Another way the lunatic right is destroying everything:

Through a wave of pandemic-related litigation, a trio of small but mighty conservative legal blocs has rolled back public health authority at the local, state and federal levels, recasting America’s future battles against infectious diseases.

Because that’s what we want, right? To be helpless in the face of pandemics?

Galvanized by what they’ve characterized as an overreach of COVID-related health orders issued amid the pandemic, lawyers from the three overlapping spheres — conservative and libertarian think tanks, Republican state attorneys general, and religious liberty groups — are aggressively taking on public health mandates and the government agencies charged with protecting community health.

Because it’s bad to protect community health. What we want is more disease and early death!

In Wisconsin, a conservative legal center won a case before the state Supreme Court stripping local health departments of the power to close schools to stem the spread of disease.

Let the kids get sick and spread the sickness! That’s freedom!

In Missouri, the Republican state attorney general waged a campaign against school mask mandates. Most of the dozens of cases he filed were dismissed but nonetheless had a chilling effect on school policies.

Good good good. We don’t want schools trying to slow the spread of disease.

Although the three blocs are distinct, they share ties with the Federalist Society, a conservative legal juggernaut. They also share connections with the State Policy Network, an umbrella organization for state-based conservative and libertarian think tanks and legal centers, and the SPN-fostered American Juris Link, described by president and founder Carrie Ann Donnell as “SPN for lawyers.” In the COVID era, the blocs have supported one another in numerous legal challenges by filing amicus briefs, sharing resources and occasionally teaming up.

Their legal efforts have gained traction with a federal judiciary transformed by Republican congressional leaders, who strategically stonewalled judicial appointments in the final years of Democratic President Barack Obama’s second term. That put his Republican successor, Trump, in position to fill hundreds of judicial vacancies, including the three Supreme Court openings, with candidates decidedly more friendly to the small-government philosophy long espoused by conservative think tanks.

Just in time for global warming to kick into high gear. Genius.

Battlefront France:

Western France is facing a “heat apocalypse”, experts have warned, as extreme temperatures continue to hit much of Europe.

Temperatures could reach record levels in 15 regions of the southwest, with firefighters battling wildfires and thousands forced to evacuate. Blazes in Spain, Portugal and Greece have forced thousands more to flee.

Record temperatures are also expected in parts of the UK, which has its first ever red extreme heat warning in place. Wildfires in France in recent days have forced over 24,000 people to flee, with emergency shelters set up for evacuees.

It was like that in this part of the world a year ago. The town of Litton in British Columbia burned to the ground. This isn’t the distant future we can shrug off as the kids’ problem (which is a rather callous thing to do anyway), this is now.

Fires also broke out in Castilla y León, Galicia, Castille, Andalusia and Extremadura. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez visited Extremadura on Monday.

“Evidently, climate change kills,” he said. “It kills people, kills our ecosystem, the biodiversity”.

Temperatures in Portugal hit 47C (116F) on Thursday – a record for July.

One third of the mainland still remains at extreme risk of fire, according to the national meteorological office IPMA. This is due to severe or extreme drought conditions virtually everywhere.

This is all very horrible. Let’s ignore it and talk about stunning and brave trans women instead.

More on religious interference with medical treatment in Washington state:

For years, religiously affiliated hospitals have merged with secular health care systems, often with disruptions to services like reproductive health care. About half of health care systems in Washington are affiliated with religious organizations, which means that even with state-level and national protections for abortion, hospitals in Washington can deny or restrict reproductive health care based on religious protocols. The result is a patchwork of reproductive health policies that vary by hospital, and can leave patients confused or without care altogether.

It’s bizarre. It’s also evil and infuriating, but the bizarreness is puzzling. I don’t understand why they’re allowed to do this. I don’t think engineers get to design defective bridges “based on religious protocols,” and I don’t see why medical care is different. Medicine is technical; religion has nothing to do with it.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives, a set of theologically rooted guidelines for Catholic health care institutions, prohibit abortion entirely, but their limitations extend far beyond elective abortion, complicating a number of routine treatments and procedures. For example, if a patient has an ectopic pregnancy — a nonviable pregnancy that occurs when a fertilized egg develops outside the uterus — the directives forbid any intervention that includes an abortion. But termination, either through medication or surgery, is the only treatment for ectopic pregnancy. If left untreated, ectopic pregnancy can cause the fallopian tube to rupture, which is a life-threatening medical emergency. 

In other words Catholic bishops (by definition all men, of course) give themselves permission to kill women because of their “religious protocols.” It shouldn’t be allowed. The bishops should be in prison.

