•A woman in Utah gave birth to twins. When one was stillborn, she was arrested and charged with criminal homicide based on the claim that her decision to delay cesarean surgery was the cause of the stillbirth.
•After a hearing that lasted less than a day, a court issued an order requiring a critically-ill pregnant woman in Washington, D.C. to undergo cesarean surgery over her objections. Neither she nor her baby survived.
•A judge in Ohio kept a woman imprisoned to prevent her from having an abortion.
•A woman in Oregon who did not comply with a doctor’s recommendation to have additional testing for gestational diabetes was subjected to involuntary civil commitment. During her detention, the additional testing was never performed.
•A Louisiana woman was charged with murder and spent approximately a year in jail before her counsel was able to show that what was deemed a murder of a fetus or newborn was actually a miscarriage that resulted from medication given to her by a health care provider.
•In Texas, a pregnant woman who sometimes smoked marijuana to ease nausea and boost her appetite gave birth to healthy twins. She was arrested for delivery of a controlled substance to a minor.
•A doctor in Wisconsin had concerns about a woman’s plans to have her birth attended by a midwife. As a result, a civil court order of protective custody for the woman’s fetus was obtained. The order authorized the sheriff’s department to take the woman into custody, transport her to a hospital, and subject her to involuntary testing and medical treatment.
CC: everyone who says “wahhhhh i don’t want to pay for your birth control”
Birth control makes sense economically
The crazy thing is that I’m pretty sure the GOP knows this. That’s how bad they want to control us and our bodies. That’s how afraid they are…
Then again, if you pay attention to what happened in the senate today (re: the UN Disability Treaty), this does seem about right, unfortunately. That’s why we gotta keep the momentum from this past election.
If you’re pregnant, think you might be pregnant, are considering parenthood/abortion/adoption and just need to talk to someone who won’t judge you for your decisions, my inbox is always open and all conversations will be private!
Heck, if anyone feels like they need someone to talk to, I’m here! It doesn’t matter if you’re my follower or not or whatever you want to talk about, my inbox is always open and I won’t judge you.
It is no secret that Mitt Romney and his running-mate, Representative Paul Ryan, are opponents of abortion rights. When Mr. Ryan was asked at last week’s debate whether voters who support abortion rights should be worried if the Romney-Ryan ticket were elected, he essentially said yes.
They would depart slightly from the extremist Republican Party platform by allowing narrow exceptions for rape, incest or the life of the woman. Beyond that, they would move to take away a fundamental right that American women have had for nearly 40 years.
Mr. Romney has called for overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that recognized a woman’s constitutional right to make her own childbearing decisions and to legalized abortion nationwide. He has said that the issue should be thrown back to state legislatures. The actual impact of that radical rights rollback is worth considering.
It would not take much to overturn the Roe decision. With four of the nine members of the Supreme Court over 70 years old, the next occupant of the White House could have the opportunity to appoint one or more new justices. If say, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the oldest member, retired and Mr. Romney named a replacement hostile to abortion rights, the basic right to abortion might well not survive.
The result would turn back the clock to the days before Roe v. Wade when abortion was legal only in some states, but not in others. There is every indication that about half the states would make abortion illegal within a year of Roe being struck down, according to the Guttmacher Institute. The Center for Reproductive Rights, which challenges abortion restrictions around the country, puts the number at 30 states. For one thing, abortion bans already on the books in some states would suddenly kick in. And some Republican-controlled state legislatures would outlaw abortion immediately.
Even with Roe and subsequent decisions upholding abortion rights, more than half the states have enacted barriers like mandatory waiting periods, “counseling” sessions lacking a real medical justification; parental consent or notification laws; and onerous clinic “safety” rules intended to drive clinics out of business.
Mr. Romney is a vocal supporter of this continuing drive in the states and in Congress to limit the constitutional right, even without overturning Roe. To a large degree, the anti-abortion forces have succeeded. In 1982, there were about 2,900 providers nationwide; as of 2008, there were less than 1,800. In 97 percent of the counties that are outside of metropolitan areas, there are no abortion providers at all.
We do not need to guess about the brutal consequences of overturning Roe. We know from our own country’s pre-Roe history and from the experience around the world. Women desperate to end a pregnancy would find a way to do so. Well-to-do women living in places where abortion is illegal would travel to other states where it is legal to obtain the procedure. Women lacking the resources would either be forced by the government and politicians to go through with an unwanted or risky pregnancy, attempt to self-abort or turn to an illegal — and potentially unsafe — provider for help. Women’s health, privacy and equality would suffer. Some women would die.
Mr. Romney knows this, or at least he used to. Running for the United States Senate in Massachusetts in 1994 against Edward Kennedy, Mr. Romney spoke of a young woman, a close relative, who died years before as result of complications from an illegal abortion to underscore his now-extinct support for Roe v. Wade. In a report in Salon last year, Justin Elliott, a reporter for ProPublica, found that when the young woman passed away, her parents requested that donations be made in her honor to Planned Parenthood. That’s the same invaluable family-planning group that Mr. Romney has pledged to defund once in the White House.
