#abortion

[infamousbrad]

Oh, look, it's that question again! The one I've been obsessed with ever since I first learned about the Holocaust as a kid:

How would you know if it were time to run?

[homosexuhauls]

Feminists who make sensible, reasoned arguments in favour of autonomy and have calm debates with the anti-abortion crowd are amazing and I admire them and of course we need them to continue educating and informing, for the sake of the women and girls on the fringes of the discussion especially.

But ffs I do not CARE if the foetus is alive, or a person, or a baby, or anything else. If something is in my body and I do not want it there, it is not staying inside me. I am not a vessel. I am not obligated to grow a new human with my own body and its resources.

"Consent to heterosexual sex is consent to pregnancy but also if you're raped don't blame the ickle baby and abort." Sure. Hence abortion. Hence contraceptives. Solutions are invented when there are problems to be solved. Whether those problems are natural or created or even self-inflicted is irrelevant.

"Mothers have an obligation to their children." And yet, those who seek abortions should be prepared to choose adoption as a satisfactory alternative. So which is it, are we dutiful mothers from the moment of conception or are we supposed to be happy performing unwanted reproductive labour for adoptive parents? Are we cattle or are we dogs?

"You're killing your baby." I don't care if it's an endangered Amur leopard cub tbh, it's not staying there. I am not a mother and I do not want to reproduce. I have seen motherhood. I think mothers are incredible, as a group and often as individuals. I also think unwanted motherhood is the cruelest fate imaginable, for both woman and child.

Bottom line is, there is no scenario where it is more ethical to force a woman or girl through pregnancy and birth than it is to safely terminate said unwanted pregnancy. No amount of guilt-tripping or moralising or misinformation or provocative rhetoric can outweigh my right to choose not to be pregnant.

(Also personally I would terminate myself if I couldn't access termination for an unwanted pregnancy. So I guess the foetus would still technically end up aborted lol. You ain't growing from me, sunshine.)

[houseofbrat]

For three days last fall, Leah Wilson entered her pregnant patient’s hospital room and checked the fetus for a heartbeat. She was waiting for it to stop. The woman’s water had broken at just 19 weeks of pregnancy, well before viability, causing an infection in her uterus. The fetus would not survive, but until it died, or the woman’s condition worsened, there was little the hospital would do, said Wilson, who was her nurse at the time.

Typically in this kind of situation, doctors would terminate the pregnancy to prevent a life-threatening infection or other serious complication. But this patient was in Texas, where abortion is no longer legal.

So they waited. The smell of the infection filled the room, Wilson said. She tried to help the patient stay clean. She watched her vitals and monitored her for sepsis—if the infection got bad enough, if it spread through her body, then the doctors would finally intervene, to save her life. Wilson struggled to explain to the woman slowly losing her pregnancy why they weren’t doing anything else to help. Finally, on the third day, she said, the heartbeat stopped.

[...]

More than a year and a half after Texas implemented its six-week abortion ban, and months after Dobbs, medical providers say they are facing impossible situations that pit their ethical obligation to patients who are dealing with traumatic and dangerous pregnancy complications against the fear of lawsuits, loss of their medical licenses, and incarceration. The problem is encapsulated by a lawsuit filed this month in Texas, in which five women and two OB-GYNs sued the state over the abortion bans that they say have created so much confusion and fear among providers that it has affected women’s health and even threatened their lives. Unsure of how to comply with the new rules, hospitals have interpreted them differently, with some requiring approval from attorneys or ethics boards for physicians to provide abortion care in medical emergencies, and others leaving it up to individual doctors, with little guidance or support. This has meant that some physicians wait until patients are near death to intervene in medical emergencies, according to recent research, court filings, news reports, and interviews. “I’ll get consults from another doctor asking me what to do in a particular case—a mother bleeding, or a pregnancy where there’s an infection in the womb before the baby can survive outside the womb. I have doctors calling me, hesitating, not quite knowing what to do because the baby has a heartbeat, when clearly the mother’s life is at risk,” John Visintine, a maternal fetal medicine specialist in McAllen, Texas, told me. “These are things that I haven’t seen in, you know, 20 years of practicing OB, 14 years of practicing high-risk OB—I’ve never run into these situations where people are wondering what to do.”

The inability to provide what they say is the standard of care to pregnant patients is taking a toll, personally and professionally, according to interviews with more than a dozen doctors and nurses across Texas. And it’s causing many, like Wilson, to reconsider the future of their career in the state. Almost every provider I spoke with for this story has thought about leaving their practice or leaving Texas in the wake of S.B. 8 and Dobbs. Several have already moved or stopped seeing patients here, at least in large part because of the abortion bans. “If I was ever touch a patient again, it won’t be in the state of Texas,” said Charles Brown, chair of ​​the Texas district of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), who stopped seeing patients last year after decades working as a maternal fetal medicine specialist. Many asked that their hospital affiliation not be included in this story, in some cases because they feared consequences from their employer or the public for speaking out about these laws, even though they’re not breaking them. Some worry about what will happen to their own kids if they are targeted. Several cried through the interviews. Many of those I spoke with who haven’t left yet are still thinking about it regularly—people who have family and homes and lives in Texas and would not otherwise have considered moving.