While some hospitals that don’t provide abortion care will refer patients elsewhere, a referral may not be possible in an emergency. In 2013, a Washington woman almost died at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham after being denied treatment for an infection following a miscarriage. Cases like hers, reported by Rewire News Group and documented by the ACLU, led the state Legislature to pass the Protecting Pregnancy Act in 2021. The law allows doctors working in institutions under the Catholic Church’s purview to override ethical-religious directives in the event that a medically necessary abortion is required. “Patients were in these situations, some of them very dire, and they were having their care delayed or denied, which is unacceptable,” said the ACLU’s Rutman.

To put it mildly.

Even before the rise of hospital mergers, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists documented a number of cases across the country in which patient outcomes were adversely [affected] by providers’ refusal to participate in reproductive health care. The professional organization has been clear in advocating that reproductive health care be upheld when hospitals merge, citing concerns about physicians’ ability to care for their patients. 

“Where reproductive health care services are prohibited, health care providers are put in the difficult position of having to withhold needed care until patients’ conditions deteriorate to a point at which care is permitted,” said the group in a position statement on reproductive health care restrictions, including those at religiously affiliated institutions. “Ultimately, the health of women and quality of the patient-physician relationship suffer.”

Because guess what, sometimes patients’ conditions deteriorate so much that they die before the doctors are finally allowed to treat them. Oops.

The state’s Reproductive Privacy Act ensures that even if Roe is overturned, abortion would remain legal in Washington state. But the confusion comes at a time when the state’s reproductive health care infrastructure is already strained, especially in areas where there are few clinics and high demand resulting from out-of-state patients. While 18 health centers provide abortion in and around the greater Seattle area alone, just 11 health centers operate east of the Cascades, only three of which are full-service clinics providing both onsite surgical and medication abortion in Yakima, Kennewick and Spokane.

The state east of the Cascades is huge geographically, and tiny in terms of population.

Clinics across the state are preparing to accommodate a growing influx of patients from states like Idaho, whose residents already routinely seek abortion care in Washington. While elected officials have pushed the idea that Washington will become even more of a haven for patients seeking abortions in world without Roe v. Wade, expanding actual capacity for care beyond those five clinics on the eastern side of the state would be complex, with so many of the state’s hospital beds under religious control.

This is the result of years of hospital mergers that have weakened the state’s ability to provide adequate reproductive health care. The true extent of that weakness will soon be determined if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

Check.

It’s not just the Supreme Court ruling though.

Washington is just one of a handful of states in which more than 40% of hospital beds are controlled by Catholic doctrine. This shift became more acute with the 2021 merger of Virginia Mason and CHI Franciscan, creating Virginia Mason Franciscan Health, which operates 11 hospitals and 300 sites of care. With that merger, Virginia Mason said it would “not become Catholic,” according to reporting by The News Tribune, but it also would no longer provide “elective” abortions or participate in the state’s Death with Dignity process.

A distinction without a difference. Nobody gives a shit whether Virginia Mason is playing with rosary beads or not, the point is that it shut down abortions at the behest of a Catholic institution, in a state that has not passed laws forcing women to stay pregnant.

The new entity’s website now reads, “It is the policy of Virginia Mason Franciscan Health that all services rendered in our facilities shall be supportive of life. At no time may direct actions to terminate life be performed or permitted.”

Oh really? So they don’t use antibiotics? They don’t use germicidal cleaning materials?

This latest merger came nearly a decade after secular Swedish merged with Catholic Providence in 2013 and stopped providing most abortion care. Under pressure from reproductive health advocates in 2011 when the merger was being considered, Swedish partnered with Planned Parenthood to underwrite a clinic to provide abortion care near the hospital.

Why are secular hospitals merging with Catholic ones anyway? And why aren’t there laws preventing Catholic hospitals from imposing their religion on patients? Why aren’t all hospitals secular as a matter of course? What does religion have to do with medical care?

A spokesperson for Providence Swedish Puget Sound said in an email, “Elective abortions are not performed in Swedish facilities. However, Swedish does not deny emergency care. When a pregnant patient’s life is at risk, Swedish clinicians provide all necessary medical interventions, including pregnancy terminations, to protect and save the life of the patient.” 

How very generous.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Who stole the dino emoji?

As far as “ownership” of dinosaurs goes, the “genderqueer community” are at the end of a very, very long line of other people and institutions that got there first. Waterhouse Hawkins’ Crystal Palace dinosaurs (which outlasted the Crystal Palace itself) were unveiled in 1854, just a little more than a dozen years after Richard Owen’s coinage of the word “dinosaur” itself.

