Election on Tuesday.
Nov. 3rd, 2024 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickI am not typically a single-issue voter. I'm a 54 year old woman where Roe has been the law of the land from when I was three until I was well past childbearing years.
But hear me out. Or skip if your brain is full. I'll understand, either way.
I have two aunts who were pregnant when they were young and unmarried, before there was a legal right to abortion.
One had a child, a son, and gave him away as an infant. She also, at the same time, dropped out of college and never got a college degree after that. Instead, she married, raised four kids, got a divorce from her cheating husband, and lived in relative poverty from then on, a situation not at all helped by the lack of college degree keeping many doors closed to her. She was very, very smart, but her life went into a different direction than she had planned, largely as a consequence of the "pregnant out of wedlock, drop out of college, etc" chain of events.
My other aunt fell pregnant out of wedlock and managed to secure an (at the time) illegal abortion through a friend of the family. She pursued a degree in college and later went back to get a more advanced degree. She also married and had two kids. Her eventual socioeconomic status wound up being a great deal higher and more comfortable than the life my other aunt lived.
As a result of this, it is difficult for me to look at Roe and abortion access as an issue that does not have a clear and direct bearing on the lives of women.
Additionally, as a woman of a certain age, I am aware of how fucking often pregnancy doesn't work out. It's more common than people like to think.
My sister-in-law miscarried right before the "ok to tell people" time, between kid 1 and kid 2. My friend's daughter had at least two miscarriages between kid 1 and kid 2. My grandma had several failed pregnancies, including an unnamed infant who lived mere hours, between kids 1&2 and kids 3&4. Dad was born in '42, SJ in 43, then there was a six year gap during which "nothing happened". Then J was in '49 and DL was born in '50. That gap there? Yeah. Miscarriage, miscarriage, infant, miscarriage. It wasn't nothing. (Why didn't she use birth control? Oh, honey, no. There wasn't decent birth control until later. The pill didn't exist until the sixties.)
Pregnancy is a risk to life and limb for the pregnant person. It is not a risk free event and for every ten joyous belly pics or gender reveal you see on facebook, there is a corresponding miscarriage that you might not ever hear about unless you're quite close to the family. Lots of pregnancies do not go well. Many fail before implantation of the fertilized egg. As near as we can tell, somewhere between 10 and 20 % of all fertilized eggs wind up as miscarriages, typically (80%) before week 13 of the pregnancy.
Now, I do know that there are people who believe in the marrow of their bones that abortion is murder. I do get that. I understand that the literal existence of abortion burdens them with inexpressible grief.
However, abortion bans make for more dead women and more women made infertile through delayed healthcare. This is not ideal, either. These women do not have to die. These women could have been saved. They are dying now and will continue to die because of abortion bans.
Amber Nicole Thurman, dead after complications from a medical abortion, could not get care in Georgia to remove retained dead baby parts from her uterus until it was too late. And so perhaps you might say, "Well, she went against God and deserved it because you reap what you sow to which I will respond: Forgiveness of sinners is God's greatest gift, you fuckwit. (I mean, it ain't my book but I'm pretty sure that God gave his only son to die on the cross for all of us lowly sinners and each and every single one of us is sinful as fuck and ain't nobody not sinful so just tend to your own business and let other folks alone lest ye also be judged. Pretty sure that's the party line, here.)
Candi Miller suffered the same fate as Amber Nicole Thurman. She had multiple health conditions (high blood pressure, lupus, diabetes) that had led her doctor to tell her that another pregnancy could kill her. Afraid to go to a doctor after an incomplete medical abortion because of the laws in Georgia, Candi Miller died, leaving her two children motherless and her husband a widower.
Oh, but they tried to KILL THEIR BABIES and they didn't FULLY RELY ON GOD and they that live by the sword shall die by the sword and all that shit. This is not a trolley problem where you get to kill the guilty and save the innocent. This is not that.
I know you think you can pull the lever and make the trolley go towards the evil whore women wanting abortions. After all, they DESERVE it. The unborn are completely innocent of sin and did nothing to deserve being murdered. And maybe that's true, but abortion being illegal kills all women who need abortions for medical-care reasons, not just the evil women trying to get out of the wages of sin for fucking like scarlet whores.