Brown put the stakes bluntly: “Are people quitting? … The answer is yes,” he said. “I hope I’m 100 percent wrong about this, but I think it’s a much bigger trend that’s going to become obvious pretty quickly.”

[...]

Guan said she questions her future practicing in Texas each time she sees a case like this. “It doesn’t feel very sustainable for me in the long run, to feel like I’m not allowed to be a doctor,” she said. Most of her friends stayed in Chicago where they trained, or moved to other states that aren’t subject to abortion bans. “A lot of them feel like, If this is the toll that it’s going to take on me, I should just move, or find some other kind of position where I’m not going to be exposed to these patient cases. But I also feel like if anything, that makes the problem worse, right? If every OB—let’s say every OB you talk to who felt similarly—decides to leave the state, we just have fewer OBs here, even less access for these patients. And that doesn’t feel like a viable solution.”

[...]

Texas has one of the most significant physician shortages in the country, with a shortfall that is expected to increase by more than 50 percent over the next decade, according to the state’s projections. The shortage of registered nurses, around 30,000, is expected to nearly double over the same period. Already, Texans in large swaths of the state must drive hours for medical care, including to give birth. According to recent research from the nonprofit March of Dimes, it is among the worst states for maternity care access, which has decreased in a dozen Texas counties in the past two years, mostly due to a loss of obstetrics providers.

This doesn’t yet take into account the effects of increased criminalization of abortion care, which is further compounded by dramatic pandemic-induced burnout among clinicians. As physicians retire, hospitals are struggling to replace them; as nurses burn out or leave for more lucrative travel nursing roles, their positions are sitting open. There have been a string of policies and factors that have stretched providers in Texas for many years, from having the highest uninsured rate in the country to low Medicaid reimbursement rates to the demonization of science to attacks on transgender health care, and now the abortion bans, according to Tom Banning, the CEO of the Texas Academy of Family Physicians. “The first rule of holes, when you’re trying to get out of the hole, is to stop digging,” he said. “We just continue to dig the hole that we’re in deeper.”

[...]

Liedtke and others are concerned these gaps will only grow now that new doctors training in obstetrics are unable to learn the full scope of pregnancy and abortion care in Texas. Already, residencies and recruiters are reporting a hesitancy among new and seasoned doctors to practice in states with abortion bans, and some programs are sending current residents out of state for training rotations where available so they can meet medical standards. Guan, who works with residents at her hospital, said she reminds them that certain ways pregnancy complications are now managed in Texas are not the standard of care—that this is not the way these situations are treated everywhere. The scarcity also raises the stakes: When there are limited providers, the importance of each one knowing how to deal with complicated situations is higher, Banning said: “There’s no safety net.”

[...]

Still, she’s felt the impact of the new laws on her practice. On the day we spoke in November, Liedtke said she had gone to three different pharmacies in town to try to get a prescription filled for methotrexate. The drug can be used to end a pregnancy, and Liedtke needed it for a patient who came to the emergency room with an ectopic pregnancy, which is nonviable and life-threatening if left untreated. Despite an explicit exception for ectopic pregnancies in Texas abortion law, Liedtke said the physician who first saw the patient didn’t want to prescribe the drug, and the big pharmacies in town won’t fill it anymore. Eventually, her neighbor, who’s a pharmacist, agreed, provided she fax over the ultrasound. The personal relationships are critical, she said: “My neighbor knows that I don’t do elective abortions, I only do them when there’s medical indication. And we go to church together, and he knows that.”

[...]

Providers in Texas have been navigating care under a near-total abortion ban for the longest time of any state in America. But this conflict over whether to stay or go is also playing out across the dozen other states that have banned abortion care following Dobbs. And while those working in reproductive health care are most directly affected by these abortion bans, doctors I’ve spoken to warned it doesn’t end with them. Cancer doctors are wondering if they can treat pregnant patients. Some providers who can become or want to become pregnant are considering moving away or are hesitating to come to states with abortion bans for their own safety, physicians told me. Others with kids already are making similar calculations. “It’s everything,” Brown said. “They don’t want to live in a state where their children can’t get health care.”

[moonlight-kr]

POSTING THIS AGAIN!!!

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE BE CAREFUL OUT THERE!!!

[samwisethewitch]

I literally do not care what the Bible says about any political issue. I am not Christian. Christian scripture should have zero effect on my life or my personal freedoms. 

