"The Women"

 

 

The average American reads about 12 books a year.         

Since Sharon has been retired for nearly 10 years, and I work as a substitute teacher, we read more books than the average American. I normally average about 50 books a year, and Sharon averages about 100.

On occasion, we will stumble on a book that is so compelling, that it is hard to put it down.

“The Women” is one of those books.

I don’t remember what organization recommended the book – but I am glad that they did.

I picked it up at the library on Wednesday afternoon, and I finished reading it Friday afternoon, a decent accomplishment in view of the fact that the large print edition of the book is more than 600 pages.

The main character is a nurse named Frances, and she went to Vietnam in 1967 as an Army nurse. Obviously, she lived through some difficult times, and her return home two years later was not exactly a welcoming experience.

In the late 1960’s, the folks who served their country were not treated with respect, even though they should have been

In the first draft lotter, in 1969, I drew #169, which meant that I would have been drafted in May of 1970. Naturally, I went to every guard unit and reserve unit in the Twin Cities, and joined the first place that called me, which was a National Guard unit in St. Paul, where I eventually spent 6 years of my life, meeting once a month, and 2 weeks every summer at a camp in northern Minnesota.

 

I have been to the Vietnam Veteran wall in D.C. and can attest to the fact that there are people that I knew that have their names etched in to the black marble on the all, including a young man named Thomas Brennan.

 

Gary Sinese has done as much as anyone in  supporting the guys that served, and his book “A Grateful American” is worth reading. You may remember that he played the part of Captain Dan in Forest Gump”.

 

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2023/10/fortunate-son.html

The men and women who serve in the military today are treated much better than the folks who came back home in the 1970’s – but not by everybody.

Any politician who thinks that the people who serve in the military are “suckers and losers” is a complete scumbag, and should not be allowed to hold office, ESPECIALLY as commander-in -chief.

Set some time aside and read the book. You will be glad that you did.

 

 

 

 

How America’s worst president got re-elected

 

More than 150 political analysts have determined that Donald Trump is the worst president in our country’s history:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/historians-voted-trump-worst-president-ever/

In view of that fact, how in the world did he get re-elected?

The answer is simple:

Lies

By now, most people have figured out that you cannot believe anything that Trump says.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/

When The Washington Post Fact Checker team first started cataloguing President Donald Trump’s false or misleading claims, they recorded 492 suspect claims in the first 100 days of his presidency. On Nov. 2 alone, the day before the 2020 vote, Trump made 503 false or misleading claims as he barnstormed across the country in a desperate effort to win reelection.

 

This astonishing jump in falsehoods is the story of Trump’s tumultuous reign. By the end of his term, Trump had accumulated 30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.

 

What is especially striking is how the tsunami of untruths kept rising the longer he served as president and became increasingly unmoored from the truth.

 

Trump averaged about six claims a day in his first year as president, 16 claims day in his second year, 22 claims day in this third year — and 39 claims a day in his final year. Put another way, it took him 27 months to reach 10,000 claims and an additional 14 months to reach 20,000. He then exceeded the 30,000 mark less than five months later.

 

 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/

 If you watched his debate with either Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, you may have noticed that he still has an aversion to truth. In addition, if you have been following his rallies, you will notice that that he still has trouble telling the truth.

Having said that, though, how did he get re-elected?

More lies.

This morning, the Washington Post provided more details on his victory:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/15/republican-ads-false-flag/

Although it is worth reading in its entirely, here are a few of the key points:

Muslims in Michigan began seeing pro-Israel ads this fall praising Vice President Kamala Harris for marrying a Jewish man and backing the Jewish state. Jews in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, saw ads from the same group with the opposite message: Harris wanted to stop U.S. arms shipments to Israel.

Another group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream.

 Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches.

 What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single, $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk who had previously worked on the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a presentation about the group’s efforts obtained by The Washington Post.

 Have you noticed that Elon Muck is suddenly “best buds” wit Trump?

