Last weekend, a friend shared her story of terminating her pregnancy in the second trimester due to problems that would have made it unlikely for the fetus to make it to birth. Or if it had, it would have died within weeks.
Her hospital and doc don't perform abortions even when medically necessary, so she went to my dad.
She said there was no way that she would be able to survive until 9 months (and maybe after) with people walking up to her telling her about how exciting it was to have a baby when she knew it wouldn't survive.
Then, as people who had experience with miscarriages know, you have to deal with friends and acquaintances walking up to you a year later saying things like "Your baby must be one years old now!!!"
I have nothing but contempt for people who wish women (and the men involved) to be forced to go through that.
link's broke (extra tag at the end)
The nice part about having to fly to another state to get the late-term abortion I couldn't get at my local hospital is that I don't have to be reminded of it by any local landmarks. Also, we can choose (and have) to never go to that fucking state again. (While simultaneously being incredibly grateful that they were able to help us).
The hard part was getting the bad diagnosis and making flight and hotel plans that same day, flying to another state the next day, knowing what we were traveling for, and being far from home while it happened. We were zombies. I kinda can't believe we actually managed to move through it. Also, travel for both of us added $1.5K to the costs.
The article is right about how kind the counselors are at the clinic, how they talk to you the whole time if you want them to, and how interesting the journals in the recovery room are.
She said there was no way that she would be able to survive until 9 months (and maybe after) with people walking up to her telling her about how exciting it was to have a baby when she knew it wouldn't survive.
I understand the decision to carry to term much better than I did before. I used to think they hoped for a miracle (and some do) but most seem to think that it is all the time they're going to get together so they'll take it in whatever fashion they can. Even so, I couldn't do it.
That article fills me with rage about the state of the social welfare system in this country. That woman looked into the help she'd be able to get, and made the call that no, it wasn't anywhere fucking close to what she'd need to be able to make things work.
One question asked in the Supreme Court arguments about in the "partial birth" abortion cases was "So the abortion can still be performed, but the doctor has to utilize a procedure that is sometimes less safe than the procedure the doctor wants to use?"
Fuckers.
That woman looked into the help she'd be able to get, and made the call that no, it wasn't anywhere fucking close to what she'd need to be able to make things work.
While true (and I agree completely) that reminds me of the one qualm that I had about the article. It feels like they went out of their way to find a story that they could present in the most sympathetic light.
She was married, wanted a kid, and only started thinking getting an abortion after her husband was arrested . . . It goes out of it's way to present her as being completely responsible. Which is part of what makes it effective, you feel the emotional weight of each decision that has to be made leading up to that long drive. But it seems important to say that abortions should be legal (and accessible) regardless of whether you have a sympathetic story.
It feels like they went out of their way to find a story that they could present in the most sympathetic light. She was married, wanted a kid, and only started thinking getting an abortion after her husband was arrested
I almost wrote the exact opposite. (I did, and then erased it, because I couldn't put my finger on what I was trying to say.) That I thought it was a really unusual narrative that didn't fit into typical Good Abortions - like, almost a strawman anti-choice narrative of a wanted baby that just doesn't suit the modern woman's ways, or something.
I still can't phrase it right! I just thought it was a very non Standard Good Abortion story.
I think the unusual bit is changing her mind about a wanted pregnancy, in the absence of medical complications. American Pluckiness doesn't allow for that kind of shade of gray - you're supposed to either know from the start that this is a terrible life de-railing invasive thing, or you're supposed to have medical complications.
Right, what heebie said. This is a classic right to life narrative, but with the real-world twist that surprise! No one is actually waiting there to help you with anything after the birth. And the woman is very clear-eyed about that.
Further: I wonder how sympathetic the story is for a right-to-lifer. It sounds like a big part of the woman's decision was made on the basis of material reality. That's the kind of thing that's supposed to be of lesser importance than spiritual matters, right?
8 is how I reacted, but it still works as an anti-abortion story, too. After all, her husband was straightening his life out. If only she had waited ...
But it seems important to say that abortions should be legal (and accessible) regardless of whether you have a sympathetic story.
Exactly.