They’ve been up for grabs ever since, used by everyone from museums, gas companies (Sinclair), toy manufacturers, to movie studios, to make money. If the trans/queer paleoart community wants to make some sort of IP claim, they’ll have their work work cut out for them. The beauty is that dinosaurs “belong” to everyone. They are part of the very fabric of the story of life on Earth, which is our story. It’s not surprising that the “genderqueer” is ready to lay exclusive claim to something that doesn’t belong to them.

I think my initial knee-jerk reaction, um, was just like, Well, you can’t have them. Like dinosaurs are ours.

Ha ha, good one. Back atcha. You return the word “woman,” and maybe we can talk about dinosaur emojis later.

“I hate to speak for the entire trans or genderqueer community but…”

Liar. This isn’t something you hate. If you hated it so much, you wouldn’t be doing it at all. You’re relishing this chance to smear “[y]our social enemies.” You’re fine with taking this opportunity to muddy the waters, claiming feminist use of dinosaur emojis is some sort of secret handshake/dogwhistle.

It really just made zero sense to me whatsoever in terms of like, you know, they could have picked anything else and it might have made a little bit more sense to me.

Here, you’re pretending complete bafflement as to the motives and reasoning behind this move. As Ophelia points out, it was clearly too much work to uncover the real reasons that lead to this. It wasn’t random, capricious or arbitrary. Looking too closely would reveal ugly facts that would murder your beautiful theory of sheer bloody-minded, transphobic hatred. This amounts to the purposeful concealment of information that would ruin your story altogether, turning it into the opposite of what you’re claiming. It makes me wonder: are all of your articles and books as shittily researched as this? You might be able to frame the narrative for those only ever hearing about it from you, but you’ll never fool anyone who already knows the facts of the matter. This is a risky strategy for a science writer. It destroys the trust of knowledgible readers, who will now see you as little more than an unreliable, partisan hack. Where does that leave you when your product is reputation, and trust itself?

Eventually, grudgingly, comes the admission that there is in fact more to the feminist use of dinosaur emojis than the simple, dishonest explanation of hard-hearted anti-trans bigotry. That it is a snarky, political response to an attempt to shame women standing up for their rights. Trans activists can’t admit of any conflict between women’s rights and trans “rights.” They are forced to portray feminists’s legitimate interest in defending their rights and spaces against male appropriation as blind, hateful anti-trans spitefulness. To do otherwise opens the door to questioning and debate which trans talking points cannot survive.

Some years ago I met “Riley Black” when he was just plain old Brian Switek, bespectacled science writer. No blue hair, no head tilt. This was before he “came out” as a “furry” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/21/furry-wild-side-fursona-animal-nature Does the furry “community” get to claim “ownership” of mammals? No, though I’d say they’ve got a better claim to them than the “trans and genderqueer” one does to dinosaurs. At least “furries” are actually mammals themselves. The optics are a bit better too, since, save for birds, dinosaurs are largely known for being extinct, which is an ironically inapt choice of emblematic creature for a community constantly claiming that they are potential victims of “genocide.” As far as a better icon for the trans struggle for pretend “rights” goes, I would recommend they stick with unicorns, which are, appropriately, imaginary. It would be a perfect fit if they were also poisonous.

The BBC Radio 4 program The Moral Maze discussed abortion yesterday. Unfortunately the head of Abortion Rights UK, Kerry Abel, had to weaken and muddle her own argument by doing the usual. Starting at about 11 minutes:

Anne McElvoy: “You believe very strongly in bodily autonomy, because it’s a woman’s body, am I correct?”

Kerry Abel: “Women n pregnant people, yup.”

AM: “That there is bodily autonomy and – so far it is women who have babies isn’t it?”

KA: “It depends if they refer to themselves as a woman [inaudible]”

AM: “That is a different show, but let’s” – she asks about fetal viability and the moral issue, whether there is one.

KA: “The campaign that I head up, we take the position that it has to be the woman or pregnant person’s point – that they are they are the you know the person with control over that so we would say they need to make that decision.”

They they they they – maybe that’s why she stumbled so badly, all that they-ing. It should all have been she, and then the fact that it’s women would have been underlined, but nooooooooooo, it had to be they, as if this legislative rape were happening to men too.

I didn’t listen to any more of it so can’t tell you how it went.

