Republican Officials Openly Insult Women Nearly Killed by Abortion Bans

MicroWave@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 532 points – Republican Officials Openly Insult Women Nearly Killed by Abortion Bans
slate.com

Red states would rather let a patient die than let her terminate a dangerous pregnancy. And they’re barely pretending otherwise.

For many years before S.B. 8 passed in Texas and was then swept into existence by the Supreme Court, and before Dobbs ushered in a more formal regime of forced childbirth six months later, the groups leading the charge against reproductive rights liked to claim that they loved pregnant women and only wanted them to be safe and cozy, stuffed chock-full of good advice and carted around through extra-wide hallways for safe, sterile procedures in operating rooms with only the best HVAC systems.

Then Dobbs came down and within minutes it became manifestly clear that these advocates actually viewed pregnant people as the problem standing in the way of imaginary, healthy babies—and that states willing to privilege fetal life would go to any and all lengths to ensure that actual patients’ care, comfort, informed consent, and very survival would be subordinate.

We are only beginning to understand the extent to which pregnant women are dying and will continue to die due to denials of basic maternal health care, candid medical advice, and adequate treatment.

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This has always been about controlling poor people, everything else is window dressing and rhetoric.

Mel Brooks once said that tragedy is when I get a splinter in my finger, and comedy is when you fall in a hole and die.

Apply that to the GOP. Tragedy is when they have to accept LGBTQ+ people, and comedy is when a teenager gets killed for ringing the wrong doorbell.

I mean did anyone expect any other type of behavior coming from Republicans?

I expected worse.

It’s hard to get much worse than gaslighting, shaming, and fighting in every tool for the ability to leave people to die by withholding medical care—all for political points and cruelty.

How can people be so openly evil? This just blows my mind.

Here's the thing.

Mitch McConnell spent decades cultivating the GOP into the party that isn't there to govern, but to just be against anything the Democrats do purely for the sake of contrarianism. It doesn't matter what the Democrats do; the GOP must take the exact opposite position at all costs. However, this was largely just GOP ideology, which often did take a back seat when push came to shove. At the end of the day, they'd hem and haw over it, but at the end of the day, a deal would always be struck.

Donald Trump came along and turned what was previously a GOP ideology that could at least be reshaped when push comes to shove and turned that into a cult-like dogma that can never be disobeyed under any circumstances, consequences be damned. Logic be damned. Truth be damned. And he managed to get 70 million or so people to follow him, forcing the rest of the party to either fall in line and push the MAGA agenda or see the end of their political careers. No price, in his eyes, is too high a price to pay (mostly because he's not the one that has to do the paying). And that's GOP dogma now. How does the saying go? "Many of you will die, but it's a price I'm willing to pay."

And that's where we are now. Pick a subject, and the GOP must be against it. Try to say that doing so will affect something else, and they'll suddenly be against that too. Trying to reason with them about their position being too extreme only causes them to get more extreme. Try to tell them that exceptions must be made for the good of society, and they'll gladly tell you what they think of society. Because that's what their 70 million voters have been conditioned to want, even when it's against their own best interests. As long as it's hurting "them", no price is too steep for them to pay. If the only way to defend your position is to argue in favor of something that is irrational, illegal, nonsensical, heartless, and hurtful, then you still take that position, because GOP dogma must be maintained at all costs.

You know why the GOP are suddenly against exceptions for rape or life of the mother? Because the Democrats showed that these reasons are a need for why abortion care is necessary in the first place.

You know why the GOP are suddenly all sorts of interested in restricting interstate travel? Because Democrats pointed out that blue states will continue to provide abortion care, even to those travelling from out of state.

The answer to the question of "Well, what do we do about this?" or "What do we do about that?" isn't to reflect and adjust their position as the evidence guides them. It's just "Ban that too!". And if that causes even more problems? Keep swinging the banhammer. Don't address anything inconvenient. Ignore it. Sweep it under the rug. Forget about it. Ban it. The fallout? That's a future generation's problem. Dogma must be preserved at all costs, including the cost of the lives of you and your loved ones.