I always go back to three basic facts:
1. People will always have sex.
2.Women will always get pregnant.
3.Pregnancies will always be terminated.
These three facts have been true since the dawn of time and they will be true far after we are dead.
There are ways to reduce all three of those things. But the anti choicers rarely seem interested in any of the things that we know will reduce those facts. Why they persist in pursuing the most ineffective strategies baffles me, unless they just enjoy the act of shaming people.
unless they just enjoy the act of shaming people
Bingo! I think it's got a hell of a lot to do with self righteousness, and the shaming is part of that.
Further: I wonder how sympathetic the story is for a right-to-lifer. It sounds like a big part of the woman's decision was made on the basis of material reality.
I think I figured out why I read the story differently (and, having thought about it, agree that it is an interesting non-standard Good Abortion Story).
If someone's discomfort with abortion is based on the idea that abortion is murder, and the question is, "why not keep the child?" I think that person would be uncomfortable with the story -- she's an able-bodied, employed, adult woman and seems like she would be capable of raising a child, but she decided not to.
If the discomfort with abortion is based around a vague sense of sexual propriety (and sexism), and the question is, "why not abstain or use birth control properly?" there's nothing in the story that would be disconcerting.
a vague sense of sexual propriety (and sexism)
It's weird trying to talk about this stuff from personal experience. Back when I was posting about my abortion (for people who weren't around for the post, condom failure my first month or so dating Buck). Now, I was posting about it here, which is (for me, at least) a pretty sheltered environment, no one was likely to be an asshole to me, but we had at least a couple of people who were sort of open to the interests-of-the-fetus-type-moral-case.
And I was kind of thrown, given the existence of people willing to make that kind of argument, that no one seemed to agree with me that if you were going to call any abortion frivolous or morally unjustified, the one I had would have to be in that class: I wasn't a teenager, I had a college degree and an affluent family who could have helped out, while my relationship with the father wasn't yet long-term or solid he was identifiable, non-abusive, and employed (and generally a good guy), neither I nor the fetus had any health problems. Anyone looking to judge abortions by whether the hardship to the mother outweighed the morally weighty decision to kill the fetus, I should have come up solidly on the Bad Abortion side of the scales.
But of people willing to talk about abortion as morally weighty but sometimes justifiable, I've never, as far as I recall, run into anyone who made a move toward judging my reasons specifically as not good enough. Which I completely fail to get, unless it's solely that everyone who's engaged with me about it and who considered abortion only sometimes justifiable was refraining from judgment out of politeness.
17: Any sensible reading of my parents' theological opinions would suggest they believed that not only will I be tortured forever after my death, but that this is a good thing -- something that should happen in a universe that operates according to a Righteous Plan.
We got along fine, but I always found it wise not to probe them too closely on this issue.
In case they decide not to wait for your death?
17: I don't want to speak for your interlocutors in that conversation, but I do think it's pretty easy to see - even if we don't assume normal politeness - why you wouldn't be subject to the harshest judgment from the anti-abortion types.
Poor people who have abortions are doubly at fault: For having the abortion, but also for allowing themselves to be in a position where giving birth would be ruinous. In this just universe, if poor people were good people, they wouldn't be poor. (With the notable exception of a personal friend or offspring who really did run into some bad luck, and aren't sponges on society.)
Very few of the antiabortion types are particularly serious about believing that early-term fetuses carry the moral weight of independent humans. And pretty much nobody in public life is willing to defend the logical implications of that position.
Lots of people do find abortion icky and would rather not think hard about it.
The folks at Alas, a Blog really had the final word on this subject some years ago.
It also looks to me like many people who say they are pro-life are vehemently opposed to abortion in the abstract, but turn out to be supportive of an individual woman's right to choose when they know the individual woman.
This got played out in whatever that one video was where someone (Samantha Bee?) asked a bunch of protestors (a) whether they thought abortion should be illegal (yes, absolutely) and then (b) what they thought should happen to women who got abortions (nothing, really).
It's pretty much the standard human perception that people you personally know (where personally can be repeated interactions through a blog) are real people who you can't hate with the fire of a thousand hells, whereas the "other" are "those people" who are out there and deserve our scorn for their immoral ways.