There literally are Savita Halappanavar cases happening in the US now. Lindsey Tanner at the Associated Press reports:

Even in medical emergencies, doctors are sometimes declining immediate treatment. In the past week, an Ohio abortion clinic received calls from two women with ectopic pregnancies — when an embryo grows outside the uterus and can’t be saved — who said their doctors wouldn’t treat them. Ectopic pregnancies often become life-threatening emergencies and abortion clinics aren’t set up to treat them.

In an ectopic pregnancy the fetus is doomed no matter what, so deciding to wait until the woman is hemorrhaging is futile as well as murderous.

Dr. Jessian Munoz, an OBGYN in San Antonio, Texas, who treats high-risk pregnancies, said medical decisions used to be clear cut. “It was like, the mom’s life is in danger, we must evacuate the uterus by whatever means that may be,” he said. “Whether it’s surgical or medical — that’s the treatment.’’

Now, he said, doctors whose patients develop pregnancy complications are struggling to determine whether a woman is “sick enough” to justify an abortion. With the fall of Roe v. Wade, “the art of medicine is lost and actually has been replaced by fear,’’ Munoz said.

Munoz said he faced an awful predicament with a recent patient who had started to miscarry and developed a dangerous womb infection. The fetus still had signs of a heartbeat, so an immediate abortion — the usual standard of care — would have been illegal under Texas law.

“We physically watched her get sicker and sicker and sicker” until the fetal heartbeat stopped the next day, “and then we could intervene,’’ he said. The patient developed complications, required surgery, lost multiple liters of blood and had to be put on a breathing machine “all because we were essentially 24 hours behind.’’

That’s exactly how the people at University Hospital Galway let Savita Halappanavar die. They watched her get sicker and sicker and sicker and then she died.

The Boston public radio station WBUR did a conversational show several months ago about dinosaur emojis.

Emoji might not be 66 million years old, but they are pretty much everywhere. Join Ben and Amory as they explore the history of dinosaur emoji in LGBTQ+ communities and their more recent use as an online dog-whistle for anti-trans activists. What happens when one symbol is used for conflicting reasons? And can the dinosaur emoji avoid redefinition — or extinction?

…

Ben: So I want us to explore this. This specific thing that is happening with this specific set of emoji that’s really become this heated debate involving who gets to own the meaning of symbols, specifically the symbols that we all use to make meaning on our phones.

…

Ben: And we’re gonna start with this one: The saga of those innocent little dinosaur emoji that ended up getting used for something not so innocent.

…

Amory: This is Riley Black.

Riley: I’m a science journalist and author. I’ve written books like Skeleton Keys and The Last Days of the Dinosaurs. 

Ben: Riley LOVES her some dinos.

Riley: Big and loud, for whatever reason, was my jam. 

They chat a bit about paleontology and dinosaur art, then say there are other people who like dinosaur art.

Riley: Many people who are queer, whether they are trans or some other form of genderqueer or whatever it is…We love dinosaurs.

Ben: Along with being a dinosaur expert, Riley is, herself, transgender. And according to Riley, there is a whole community of genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts online. We had no idea. So we checked it out. Sure enough, they’re there. We found dozens of paleoartists online that identify as queer.

Amory: Type “dinosaur” into the LGBT subreddit. Hundreds of results, with pride dinos, rainbow dinos, dino moms, dino dads, and a LOT of puns. Like, Ally-saurus.

They speculate on why dinosaurs are a “genderqueer” thing.

Riley: And I think that aspect of falling into more than one category at once and some of these threads of sort of transformation through time are just naturally appealing to people like me and other people in the trans community. 

Ben: This community might not be gigantic. But it is strong and undeniably present. And along with art and expressions of pride, you will definitely see dino emoji.

Ben: Were you using the dinosaur emoji relatively frequently before all of this stuff happened?  

Riley: Yeah, I mean, I would use dinosaur emojis for emphasis just to share things I was excited about, especially when paired with other emojis like I have a book that’s coming out in April about the extinction of the dinosaurs that occurred 66 million years ago. Whenever I talk about it, I use a little dinosaur emoji, a comet emoji, a plant emoji and a raccoon emoji to kind of tell that story of like the dinosaurs going extinct and plants and mammals coming back afterwards and just having fun like with storytelling. 

Amory: But a few months ago, Riley started to see dinosaur emoji that weren’t so fun.

Riley: I think my initial knee-jerk reaction, um, was just like, Well, you can’t have them. Like dinosaurs are ours.  

Ben: The T. Rex and brachiosaurus were showing up in the profiles of a different online community. Kind of as a badge. A dog whistle to say to others within that community: I’m one of you.