Sometimes, abortion bans kill pretty, young, white, Christian, pro-life women who are excited about being pregnant and AT THEIR BABY SHOWER when they start feeling wrong. Exhibit A: Neveah Crain, a Texas women suffering from a failed miscarriage while six months pregnant. Tried go to to the ER three times. Dead due to medical inaction.
Look. I do not think that having idiot legislators who say things like Todd Akin's wonderful quote If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. should be trying to make rules about what doctors should do. It makes for shitty laws that are unclear. It makes for doctors and nurses afraid to act, afraid to do what is best for the patient in front of them. It makes for dead women.
Oooh, but WE have a compassionate exception for rape and incest. Nice. Do you know how to prove you were raped to the satisfaction of a medical professional who may be facing felony charges and loss of license? What if the doctor doesn't believe you? What if you didn't go to the cops? What if you have only your word and the word of your best friend, the only other person you told about what happened to you? Is that "proof" or is that "lying after the fact because you're a whore who wants to evade responsibility for spreading her legs"? Who decides?
Or, say you're eleven and your uncle has been fucking you. He says you can't tell anyone or they'll take you away and you'll never see your family again. Gem of a man, he is.
But you finally tell your mom because your clothes don't fit and you can't stop throwing up. And your mom doesn't believe you but she does take you to the doctor's office to see what's what. Do you try again at the doctor's office, try to tell a stranger about what's been happening, with your mom standing right there and giving you the mom look to make sure you don't try to spread those awful lies about uncle Bobby?
"She's lying. Bobby's my brother. He's a great uncle, spends a lot of time with the kids. He'd never do anything like that. I don't know where she comes up with that filth."
As an adult, I know there are DNA tests that will 100% prove beyond the shadow of a doubt the father of any child or fetus. Did I know that at eleven? Does everyone? Does the word of an eleven year old child overrule the word of her custodial parent? Could this child even GET a paternity test if it might be risky for the life inside her? Or would she have to carry to term, only for everyone to discover that she had been telling the truth all along?
The exceptions for rape and incest are the thinnest of cobweb veils, offering no real protection to those who most need compassion and understanding for the circumstances that are not of their making. They do not do what they are allegedly supposed to do. The only thing they do is make some people feel a little bit better about abortion bans.
Also, I'd be more on board with your slate of ideas if you fully funded stuff like childcare and schooling for pregnant teens and WIC and Head Start and school lunches and so forth. I'd also be more on board with your slate of ideas if all forms of birth control were federally subsidized and offered to all persons capable of becoming pregnant. Also, I'd like fact-based (not "abstinence only" bullshit) sex education in all schools starting in about first grade. Everyone should know how babies are made and ALSO how to engage in sexual activity that is wanted without making babies by accident.
You, there, in the back, shut your fucking mouth about "GOD SAYS". You don't get to sling that stuff when actual policy is being made. In this country we have freedom of religion and you need to understand that not all Americans believe that consensual sexual activity is a sin. Some of us aren't real on board with that at all. Facts, here, are more important than your belief system.
Giving people information about how to act responsibly in matters of consent and contraception is not something that the bible thumpers should be allowed to prevent. Bible thumpers, you can spill poison into the ears of your children all you want at home and at church, but in the school funded by my tax dollars, they had best get actual factual information that they can use to live their best lives.
I could get behind "Abortion is very undesirable and we'd like to require a doctor to say it's medically necessary for the health or fertility of the mother before doing any abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy." I could probably get behind "Abortion is exceptionally undesirable and there is no abortion available in this country after 12 weeks without two different doctors agreeing that it is medically necessary to preserve the health or fertility of the pregnant person." -- but only IF there was subsidized birth control and a very clear and strict fact-based system of education about sex and pregnancy in the schools from first grade onward.
You say that is too young, that kids should be allowed to be kids. I say that one of my friend's 4-H kids got pregnant the very first time she had sex. She was fourteen. Her parents believed strongly that abortion was wrong and they raised the child. But still, she got to be a pregnant fourteen year old, which I am not sure is winning by any stretch of the imagination.