It's very hard to hate someone you know as a real person- see all the testimony from personal acquaintances of the corrupt politician or violent drug addict or rapist about how really they're very nice people, I can't believe they'd do something like this. Not to say someone getting an abortion is similar to any of those people, just that even when there is a legitimate reason to hate someone it's always easy to find personal connections who don't.
There was a very interesting recent This American Life segment about attempts to change public opinion, first about gay marriage, and then about abortion. I can't do it justice, but they found that people were quite likely to change their opinions on both if confronted (in a pleasant, non-threatening manner) with someone's personal experience.
21 matches what I've seen teaching applied ethics courses. I've met more than one innocent college student who assured the class that, I mean, obviously they were pro-life (with the air of "look, I'm not pro-animal torture") but abortion isn't necessarily bad in all cases and it's the woman's choice whether or not to have one. There's almost no use in pointing out that this is a pro-choice position, because "pro-life" usually just means some vague tribal/lifestyle identity and has nothing at all to do with what the people they vote for/support/or even sometimes give money to actually are out there saying.
I guess that shouldn't be surprising though. I mean, it's a really substantial feature of American political life, especially among the more conservative groups. But it is endlessly frustrating when faced with the "the majority of Americans are vastly to the left of anyone they would ever even consider voting for" phenomenon in real life.
The 'generally left wing organizations/movements have names describing what they're about; generally right wing organizations/movements have names that sound nice but have little to no bearing on what they're about' phenomenon doesn't help with this. It means that students who think abortion is a woman's choice and shouldn't be restricted don't realize that "Pro-Choice" is called that because that's the position it takes.
unless they just enjoy the act of shaming people.
They want more healthy white babies on the adoption market. Making abortion illegal, shaming single moms, and making raising a child as a young single women impossible seem incoherent until you realize this is the goal. They don't want sluts young women actually raising the babies, they want them to go to nice Christian couples.
27: I've had that thought about the pro-life position before, but considered the collateral damage (of all of the extra black and brown babies that no one will adopt) too obvious to ignore. I kind of get it, in the thinking only about people they can imagine way... but it seems like a huge oversight, even given their goal.
6: It made me sad. She is at peace with her decision, but Christ on a cracker, we as a society are so awful that we can't spare enough help for someone who's facing some challenges that could be helped with some extra care for a couple of months?
27 I don't doubt that there are people who think that way -- it's a big country and there are people who believe every fool thing -- but purely ex recto I think the numbers on this faction have got to be pretty low.
27 - I think "women shouldn't be allowed autonomy, especially when it comes to sex" covers things pretty well, and shaming is absolutely a large part of it.
I mean, more babies for adoption would probably be nice for some of the pro-life people, but most people I've met (who haven't literally tried, themselves, to adopt a baby) have no idea that there is even a surplus of parents wanting to adopt compared to babies needing to be adopted. When you tell people about the ratios involved you usually get to see some impressive jaw dropping.
What does sound appealing to a lot of them, as far as I can tell, is the 'confined to the shameful single mother ward of shame shame shame on you at the hospital' thing that used to come along with women who were going to put babies up for adoption. They bring up 'you could just put the baby up for adoption' bit that comes up is motivated mostly by the desire for the women to have to go through the whole process of pregnancy and birth rather than the desire for the baby to be on the adoption market - I have yet to see people look disappointed when you bring up "but what if they decide to keep it, eh?". The general reaction is a sort of 'well good for them then I guess but whatever' shrug.
There's surely an equivalent left-wing-in-theory-through-tribal-affiliation-but-not-in-practice thing, though, as any tax accountant or private school admissions officer in Santa Monica could tell you.
I think "women shouldn't be allowed autonomy, especially when it comes to sex" covers things pretty well, and shaming is absolutely a large part of it.
This isn't quite it. It's more what the link in 20 is asserting - we don't mind if girls have sex, as long as there's a sturdy punishment mechanism. What sets them off is interfering with God's Systemic Punishment for being a slutty slut. It's all about keeping punishments intact.
I mean systematic, not systemic.
It's all about keeping punishments intact.
If your hymen's not.