[nicostiel]

[ankle-beez]

Welcome to the United States of America where if you want to be safe from guns you die if you want to get a safe abortion you die if you're gay you die if you're black you die if you're a woman you die if you're disabled you die if you're a kid you die if you're a POC you die if you're trans you die and no one will do anything about it because some stupid cuntrags that are two steps away from tripping on a staircase and dying cling to some dipshit beliefs from over 6 decades ago and decide to make it everyone's problem

[liberalsarecool]

Health care includes abortion.

[gardening-tea-lesbian]

Original thread:

https://mobile.twitter.com/DianaMiller5/status/1522278413096132609?cxt=HHwWgoC53deJnKAqAAAA

Note, I am finding these threads on the twitter feeds of ICU nurses who are now dreading the horrors that Roe falling will bring to their hospitals. This, on top of the horrors that they’ve seen and continue to see because of the pandemic. They were already exhausted and hanging by a thread.

[uselessnocturnal]

[thepro-lifemovement]

I hate when I see this message on YouTube because, by this logic, a c-section could be called an abortion. It removes a fetus and placenta from the uterus via surgery. They are so scared to be honest about what abortion really is: the intentional death of an unborn human being.

[luulapants]

stop feeling hopeless, start getting ready

If you are in a red state, your state either has an abortion ban in place or is rated by the Guttmacher Institute as likely to enact a ban. Your focus should be on protecting yourself and others who need abortions.

stop using electronic period tracking apps or software

educate yourself and others about pregnancy prevention and join groups that are making preventative birth control more accessible

learn the nearest and most accessible routes to states where you and your loved ones can access abortion

contribute to mutual aid funds to help transport people over state lines if they are in need of abortion

consider joining The Satanic Temple so you can claim protections under the Religious Abortion Ritual if you are prosecuted for obtaining an abortion

keep a stock of by-mail abortion pills for yourself and/or others who may need them (you may need to travel out of state to obtain them)

form community provider networks and see if you or someone you know can be trained to use manual vacuum aspiration kits or a Del-Em

all of the above should be done in complete secrecy using verbal communication, end-to-end encrypted apps such as Signal, or a VPN

If you are in a yellow state, you currently have constitutional abortion protections but they are in jeopardy. Get active in local political groups NOW to fight back against constitutional amendments to ban abortion. Your focus should be purely on political action.

If you are in Michigan, you currently have a ban in place which is being challenged, and your governor is working to add abortion protections into the Michigan state constitution. Your focus should be on supporting the work that is currently under way.

If you are in a green state, your state has constitutional protections for abortion that are unlikely to be challenged. Your focus should be on helping others to enter your state for abortion care.

connect with abortion access groups such as Aid Access, Abortion on Demand, the National Network of Abortion Funds, or Just The Pill

volunteer to help people enter your state for abortion care, either with transportation help or letting someone crash on your couch

if you live in a green state with no current or predicted primary routes from other states for abortion access, you can focus your efforts on supporting political action in other areas

If you are in a purple state, your state currently has no constitutional protections for abortion but is unlikely to implement a ban. You have two focuses: pushing for constitutional protections AND helping others to enter your state for abortion care (see green state list).

[fox-bright]

This meme is a MURDER ATTEMPT.

I am absolutely fucking serious. The original meme, without the big red denial, is someone's attempt to fucking kill people.

There is NO SAFE DOSAGE of pennyroyal oil. Even Mother Earth News says there's no reason to use pennyroyal essential oil for ANYTHING, even topically or as a fragrance, for fuckssake! That should give you some idea about how dangerous it is!

Pennyroyal tea, plant matter in hot water, is a traditional abortifacient. It is *incredibly* dangerous, induces abortion by bringing the body close to organ failure (and frequently pushing the system right over the edge, because dosage is impossible to meter), but I would drink a gallon of it before I took a half-teaspoon of pennyroyal essential oil.

Two teaspoons, taken across 48 hours, has successfully killed someone.

Three teaspoons taken as a single dosage killed the consumer within THREE HOURS.

There is NO SAFE DOSAGE! FOR PENNYROYAL OIL INTERNALLY! NONE!

The person who made this meme is PURPOSEFULLY, ACTIVELY, trying to get desperate people killed!

[lesbiacebian]

ppl being like “abortion is okay only if you took all the “correct” measures first or if you were impregnated non-consensually” SHUT UP! abortion for “sexually promiscuous” people and sex addicts and ppl you call sluts and whores and people who have one-night stands and every single person who had sex because they felt like it! you do not have to reach a quota of suffering to “deserve” an abortion. abortion is not something you earn. abortion isn’t a moral thing like you protestants like to think it’s a fucking right and everyone deserves access to it and they don’t have to prove that they deserve it. pregnancy is not a punishment for sex and every single person deserves the right to terminate a pregnancy regardless of how they became pregnant. shut up

[odinsblog]

Finally, some good news.

👉🏿 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/health/abortion-pills-fda.html

[chuutoro]

the onion going hard in its landing page layout again...

i felt this in my soul: