Alabama Abortion Law Highlights Poor Maternity, Childcare Stats

From the article:

In Alabama, a state that just passed a total ban on abortion, more than a quarter of children live in poverty; 30 percent of those children are under the age of five.

Only half of Alabama’s 67 counties have an obstetrician.

Infant care for a single child in Alabama takes up an average of 11 percentof a family’s income. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, child care costs are unaffordable when they exceed 7 percent of a family’s income.

Single mothers in Alabama spend 29 percent of their income on childcare costs.

Child care costs for families with two children—an infant and a four year old—cost 28 percent more than the average rent in the state.

About 88 percent of Alabama’s rural hospitals are operating “in the red.”

Alabama has the second highest infant mortality rate in the country.

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Single mothers in Alabama spend 29 percent of their income on childcare costs.

Child care costs for families with two children—an infant and a four year old—cost 28 percent more than the average rent in the state.

About 88 percent of Alabama’s rural hospitals are operating “in the red.”

Alabama has the second highest infant mortality rate in the country.

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Single mothers in Alabama spend 29 percent of their income on childcare costs.

Child care costs for families with two children—an infant and a four year old—cost 28 percent more than the average rent in the state.

About 88 percent of Alabama’s rural hospitals are operating “in the red.”

Alabama has the second highest infant mortality rate in the country.

Source: Alabama Abortion Law Highlights Poor Maternity, Childcare Stats

Yeah, abortion was really the biggest issue in Alabama. . . I say sarcastically.

It’s almost like these politicians don’t actually care about the people that make up their constituents.

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Why Alabama’s Abortion Ban Goes Beyond Alabama | The Mary Sue

From the article:

The ban on abortion in Alabama has been signed into law but is unlikely to go into effect for a long time, if ever, being purposefully designed to attract court challenges in order to take the case to the Supreme Court. Still, the law includes no exceptions for rape and incest and would be devastating and life-endangering for Alabama women—but at the same time, it’s about more, even, than Alabama. It’s about Roe v. Wade, and the health, human rights, and futures of all women and pregnant people in this country.

That said, it didn’t take Trump becoming president to render abortion virtually inaccessible for many women, and especially lower-income women of color, in several states, with myriad socioeconomic and geographic barriers already in place on the state and federal level. Since 1973, when Roe v. Wade was first decided, close to 1,200 state and federal laws restricting abortion access have passed, and as of 2014, around 90 percent of all U.S. counties lack an abortion provider.

Barriers to reproductive rights in this country have been taking us in this dreaded direction for years, but Donald Trump and his power to craft a judicial system and Supreme Court in the spitting image of his misogyny, has finally made the anti-abortion movement’s endgame a real possibility in America. After all, just this week, the U.S. Senate confirmed Wendy Vitter, Trump’s nominee for a federal judgeship in Louisiana, and a new, inexperienced, and radical opponent of abortion rights who has spread lies that abortion leads to cancer and suicide.

Source: Why Alabama’s Abortion Ban Goes Beyond Alabama | The Mary Sue

This is the culmination of decades of chipping away at abortion rights. The problem with the more progressive liberal side of things, is that it is by nature reactive. It takes a while to react, and when small slow changes accumulate, it’s hard to see what’s been going on.

Then, we have a sudden surge of bullshit, and the Supreme Court is already stacked with anti-abortion judges.

This article is a good read, if you are just becoming aware that this is a problem.

Missouri State Senate Passes a Near-Total Abortion Ban

From the article:

Now that Alabama Governor Kay Ivey has signed a near-total ban on abortion into law, Missouri is the latest state to follow suit.

Source: Missouri State Senate Passes a Near-Total Abortion Ban

This is a no-exception ban on abortion after 8 weeks.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s with the knowledge I could access abortion, was a comfort to a guy that was born into a woman’s body. While I was fairly comfortable with how I looked, the idea of pregnancy haunted me so much I got a tubal ligation at the age of 20. The mere idea of being pregnant was a total no go.

Planned Parenthood saved my life because I had a pregnancy scare at 16, and I had no way to express the horror I felt at the idea of being pregnant. They tested me, got me on birth control, and I felt safe again. I’m not sure I’d still be here if I had been forced to be pregnant. I had already planned that at the age of 16.

My fear of pregnancy was enough that I took birth control pills in secret, and made the men I slept with use condoms as if that was the only birth control to avoid the inevitable straight boy arguments.

