing to CT Majority Leader Bob Duff, as he and his staff have been very sympathetic about trans rights in the past. The trans community's eye in the sky, Erin Reed, wrote an article about the CA special session and what's legally possible for a legislature to do to covers its figurative ass. Look up your reps! You've got federal, state, and local ones! Are your reps pieces of shit? Write to other reps. I wrote to Bob Duff before I was even a resident of his state. He STILL isn't my rep, but he's the Majority Leader and that's still plenty of influence in a Blue State.

[satancopilotsmytardis]

I thought I was writing a mermaid romance. I think I'm writing dystopian fiction instead.

[sagegarnish]

Stop using "they're sterile" as a reason to say a character is "gross", bad, or unsuitable for romance

They are just fictional, HOWEVER when you use that as a negative quality you are actually saying some FUCKED UP SHIT about actual people

[technically-human]

God's voice: Aziraphale hadn't just created water. Although he didn't know this at the time, he also had the first case ever of what would later be known as 'having a crush.' Consequently, he was also the first being whose crush didn't like him back.

[sunrizef1]

PLEASE AMERICA I DONT WANT TO DRINK THE UN-FLUORIDED WATER

[wiisagi-maiingan]

Even when I'm really invested in the topic and enjoy the writing style, reading books about the history of Natives in the US really is just a miserable and draining experience. It's just a constant flood of hate and violence and cruelty.