11, 12 year old rape victims, incest survivors shouldn’t have to carry their attacker/abuser’s baby and they certainly shouldn’t have to, to appease the extreme religious ideology of the minority lawmakers in sparsely populated, rural states.

Current Trends by Natasha Sapp

It isn’t surprising we are where we are, doing a double take checking our calendars to ensure the date really is 2019 not the 1950’s, 60’s, prior to the 1973 Roe V. Wade ruling legalizing abortion, we aren’t actually less than 5 years out from the landmark decision where vying entities are trying to circumvent something new they don’t agree with mirroring reactions to civil rights legislation and desegregation; facing the latest round of abortion restriction bills aimed to restrict the procedure to being done before the 8th, sometimes the 6th week of pregnancy before a woman knows she’s pregnant in most cases. Stepping beyond where most dared in previous years permitting no exception for documented victims of rape or incest to receive the procedure later than usual or at all; it’s the product of nearly 50 years attempting to turn back the clock, chip away at the legality and feasibility of women obtaining an abortion. Nor is it any real revelation the entity spearheading an all-out assault on abortion for those past nigh on 50 years is the religious right who went from mobilizing the fear addled whites coming off their failure at the success of the 1960’s civil rights movement to support segregation at a private Christian bible college, the last vestiges of something they could control in terms of ‘scary’ integration, when the IRS wanted to remove Bob Jones University’s tax exempt status if they were set on maintaining black exclusion during the late 70’s, the same university who didn’t rescind their interracial dating ban until literally the dawn of the 21st century in the year 2000. Predictably after bitterly losing their original fight circa the early 80’s, the supreme court denouncing their polices, looking for a way to galvanize their newly discovered political power around a single issue, coming to the conclusion church pews could be teaming with eligible to vote republicans, chose abortion merely because someone blurted it out at a meeting of such leaders. Prominent figures like Jerry Falwell, the moral majority and company spending the decades of the remaining 80’s and 90’s essentially brainwashing Christian congregations all exactly how bad abortion was complete with D list level ‘educational’ films showing dismembered dolls on a beach or carelessly thrown down a shoot, message hardly subliminal, where some Christian had actually allowed their diaper clad child to be put in a cage, roping in politicians to see said inaccurate things portraying abortion as something happening as casually as you might order a pizza and with as much thought, causing a legislative panic to stop the atrocity. Going out among their congregants calling clinics who perform the procedure, regardless what other women’s health services, general healthcare they provide (think Planned Parenthood’s pap smears, reproductive health check pelvic exams, mammograms where equipment was on site and referrals where not, treatment of reproductive diseases like endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome, STD testing/treatment including HIV screening and treatment planning, colonoscopies, urinary tract infection testing and resulting anti-biotics, menopause testing, men’s health services in addition to STD testing/treatment sexual dysfunction, fertility services for both men and women) abortion mills guilty of murdering millions of babies annually spawning the targeting of so called abortion doctors at least 4 of which over the decade of the 90’s were in Canada and shot for providing the legal medical procedure there or along their southern border with the U.S. Catalyst for, as Samantha Bee laid out in her darkly humorous historical breakdown of how the religious right got tangled into healthcare decisions; because, like to or not, that is what abortion essentially is, a healthcare decision, that may well be saving a mother’s life, may be removing a strain on her body that will negatively impact her overall health or prevent the birth of a very unhealthy child who either has an anomaly or the mother doesn’t have the means to do all the things she needs to do to ensure a healthy pregnancy far surpassing the prenatal vitamins possibly obtained from the free health clinic/demonized Planned Parenthood, 185 cases of arson, 42 bombings, 100 acid attacks, 26 attempted murders, and 11 actual murders. Statistics only from 1977 to 2015, encompassing the Colorado Planned parenthood shooting carried out by Robert Lewis Dear that year killing 3 and injuring 9, him repeatedly screaming save the babies. Abortion bills, contraceptives restrictions, violent fanaticism spurred on by the same caliber of people who when doing an MTV abstinence ad compared masturbation with adultery, that fresh faced girl Christine O’Donnell who would later run for senate in Delaware (2010) and lose in part due to her absurd stance, the same religious contingent who calls withholding sex from your husband witchcraft. Outright overturning Roe V. Wade or Planned Parenthood v. Casey legalizing abortion and codifying into law parameters on access respectively rendered impossible, still the 2000’s saw several victories for those hating abortion including the born alive infants protection act signed by president George W. Bush (2002) legally “assert[ing] the human rights of infants born after a failed attempt to induce abortion. A “born-alive infant” is specified as a “person, human being, child, individual”. “Born alive” is defined as the complete expulsion of an infant at any stage of development that has a heartbeat, pulsation of the umbilical cord, breath, or voluntary muscle movement, no matter if the umbilical cord has been cut or if the expulsion of the infant was natural, induced labor, cesarean section, or induced abortion,” the ‘partial birth’ late term abortion ban of 2003, ignoring it took so long, 3 years into the next century, from their fight for the ban because for the longest time they refused to provide any exemption for life of the mother. Enter the tea party of 2009 energized by their opposition to black presidential candidate Barack Obama, angry about the emerging recession churning out candidates like Sharron Angle on fiscal issues like social security and O’Donnell on abortion both from 2010, both losing spectacularly. Mississippi’s 2011 abortion law defining personhood assigning it to the youngest gametes, zygotes and embryos but so poorly worded it could limit embryos used in IVF for women trying to get pregnant, the state whittled down to a single clinic by 2014 only kept open by court decision, Virginia’s 2012 bill that would have forced women seeking an abortion to undergo transvaginal ultrasounds literally shoving a probe into a woman’s vagina to get a 3D image of the fetus, a last ditch effort to convince a woman to rethink her choice; independent said ultrasound feeling too much like rape and holding little difference to laws demanding ultrasound be performed and monitors be shoved in a woman’s face showing her how developed her ‘child’ is. 2013 saw Ohio not want to defend its latest round of abortion restrictions so just shoved them into the state’s budget hoping to push it past, North Carolina’s state legislature debating a law to add to the state’s sex ed. curriculum under causes for pre-term birth ‘induced abortion.’ Mike Huckabee also in 2013 swearing liberals didn’t make sense opening his several minute long diatribe, spurred by house of representatives opposition to a 20 week abortion ban, saying liberals didn’t want conservatives in their bedroom but when something happened in that bedroom they didn’t like they wanted the government to step in and clean up the mess, his interpretation of the Obamacare mandate insisting all employers and educational institutions provide health insurance options that included all reproductive care meaning abortions and contraceptives the religious community thought abortifacient; how they had been getting away with anything else 1973 to roughly 2014 still a mystery. Stating liberals were against pain for animals, torture for terrorists, the death penalty for those convicted criminals when the execution was decided by jury but not against the pain of having your arms and legs ripped off, his depiction of what happens during an abortion 20 weeks or after grossly exaggerated at best, outright fiction at worst. Ignoring the hundreds of ‘criminals’ exonerated after their convictions due to the advent of DNA testing, DNA testing advancements, other already jailed criminals confessions, recanting of witness stories usually coupled with uncovered prosecutorial misconduct, public defender overwork or incompetence almost always based on race, condemning minority, poor black and brown persons; rational people, liberal or otherwise against killing innocent people on flimsy evidence, fabricated evidence and biased assumptions, execution not something you can take back. Adjacent thinking behind yes why we are against torture for terrorists, we aren’t interested in stooping to their level to achieve our goals which were supposed to be about our national protection; never mind the number of Gitmo detainees who were not actually terrorists rather guerilla fighters protecting their homeland from the invaders—us, people who did not know anything about terrorists or participate in their activities, it begets more terrorists if you treat them badly and give them a reason to hate you apart from confinement and questioning from the start. Yes, against pain for animals in terms of the days when people were still wearing fur driving to extinction animals with cute little faces, today against pain for animals caused by testing cosmetics on them so we can have better eye shadow and mascara; against the pain for dolphins and whales caught in fishing nets for tuna or caused by climate change exacerbated by mankind’s horrible treatment of the planet. Former governor further stating 6 year olds could get birth control but not access to a salt shaker or a 20 oz. soda; forgetting that was the action of 2 to a handful of school nurses misunderstanding a new policy giving birth control to seeking teens not liberal views on contraception causing the issue, blog and author calling out the well intentioned food bans by liberals as ineffective when we can’t sufficiently card underage persons for more dangerous things i.e. alcohol and cigarettes. Huckabee’s additional upset teens could get an abortion at 14, or 16 but needed to remain on their parent’s insurance until 26 shows his fundamental misunderstanding of how long it takes for young adults to reach financial independence enough to be on their own able to manage their own healthcare premiums, realities only steepening with the intervening years; 24 now deemed the new 18 by sociologists looking at how much longer young adults stay in school, older ages for getting married, starting their own families which was evidence enough to advocate continuing young adult support services into their 20’s, the point of their findings and the news segment. Given breakdowns among numerous other items he mentioned, too lengthy to list here closing quoting the ‘great psychologist’ Ron White about not being able to fix stupid; one problem, Ron White is not a mental health professional of any kind but a comedian known for his affiliation with the Blue Collar Comedy Tour making Huckabee the butt of his own joke, if it was a joke at all, examining the thought processes of conservatives that’s unlikely. Huckabee covered 2 years later defending Josh Duggar’s teenage pedophilia acted out on his much younger sisters as youthful indiscretion failing to connect his strict religious upbringing’s contribution to the problem not teaching sex ed., body autonomy, what is and isn’t appropriate leading to the exact abuse that occurred; Huckabee who didn’t call out the hypocrisy of supposedly religious, moral parents too ignorant of the legal system or too conniving to do the right thing in alerting police. Never getting their obviously psychologically troubled child real help except from an academy run by a person accused of his own inappropriate behavior only as a full adult. No help given to his abused sisters either to process what they went though, set the example such abuse isn’t something to be blown off, brushed aside, still the former governor’s praise for the parents effusive and support unwavering seen all across America. Last ardent national debate on abortion and contraception happening when president Obama’s mandate contraceptives be covered by employers under Obamacare that was slated to take affect that next year amidst statutes putting ever more stringent restrictions on abortion providers, barriers to access including waiting periods, invasive exams, mounting rules on the structures of clinics: width of hallways, meeting the requirements of mobile surgical theaters and forcing doctors to have admitting privileges at the a hospital no more than X miles away; a fight he won but was overruled by the incoming Trump administration putting in wanted religious and moral exemptions. It follows state by state bills mandating women report miscarriages and police investigate no human interference lead to those miscarriages, it follows the years Purvi Patel spent in prison in Indiana for her miscarriage before finally getting her convictions on feticide and child neglect overturned by the state court of appeals. Bill after bill that criminalizes miscarriages sometimes turning laws meant to protect women from abuse such as domestic violence, violence visited upon a woman say during a robbery where the baby is injured and dies inside the mother against them charging them with neglect of their child, before viability or no. Ordering an abortion drug for your pregnant teen daughter, think twice you might be charged with dispensing abortion advice without being medically authorized to do so, exactly what happened to a Pennsylvania mother seeking to deal with her daughter’s unwanted pregnancy. Indicative of histories littered with frog marching women to hospitals for the C-section they’ve declined appointing a lawyer for the unborn child but none for the mother when she’s in no position to have a lawyer on speed dial, not caring about how the stress they were perfectly willing to put the mother through could harm the baby they were so interested in protecting. The earlier case of a woman with cancer too sick to make a decision, family acting on her wishes not to shorten her life; state went to court, got an order to deliver the baby, both mother and baby died, goal not remotely achieved rather snuffing out the remaining time a woman had left to her on earth. Or the woman in Iowa charged with feticide after falling down the stairs independent being treated at a private hospital and deemed physically fine; why because she confided in the nurse she was scared about continuing the pregnancy as her husband had recently walked out. A woman with a heart condition unable to carry her baby to term forced to be sent across state lines to get the lifesaving abortion she medically needed, in Texas a doctor encountered a woman 4 months pregnant, suffering heart failure brought on by her last pregnancy but the public hospital denied her an abortion forced to travel to New Mexico because she was too medical compromised to go to a standard clinic; another who had to be transferred to a private hospital under similar circumstances. Circa 2017 Illinois saw women flocking to their door for the privacy laws and judicial wavers on parental consent but also for now deemed later term abortions (after 20 weeks); one couple post a severe fetal cardiac anomaly was detected on ultrasound, specialists were consulted but her home state wouldn’t permit the abortion at 21 weeks thanks to law enacted there. It follows years since Roe V. Wade became the law of the land of the Hyde amendment being tacked onto every piece of republican legislation to make its way through congress, that amendment barring federal funds/ tax dollars being used for abortion even in say health programs like Medicaid for the extremely poor, abortions performed for medical reasons of non-viability, to save a mother’s life yet have spent their modern years in power sending out bills upon bills to defund Planned Parenthood roughly as many times as they tried to repeal Obamacare achieving about as much success circa Ohio in 2016’s attempt to do just that stayed by a district court judge. Oklahoma in 2016 in essence banning abortion by targeting doctors making it a felony to perform an abortion and rendering a doctor who has done so unable to get or renew their state license to practice medicine only to be vetoed days later by then governor Mary Fallin. Later that year the state Supreme Court throwing out a law forcing doctors to have admitting privileges at a hospital no more than 30 miles away, Mississippi won the right for their Planned Parenthood to participate in that state’s Medicaid program, recalling they provide health services not singularly abortions, Texas suffered 2 major defeats striking down laws meant to make clinics like surgery centers summer of 2016 and another by early 2017 again trying to choke off their Planned Parenthood funding through Medicaid repeating ourselves before ending paragraph 1, seeing as the facility provides added healthcare not exclusively abortion; guess replacing Rick Perry wasn’t enough to stop their anti-abortion fervor. Trying a new tactic to bring down the number of abortions there was the bill allowing doctors to lie to expectant mothers about the health of their fetus, little things like medical ethics be dammed, that got past the state senate, the Arkansas bill forcing doctors to investigate their patients’ pregnancy history to ensure they are not attempting to abort their fetus based on sex, rarely if ever cited as a reason for pregnancy termination, signed into law by the governor, Florida trying to do it with their new Medicaid law sued by Planned Parenthood, Kansas and Ohio slapped with similar legal documents for their laws; Ohio appeals court ruling this year in the state’s favor they can defund their state’s Plan Parenthood facilities. Texas’ repeat appearance in the form of a lawmaker who wanted to jail women for their abortions up to charging them with murder putting the death penalty on the table if convicted reintroduced in 2019 and soundly rejected by a state represented refusing to allow it out of committee then subject to safety concerns for a logical decision. Kentucky prevented from outlawing second trimester abortions as of late 2018 final ruling summer this year upholding the lower court decision, Oklahoma succeeding in banning the same dilation and evacuation abortion procedure in their state just this month. Georgia banning abortion at 6 weeks once a fetal heartbeat is detected at a week earlier than Missouri, Louisiana trailing less than 2 weeks after with their own fetal heartbeat bill, Ohio touching off this year’s spate of anti-abortion legislation spanning 13 states among them North Dakota who tried to legally say doctors couldn’t use surgical tools such as clamps in second trimester abortions expediently struck down. Kansas’ legislature unable to override a gubernatorial veto of a bill demanding doctors inform patients that medical abortions via pill are ‘reversible’ after the first 2 doses, similar bill signed in Oklahoma in April; science dubious on the claim set forth in the law or other medications asserting they can stop medically induced abortions in progress, Nebraska putting forth their own bill on informing abortion patients of potential reversal ‘options.’ New York taking until the beginning of this year 2019 to remove abortion out of their criminal code and under the auspice of public health regulation expanding who performs abortions and sanely permitting ‘late term’ abortions when doctors have determined non-viability or it endangers a mother’s life as opposed to what was seen in so many other states, leaving the state to get medically necessitated care. Geriatric conservative lawmakers, shutter to use the term, who appear to understand less about the constitution, state, federal and local law than your average middle schooler, people who never learn passing slightly varied bills that repeatedly go nowhere is not an effective use of their legislative time and not what the majority of persons who voted them into office sent them to do, uncaring or unaware of AA’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result; these are the smaller and smaller group of people we let make choices for us? Not all Christians, conservatives or doctors subscribing to the anti-abortion nonsense pervading the last 30 years; boiling down to reproductive justice and Christianity are not mutually exclusive, separate entities at least for the interviewed man below. Broader than the concept pro-life should mean saving the mother’s life when it’s the only one I can save, sparing rape and incest victims regardless their age the psychological and physical burdens of carrying their attacker’s child, pro-life should mean not willfully putting a child in arm’s length of abuse, neglect, to a parent who has made clear they don’t want them, why’s varying from not knowing how to take care of a child through all the stages 0-18, not possessing the monetary, not to be forgotten emotional/mental capacity, to do so over the given time frame, is how dare you call yourself pro-life when you aren’t interesting in the immorality of injustice, willing to cut 1/3 of social services to poor people, expect people to work jobs of today with yesterday’s training and then say they are wanting a handout to have substantial retraining; reminding us life isn’t something that merely begins but must also be sustained all people having access to the basics to live humanely with dignity or you lose pieces of your own humanity. Larger pictures lost when lawmakers stare at a tiny speck of the puzzle they had no wish to unravel or solve in the first place. Who cares who they hurt as long as they are ok, their minute view of life doesn’t change.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/02/virginia-ultrasound-law-women-who-want-an-abortion-will-be-forcibly-penetrated-for-no-medical-reason.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN-mzfcNuok
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71yYQmxGqRE

