Pro-death
One, ten, many Savita Halappanavars. The Washington Post has the details:
At 36, she’d already experienced a long line of miscarriages, but none of the pregnancies had been more than five weeks along. Now she had to deliver a nearly 16-week fetus — a daughter she’d planned to call Bunny.
And when she did she immediately started hemorrhaging.
She had intended to deliverthe fetus in a hospital, a doctor by her side. When her water broke the night before — at least six weeks ahead of when a fetus could survive on its own — she drove straight to the emergency room, where she said the doctor explained that she was experiencing pre-viability preterm prelabor rupture of the membranes (PPROM), which occurs in less than 1 percent of pregnancies.
Remember that? From the Halappanavar case? Medically speaking it’s essential to do a D&C when that happens so that the woman doesn’t bleed to death. The way Savita did. It’s standard of care.
But in Florida it’s “Go home and die.”
At the hospital in Coral Springs, Fla., Cook received antibiotics, records show.Then she was sent home to wait.
Which is medical malpractice.
Cook’s experience reflects a new reality playing out in hospitals in anti abortion states across the country — where because of newly enacted abortion bans, people with potentially life-threatening pregnancy complications are being denied care that was readily available before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June.
Catholic hospitals have been doing this all along. A big hospital in Seattle merged with a Catholic chain recently so now they follow the Catholic woman-killing rules. It shouldn’t be allowed but it is. Women just don’t matter.
When abortion was legal across the country, doctors in all states would typically offer to induceor perform a surgical procedure to end the pregnancy when faced with a pre-viability PPROM case — which is the standard of care, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), and an option that many women choose. Especially before the 20-week mark, a fetus is extremely unlikely to survive without any amniotic fluid.
But in the 18 states where abortion is now banned before fetal viability, many hospitals have been turning away pre-viability PPROM patients as doctors and administrators fear the legal risk that could come with terminating even a pregnancy that could jeopardize the mother’s well-being, according to 12 physicians practicing in antiabortion states.
Could kill the mother. Isn’t it odd how the dead fetus matters more than the living adult woman. It’s almost as if it’s just an excuse to torment and murder women.
One of the sponsors of Florida’s 15-week abortion ban defended the currentlaw as written, saying the existing exception should be sufficient to cover cases with serious health risks. An explicit exception for PPROM is not necessary, she added.
“The bottom line is we value life, and we would like to protect life,” said former Florida state senator Kelli Stargel (R). “We don’t want to give a gaping exception that anyone can claim.”
Liar. She’s not protecting life, she’s protecting the fetus, even the dead fetus, at the expense of the living woman.
Women with potentially life-threatening pregnancy complications. WOMEN.
This stupid way of appeasing the violent TRAs also hides the reality, nicely summed up in your final sentence. It’s about not allowing women autonomy. It’s about not giving a flying fuck about women. It might even be about hating women.
Protecting a dead fetus doesn’t make any sense otherwise.
In a democracy, the majority is generally supposed to rule on any given issue. But here’s the catch: pregnant women who have (for them) fatal complications during their pregnancy are themselves a minority, and if a selfish ‘damn you; I’m OK’ attitude is strongly enough entrenched in any significant slab of the population, then an anti-empathetic attitude can win on any given issue and on any given day.
As far as I have been able to track it down via a quick web search, it was Albert Camus who said “democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.”
Less than half of us carry a pregnancy to full term and become mothers, even though every last one of us is the viable offspring resulting from a woman carrying a pregnancy sufficiently far in time for us to be able to survive on our own, albeit with the care of some adult as a newborn and then as a child.
But here’s an even bigger trap for the unwary: If I and/or any sufficient number of others am of the belief that when we die that will not be the end of our life, but we will instead go to a paradise in the sky and become a member of a heavenly choir singing for the rest of eternity the praises of the most egotistical god that has ever been cooked up in the human imagination, then we might also be persuaded as a consequence of that belief that no pregnancy should ever be terminated, no matter what the consequences for the woman concerned might be. (It’s an untestable counterfactual in my case: never been there to find out how I would fare on that particular issue.)
The Christian virtue of empathy as expressed in Christ’s ‘golden rule’ was apparently first formulated by Confucius around 550 years BC, in the arguably superior negative form of ‘do not do to others what you would not have others do to you.’ It was probably transported down the Silk Road from China to the Christian Holy Land. There it finished up in the (arguably inferior) positive form adopted by Christ and his following of “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
Some of Christ’s other teachings included ‘if you get into a brawl, let them bash you up and do with you as they please,’ or words to that effect. That one was honoured by subsequent generations of Christians far more in the breach than in the observance. But then St Paul rode in on his trusty steed and gave the world the Evangelism that is now preached from damn near every pulpit in the world and particularly in America. All that matters is personal salvation, made possible by the generous act of the abovementioned God, who had himself born on Earth in human form, and gave himself as a sacrifice to himself to pay for his own original mistake of creating that damned talking snake, which he had installed in his Garden of Eden, and which led Eve astray, who in turn led Adam astray; with the result being all the wars, revolutions, murder, mayhem and general depravity in no way foreseen by the said omnipotent and omniscient God when he made that fateful decision.
(All regulars at this site please note: anyone of that persuasion is also in the market to purchase any or all the bridges of the world, from Sydney Harbour to the Golden Gate; going cheap in a special, never-to-be-repeated bulk offer.)
Evangelical Christians thus became one of the most self-centred and selfish mobs ever to walk the face of this Earth. Their ‘golden rule’ is in reality ‘if the price of my own salvation is the deaths of a whole lot of women mostly unknown to me, then so be it. My own welfare comes first.’
Feminist would argue that this is a patriarchal attitude, and I am inclined to agree. But every time I tune in my TV to catch the Rev Jimmy Swaggart for a bit of light musical entertainment, I find that the majority of his choir and congregation is mainly made up of highly enthusiastic women, praising God for their own salvation. Which leads me to the conclusion that we still have some distance to go.
Savita Halappanavar didn’t bleed to death, that would have been a faster and easier death. Hemorrhage isn’t the biggest risk, sepsis is. Once the amniotic sac ruptures, there is nothing keeping bacteria out of the uterus and the mother’s bloodstream. Savita died of septic shock over the course of 3 days, in pain and raging with fever while the doctors waited for the fetus’ heartbeat to stop or for her to get so close to death they felt they wouldn’t be prosecuted for performing the abortion, even though there was no hope for the fetus to survive. They underestimated how close to death she was .
I know. I guess my opening paragraph is confusing – the woman in the Post story isn’t Savita Halappanavar, but a different woman who did hemorrhage. Sorry for being unclear.