So this year, I'm a single issue voter.
But also, I believe in some other things that I do not feel are going to be reasonable in a Trump presidency.
Item the first: Gay people exist and have always existed and it's OK for them to exist and get married if they want and raise families if they want. Like, that's OK. It's not wrong and the government should not be out there trying to make it wrong.
Item the second: Trans people exist and have always existed. It's OK for them to exist and to live their lives the way they want. They aren't wrong and the government should not be trying to make them wrong for existing. They are people, just like the rest of us.
Item the third: Public schools aren't allowed to give out tylenol to kids. There is absolutely no way that they're doing gender reassignment surgeries to children in school. That isn't happening. There also are no school bathrooms with "kitty litter" for "children who identify as cats". That's not a thing because I have not seen a video about it on Instagram. If there was any bathroom in any school in the United States with a human-sized litter box for a child to shit in, it would be all over Instagram. Everyone has a video camera in their pocket these days and you cannot tell me that it wouldn't get a gazillion likes as a video. Pics or it didn't happen.
Item the fourth: We need to do more in this country to allow all people who want to vote to vote. It is unbelievable that some citizens (only citizens are allowed to vote in the United States of America, please do not speak of illegals voting, they are not allowed to vote) have to wait in line for four hours to vote when I can just walk into my local polling place and vote, ten minutes tops. A national voting rights act would help enfranchise all of our citizens equally, and probably we should get on that.
Item the fifth: I do not think that calling every damn election "rigged" and casting doubt on the process with absolutely no evidence and 60 failed lawsuits to your name is the act of a responsible person seeking elected office. Vowing to only accept the results if you win and claiming that any other result is a consequence of cheating suggests to me quite strongly that you don't really have any desire to follow the process of civilly electing the leadership in this country. I fear for the continuation of our democracy under the Orange Idiot.
The election is Tuesday, November 5. If you haven't voted, please make a plan to vote. (Yes, even if you're voting Orange Idiot instead of Brown Lady. Everyone should vote. That's how democracy works.)
But hear me out. Or skip if your brain is full. I'll understand, either way.
I have two aunts who were pregnant when they were young and unmarried, before there was a legal right to abortion.
One had a child, a son, and gave him away as an infant. She also, at the same time, dropped out of college and never got a college degree after that. Instead, she married, raised four kids, got a divorce from her cheating husband, and lived in relative poverty from then on, a situation not at all helped by the lack of college degree keeping many doors closed to her. She was very, very smart, but her life went into a different direction than she had planned, largely as a consequence of the "pregnant out of wedlock, drop out of college, etc" chain of events.
My other aunt fell pregnant out of wedlock and managed to secure an (at the time) illegal abortion through a friend of the family. She pursued a degree in college and later went back to get a more advanced degree. She also married and had two kids. Her eventual socioeconomic status wound up being a great deal higher and more comfortable than the life my other aunt lived.
As a result of this, it is difficult for me to look at Roe and abortion access as an issue that does not have a clear and direct bearing on the lives of women.
Additionally, as a woman of a certain age, I am aware of how fucking often pregnancy doesn't work out. It's more common than people like to think.
My sister-in-law miscarried right before the "ok to tell people" time, between kid 1 and kid 2. My friend's daughter had at least two miscarriages between kid 1 and kid 2. My grandma had several failed pregnancies, including an unnamed infant who lived mere hours, between kids 1&2 and kids 3&4. Dad was born in '42, SJ in 43, then there was a six year gap during which "nothing happened". Then J was in '49 and DL was born in '50. That gap there? Yeah. Miscarriage, miscarriage, infant, miscarriage. It wasn't nothing. (Why didn't she use birth control? Oh, honey, no. There wasn't decent birth control until later. The pill didn't exist until the sixties.)