https://newrepublic.com/article/84511/georgia-legislation-abortion-miscarriage

https://rewire.news/article/2010/02/20/utah-bill-criminalizes-miscarriage/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/22/abortion-pregnancy-law-prosecute-trump

https://www.salon.com/2016/08/04/the_case_of_purvi_patel_how_mike_pence_won_his_crusade_against_abortion_in_indiana/

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-2004-03-25-0403250176-story.html

https://rewire.news/article/2019/03/07/not-dead-enough-public-hospitals-deny-life-saving-abortion-care-to-people-in-need/

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-abortion-out-of-state-met-20170714-story.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tiTtyb1dAM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ecSpWPQgUU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw64bo-DN38
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rCu558iPFM

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/30/doctors-will-have-to-investigate-medical-histories-of-abortion-patients-under-new-arkansas-law/

https://www.apnews.com/aedbde1c9e8a467990f1be0cebaf5809

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/kansas-lawmakers-fail-to-override-governors-abortion-reversal-veto

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/kansas-lawmakers-fail-to-override-governors-abortion-reversal-veto

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/01/new-york-has-finally-updated-its-archaic-abortion-law.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPgw2FS4t0k

http://www.salon.com/2017/05/23/a-catholic-nun-on-what-it-really-means-to-be-pro-life_partner/

What is surprising isn’t, again the ignorance with which predominately male lawmakers, specifically old, white men approach female reproductive rights, fail to understand things even an abstinence only sex education high school student could tell them about the anatomy of their opposite gender gleaned from posters in their doctor’s office if nowhere else; that too follows Herman Cain who couldn’t pronounce in vitro fertilization to save his life in an interview on national television yet refused, or didn’t have the wherewithal, to mangle the pronunciation once and henceforth refer to it by its common abbreviation IVF throughout the exchange with MSNBC’s show anchor knowing people would fully understand what he meant while talking about the contraceptives debate surrounding bills that would, irony of ironies, have hampered women seeking to get pregnant via the procedure and other fertility aide methods. Or Ben Carson 2016 presidential candidate who, when confronted about his hardline stance on abortion calling it going off the deep end, comparing it to slavery, specifically as it pertains to women who have been raped, victims of incest said he hoped victims would go to the ER and receive RU486, routinely called the abortion pill meant to chemically induce pregnancy termination, not plan B emergency contraception designed for such instances or the too much to drink at a party sex with no protection afterwards preventing egg and sperm ever meeting, halting ovulation, to form the cells 9 months later becoming a baby. Unconscionable considering his is a doctor, yes a renowned and probably retired neurosurgeon, but you’re in the medical field not the psychological and you don’t know attributes of medicine available for public consumption, increasing public knowledge, saying something like that while vying to be president of the United States? It falls in line with Ted Cruz just 4 years ago late 2015 distilling birth control, access to contraceptives down to no one being the condom police, scoffing we don’t have a rubber shortage 3 years after Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who had to fight to testify, be heard before a congressional panel on women’s health, namely reproductive care talking about humiliated students at the pharmacy when they realize their religious school’s health services program doesn’t cover birth control to treat everything from severe acne to reproductive disorders completely divorced from pregnancy, pregnancy prevention; and, the consequences of that barrier to coverage— a student who instead of taking their final was in the hospital having an ovary removed due to untreated polycystic ovarian syndrome directly because they couldn’t gain birth control pills used to treat it in this individual’s case, pushing her into early menopause at 32 dancing on the edge of never being able to have children of her own. The heartbeat bills that are based on medical inaccuracy, idea being women can’t have an abortion once a fetal heartbeat is detected; except A what is being detected today wasn’t detectable just 5-10 years prior due to betterment of ultrasound technology to pick up increased sounds not changes in what we understand to be embryonic/fetal development, B doctors have spoken out, the concept of fetal heartbeats found at 6 and 8 weeks is medically inaccurate: what’s being documented is in fact 2 tubes lined with cardiac cells capable of vibration, perhaps electrical impulses that either will become the circulatory system of the heart or heart cells not a fully developed heart or even a partially developed one. Further you can get 2 embryonic heart cells grown in a petri dish at a science lab to beat in tandem with each other, that by no means constitutes a whole or partially developed heart either; science they know nothing about, want nothing to do with because it involves stem cells the medical taboo conservatives, republicans took a ‘moral’ stand on because it came from embryonic stem cells generated in fertility clinics for women attempting to get pregnant destroying the embryos to harvest said cells, president Bush ruled existing ones could be used for scientific purposes but no more, forgetting they would be destroyed if not used anyway. A debate that fell off as science grew beyond it finding the same blank slate, can be turned into any body tissue cells in other places umbilical cord blood and select areas on/in a person’s own body, often used in lieu of a bone marrow transplant for cancer patients. We’ve seen the same ill-informed nonsense, there really is no other word for it, time and time again over the years, coming as a shock is they think their sputtering, unprepared, word salad, patently made up answers will go unnoticed. Alabama’s law sponsored by a guy who said he didn’t know if he was smart enough to be pregnant that’s why he appreciated the wisdom of our heavenly father (god); Samantha Bee hitting the nail on the head when she stated, in her comedy routine on the subject, if you aren’t smart enough to be pregnant you’re definitely not smart enough to legislate it. Next listen to the male Alabama legislature member (African American) hammer his male, identical author of the statements above, fellow legislator (balding and white demonstrating plainly the talked about pattern) about why his proposed bill makes no exception for rape or incest whose stumbling rant ended with “biology and things,” rambling on, talking endlessly about the time it takes chromosomes to develop somehow alerting a woman she’s pregnant; sounding for all the world like the child who was supposed to do a book report but never read the book, in essence saying a woman could get an abortion right up until she knew she was pregnant. Saying the quiet part loud, (as used by progressives to mean when politicians readily exposes the real impetus behind their views or legislation, ‘they want war with Iran to feed the military industrial complex’ is a common one, or their motivation behind the census question is racism and forcing a miscount by undocumented, mixed households with both citizens and not afraid to reveal their information meaning less representation, federal funds for areas of black and brown people) an utterly insane response to a relevant question; why, because there is no good, reasonable excuse not to, at minimum, allow abortions to rape victims and incest survivors when they ask for it. Especially the 11, 12 year old victims traumatized by repeated sexual abuse/rape who take longer to recognize they could be pregnant, grappling with the courage to tell an adult/their parents what’s happening, happened to them, (forgotten entirely is if one of the parents is the perpetrator of said abuse, or the other parent is complicit in the abuse occurring in their own home) too often finding one who will believe them when they say they were abused, could be/are pregnant from rape not risky teen/preteen behavior creating another obstacle; let alone getting the requisite medical care to bring their abuser to justice, evaluate the health of the abused pre-teen’s physical wellbeing then get around to discussing the feasibility of her carrying the child to term, the biological risks of having a child from first degree relatives fathers/uncles exc. in cases of incest, physical repercussions of the hormonal changes associated with pregnancy on a body just gone through puberty. Considering the psychological implications of pregnancy representing a symbol of the trauma endured, things pregnant mothers must do and avoid to produce a healthy child an 11 or 12 year old probably won’t be able to keep track of, mental burden it also places on them to try, the psychological effects of above mentioned hormonal changes accompanying pregnancy that may or may not lead to at least temporary mental illness. When you demand medical procedures be performed that don’t even exist, case in point once more the Alabama law that mandated an ectopic pregnancy (one that has attached itself somewhere inside the mother’s body other than the uterus) be removed from said location and implanted in the uterus; one problem, doctors currently can’t do that, in fact an ectopic pregnancy often severely limits a woman’s future chances of having children if desired because removal also routinely means removal of the fallopian tube or ovary where it attached and if not results in scar tissue preventing egg release and thus conception, uterine damage preventing carrying a child or carrying it to term if it attached on the outside rather than the inside as nature intended. If they were educated on the science surrounding the subject they would be funneling the money into medical research to make the procedure they want a reality, to create an artificial womb so that infants born far too early can increase their survival rate, ectopic pregnancies don’t have to be terminated; procedures, devices that might be if they didn’t spend so much time on issues like abortion already decided by the majority, object to medical research funding on ‘moral’ grounds rooted in archaic religious beliefs held by smaller and smaller portions of the population, medical research that shouldn’t be controversial on any sane, rational grounds because it’s morally and religiously neutral. When you find male lawmakers who are not religious zealot ideologues standing up shouting in anger and exasperation proposed bills give more rights to the rapist than the woman, completely accurate in their assessment it doesn’t give them pause to ask within themselves what am I doing, what am I saying, what am I supporting, they don’t think people across the country and their state will ask the same question of their legislature and lawmaker unto voting them out at first chance? Speaking of rights for rapists, the sentencing history thereof, Alabama’s additional pieces attached to the legislation effectively bans abortion totally and punishes doctors who perform abortions after the law goes into effect with up to 99 years in jail when the average sentence for rape is, 8 years as of 2011 and we’ve seen ridiculously short sentences for rape in more recent years; think Brock Turner who got 6 months for raping a passed out girl unconscious behind a dumpster and shoving leaf litter inside her, judge refusing to hear statements from his college’s female swim team when he was a member of the male team making them feel harassed and uncomfortable, showing a pattern why he should receive more time behind bars and/or more restrictions upon release. Not to mention subsequent laws changed in California to lengthen sentences for convicted rapists lessening faulty judicial discretion; laws on statutes of limitations changed there too after the sexual predator history of Bill Cosby was exposed. The maximum sentence for rape is 20 years to life; however, that usually entails multiple rapes, kidnapping, torture of the victims, victims being children or teens think Ariel Castro who kidnapped 3 teens over 2 years, fathered one child, caused one victim to have multiple miscarriages and kept them captive for 11and 9 years respectively, the atrocities of Phillip Garrido responsible for kidnapping Jaycee Dugard holding her for 18 year and fathering 2 children or the man who got life for an attempted rape of a college student partly based on the trauma he tried to inflict upon the much smaller woman in broad daylight if not for an alert bystander and the power of her victim impact statement; leniency of sentencing on rape conviction the rule not the exception. What are we up to, the 3rd time now, of asking you don’t think the public will notice what you are doing, those very persons mentioned rescued or escaping their ordeal won’t sound off if nothing else than with their vote on how unfair and dangerous your proposal is, the droves like them who survived their kidnapping and captivity, those who were teen and pre-teen rape victims (regardless exact circumstances) who were able to get an abortion and are thankful that option was open to them? We might feel a microscopic spec of momentary sympathy for the former detective who when speaking on his state’s legislative floor talking about the cases of sexual violence he dealt with mistakenly, foot in mouth, called them ‘consensual rapes,’ (obviously meaning dubious acquaintance sexual encounters where it was difficult from a law enforcement standpoint to determine if it was sexual regret between 2 initially consenting parties or iron clad acquaintance rape either person forced against their will— and nobody didn’t understand what he meant) if this wasn’t Missouri where they had already seen the fall out of candidate Todd Akin and his ‘legitimate rape’ comments thinking a woman’s body could spontaneously shut down the process of getting pregnant if it was indeed rape as an explanation as to why even rape victims should never need an abortion. If we hadn’t seen elsewhere in the country that year Richard Mourdock of Indiana running for senate who trying to extol what a blessing a child could be independent the tragic details of its existence fumbled into “I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that’s something God intended to happen,” waking up post-election day 2012 reverberating question being did the rape guy win, response which one? If we hadn’t seen the same thing in Oklahoma as late as 2017 from representative George Faught when asked if rape was the will god, while debating that state’s bill to ban abortion on the basis of fetal anomaly no exceptions for rape or incest, responded once more with gibberish, exposing a pattern of deliberate misrepresentation of the issue; rape and incest survivors should be permitted abortions period knowing the anomaly rate chances multiply exponentially when dealing with incest/children born from biologically first degree relatives, information they should know out of history class, being as old as they are, and the Habsburg’s hereditary hemophilia brought on by constant inbreeded to maintain royal bloodlines, if they just couldn’t understand/weren’t paying attention in biology all those years ago. Plus if it wasn’t for the Missouri speaker’s profession, having been in law enforcement charged with investigating such crimes and that was your attitude, approach; how many rapists went free in your state because you didn’t believe victims who said they were forcibly raped, investigate hard enough to find out definitively one way or the other? Assuming lawmakers got the reasonable compromise on a bill a majority feels is unnecessary granting rape and incest survivors access to abortion, how many wouldn’t get it because there isn’t the ‘requisite paperwork’ conservative legislators would insist on signed by police saying yes there was a rape, a police report filed alleging rape? Rape a different part of Alabama’s other new adjacent legislation making it a crime to falsely accuse someone of rape, sexual assault knowingly or maliciously unto paying the accused legal fees, definition of redundant seeing as it is already a crime to file a false police report or didn’t these people hear about the Jussie Smollett saga and the special prosecutor assigned to determine how all his charges were suddenly dropped; but, predictable, the other major thing Alabama doesn’t know is the law, just look at Roy Moore’s odyssey to the state supreme court and too slow fall from grace. Hard not to be seen as a roundabout way of punishing women without coming out and saying that’s what they’re doing in addition to leveling exorbitant prison sentences against doctors giving those women agency over their own bodies. Missouri punishing doctors performing abortions after the allotted time facing significantly less years behind bars but still overkill at up to 15; Missouri who didn’t stop there but continues to try and make the show-me state the first to totally remove access to abortion via revoking the last clinic providing the service’s license citing non-existent safety violations. And not by passing new legislation but reinterpreting existing law forcing doctors to perform a second pelvic exam on women seeking an abortion even those desiring a medical abortion i.e. the pill form, a pelvic exam already performed on those wanting the physical procedure known as abortion, worse it must be performed before the clock starts on the 3 day waiting period that has to be legally observed before completing an abortion. Doctors complying only to keep their license/their doors open leaving the one lone clinic in the state available only for state officials to back off, reverse course when public outcry reached a boiling point after doctors spoke out about what they were being mandated to do, boldly but correctly calling it state sanctioned sexual assault, detailing the trauma inflicted on their patients with no medical purpose; proving it wasn’t about a more accurate reading of the law, but a secret, backdoor, sneak attack to drive women away from their legal right to abortion with or without closing the clinic. Train driven by one Randall Williams with a dubious past allowing the dumping of coal ash telling people in North Carolina circa 2015 to disregard warning letters sent to people warned their well water was teaming with carcinogens and not to drink it, lawsuit resulting where the state toxicologist called him and his decisions out in depositions by them and the state epidemiologist lasting a scant 18 months as state health director only to be trapped by the newly minted governor of Missouri Eric Greitens who resigned after a creepy scandal involving forced BDSM in a basement and the resulting photo, still confirmed by the states republican legislature to be their director of health and senior services, thus here we are. It follows the history of the 2011 Mississippi law demanding an earlier, different invasive procedure to undermine women’s choice mentioned in the introduction. While The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act never garnered the 60 votes to pass the senate in 2017 that didn’t stop multiple states from taking the initiative and banning abortions of pregnancies at 20 weeks the moment it was introduced as a concept, where pro-life ‘experts’ say a fetus can feel pain, everything after that categorized late term and illegal unless it’s saving the mother’s life; but, medical opinion either debunks this notion or is inconclusive, consensus putting the ability to feel pain at 28 weeks stating a reflex some doctors report seeing when doing surgery on mom with the baby still in utero isn’t the same as pain. North Carolina becoming the 17th state, that year, to ban abortion at 20 weeks; independent the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 66 percent of legal abortions occur within the first eight weeks of gestation, and 92 percent are performed within the first 13 weeks. Only 1.2 percent occur at or after 21 weeks (CDC, 2013), 2015 seeming to be the latest data available on when throughout gestation abortion occurs. Same applying to report miscarriage laws, forget women who miscarry don’t always or even most times know they were pregnant assuming it’s their period, early on there are not remains to identify let alone bury. Women who do know they are pregnant may assume spotting or cramping is normal and still register hormone positive pregnancy testing, even at a doctor’s office, from remaining cells in the uterus, even those under a doctor’s care finding they have miscarried via ultrasound don’t always need surgical intervention instead can expel the tissue naturally never mind don’t want it after the emotional upheaval of losing child they wanted, or at least were warming to the idea of having. Medical fact, what causes said miscarriages is still today a big unknown, once more something lawmakers could push money toward, if only they would; perhaps the money they’re spending in legal battles to get their way, not stopping abortions in the least merely driving them into the realm of the underground and unsafe costing more in healthcare dollars to states who already can’t take the weight. Abortion reversal pills or being able to halt a medical abortion after 2 doses junk science worthy of its name with no reliable science sources to support it but minimum half a dozen states have laws forcing women to be informed’ of the possibility and perpetuates the long held myth women are fickle and can’t make up their mind what they want so they need to know they can do this, take X and chose something else; whereas surveys talking to women who’ve had an abortion, contemplated what to do with an unexpected pregnancy shows by the time they are at their doctor’s seeking an abortion their deliberation is done. Countering too they will feel depression and regret when what’s most often reported is a feeling of relief, but the myth continues undergirded by pop culture depictions, nor does safe, legal abortion lead to infertility or cancer, the only way it leads to the former (latter akin to Donald Trump’s similar comment on wind mills/turbines) is if done by unlicensed back alley doctors who’ve got disciplinary records, malpractice suites a mile wide; what is more likely to happen if they keep throwing more laws at it. When you have a conservative pundit saying carrying a rapist or sexual abuser’s baby is better for learning their identity and catching them than abortion because you can then find out who they are; totally missing you can find out who they are by conducting a rape kit to capture hairs and body fluids they left behind or perform a DNA test on the fetal tissue to compare to a potential suspect, things we all gleaned from episodes of CSI and it’s spin offs, might we suggest binge watching or keeping your mouth shout on things woefully out of your depth, predictably another man mansplaining. When you have a comedian doing monologues on this and they are giving you new information, not on the most recent incarnation of abortion bill, penalty for doctors, requirement for clinics, but things learned in a health class over the last 30 years that’s the problem; basics like it takes 8 days after sex to be able to determine pregnancy with the most sensitive tests, not as the lawyer drafting Alabama’s bill stated a couple can have sex, go straight to the clinic and find out if she’s pregnant. Or that when a doctor says a women is 6 weeks pregnant it doesn’t mean they’ve actually been pregnant that long only that the doctor is counting back from her last period that can happen 5 weeks before conception, determinations still carrying a fair amount of guess work but are the best we have. Neither do women 100% know they are pregnant by 6 weeks having no typical symptoms, symptoms you do have tiredness, bloating and gas can be everything from precursors to your period, stress or your diet. Men prone to when hearing anything under the heading ‘female problems’ sticking their fingers in their ears and going la, la, la, la; it’s just like the lawmaker who asked what is the Facebook or the one who when questioning a google representative asked why when he typed in his name negative stuff was shown to his granddaughter on his i-phone or the Christians upset by the comedy show about demons Good Omens addressed their protest letter to Netflix when the show is on Amazon Prime proving they’ve probably never watched it, they are the last people who should be regulating it if they won’t digest the facts first.

