25- Adriana Smith, a cautionary tale

Somewhere in a hospital in Georgia a woman lies dead. Her body is being illegally hijacked by the state’s abortion bill and is serving as a dead host to a parasite. Without her permission, against her family’s wishes and permission.

It does not matter that this parasite is a child to be.

It does not matter to the state that she was a nurse.

It does not matter to the state that she was a mother to a five year old little boy who is now confused and

It does not matter to the state that she was a daughter.

It does matter matter to the insurance company who will not pay this astronomical hospital bill because the policyholder has been declared brain dead 12 weeks ago.

It matters that her headaches were not treated appropriately.

It matters that her five year old son cannot conceive that his mother is dead and he thinks that she is sleeping.

It matters that the fetus has been without stimulation from the mother for 12 weeks. No one knows what that does to the fetus.

It matters to women everywhere because we knew this was coming and were unable to stop it.

This is medical experimentation of the worst kind. This smacks of Henrietta Lacks and her immortal cancer cells.

Be mad for her.

But be mad at the crazy politician who wrote the abortion ban in such a way that allows for the state to deny this woman a peaceful passing.

Be mad at the mad scientist who just wants to see what they can do with the bill and how far they can push medical knowledge.

Be sorrowful for Adriana Smith’s family, especially the 5-year old, and the mother who has to watch her child be experimented on with no consent granted.

But be mad at the political machinery that has been put in place to prey upon this woman and her family and the child who may never be.

Most importantly, when this fails and this fetus dies a horrible death, stay mad.

Most importantly, when this fails and this fetus survives into a family that is shocked and appalled at this science fiction bullshit, stay mad.

I have written it before and often. This kind of chicanery is about control.

Only now they have added medical experimentation on top of it.

But stay mad.

Stay vocal.

Tell the mad scientists that there will be no more experimentation without consent. Tell the mad scientists that we are ashamed of them and their ancestors are ashamed of them.

Call this what it is, Handmaid’s Tale bullshit.

A nugget of information that I learned very recently is that Margaret Atwood was intentional about the scenes that she wrote. Nothing that happened to any of the women, to any of the Handmaids, was plucked from history.

Be careful out there.

Tuesday Top of Mind 1/7/25-of course babies are being thrown away in TX

SIX babies have been found abandoned in dumpsters in this last year in Houston, TX, alone. According to reporting by Fox News 26 in Houston, this is a 500 increase since 2022. In that year ONE baby was abandoned.

What else happened in 2022? The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, dooming more than half of their constituents to fear and the possibility of death if pregnancy doesn’t go 100% right.

This sounds like the natural consequences to their actions. To be clear, the government and the legislature are not the ones facing the consequences or death.

The worst part of this story is that 2 of the babies were found dead.

The other worst part of this story is that it is not just Houston.

The other other worst part of this story is that sometimes it is a ditch.

Reminder, Texas has one of the strictest abortion laws in the US.

And they are surprised? No, of course not, this is just expected fallout of their control issues. Acceptable casualties such as these have probably already been calculated and their concern level has not been breached.

There is another way. There are safe haven laws on the books in Texas. It just comes with an eensy, teensy catch. The mothers (it is always the only the mothers, have you noticed?) might not even know about them as the powers that be in TX certainly don’t advertise the laws. To do so would burst their happy little bubble that this is fine, everything’s on fire, but it is fine.

Dead women if you do (abysmal women’s maternal mortality rate, worst in the nation according to the state rankings), dead infants if you don’t (allow abortion rights, fund women’s healthcare, give a damn about your constituents, allow ).

And the women who have the money and the support to go out of state to seek their very much needed healthcare? Texas and Indiana and possibly Idaho would very much like to know where women go when they flee the state for needed healthcare.

A law called HIPAA prevents them. But that doesn’t stop them from trying. From battering down the walls that are protecting women from creeps like them.

Are you paying attention yet?

Or are you pleased this is happening and the dead children and dead women are acceptable losses?

Tuesday Top of Mind 12/31/24- criminalizing miscarriages

I am sure I have written about this before. When it happened in South Carolina, when it happened in Ohio. In fact, there have been at least 7 states that have prosecuted women for failing to seek medical care. Well, what they considered prompt medical care.

But what is happening in South Carolina is another swing at the apple of declaring that life begins at conception. Whatever your creed or not creed when life begins has very different answers. According to Genesis 2, life begins at first breath.

Reminder, the bible is not necessarily truth. It is a truth that was written by men. And I use the term truth loosely. It has been translated many, many, many times and we all know what happens when you play telephone.

By declaring that life begins at conception this opens the door to naming miscarriages and abortion as murder. Since South Carolina is a death penalty state, this potentially means the death penalty for women who suffer a miscarriage. That’s 25% of all pregnancies, straight off the top. This leads me to wonder “Can they math?”

