lattebubblebitch - Tumblr blog

[lattebubblebitch]

…we got to this terrifying place not just by some wrong turn made recently by one wrong person we don’t like, but by decades-long, systemic failures. The biggest and most damning of these is the failure to counter a regressive movement’s project to ensure minority rule and thus dismantle the rights and protections won by activists who labored over generations to gain them — abortion rights very much included. That failure in turn reflects a deeper one: an unwillingness to take the full humanity of women, of pregnant people, of Black and brown and poor people, seriously.

The overturn of Roe will not be about one failed electoral campaign or badly timed Supreme Court death or failure to retire — though as with any historical cataclysm, its timing and shape will have been determined by those factors, sure. But Roe — like the Voting Rights Act that was gutted in 2013, and the labor and climate and anti-corporate and gay-rights protections that have been and will continue to be rolled back — would not have been made vulnerable to these quirks of timing and personality had it ever had the kind of institutional, ideological, intellectual, and emotional muscle behind it that it deserved. Its loss will reflect years of inattention from those entrusted with its guardianship, by definition the people nearest to the top of our power structures, people who advertise themselves as invested in the rights and protections of people closer to the bottom, yet who have repeatedly failed to prioritize those people’s dignity and well-being — to even really see, much less care about, the daily, lived impact of abortion prohibition.

It wasn’t four years after Roe that the Hyde Amendment — which barred the use of government insurance programs to pay for most abortions — first passed, making the purported legal right to abortion care practically nonexistent for people who relied on federal insurance programs for their health care. Over the half-century that abortion has been officially legal on a federal level, it has become ever more inaccessible to people of color, to poor people, to immigrants, to younger people, to people in rural communities and in red states, thanks to Hyde and more than 1,300 state and local restrictions and regulations. Curtailed abortion access has made already imperiled populations ever more imperiled, all while Roe has officially stood.

Meanwhile, abortion clinics have been bombed and people shot and killed within them; providers have been brutally murdered, including at their places of worship. The Republican Party has strategized takeovers of school boards and state legislatures on campaigns built around the valuation of fetal life above female life, and still those who have screamed about all of this — who have jumped up and down and yelled that this was happening and that the Democratic Party should prioritize it and that the press should cover it because these were actual human beings — those people have been derided, including by people supposedly on the same side of the fight, as hysterics and blinkered single-issue voters.

The Democratic Party, including its presidents over the decades, has not taken seriously enough the threat to abortion rights. It’s not that these politicians didn’t officially support the correct thing: Barack Obama opposed the Hyde Amendment but also described the “tradition, in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government-funded health care.” Again, this is not about Barack Obama any more than it is about Hillary Clinton (who offered one of the most powerful public explications of abortion as health care of any Democrat during her debate against Donald Trump and who is rumored to have devised the regressive “safe, legal, and rare” framework in the 1990s that cast abortion as a regrettably necessary evil, not a cornerstone of comprehensive health care) or about Bernie Sanders (who has remained a staunch opponent of Hyde or any abortion restriction throughout his career and has argued that voters could get past their differences on guns and abortion and find common economic ground, as if abortion is not itself an economic issue).

It’s about a Democratic Party that has, before and since Roe, included lots of politicians who believe in abortion rights and access but simply do not prioritize it, who have argued that their party should be more, and not less, open to those who actively oppose abortion if they are otherwise progressive on economic issues, as if those stances are compatible (they are not).

Democratic leadership chose not to fight vocally the Supreme Court nominations of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, or Amy Coney Barrett as being an assault on legal abortion, even though the president who nominated them had directly promised anti-abortion groups “another two or perhaps three justices ” who would “automatically, in my opinion” overturn Roe. This was right out there for everyone on the broadly defined left to see, hear, and fight tooth and nail against. But again and again, those at the top of the party signaled that it was not a fight worth having and have remained quiet even as Republicans cast the ones who were fighting as deranged. During Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, Nebraska senator Ben Sasse lectured on how there have “been screaming protesters saying, ‘Women are going to die’ at every hearing for decades.” Sasse was correct. There have been those protesters, and they have been treated as hysterics, not just by Sasse himself, but by the party that should have been letting their intensity guide them.

Make no mistake: Those protesters have been correct, for all the years and all the hearings. Yet Democrats have permitted an inaccurate, dishonest right-wing framework — the notion that abortion is some hot-button issue on which the country is sharply divided, when in fact the protection of the right to legal abortion is one of the most popular planks in a Democratic platform even in most red states — to keep them from making political fights about abortion. I’m sure that the argument behind this can be backed up by some pollster or numbers guy or consultant, but the big, unspoken reason is that most politicians, the majority of whom remain white men and many of the rest wealthy white women who themselves will never know inaccessibility of health care, find abortion icky and distasteful — because they find the bodies and lives and needs of people who need abortions icky and distasteful.

This was error and dereliction, repeated over decades and amplified by the press. The lies told by a right wing, and by a press corps eager to repeat them, were easily disprovable: Everyone knew where Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Barrett stood and what they were put on the court to do, and yet we had to watch some bizarre performance during their confirmation hearings of pretending that they cared enough about precedent to let Roe stand. Supreme Court justices appointed by presidents who won fewer votes than their opponents dared this week to entertain the argument that a functional democratic process would surely protect the abortion rights of those who wanted them, should abortion go back to the states. They just sat there, with their ill-gotten seats, pretending that democracy was an intact remedy.