Pregnancy is a risk to life and limb for the pregnant person. It is not a risk free event and for every ten joyous belly pics or gender reveal you see on facebook, there is a corresponding miscarriage that you might not ever hear about unless you're quite close to the family. Lots of pregnancies do not go well. Many fail before implantation of the fertilized egg. As near as we can tell, somewhere between 10 and 20 % of all fertilized eggs wind up as miscarriages, typically (80%) before week 13 of the pregnancy.
Now, I do know that there are people who believe in the marrow of their bones that abortion is murder. I do get that. I understand that the literal existence of abortion burdens them with inexpressible grief.
However, abortion bans make for more dead women and more women made infertile through delayed healthcare. This is not ideal, either. These women do not have to die. These women could have been saved. They are dying now and will continue to die because of abortion bans.
Amber Nicole Thurman, dead after complications from a medical abortion, could not get care in Georgia to remove retained dead baby parts from her uterus until it was too late. And so perhaps you might say, "Well, she went against God and deserved it because you reap what you sow to which I will respond: Forgiveness of sinners is God's greatest gift, you fuckwit. (I mean, it ain't my book but I'm pretty sure that God gave his only son to die on the cross for all of us lowly sinners and each and every single one of us is sinful as fuck and ain't nobody not sinful so just tend to your own business and let other folks alone lest ye also be judged. Pretty sure that's the party line, here.)
Candi Miller suffered the same fate as Amber Nicole Thurman. She had multiple health conditions (high blood pressure, lupus, diabetes) that had led her doctor to tell her that another pregnancy could kill her. Afraid to go to a doctor after an incomplete medical abortion because of the laws in Georgia, Candi Miller died, leaving her two children motherless and her husband a widower.
Oh, but they tried to KILL THEIR BABIES and they didn't FULLY RELY ON GOD and they that live by the sword shall die by the sword and all that shit. This is not a trolley problem where you get to kill the guilty and save the innocent. This is not that.
I know you think you can pull the lever and make the trolley go towards the evil whore women wanting abortions. After all, they DESERVE it. The unborn are completely innocent of sin and did nothing to deserve being murdered. And maybe that's true, but abortion being illegal kills all women who need abortions for medical-care reasons, not just the evil women trying to get out of the wages of sin for fucking like scarlet whores.
Sometimes, abortion bans kill pretty, young, white, Christian, pro-life women who are excited about being pregnant and AT THEIR BABY SHOWER when they start feeling wrong. Exhibit A: Neveah Crain, a Texas women suffering from a failed miscarriage while six months pregnant. Tried go to to the ER three times. Dead due to medical inaction.
Look. I do not think that having idiot legislators who say things like Todd Akin's wonderful quote If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. should be trying to make rules about what doctors should do. It makes for shitty laws that are unclear. It makes for doctors and nurses afraid to act, afraid to do what is best for the patient in front of them. It makes for dead women.
Oooh, but WE have a compassionate exception for rape and incest. Nice. Do you know how to prove you were raped to the satisfaction of a medical professional who may be facing felony charges and loss of license? What if the doctor doesn't believe you? What if you didn't go to the cops? What if you have only your word and the word of your best friend, the only other person you told about what happened to you? Is that "proof" or is that "lying after the fact because you're a whore who wants to evade responsibility for spreading her legs"? Who decides?
Or, say you're eleven and your uncle has been fucking you. He says you can't tell anyone or they'll take you away and you'll never see your family again. Gem of a man, he is.
But you finally tell your mom because your clothes don't fit and you can't stop throwing up. And your mom doesn't believe you but she does take you to the doctor's office to see what's what. Do you try again at the doctor's office, try to tell a stranger about what's been happening, with your mom standing right there and giving you the mom look to make sure you don't try to spread those awful lies about uncle Bobby?
"She's lying. Bobby's my brother. He's a great uncle, spends a lot of time with the kids. He'd never do anything like that. I don't know where she comes up with that filth."
As an adult, I know there are DNA tests that will 100% prove beyond the shadow of a doubt the father of any child or fetus. Did I know that at eleven? Does everyone? Does the word of an eleven year old child overrule the word of her custodial parent? Could this child even GET a paternity test if it might be risky for the life inside her? Or would she have to carry to term, only for everyone to discover that she had been telling the truth all along?
