Now I'm wondering if other men have message groups they hide from me.
On Tuesday, when I was leaving work I mentioned to two of my coworkers that I was going to a pro-Roe rally. Both of them people that I've worked with for a long time and think of as not that political. Well-off men who are centrist Democrats and generally good but not that politically motivated. I was surprised that both of them immediately responded that Democrats should 100% make the midterms a referendum on abortion and focus on it as a primary plank.
The leaked decision had clearly caught their attention.
I encourage people to watch the commercial in the OP; I thought it was very well done.
Inadvertently posted in the check-in thread:
I am interested in thinking about the question of whether the word choice is too closely linked to libertarianism.
In the developmental disabilities world, it was viewed as empowering to call people consumers of healthcare services, but I think that framing can be problematic.
I've read a few twitter threads, and one was a story from an ICU nurse whee the woman's life was in real danger. Everybody says that the life of the mother is an exception (except for the creeps who want to re-implant ectopic pregnancies), but this story was harrowing. The woman had severe pre-eclampsia, and they had to put her on a vent. This was a desperately desired pregnancy. Her family tried to get her to 24 weeks so that the fetus would be viable, and she was in the ICU for a couple of weeks, but her condition deteriorated so rapidly that they had to terminate. Her blood pressure normalized quite quickly and they were able to get her off the vent. She was devastated to wake up and learn she was no longer pregnant, but not terminating the pregnancy would have resulted in her dying and the fetus would not have survived. I don't. Know what language to use there. I'm sure she felt that she lost a baby.
In any case, that would be protected by a "life of the mother" standard, but they had such a standard in Ireland, and Savita Halappanavar still died.
2 Democrats don't decide what the election is going to be about. It's not like they picked 'emails' as the theme for 2016.
I've always though that Roe was a vbfd, both on its own and as a piece of the wall that prevents us from lapsing into an Xtian authoritarian ethno-state, which is why I was positively enraged at everyone who would not support Clinton in 2016 and continue to be completely enraged about that. I'm mad about this even when there aren't any women around.
I don't think there's a single right answer about how to talk about abortion. What is there to even say to Republican legislators in Louisiana? They're currently trying to one-up each other to see who can think up the most restrictive, most punitive scheme. They are confident they'll be re-elected, and they are probably right.
If Congress changes hands, then next year there will be bills for a national ban. Biden will veto them, so it'll really just be posturing, and maybe McConnell even prevents it from coming up for a vote in the Senate. But whoever is running as the Republican nominee in 2024 pretty much has to campaign on a national ban. The discussion, nationally, is going to be about whether we should ban everything, or just ban some (as indeed we already do nationally).
Further to 5.1, a huge number of Republican voters absolutely thought that 2016 was about abortion. So did a whole bunch of Democratic voters. Our national press that it was about emails, or who to have a beer with, or who would be entertaining. Who would keep taxes low for big business.
Democrats don't decide what the election is going to be about. It's not like they picked 'emails' as the theme for 2016.
Yes, I was just surprised at their vehemence.
I don't know what to do about the good or bad reason issue politically, because I don't think anyone for whom the issue is salient is thinking about it coherently rather than just as a way to distinguish between women they approve and women they don't. (I'll accept a sort of merely theoretical exception for consistent abortion opponents who are sincere about a life-of-the-woman exception as reasonable, but I don't think that's common or politically important.)
New language for this fight: "there's nothing wrong with abortion. Get off your high horse."
I know it's bad politics. But it's what's in my heart.
Inside your heart is a horse and inside the horse is a small Greek military force.
11 is so dumb (sorry Moby) but it made me laugh a lot.
I always thought it was funny that the condoms were called that. Doesn't it imply that they're leaky?
I though it implied that if you wrapped gifts from Greeks in latex, any problems would suffocate.
It always made me visualize sperms as tiny soldiers, ready to leap out and stab the egg with their little swords.
Exactly. And like Greeks, they have tails.
Our local small-market radio group has a station that plays upbeat pop music targeted at a demographic that's like 75% women. I'm sure these exist in just about every market - though ours is particularly purple - and I feel like pro-choice, anti-Republican ads should be playing on there, non-stop.
Yeah, it is hard to navigate. I want to be useful in the effort and have the story to tell (and am trying to find places to tell it). But I also don't know how to avoid the whole "but mine were good/necessary, unlike those other ones" framing.