And here, I thought they were concerned with the declining birthrate and, by extension, the declining population numbers that do not match what is required to take care of the elders.

The thing is, South Carolina tried this before in March of 2023. In a bill that went nowhere. In fact, the reason it went nowhere is that several republicans pulled their support of the bill. Perhaps when it started getting a lot of publicity.

I am sure that some of this stems from a genuine concern for the unborn by a small amount of people. But not most of it. The rest are concerned with the federal money. Missouri told us that.

At heart, and I have definitely written this before, it is about controlling women.

Full stop.

But I don’t think it sends the message they want to send.

If a woman fears the death penalty for getting pregnant, she can take birth control. And not get pregnant.

Do you see where this is a foolish idea?

Good job scaring a lot of women, South Carolina. I hope you DON’T get what you are after.

Don’t worry, criminalizing birth control is next on their pretend outrage docket.

After they finish dumping crappy bills into December when no one is paying attention.

FFS Friday 12/6/24- Forget

Today’s F word is Forget.

Just like the red states want us to do when women die from not having access to abortion care.

Let’s look at two states that have been wishing really hard, with their fingers and toes crossed, that we will forget that women are dying. These women are dying from their policies and their need for control of women’s bodily autonomy.

And they don’t want you to know about it.

Texas announced that the committee that oversees maternal health and death will not be examining the deaths that occurred in 2022 and 2023. We all know what happened in 2022 and the Dobbs decision.

The committee says there are too many deaths to investigate. No, what they said is that the backlog is too big and doesn’t let them examine more recent deaths.

Think about what that is saying.

women are dying from being denied healthcare
women are dying a LOT from being denied healthcare
so many women have died that they can’t be bothered to look at the past and prefer to look at the more current deaths
the deaths from 2022 and 2023 should not be looked at and we should just forget about them
they don’t care about the women

This leads me to conclude that there have been more deaths than have been disclosed publically. Point 5 is my favorite. They haven’t come out and said this explicitly but I can read subtext.

Don’t forget this is the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Committee. Morbidity is everything else but death. It does not imply that the women are okay, just that they are not dead.

They don’t care about women.

Georgia dismissed the entire maternal death review committee after there was a leak about two women’s deaths after being denied the healthcare that they needed for a miscarriage. They said it was because the sharing of the information, whoever it was, violated state law.

The review committee had found that the women had died from a preventable cause but also that doctors did not adequately treat them due to fear of reprisals.

Let me sum up. Two women, probably more but these two women who have died and the details leaked, died from a pregnancy complication that we have the tools to treat and doctors have the knowledge of how to treat the complication. But they didn’t get the care they needed to save their lives because the doctors were concerned about their freedom.

Let me put it baldly. Georgia doesn’t care about women. They want us to be unaware of the deaths that their abortion ban is causing. Because there have been deaths.

This entire thing boils down to if you don’t look, no blame can be cast. Because they don’t want us to blame the laws that are killing women.

These stories need to keep coming out because we won’t forget about the loss of our bodily autonomy, or the needless deaths, or the continued suffering of women.

Don’t forget about them.

Tuesday Top of Mind 10/22/24-the pregnant woman “owes” the state her progeny because they will be taxpayers someday-WTAF

The truth comes with a complaint in TX before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Court (of course). This is yet another attack on mifepristone by mail. Reminder, of the varying bans that politicians and states have placed on women’s bodies and their access to healthcare. Okay, it is really the abortion bans that have been ramrodded through state legislatures. And 63% of all abortions in the US are self-administered through medication such as mifepristone and misoprostol. Even before the Dobbs decision, the rule from the FDA allowed these medications to be distributed by mail.

Some people don’t appreciate that and they are throwing anything and everything at the rule and the FDA to stop it.

We have been living this for 2 years. They utilized much of the same constant approaches against Roe v Wade and we all know that sometimes shit sticks.

This last filing is a doozy and apparently pregnant teenagers are the “property of the state”. This is from the state of Texas. And the state of Missouri, as a second complainant, thinks it is the duty of a pregnant woman in Missouri to have the baby. You know, to make more taxpayers.

As I’ve been writing about it is about money and control.

But from the complaint itself being able to obtain abortion drugs “has caused abortions for women in the Plaintiff Stats and decreased births in Plaintiff States. This is a sovereign injury to the state itself… a loss of potential population causes further injuries as well: the States’ subsequent “diminishment of political representation” and “loss of federal funds” such as potentially “losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are” reduced or their increase diminished.”

What the actual fuck!

They’ve tipped their hand.

This is it; the entire reason for this bullshit. For the stripping of bodily rights from the women.