https://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/251078-carson-abortion-pill-should-be-available-in-cases-of-rape-or-incest

https://www.news-leader.com/story/news/crime/2018/08/18/springfield-man-sentenced-life-prison-attempted-rape-missouri-state-campus/1020911002/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9ZO7n3Lf90

https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-united-states

https://www.self.com/story/the-fetal-pain-myth-is-only-one-of-the-problems-with-the-20-week-abortion-ban

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/10/3/16401826/abortion-ban-pain-capable-unborn-child-protection-act

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Do-fetuses-feel-pain-Reflex-responses-do-not-pain.-Lloyd-Thomas-Fitzgerald/1dacf8518a31eab1f2dcdbe62d5f4f5354d288c0

https://www.thedailybeast.com/abortion-reversal-is-scary-bogus-science

https://www.salon.com/2019/05/25/leaked-gop-talking-points-forced-birth-better-than-abortion-for-rape-incest-victims/

The anecdotal nature of the miasma these legislators chose to immerse themselves in feeds into a secondary ignorance fueled by preconceived notions about who is getting an abortion according to lawmakers dead set on securing its illegality, obsessively fervent in their belief contraceptives are morally wrong, select ones, or all of the above, are abortifacient and giving young people access will entice them to engage in sex; myths every last one. Their idea of individuals seeking abortion are irresponsible teens unwilling to face the consequences of their actions, single, unattached, character deficient women already having one strike against them for engaging in fornication, but worse, doing so without any intention of ever legally coupling up, beginning a family the high cost of ‘loose promiscuity;’ never pondered the social and cultural expectations everyone seems to have surrounding marriage, all differing to varying degrees, might be turning women off to holy matrimony. Remember these are the people prone to listening to church pastors who think marriage gives the husband the right to spank his wife not as an exciting bedroom activity but as discipline like you might an errant child, thinks the best place for a woman is in the home barefoot and pregnant, in the kitchen serving him his dinner plate, once vice presidential candidate Sara Palin advising young girls to aspire to their ‘traditional role;’ very public/modern example of how the connotations associated with the word marriage can potentially destroy a relationship, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt who spent more years as a functional committed couple sans a marriage certificate/webbing band than they did as a married couple, hmm. Utterly foreign to them a woman liking and enjoying sex, what sacrilege only men are allowed to enjoy sex; and, only young men not young women, are allowed to sow their wild oats, play the field, in any way gain sexual experience before marriage, outside the confines of marriage. Lawmakers inventing wild explanations as to why 11, 12 year old rape victims can’t morally or legally get an abortion because otherwise they would have to acknowledge 11,12 year old rape victims are a category of persons/fellow human beings that exist, that rape can’t simply be couched into a thing that happened because someone wore the ‘wrong,’ ‘too revealing’ outfit, flirted with the person at the bar, drank too much, or at all, at a bar, was seen present at the dubious location known as a bar, house party or rave, engaged in any of the listed activities while under legal age to say drink, that these aren’t woman ‘crying’ rape post waking up in the morning after a night of regrettable sex. Connection left dangling, the correlation between sexual abuse, sexual assault, rape and their demonized promiscuity, ignoring too the staggering percentage of girls and women who will confront some form of sexual assault in their lifetime 1 in 5, 81 % subject to either assault or sexual harassment; dismissing out of hand for the self-professed Christians among them, their catholic church cousins, droves indicted for abuse visited upon male and female parishioners alike, local pastors back home exposed doing the same to teens, girls who could easily become pregnant. School districts in their home constituencies housing pedophile teachers and participating in the despicable shuffling known as passing the trash, shipping sexually inappropriate educators off to other districts with glowing recommendations so they don’t have to deal with them; members of their own families who have probably been victims of this kind of sexual abuse, unlikely to tell them either aware of their views or still grappling with shame and self-blame. They should listen to the testimony of the woman who was a 12 year old rape victim repeatedly abused by family members getting her pregnant, dad a high ranking member of local police translating to no one would ever accuse anyone in that family of… causing mistrust of same, attempts to tell teachers and church volunteers going nowhere because they were from a good family and whatever was going on, if anything was, they would take care of it, walking to the drugstore, lying to the clerk about needing a pregnancy test for her mother putting it in her fanny pack walking home. Account read by an HLN anchor blunt about how any adult should view an a11 or 12 year old whose pregnant as a rape victim, as a sexually abused child because 12 year old’s can’t consent to sex, any pregnancy is traumatic because little girls aren’t supposed to have full wombs, that she didn’t know she had options because she had seen girls who had their babies called sluts and those who chose abortions called murderers. Shannon Dingle’s story embodying what was detailed above about the physical capacity of an 11, 12 year old’s body to carry a child to term describing herself as a slender kid who appeared not to have yet gone through puberty ultimately miscarrying the child, exactly what she appeared on HLN to discuss in light of the current rounds of abortion bans at 6 and 8 weeks, sneakily banning the procedure altogether in one state. Human trafficking brought up by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes when laying out the parameters of the Alabama bill as another category of exceptions to their ultra-restrictive abortion ban they won’t grant, educated guess is, once more, because they would have to acknowledge first people are indeed humanly trafficked, kidnapped, sucked into what amounts to sex slavery and yes as born and raised U.S. citizens, how many of them are children and teens or started out that way in this seedy ‘business;’ teens from horrible home lives, tans and other LGBT community persons religious minded lawmakers dismiss for their ‘unnatural,’ lifestyle, trafficking victims lacking education, remember the Illinois clinic story link in the intro, one of those stories was a rural girl bounced around said communities all her life describing her education as just poor, bereft of adult guidance, help, exploited by evil. Evil going by known names like Geoffrey Epstein and his entire network of getting deliberately underage girls for increasing sex acts, finally arrested on a host of new charges out of New York after a 53 page indictment was brushed aside for a non-prosecution agreement in Florida 12 years prior; that man Alex Acosta tapped as president Trump’s labor secretary promptly cutting the budget for human trafficking prevention, task falling under the jurisdiction of the department, pressure forcing his resignation but budget monies for trafficking left in limbo. Who knows how many young girls were abused in the 12 years he was allowed to walk free after a 13 month county jail sentence were he was permitted 12 hour a day 6 days a week work release for forcibly raping teen girls; new victims already coming forward to say they too were recruited and lured by Epstein. Subway’s Jared Fogle who sought and was convicted for transporting underage girls across state lines for sex, the high profile and controversial case of Cyntoia Brown convicted and sentenced to life in prison at 16 ineligible for parole until she turned 67 for killing essentially her 43 year old pimp because she though he was going to seriously injure or kill her; family circumstances and a hard life pushing her into trafficking, facts the jury never heard due to her not taking the stand to testify at the time attorney citing diminished capacity functioning at a 10,11 year old level, sentence finally commuted after serving 15 years with celebrity involvement and public scrutiny, lead prosecutor discovering the facts of her pitiful life. Pivoting to clear adults and why they chose abortion in actuality activists describing the hardship of lone abortion clinics in these red states looking to restrict abortion until it’s practicality wise unattainable independent laws on the federal books, are talking about women having to arrange childcare and travel hundreds to thousands of miles across an entire state because they already have at least one child, many of whom are married or in committed monogamous relationships opting for abortion citing financial constraints or being at their emotional/mental limits caring for the children they currently have. Willful obliviousness to pregnancy being an alarmingly high cause of female mortality during reproductive ages even in the United States, much of it preventable if the medical community would stringently follow its own best practices, taking mothers from babies they truly wanted or were a welcome surprise; if they truly wanted to do something to change those outcomes they would pass measures to stem the tide of rural hospital closures and health deserts of hospitals without an OBGGYN, obstetrics unit, NICU, maternity care of any kind, places without hospitals for hundreds of miles killing far more than expectant mothers and their infants because they live in isolated areas. Ignorant despite fellow lawmakers like Wendy Davis and her attention grabbing filibuster protesting highly restrictive bills in Texas forcing clinics to operate at hospital level surgical standards, open and honest in her book about her fertility struggles, having removed an ectopic pregnancy and aborting a fetus with a severe brain abnormality that were it to live to term, survive delivery would be blind, deaf and in a permanent vegetative state- what her doctor surely told her was non-viable. Never mind the legislation’s catalyst was the horrors at the West Philadelphia Gosnell clinic where when it was finally raided on unrelated criminality in 2011 police found fetal remains in the refrigerator along with employee lunches, not inspected since 1993, unsterilized surgical tools giving women venereal diseases, botched procedures puncturing patients uterus or intestines; easily stopped by standard yearly inspections there and in your state, cracking down on legal, licensed abortion facilities funneling people too far along for a legal abortion to clinics like his in your state or that he was convicted and essentially given life in prison for the negligent death of a patient and at least one fetus. Doctors in the above video related to the Missouri clinic closure detailing the inaccuracy of the fetal heartbeat idea when lawmakers and pro-life advocates want to invoke it also called out another bit of startling language used by the right to push their anti-abortion, never an abortion agenda, so called ‘partial birth abortion’ emphatically stating that’s not a thing, has never been a thing, medically they have no idea what it means; yes in the Gosnell court proceedings video you hear instances of partially born fetuses having their spinal courts snipped, you hear about essentially the murder of a baby that was out of its mother, moving and had been for 20 minutes, arguably why he was on trial for performing illegal abortions in gruesome ways on top of being an unlicensed disreputable abortion ‘provider,’ hiring staff with no medical background and regularly injuring his patients. And where is he, convicted on all counts and serving life in prison as even many of his patients feel is just. Willfully unable to connect all the obstacles you place in front of an abortion leaves women seeking ‘late term’ abortions by the time the poor, minority individual cobbles together travel money, childcare arrangements and the fees associated with them, the fetal remains laws adding more expense to abortion when they have to make funeral arrangements for tissue in once more Mike Pence’s Indiana, the supreme court struck down Texas’ attempt at same and part of Louisiana’s new law demands a funeral for fetal remains as does Ohio’s. When you force women to abide by 3 day waiting periods in a motel, force them to have excess invasive procedures such as the second pelvic exam conducted for 3 weeks in Missouri on a woman who may have been a rape victim, at the very least had an extremely unpleasant sexual experience even if it doesn’t meet the legal definition of that or sexual assault; it’s