I've sent in an op-ed arguing that if California wants to be the abortion haven, there must be at least one place in the entire state that offers third trimester terminations for medical reasons. Preferably several.
The term "choice" comes up primarily in the context of the one-word descriptor for people who favor abortion rights. What alternative does Shenker-Osorio propose? Do the folks in Ireland call themselves "pro-care"?
Support for abortion rights is support for a right -- and all individual rights can be denigrated as consumer-oriented and libertarian -- because that's what they are. I get to be an atheist because the Constitution understands that my freedom in this matter doesn't poison the body politic. I am a civil libertarian.
I've only read that specific Twitter thread, but Shenker-Osorio doesn't mention another place where the framing she proposes was successful in making abortion legal: The United States. Back when women were desperate and dying, there was a lot more focus on the extreme situations created by the illegality of abortion. Our current lack of graphic horror stories limits the impact of the (very good) commercial that she cites. But this is a problem that will solve itself.
I'm idly curious whether anyone has written about the period (80s, 90s) when abortion was widely considered A Debate -- the idea of debating the subject was a big piece of the framing for young people like me, learning about it. You would hear both sides, you would find one side or the other more persuasive, and you would pick one. This feels as archaic as a sanitary belt now. That debate, like most debates, is now dead, and it's just a battle. I've been in "battle mode" for decades now, and only thinking back on the "50 years of Roe" led me to remember my childhood belief in reasoned debate. I really did, in some way, believe in it.
I remember that time. In retrospect, I think maybe the violinist was a metaphor.
That debate, like most debates, is now dead, and it's just a battle.
I just wanted to highlight that because it's such a pithy description of current conditions.
It was somehow going to be settled if we could establish that life does not begin at conception (i.e., that men who fertilize eggs are not, in the image of God, the creators of life, and pregnancy not mere humble service of the creative power). I underestimated Christianity here in a big way: this is a religion that recognizes two separate events of conception (of Mary and Jesus) as core elements of the fabric of the universe, right? They have at least one conception feast day? (IAobviouslyNAC) I mean, shit.
18: Our MA laws were not great - or not liberal compared to NY - not as most people would assume. We were pretty reliant on Roe. As recently as 2017 we had not repealed pre Roe abortion ban, so the legislature passed the ROE act in Dec 2020. Baker vetoed portions of that. Specifically, the age to get an abortion w/o parental consent or judicial bypass (which was almost always approved but a barrier for many) was reduced from 18 to 16 which is the age of Consent. As of Jan 1, 2022 can perform abortion after 24 weeks if life or health of mother endangered or a lethal fetal anomaly.
Patients needing a late term abortion needed to travel to Colorado and New Mexico. I don't know how much ROE Act changed late-term abortion access.
Seconding 22.
Do the folks in Ireland call themselves "pro-care"?
Good question. Here's what the campaign platform says:
Together for Yes is the national civil society campaign to remove the Eighth Amendment from the Constitution. Together we are campaigning for a more compassionate Ireland that allows abortion care for anyone who needs it. The Together for Yes Campaign Platform brings together a wide range of civil society organisations who represent various sectors of Irish society. We share a unified aim which is to secure a yes vote in the referendum to remove the 8th from the constitution.
As someone whose dealt with repeated pregnancy loss and infertility, there's a whole other side to women's healthcare that will be impacted far beyond the decision to abort a healthy baby or not. 2% of miscarriages are missed miscarriages, meaning the fetus/embryo dies but the body still thinks it's pregnant. The only real medical treatment for this is to forcibly evict the dead baby, i.e. through an abortion procedure. When doctors stop performing D&Cs or when abortion pills are outlawed, these women are going to be horribly impacted, mentally if not physically. Imagine being told your baby is dead, but there's a three to five month waitlist for the only doctor left willing to do the procedure in your state. I had a MMC and live in a blue state with excellent healthcare. Even so I had to wait 12 days and it was the longest 12 days of my life. Or worse, being told you're carrying a dead baby but instead of moving on and starting over, you just have to hope it gets reabsorbed and you don't get an infection that requires a hysterectomy? Or if you can get proper treatment, if you are at all poor and/or brown imagine having to go to court immediately after to "prove" your baby died in utero and wasn't 'murdered' by your doctor? There's also the whole issue of ectopic pregnancy, where for awhile standard Catholic country care was to wait for it to rupture and then treat it as an emergency. Ectopic pregnancies were the leading cause of death for pregnant women in Nicaragua after they banned all abortions in 2006. We've halved our ectopic mortality rate since the 80s but I can see that climb right back up.