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Last year my Dad bought a car even though his doctors told him it was unsafe to drive. I reported him to the RMV, and he lost his license. I bet he's still driving. I hadn't spoken to him in about a year, but I did invite him to my wedding.
I got a check from him for $3k for my wedding. One of my godmothers thought it was very nice that he wanted to give me $3k. I told her that it was terrible, because it could jeopardize Medicaid eligibility and keep my mother from getting access to a nursing home when she needs one. I am also afraid that that same godmother will not follow through on the 2nd half of her financial contribution to my wedding; happy to have my parents take over.
I was in contact with their doctor, and I got a letter today that my Dad had done stuff which basically blew up 85% of the work I had done trying to help them. This grief is so overwhelming.
I don't even know if I can bear to have them at the wedding, and I am sure that I will get judged by certain people if I rescind my invitation.
I don't know if I can take this/manage/survive.
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39
That's terrible. Do you have any siblings who can help manage your parents?
28, 30
It's actually a huger contingent than you think. There are enough Christians who are happy to adopt nonwhite healthy babies too. Adoption is hugely pushed in Evangelical communities as a missionary move, even if you have a ton of kids yourself. It's really widely known among Evangelicals that it's harder and harder to adopt, even among people who haven't adopted yet.
There's actually probably two strains being collapsed in my comment, the 'fear of a black planet' people who are upset at white liberals having abortions, and Evangelicals, who simply want more babies on the adoption market. The big "PP are Nazis and abortion is black genocide" campaign comes from Evangelicals who are pretty happy restricting abortion for women of all colors.
I mean, yes misogyny is a big part of it, but the evangelizing through adoption is another big component.
40: Evangelicals and Catholics like my mom.
42: I didn't know Catholics could be "born again" until I met the boyfriend's uncle and his six five adpoted kids (they had to send one back).
39: I'm sorry you're in such a miserable situation. I have no helpful suggestions, but I hope you find some peace with your situation.
The Alas, A Blog link in 20 is really interesting. I'm curious in particular about the item (first listed in the chart) which states that rank and file anti-choicers favor abortion bans which expressly protect the mother from all legal consequences.
Is it really true that many or most pro-lifers take this position? I confess that I've really gotten the impression that the movement is driven by the belief that all (human) life is sacred.
Someone should do an 'inside the pro-life movement' journalistic investigation or whatever, similar to the 'inside the white power movement' things that have been done for decades now: a sort of undercover assignment in which members of the tribe are befriended and recorded expressing their true thoughts. Perhaps someone has.
As it stands, we're left helplessly peering in, wondering what they're actually thinking.
39 -- My parenting philosophy is a pretty thorough rejection of the whole 'tough love' idea, but maybe with your dad, you're just going to have to let him live with the consequences of his actions.
I agree completely with Buttercup about the adoption components.
40: My sister is pretty mad at me, because I told her psychiatrist when she was out-of-control psychotic, and we tried to get her hospitalized. Not only can she not help, she's someone I have to worry about.
45- but it sounds like Anonymous' _mother_ is worse endangered. That's heartbreak.
Someone should do an 'inside the pro-life movement' journalistic investigation or whatever
Someone did, and wrote a classic book, thirty years ago. I mean, sociology not journalism, but it also was based on 200 activist interviews.
Oh, that was me. Not that I've read the book. But I feel bad about not having read it. And now the rest of you can too.
My sympathies for 39, that does sound incredibly stressful.
Would it help at all if you just didn't deposit the check for wedding expenses? (and made sure to let the godmother know that you weren't depositing it and why).
39: I hesitated to post this, Anonymous resident, so please know I'm in no way trying to minimize how awful this feels, or to create more work for you. You were asking "how do I survive?" Please keep your eye on that 15% percent of your work that your Dad hasn't managed to undo. Even if or when it is eventually undone, you provided it, and it was there for a time. Please keep a written record of what you did, so that years from now, when they are gone and you feel terrile about things you could have done, you can pull out that record and see the time and the care you took, especially the efforts to navigate the red tape, and the contradictory conversations you had. Start that record now, if you haven't started. Try to accept that even if you dropped everything in your life to watch over your parents, you would still have to sleep sometime, and you cannot prevent every disaster because you are one person. Get counselling for your grief, get someone to whom you can tell the crazy story repeatedly. Get a power of attorney for their personal care if you can (That may work differently in the US., don't know. Here we were able to prevent my Dad from becoming homeless with one, but we couldn't use it until he was right at that point. Getting one for property wasn't possible, but the one for personal care made a huge difference in what we could do. You probably know all about this from family and work already.) Good luck, and I'm so sorry.