Riley: It really just made zero sense to me whatsoever in terms of like, you know, they could have picked anything else and it might have made a little bit more sense to me. 

Amory: Riley refers to the group of co-opters as TERFs, as in T-E-R-F. Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, who call themselves “gender critical.” In other words, anti-trans.

Except no, not “anti-trans.” Anti the ridiculous ideology of Swappable Sex, but not Determined To Harm Trans People.

Broadly speaking, TERFs promote the idea that trans women are really men—that, unlike cisgender women, trans women have benefited from being a part of the patriarchy and thus are a threat to cis women. Above all, they say that, unlike sex, gender identity is an ideology and is not grounded in science. We’ll come back to this.

We “promote the idea” that men are really men. Can you believe it?! Aren’t we silly.

Ben: Anyway, TERFs using dinosaur emoji was a problem for Riley.

Riley: To see, you know, our social enemies for lack of a better term taking, you know, these symbols and trying to use it as their dog whistle, it was something where it’s just like, Where’s this even coming from? This makes zero sense. And also dinosaurs are ours. I hate to speak for the entire trans or genderqueer community but, like, no. We’ve already been wondering about them and drawing them and interested. 

Then why not find out where this is even coming from? Too much work?

Amory: No matter who you are, if you see something beloved taken over by someone else, that can be hard. Suddenly, genderqueer fans of dinos everywhere felt under attack as TERFs kept dropping the emoji into their feeds.

Ben: And we know how these things go. Just think of Pepe the frog. Or the Punisher skull. Or the swastika. When outsider groups latch onto a symbol, that symbol is often changed. Irrevocably.

Except that it wasn’t “taken over” by “someone else.” It was a retort to a stupid dismissive remark by David Lammy MP calling feminist women “dinosaurs.” The hosts finally get around to mentioning the pesky facts that undercut everything they’ve just been saying.

Ben: It’s not clear if TERFs knew they were co-opting something beloved to this slice of the genderqueer community. As far as we can tell, dinosaur emoji began showing up in anti-trans Twitter bios around October of last year.

And the catalyst may have been the UK’s Parliament… which reminds one of Muppets in more ways than one.

There’s no “may have been” about it. We watched it happen.

Ben: And back in September, Lammy was asked in a meeting about transgender rights. So, he responded … calling out his colleagues on the right and in his own party for being anti-trans. He called them dinosaurs. As in, behind the times.

Amory: This was not big news. Except on Twitter, where a little pocket of the internet was blowing up. TERFs were offended by the analogy. And then, they embraced it.

Like one person who goes by the handle @LilyLilyMaynard. She started tweeting videos of her fellow TERFs outside the Labour Party’s headquarters.

Ben: They’re dressed in cheap, inflatable dinosaur costumes, singing off-key about genitals, which, we’re not going to play for obvious reasons. But if you Google “Labour Party Head Office,” the main image representing the building is of these dinosaurs. It would be comical… if it weren’t in service of one group rejecting another’s identity.

Except it’s not their identity, it’s ours, and they’ve helped themselves to it. Ben and Amory would be all over it like a rash if it were Black identity being expropriated that way, but when it’s just stupid whiny women they’re full of contempt.

When satire is all too much like reality. The Babylon Bee:

Cigarette maker Marlboro has announced that they have added puberty blockers to cigarettes to make them legal for kids.

“Now that our smooth Marlboro cigarettes can block puberty, 13 and 14-year-old kids should be able to use them legally, without parental consent,” said a spokesperson for the company. 

Cited as “lung-affirming care,” the cigarette manufacturer’s decision to supplement their products with puberty blockers has caused progressives to praise Marlboro as a true advocate for children’s health.

…

Critics have pointed out the cigarette manufacturer’s sordid history of using deceptive marketing tactics to make young, susceptible populations think cigarettes were cool. But these critics were quickly and violently silenced by trans activists for daring to question a child’s desire to please woke parents by changing genders.

Just don’t inhale.

H/t Peter N

The utter patronizing stupidity of these people.

Of course by “inclusive” they don’t mean what sane people mean by “inclusive.” Of course they mean exclude women by talking about people instead of women.

No it is not “exclusionary” to “center” i.e. talk about women and women only in pro-abortion “messaging.” Why? Because men don’t need abortions, that’s why. Why don’t men need abortions? Because they can’t get pregnant. Most adults know this kind of thing.

It doesn’t matter if some women “don’t identify as” women. That’s just childish trivia. A few adult women want to play let’s pretend, ok, that’s embarrassing but it’s their business, but the rest of us do not have to avoid using the word “women” to humor them. Abortion rights are deadly serious business, and this frivolous nonsense about make-believe genders is a grotesque intrusion. Go all the way away.