There's TMFR, or termination for medical reasons, which I believe encompasses most 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions. Women who find out a much-wanted pregnancy isn't viable will now be forced to carry it to term, spending months in psychological torment and physical discomfort. Since fertility decreases with age, for women with fertility issues like DOR or who are in their late 30s/early 40s, the months or year they spend carrying a nonviable baby + recovering from birth may close the window on their ability to ever conceive another child. I have luckily never had to make the decision to TMFR, but I know a lot of people who have and frankly the idea of not letting a woman take advantage of modern obstetric care to preserve her mental health and fertility is barbaric.
I posted awhile back about a woman who conceived a baby through IVF (so very much wanted), only to find out at 12 weeks it was completely headless, no brain no skull. It had a heartbeat though, so due to Texas's heartbeat law, TMFR was not covered by her insurance. I know another story of a man whose wife was pregnant with twins, also IVF. They found out at 20 weeks one of the twins had a fatal defect and would likely die in utero. Since they shared a placenta, the nonviable twin's death would also kill the viable twin, and the only option to save the one twin was to terminate the nonviable one. It was a tricky, specialized procedure that no one in their Red state would perform as it was a "late term abortion." They had the financial means to fly to NYC for the procedure and now have a healthy 8 year old daughter. With all the new fugitive uterus laws, they could face jail time or a long court trial if they made a similar decision. Imagine having to choose between a baby and prison or letting both your kids die?
These sorts of stories have been pretty absent from the mainstream conversation where the assumption is that a positive pregnancy test gets you a healthy baby 9 months later. I think this does a disservice to understanding exactly the chilling, knock on effect these sorts of policies have on women's healthcare.
As someone whose dealt with repeated pregnancy loss and infertility, there's a whole other side to women's healthcare that will be impacted far beyond the decision to abort a healthy baby or not. 2% of miscarriages are missed miscarriages, meaning the fetus/embryo dies but the body still thinks it's pregnant. The only real medical treatment for this is to forcibly evict the dead baby, i.e. through an abortion procedure. When doctors stop performing D&Cs or when abortion pills are outlawed, these women are going to be horribly impacted, mentally if not physically. Imagine being told your baby is dead, but there's a three to five month waitlist for the only doctor left willing to do the procedure in your state. I had a MMC and live in a blue state with excellent healthcare. Even so I had to wait 12 days and it was the longest 12 days of my life. Or worse, being told you're carrying a dead baby but instead of moving on and starting over, you just have to hope it gets reabsorbed and you don't get an infection that requires a hysterectomy? Or if you can get proper treatment, if you are at all poor and/or brown imagine having to go to court immediately after to "prove" your baby died in utero and wasn't 'murdered' by your doctor? There's also the whole issue of ectopic pregnancy, where for awhile standard Catholic country care was to wait for it to rupture and then treat it as an emergency. Ectopic pregnancies were the leading cause of death for pregnant women in Nicaragua after they banned all abortions in 2006. We've halved our ectopic mortality rate since the 80s but I can see that climb right back up.
There's TMFR, or termination for medical reasons, which I believe encompasses most 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions. Women who find out a much-wanted pregnancy isn't viable will now be forced to carry it to term, spending months in psychological torment and physical discomfort. Since fertility decreases with age, for women with fertility issues like DOR or who are in their late 30s/early 40s, the months or year they spend carrying a nonviable baby + recovering from birth may close the window on their ability to ever conceive another child. I have luckily never had to make the decision to TMFR, but I know a lot of people who have and frankly the idea of not letting a woman take advantage of modern obstetric care to preserve her mental health and fertility is barbaric.
I posted awhile back about a woman who conceived a baby through IVF (so very much wanted), only to find out at 12 weeks it was completely headless, no brain no skull. It had a heartbeat though, so due to Texas's heartbeat law, TMFR was not covered by her insurance. I know another story of a man whose wife was pregnant with twins, also IVF. They found out at 20 weeks one of the twins had a fatal defect and would likely die in utero. Since they shared a placenta, the nonviable twin's death would also kill the viable twin, and the only option to save the one twin was to terminate the nonviable one. It was a tricky, specialized procedure that no one in their Red state would perform as it was a "late term abortion." They had the financial means to fly to NYC for the procedure and now have a healthy 8 year old daughter. With all the new fugitive uterus laws, they could face jail time or a long court trial if they made a similar decision. Imagine having to choose between a baby and prison or letting both your kids die?
