It’s to protect girls and young women (I know you understand!)
I was heartbroken to read that Amber Nicole Thurman had died because a Georgia hospital refused to give her the medical treatment she needed.
She needed a D&C to get rid of tissue that had not been expelled with mifepristone.
Georgia has outlawed abortion.
By the time they finally did the D&C, it was too late.
She.
Died.
She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.
But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.
Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.
It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.
An otherwise healthy 28 year old woman died.
Unnecessarily.
She left a little boy motherless.
No.
The state of Georgia – DONALD TRUMP – left that little boy without a mother.
Look closely at Meg Lionel Murphy’s painting above.
Do you see the part where a baby is being born?
When you see it, ask yourself where else you have seen this event portrayed in Western art.
Almost never, right?
Childbirth – and its attendant dangers – is all but ignored.
Pregnancy is glorified because it’s the thing men can’t do but they need because they want heirs and someone to carry on their name and all sorts of BS that make me roll my eyes.
We have forgotten that pairs of graves like this – which took me only minutes to find as I walked in the old section of a cemetery – used to be common.
(And in the three minutes after finding these graves, I found four other graves of 1800s women who had died before they reached the age of 35. I can’t be sure if they died of pregnancy or birth complications, but I would guess it’s likely.)
All those stories of our great-grandfathers and multiple wives?
It’s because women died while giving birth.
(And then they would lose children to diseases that are now easily preventable if parents are not idiots and vaccinate their children, which is a different story but it isn’t really, is it?)
Some man online said that older women are just jealous of younger women who are involved with men our age.
I said nope, that’s not it at all. It’s that we want to protect young women from predators.
That’s our mission right now: We have to protect young women and girls. We have to protect them from predators and we have to protect them from bad laws that keep them from getting the medical care that they need.
We all know someone who has had an abortion or a miscarriage and has needed a D&C.
Even if you think you don’t know anyone, you do! One in four women is expected to have an abortion in their lifetime. And about 10-20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage, which sometimes needs a D&C as well.
Believe me, you know someone.
Even if you are not in a swing state and can’t knock on doors (I KNOW! I HATE IT TOO! But I hate the alternative more.), you can do something.
You can phone bank. They train you and give you the phone numbers and a script.
You can text bank.
And you don’t necessarily run the risk of talking to people who are hostile. A lot of it is just reminding people to vote. When I texted for Mandela Barnes, I encountered people who had questions about issues – questions I could answer (because I had an entire list of FAQs). I also found people who wanted to donate money but wanted to send a check to a physical address and needed that address.
My point is that you don’t need to be scared of calling or texting people.
In addition to those things, you can also leave notes in the ladies’ room. There are women married to R men who don’t want their husbands to know how they vote. We need this election to be a landslide for Kamala. Help these women – many of whom have voted R in the past but who are furious about abortion – know that the can vote the way they want. I keep a pack of sticky notes in my purse now and leave one in each stall in any public restroom I use.
Texan in Exile 
Yep! At least four women I know would be dead without proper, prompt treatment for ectopic pregnancies and for miscarriages which did not evacuate. One of those I haven’t checked in with for a while, so I do not know whether she’s gone on to successfully have a baby, but the rest went on to then have babies which would not exist if they hadn’t gotten medical care. Another friend would most likely not have the toddler she has except for methotrexate having been available to clear a tubal ectopic pregnancy early on (that happened before Roe was overturned; she’s in a red state); obviously, if the tubal ectopic pregnancy hadn’t been dealt with at *some* stage, she’d also be dead.
Five! And that’s just the ones I know of! (this is a topic most people don’t talk about, so I would bet there are a lot more among the people I know) And those were literally *all* trying to conceive pre-Roe-overturn! And also that doesn’t even count all the women I know who have had medical treatment after miscarriages who came close to bleeding out or similar; I’m less sure whether those would have been declined for treatment, but in some states a nervous-for-a-reason doctors might have delayed things – for extra scans, for checks, whatever – in a way that would have turned out fatally – no idea – but there are a *lot* of them, too. (it is good to get medical care after a miscarriage to make sure there is nothing left behind that will go septic; if women with miscarriages are treated as potential criminals, however, fewer of them will go in for medical treatment while they are still extremely emotionally fragile from having a miscarriage; I don’t know how many additional maternal deaths per year *that* would cause, but given the number of spontaneous miscarriages, I’d bet the number is not small.)
(for more, I also just read: http://nancy-motheroffive.blogspot.com/2024/09/my-facebook-post-today-september-19-2024.html )
It’s nuts and it is not okay.
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Wow I read that post. Yeah, there are so many stories like that. Mr T was canvassing last week and talked to a woman who wasn’t intending to vote. But it turned out that she had had a D&C years ago and after a long conversation, she decided that yes she would vote and would vote D.
We have to tell these stories to everyone.
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This whole Trump anti-women agenda makes me furious. Sadly (for lots of reasons!) I am old enough to actually remember the bad old pre-Roe days: the 15 year old friend of mine who spent a year at her grandmother’s and returned to school so changed, so sad; the second year teacher whose baby died in the 5th month and there was nothing the docs could (would?) do, so she carried it for three more weeks until she finally miscarried “naturally”; and several college women who suddenly left school for a few days and went somewhere else to get help from someone somebody knew. And, I remember how it felt in 1974 to TOUR the first legal abortion clinic in D.C., to make friends with their counselors and know that I could refer women from the community college where I worked and know they would get good safe care.
I’m with you 100% on our need to VOTE and help others. Love your sticky note idea and will copy it.
I have also joined a FB group of Aunties who raise money to pay for their nieces when they need to make a quick trip out of state for medical help; to send pills where they are needed; and to support women who come to our towns for medical care. And, I finally sat down and wrote to my niece in GA to remind her that I live in a state where women’s health care is sometimes difficult (the R’s have put some stupid obstacles in our path) but available. And, I would be happy to have her or her friends come for a visit.
Keep up the good work, Goldie!
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Thank you for your work! Have you read “The Girls Who Went Away?” by Anne Fessler? She talks to these girls and young women (mostly white – Black girls were called promiscuous) who were sent to maternity homes and then had their children taken from them. It’s heartbreaking.
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