“We just ask that you remove all mention of women from your protesting.”

Fuck all the way off.

For your reading enjoyment, a comment by philospher Daniel Kaufman in reply to a comment on a guest post at his blog Electric Agora:

Let me just be very clear, since I keep getting pulled into this imbecile conversation with the Manne Fan.

1. If you think that the abortion catastrophe we just experienced calls for referring to women as ‘impregnables’, you are either batshit crazy or too stupid to count your toes.

2. If you think this is a good idea politically; that it will strengthen the pro choice coalition, you are a fool and should be kept far away from politics if the Democrats are to have a chance of winning.

3. Telling your elders and betters that they should heed you or be “held accountable” will only earn you the following: contempt; mockery; and dismissal. Ditto with calling them ‘phobes and ‘ists of every variety.

4. No one deputized you for jack shit.

Enjoy your Saturday.

This is even more terrifying – by a professor of pediatrics at Indiana University:

Earlier this week I was preparing to write a guest essay with my colleague Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an OB-GYN here in Indiana. We wanted to write about the chilling effect that the overturning of Roe v. Wade has had on medicine in our state and around the country in just a few short weeks. But then Dr. Bernard became a target of a national smear campaign for speaking out about her 10-year-old patient, a rape victim from Ohio who needed an abortion and had to travel to Indiana to receive one, given the restrictions in her home state.

On Wednesday night, our state’s attorney general said his office would be investigating Dr. Bernard. So I’m writing this essay myself — not only to bring attention to the chilling effect on medicine we’re seeing at this moment but also because I’m terrified that I or any one of our colleagues could soon face what Dr. Bernard is going through after delivering care to our patients.

Investigating Dr. Bernard for saving a ten-year-old girl’s life. This is hell, nor are we out of it.

On Wednesday, a suspect in the Ohio rape case was arraigned after reportedly confessing. But the attacks against Dr. Bernard have continued. Indiana’s attorney general said on Fox News on Wednesday evening that his office is investigating her, despite the fact that the abortion the 10-year-old patient received was legal in the state. 

Indiana’s attorney general should be impeached and then prosecuted.

The New England Journal of Medicine tells us that Texas is hell-bent on letting women die if their pregnancies go wrong. Two, three, many Savita Halappanavars.

Health systems and clinicians planning their responses³ can look to Texas, where we have already witnessed the impact of strict abortion bans on the provision of evidence-based, essential health care for pregnant people. Since September 1, 2021, Texas Senate Bill 8 (SB8) has prohibited abortions after the detection of embryonic cardiac activity, which occurs around 6 weeks after a person’s last menstrual period. After that point, SB8 allows abortions only in physician-documented medical emergencies. Anyone suspected of violating the law or aiding and abetting a prohibited abortion can face a civil lawsuit with monetary penalties of at least $10,000.

(Even here, where clarity is so urgent, even the NEJM censors the word “women,” as if this vicious, murderous policy were an injustice to everyone as opposed to very specifically women.)

We interviewed 25 clinicians from across Texas about how SB8 has affected their practice in general obstetrics and gynecology, maternal and fetal medicine (MFM), or genetic counseling. We concurrently interviewed 20 Texans who had medically complex pregnancies and sought care either in Texas or out of state after September 1, 2021. Although aimed at clinicians who provide abortion care, SB8 has had a chilling effect on a broad range of health care professionals, adversely affecting patient care and endangering people’s lives.

…

Clinicians we interviewed recounted a variety of circumstances in which a patient could have received hospital-based abortion care before SB8 but was now denied that care. Patients with a life-limiting fetal diagnosis, such as anencephaly or bilateral renal agenesis, are only being counseled to continue their pregnancy and offered neonatal comfort care options after delivery. All hospitals where our respondents practiced have prohibited multifetal reduction, even though in some cases (e.g., complications of monochorionic twins) failure to perform the procedure could result in the loss of both twins.

Patients with pregnancy complications or preexisting medical conditions that may be exacerbated by pregnancy are being forced to delay an abortion until their conditions become life-threatening and qualify as medical emergencies, or until fetal cardiac activity is no longer detectable. An MFM specialist reported that their hospital no longer offers treatment for ectopic pregnancies implanted in cesarean scars, despite strong recommendations from the Society for Maternal–Fetal Medicine that these life-threatening pregnancies be definitively managed with surgical or medical treatment.