These sorts of stories have been pretty absent from the mainstream conversation where the assumption is that a positive pregnancy test gets you a healthy baby 9 months later. I think this does a disservice to understanding exactly the chilling, knock on effect these sorts of policies have on women's healthcare.
Also, it looks like they are willing to support policy which would be much more restrictive than what the pro-choice people in the US (and I include myself) would want.
25: It's probably unwise for me to participate in threads about political messaging because I generally reject the premise behind them, which I would describe as: This one weird trick will gain you political victory.
Different messages are a result of different contexts. The US conversation is about rights because the Supreme Court determined the existence of a right -- and some folks disputed that right. That history is always going to exist and have an impact on the US context, but the messages will naturally change as the circumstances change. The discussion of abortion in terms of rights was always appropriate. Let's remember that -- purely as a matter of messaging -- it worked. It got the law changed, and actual Americans came to favor abortion rights.
The other false premise in "messaging" conversations is that bad political results are a product of bad messaging. It was perfectly possible for the Supreme Court to overturn abortion even though Americans consistently voted for presidents who would appoint pro-choice justices. Despite Americans' durable pro-choice inclinations and voting record, none of us has trouble imagining that our "democratically elected" Congress will institute a national abortion ban. If that happens, the root of the problem will not have been messaging any more than the catastrophic American attitude about guns is about messaging.
26: Completely agree, but I also worry about the framing Megan talked about - that these are good abortions and the other kind are bad.
31
I get that's a worry, but right now we've ceded the pro-life framing completely. We've let the conversation be about future baby vs. mental health or distress of the mother, etc. In a lot of cases "pro-life" policies will result in needless actual death of women, loss of future potential children, and in no way ever produce a live baby. Once politicians start regulating healthcare, they create horrible and indefensible unintended consequences that would make a lot of even soft anti-abortion people squirm. Making people, like middle class suburban women confront the fact they're voting to make women carry dead babies for months, or to kill women with ectopic pregnancies, is in my opinion politically useful. It strips away the ability to frame it as simply pious concern for all children.
Ideally we can reclaim the message and frame it in multiple ways, including about women's autonomy and self-determination, but I'd love to see a Fox news host be forced to say point blank she'd kill both twins rather than save the life of viable twin.
25: It's probably unwise for me to participate in threads about political messaging because I generally reject the premise behind them, which I would describe as: This one weird trick will gain you political victory.
Yeah, I have similar hesitation. Perhaps I'd explain my motivation for the OP as, "I don't expect that there will be a single message on abortion rights, but if I'm going to have more conversations about the topic over the next several months (and years), I'd like to have a good sense of what messages and what framing are likely to be well suited to different contexts." I think there is value in having a sense of what rhetorical tools are helpful to have at hand.
I don't want to hype the sample commercial too much but, FWIW La Presidentessa, the scenario you are talking about is what the commercial opens with.
32 and 33: I don't know that I completely trust the phrase "between you and your doctor." Either. I mean, I support some regulations of healthcare providers - like requiring them to provide certain types of access to people with disabilities. Those are things that doctors weren't going to do on their own. It took activism and politicians. Or like, if a doctor isn't willing to provide an abortion him/her/theirself, I think they should be required to give information about where a person with a uterus can get one.
,Another interesting bit. ACOG requires residency programs train residents in abortion care. Programs in states that ban abortion are going to have to send docs out of state to get the training or risk losing accreditation which will further reduce access to OB care.
36
Right, plus those are really important skills for doctors to know as part of women's obstetric healthcare more generally, they're not just abortion techniques. Some women need a D&C after birth to get all the placenta out. Women with incomplete miscarriages needs D&Cs to remove all the fetal remains. A poorly done D&C can permanently damage the uterus and lead to infertility, similar with an untreated infection from retained placenta. Imagine a woman has a tricky birth in a red state and is rendered sterile because her doctor doesn't know how to do a D&C very well. This will likely be a reality soon.
