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 