14-year-old Cassidy Goodson was indicted by a grand jury on October 4 for the murder of her newborn baby. She’ll face trial as an adult for charges of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse and may serve a life sentence if convicted.
Cassidy went into labor in her Lakeland, Florida mobile home, and gave birth to a 9-and-a-half-pound baby boy on September 19. According to authorities, she bit down on a towel and ran the shower to muffle noise from the bathroom for fear that her mother, also in the mobile home, might hear her.
This incident should be a wake-up call to proponents of abstinence-only-until-marriage curriculum, and to educators who stand to effect change in the lives of students concerning healthy sex. Instead, both the media and the criminal justice system is operating fully within an anti-choice narrative that values fetal rights over those of the mother and ignores the physical and psychological health of pregnant women and girls in need to systemic support.
We have no way of knowing the intimate circumstances of Cassidy’s home life, or any intimate knowledge of her internal struggle. However, it is the responsibility of sex-educators and law enforcement to acknowledge and explore the possibility that this manner of “prevention” is not effective and may have contributed to Cassidy’s case. To blame a 14-year-old entirely for her reaction to a sense of helplessness exempts the system that was meant to prepare her.
“Before the seventeenth century, men had no accurate knowledge of their role in conception. Early scientists, called natural philosophers, portrayed the pregnant woman as an incubator or receptacle for the fully-formed, miniature foetus which was deposited into her during sexual intercourse.”
—
Finn, Geraldine. Voices of Women, Voices of Feminism: Limited Edition. Fernwood Publishing; Halifax. 1993. (pg. 108)
Whatever our political conflicts, we can generally agree that we should treat pregnant women nicely. We don’t hesitate to help them carry their groceries or give them a seat on the bus. Yet when pregnancy comes up as a political issue, lawmakers are far more fixated on what an expecting mom’s womb is doing, rather than her hands—as she slips the check under your plate and hopes for a decent tip—or her mind—as she loses sleep wondering whether she’ll lose her job as her due date nears.
Under current law, it’s easy for bosses to mistreat pregnant women or force them off the job. Yet the men who run Congress are too busy sponsoring anti-abortion bills and slashing social programs, it seems, to protect pregnant women in the workplace. One of the many labor bills left off the congressional radar is the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, (PWFA) which would help prevent pregnant women from being arbitrarily fired and make employers better accommodate them.
“Former Us Weekly editor Janice Min realized just how deeply ingrained her magazine’s stories about pregnant celebrities and weight loss are when her manicurist asked when her baby was due four months after she gave birth. Min notes that “this 1 percent of lucky mothers with the time, money and good genes to be skinny in their skinny jeans have informed our judgment of the other 99 in a sort of trickle-down mean-girls effect” and admits that she wishes she could “undo” this physically perfect mother image just a bit. Of course, she backtracks a bit, saying that we can learn a lot from these celebrity mothers and that “letting yourself go” after pregnancy isn’t acceptable. It’s also noteworthy that Min is set to publish a book about motherhood and weight loss – and pioneered the “pregnant celebrity weight loss” focus during her time at Us Weekly.”
Doctor Andrew Rochford and his wife had twins a few years ago. He says: ” When I stood there next to her, I thought I understood what she went through.”
In the Australian show ”What’s good for you” the doctor and host himself now go through “labor”. Electrical impulses will create contractions in the stomach that will be like real labor pains. To help - so everything will be correct - the doctor have a mother of four who voluntarily offered to be a guinea-pig. She makes a face when the machine starts. When the “contractions” starts she says: ” Yes, that’s how it feels”. Before she leaves the room she smiles to the doctor and says; “Men can’t do this so good luck”.
A midwife and a doctor is in place to monitor the experiment. They start with giving Andrew Rochford Braxton Hicks. “Oh God”, he says and starts to sweat. When the contraction is over he relaxes. “What a relief”, he says.
Just like with a ordinary first timer the contractions finally comes more often and lasts longer. Andrew Rochford have a harder time to deal with the pain and begs for something for the pain. he gets nitrous oxide (laughing gas). After about 3 hours he has 60 seconds long contractions and 60 seconds break in between.
– “How much longer?”, he asks.
– “A first timer usually have contractions for about 12 hours, so you have 9 to go”, the midwife answers.
That’s when Andrew Rochford had enough and stops the experiment.
– ” I thought I knew what you are going through. I don’t. All talk about men having a higher threshold for pain than women is a lot of bullshit. Women, you win”, he says.
Hahaha soooo funny.
This makes me so happy.
I’ve never known of a woman who hasn’t given birth claiming she knows what it’s like or bragging that she could easily take it.