I underestimated Christianity here in a big way: this is a religion that recognizes two separate events of conception (of Mary and Jesus) as core elements of the fabric of the universe, right? They have at least one conception feast day? (IAobviouslyNAC) I mean, shit.
Yeah, I hadn't thought about it specifically in relation to the theological emphasis on conception before, but it's very much an idiosyncratic Christian (historically, specifically Catholic) fixation. At some point Catholics developed a particular theological obsession with the fate of the unbaptized, including the unborn, that branched out in all sorts of weird directions. I don't know when it started but it was well established by the eighteenth century. The very funny opening chapter of Tristram Shandy is one satirical Protestant take on it from that era. Priests also routinely did Caesarians on women who died pregnant to ensure that the fetus got baptized if it was still alive, even in remote colonial areas. The Franciscans at the California missions did a bunch of them.
32, 33 -- I wouldn't call it ceding the framing as much as allowing people who categorically reject our framing to attain positions with the power to dictate the framing. We can talk about this any way we want. It doesn't mean anything, though, if the people who are calling the shots get to say 'yeah, I know that that's what you think, but I don't agree, and as the system as configured right now, it's my call.'
The other side uses a lot of bad facts, and definitely acts in bad faith more often than not, and this doesn't matter to them or to any of the people that support them. They didn't reason their way into thinking that women should not be allowed to terminate pregnancies, and they won't be reasoned out of it.
On the right, 2016 was is many ways a referendum on abortion. A majority on the left saw it that way as well, but apparently not enough in enough of the marginal places to carry the day.
Obviously, though, the conversation with Massachusetts legislators is different. Should the relax limitation X? Yes they should, and personal autonomy, and a demonstration of the horrible cases that result from limitation X, should be sufficient.
I'm idly curious whether anyone has written about the period (80s, 90s) when abortion was widely considered A Debate -- the idea of debating the subject was a big piece of the framing for young people like me, learning about it. You would hear both sides, you would find one side or the other more persuasive, and you would pick one. This feels as archaic as a sanitary belt now. That debate, like most debates, is now dead, and it's just a battle. I've been in "battle mode" for decades now, and only thinking back on the "50 years of Roe" led me to remember my childhood belief in reasoned debate. I really did, in some way, believe in it.
25: It's probably unwise for me to participate in threads about political messaging because I generally reject the premise behind them, which I would describe as: This one weird trick will gain you political victory.
Thinking about this a little more, I want to offer a slightly more optimistic take.
As far as political messaging goes, I don't think there's "one weird trick" that allows you to bypass all the people that disagree with you. I think political success requires either persuading, negotiating with, or outvoting people who disagree, but you can't just make them go away. I think political message can be helpful for the "persuade" or "negotiate" option.
As far as debate, you describe a very recognizable dynamic. But I think part of what's happening (for people who are on the internet) is that when you first get exposed to the debate it happens so quickly. The internet makes it possible to immediate see all the standard moves and counter-moves ("you say you care about X, but doesn't Y go against that", "people who say that Y are a problem are ignoring the fact that Z clearly distinguishes between X & Y", etc . . . ). A lot of the model of "rational debate" that you talk about was based on the idea that you might persuade somebody and they would walk around half-believing what you said and then, a month or two later they might encounter the opposing argument and go back to the other direction. Now, the standard back-and-forth can happen in one comment thread.
I think that means that people spend much less time receptive to hearing new arguments, and much more time wandering around feeling burnt out on the issue, but I still think it matters to make good arguments. It's still helpful to be providing the grist for an argument that somebody will end up rattling off in a comment thread. It's just much less satisfying.
32:. I've seen a number of Twitter threads that support what you say. The right is really bad about abortion knowledge generally - not realizing that a D&C means procedures that clean out tissue from the uterus, regardless of the reason. Not realizing that the pretty pics of the baby in the womb aren't what's at issue in late term abortion. That the fetal heartbeat isn't a measure of viability. (iirc, not only the ultrasound heartbeat noise computer generated, it's actually tracking the cord flow). That "life of the mother" can be interpreted to mean "immediate danger" which means it's illegal to terminate an ectopic implantation, because it's not an emergency until it ruptures. Or that treating the pregnant woman will kill the baby (placenta abruption at 25 weeks, e.g.) It's an area where the law has bright lines and nature doesn't. And people keep saying "oh but we don't mean that" but it's exactly what the law does.