Ads tested better if Muslims felt they were seeing a message meant for Zionists, “Bernie bros” felt they were hearing from the far left, and “Zyn bros” felt they were hearing from activists who wanted “a world without gas-powered vehicles,” a ban on fracking and affordable housing for undocumented Americans — policies Harris did not actually support during her campaign.

 “The worst part is Kamala Harris talks out of both sides of her mouth,” said one of the ads, which was designed by Trump supporters to look as if it was advocating for leftist priorities like “free health care” and a “break on tuition.”

 The entire effort grew out of research by Building America’s Future, a conservative political nonprofit that was founded during the first Trump administration by Republican consultants Generra Peck and Phil Cox. With others at P2 Public Affairs, Peck and Cox, former advisers to DeSantis, were top strategists for a separate effort, America PAC, the super PAC funded by Musk to support Trump. Musk donated to Building America’s Future in 2022, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. The group’s leaders have declined to comment on their donors.

Starting in February, Ryan Tyson, a former pollster for DeSantis, began holding a series of about 25 focus groups with specific communities of targeted voters, with most of the research effort focused on likely Democrats who were uncertain about voting. The goal was to figure out how to help Donald Trump win during a campaign in which Democrats were vastly outspending Republicans on digital advertising.

 

“Clearly, you had a White liberal demographic that hated Donald Trump. That was without question. You could see that coalition everywhere. But once you get past White progressives, every other historical demographic stronghold from the Democrats just started to drop off,” Tyson said about the effort. “What did exist was a tremendous amount of voters on the left that were disaffected. And the only persuasion question was whether they could be persuaded to vote.”

 

The effort worked in concert with a separate project by the Trump campaign to depress turnout for Harris — knowing that Trump would be unlikely to drastically expand his vote totals. In 2020, Trump received about 74 million votes to Joe Biden’s 81 million votes. In 2024, Trump received a little less than 76 million votes to Harris’s 72.6 million votes. In other words, Trump’s total went up slightly, while Harris dropped about 8 million votes.

 

“The entire goal of the campaign was to push her numbers down,” said a top Trump campaign adviser, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal strategy.

 

Building America’s Future tried to focus its spending where the Trump campaign’s top advisers publicly signaled an interest, investing heavily in Muslim communities that the campaign was targeting and seeking to magnify the candidate’s appearances on podcasts with significant White male audiences.

 

“We studied the strategy that was put in place by Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita and James Blair very closely,” Peck said. “And we did what outside groups can do. We tried to amplify and support the direction in which they were taking the earned and paid media.”

 

They also deployed multiple brands to place the ads, concealing their common origin — Future Coalition PAC, Duty to America PAC, Americans for Consumer Protection and Progress 2028, according to people involved.

 

Democrats grew alarmed in the final weeks of the campaign as the ads started appearing on Facebook and Google. Priorities USA, a Harris-backing super PAC, made efforts to get spots taken down from both platforms because of their deceptive nature. Google eventually struck at least one spot in which one of the Building America’s Future groups took footage from a Harris ad in Pennsylvania targeting Jews and began targeting it to Muslims with the words “This is a real Kamala Harris ad” superimposed.

Other efforts to get ads taken down were not successful. Facebook, which has pared back its ad restrictions since 2020, declined to act on a number of requests to take down ads from Progress 2028 that praised the Harris agenda while also describing policies she did not support in 2024, like mandatory gun buybacks, universal health care for undocumented immigrants and “the most progressive Green New Deal yet.”

 

“There is plenty of blame to go around for another election cycle riddled with misinformation online,” Priorities USA executive director Danielle Butterfield said in a statement. “Big Tech is still unwilling to hold bad actors accountable, Congress is unwilling to step in and write new rules for the 21st century, and Republicans will continue to slander and lie to voters to make their case. Because of all of this, Democrats lose, and we need to acknowledge this reality and figure out new ways to communicate with voters on today’s internet.”