When I was older I took some of my friends, and eventually my sister for an abortion. Each instance was a case of extremes. Homelessness, drug abuse, or in my sisters case, spousal violence. None of those women could have carried a baby to term.

This concerted effort to outlaw one of the safest procedures you can medically get, is a violence against anyone that can get pregnant.

Women Die Because Lawmakers Don’t Understand Sex Ed | The Mary Sue

From the article:

Despite the danger their laws pose, the anti-abortion Republican lawmakers behind these bills hardly seem interested in learning fact from fiction, even when it means the death or punishment of women as collateral damage for their ignorance. Just on Wednesday, anti-choice lawmakers in Ohio introduced a wide-ranging bill that would all at once ban insurance coverage of abortion, prohibit access to pretty much all birth control, and institute a misguided measure regarding ectopic or tubal pregnancies involving conception outside the womb.

Per the bill’s male writer, abortions for these ectopic pregnancies would be prohibited because the embryo could be “removed from the fallopian tube and [reinserted] it in the uterus,” wholly ignoring women as human beings beyond their reproductive systems. For one thing, as experts have pointed out, this imagined health procedure just … doesn’t exist, and for another, following the same anti-science reasoning, the bill would also prohibit birth control methods like pills, IUDs, and other hormonal contraception by equating any birth control that could act to stop a fertilized egg from implanting to the uterus with abortion.

Source: Women Die Because Lawmakers Don’t Understand Sex Ed | The Mary Sue

Emphasis is mine. That isn’t even fucking possible. It’s just like that stupid “abortion reversal” that is all fucking made up lies. It’s not fucking medically possible.

The most stark part of this is that the bill prohibits actual birth control. It was never about reproductive options. It was always about punishing women for having sex.

Fuck them.

Alabama Abortion Law: Lawmakers Outlaw Nearly All Abortions In The State : NPR

From the article:

The Alabama Senate passed a bill Tuesday evening to ban nearly all abortions. The state House had already overwhelmingly approved the legislation. It’s part of a broader anti-abortion strategy to prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider the right to abortion.

It would be one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the United States. The bill would make it a crime for doctors to perform abortions at any stage of a pregnancy, unless a woman’s life is threatened or in case of a lethal fetal anomaly.

The vote was 25-6, with one abstention.

Doctors in the state would face felony jail time up to 99 years if convicted. But a woman would not be held criminally liable for having an abortion.

Source: Alabama Abortion Law: Lawmakers Outlaw Nearly All Abortions In The State : NPR

The point is to force this to go to the Supreme Court, and try to overturn Roe vs Wade, and create a precedent to outlaw abortion in total.

I fucking hate the South right now. There might be good people that live there, but it’s a fucking hellhole for women’s rights, LGBTQ people, and racial inequality.

This is a big deal. This constant unrelenting attack on reproductive rights is exhausting and cruel.

I can guarantee you that women with money, like upper class white women, will not be half as effected. They will just pay the funds to fly to a different state and have it done. (The only moral abortion, being their abortion.)

It will be the poorer women, without the means, that will be stuck. In this case, it will also be the victims of rape and incest.

Trans people could lose access to health care if this large hospital joins a Catholic network / LGBTQ Nation

From the article:

Health care professionals are protesting a proposed hospital merger because they would be forced to deny care to transgender people.

The University of California’s hospital in San Francisco is considering a merger with the Catholic hospital system Dignity Health. Dignity has 39 hospitals.

Because Dignity is Catholic and follows the doctrines of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, doctors and other health care workers there are banned from performing abortions, in vitro fertilization, doctor-assisted suicide, and any gender-affirming care for transgender people.

The hospital chain is currently fighting two lawsuits from the ACLU. In one case, the hospital refused to provide a hysterectomy to a trans man.

Source: Trans people could lose access to health care if this large hospital joins a Catholic network / LGBTQ Nation

It’s not all bad as 1500 faculty, residents, students and alumni have opposed the merger.

Religion in hospitals is such a strange development. Catholic hospitals are a real things, and they do have rules that conform to their religious philosophy.

This merger will impact reproductive healthcare for people that can get pregnant, and transgender people seeking services.

I found it interesting that the article points out that the number of Catholic owned hospitals increased to 22% from 2001 to 2016. That’s almost 1 in 4 hospitals in the US that can refuse you care based on their sincerely held religious beliefs.

