Same again – the creepy evasive People replacing women in every sentence.

Meet the Reddit ‘Aunties’ covertly helping people get abortions

But it’s not “people” who need abortions, it’s women.

The Reddit group offers a glimpse into a post-Roe era where people resort to informal networks to assist those locked out of an abortion

Women. If it were “people” there would be no ban.

On the page, volunteers sign up to lodge, transport, assist and care for people needing abortions who are alone or in states where it’s difficult to get one.

Women.

A modern day adaptation of underground abortion networks that helped people access care when the procedure was illegal…

Women.

The Reddit community, r/auntienetwork, started in May of 2019, according to the group’s page. It was meant to be an organic space for people who needed help getting abortions to post andfind assistance from others.

Women.

In the thread, users from all across America offer various services to people seeking abortion.

Women.

There’s the rural Colorado auntie who lives with their father near a Planned Parenthood and offered people seeking abortion a “comfy twin bed and a supportive place to crash” among the mountains.

Women.

It’s mildly interesting that “auntie” is allowed, but I guess because it’s in scare quotes it’s ok.

Andrea Miller, the president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, said mutual aid organizations like Reddit’s Auntie Network show how “ready and eager” people are to help those needing abortion care “especially in the face of this hostile Supreme Court.”

Women. Not “those needing abortion care” but women needing it.

She added, however, that Reddit members signing up to volunteer should consider offering help to formal groups that have been around for years, such as the Brigid Alliance which arranges and funds travel for those seeking abortions, or the National Network of Abortion Funds, which helps remove logistical and financial barriers for people seeking abortions.

So careful to make sure NEVER to say “women.”

“We have far too many examples … of ways in which those who are absolutely determined to prevent people from being able to make decisions about the reproductive lives and have abortions literally will stop at nothing,” she said.

Women. To prevent women from being able to make decisions.

“It’s heartbreaking to me,” she said. “People are already in a desperate, terrifying situation and now they’re having to rely on the goodwill of strangers to get access to necessary health care.”

And the Washington Post refuses to call them women.

The word “people” appears 19 times in the article. The word women 0 times.

Even the editorial board of the Washington Post does it.

On Monday, Politico published a draft of a Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling declaring that the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to end their pregnancies.

That jolts like a badly-constructed bus hitting a pothole. It’s not “Americans” who had the right to end their pregnancies, it’s American women who did. The Washington Post is not a teenager with tattoos; it should talk like an adult.

What brought the court to its current precipice was not a fundamental shift in American values regarding abortion. It was the shameless legislative maneuvering of Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who jammed three Trump-nominated justices onto the court.

In his draft, Justice Alito points out that the court has overturned many cases in the past, including the atrocious Plessy v. Ferguson, which permitted racial segregation. But the court has never revoked a fundamental constitutional right. Overturning Plessy expanded liberty. Overturning Roe would constrict liberty — and be a repugnant repudiation of the American tradition in which freedom extends to an ever-wider circle of people.

Or, to put it another way, in which people who aren’t property-owning white men gain some of the rights those men allotted to themselves only.

For most people, Roe is a workable standard on a fraught issue; absent a clear understanding about when life begins, and with the moral implications surrounding that question far from settled, the Constitution’s guarantees of personal autonomy demand that pregnant people be able to make the difficult decision about whether to end their pregnancy according to the dictates of their own conscience.

Sigh. That “guarantees Americans” wasn’t an oversight; they’re doing it on purpose. They’re adding their bit to the fiction that this is an attack on the rights of everyone when it is in fact a massive attack on the rights of women. Women only. This isn’t done to men. However sympathetic men may be, however inconvenienced they may be, the attack is on the rights of women.

The Post has the bit in its teeth now, and goes all in.

It is Justice Alito’s proposed decision that would further divide the country, starting in nearly every statehouse. Yet the greatest casualties would not be the court as an institution or the nation’s already toxic politics. It would be pregnant individuals suddenly stripped of a right they had been guaranteed for almost half a century. Wealthy people would be able to cross state lines to end their pregnancies. (Although some states are already trying to outlaw that practice, as well.) Poor people would be forced either to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, with all the health consequences and risks that entails, or to seek illegal abortions that could endanger their lives.

Emphasis mine. Perverse choice of wording theirs.

The piece doesn’t mention women at all. Not once.

Matt Gaetz thinks women should not be educated.

There is nothing worse than an over-educated woman.

Chase takes a moment to shit on feminist women again.