I guess I just think that after 40 years, there isn't much room for persuasion or negotiation. They either deny that their statute covers ectopic pregnancies, or are certain that God won't take any lives without good reason. We've just had a huge experience with this, and it's quite evident that the one thing the "pro-life" people have little or no concern about is life.
What will soon see is that the "debate" on this issue is between Roberts (Roe doesn't have to be overturned on this one, because the 15 week limit isn't unduly burdensome), Alito (the whole thing is rotten, but, really, just as to abortion -- trust me it's just abortion), and Thomas (none of that due process clause stuff is valid, and it should all be swept away).
40: The former VP for Government Relations for Planned Parenthood in MA was on WGBH TV the other with another local activist. (She ran in the primary for Kennedy's Congressional seat as a Progressive, but lost b/c the Progressive vote was split, and we lack ranked choice voting), so a corporate guy who had even worked w/ Repubs won.
She reported that even a few years ago she sat in the office of a chairman of a committee who laughed at her when she said a few years ago that Roe was in danger and MA needed to act. The other activist nodded, though neither said who. Before Barrett was appointed, I don't think it was easy to get the MA legislature to act. Plus Baker is pro choice for middle class suburban adult women, but the legislature had. To override his veto to lower the age at which you could get an abortion w/o parental consent.
41: Lili's thread here is pretty right. That was posted before the symbolically-significant departure of the RNC from the Commission on Presidential Debates a month ago, and even slightly before the decision to go into the 2020 Convention without a new platform.
Strike one of those "a few years ago"s.
I think the debate-phase about abortion ended because close to everyone who was pro-life based on theological arguments has by now realized that the "pro-life" movement has become a single-issue anti-abortion movement run by people who are not Christian in the usual sense of trying to pay attention to what Jesus taught. Those people have become pro-choice or decided that Democrats are the lesser evil so keep quiet about abortion or they're doing whatever Elizabeth Bruening is doing (I could google, but I'm not going to as I suspect this is not a large group). The anti-abortion people aren't worried about factual stuff like banning treatment for ectopic pregnancy because they're expressing an identity, not setting up rules based on ethics. And, like the "anti-vax" people who show up in the hospitals with covid and forget their objections to doctors in an attempt to get back their health, they have no intention of following those rules.
I am impressed by this implication that decades in the pro-life movement primed conservatives to place pseudo-virtue over health during the pandemic. It's a terrifying thought, but might be onto something.
Christian in the usual sense of trying to pay attention to what Jesus taught.
I keep thinking of that one sentence in Adam Kotsko's n+1 essay: "The end result of their Christian faith is the unshakable conviction that nothing could be stupider than expecting people to live by the teachings of Christ."
I really spent too much time reading the Herman Cain Awards.
Anyway, it's still not as funny as a group of people committing crimes in public with an ideological commitment to not covering their face up.
43: the bit about how it's just abortion and nothing else derived from privacy looked to me like fishing for Roberts.
51 I've let myself become convinced that the opinion was leaked by either Alito or Thomas (through an agent) to keep Kav from defecting over to Roberts.
Roberts pitch could have been 'you know you did swear that you weren't going to ditch Roe.'
23: this is very much a Catholic thing rather than more broadly a Christian thing. The conception of Christ is not a huge deal in normal Prot churches and the conception of Mary is very much "I guess it happened in the normal way, but really who cares?"
Conception of Jesus is very much a big deal in evangelical churches. Obviously conception of Mary absolutely isn't as there's nothing in the Bible about that. (Similarly evangelicals care a lot that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born, but think any kind perpetual virginity is obvious nonsense since the Bible routinely mentions Jesus's brothers.)
54: I don't think Amay meant evangelicals when he was referring to normal Protestant churches. I think those are more akin to what we call mainline denominations in the US - Presbyterians, and Methodists. Lots of those people are pro-choice.
Hell, the Episcopal Church's national convention just said that Convention's position since 1967 has been to oppose *restrictions* on abortion.
Ok, it looks like I was wrong about Methodists being pro choice. But they do support protecting the lives of women. Methodism is a kind of evangelical tradition. Lutherans are pro choice. Congregationalists are, well, Congregationalists, but as a practical matter, they are mostly pro choice.
Lutherans are pro choice.