designed to turn her off to the medical choice of abortion, cruelty the feature not the bug to lawmakers who will never know what that feels like be faced with that choice. Want more recent proof it’s a game to officials of wait out the clock until they’re too far along to legally abort, take the Trump administration appointed anti-abortion, anti-contraception individual to head the office of refugee resettlement who immediately was not only creepy in tracking the periods of migrant girls, tracking the pregnancies of ones who were, but who took a teen rape victim to court after she had arranged to pay for her abortion, transpiration to the clinic but was barred from leaving her detention center for the procedure until the ACLU got involved and it was exposed in court how far along she was throwing up legal maneuvers to push her past the window of legal termination because he is against the practice, her far from the only one. Willfully uninformed a baby born at 20 weeks or after doesn’t always survive, in fact rarely does, the one in the video was delivered at 23 weeks 3 days and is being featured on the news going home now at 5 months precisely because she lived when so many others don’t; one of the Missouri Planned Parenthood cases terminating her pregnancy because of a fetal anomaly heartbroken that was the best step for her and any current children she had, children she might want in the future, not because she suddenly didn’t want it anymore. Blog and author clear they don’t support Iceland’s practice of recommending abortion to those with pregnancies revealed to have Downs Syndrome as a country wide medical/social policy but has equally made clear too support for an individual woman’s right to choose that’s not the best thing for her when she was wavering on taking care of a baby with 10 fingers, 10 toes, healthy only to discover well before birth it’s not; Downs carrying potentially much more lasting issues than their distinct physical features and developmental delays, heart and other organ defects common, opening the door to other disorders compounding Down’s effects. The same people who were up in arms about giving a cervical, reproductive organ cancer vaccine to pre-teen girls because the HPV virus is contracted through sex insisting they were too young, it was sending the wrong message absence of intellectual curiosity and knee deep hysteria over what they think something means; superseding medical and social fact on the safety of the vaccine or realities of potential for abuse, why it is necessary to give ‘so early.’ Ignorant of HPV stemmed throat cancer and other cancers in men why advocates were and are pushing boys too be vaccinated as girls; short-circuiting conservatives brains wrongly assuming all sexual contact is consensual not abusive or missing that the Christian message ‘the worst thing you can do is girl a girl pregnant’ leads to riskier oral and anal sexual activates giving males HPV generated cancers. Vast misinformation the motivation behind why Alabama was recently contemplating charging a woman, Marshae Jones, with homicide or manslaughter after being shot in the stomach and losing her child, no not because she shot herself in a deliberate attempt to end her pregnancy, was careless handling a gun while pregnant resulting in the shooting, rather because she got into an argument with another woman, Ebony Jemison, in a store parking lot centered around the baby’s father and the other woman pulled a gun and shot her; a grand jury declining to indict the shooter deeming her actions self-defense while justifying charges against the grieving mom because she perpetuated the verbal altercation. Alabama leading the nation in fetal harm prosecutions; certainly not a lone incident, in 2014 a woman endured kidnapping, rape and repeated beatings only to be charged under Oklahoma’s similar law when her unborn baby couldn’t survive the ordeal charging her with homicide under their fetal homicide law. Abortion advocates particularly worried about the latest Alabama case fearing it won’t stop with woman like Jones but will continue on to those who had a sip of alcohol either at the tail end of their pregnancy or before they knew they were, average citizens policing a women they don’t agree with’s prenatal care, self-care while pregnant well beyond drinking or illicit drug consumption, prescription drug abuse amidst pregnancy or those taken in consultation with your doctor full knowledge of the child you carry, advice women treat themselves as ‘pre- pregnant’ taking supplements like folic acid, charging and jailing women accordingly when they’ve don’t, charging women who took medicine as directed by a physician, women having not done anything wrong. Carrying on as if, redundancy being the word of the day, people won’t notice the insanity of this case, can’t use, to quote Joe Scarborough, ‘their google machine, their neighbor’s google machine’ to find the lengthy history of states at least trying to jail women for miscarriages and stillbirths. Charges dropped probably thanks to, in no small part, the public being made aware and public pressure calling out the absurdity of charging the victim of a crime for the death of her own baby even if she escalated the verbal altercation with more verbal altercation, not making her liable for the other woman who brought a gun to a shouting match then chose to fire that gun in the vicinity of a woman visibly pregnant; that they thought about it representing the bigger problem. Willingly perpetuating utter stupidity in handling a woman who lost her baby because of an argument upholding the shooter’s right to self-defense by not calling out local prosecutors from your position as state representative rather putting the laws on the books for them to use in such cruel and erroneous prosecutions. Ignorance is how you get religious minded pharmacists who won’t fill an abortion pill prescription on ‘moral grounds’ while the woman passionately explains she’s taking it to medically resolve a miscarriage, she’s trying to, wants to have a family; because, they don’t know or don’t care that the so called abortion pill can be used to remove the tissue of a miscarriage, the woman in question having already had multiple miscarriages in an attempt to conceive so the doctor gave her the option to take the pills, handle it at home in a more relaxed setting, allow herself to simultaneously grieve the child that isn’t going to be. Yet you are a pharmacist advising people about the drugs they have been prescribed, side effects to watch out for, potential interactions with over the counter medications, supplements they also take; and we, the American public, are allowing this locally where we live? Ignorance making critical lawmakers local and federal vulnerable to everything from junk science on fetal pain, to inaccuracies about ‘sexual disease vaccines,’ made up fallacies about birth control being abortifacient; who was it who fell for the Project Veritas’ Planned Parenthood videos but republicans and their operatives who did catch workers on tape talking about price for transporting otherwise discarded tissue for medical research into curers for diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, Project Veritas throwing in popular stock anti-abortion videos Chis Mathews of MSNBC’s Hardball having a perfect word for that, propaganda, textbook definition to boot. Can anyone forget Carly Fiorina’s impassioned dare to the Obama’s and Hillary Clinton to see the baby on the table heart beating, legs kicking while someone says ‘we have to keep it alive to harvest it’s brain,’ things that never happened even in the video she referenced and the only live baby killed by an ‘abortion provider was the often mentioned Gosnell serving life for his actions. Danger in such belief proven by Mr. Dear who did what he did to counter things he heard about the videos discussed probably on networks like Fox News, hints his repeated shouting save the babies even in court proceedings deemed mentally unfit to stand trial. Participating Project Veritas members indicted on 15 felonies, Planned Parenthood cleared of any wrongdoing and no longer paying for tissue transport; California’s Supreme Court allowing the case to continue spring 2019. Just like there has never been a baby born clutching an IUD nor free ‘abortion vacations’ provided by, who the Alaska republican shouting about it never said, only that assumed remote living Alaskans wanted a free trip into the city others to Seattle he said, urban legends all but used to get the right’s point across; stories appealing to emotion rather than fact, solid science. But therein lies the end goal it isn’t to be reasonable, craft practical, necessary restrictions on abortion to protect the health of all citizens even the yet to be born once they reach viability, it isn’t that they don’t know they are at the fringe edge of thinking on the subject, a majority do, it’s just a pathway to their ultimate goal; which is to draft the most extreme bill, states currently seeming to compete for which one that will be, and run it up the legal flagpole all the way to the supreme court hoping they’ll bite and the republican, conservative packed high court will grant them their fondest wish overturning Roe V. Wade again making abortion illegal leaning on the science and medicine they don’t understand, believe in to get it done. No thought to the dollars wasted doing so that could fund social services in their individual states making abortion a less likely turned to option for people who believe they can’t financially handle another child, put more money in parental pockets for babysitters, after school care and extracurricular/summer activities for rung out parents thinking they can’t mentally and emotionally take care of an additional child, caregiving services for elderly and infirmed persons so that someone isn’t contemplating a choice between caring for an elderly parent, sick adult sibling and having their baby because they only have 2 hands and so many hours in the day, oh no never that. Yes science has changed, medicine has changed but not to the point we should be punishing women for having something other than a healthy baby the true purpose behind miscarriage certificates, Indiana or elsewhere, as if a distraught woman who wanted her child, who if nothing else was coming around to the idea of being a mother is supposed to remember to file a police report. Fact science and medicine has changed but not so much we can eliminate the miscarriage, the premature birth or the deadly fetal anomaly meaning the child won’t be born viable and could harm the mother if simply left at later junctures of her pregnancy; science and medicine aren’t there yet which means laws shouldn’t be either and if they were, as mentioned in paragraph 2 committed to it getting there they would fund research not regulate abortion out of existence.

https://www.vox.com/2019/5/16/18628002/abortion-ohio-alabama-georgia-law-bill-details

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/5/17/18629279/youknowme-hashtag-twitter-women-abortion-stories

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/feb/08/sexual-assault-women-crime-survey-england-wales-ons-police-figures

http://www.salon.com/2016/10/29/im-grateful-for-my-abortion/

https://www.chatelaine.com/living/choices/abortion-in-my-30s/

https://www.scarymommy.com/married-i-want-an-abortion/

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/05/why-more-women-dont-choose-adoption/589759/

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/02/who-are-the-1-in-4-american-women-who-choose-abortion_partner/

https://www.salon.com/2018/03/20/medicaid-is-rural-americas-financial-midwife_partner/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spKv0LPqiCo

https://www.vox.com/2016/7/14/12190380/mike-pence-trump-vice-president-abortion-funerals-fetuses

https://www.cleveland.com/open/2019/03/ohio-senate-passes-bill-to-require-burial-cremation-of-fetal-remains-after-abortion.html

https://slate.com/technology/2006/07/conservatives-hit-a-dead-end-on-hpv.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/16/conservatives-hpv-vaccine-dilemma

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mike-pence-should-follow-jesus-on-hpv

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/silent-epidemic-cancer-spreading-among-men-n811466

https://www.salon.com/2013/08/07/fetal_pain_is_a_lie_how_phony_science_took_over_the_abortion_debate/

http://www.salon.com/2017/05/08/baby-born-clutching-iud-free-abortion-vacations-nope-but-such-urban-legends-are-very-useful-to-the-right/

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/29/anti-abortion-activist-filmmakers-charged-with-15-felonies/

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/may/19/david-daleiden-sandra-merritt-planned-parenthood-c/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/charged-with-murder-for-a-miscarriage-in-oklahoma

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-becomes-first-state-to-provide-certificates-for-miscarriages-under-new-law/