 

The Harris campaign also responded to the spots being geo-targeted to Dearborn, Michigan, where many Muslims live, by running their own digital ads showing the vice president discussing her concern about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

 

What we have already seen is that Trump has picked numerous people for various cabinet positions. So far, the worst possible candidate is Matt Gaetz, who Trump has nominated to be Attorney General. Unless he gets approved by a recess appointment, he has little chance of being approved by Congress – and that is a good thing. Trump’s other cabinet picks are nearly as bad.

So, what do we do know?

For starters, it would be wise to try to limit your exposure to political news, since all us are currently experiencing “battle fatigue”.

There are actually people who believe that Kamala Harris is a communist.

There are people who voted for Trump because they have ALWAYS voted for Republican, oblivious to the fact that the Republican party no longer exists because is now the party of Trump.

There are people who were unable to vote for a pro-choice candidate, ignoring that women living in states that have strict abortion laws (like Texas) are dying because they could not get the care they needed for things like sepsis as a result of miscarriages, non-viable pregnancies, and Ectopic pregnancies. Ireland now permits abortions because a female doctor named Savita Hallappanaver developed sepsis during a miscarriage, and eventually died.

There is nothing “pro-life” about strict abortion laws.

https://www.irishamerica.com/2022/06/abortion-legal-ireland/

None of the people in the examples listed above is going to change their mind – so don’t try to convince them that they are wrong.

 Avoid them if you can. If they are friends or relatives, try to stay with neutral topics.

 After all, the Superbowl is not that far away – and that is no lie.

 

the places that scare you

 

When I was in basic training in North Carolina in 1970, the highlight of the day was when we got letters from home. Other than the time that was allotted for polishing our boots or cleaning our weapons, it was about the only time of the day when we actually had some free time.

More than 30 years later, I got the same thrill about getting letters from home when I was in China. Although my daughter was with me for part of the year, I spent more than 6 months in 2004 living in China by myself. One of the books that my sister sent to me was “The Places That Scare You”, which was written by a Buddhist nun named Pema Chodron.

Here is the summary that was posted on Amazon:

 

Lifelong guidance for learning to change the way we relate to the scary and difficult moments of our lives, showing us how we can use all of our difficulties and fears as a way to soften our hearts and open us to greater kindness.

We always have a choice in how we react to the circumstances of our lives. We can let them harden us and make us increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and allow our inherent human kindness to shine through. Here Pema Chödrön provides essential tools for dealing with the many difficulties that life throws our way, teaching us how to awaken our basic human goodness and connect deeply with others—to accept ourselves and everything around us complete with faults and imperfections. She shows the strength that comes from staying in touch with what’s happening in our lives right now and helps us unmask the ways in which our egos cause us to resist life as it is. If we go to the places that scare us, Pema suggests, we just might find the boundless life we’ve always dreamed of.

The last place I worked in China was the College of International Studies, which was located well north of the city of Guangzhou. To get there from my apartment in Guangzhou Country Gardens, I needed to walk a few blocks to the bus stop in the complex, where I caught a bus that took me to the White Star Hotel in what amounted to be downtown Guangzhou. From there, I could with take another bus to the main bus terminal on the west side of town, where I could catch another bus to get to the college.

From start to finish, the commute was roughly 3 hours each way. As a result, I took the bus north on Monday afternoon, and stayed at the college on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights. On Thursday afternoon, I reversed the process.

When I got back to the main bus stop, I could either take another bus back to the White Star hotel, or I could ride on the back of a motorcycle, which both Kelly and I had done numerous times.

On one occasion, I felt confident enough that I felt I could negotiate a cheaper price from the dozens or so motorcycles that were parked there, and I eventually achieved what I wanted - which should have been a warning.

When the driver took off, he went a different direction than I thought that he should have, so for a few minutes, I assumed that he was taking a shortcut. As we got further away from the hotel, though, I realized that I had a made a serious mistake by jumping on the back of the cycle, but I was far enough along that jumping off and walking back was not a solution either.