Men see women as nothing more than possessions. This includes the output of our uteruses. To their mind, they OWN us and any output our uteri might supply. And how dare we have a sense of our own and thoughts and aspirations of our own! To think that we are people.

After all, the ENTIRE reason for being a woman is to make a man’s job/life easier.

Or, so they think.

I saw this mentioned in an Esquire article and confirmed it with a CNN article and I am appalled. And disgusted. And unsurprised

Everyone needs to know about this.

Women need to know about this.

As a reminder, Missouri has a state constitutional amendment about the Right to Reproductive Freedom on the ballot in 15 days.

Just saying.

Tuesday Top of Mind 10/8/24- explicative deleted the supreme court

Me again.

Back on abortion news that is so hot it would burn if I had any fingertips left.

Yesterday, the supreme court declined to hear a case from the BIDEN administration about the draconian abortion law in Texas. The state was using that law to say, nah bro, even if a patient is on the verge of dying, emergency rooms don’t have to do an abortion. And they send the woman HOME.

In other words, in starker words, let the woman die instead of performing an abortion, which is the evidence-based standard of care for miscarriage. The problem is that the fetus isn’t dead YET, or at least their cardiac poles are working, and the woman isn’t sick enough YET.

Let the woman die.

Because the output of her uterus has a stronger case in front of the current supreme court than her right to life.

You know, the right to life is in the constitution’s preamble.

But, sure, why not deny a woman her rights?

After all, she is a lesser being than the clump of cells in her uterus.

They had punted a similar EMTALA case in June of this year. Do you remember?

EMTALA is a federal law that means everyone who presents to the emergency room gets the treatment they need. No matter what it is.

Ringing a bell now?

The thing is the Biden administration was asking to send the fifth circuit appeals court ruling on EMTALA and Texas back to a lower court to be retried.

The supreme court said nah.

I am not sure who is paying attention if anyone. There are a lot of other things commanding our attention: the 2024 general election, the devastating loss of life and property over 6 states after Hurricane Helene, the category 5 Hurricane Milton that is bearing down on almost the exact spot where Hurrican Helene hit Florida, the Russian bots that are trolling the news sites and giving out lies. I won’t even talk about their most current lie about FEMA money but it is certainly a lie.

Misdirection is the standard for all magic tricks.

I wonder what else they are doing when we aren’t paying attention.

To be clear, the they isn’t just the supreme court, but news media, and the aforementioned troll bots that are desperate to make you believe lies.

I am tired of being told that my life doesn’t matter, that what I want doesn’t matter by these clowns.

I am definitely tired of being reminded over and over and over and over and over again that because I am a woman my life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness matter less than the potential output of my uterus.

Don’t get me started on the fact that my husband and I do not have children. Which also makes us lesser.

Tuesday Top of Mind 10/1/24- Blame the victim… of course

They are weaponizing abortion bans against victims. Blame the victim is the name of their game and it has never been clearer. In their minds and out of their mouths comes language that says that if a woman hadn’t had sex and sought a medication abortion and had a rare complication and sought care from the state in which they live and was denied actual medical care for a true medical emergency and they shun her and turn her away from the emergency room and she dies it is her fault.

Did you get all that?

It is like holding someone’s arm and using your muscles to slap their face, telling them all the while “Stop hitting yourself”. In no way are they hitting themselves. You are. And blaming them for it.

Because she wasn’t a “good girl” and had sex.

After all, the vagina is the root of all evils. Right?

Twas Eve who ate the apple from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden.

Twas Eve who tempted Adam to eat the apple.

Twas Eve who got them banished from the Garden of Eden.

Because blame the woman, right?

Some people believe that their holy book forbids abortion. Without actually coming out and saying it. Because abortion is not mentioned in the Bible. Neither the old testament nor the new testament. Not in the Jewish version.

Same thing for birth control. Nowhere is it mentioned that it is banned.

But some people believe it because their god said so. No, no, they say when you point this out. But I know that it is something that he doesn’t want. No, no, not his son when you point this out that their behavior isn’t exactly Christ-like. Not his son. I just don’t want god to be mad at me for a reason I made up in my head.

Do you know what is also not banned? In-vitro Fertilization.

I don’t normally write about essentially the same thing for Tuesday Top of Mind two weeks in a row.

But they need to get over themselves.

Because they are killing women and the potential children they profess to want born. Without any medical support or financial support or legislative support.

No, they want fully-aged people who can work and pay taxes. Because infants and children are messy and demanding. And they don’t have the patience. But they want the money.

And the control.

but mostly the money.

Tuesday top of mind 6/24/24- TWO years post Roe

Two years have passed since the fall of Roe v Wade.

Well, this isn’t a dispatch I ever thought I’d write. And I wouldn’t be writing it now if some people, cough, cough, hadn’t lied at their job interview to the Senate.

Am I still mad as hell?