That’s just plain terrifying. Ectopic pregnancies can explode and cause the woman to bleed to death before the medics can stop the bleed.

Some clinicians believe that patients with rupture of membranes before fetal viability are eligible for a medical exemption under SB8, while others believe these patients cannot receive an abortion so long as there is fetal cardiac activity. In multiple cases, the treating clinicians — believing, on the basis of their own or their hospital’s interpretation of the law, that they could not provide early intervention — sent patients home, only to see them return with signs of sepsis.

Like Savita Halappanavar.

Take a deep breath.

Swimming World reports:

Lia Thomas, Brooke Forde Among 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year Nominees

Man who cheated women out of swimming medals nominated for woman of the year. The insults just never end, do they.

NCAA champion Lia Thomas and American Olympian Brooke Forde were among the nominees for the 2022 NCAA Woman of the Year, released Thursday.

The duo is among 577 graduating student-athletes in Division I, II and III nominated for the award. Schools nominate their athletes for the award, and conferences select up to two from each school. The preliminary list will be narrowed down to 10 athletes from each division, 30 in total. The Woman of the Year award was created in 1991, honoring “female student-athletes who have exhausted their eligibility and distinguished themselves in their community, in athletics and in academics throughout their college careers.” This year’s class of nominees coincides with the 50th anniversary of Title IX.

So Penn decided to insult all its female swimmers by nominating a man – a tall hulking man with enormous shoulders, at that – Woman of the Year. Penn might as well spit in their faces.

Jamal who?

President Joe Biden bumped fists with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman when the two men met for the first time in Jeddah on Friday, effectively putting an end to his efforts to shun the Saudi leader.

“Yo, buddy. That whole cutting up Jamal Khashoggi with a bone saw thing is water under the bridge.”

The low-key greeting underscored the tense circumstances of the trip, with Biden seeking Saudi promises to help lower oil prices, but wanting to avoid any appearance of being too friendly with Prince Mohammed, 36, whom he’d vowed to ostracize for the 2018 killing of columnist Jamal Khashoggi. 

Look, we need the oil, ok? What are we supposed to do, figure out how to manage without it? Be realistic!

The chairman of the US House intelligence committee, a Democrat, wasn’t buying it.

“If we ever needed a visual reminder of the continuing grip oil-rich autocrats have on US foreign policy in the Middle East, we got it today,” Representative Adam Schiff tweeted. “One fist bump is worth a thousand words.”

Torturers on the one hand, climate change on the other – our hands are tied. Tied, I tells ya.

Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Split the girl.

Local Ohio news outlets: Pregnant 10-year-old is forced to go to Indiana for an abortion because it can’t be done in Ohio

Conservatives: This can’t be true! This story is false!

Glenn Kessler, WaPo “fact checker”: Hmm, yes, this story seems very dubious, where is the criminal charge against the rapist? (Because we all know that all rapes result in criminal prosecutions) And this doctor is an activist, because she performs abortions, unlike GOP state officials, who are objective and trustworthy.

Local Ohio news outlets: Uh, yes, it’s true, we attended the rapist’s arraignment today, where were you guys?

Kessler: Hm. Well. Nevertheless. It’s all about ethical practices in journalism.

Liberals: Excuse me, can we get back to talking about how this is exactly what forced birth assholes have spent 50 years trying to bring about? It happened, and it’s going to happen again and again and again!

Jon Turley: Oh, don’t be silly. States aren’t going to go after doctors for terminating the pregnancy of a 10-year-old

State AGs: We’re totally going after this doctor and any others.

Forced birth advocates: We’re totally banning abortions for 10-year-olds

NY Times: Today’s hot topic in the abortion debates — did Ohio journalists err in trusting the word of a doctor?

It’s been quite a week. Can’t wait for happy hour, I need a drink.

Always be sure to fact-check the rapes. Bitches lie, you know, especially when they’re ten years old. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler was on the case:

This is the account of a one-source story that quickly went viral around the world — and into the talking points of the president.

The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed a right to abortion, has led a number of states to quickly impose new laws to restrict or limit abortions. Ohio was one of the first, imposing a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape and incest.

On July 1, the Indianapolis Star, also known as the IndyStar, published an article, written by the newspaper’s medical writer, about how women seeking abortions had begun traveling from Ohio to Indiana, where less restrictive abortion laws were still in place. “Patients head to Indiana for abortion services as other states restrict care,” the article was headlined.