As we meandered further away from where I wanted to go, he made a couple of phone calls when he made stops for a light. Eventually, we wound up in an area that was less inhabited, and he pulled into a lot next to a couple of manufacturing buildings. Almost immediately, one of the buddies that he called on the phone charged out, and quickly took a punch to my face, which split my lip, and caused my glasses to fall off. Inside the back pack that I had been carrying was my dirty laundry for the week, a few papers, and the book that I had finished reading that afternoon, which happened to be “The Places That Scare You”, a bit ironic, since I was now in a place that DID scare me.

They got my phone, my wallet, and my back pack with my dirty laundry, and took off.

After my glasses got knocked off, I could not find them in the dark, so I gave up.

Fortunately, I was close to a busy road, so I walked to it and stuck out my thumb.

Since I looked a bit disheveled, and had blood on my shirt, a passing motorist felt sorry for me, and picked me up. In Chinese, I explained to him that I needed to get back to the White Star hotel, which he did. Since I no longer had my wallet, I explained to the bus driver at the hotel that I had been robbed, so I was able to ride back home at no charge.

I had planning on going to a Toastmaster meeting that night, so as soon as I got home, I called my friend Sayed Hahoub, and told him I would not be attending that night.

Within an hour, Sayed and few other of my friends came to my apartment. They then went with me to the local hospital, where Sayed paid for my treatment and my medicine. To the folks who think all Muslims are killers, they can kiss my ass.

 Since the next day was a Friday, I did not have to go to work, but I DID go in the following Monday, where I explained to the students that I could not see them.

The following weekend, my friend Maggie Woo went with me to the optician so that I could get new glasses, which is that pair that I wore for the next few months. Since the lenses were fairly thick, some of the managers at The Autobarn called me “Mister Magoo” until I could afford to buy more stylish glasses.

If you believe in ironies, you’ll appreciate that fact that on the afternoon that I finished “The Place That Scare You” on the bus that I found my self at a location that DID scare me.

I stayed in China for roughly six months after that, at which point, I returned to the Chicago area. However, for the remainder  to my time in country, I never again rode on the back of a motorcycle.

 Fortunately, our local library has a copy of the book in their shelves, so I put it on hold today. 

It should bring back a lot of memories.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The great melting pot, version 2

 

America has long been a home of immigrants. With the exception of the Native population, literally everyone who lives here is descended from immigrants, and that includes Donald Trump, whose mother was born in Scotland, and whose paternal grandfather came from Germany.

Both his first and third wife were also immigrants. Ivana came from Croatia, and Melania came from Slovenia.

In less than 20 years, Caucasians will be a minority in this country, due to declining birth rates of white folks, and increased immigration of people from places like Mexico and the Orient.

The reason that we now have the strongest economy in the world is due to immigrants. Not only do they pick farm crops, they also have founded some very successful companies.

Apple founder Steve Job’s birth father was born in Syria, and one of the founders of Google (Sergi Brin) was born in Russia. He was wealthy enough that he could afford to pay his ex-wife $1 billion in their divorce settlement.

The face of immigrants was brought home to me today when I monitored an ELD (English language learner) class at a local high school.

 Just for fun, I asked the students to write down their first languages.

 7 spoke Arabic

7 spoke Spanish

1 spoke Wolof (a language spoken in west Africa)

2 spoke Farsi

4 spoke French

1 spoke Turkish

1 spoke German

1 spoke Samali

1 spoke Swahili

Using Google Translate, I asked the Swahili speaker in his native language how many languages he spoke.

His answer was “eight”

As you know by now, a person who speaks two languages is bi-lingual)

A person who speaks three languages is tri-lingual

A person who speaks many languages is a polyglot

A person who speaks one language?

An American

There are still people in this country who feel that English should be our official language.