(I don't know what you do about the wedding invite, but didn't the idea of hiring chaperones for disturbed parents get discussed here years back?)
Penny, I myself have cut contact with my mom after years of a situation similar to Anon's, and I wish someone had given me your advice years ago (I also wish I had listened to others and cut contact and/or refused a codependent role years earlier, but that one I had to learn on my own).
Penny, I second J in liking that framing. I'm thinking about it too.
Someone should do an 'inside the pro-life movement'
Megan Koester went to a rape crisis center with a vial of pregnant-lady pee, so there's that.
Here's a bit more on the adoption connection--Crisis Pregnancy Centers are actually coercive adoption centers:
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2009/10/06/shotgun-adoption/
I'm glad if it helps. Part of the way through Dad's decline I had a baby, and that clarified things a lot for me. I have *this* much energy and time. I love them both, but *this* being wants to live and *this* being sometimes does, sometimes doesn't.. It's terrible that the things done to my Dad as a child contributed to his being the way he was. So much unfairness. But having an actual child to care for and seeing how much that child wanted to grow and be independant and healthy made me lose patience with the adults in my life who seemed to only be able to feel loved when they were being exclusively cared for. Trauma is a damned thing, and it's not something one person can fix.
I just realized I should clarify too, that while I went through many times of feeling like "I'm done, I'm not stepping in any more", after a rest period there would come some occasion where I'd think, "there's a really obvious good way to assist here,", and I'd be back in for a while. I don't think either one was wrong or right. But there was great relief in the clarity of "his life is his own, his money is not my money, his decisions are his." Whenever I convinced myself I could make him do something, a world of pain followed. When he was sick enough that he had his choices taken away, things got easier, and sadder, but easier.
My sympathies to Anon as well.
49 et al.: Thanks. On the fact that so-called crisis pregnancy centers are actually dedicated to dissuading women from aborting, in favor of adopting out, sure. That doesn't really get to the question posed, though: is adoption favored over abortion because life is considered sacred, or because (some certain class of) people would like to adopt and would like to consider the pregnant women breeding factories for that purpose?
No doubt the purposes are mixed; still, I'd like to hear from pro-life activists what their seekrit thoughts are. Perhaps I'll read the book trapnel linked. But something more current would be preferable, since the abortion debate has certainly morphed since the 80s.
52, 53 and 59: Yes, thanks, Penny. That was helpful and kind. If my Dad blew through money, it would really be my mother's money. I spent a lot of time trying to get them a subsidy for assisted living, but making up the difference is still a lot. My Dad thought that he could live nicer for less and not spend down everything, but then he felt that his wings were clipped, so he got even more reckless with what was under control.
I thought he'd dropped out of the program of coordinated care that was providing the subsidy, because he wrote me a letter saying that he had because their care was substandard. (It wasn't.)
But now I'm wondering whether he's just lost his mind. He actually gave the name of a new doctor, but I looked the guy up, and he's a boutique doctor who charges a $5k annual fee and limited his practice to 400 patients. He's done a lot of things, but I'm pretty sure that he's not actually a patient of that doctor. So, my Dad's mind is not there, which is very sad, but in a different way. He also came up with a totally arbitrary rent number.
I know that I can't fix anything, and my partner is very supportive, but we both feel like we got isolated from other people and that even the people who know what we've been through don't ask how we're managing or tell us that they're sorry we had to deal with this. Sometimes, weirdly enough, I feel like I'm a leper. "So sorry" goes a long way.