That was a benign headline. But it was the anecdotal beginning that caught the attention of other news organizations. The article said that three days after the June 24 court ruling, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist, Caitlan Bernard, who performs abortions, received a call from “a child abuse doctor” in Ohio who had a 10-year-old patient who was six weeks and three days pregnant. Unable to obtain an abortion in Ohio, “the girl soon was on her way to Indiana to Bernard’s care,” the Star reported.

We get several more paragraphs on the lack of corroboration for this story, and at the end he sums up:

This is a very difficult story to check. Bernard is on the record, but obtaining documents or other confirmation is all but impossible without details that would identify the locality where the rape occurred.

With news reports around the globe and now a presidential imprimatur, however, the story has acquired the status of a “fact” no matter its provenance. If a rapist is ever charged, the fact finally would have more solid grounding.

Below that there’s an update saying the story has been confirmed.

Fact checking is obviously a good and necessary thing, but it’s not equally obvious why Kessler saw fit to single out this one for an actual story.

Yes, journalism is, among other things, an accumulation of facts, but it’s a lot of other things too. It’s a choice of what to cover, for instance, and a choice of how to cover it, and sometimes even a questioning of reasons for covering it.

H/t Screechy Monkey

This may be the stupidest ever.

Here’s your daily reminder that the universe is made of custard.

Here’s your daily reminder that sheep have 47 legs.

Here’s your daily reminder that Thomas Jefferson got a PhD in astrophysics at Stanford.

Here’s your daily reminder that it takes 5 hours to walk from Boston to San Diego.

In short, no, not everyone gets abortions. Let’s break this down to make it easy to grasp: there’s a whole large category of people who can’t get abortions, so that’s those people off the list right at the start. Here’s the funny thing: they’re roughly half of all people, so our tweeter made quite a big mistake!

Ok so roughly half of all people – men – can’t get abortions. Nor can either sex before puberty, for that matter, so the category of people who can get them (leaving aside for the moment whether they do or not) is post-puberty females.

And then there’s another big category, which is women who are happy to be pregnant, and thus don’t need or want abortions unless there’s a serious medical issue.

So who gets abortions? Women and girls who want or need to stop being pregnant and have access to abortions. It’s a pretty small fraction of everyone really.

Originally a comment by Sastra on The genderist version of the German-Russian Non-Aggression Pact.

Getting clear definitions of these concepts is like nailing jello to the wall; that’s intentional. That nobody on the genderist side seems to care is interesting.

Indeed it is. It’s particularly interesting when the insouciance is coming from skeptic or atheist communities which up till now have been laser-focused on the weakness of poorly-defined concepts shoring up elaborate edifices of practice.

“Homeopathy works because (garble garble) … okay, whatever, the point is that it works.”

“God exists as (garble garble) … okay, whatever, the point is that He exists.”

“The ‘gender’ in ‘gender identity’ means (garble garble) … okay, whatever, the point is that trans people just want to be accepted as who they truly are.”

There are two common apologetic arguments based on the needs of the believer. The first is that the need of the believer to believe is good reason to think their belief is true. CS Lewis liked this one. The world fits together. We don’t have thirst without water to slake it; the desire for God could not exist without a God to fulfill the desire. Yeah.

The second apologetic is that the need of the believer to believe is good reason to play along with the belief. People who go to psychics who claim to talk to the dead are weak, damaged, and grieving. If they find some comfort here, why take it away from them? They can’t handle the truth. Stop investigating, stop talking. And again— uh huh.

I see both Arguments from the Needs of the Believer being used in transgender doctrine by those who reject them in other contexts. The strong desire to be the opposite sex means that person must actually be the opposite sex. Forget the definitions. No better way to account for it. And given how vulnerable, marginalized, and needy trans people are, why are we blathering on about consistency and coherency? What about compassion?

It’s possible that the (garble garble) doesn’t seem to bother them because something diverted the thought process into an emotional journey: it’s better to be nice than right. Sure.

Global hotting is real.

Residents and holidaymakers have fled towns and villages in France as fires are whipped up by high winds and tinder-dry conditions in several countries in Europe. More than 10,000 people have been forced to leave the south-western Gironde region in the past few days.

Dozens of fires are burning in Portugal and Spain where temperatures have surged above 40C. At least 281 deaths in the two countries were linked to the heatwave.

Meanwhile the cruise ships arrive and depart, the planes take off and land, the cars zoom, the container ships circle the globe.

Temperatures were set to top 40C in large areas of western Spain as well as Portugal on Friday. At Pinhão in the north, 47C was recorded on Thursday, a record high for July in mainland Portugal.

113F. It was 108F here last summer, and that was a record high.