And that's where we are now. Because Democrats want to shore up abortion rights in their states, the GOP must be on a crusade against it. It is required. It is dogma. And anything that goes against the dogma must also be eradicated. Exceptions for things like rape and viability of the mother are no longer acceptable, because a woman might be able to use that reason to actually get an abortion. And their hard-line stand on the subject means that whenever someone like Kate Cox or the 10 year old rape victim from Ohio comes along and offers themselves as proof of why abortion care is necessary, they are literally treated as collateral damage. A sad statistic that can be dismissed 5 seconds after you read it. Because anything else would be an acknowledgement that they were wrong. It would poke a gigantic hole in what I very loosely refer to as their "logic". It would go against the dogma. And that is absolutely not allowed. If it's a choice between going against dogma and saving the woman's life, or letting both the woman and fetus die anyway in order to not break the narrative, they'd rather just let both of them die for what they consider the "greater good", even though their version of the "greater good" is basically a script from the Handmaid's Tale.

This is where we are now. The GOP are on one road, and they must stay on that road under any circumstances. If you come between them and their ideology, you will be run over. You will be made an example of. Even if it means you die. Never mind the fact that the fetus they're supposedly trying to "save" is going to die too. That part is conveniently ignored because it doesn't jive with their dogma. But their dogma must be preserved, defended, and advanced at all costs. Today's GOP will accept nothing less.

Mitch just picked up the torch. Newt Gingrich is the one that started it with the 'moral majority' under Reagan. They made politics into religion, at which point any attempts to be bipartisan or negotiate was essentially making a deal with Satan. He ended any political viability to compromise on the right.

It's Jesus, basically.

You have to understand that these women are whores. If they didn't want to be pregnant, they should have kept an aspirin between their knees. The ones that have legitimate medical issues are collateral damage. Unfortunate, but they too have to suffer because when you start to write exceptions to rules, well then, some whores might be able to lie their way out of it, and we can't have that.

Whoring and lying are sinful. In their eyes, most of these women are sinners of the worst kind: whores, liars and remorseless at that - even potential murderers!

Because they are Christians, just like their Abrahamic cousins the Muslims - these people are all in the business of punishing sinners. It couldn't be more obvious. If this looks like "evil" to you, then you're likely one of those kinds of sinners they haven't got to yet. Don't worry, they will.

The Cruelty Is The Point.

If all of these women died tomorrow and the reporting on it was exhaustive, GOP numbers would only go up.

Uhh… these are the GRAB ‘EM BY THE PUSSY guys were talking about, right???

Republicans don't give a shit about children, they're actively and proudly complacent in what I can only describe a "gendercide"

Anyone who actually has an issue with the practice of abortion out of value for life, should consider the GOP as psycho-murderers

In 2021, only 1200 women died during birth. In the same year, 626,000 babies were legally aborted. I mean...even if we reduce the abortion by 1%, we'd have more babies than maternal deaths.

No baby was aborted, ever, by definition.

Pregnancies are aborted.

Aborting a pregnancy involves destroying a blastocyst or embryo, in most cases.

At no point is a baby involved.

But I'll bet that some actual children who were orphaned when those 1200 women died wound up dying as well.

Depends on your interpretation i suppose. But lets go with yours. Those pregnancies still had the potential to be over a half million babies.

New here, but I can't see the original comment, I think it mentioned Republicans don't want more babies. If they're pushing for banning abortions, that would mean more babies, or at least less promiscuity.

In many of the cases that Republicans refuse abortions for, there is no baby at the end. If a woman is at risk of dying and the fetus has such severe abnormalities that it will breathe twice and die, then what's the argument against an abortion? It could save the woman's life and wouldn't "kill a baby" (even if I accepted that abortion killed a baby - which I don't).

But the Republican line seems to be that a woman needs to be actively dying before they'll even start to consider allowing her to have a life saving medical procedure.

There needs to be exceptions for sure. Mothers life comes before the baby's.