Their go to argument against abortion, against aspects of contraception is their touted stance shouting about sanctity for life at all stages of that life equating abortion to killing babies, contraception to interfering with the natural process associated with conception; assertions increasingly falling flat in the wake of irrefutable fact that that life is meaningless once it has left it’s mother’s womb and ceases to be a cudgel with which to control women’s actions, bodies. So called moral virtues falling flat based on their policies from cutting food stamp and welfare benefits improving the lives of those children well past viability, birth, toddler, childhood and adolescence, the repeated lies told about on both food stamps and welfare, who does and doesn’t consume the most in benefit dollars (hint their go to scapegoats black and brown people) when the majority are white, elderly, disabled or children residing in a household where at least one person holds a job, those not holding a job are either unemployed college/trade school students, caregivers for infirmed relatives, spouses, offspring or children under 18 statistical facts that go back years. Pro-life pronouncements laughable in the face of the Illinois bill in 2016 that would deny benefits to single mothers if the father is not named on the birth certificate never mind if he’s a domestic abuser and she’s fleeing from him, honestly doesn’t know because she was raped and is making the brave decision conservative republicans want her to make keeping the baby, she was drunk, drugged, has a medical problem, was in an accident hit her head barley remembers who she is, the baby’s ok but no she doesn’t know who the father is; that gives legislators the right to punish the child, because that is precisely who your punishing when you deny access to food, means to buy clothing and care products for a child, for their parents mistakes. Let alone understanding paternity testing has a dark and twisted history, now big business because there remains the perception women can’t be trusted, bill suddenly dropped probably when it reached national headlines, but we’re pro-life; yeah keep telling yourselves that. Incoming administration possibly the hardest of all on poor people including those facing a surprise pregnancy impacting abortion rates and not for the positive; president Trump who initially wanted to replace the food stamp program with food boxes then currently wants to change how we calculate poverty to a less reliable method removing huge swaths from eligibility despite their palpable need. Worse is why he wants to do this, less the latest incarnation of get a job you bums and more he craves the bragging rights of having lifted more people out of poverty without actually doing the work, tangibly making it happen. Both Trump and the republicans in congress complicit in the plight of children they dismiss the moment they’re born from refusing to demand equal pay for equally working women, organization pay transparency and keep resisting raising the minimum wage to $15 dollars an hour, forget tying it to inflation to remove having to repeatedly petition congress for its alteration the way surviving 9/11 first responders have to for the funds to treat their ongoing medical crisis and impending deaths for working in what were later found to be toxic conditions with little or no protective gear. Actions that would raise millions of children out of poverty and reduce their and their family’s need for assistance, provide a better more functional quality of life for the children they claim to care so much about through parental self-sufficiency, potential ability to afford items like their child’s entire school supply list, functional shoes and clothing lessening bullying not to mention protecting them from the elements, limiting distraction or falls from ill-fitting footwear, allow them to get the exercise they need to combat obesity, poor people foods known to pack on the pounds, by being able to fully participate in Phys-ed., play at recess; as if we haven’t seen a need when teachers are digging into their own pockets, sending out pleas on Facebook for shoes to give their students. Computers, tablets and home internet to complete increasingly complex homework facilitating their education; allowing them to put some straps on those boots to pull them out of the bad circumstances they were born into/to make better lives than their parents, if only. Identical red states ranked the lowest in the nation on metrics like reading and math proficiency, graduation rates and teacher pay, housing decision makers like the judge in Michigan who said kids had no constitutional right to literacy via present/competent teachers, textbooks and other classroom materials as well as functionally and structurally safe buildings in which to learn, equipped with staples like heat, but they care so much about life uh-huh. To predominately red states, coincidentally the ones enacting the latest incarnations of so called heart beat bills, who refused Medicaid expansion as part of Obamacare, who have in the past too repeatedly rejected funding for pre-school now mandating work requirements for adult Medicaid recipients, who to qualify after the age of 18, maximum 21, have to already be not only low income but medically compromised pretty much precluding work, forget for older persons whose retraining options are limited; facts that didn’t stop states like Kentucky, Indiana and Arkansas from trying to pass laws mandating said requirements only for Kentucky and Arkansas’ plans to be overruled by a federal judge concerned with access to care. Select states who’ve tried to pass laws saying you can’t abort your baby based on race, ethnicity (who was doing that) or fetial disability are usually the same ones refusing to expand Medicaid to pay for the costs of raising such special needs, medically fragile children, majority temporarily or permanently blocked by the courts, yet we see what they want to do, would put in pace if permitted to have their way. HPV vaccines for girls were a no, no at the prime age to make a positive difference based on male panic about teen sex, research showing instead young millennials and teen gen Zer’s are having less and less sex to the point of raising replacement level population concerns, but they are pro children’s life, pro children’s lives until it means altering their backwards beliefs. Pro children’s lives until it means regulating religious day care centers especially the ones run by factions of the Christian church whose exemptions to regulations lead to child deaths or the Indiana woman who used the religious freedom law to beat her 3 year old son then got probation; despite that example select states continuing to churn out religious exemption law after religious exemption law, but we have, they have time to regulate abortion to the nth degree. Republican congresspersons, conservative, religious lawmakers obsessed with children being raised in 2 parent homes as seen above to the point of cutting off assistance to mothers who won’t name their ‘baby daddy’ but conservative voice of popular talk show The View Meghan McCain viciously mocked progressive Andrew Yang, his proposal for free marriage counselling/couples counseling vouchers citing social outcome metrics that get better being raised in a 2 parent home; predictable she would attack his universal basic income too despite the gig economy and low wage jobs being where the employment openings are, another relevant fact that doesn’t care about your feelings: nearly half of women having abortions live at or below the federal poverty level. Sure the often referred to ‘family values’ party and its followers, consistent voters are pro-life right up until their mistress needs and abortion, as long as the world and their wife don’t find out they’ve been creeping on the side, reckless enough to use no protection, then of course one should be available for them. They are all staunchly pro-life unless it’s black and brown life then it can live in dilapidated neighborhoods ingesting lead paint, we forget that too is part of the saga of Freddie Gray thrown in the back of a van while handcuffed, no seat belt put on a man who couldn’t do it himself to sustain a life ending brain injury from being bounced all over said van, Chicago parents livid about their lead levels living in areas of subsidized housing under HUD while it’s secretary Ben Carson sat before congress asking in his usual sleepy manner what would happen if we didn’t remove the lead paint; studies showing not only the devastating effect on children but the increased propensity for crime in adults then they wonder what’s up with all the black criminals, gee we don’t know. Another neighborhood contaminated with industrial chemicals in the soil making residents sick, contaminating their children with lead impacting their development, again minority persons in a different state’s public housing where it took a year to inform people of the danger to them and their children; military families in private contractor housing inundated with bug infestations, dangerous mold, staggering disrepair, asbestos, leaks warping floors government still giving out the contracts, company cooking their books to remain eligible for performance bonuses. Military families across the country sent to expensive cities housing army bases where their low military pay leaves their children going hungry, eligible for free and reduced lunch along with other programs at alarming rates; but we’re pro-life, does anyone reading to this sentence still believe that? Retuning exclusively to black lives, theirs being lives police are free to terrorize, gun down in the streets robbing children they were apoplectic over in the earliest stages of development of household breadwinners, involved biological fathers, father figures in hapless children’s lives, think Philando Castile known to the kids he supervised during lunch as Mr. Rogers with dreads or the positive influence he likely was to his girlfriend’s 4 year old daughter, assuming he wasn’t the father, until the day she had to watch him bleed out in the family car over a traffic stop and him attempting to inform the officer he had a legal permitted gun; we forget Eric Garner had children and if he was selling lose cigarettes their wellbeing easily discernable as why, Alton Sterling had at least one son hocking CD’s that night to eke out a living, Walter Scott ran away from police during his traffic stop fearing a return to incarceration for what-unpaid child support, black lives we are hair trigger quick to thrown the book at complete with felonies ruining any chance at meaningful employment putting them in insurmountable catch 22’s then yelling at them to make something of themselves. Concurrently demanding they pay child support followed by states who take driving licenses away from men for unpaid child support or lock them up in jail both preventing them from looking for or getting to work if they possess a job, incarceration sure to lose them a job they may presently work, make it harder for them to be employed going forward robbing both the child of immediate dollars and the state of back paid monies owed for that child’s care shifted onto their shoulders when he didn’t come through, but we’ll do it anyway calling him a dead beat, derelict while we’re at it. No consideration given absentee fathers absent because you locked them up for being poor, doing your city/state a disservice as well as the child, who has bonded with that parent, removing that parent’s ability to raise the child into a functional, contributing member of society; give the other, primary parent a break making better people all around, but we’re pro-life is the relentless shout. Honestly republicans you don’t think 2 officers screaming profanities at a family encompassing a pregnant mother frantically telling police she can’t put her hands up because she’s holding her 1 year old won’t cause her to potentially miscarry her baby (and she was pregnant not like the mentally ill woman wandering her neighborhood shot by a cop who also lived in the area even after shouting she was pregnant though her family couldn’t confirm that), all over what, a 99 cent Barbie the 4 year old allegedly stole from the dollar store without the parents’ knowledge; how about forcing a pregnant woman onto her stomach because she wouldn’t give her name prior to the officer ever stating she was under arrest and what for, attempting to use her smartphone to double check the officer’s right to demand her name. Officers charged in the death of an autistic boy in the car with his father when they tried to apprehend him on an outstanding warrant though state officials could never find it; no warning pelting the car with bullets shooting the boy 4 times and critically injuring his father who was trying to get his son to a babysitter so he’d not see his father arrested on a potential DUI. Hardly surprising Michael Brown’s life was ended after a scuffle with police over less than $5 of mini cigars, a teen was just stabbed to death by a man at a gas station because his 90’s, early 2000’s rap music made him feel unsafe working 2 jobs to pay for his car and it’s upgrades while an off duty deputy shot a man in cold blood after an altercation where fireworks scared the deputy’s dog; people who if asked would doubtlessly proclaim themselves pro-life, politicians who will deflect citing the right to defend yourself understanding their fear but confused as to why protestors against police violence chant black lives matter and it’s the name of an organization combatting the issue. Conservative pro children’s lives unless it’s the ones handcuffed at 7 for ‘attacking’ a teacher who was hit and uninjured but police did it anyway, the ones with autism handcuffed at school for violent/disruptive behavior typical of their disorder and far from unmanageable without force. Idiotic cops who arrest black men as if any one of them will do to incarcerate for the listed crime on the wanted poster/bulletin, provided he looks close enough to the person pictured or sketched; mistaking Clarence Evens for someone named Quintin with a warrant in Louisiana (incident in Texas) asserting also his dog was not his, Evans refusing to hand over information being on his own front lawn, commonality between him and the suspect seeming to be hair, dreads or locs. When picking up trash around the outside of your own apartment complex gets a gun pulled on you by police needing to dot their I’s and cross their T’s that yes you do live there, like it would be so horrible to let him be even if he didn’t because he’s performing a public service or that the response should have been pulling a gun on him, regardless whether he lived there or not, when the only thing he’s holding is a grasping tool to pick up garbage with something other than his bare hands. Par for the course for ‘officers of the law’ willing to drag 65 year old out of their car during a traffic stop or shoot an unarmed panhandler; blog and author adamant old people be asked to own their behavior just as equally as young people are and be criticized the same way younger people are when the shamefully don’t right in the public eye, but their treatment was unnecessary and did nothing to better public safety, laws against panhandling (essentially begging) repeatedly deemed unconstitutional. GOP, religious conservatives known for harping on people working, pulling themselves up by the boot straps characteristically silent about the police brutality visited upon a woman and her 2 year old son as she sat on the floor of her local welfare office entraining him and waiting in line (on the floor since there were no more chairs in the crowded office space) for a childcare voucher so she could go where—to work, initially charged with resisting arrest and various other misdemeanors held in jail on another state’s warrant, charges dropped when video went viral, other matter expediently resolved. Child left in the care of his grandmother not one word from republicans about the trauma visited upon him; her disorderly conduct and resisting touched off by their manhandling of her toddler as they tried to take her into custody, seeing his mother arrested so violently won’t have instinctually imprint on him, cause him to fear police, that if it hadn’t been for a relative able to temporarily take him in he would have been in state custody at the cost of the state all because she sat on the floor playing with her toddler waiting her turn to receive an available social service meant to help struggling parents do what they constantly tell them to do, get/maintain a job. A place she wouldn’t have had to be, let alone with her child, if affordable childcare weren’t such a deeply transparent oxymoron; nothing again said about the erroneous call bringing police into it to begin with adding to the growing catalog of white people calling police on black persons doing normal things including 2 attending school, 2 Indian boys touring a college reported to police when a parent was frightened by their metal ban t-shirts. Have a stable job, making a good living, able to afford an upscale dwelling or simply not in the worst part of town, don’t expect it means they’ll leave you alone all the naysayers, conservatives and don’t forget law enforcement; instead you are likely to get adjacent treatment to the guy who was picking up trash officer in the latter case approaching a black man as he pulls up to his building asserting ‘you don’t look like you live here,’ on par with the people harassed by fellow tenants for being in their own apartment building, thrown out of their apartment complex pool, harassed for using a hotel pool as a guest, the community pool as a community member, thrown out of the public pool for the ‘crime’ of being young and black. Brown lives be they the ones at the border in cages consequence for fleeing violence, gangs, rape, LGBT persecution, starvation in their home country, migrants the current administration has decided don’t need refuge or help in one of the most stable countries on the globe or those who were brought here as children by desperate parents who couldn’t wait for the slow wheels of legal immigration to turn who know no other flag but ours, who know no country but America, don’t speak Spanish or the ‘native’ language of their ‘birth country,’ all that matters is their papers; don’t have them, back to a place you don’t remember you go. Start a business here, not good enough, start a family here, not good enough; not only will we refer to the child you love as an anchor baby we’ll execute your deportation order in front of your U.S. citizen daughter as you walk her to middle school. We see the demographic trying to enter the country, not illegally but rather seeking asylum mothers and children, whole families mothers, fathers children, aunts, grandparents and children while there is video of border patrol officers dumping out jugs of water left by humanitarian groups and concerned citizens for migrants crossing the desert, their dead bodies regularly found for a lack of water or food; a man from one group charged with illegally giving aide and transport to illegal aliens and aiding in the evasion of law enforcement facing 20 years in prison, ultimately a mistrial declared, who calls that pro-life. Republicans, Christian conservative lawmakers, operatives are pro-life until that means doing remotely anything on guns, combatting the rampant gun violence plaguing America citing their seemingly much more precious 2nd amendment and the right to bear arms even when the phenomenon ravages suburban white kids in school shooting after school shooting, having already done so in areas like Chicago for years thanks to police mistrust making citizens think they have to handle issues they would normally call the police for alone, lacking opportunities and upward mobility believing respect in the streets the only thing they have or ever will have. Even after the carnage of the Las Vegas concert shooting it took a president like Trump operating in their spirit of broken watches right twice a day, to ban bump stocks making any weapon fire like an automatic machine gun; conservative lawmakers standing in the way of simple changes like universal background checks, reinstating the assault weapons ban which was a thing from 1994 to 2004 arguably needed now mare than ever as weapons like the AR15 re the go to gun for mass shooters. On a local level making sure basics like school security are in place and operational as opposed to the 2 more parkland officers parkland fired for dereliction of duty for not going into the building where shooting was taking place bringing the total to 4 or Santa Fe Texas where Dimitrios Pagourtzis was able to plant pressure cooker explosive devices because someone clearly wasn’t paying attention; making sure mandated background checks are run and not hampered by an employee’s inability to log in to the system doing said checks, don’t function like Illinois where the man who shot up his workplace applied for the state’s gun permit received it, bought a gun applied for a conceal and carry permit and not until the federal background check went through did they find his felony in Mississippi preventing him from owing a gun yet law enforcement never retrieving the fire arms he purchased, his employer run check too missing the felony. Republicans, Christian conservative lawmakers, operatives are pro-life until that means applying 3 strikes laws on petty crime, no matter the reason why, think 2 cases of writing bad checks and one count of steeling baby formula though it was only ever meant for violent and high level drug offenses putting a undoubtedly poor mother behind bars for the rest of hers, real crime being a destitute predictably black or brown individual. Are pro-life until it means addressing the disparity between possession/addiction to crack versus powder cocaine, the former found on black people or addressing drugs with the humane compassion necessary shipping people to treatment not a cellblock; pro-life until it means altering ridiculous marijuana laws putting people behind bars for life because of one joint, retro activating laws legalizing recreational marijuana to release and expunge the records of people serving prison and jail terms for that offense. About as interested in the positive effects of Marry Jane from the alleviating nausea of chemo to the plants other attributes treating otherwise untreatable epilepsy to calming anxiety, easing bi-polar symptoms, lessening pain to helping veterans and trauma survivors cope with PTSD; natural with few side effects versus medically sanctioned drugs whose potential effects list is often worse than what it’s treating or equal in the case of psychiatric medications, as they are in jumping off a cliff or investing in research on other illicit drugs potential medical properties in a controlled setting. They are pro-life until you are one of the unborn inside an incarcerated mother then she can have all the miscarriages, stillbirths, ectopic pregnancies she ‘wants’ completely undisturbed by states’ laws on such, ignored if asking for help; should the baby make it to term, ready to be born, its mother may be forced to give birth shacked, on her cell floor or handcuffed to a prison infirmary bed, no qualms about punishing the little, innocent life for it’s parents’ mistakes then. Pro-life until it means enhancing the quality of that life by the least little bit, following the will of your state’s voters and giving non-violent felons who’ve served their time back their voting rights; no opposing lawmakers there had to go and institute a poll tax demanding people who just got out of jail pay all fines and restitution then they can vote, one of the many reasons why comedian Patton Oswald calls the sunshine state America’s scrotum no doubt. Pro-life until it means discussing a national family leave, sick leave policy like every other developed nation on the globe resisting it would be good for those newborn innocent lives they are so intent on defending with abortion laws but leave bereft any other time in their lives, or that not coming to work spreading your sick germs protects the life quality of your co-workers and boss, their families once they go home, the functionality and profitability of your company in consistent to increased productivity; yet that wouldn’t jive with the protestant work ethic that has been turned onto modern slave driving to businesses’ benefit and not singularly in America Japan’s 9-9-6 (9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week) socially expected work culture receiving pushback from the millennial generation seeking balance; maybe someone needs to redefine pro-life or remind them of the definition of it.