I'm curious how we'd get at those seekrit thoughts, though. Presumably if people actually want to prevent abortion so that there is a steady stream of adoptable babies, that's not the actual story they tell themsel
Okay, in writing that I realized that no, there are definitely people who would actually believe that at a conscious level. That it was all a part of god's plan that this unwanted baby showed up for these people who want a child so badly but can't have one.
Last year's March for Life or whatever it's called was explicitly about spreading the "birthmother = good mother" propaganda that's an official part of the crisis pregnancy center push to coerce expectant mothers into adoption. I also think it's canny marketing when you have the largest group of anti-abortion teens and young adults in a passionate cramped situation where affection might bloom, but perhaps I'm being even more cynical than is warranted.
62.2: I'm jaded because the bedtime story I just have was about how sorry I am that my being sick scared them and that I'm sorry they have to worry parts will disappear and sorry they needed to be adopted but pro-adoptive parent bias is one thing that unites the right and left. People know their friends would make great parents and hope they'll end up with great kids and I truly believe this keeps us as a U.S. culture from offering poor and marginalized patents sufficient support. And obviously I say that as a parent who has benefitted immeasurably from adoption, but I still wish my kids had never needed me because it would have been better for them.
"People know their friends would make great parents and hope they'll end up with great kids and I truly believe this keeps us as a U.S. culture from offering poor and marginalized patents sufficient support."
I had never thought of it this way. That there are all kinds of terrible excuses for denying support, yes, but not this one. Wow.
I mean, that's only one small part and apparently I can't spell "parents" but I still think it's true.
Yes, we as a society are very good at offering support to poor and marginalized patents.
I also think it's canny marketing when you have the largest group of anti-abortion teens and young adults in a passionate cramped situation where affection might bloom
that is a beautiful scenario.
is 67 a sarcastic rejoinder to someone claiming that we do? It confuses me.
67 is 100% sincere. Read it very carefully.
(It's also a riff on 66, if that helps.)
Okay, in writing that I realized that no, there are definitely people who would actually believe that at a conscious level. That it was all a part of god's plan that this unwanted baby showed up for these people who want a child so badly but can't have one.
I've heard this explicitly. And that women who get abortions are selfish because they're depriving someone else of the badly-wanted baby. (In the next breathe, ranting about those women who have too many babies and don't know who the fathers are and can't take care of their babies. Totally incoherent, but my assumption is that the speaker is a racist shithead, and so the abortion-having woman is white and the can't-take-care-of-too-many-babies is brown.)
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I can't even think about the topic at hand without angrying up the blood too much, so instead:
I was riding the bus with a group of young, working-class Black men last night, and as one got up to exit, another said "Be safe, kid", and of course, he was a kid, certainly no older than 22 or so, and probably like 19 or 20. And it brought home to me again how remote I am from these people I live among, that in their position, you do actually have to worry that if you don't remind your friend to be safe, maybe he'll make that one tiny error that leaves him on the ground, bleeding out of a bunch of .40 caliber holes.
Relatedly, how many of y'all are aware of the 10 year old kid who got pepper-sprayed (directly) by a cop at a Black Lives Matter protest here this week? There's plenty about it on my FB, but of course it's local. Can't help but contrast the apparent lack of national interest with the pepper-spraying cop from California a couple of years ago. Fucked up.
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Natilo! Damn you, you've introduced a second topic close to my heart.
And it brought home to me again how remote I am from these people I live among
I had a fascinating conversation with my friend the Balto inner-city public school teacher last weekend: he's now back at the school he started at, one of the most challenged in the city. He describes his fifth-graders as "feral," so that his principal task in the classroom is just keeping order.
At any rate, he related to me some of the slang in currency at the moment. "Thot" = That ho over there. "nez [pronounced "knees", maybe a version of "these"] nutz", which I think he said is a reference to a song from some 15 years ago (?) and is now going through a resurgence -- this is written/spray-painted all over the school. And "clappers," a reference to a dance move by black women, like in pole dancing, whereby they clap their butt cheeks together. Huh. Yeah, I don't know a damned thing about the lives lived 10-15 miles away from me.
Anyway.
Back on the abortion/adoption thing, 72 sounds about right for the subtext behind much of the anti-choice rhetoric coming from the right.