Ah yes the "less promiscuity" angle. Ever enjoy a relationship even a marriage with a partner of the opposite sex? What happens to most hetero relationships when you stop having sex? Women even in commited monogamous partnerships generally already have to weigh the risks but now you have gynecologists fleeing red states or choosing not to go into the specialty , emergency rooms refusing to help you if you're pregnant, the possibility of becoming a living coffin for months knowing what comes out will never be a living child and the automatic choice that if a delivery goes wrong you will always be discarded like trash in favor of the baby no matter what the chances are.

Meanwhile if you have any debilitating conditions that mean chronic pain or any life threatening conditions that arise from a reproductive system gone wrong you're just SOL because who wants to go into a specialty where you have to stand back and watch your paitents die in excruciating pain because you court a prison sentence if you try and save them.

You are basically advocating for dead and dying marriages or dead and dying women. All for what? Children that will be resented their entire lives as burdens unwillingly foisted on their parents by the state? No. It's time to go back to your bible and realize your purity doctrine is all sourced from the one sex repulsed asexual guy in love with telling people what to do who fell off a horse and hit his head on a rock and hallucinated Jesus because he never actually met him in real life and just get over the fact that humans have sex.

I'm not for outlawing abortion, especially in cases where the mothers health is at risk. But banning abortion tends to lead in the direction of a positive birthrate, even though there should be exceptions.

Also the part where you mention kids resenting their parents? Maybe there needs to be a culture shift in America where folks focus more on the future and having kids instead of just self pleasure.

Any long lasting society depends on the back breaking work of parents to raise the next generation, to pass on their values and traditions.

No one woud thank you for it. There's plenty that could be done to lower the bar for people to embrace being a parent but it's instinctual to not bring offspring into the world when you are facing precarity. A lot of mammals will outright murder their offspring if they don't like their chances. Not enough resources and way too much stress and perceived danger is a recipe for instinctual abandonment. Once a society sees something like that too often it gets callous. A future where you force people into greater precarity isn't the answer and adoption isn't much of a solution. The mental trauma from adoption has known long term effects that tend to make mothers of unwanted children who opt for that genuinely less resilient in other spheres. Flooding the system with children there are no resources to bring up well also exacerbates issues of community wide antisocial problems, mental and physical illnesses. It is far better to allow individuals and families to make their own judgements about what they are capable of doing.

You want a culture shift, eliminate precarity. Social safety nets, good community resources, affordable housing, family sustaining wages that allow enough time and energy to be alloted to childcare. We are in a situation where the future is pretty much looking like doom and drudgery with little relief in sight. Nobody has retirement savings anymore, climate change is visible, lots of people are only a bad month away from being homeless and jobs are getting less rewarding as we go on and rates of burnout are skyrocketing. Now is not the time to add more babies into that mix, people will go literally fucking insane and historically speaking desperation and actual not-a-fetus infantcide are real good friends

They took kids from their parents at the border, specifically to be cruel and inhumane. Cruelty is the point. They want control, and expect everyone to cower in fear until they have it.

I'm pretty sure what happens is the world's most obvious proof against absurdity of anti abortion laws have summoned itself immediately and conservatives can't handle being disproved with the logic that can't be spun into oblivion so they lash out like little babies they pretend to protect and care about.

The cons represent the Fifth Column in this country. They should be removed from power at every turn.

Leave these shithole states to rot.

The issue is that most states (yes, even Republican states) are pretty purple when you look at the straight numbers. But many states are gerrymandered to hell, and liberals are less likely to vote (for a variety of reasons, including everything from apathy to outright disenfranchisement,) so the conservatives are able to keep a hold on the states even though they rarely hold a popular majority.

There are a lot of liberal people who didn’t vote for this, who are essentially trapped with no way to escape. They’re the ones stuck in a daily grind; too poor, no marketable skills to allow them to find decent work elsewhere, no outside connections to rely on, etc. They don’t deserve what the state is doing to them, but they’re powerless to stop it.

Sure, there are some states that are just hard conservative. But most states are comprised of highly populated liberal cities, surrounded by huge swaths of rural conservatives. And those cities have their voting districts broken up so much by gerrymandering, that they don’t get any decent representation.