Depends. The conservative Missouri Synod is pro-life. As is the Wisconsin Synod. On the other hand the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is reasonably pro-choice, and it's about twice the size of the other two main Lutheran denominations combined.
57: right. ELCA is. I should remember thAt because I had a creepy Missouri Synod guy try to court me. I later looked him up, and he hat written some neo-Victorian article about women's place being in the home for a now defunct socially conservative magazine.
home for a now defunct socially conservative magazine
Assisted living facilities are getting really specialized.
Most of a congregation of Methodists in my hometown de-Methodized themselves because of something their synod did. This was in the 90s. I can't remember what it was about. It wasn't part of a national divide that was in the news at the time. My dad never said beyond "they didn't like the pastor" and I didn't really want to know what pisses off Methodists.
58: Ugh, that's awful.
Moby!
Anyway, my wife's still pregnant. We're horrified about what's happening in the US.
Babies are great. That's why the hospitals have to lock them up. Nobody ever tries to steal a patient with gout or something.
I mean, no one but specialist collectors.
I know slightly less about Protestantism than about the Catholicism that hovered around the edges of my childhood*, and both knowledge levels are minuscule, so the clarifications are appreciated.
* Mom's family is Catholic, she emphatically is not. I went to Catholic school for a year for the supposedly better academics and got an A in the pretty friendly and tolerant "religion" class, which taught me about interesting things like the concepts of grace and divine mystery. I took a college philosophy class on Aquinas because I thought The Name of the Rose was cool, but there wasn't as much violence or excitement: once I spent half the class asleep with my face in my lunch bagel. The stares that greeted me when I finally opened my eyes were memorable.
Very interesting thread about the poor polling about abortion: https://mobile.twitter.com/teemoneyusa/status/1522579786006212608
62: He was an economics concentrator who took a lot of Latin classes and was in my prose composition course. He sent me flowers on Valentine's Day with an original Latin composition. He also composed a poem and had it delivered to my door. I should have saved it, but I remember the final lines: "like Diana, chaste and fair/ all I am and all I have I humbly offer you."
I had lunch with him in the dining hall and said I didn't think we had a lot in common. H it s response: "we're both Christian."
I went all through college without sending flowers to anyone or learning Latin or writing a poem. I did drink a lot of Keystone Light.
One of the most naive things I've read from a guy who writes a lot of naive things. Sure, everyone has time to take off work and travel halfway across the country, to say nothing of the laws that will criminalize this.
Presumably, he's practicing and got better.
Since I needed two TfMRs, I can actually compare and contrast traveling for an abortion to having one a mile from home. It was miserable to be going through airports and in a hotel, on top of the other misery. The other thing is that many people want their partner with them for emotional support. Which means two people traveling, if travel is involved. We were able to afford for us both to go; being separated right then would have been all the more awful. The TfMR at home was still very sad, but at least we could wait at home and sleep in our own beds.
47, 48: I keep thinking of Wilhoit's Observation --
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:
"There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288
71 - at what point in pregnancy does one have to leave California to get an abortion?
We have abortion after 24 weeks for life, health of mother or fatal fetal anomaly only, but that was new in 2020, and the legislature had to override Baker's veto to pass the law.
I actually know someone who didn't realize she was pregnant until 6 months in. Everybody was gaining weight during COVID, and everybody just thought she was getting heavy, as many people were gaining weight. This person works in a doctor's office. My husband knew someone at work whose girlfriend did not know until she was in labor. She was quite overweight already, and she had regular bleeding which she thought was her period.
It may or may not be legal in CA, but there is no one willing to provide one. That would get them the attention of anti-abortion protesters and they won't risk getting shot or bombed. The doctor's words to me were "if a nurse told the press..." He later did the D&C for me at 23 weeks and has testified before Congress in favor of TfMR, so he is an ally. But hospital policy was that they couldn't be known for TfMR after 24 weeks. I had to go to New Mexico.
69: one thing i can say for k drum is that he makes my dad look better, better, best. go dad for becoming more focused on egalitarianism, the horror of poverty, and our enraging collective irresponsibility as you push right through your 80s!
71: one of my best friends had to abort a non viable pregnancy very late, the toll of doing so from home with caring professionals and family and friends near is horrific. add stressful travel just unimaginably vindictive & cruel.
After Tiller in Kansas was killed, there were only like 2 clinics in NM and CO performing the procedure. I think BIDMC here would now do it. I think MGH is kind of wimpy about reproductive health and might not.