Somebody has to.

Even now the ACLU won’t say the word.

The Guardian talks to some actual women about the abortion ruling:

Bonnie Greer:

As someone who had an illegal abortion – in my home town of Chicago in 1969, four years before Roe v Wade – I was very angry when I heard the news. I am very angry. For women, our destiny has always been our biology, and we’ve fought for ever to change that, to ensure that we’re respected and protected as whole human beings, equal to men under the law.

Now we’re fighting just to be mentioned in news stories about the loss of our rights.

Know this: women will always get abortions, and the overturning of Roe v Wade would mean we will once again be at risk.

It means that men and women are not equal under the law, based on our biology. It’s the same thing as saying that a human being is not equal under the law based on the colour of their skin. Both are things that cannot be altered. I hope that the US people will vote out of office the Republicans who have pushed for this to happen.

Greer doesn’t change the subject to trans women. The next interviewee, Judy Chicago, does.

The fight for women’s rights is a long historic struggle against a set of values that restricts the rights of, not only women, but LGBTQ people, trans people and people of colour.

Must change the subject. Women are the deferential sex, so we’re not allowed to focus on our own rights. It’s shocking that the Guardian allowed Bonnie Greer to get away with it.

Mona Eltahawy defers:

I had an illegal abortion in 1996 in Egypt and a legal abortion in the US in 2000. I can’t believe that my past is becoming the present in the United States. This is the most powerful country in the world, and this fundamental right for pregnant people is being stripped away.

Those who can afford to get a safe abortion will continue to do so, and mostly Black, Indigenous and Brown people, and working-class people, will not. But that’s been the reality for many years now. Texas had already shrivelled the number of abortion clinics it had.

People people people. But she does use the word “women” in the end – just long enough to blame them.

As an Egyptian feminist, I have to call out the role of women in creating this theocracy. Look at supreme court associate justice Amy Coney Barrett. It is not just men taking away our abortion rights.

Robin Morgan is with Bonnie Greer: not ashamed to use the word.

There will be marching, demonstrations, sit-ins, petitions. Women will go ahead and disobey the law. What are they going to do when half the population is in revolt? Not 20%, not the ultra right wing, not the evangelicals. Women are going to control what happens to our own bodies. No matter how many thousands of us have to go to jail. We are not turning back the clock. No way.

Katha Pollitt, of course, doesn’t mess around.

Roe v Wade was a life-changing ruling, probably one of the most important – from the ground level – supreme court rulings there has ever been. It meant that women could stay in school. It meant women could work in a consistent way. It meant women could leave abusive partners. It meant that women didn’t have to marry the man who got them pregnant.

I felt horrified when I found out it could be overturned. This really allows states to do whatever they want with abortion, and 26 states is a lot of people. This is going to affect women whether or not they have an abortion, because it says, basically, you’re here to procreate, and we don’t care if there are health concerns, or rape or incest.

If a man can get you pregnant, you have to have that child. I think that’s a tremendous statement that women do not have that human right any more.

Katha literally wrote the book.

Signal that virtue, you woman-hating toads.

Yes this is the way to defend abortion rights, pretend you don’t know who does the baby-having.

“Birthing bodies.” How fucking insulting.

The ignorance is staggering.

Not anti-women, just anti-women. Women aren’t allowed to get together to talk about women’s rights, that’s blatant hypocrisy and transphobia, and it’s not at all anti-women to say so.

Ahhhhh but what if we don’t call it “the LGBT community”? What then? What if we call it the LGB community? Changes everything, doesn’t it.

News flash: there is no law that we have to include the T. The reality is the T doesn’t have much in common with the L and the G, and it tends to do all the talking and certainly all the shouting, so a lot of people are fed up with the forced teaming.

But it gets even better.

For sure. I just can’t imagine why women would be talking about women’s rights at a moment when the Supreme Court is about to enshrine forced pregnancy in federal law. How selfish and narcissistic women are making it all about them. Let’s talk about how forced pregnancy affects men.

Do better! Stop making abortion rights all about women! Be inclusive of men when you talk about abortion rights!

Investigate! Investigate now!

Investigate what?

The leak! The leak the leak the leak!

Not the corruption?

What corruption?

Chief Justice Roberts said that there would be an investigation of the SCOTUS leaker, but he has done nothing about Clarence and Ginni Thomas.