You bet your sweet bottom dollar that I am.

However, this isn’t about me.

It is about the women who are raped and no longer have access to safe reproductive care, including abortions, and have to now carry their rapist’s child to term.

It is about the doomed children who are not meant to live in this world but the safest exit is not allowed anymore.

It is about the women who are carrying the doomed children who can no longer access safe reproductive care and risk their fertility and their lives waiting for some government asshole to decide that they can have the care they desperately need. And be denied by the hospital administration who are scared of their own shadow and the lawsuits that will happen if word got out that an abortion was allowed on a dead clump of cells.

It is about the same-sex couples who can see the writing on the wall and know that their number is coming up next in this unholy war against progress.

It is about the girls who are watching this play out and knowing that they have less freedom than their mothers did at their age.

It is about the increase in infant deaths in some of these states (cough, cough, Texas) where there is no “miracle” at birth. These infants know only pain in their short lives.

It is about the whole-cloth womb slavery of all women from puberty to menopause.

It is about the women who have been told they no longer are in control of their bodily autonomy.

It is about the old white men deciding that THEY know better what I as a woman need and can do with my body.

It is about the taxpayers that are being “killed” during abortions before they can add to others’ profits.

It is about and has always been about, control.

It is about control of women.

Because if it was about control of everyone, men would have to be sterilized when they hit puberty. Or lock up the penis up in a fancy cage until they are deemed old enough to use it.

Tuesday Top of Mind 6/18/24-professors suing to fail girls who have had abortions

To set the scene, two professors in Austin Texas want to punish students for their actions outside of class. The action in this case is abortion. How would they know that there was an abortion is not mentioned. The second professor is suing to not hire teaching assistants who have had an abortion.

Again, how would they know?

In their lawsuit, they claim that girls who take time off of class to have an abortion should be failed. By them. For the egregious crime of becoming pregnant and not wanting to be. Does this mean they will fail all women who can’t come to class because they are sick or need surgery? Because, of course, if they are absent because they are sick they must have had an abortion. But boys who are sick or need care can have it no questions asked, no threat to their grades?

Are they also going to fail the boys who participated in the girls becoming pregnant?

No?

I just asked because if the girls are pregnant and desire an abortion because reasons, the acknowledgment that it takes two for a pregnancy would be useful.

Or does it go back to the judge who sentenced the Stanford rapist to 6 months because otherwise, it might hurt his career? I won’t write what I said then because there aren’t enough curse words. This was back in 2016, let me jog your memory. And when his dad piped in that it wasn’t worth ruining his life for an action that was 20 minutes. I think he forgot that the girl that his son assaulted has to live with that forever. She got a far harsher sentence than he did and she wasn’t even on trial. Because he was remorseful. Yeah, remorseful he got caught.

But to go back to the failing of women and girls because they couldn’t attend class because of an abortion, how would they know?

This comes from an open desire to control the actions of women and girls.

Again, it is all about control.

The men want it and therefore the women should give in.

I’d ask if that was what they want but I’m afraid I can’t stomach the response.

This entire “culture war” that they’ve created and railed on is all about control.

I have a new shirt, did I say?

An RBG tee shirt that says “I’ve heard enough from old white men”.

That says it all, right?

These men are afraid of losing the control they think they have over women.

Tuesday Top of Mind 6/11/24- the vote against the federal right to birth control

Again with this bullshit.

Okay. Back up.

Last week there was a Senate vote on protecting the federal right to birth control. And it failed with only 51 votes to 39. Reminder, The Senate needs 60 votes to pass legislation. That is a different top of mind. There were some Republican yeas (okay TWO) and a couple of Democratic nays and still more people voted by not voting.

But the important thing is that it did not pass.

Even though over 90% of Americans support birth control.

What was to be protected by the bill?

A person’s ability to obtain and use birth control. And a doctor’s ability to prescribe said birth control.

There are mealy-mouthed people who say that the right to birth control is not in danger.

OH REALLY?

Some people said that Roe was settled law. This was very, very recently at their Supreme Court nomination hearings. Remember them? I do.

The right to birth control was settled with the 1965 decision of Griswold v Connecticut. This ruling essentially meant that the Constitution protected marital privacy rights against state restrictions. This has been used for many things, including Roe v Wade. And interracial marriage. This has definitely been mentioned in the last two years, by Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito.

You understand our concern.

Forgive me if I don’t believe them. Any of them.

This is about controlling women.

And controlling child-making.

Which was the reason for Dobbs.

But it is ALWAYS and FOREVER about controlling women.

This is your call to look up and see if your Senators in your state voted yea or nay. If they voted nay make a note on your calendar to call their office monthly to say how disappointed and angry you are. I mean, you are not one of their billionaire handlers but it will make you feel better.

I hope. Let me know if it works.