The exceptions for rape and incest are the thinnest of cobweb veils, offering no real protection to those who most need compassion and understanding for the circumstances that are not of their making. They do not do what they are allegedly supposed to do. The only thing they do is make some people feel a little bit better about abortion bans.
Also, I'd be more on board with your slate of ideas if you fully funded stuff like childcare and schooling for pregnant teens and WIC and Head Start and school lunches and so forth. I'd also be more on board with your slate of ideas if all forms of birth control were federally subsidized and offered to all persons capable of becoming pregnant. Also, I'd like fact-based (not "abstinence only" bullshit) sex education in all schools starting in about first grade. Everyone should know how babies are made and ALSO how to engage in sexual activity that is wanted without making babies by accident.
You, there, in the back, shut your fucking mouth about "GOD SAYS". You don't get to sling that stuff when actual policy is being made. In this country we have freedom of religion and you need to understand that not all Americans believe that consensual sexual activity is a sin. Some of us aren't real on board with that at all. Facts, here, are more important than your belief system.
Giving people information about how to act responsibly in matters of consent and contraception is not something that the bible thumpers should be allowed to prevent. Bible thumpers, you can spill poison into the ears of your children all you want at home and at church, but in the school funded by my tax dollars, they had best get actual factual information that they can use to live their best lives.
I could get behind "Abortion is very undesirable and we'd like to require a doctor to say it's medically necessary for the health or fertility of the mother before doing any abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy." I could probably get behind "Abortion is exceptionally undesirable and there is no abortion available in this country after 12 weeks without two different doctors agreeing that it is medically necessary to preserve the health or fertility of the pregnant person." -- but only IF there was subsidized birth control and a very clear and strict fact-based system of education about sex and pregnancy in the schools from first grade onward.
You say that is too young, that kids should be allowed to be kids. I say that one of my friend's 4-H kids got pregnant the very first time she had sex. She was fourteen. Her parents believed strongly that abortion was wrong and they raised the child. But still, she got to be a pregnant fourteen year old, which I am not sure is winning by any stretch of the imagination.
So this year, I'm a single issue voter.
But also, I believe in some other things that I do not feel are going to be reasonable in a Trump presidency.
Item the first: Gay people exist and have always existed and it's OK for them to exist and get married if they want and raise families if they want. Like, that's OK. It's not wrong and the government should not be out there trying to make it wrong.
Item the second: Trans people exist and have always existed. It's OK for them to exist and to live their lives the way they want. They aren't wrong and the government should not be trying to make them wrong for existing. They are people, just like the rest of us.
Item the third: Public schools aren't allowed to give out tylenol to kids. There is absolutely no way that they're doing gender reassignment surgeries to children in school. That isn't happening. There also are no school bathrooms with "kitty litter" for "children who identify as cats". That's not a thing because I have not seen a video about it on Instagram. If there was any bathroom in any school in the United States with a human-sized litter box for a child to shit in, it would be all over Instagram. Everyone has a video camera in their pocket these days and you cannot tell me that it wouldn't get a gazillion likes as a video. Pics or it didn't happen.
Item the fourth: We need to do more in this country to allow all people who want to vote to vote. It is unbelievable that some citizens (only citizens are allowed to vote in the United States of America, please do not speak of illegals voting, they are not allowed to vote) have to wait in line for four hours to vote when I can just walk into my local polling place and vote, ten minutes tops. A national voting rights act would help enfranchise all of our citizens equally, and probably we should get on that.
Item the fifth: I do not think that calling every damn election "rigged" and casting doubt on the process with absolutely no evidence and 60 failed lawsuits to your name is the act of a responsible person seeking elected office. Vowing to only accept the results if you win and claiming that any other result is a consequence of cheating suggests to me quite strongly that you don't really have any desire to follow the process of civilly electing the leadership in this country. I fear for the continuation of our democracy under the Orange Idiot.
The election is Tuesday, November 5. If you haven't voted, please make a plan to vote. (Yes, even if you're voting Orange Idiot instead of Brown Lady. Everyone should vote. That's how democracy works.)