Georgia’s Governor Signs ‘Fetal Heartbeat’ Abortion Law

From the article:

Lawmakers approved the bill in March and the law is set to take effect Jan. 1, 2020. It significantly decreases the period of time for a woman to have an abortion in the state, currently set at 20 weeks.

Source: Georgia’s Governor Signs ‘Fetal Heartbeat’ Abortion Law : NPR

Right now, this is happening all over because they want to force it to go to court to attempt to get this as the de facto rule for abortion set as a precedent.

Let’s also be clear, that a 6 week abortion ruling would effectively outlaw abortion in total. If, and it’s a big if, a woman has a four week cycle, she could not know she’s pregnant until after the 6 weeks is past. The problem is if you conceive at the beginning of your cycle, you go the four weeks, and then are a week or two late? You are out of time.

Not every woman is remotely regular in her cycles, and even if you are? It’s not uncommon to be late a week or so.

This is a strategy to ban abortion. It will not effect rich people, as they will fly wherever it takes to get one, but it will effect those people that don’t have the means.

Trump touts new faith-based protections for health care workers for the right to refuse to treat patients.

From the article:

Health-care providers and civil rights groups, however, expressed worry the rule could compromise patients’ well-being in ways large and small. On page 80, for instance, HHS appears to allow for the possibility that ambulance drivers, or EMT personnel, could refuse care in certain situations.

“It appears that a paramedic could refuse to drive a woman having an emergency – such as an ectopic pregnancy – because they object to the treatment she will receive at the hospital,” Heather Shumaker, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center.

Others feared the rule would be used as cover for discrimination.

“The administration’s decision puts LGBTQ people at greater risk of being denied necessary and appropriate health care solely based on their sexual orientation or gender identity,” said David Stacy, government affairs director for Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBTQ advocacy group.

Source: National Day of Prayer: Trump touts new faith-based protections for health care workers – The Washington Post

This is going to disproportionately impact the LGTBQ community, and anybody seeking reproductive healthcare.

This is nothing more than a license to discriminate.

From my own experiences as a transgender man, giving bigots the right to refuse me when they were more than willing to do so in a healthcare setting before this is horrific. Now, they will have no repercussions when using what power they have to hurt others.

My only hope is that the next administration will right all of these very egregious wrongs.

The Truth About Abortion Reversal

From the article:

But there is no scientific or medical evidence that proves “reversing” a medication abortion is possible: There are no clinical trials and no objective or credible data. It is only a theory that has been introduced by anti-abortion activists and politicians to further attack access. When misinformation spreads, it affects the patients who seek care in my exam room.

Source: The Truth About Abortion Reversal

I was a low level nurse, with no real background in abortion, but I know enough to know that this abortion reversal thing is absolute bullshit.

This is blatant lies and misinformation. This article breaks down how medical abortions work, how the theory of a reversal would work. When you see it laid out it becomes even more ludicrous.

The author even goes over the flawed study that was used to say this was an option.

It’s a good read if you are tired of hearing about abortion reversals that are just more lies.

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This is my last day out. See you back to the normal blog tomorrow.

Time to Do More Than Just Play Defense on Abortion Rights | The Mary Sue

From the article:

The same week black women lawmakers launched the landmark Black Maternal Health Caucus, this past week was also a particularly busy one for anti-choice politicians. From Ted Cruz initiating a pathetic Senate investigation about Twitter supposedly persecuting an anti-abortion propaganda film, to Texas legislators introducing a bill to subject women who have abortions to the death penalty, we encountered some exhaustive efforts to endanger women’s health.

Cruel legislation and cultural movements by anti-choice activists and lawmakers have forced reproductive justice advocates to take on a defensive role for decades, but this week’s formal announcement of the Black Maternal Health Caucus should remind us of our power to fight for more, to go on the offensive for the rights and health care women and marginalized people deserve.

Black women are 243 percent more likely than white women to die of pregnancy and birth-related causes. Addressing this harsh reality, and many others like it, is going to take more than standing up to anti-abortion bills in state legislatures; it’s going to take proactive legislation and advocacy to not just preserve existing rights, but expand these rights and demand real, tangible reproductive justice for all.

Source: Time to Do More Than Just Play Defense on Abortion Rights | The Mary Sue

I knew it was bad. I didn’t know it was 243% bad. Are you kidding me? That is fucked up.