The voting and reproductive and labor rights now being undone were won over generations, not by those at the top of our systems, but by the most vulnerable bodies, working in coalition through their lives on a project that would extend well beyond their deaths, over centuries. The irony is that when those rights and protections were finally codified, they were put under the protection of a party and covered by a press that simply didn’t take any of that work, those sacrifices, those stakes, seriously.

—The Betrayal of Roe

[lattebubblebitch]

Men who thought that being told to wear a face mask in supermarkets was unconstitutional tyranny that would lead to the end of democracy in America are telling us now that being forced to surrender our internal organs, health, teeth, hair, and lives to fetuses is actually no big deal because we can give the fetus up for adoption in almost a year, assuming both of us survive the gestation.

[lattebubblebitch]

re: “Children cannot consent to sex, and they cannot consent to abortion. Arranging for a 10-year-old rape survivor to have an abortion is both a crime against the unborn child & the 10 year old. In this tragic, extreme situation, both children are victims & both deserve care.”

I really have noticed at this point that, at least 90% of the time on this site, when people feel the need to start their tweet with “children cannot consent to sex,” the rest of the tweet will be some of the most vulgar defense of child sexual abuse you could possibly think of.

If people start their message with “children cannot consent to sex,” almost every damn time the next thing that person will say will be something along the lines of “but we can consent for them.”

Your claims of personhood of an unborn fetus means nothing, less then nothing even, when you cannot consider a living child, a person who can move around on their own, talk to you and others, feel emotions, have hobbies, friends, and motivations for living, a human being in of themself.

And this Lila Rose does claim, at least, to care for the well being of the ten-year-old as a rape victim. But if you truly cared about her as one, cared about taking away at least some level of pain and suffering from her life, you’d be willing to help get rid of a fetus from inside of her.

Even if you considered that fetus a living being, what do you think would be less suffering? Getting rid of an unborn child before it has the chance to live with the struggles of being a product of child rape? Or letting them live as one, a hell few people ever truly know?

But of course, you don’t really care about the actual humanity of living children.

[lattebubblebitch]

[lattebubblebitch]

when is someone going to spew classic love quotes on the anniversary of meeting me

[lattebubblebitch]

I know.

You're angry. You should be. You're scared. You should be.

This is awful. It's horrifying. It's deeply depressing. Rage. Scream. Mourn the tragedy we know is coming.

But remember this: what we are about to experience is the world our grandmothers and great grandmothers lived in. This is what they fought against.

Remember that they won. Even if the victory was temporary, they still won.

We can win, too. Prepare yourself. Finish your mourning, and get back to the fight. Yes, it's awful that we have to have this same fight. It's frustrating. It's heartbreaking. But now is not the time to surrender to despair.

Now the work begins.

[lattebubblebitch]

I genuinely mean this, I hope all 5 of those Supreme Court members who voted Yes have to live their lives getting harassed and are extremely bothered till their last dying breath.

Bother them, make their lives miserable, make them not want to leave their homes.

Reminder: “People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.” ― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

[lattebubblebitch]

in that case, i’m going to file to be able to vote in a month when i’m seventeen and three months, because that’s when i was conceived! i have been a whole person all that time!

Holy fucking shit.

They are out of their goddamn minds.

Then are those fertilized eggs "dependents?"

Do those fertilized eggs get child support?

How far are they going to go? Will the destruction of those stored fertilized eggs be considered "murder?" How far back? Is there a statute of limitations?

Will only the egg maker be charged with murder, or will the sperm donor also be charged?

[lattebubblebitch]

and make him pay out of his own pocket for it all, face societal rejection, be taught in school that it is shameful… the list goes on.

Brilliant from Gloria Steinem: "How about we treat every young man who wants to buy a gun like every woman who wants to get an abortion - mandatory 48-hour waiting period, parental permission, a note from his doctor proving he understands what he's about to do, a video he has to watch about the effects of gun violence...Let's close down all but one gun shop in every state and make him travel hundreds of miles, take time off work, and stay overnight in a strange town to get a gun. Make him walk through a gauntlet of people holding photos of loved ones who were shot to death, people who call him a murderer and beg him not to buy a gun."

[lattebubblebitch]

k, so a little about me:

im seventeen, white and non-binary

my name is toni, and i use they/them pronouns

i am a lesbian

i am autistic

i love music, and i mostly listen to taylor swift, olivia rodrigo, louis tomlinson, avril lavigne, little mix, paramore and harry styles (yes a weird mix ik just go with it)

im a bit of a bitch sometimes and i am not afraid to make people mad when i go off on my clown shit, although i’ll probably make a different blog for that

i do have mental illnesses, so some things make me uncomfortable

i will block if things make me feel unsafe or uncomfortable

aaaand that’s all for now, i will be sharing random thoughts, struggles, daily things, maybe some fandom stuff, and probably at some point some weird cryptic shit on here

so hi

[lattebubblebitch]

do you ever just look up at the stars and think how small you truly are, and how inconsequential all of the troubles you’re facing in your life are on the scope of the universe? and how, in the end, we are all just dust in this massive world? we have purposes here on earth, but in the grand scheme of things, we are smaller than we realize. so let that shit go. your place in this universe is too special, and it is unique even if there are trillions of others. so don’t let your life be wasted on things that bring you pain. live it as those great stars above do, shining as hard as you can. let your light shine. the stars are watching.