Roberts said in a statement:

We at the Court are blessed to have a workforce – permanent employees and law clerks alike – intensely loyal to the institution and dedicated to the rule of law. Court employees have an exemplary and important tradition of respecting the confidentiality of the judicial process and upholding the trust of the Court. This was a singular and egregious breach of that trust that is an affront to the Court and the community of public servants who work here. I have directed the Marshal of the Court to launch an investigation into the source of the leak.

Conflicts of interest, however, we don’t give a rat’s ass about – unless it’s some pesky liberal justice doing it.

We are still waiting for Chief Justice Roberts to announce the investigation into Justice Thomas and his wife for their conflicts of interest, corruption, and activities surrounding the 1/6 attack.

We might as well wait for Donald Trump to say something intelligent. Ain’t gonna happen.

There’s a Woman’s Place UK event in Bristol this evening; it just got started a few minutes ago.

Some people want to keep women out of Bristol.

Do gender critical women ever say things like “trans people are not welcome in our city”? I don’t think so. It sounds threatening as well as hostile and rude and unjust. We don’t think we own particular cities and get to keep other people out of them. We generally recognize “X people are not welcome in our city” as way too similar to slogans and placards from, say, protests against the integration of Little Rock Central High School.

But apparently it’s fine to say it about women meeting up with other women. “Women are not welcome in our city.” Okaaaaaaay…

From The Atlantic in 2011:

In an interview with California Lawyer magazine, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia seemed to suggest that the Constitution does not protect women from gender-based discrimination. “Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that,” said the famously conservative justice, adding, “If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws.”

What does the 14th Amendment say?

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

It’s a Reconstruction amendment, which made enslavement a violation of the Constitution.

The Atlantic quoted some reactions:

“The central purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to guarantee equal citizenship and equality before the law for all citizens and for all persons,” Legal blogger Jack Balkin argues. “It does not simply ban discrimination based on race. The fact that the word race is not mentioned in the text (as it is in the fifteenth amendment) was quite deliberate. Scalia argues that the fourteenth amendment was not intended to prevent sex discrimination. That’s not entirely true.”

The two forms of discrimination were often linked at the time. Frederick Douglass was a feminist; the Grimké sisters were abolitionists.

Moira Donegan doesn’t mince words.

The draft opinion, authored by Samuel Alito, the most rabidly hateful member of the court’s arch-conservative wing, will upend 50 years of precedent and undo a landmark ruling that has profoundly shaped legal doctrine, popular conceptions of the law, and millions of American lives. It will make women prisoners to their own bodies, and to men’s ideas of what those bodies must mean. It will make our country weaker, crueler, stupider and less vibrant.

We’re all prisoners to of in our own bodies, of course, but unwanted pregnancy is a particularly intrusive and disruptive demonstration of that imprisonment.

In a way, the leaked opinion didn’t tell us anything we did not already know: these are the last days of reproductive freedom in America, and most states will soon ban abortion outright, or restrict it so onerously that it is inaccessible within their borders. But Alito’s draft opinion nevertheless represents about as odiously maximalist an approach as the court could have taken.

The opinion does not just overturn Roe and Casey; it expresses outright contempt for the notion that the constitution protects bodily autonomy for women.

Because after all what are women for if they’re not baby factories? What is even the point of them?

The end of legal abortion will not be where the court’s reactionaries stop. They aim to hurt, punish and narrow the lives of Americans in many more cruel and inventive ways.

…

The state compelling a person to be pregnant is not like compelling her to pay taxes. The event doesn’t occur in a courtroom or on a balance sheet; it occurs inside her body.

It is, perhaps, somewhat like the draft. Draft laws are also controversial, for obvious reasons.

In making abortion illegal, the court is imposing a legal status that is so cruel, so personal and so life-altering on half its population, that those subject to this imposition cannot be called free. Is there any condition more essential to democratic citizenship than a person’s control over her own body? Can we call ourselves a free country without it?

Could 1950s Ireland call itself a free country? (Spoiler: no.)

What next? The Post says likely a push for a nationwide ban on abortion.

Leading antiabortion groups and their allies in Congress have been meeting behind the scenes to plan a national strategy that would kick in if the Supreme Court rolls back abortion rights this summer, including a push for a strict nationwide ban on the procedure if Republicans retake power in Washington.

…

A group of Republican senators has discussed at multiple meetings the possibility of banning abortion at around six weeks, said Sen. James Lankford (Okla.), who was in attendance and said he would support the legislation.