Kansas seemed like an unlikely spot for that kind of clinic.
72: Because I am the only person who worries about Wilhoit's aphorism functioning as a thought-terminating cliché, I've decided to pose as a detractor, but it would be nice if a real detractor came along because I don't really disagree with it. I think my problem is more with the thought-terminating properties of social media.
I actually think this supreme court thing is also diminishing my general feelings towards mothers day. Like "happy forced mother's day, breeding class."
Actually I'm surprised that social media hasn't led to more of an upsurge of the aphoristic, the epigrammatic......I think it turns out that the power of social media works entirely through repetition and the well-craftedness of the original chunk of language means essentially nothing
add stressful travel just unimaginably vindictive & cruel.
I'm trying to place an op-ed to that effect, with the hook that if CA wants to be the abortion sanctuary, it needs to offer 3rd trimester TfMRs anywhere they would offer a 2nd trimester TfMR..
LB helped me with the thought process, with the realization that literally the only reason hospitals don't is that pro-life terrorism has done what it set out to do: scare providers out of the work.
LB helped me with the thought process, with the realization that literally the only reason hospitals don't is that pro-life terrorism has done what it set out to do: scare providers out of the work.
That sounds like a powerful piece; will you share a link if it's published?
Oh sure. Don't know if it'll go anywhere but I figure we should strike when the iron's hot.
Brava, Megan. Urgently needed piece.
81: Yeah, the two that come to mind that really got traction are Wilhoit's line and Adam Serwer's "the cruelty is the point," but memes and tweets play a pretty similar role -- the distinction may be that "reply" and "reaction" are such key functions, whereas aphorisms come out of an individual process of reflective synthesis which is much less in demand. Something like that.
If you want help with the placement, Megan, drop me an email and I can get you in touch with a potentially helpful contact.
Oh, I might. Offered it to the Bee three days ago. Don't know when I can shop it around after that.
82: As in, not what's legal, but what providers will typically do?
Right. I believe it is legal and none will do it, because they (rationally) decide they can't take on the pressure from pro-life protestors. My diagnosis came from within a high-risk pregnancy clinic at a hospital and the hospital (rationally) thought, 'nope, not getting in that mess, it would interfere too much'. Which I get, but when they all do that, there ends up being no providers in the state.
What going on in New Mexico that's different? Braver staff? Better response by law enforcement to threats? Is there something California can replicate?
One of four (but I don't know what/where two of them are, only the Colorado and New Mexico ones) stand-alone clinics. More dedicated, is my guess. There is a documentary (After Tiller?) about them, which I haven't seen. But the doctor who did our procedure is in the trailer. I mean, the odds were good.
"Better cops" is very unlikely to be a distinguishing feature of New Mexico. I've also wondered why that clinic has persisted but I don't have any ideas.
Maybe if you sell enough turquoise jewelry, you no longer fear death?
93: It's a good documentary. One of the women providers flew into New Mexico to the clinic.
Warren Hern in Colorado developed some innovative techniques for late term abortion in his private practice. He's been fully qualified since 1972. What happens when he retires? I think he's around 80.
And in his 70's he had a young-ish child, so his wife was pretty worried about it because of the death threats and the obsessive dedication.
Yep, that's her. She lives somewhere near my sister when she isn't commuting to NM.
The 4th is Leroy Carhart who is in Nebraska, which is hardly a welcoming state when it comes to abortion.
That's three. Nebraska, NM and Colorado. Or is it three locations, four doctors? Total, in the whole country?
I could watch the documentary and find out, I suppose, but I'm not that eager to know more.
100:
Virginia. I'm hurt that you people so easily forget.
I usually call it "South Delaware".
101: will, I did not forget that you did work to protect abortion rights and was just thinking of you because of this. But I did not know that Virginia had a late-term clinic. I thought there were just four doctors.
Teofilo!
Bostoniangirl: in fact my dad was one of the four doctors in the Carhart, et al cases and he still practices.
Very good to see you, Will.
Lap swim just opened for the summer and I'm really enjoying it.
i'm doing an open water stroke clinic on saturday and i'm soooo looking forward to it. ahhhhh ...
Megan and DQ:
Outside swimming is the best.
Agreed - first swim of the year at the weekend - a bit later than last year which was at Easter (though very brief)