Texas is 2012 Galway
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 aperson’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
Texanswho 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 endangeringpeople’slives.…
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.
When such things are allowed (or legislated!) to happen, this is not just control of women, it is hatred of women. Hatred of half the human population, the half that is most directly responsible for the existence of the ones hating them. If I were a Freudian, I would probably say it was a reaction to a controlling mother, but I am not a Freudian, so I will throw up my hands as to why so many people (of both sexes) just plain hate women…even if they don’t acknowledge it.
I guess at some point you got tired of striking through the “people” and “patients”? Or you just figured we got the point?
I figured you got the point and also I figured it probably is normal for medical people to say “patients” much of the time.
I don’t know, perhaps because they’re sluts? Even if they are ten year old rape victims?
That’s just a wild guess, of course…
It boggles the mind. It boggles it so hard, I’m afraid it will shake loose from my skull and be lost.
I would charge every legislator who votes for such laws with murder of the women who get denied medical care because of such laws.
My main reason for being hesitant to approve the death penalty, is all the cases where someone is wrongfully convicted, but here there is no doubt about which people are guilty.
I suspect that virtually everyone in favor of such draconian laws is also well-versed in the apologetics around the Problem of Evil. If God loves us and could prevent Evil — the harm caused by killers and tornados and women dying in childbirth — then why doesn’t He do so? Could it be that such a god does not exist?
Not at all. In order to create a world in which people can freely come to love Him back, it was necessary to create the conditions of pain and suffering. Perhaps it allows Free Will; perhaps it builds souls; perhaps it humbles us and forces us to admit we need God. Doesn’t matter. In every theodicy, there is a great Good for a privileged few which requires great Evil for many. In order to make an omelet, you have to crack a few eggs.
Arguments against abortion are usually religious. If they’re very religious then they’re steeped in a world view in which Ultimate Perfection in a Perfect World requires harming people. And by “people,” they usually mean “women.”
The “free will” argument, ugh. Not everyone has the same “free will.” God picks and chooses. God always values the free will of the rapist, but not the free will of the 10 y.o. girl. Why is that? Why is God giving men complete free will to commit the evil of rape, but not giving women and girls any free will to commit the evil of abortion?
God is willing to let men exercise their free will over women and girls, and also takes away the free will of the women and girls in favor of the “free will” of an entity that has no free will to exercise? To put it bluntly, that’s God’s will interfering with the free will of women and girls. So, which is it? God gives free will to BOTH men and women to commit sins and do evil? Or God doesn’t give free will to women and girls, and imposes God’s will on them to prevent their exercising their free will? Which is it? You can’t have it both ways.
@maddog1129@
In Christian theology, the only free choice that matters is the one to love God. Getting to decide for yourself how to live a happy life on earth is irrelevant. When asking “why does God (whatever)?” the only answer is “to increase the strength and value of your faith.” Everything else is just so much noise.
Therefore, the rapist has the free will to repent, and the victim has the free will to turn to God for consolation.
Well, she could sin and then repent, too, just like the man gets to. Of course, he gets to “repent” by marrying her. Again, his free will, A-OK. Her free will? She doesn’t have any. God hates women.
In the beginning of my militant atheist days, while I was still into arguments against “God’s” existence*, I once debated a fanatical 7th Day Adventist. I made the point that “free will” cannot absolve God of responsibility for the existence of evil (actually I was talking about imperfection, but the same logic applies): If humans were created perfect, they would never use their free will to chose to become evil since that in itself would be an evil choice, hence any possible motive they might have for making such a choice would by necessity make them evil to begin with. In short, “free will” means you’re free to chose evil if you want to, whereas being created perfect mean you don’t want to.
Unfortunately for him he was in the habit of answering atheists without even bothering to read their arguments and ended up making my point for me. His answer was basically “God created humans perfect, but don’t forget that humans have free will (as if I hadn’t mentioned it at all). You’re not perfect unless you have full freedom to choose and still choose to do the right thing”. After that all I had to do was point out that according to what he just said humans choose to do the right thing, so how did evil come into being again? Obviously postulating a “devil” only shifts the problem to how the devil himself turned evil. That’s when he stopped answering me and proceeded to make the same previously debunked arguments to somebody else as if no one had ever answered them before.**
And, of course, if the risk of turning evil is an inevitable consequence of free will and God himself has free will, then theists have to accept the possibility that God himself can turn evil at any time. Or if it’s logically possible for God to have free will without any risk of turning evil, then it’s also logically possible for humans to have free will without any risk of turning evil, so why didn’t God create them that way in the first place? By the same logic, if the risk of turning evil is an inevitable consequence of free will and people still have free will in Heaven, theists have to accept the possibility that evil is going to keep reappearing in the hereafter, leading to an endless number of apocalypses, judgement days, and damnations,.
Also, if God is perfect, why create anything at all? As long as only the perfect God existed everything that existed was perfect, hence there is no possibility that creation could represent any change for the better. A perfect God could have no possible motive for doing something that couldn’t lead to any improvement, but with every every possibility of going spectacularly wrong.
*My current view is that nonbelievers shouldn’t accept any burden of proof what so ever. Besides those arguments are not my real reasons for being an “atheist” anyway. I cannot honestly say that I would believe in God if not for the fact that, say, the Argument from Evil is so compelling. It’s not. Something like the Holocaust is exactly what I for one would expect it the Biblical devil-god were real.
** Another time he told me he would never trust his own fallible human judgement in philosophical questions, only the Bible. I pointed out that his own fallible human judgement – the thing he just told me he did not trust – was the only thing that told him the Bible was reliable in the first place.
Well, we don’t really have free will, anyway. We choose what to do, but our decisions have antecedents in the form of our personal morality, our education on what our choices mean and what effect they will have, our desires, and other factors. Naturalism.org is a resource for those who would like to have much better explanations.
A friend of mine told me he was very proud that his son chose to follow his parents’ religion out of his free will, meaning that he and his wife hadn’t put pressure on their son to join their religion. Overt pressure, of course. But raising him in their church gave him some precedent for picking that church and religion. We choose the gods we are familiar with, we choose to believe gods exist because of our cultural heritage that bombards us with that message on a continual basis.
I agree that there’s no such thing as “free will” as (I strongly suspect) most people understand the expression. As they say, the mind is what the brain does, and what the brain does is governed by the same physical laws as everything else. There is nothing “free” about it. Quantum mechanics does not disprove determinism, and even if it did, randomness does not give us “free will” as commonly understood. I would argue that even postulating a “soul” doesn’t help. The human will is not just believed to be uncaused, but more accurately self-caused. I.e. the human will is supposed to do something very analogous to Baron von Münchhausen lifting himself up by his own hair.
Not exactly. Christopher Hitchens was certainly not arguing from a religious conviction.
I would state, however, that the same basis seems to apply to those like Hitchens that also applies to the religious: the idea that humans are sacred. This is one of the reasons I never embraced humanism; too much commitment to humans, humans, and only humans. There are many other life forms on earth, and the more “sacred” humans that exist, the fewer of those that can exist.
To give Hitchens credit, though, he was a strong advocate of accessible, affordable birth control as the means to reduce abortion, rather than forced birth.