The intersection between anti-abortion activism and racism is just really interesting, and I wondered about the seekrit thoughts chiefly because we do have documentaries capturing the thinking of white power groups. I've mentioned here before a documentary called Blood in the Face: highly, highly recommended.
Can't help but contrast the apparent lack of national interest
It's just not very interesting. His own mom isn't sure if the cop saw him in the crowd. People were jumping on cars and trying to open them and so they got sprayed. And maybe people just don't care about a protest when the guy "murdered" by the police in Wisconsin was a guy on probation for armed robbery who decided to get high as shit and attack a bunch of people, including the cop responding to the scene.
As usual you seem to have forgotten to write "according to the police officer who did it" at the end of some of those sentences. And no one is alleging that the people who got sprayed were the ones jumping on cars/etc., just that they were in the protest and that there were people in the protest being unruly so the police just started pushing the crowd to a certain area and one of the ones who did it started spraying into the crowd.
Go read up on the Tony Robinson shooting, the basic facts really aren't in dispute.
Anyways, I think this is the actual spraying incident. Hard to see a lot of the surrounding circumstances but it sure doesn't look like the "cop jumps out and without warning immediately sprays everyone" story that the kid's mom keeps telling.
https://twitter.com/twistedmurphtc/status/598679963496153088
Hey, have I mentioned that I'm defending a couple of state troopers in a police brutality (wrongful arrest, excessive use of force) trial this summer sometime?
I haven't yet formed an opinion as to exactly what happened (I got the case after another lawyer took it past summary judgment, so I've read depositions, but I haven't talked to witnesses live yet), but it's a fairly minimal set of allegations -- the wrongful arrest, if wrongful, lasted maybe an hour and a half, and the injuries from the excessive use of force are some possible chafing from the handcuffs. So, not particularly upsetting to work on whoever's story is accurate.
74.2: Not "deez nuts/nutz?" That's what I'd expect.
80 -- "if the cuffs did fit, you must acquit"
78 - the one without any kids visible, even when it pans back? I think that's probably just a policeman spraying someone because they were talking back to him. (Maybe it's not the best video, either, for that reason.)
81: I could have sworn my friend corrected my thinking that it was "these nutz" by specifying "nez", but google got me nothing on that. Now I see that "dez nutz" is actually from a Snoop Dogg Dr. Dre song with Snoop Dogg or maybe Warren G telling a joke about it ....
So yeah, "dez nutz." It all came up last weekend when my friend was recounting the antics of one of his most astute students, who on one occasion, walking down the hall with my friend, called out to the Vice Principal (!) who was passing by, "Hey, Ms. [Vice Principal]! Dez nutz!" and joggled his nutz gleefully.
Funny kid, who also, one day recently in class, played the role of Keegan-Michael Key as Obama's anger translator: my friend was trying to get a student who was gabbing and gesticulating on her cell phone to quiet down, and the astute student called out, "What Mr. [Teacher] means is: shut the fuck up and do your fucking work!"
Heh. My friend has tried to convince astute student to buckle down and study, he can go to college some day, but the kid says Nah, it's too late for me.
This is pretty heartbreaking. Uh, sorry for the maudlin turn.
Oh, huh, I'd always thought of "deez nuts" as a Baltimore/Philly thing and wouldn't have guessed it was West Coast too, possibly because I'm provincial. (I also dislike how Alice Goffman apparently scans "jawn" in her book, but again what do I know?)
"Deez nutz" is in the NYC high schools as well.
I love Ween's version of "These Eyes". Anytime someone says deez nuts, it pops into my head.
Here's a barely audible version.
It was definitely a thing in my high school 15 years ago. Interesting that it's having a resurgence.
So what does it mean? As far as I can tell, it's a joke, kind of like "Look, a squirrel!" in white parlance.
Listening to the original Dr. Dre song, there's some reference to an AK (47, I assume) -- I can't tell whether the Dre song is aggressive or jokey or what. I am so fucking white.
Creepy and depressing story with allegations of baby trafficking, sadly plausible: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/05/06/they-were-told-their-babies-had-died-now-dozens-of-black-women-wonder-if-it-was-all-a-lie/