http://www.salon.com/2016/02/25/illinois_republicans_target_single_mothers_and_their_babies_gop_bill_would_ban_birth_certificates_financial_assistance_if_father_is_not_named/

https://chicagoist.com/2016/02/26/sponsor_of_bill_to_deny_fatherless.php

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/23/paternity-tests-are-big-business-because-women-arent-trusted/

https://www.salon.com/2019/07/07/whos-your-daddy-the-twisty-history-of-paternity-testing/

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/3724888-181/sebastopol-teacher-puts-shoes-on?sba=AAS

https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/abortion-bans-cases-sex-or-race-selection-or-genetic-anomaly

https://www.salon.com/2016/08/04/millennial_sex_panic_why_are_we_so_worried_they_arent_getting_enough_action/

https://www.salon.com/2016/04/16/religious_exemptions_kill_church_day_care_deaths_and_injuries_show_the_dangers_of_expanding_the_privileges_into_law/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2016/10/30/she-used-indianas-religious-freedom-law-as-a-defense-for-beating-her-son-then-got-probation/

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/nearly-half-of-women-who-have-abortions-live-below-in-the-federal-poverty-level-2019-05-17

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bqw2NwdgMCI

https://rewire.news/article/2015/03/31/deprived-care-incarcerated-women-suffer-miscarriages-stillbirths-ectopic-pregnancies/