…

One top advocate, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the antiabortion group Susan B. Anthony List, has spoken privately with 10 possible Republican presidential contenders, including former president Donald Trump, to talk through national antiabortion strategy. Most of them, she said in an interview, assured her they would be supportive of a national ban and would be eager to make that policy a centerpiece of a presidential campaign.

Falling all over themselves to enchain women.

Guy takes it upon himself to try to change the subject from abortion rights to The One Important Subject.

This is about women, and our right to decide whether or not to gestate an infant. Just that, nothing else. It doesn’t need to be about anything else; it’s massively important all by itself.

But clearly way too many people think otherwise. Apparently women are the trivial sex, the silly sex, the sex that doesn’t need the right to make its own choices about its own life. Apparently women always have to have some variety of men added to make their rights seem to matter.

Some thoughts.

Politico reports:

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes.

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

But even now – women’s organizations are still talking about “people who get pregnant.”

From a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Average maximum temperatures.

Dr Forrest said Mr Malinauskas had “experienced the incredible power of zero emission green hydrogen when he drove FFI’s huge haul truck, seeing with his own eyes, how a massive 6mhigh mining truck can operate without using a polluting fuel like diesel”.

Perhaps his irony metre is broken, as the reduced pollution from a hydrogen-powered truck is more than outweighed by the coal in each load it carries.

How much of the process that mkes the hydrogen that goes into the truck is “zero emission?” If it’s only the bit that gets burned in the vehicle that’s “green,” then that’s not quite the solution it claims to be. As Mike B. pointed out above, the real problem is ecological overshoot. Even if we were to change all our energy use to renewables, we’d still be fucked, beacuse we’d still be overconsuming. Energy conversion without energy use reduction (amongst many other things), just puts us on a slightly greener road to hell.

The overall global response to the pandemic gives a very slight cause for hope. If the current ecological/biodiversity/energy crises could be seen and acted upon in a similar manner, with equivalent speed and robustness, we could make more progress than we are currently. Unfortunately, we need to do a good deal more than wear masks and keep farther apart. We would have to reinvent our economies, learn to live with less, and reduce wealth disparities. There is little that we do that would not be touched by the need to restructure and scale back our economies. Ophelia has pointed out a number of times that no government promising to do what needs to be done would ever be elected, and that those inclined to dictatorship would probably accelerate in the opposite direction. Countries have found the will to make sacrifices in times of war, but this time the war we are fighting is against our very way of life. The greatest threat to our way of life is our way of life. We have met the enemy and he is us.

To undertake the transformations required would be painful and expensive; failure to do so will result in even greater pain and expense, on an unimaginable scale, greater than all previous human conflicts combined. It could be slow and gradual, or it could involve massive, abrupt changes to previously reliable, stable systems and processes. Most likely it will be a combination of both. By refusing to choose the lesser of two evils, we ensure the inevitable manifestation of the greater.

We are in uncharted territory, leaving the envelope of conditions within which our civilization arose, and upon which it is based. We are travelling at great speed without a clue as to where we are heading. Cultural inertia makes changing direction on a global scale slow and awkward, if not impossible. There are powerful forces actively working to block any change at all. We are running out of water; we are running out of food. If you think things are bad now, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Wait wait wait – Mhairi Hunter tripped herself up with this one.

See it? Of course you do. Why does no adult really need to ask what a woman is? Because we already know, right? That has to be what she means?

But what do we already know? That women are adult human females – the sex that isn’t male, just as men are the sex that isn’t female.

But Mhairi Hunter’s whole thing is that we don’t know that, that in fact that is wrong and evil.

So, what the hell is she talking about?

The wheels really are falling off this rusty wagon.

As hundreds of gigantic cruise ships belch their way around the planet, people in India struggle to survive a heat wave.

Thousands of Indians have turned to umbrellas, fruits and swimming pools as they try to cope with a brutal heatwave that has hit the country.

Average maximum temperatures in March and April in northern and central India were the highest since the country’s weather office started keeping records 122 years ago.

The heat has sparked an increase in demand for electricity, leading to outages in many states and fears of a coal shortage.

That’s the Catch 22. When it gets hotter we use more power to cool ourselves, so it gets even hotter. Repeat until only the reptiles survive.

While summer temperatures have always been high in many Indian states, experts say India is now recording more intense, frequent heatwaves that are also longer in duration. The “root cause”, says climate scientist Roxy Mathew Koll, is global warming.

But it’s worth it for the cruise ships, right?