At the same time polling shows an overwhelming majority of Americans want Roe V. Wade to remain intact and as is, want abortion to remain legal with the previous sane restrictions up to viability at 24-28 weeks, support restrictions after viability to things like significant medical anomalies, danger to a mother’s life. Contrasting the latest round of ‘heartbeat bills’ there is what we know works to prevent abortion, unintended/unwanted pregnancy in the first place; top of the list, comprehensive sex education. If there had been comprehensive sex ed. including legal definitions of rape versus colloquial ones, frank conversations on consent, what that looks like in the party situations those young men found themselves in Ohio Steubenville’s infamous rape case wouldn’t have happened; had they not enacted the policies of past years to scale back on not merely sex education but materials presented in health class, biology, anatomy and physiology those young men might have better understood what they were getting into, better understand why they were charged to prevent further charges in the future, instead, under Ohio’s latest round of attacks on reproductive rights and reproductive justice known 11, 12 year old rape victims would be barred from getting an abortion. The kinds of things you see in developing word countries like India where the international headline case of the 10 year old rape victim denied an abortion underwent a C-section, or the girl from Argentina 11 allegedly raped by her uncle too denied an abortion forced to birth the child, not in America. And every time schools anywhere in the country try to expand sex education parameters to include say LGBT issues, gender identity comprehension, safer sex practices for this group of young people, parents are suddenly up in arms and saying not my kid; whether it was the Seattle program handing out birth control to middle schoolers, not victims of rape or abuse, some of whom were coming to school on their second pregnancies, or the Kansas father apoplectic about a sex education poster including things like anal sex presented to 8th graders adding to his commentary it was ludicrous for abstinence only, except the school does not teach exclusively abstinence but abstinence plus which translates to abstinence and everything else. What they do teach is abstinence at her grade level which may or may not be a good thing when you have songs like Runaway Love from Mary J. Blige and rapper Ludacris singing about the same kind of pregnant middle schoolers they saw in Seattle a vulnerable pregnant 11 year old with an older teen boyfriend; each instance showcasing an uninformed, if not uninvolved parent, both responses demonstrating parents possess no earthly clue at what age their teens are exposed to what within their peer group, what age they are tempted to do what, requested to do by a girl, boy they like. But school officials weren’t supposed to do anything when clearly a good chunk of parents weren’t doing so effectively; when we’ve seen rants like Shanavia Miller being physically abusive, treating her daughter as if she were 6 not 16, screaming and raving, calling her child names rather than ever having sat down and talked to her about sexual safety supplemental to what she was being taught in school or in lieu of it if that was her choice as a religious minded mother or knowing her child best understanding what she’s ready for and not. Talking about a discharge, how nasty and disgusting her daughter was for having it sans knowing what it was, where it came from, from the common yeast infection, indication of reproductive disorder known to present in young people at puberty to STD/STI, but not talking her to a women’s health specialist, though information disclosed she has reached the developmental point of having periods; worse posting it, her (the mother’s behavior) on social media for the world to see facing no charges for the visual physical abuse happening in the video. Instead religious minded conservatives likely to praise Miller as a tough, no nonsense parent as opposed to using her and similar others as an example of why comprehensive sex education should be in every school full stop; nuances people al-a Mike Huckabee fail to either acknowledge or understand properly, the potentially violent reactions when ‘good Christian parents’ discover their teen is pregnant, the referenced good Christian parents who were watching his TV program when he had it, listen to his radio show, follow his appearances on other conservative shows and agree or adopted his stance on key social issues, who began shouting about their teen’s pregnancy, they reach over to shake the kid in a how could you do this manner, there are stairs nearby, the teen pulls away falling down the stairs and, if the teen doesn’t die breaking her neck, she’s likely to miscarry or permanently injure the child; negating the goal of saving the unborn child from a teen deciding to have an abortion on her own absent parental input. ‘Good Christian parents’ who turn violent and abusive, marginal/neglectful or negligent parents from the get go leading to pregnant pre-teens/teens, harming their teen and or the unborn child, even throwing their teen out of their home for getting pregnant, the same way conservatives like Huckabee suggest identical actions for dealing with a child who is gay, causing the teen to flee their home fearing harm to themselves or the child, physical consequences of an unmonitored miscarriage under such conditions; why 14 year olds are allowed to receive an abortion without parental consent. Logical if the teen has been ejected from their home and their parent/legal guardian shuns contact with the child in order to obtain desired consent; because, even if it should be criminal to abandon your child in such a way, necessitating intervention from child services and family court, by the time that plays out she will be past the point of being able to get an abortion by the most lenient guidelines, discarding if they’ve been routed from their home they don’t possess the means to take care of themselves well past prenatal vitamins they obtain from the free clinic to deliver a healthy child, ideally in their minds, put up for adoption. Like the 14 year old whose family found out she was pregnant by another relative, 4 family members holding her down siting and bouncing on her stomach, alternating between that and kicking her until she vomited then delivered an 8th month stillbirth, setting the body on fire all for fear child services would investigate the home and remove other younger children. That is after feeding her copious amounts of morning after pill contraception that failed to abort the fetus, further proof positive said contraception isn’t abortifacient; stories he doesn’t hear about on conservative news. Parental consent laws assume there are parents to consult in the first place excluding the 400,000 kids in foster care in 2018, the 11% of which are housed in group homes; one of the Illinois cases in the introduction received a judicial bypass because she had virtually no one step parent to grandparent to contact in order to obtain consent to get an abortion at her minor age. The so called family values party utterly hypocritical when if it was a first generation American teen whose parents are immigrants and were found committing similar actions they would be shouting about the need to protect this teen and her right to their own body. Utah lawmakers in 2017 rejected a bill that would allow parents to opt in to comprehensive sex ed. classes at their child’s school over abstinence only curriculum even agreeing students needed more instruction but holding onto the unrealistic party line believing it should begin at home; the same Utah who reached national headlines a few short years earlier when a school edited yearbook photos for modesty sans parental consent or notification to the point conservative mouthpiece Fox News, who hosted a show where Mike Huckabee shamed Natalie Portman for daring to attend the Oscar’s as an obviously pregnant, unwed mother though in her acceptance speech she described the ‘baby daddy’ as her fiancé, where Huckabee would later continue his defense of Josh Duggar after going on a serval minute rant about how liberals don’t make sense, both alluded to in the opening, was asking these are what your editing affirmation tattoos and barely visible bra straps with sun dresses at the height of summer and accompanying heat? As opposed to anyone coming forward pushing back against those shouting parental rights saying yes you do have a right to raise your child your way within legal limits; however, you don’t have the right to weaponize your child as a public health threat potentially spreading STD’s/STI’s because they don’t have accurate, complete sexual health information, lacking proper information about oral and anal sex thus aren’t honest with their doctors about sexual activity. Any more than they have the right to weaponize their children as a public health threat by not vaccinating them yet as listed in the previous paragraph a dominantly left wing anti-vaxxer movement gets plenty of help from the right citing big government when states want to remove religious and personal belief exemptions, when areas of New York wanted to institute a quarantine of sorts mandating unvaccinated persons for measles not go in public exposing those too young, medically unable to be vaccinated. Not sinking in to local religious, conservative lawmakers, schoolboard members schools should be part of the sexual education ‘village’ allusion to that village they want raising a child, incorporating family planning into adolescent medicine, general practitioner services as opposed religious parents taking their teens to the ‘family pediatrician’ they are afraid to talk to because their parents will find out everything or won’t give them the full scope of sexual health information being a friend of the family or acquiescing to parent wishes, doctors being cowed by patients parents on standard vaccines or sexual health related vaccines like the one for HPV in the interest of keeping their practice, earning the money to keep their doors open. We know what works providing access to and information on the medically available reproductive healthcare options including abortion and contraceptives proven in practical metrics and real lives when Colorado initiated a program to give teens and low income persons IUD’s (intrauterine devices) a form of long acting birth control that doesn’t require daily pills, pills be taken at the same time daily 24/7, 365 to be fully effective, routine shots every few months, that can be removed when the recipient wants to start a family, try and become pregnant; there the teen pregnancy rate dwindled by more than half, the teen abortion rate shrank by just under 2/3 since 2009. An example of something else that prevents unwanted pregnancy and the resulting abortions the need for more long acting birth control methods including implants along with those successful IUD’s; proving something else too, many times people’s approach to birth control has nothing to do with lacking responsibility, deficient character rather cost those IUD’s Colorado was willing to foot the bill for costing up to hundreds of dollars each. Maryland following their lead in 2016 making birth control, plan B and vasectomies free to residents who wanted any and all of the above; incidentally increased access to birth control not abortion saving the government 12 billion dollars annually as of 2017 in social programs like welfare, food assistance, childcare subsidies, children’s Medicaid and other state insurance initiatives, but conservatives and their allies will continue their emotional arguments not factual ones even while crafting law. Access in terms of doctors being willing to discuss all options with their patient, I’ve told this story relentlessly because it’s relevant every time the subject is mentioned my friend and her 5 kids; who has 5 kids because when she asked a doctor to tie her tubes after her first 2 kids she was told she was 2 young, republican conservatives doubtlessly behind the laws stipulating you have to be below X age have at least 5 kids before you can get your tubes tied at the state determined age, by the 3rd the hospital said they would set it up and didn’t, busy mom of then 3 not having the time to chase after them. By number 4 they were asking if she had signed a form when she was admitted to the hospital with abdominal pain no clue she was pregnant, bringing her days old son back to her GP asking if she missed something requesting a referral or whatever was needed to get her tubes tied only for her GP to keep suggesting Mirena with no medical explanation why she would not be a candidate for tubal ligation the medical term for tube tying; causing her to walk out dissatisfied and as time went on nervous about having it done. By child 5 hospital saying they needed 30 day notice when she came in just like she had with child 4 unaware of her pregnancy; the state paid for this early 7 month baby’s 2 weeks in the NICU because they refused to tie the mother’s tubes as requested. Her story far from unique doctors refusing tube tie requests across the nation based on age even though patients are over 18, at least 21, based on marital status, unmarried or having a spouse on active duty in the military, where doctors agreed to do the procedure and the patient was married, and that wasn’t grounds for automatic refusal, they sought permission from the husband to go ahead; what happened to one couple were he’d already had a vasectomy but they wanted to double down on permanent birth control. The fact they only have one child, are childless also cited, doctors holding an extraordinary amount of discretion, apart from medical reasoning, why the patient can’t undergo the procedure even though it has a reversal surgical option should younger persons change their mind; even cases where there was a medical basis for tube tying patients still meet needless resistance from supposed to be medical professionals while politicians simultaneously have the audacity to accuse women of ‘popping out more kids to get more in welfare dollars.’ Yet if you are black or brown there’s the horrifying history of forced sterilization of the disabled, persons in institutions and people of color; fear playing no small part in the fate of Purvi Patel, how her still-born infant ended up in a dumpster near the hospital where she was found and treated, a first generation American or an immigrant publicly unclear. What wasn’t her apprehension of doctors and what to do about her pregnancy revealed in text messages to a friend, fears only exacerbated by the newest round of laws; nor is her response out of the ordinary though rare, remember the miscarriage law example videos from paragraph 1 including the woman who had a stillbirth at home panicked and hid the body? Scared people do strange things prevented by telling people what to do instead; assuring people who come to the hospital with a still birth won’t be immediately accused of harming your child. You would think with all clamoring about immigrant hordes coming over the border, legitimate concerns about over population compared to what earth’s resources can support, they would be for birth control given to persons who wanted it, but that would be logical, the kind of logic that fails conservatives, republicans and pro-lifers. Safe haven laws not enacted until it was white teens in suburbia drowning their babies in toilets at prom, putting them in garbage bags and shoes boxes terrified to tell their parents then going to jail for 20 years for killing their baby, still seeing cases like little India dumped on the side of a road in a garbage bag because we refuse to acknowledge what is needed to prevent it, admit we would see less of it if people had the resources to handle surprise pregnancy. Contrast the red state push to prevent rape victims access to abortion to the Texas assembly assembling a taskforce to combat rape, to develop best practices in handling rape and sex assault cases, make the law enforcement medical processes for reporting rape and sex assault as easy on survivors as possible, add and improve survivor resources. Contrast those actions to the Texas principal making national ‘positive’ headlines who thinks getting a handle on the worlds ills begins with enacting a dress code for parents while on school grounds banning excessively ripped jeans, hoodies, ‘too short’ shorts, rollers in hair, satin caps, pajamas among a host of other things again not for students (who already have a similar dress code) attending the school, not for select events needing more formal attire but parents called to the school to deal with a sick/misbehaving child, attend a parent teacher conference; principal thinking this not sex ed. and body autonomy, removing the stigma, subliminal message that if you dress in any of the banned items at any time you are responsible for your rape/sexual assault, continuing the perception if you never wear these banned items you won’t be victimized by sexual assault, will not only improve test scores but standards of these children’s lives. Frustrating yet entirely expected, the people who agree with the principal kids won’t care about their appendence and by extension their character, school performance if their parents don’t, applauding preventing parents from dressing ‘ratchet’ the current incarnation of ghetto; those who didn’t understand one of the featured mothers wearing a head scarf and a t-shirt dress in Texas heat, we’re getting a primer on with the migrant conditions at the border, that yes a t-shirt dress is a thing sold at major retailers and designed to be worn just as she was wearing it. Head gear her choice of accessory probably to contain ‘unruly’ black hair in a hurry the same way men wear doo rags, likely banned as well; however if she wasn’t they’d be screaming bush your hair, do something with your hair not understanding natural/ethnic hair that looks that way even though yes it has been washed and combed. Doomed to drive parents further away from their kids, render them less involved in their children’s lives and make things more difficult for school officials when parents stop cooperating with them because they rightly refuse to be told what they can wear on their own time, start to legitimately question other school policies and the principal’s priorities when they school is failing in so many other ways that have nothing to do with what either parent or child is or isn’t wearing. Representing the existing contradictions that form Texas, look at the principal who once a week uses Facebook live and the school’s Facebook page to connect with families at home reading her elementary students a bedtime story resulting in improved reading scores and improved behavior; judge for yourself which strategy actually works. Compare traditional approaches to the principal in New Jersey setting out to solve students problems before demanding they up their SAT scores by installing a laundry room so students could have clean clothes, show up for school and not being bullied, who keeps his school open 6 to 11 on Friday, 3 nights a week during summer to give kids without parents or with parents working odd jobs and odd hours fed, off the streets and engaged in fun activities, not losing any of his students to street violence since implementing his programs to the presidential candidate, a democrat no less, who when prosecutor in her district threatened to jail parent’s for their children’s truancy. Really a larger indictment of culture who wants us to all be pro-life, raise our children to be ‘fine upstanding citizens’ while throwing them out of every public place even those both attractive, safe and meant for kids, closing doors on kid friendly establishments, community programs never having them to begin with) then wondering why they’re roaming the streets, enacting curfews for kids who want to use the skate park after dark during summer when it’s not so hot, wondering why ‘kids can’t function when they go off to college. We know what works flying in the face of Ted Cruz’s bad joke about rubbers expanding birth control options for men equalizing reproductive agency and responsibility past the condom research in the works for decades few alternatives on the market; so, in the meantime also realizing the nuclear family is no more wouldn’t go amiss, setting aside LGBT couples, single parents by choice, women who’ve never found Mr. right, rarer men who haven’t found the one and only girl, nuclear families have been less common sense the sandwich generation started caring for their aging grandparents and their growing family, taking in elders a practice in almost every other culture but our own. Countless feel good stories on the news detailing women who took in their sister or best friend’s kids after they died in a car accident, of cancer or other potentially fatal disease, how about the teacher who took in his student after finding out he would have to leave school when the foster family he was staying with returned him to the care agency; compounding his problems, he had kidney disease and without a stable home was removed from the transplant list. But we shouldn’t call that a family regardless that with a home and someone to see to his aftercare he was reinstated in the transplant list and received his kidney; what’s next decrying stay at home dads? People like Ted Cruz’s attitude and showcased ignorance on reproductive issues underscores another thing we know works, if the focus is preventing abortion not controlling sex, enforcing chastity exc. then it’s about time we get sex ed. programs dedicated specifically to the number of religious communities across America noting the statistics of Christians alone who engage in sex before marriage (85% and that number is from 2015 at the latest). Returning to the core topic, contrast Alabama, Georgia, Ohio, Louisiana spent their states legislative time crafting insane abortion restrictions where Kansas took the opportunity to enshrine abortion rights court affirming the right to the procedure as part of the state constitution, saying yes doctors can legally use a common second trimester procedure and that the ‘alternatives’ the state put forth were dangerous to women’s health, calling out their arguments as conflating 2 issues in astounding mental gymnastics, upholding the agency a woman has over her own body, family composition choices. Illinois used the moment to sign legislation protecting women’s reproductive rights in their state, establishing that embryos, fertilized eggs don’t have independent rights i.e. personhood removing a 1975 law on the subject including provisions for spousal consent, waiting periods, criminal penalties for physicians who perform abortions and other restrictions on abortion facilities, as well as the state’s partial birth abortion ban, which impacts late-term procedures, capping it off with expansions to insurance coverage for procedures and for contraception; all simultaneously as we heard about the latest cycle of abortion restrictions to come out of these negatively garnering attention red states. Both New York (already discussed in paragraph 1) and Virginia pushed to expand abortion rights and with them female autonomy over her own person; no matter how much the writer of the article thinks democrats are overplaying their hand or the dangers of 3rd trimester abortions outside stipulations for saving a mother’s life. And Nevada using the new female legislative majority passed the Trust Women Act decriminalizing abortion in all facets a direct counter to legislation in the mentioned other states restricting abortion and with it women’s rights, that legislative majority likewise bringing other women’s issues to the forefront to the betterment of their state. Finally here, recently a federal judge told the Trump administration no on cut backs to title X family planning solely on whether the facility performs abortions or is sharing an office with an abortion provider previsions of the law excised from it decades ago; illustrating these extreme fights don’t have to be an all or nothing game with the quality of people’s lives women’s lives hanging in the balance.

http://www.salon.com/2015/09/11/if_pro_lifers_wanted_to_end_abortion_rather_than_control_sex_their_tactics_would_be_radically_different/

https://www.thecut.com/2019/02/11-year-old-rape-victim-given-c-section-argentina.html

https://www.bustle.com/articles/87342-seattle-public-schools-are-providing-free-iuds-and-other-birth-control-at-school-based-clinics-thanks-to

https://www.insideedition.com/headlines/17746-mother-streams-beating-of-her-daughter-on-facebook-live-im-gonna-need-yall-to-send
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/23/let-s-put-an-end-to-thot-the-misogynistic-phrase-that-s-sweeping-the-nation.html
https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=4910764&itype=CMSID
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kxam7/tubal-ligation-requirements-doctor-denials
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q9IlXaYwj0
https://www.salon.com/2019/06/12/illinois-governor-signs-abortion-protection-bill-into-law-a-giant-step-forward-for-womens-health/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/02/new-york-and-virginia-push-expand-abortion-rights/581959/
https://hotpads.com/blog/5-strategies-getting-landlord-pick-you/
https://www.salon.com/2019/07/06/bragate-2019-how-underwire-bras-became-political-in-kansas-citys-jail/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/12/shreveport-louisiana-saggy-pants-law/1429817001/

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/arts-post/post/pajamas-in-public-should-they-be-banned/2012/01/18/gIQAtmVE8P_blog.html

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hamedaleaziz/inspector-disgusting-conditions-border-migrants-children

https://psmag.com/news/hundreds-of-judges-currently-preside-in-new-york-without-law-degrees

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/when-your-judge-isnt-a-lawyer/515568/

Flint doesn’t have clean water, Alabama has developing country, 3rd world disease outbreaks in the form of hook worm and in select counties raw sewage can be seen flowing from homes into trench pits through exposed pipes due to poor water treatment and lagging public water systems; California has rural residents not connected to city water sources forcing them onto unaffordable bottled water and this is what state lawmakers are spending their time on. Alabama the same state whose jail conditions were deemed unconstitutional citing structurally dilapidated cells to the point of being unsafe, rampant violence virtually uncontrolled by staff, rampant sexual assault and abuse, sky rocketing suicide rates brought on by essentially no help for the obviously mentally ill instead stuffing them in solitary confinement; situation dangerous to staff as well, at one juncture given a week to dramatically change the entire prison system while legislators passed new abortion laws. Though the ultimatum was issued from the federal department of justice, easy to think local lawmakers should have been on top of that not on top a woman’s uterus yet again. And we’re far from done with the state’s 99 problems that have nothing to do with abortion, a massive medical kickbacks scam putting counterfeit surgical screws into people’s backs and greedy doctors doing back surgeries on people who didn’t/don’t need it leading to pain and disability, who had a funeral director accepting kickbacks from tissue collectors for medical research threatening the new embalmer with being cremated alive, killing his entire family because of a conversation he wasn’t meant to overhear, conservative screech echoing around the country— but abortion! Alabama who wanted to create their own Christian morality police force to function as a perverted version of neighborhood watch undermining actual legitimate police authority setting up Christian Sharia law attempting to punish personal behavior not regulated under criminal codes; question, were the following the lead of the town in Florida with about two and a half thousand residents, aptly name Ave Maria, who tried the same thing, but abortion is where their focus is. Fracking for natural gas has poisoned local well waters in red states advanced by the votes of similar GOP politicians voting yes on such measures while 9 rules on drilling and extraction have been overturned under the current president’s watch and 9 more are in the process of being eliminated; Flint’s initial water problem started thanks to the same corruption as they had a clean water source but switched to the dirtier Flint River to save a few bucks spearheaded by the business man elected mayor of the city. The public found out last year, thanks to a whistleblower, Flint’s neighboring city Detroit Michigan houses a doctor giving chemo to patients who didn’t need it on top of the talked about judge’s ruling on a right to literacy through basic instruction and materials, a slap in the face to students concerned about their educations and futures, but the necessary national focus on abortion is sucking all the oxygen out of other conversations of far greater importance because elected officials can’t let go of the 1950’s. Congressional members against Medicare for all, shouting we can’t afford Obamacare should be worried about the diminished air quality over the duration of the Trump administration thanks to massive regulation rollbacks including 10 overturned rules and 12 in the process of being rescinded, adjacent votes and endless de-regulations on water quality and industrial dumping protections (part of what is making California’s water undrinkable is giant agro-farm runoff) 4 on water quality alone, 3 on toxic substances, not helping achieve longstanding goals since poor air quality increases rates of asthma, respiratory distress and disease driving up healthcare costs; yet instead of passing local legislation to keep these regulations in place, to better citizen’s health where you live, where you are, in your state there’s one channel anti-abortion, anti-abortion, anti-abortion. Depression era drainage systems that haven’t been updated since FDR’s new deal created them are responsible for much of the Midwestern flooding problems as noted in video above 12 regulations on infrastructure and planning have been wiped out, Louisiana just dodged what they thought was going to be another massive hurricane rather a minor flooding event only for residents to discover drainage systems meant to keep water out of a city below sea level hadn’t been cleaned in up to 2 years despite showing they had been cleaned on a public works app designed to inform residents; but they did have time to pass a heartbeat bill. While medieval diseases al-la typhus are spreading throughout homeless populations in sprawling metropolises like California’s L.A., doctors warning it won’t be the only resurgence of a different dark age think plague, but protecting life not able to exist outside the womb only for it to be born into those conditions, it’s mother to be exposed to those preventable illnesses killing or causing it defects is perfectly acceptable earing little more than a shoulder shrug, responsibility to be placed on the ‘derelict’ parent for not exercising better judgement in not getting pregnant, pregnant again, not raising their skills to get a better job, rather than an entire system set up to devolve like this. Spikes in homelessness not just accelerated by stagnant wages and skyrocketing prices for something so basic as housing, shelter, when there is no place in the country you can afford either a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment on minimum wage, not singularly exacerbated by gentrification lead by an uncontrolled tech industry pricing out locals in their own cities, foreign investment gobbling up real estate doing the same but vastly varying rules on eviction and tenant responsibility in different states; in my city a woman who vacated her insect infested apartment only to find out shortly after, as she searched for a better place to live, that her former landlord had given her an eviction notice, put said notice on her rental record after she left making it harder for her to find another place to live. The absurd idea that to live in midrange, middle class, lower middle class housing, sometimes the only rental apartments available in city X you need to present your potential landlord with a ‘rental résumé’ designed to make him/her want to pick you over other potential tenants; a clear absence of rules for landlords raising rents 3 and 4 times a year with no rhyme or reason, ordinances that were passed in Oregon by legislators who saw a problem and set out to solve it putting a stop to that practice in their state. Homelessness compounded by arguably old and unknown zoning laws stipulating land meant for residential dwellings be designated for single family homes alone, what that means is no apartments, no duplexes, likely no rental properties forget affordable, sounds a lot like the latest shenanigans from Mike Huckabee regarding his Florida home where he finally got a fellow conservative also a judge to grant him the right to bar resident citizens from the public beach though he knew when he built his mansion he didn’t own the beach, the sand, was using it as a summer home only their X days out of the year versus people who live there year round; but, legislators in states with the biggest problems keep insisting on rewriting abortion laws despite little change in public sentiment on the subject, little change in medical knowledge that would be impacted by the legislation unto saving a fetus’ life. Women don’t have access to sanitary menstrual products in prisons/jails nationwide, a Maryland jail was caught violating that state’s law on the very issue saying it must be provided similarly to toothpaste, mouthwash and bedding, as if that statement isn’t absurd enough; pregnant women and or their offspring have died in the jails of sheriffs like David A. Clarke, women forced to give birth on their cell floor or in a substandard infirmary both while shackled, begging for help for the minutes/hours old infant that wasn’t given and the baby died, but this (abortion) is what local legislatures are focused on. And underwire bras are a big deal in Kansas City Jails since they started setting off metal detectors, next instead of using the accompanying wand to see what and where an item on a person is setting off the alarm, they forced visitors including inmate’s female lawyers to remove their bras, then go through until they weren’t setting it off; not abortion but certainly a situation steeped in misogyny, housing a relatively simple solution but indicating those in power will focus on everything but substantive issues, worse this was a detention center housing persons yet to be convicted and merely the latest in a string of incidents involving wire bra discrimination nationwide. Never mind the innocent people left languishing in jail for want of crime lab processing expanding well beyond rape kits to confirming substances thought to be drugs actually are (repeatedly field tests doling out false positives) said lack coercing people into plea deals to serve their time and try to move on with their lives yet the state dollars are going to defend extreme bills on abortion, contraception, abortion clinic regulation in court. Mississippi and Georgia are again facing a massive state financial drain as portions of Hollywood pull out of production for various movies, TV and streaming service shows in protest of the restrictive abortion bills brought before state congresses only to be passed by legislatures with no self-preservation instincts seeing as many of those identical states suffered the same economic hit when they crafted parallel legislation against the LGBT community with bathroom bills forcing transgender people to use the bathroom corresponding with the gender listed on their birth certificate, touched off by North Carolina who used the bathroom issue to avoid giving legal protections to LGBT persons under statewide anti-discrimination statutes. You would think after hearing the outcry from advocates of 11, 12 year old rape victims who require an abortion for the simple fact their young, immature bodies can’t carry a child to term, never mind preserving their reproductive functions should they want to become parents later as adults, now adults who were pregnant rape victims at those ages and struggled to get a life/wellbeing saving abortion lawmakers, regardless of party, would be in favor of a minimum age for marriage in places that don’t already have it, not so in Louisiana whose house wouldn’t pass a child marriage ban or even stipulate a minimum age citing ‘very mature’ 16 year olds; have to wonder if that guy is related to the judge who gave a teacher 31 days in jail for his sexual relationship with a student that later caused her to commit suicide saying she was mentally older than her chronological age, whatever that was supposed to mean. Louisiana housing the city of Shreveport where officials mulled over and discontinued their ordinance on baggy pants 4 years after a man, Ervin Leon Edwards, died post getting into a fight with his girlfriend where police were called, issue already resolved when they arrived, no charges to be filed; officers decided to justify their time responding by running him in for his sagging pants (which should have resulted only in a fine) tasing him for his ‘lack of cooperation’ despite his girlfriend’s pleas and informing them repeatedly of his high blood pressure, dumping him in a cell, kicking him with their foot to ascertain if he was alive after abandoning him in the cell for several minutes with no medical treatment. Still it took the police shooting death of another black man in 2019 fleeing an officer trying to arrest or cite him for his attire to see the laws abolishment; Louisiana the state where a city commissioner put forth an ordinance banning pajamas in public, though it unlike the sagging pants ordinance seems to have gone nowhere the sentiment remains, that they can have a ‘serious’ legislative conversation about banning articles of clothing and how people chose to wear them but not child marriage that didn’t just become a problem after 2012 when the commissioner’s ordinance proposal made national headlines. Instead of say addressing the HIV epidemic sweeping the south in part due to its conservatism, puritanical views and horrendous sex ed., the ravages of the opioid crisis and what we now know about the pharmaceutical industry pushing millions and millions of pills on towns with only thousands of residents pushing them to needle drugs like heroin when they can’t pawn them off of doctors any longer also spreading ‘the deadly sex disease,’ Roy Moore is taking a second shot at the U.S. senate from Alabama, a 16th woman accuses president Trump of what legal experts would term first degree rape, (with no consequences forthcoming) for an encounter had in a high end clothing store dressing room where she describes in vivid detail him first putting his hands into her privates then violently, painfully shoving his penis into her, made public as excerpts from her memoir; her believable assault account making no major headlines while we spent 2 months talking about Joe Biden putting his hands on women’s shoulders, rubbing noses with someone, possibly smelling someone’s hair and pats on the arm all agreed weren’t sexual harassment, sexual assault, sexual misconduct, one willing to vote for him if he becomes the nominee. At the very least there should be a legal way to keep Moore from running for office again. On the boarder we have kids living in filthy squalid conditions while Trump administration lawyers are in court arguing kids don’t need soap, toothbrushes or blankets, don’t need to be permitted to sleep undisturbed through the night, don’t need enough room to lay down, relegated to sleeping on concrete floors in horrid cold, bedding apparently removed due to a lice outbreak for the government facility they are being housed in to be deemed safe and sanitary situations; local judges aghast at the lawyers hedging word salad mirroring those on abortion because just as there is no good reason for abortion not to be permitted at minimum in the cases of rape and incest, there is no sane, logical reason not to provide basic hygiene supplies, access to showers, nutritious food, adequate medical care to children, not in a facility for hours as the lawyer tried to imply, hours less than a day ruling out requirements for blankets or toothbrushes, but weeks or months at a time. Elsewhere migrants standing on open toilets seeking breathing room, subject to massive overcrowding, open toilets with no privacy, epidemics of flu and lice, no access to showers, clean clothes, not allowed to change clothes since arriving, wearing the same clothes they crossed the border in, a teen mother wearing a shirt covered in breast milk stains, not getting enough food because everyone gets the same meal age 1 to 17, breastfeeding teen mom or no. 24 people who have died in border patrol, HHS custody 6 of them children and those are the numbers we know about, so bad the Trump administration deliberately stopped counting; republicans so beside themselves about abortion having no comment on the 28 miscarriages suffered by migrant women probably in part due to listed conditions, states honed in on passing abortion bills while children are being taken to detention facilities in their state perhaps in the middle of the night. That is after at more functional facilities the Trump administration elected to remove English classes (while screaming immigrants coming to this country need to learn English choking off opportunities for them to do so long before their were ever tent cities at the border ) recreation activities like soccer, overall education to migrant kids. On the heels of those twin shocks to the American consciousness there came the photo of the drowned father and 23 month old daughter who died crossing the Rio Grande along with his wife solely because they tried to enter at a port of entry and were denied thanks to metering limiting the number of migrants who can enter the country daily exercising their international law right to seek asylum, so chose to cross the river; and, another teen migrant nearly died trying to cross before being rescued requiring CPR to save his young life. Conditions so bad there are epidemics of shingles, scabies and chicken pox, lice children reporting retaliation of taking away their sleeping mats and Mylar blanket when they complained about the chlorine taste of the water, quality of the food; children who have American parents or relatives meaning they shouldn’t be being detained for months on end at all. Women and men jammed into standing room only cells, told to drink out of the toilets when one of the sinks didn’t work, a woman told by a doctor she needed a biopsy for a lump on her back but hasn’t had it done, being given bologna sandwiches day after day after day unto needing medical attention for constipation. Allegations from a 15 year old girl she was sexually assaulted, groped and fondled not only in front of other migrants but fellow guards, a young man called Spanish slang for male prostitute, another migrant forced to wear a sign in Spanish saying he likes men, but abortion is all states in certain regions of this country can think about. New York has an epidemic in it’s lesser known regions of judges handing down sentences, conducting legal proceedings without being lawyers problem described as follows, “some of the courtrooms are not even courtrooms: tiny offices or basement rooms without a judge’s bench or jury box. Sometimes the public is not admitted, witnesses are not sworn to tell the truth, and there is no word-for-word record of the proceedings. Nearly three-quarters of the judges are not lawyers, and many—truck drivers, sewer workers or laborers—have scant grasp of the most basic legal principles. Some never got through high school, and at least one went no further than grade school. But serious things happen in these little rooms all over New York State. People have been sent to jail without a guilty plea or a trial, or tossed from their homes without a proper proceeding. In violation of the law, defendants have been refused lawyers, or sentenced to weeks in jail because they cannot pay a fine. Frightened women have been denied protection from abuse. The examination found overwhelming evidence that decade after decade and up to this day, people have often been denied fundamental legal rights. Defendants have been jailed illegally. Others have been subjected to racial and sexual bigotry so explicit it seems to come from some other place and time. People have been denied the right to a trial, an impartial judge and the presumption of innocence….”[Sic] Problems hardly confined to the state The Atlantic in 2012 did a similar break down nationwide where justices of the peace were replacing judges with less training than random jobs like hair dresser in certain regions, one only mandated 4 hours of training an voilà you’re a justice of the peace and making decisions that affect people’s lives, but we have time to endlessly debate abortion, run up the legal flagpole all the way to the supreme court bills on abortion, yet not a sweeping federal mandate judges everywhere have to at least pass their state’s bar exam and have X years experience in a court room trying cases before sitting on a local judicial bench. Explaining in one sentence how we get situations like Brock Turner, how we get stories like this blog’s much referenced examination of the wholly unjust fate of Zach Anderson spearheaded by a judge or the latest instance out of New Jersey where a judge cited a 16 year old accused of rape and prosecutor’s petition he be tried as an adult’s coming from a good family, going to a good school, having been an Eagle Scout and how much it could ruin his life as why it should stay in family court despite photographing or filming the incident texting it to his buddies/classmates with the phrase when your first time is rape, using a table to bar the door of the basement or room where this took place, girl so intoxicated his friends attending the party went to check on her and call her a ride home, those persons or others describing her vomiting all over the floor indicating she was starkly too intoxicated to consent, waking up the next day covered in bruises, with no memory and fearing she was raped. Judge adding his description of what he views as rape: at least 2 assailants dragging the victim to a shed; utterly divorced from every legal definition of the act, that rape is forced sex period whether it’s genital to genital contact, mouth or fingers to genitals, object to genitals, anus. New York City where police were underestimating rape in crime statistics by 38% via clever categorizing clear rapes as other lesser crimes often absent the vivid sexual component, but draconian abortion laws once more dominate national attention. We can pursue hard time for ice cream lickers opening ice cream in stores licking it then putting it back on the shelves as part of a social media prank commenters citing public exposure to communicable disease but find republicans shaking their head at California extending healthcare beyond the ER to undocumented immigrants, forgoing entirely that communicable diseases care about neither your immigration status or geographical boarders. Pursue hard time for those ice cream idiots but not regulation to put a plastic seal over it, seal broken don’t buy, or more to the larger topic regulations for fertility clinics helping people get pregnant after several cryogenic storage failures destroyed stored embryos; the latest horror story an Asian couple woman implanted with what she thought were 2 of her stored embryos until the twins were born Caucasian 2 women notified they had infants they weren’t planning for woman who carried them for 9 months forced to hand them over to their biological parents left with nothing, clinic having no idea what happened to her embryos. Reactions to realities that aren’t new either, it follows the people who think they were sent to their local congress to spend time insisting government documents begin with the arcane phrase in the year of our lord, craft bills making the bible the state book, school board members who want to replace AP history with bible verses and Reagan speeches, who believe the best use of their time is to pass ordinances like the ones criminalizing baggy pants, fast tracking students into the school to prison pipeline (students who were redundantly predominately black or brown, African American or Latino), who honestly believe their election to a position of power gives them to go forth in their city, county, state eliminating either their pet peeves or the pet peeves of their oldest constituents lost in a changing world. Why voters need to stop electing the oldest choice on their local ballots, believe them when they say they want to enact extreme legislation on topic X, people need to vote period and voting needs to be made easier not harder.