Why that makes no sense can be found in the article below:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2018/09/should-english-be-americas-official.html

 I’ve used the “melting pot” title once before:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-great-melting-pot.html

What many surprise is how many languages are spoken in America.

The answer is 430, but there are countries where even more are spoken.

#1 on the list is Papua New Guines, where 840 languages are spoken.

Indonesia, Nigeria, and India are also in the top 5, and China is right behind, with 301 languages spoken.

 https://www.pangea.global/blog/top-10-countries-that-speak-the-most-languages/

I’m of the opinion that languages can be fun, which is why is have studied 6 (English, Latin, Spanish, German, ASL sign language and Chinese.) However, English is the only one that I can actually use to carry on a conversation. If you like to speak another language, Google Translate and Babbel can make things easier for you.

Even in America, though, English itself can be a foreign language.

I was on a bus once in Chicago where a few people were speaking Ebonics, the “native tongue” of the south side of Chicago.

Here is what it sounds like:

I Speak Jive - Airplane! (5/10) Movie CLIP (1980) HD

There is also a large difference between how English is spoken in Boston, New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Indiana, and Dallas.

When I first moved to the Chicago area, I was accused of having an accent.

My response was that I did not have an accent because I was from Minnesota.

Minnesota, of course, has its own language system:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-to-talk-minnesotan.html

For now, that’s all I have to say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abortion and the Catholic church

 

Like all major religions, the Catholic church takes a dim view of abortion, so it may surprise you to learn that a Catholic publication just published an article in support of abortion under certain circumstances. The publication is the National Catholic Reporter, and I read it occasionally, even though I do not have a paid subscription.

 

The National Catholic Reporter (NCR) is a progressive national newspaper in the United States that reports on issues related to the Catholic Church. Based in Kansas City, Missouri, NCR was founded by Robert Hoyt in 1964. Hoyt wanted to bring the professional standards of secular news reporting to the press that covers Catholic news, saying that "if the mayor of a city owned its only newspaper, its citizens will not learn what they need and deserve to know about its affairs". The publication, which operates outside the authority of the Catholic Church, is independently owned and governed by a lay board of directors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Catholic_Reporter

According to Thomas Tweed, director of the Ansari Institute of Global Engagement with Religion at the University of Notre Dame, "I think the same thing that has happened in American political life and media has happened to some extent to Catholics. Progressive Catholics read Commonweal and the National Catholic Reporter, and traditionalist Catholics watch EWTN and read newsletters from the Blue Army

NCR has won the "General Excellence" award from the Catholic Press Association in the category of national news publications six times between 2008 and 2014.

The Catholic Press Association in June 2017 awarded former NCR editor and publisher Tom Fox its highest honor for publishers, the Bishop John England Award.

Since I was educated in Catholic schools at both the elementary and high school levels, I became I staunch critic of abortion for a couple of decades after the passage of Roe v Wade. As I became more educated over time, my position softened to the point that I now believe that strict abortion bans now longer make any sense, especially in the states that have no exceptions for incest or rape.

In theory, even states that prohibit abortions up to six weeks have exceptions to save the life of the mother. However, many women have found that the exception is only a theory – and many have died because of the theory.

The article that recently appeared in the National Catholic Reporter can be found at the link below:

https://www.ncronline.org/news/catholic-hospital-offered-bucket-towels-woman-it-denied-abortion-california-ag-said

Although I would encourage you read the entire article, here are some of the main points:

When Anna Nusslock showed up at her local hospital 15 weeks pregnant and in severe pain earlier this year, she said, a doctor delivered devastating news: The twins she and her husband had so desperately wanted were not viable. Further, her own health was in danger, and she needed an emergency abortion to prevent hemorrhaging and infection.

Providence St. Joseph Hospital, in the small Northern California coastal city of Eureka, refused to provide the care she required because doctors could detect fetal "heart tones," Nusslock said at a news conference Monday. California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against the Catholic hospital detailing Nusslock’s dangerous experience and alleging the hospital violated multiple state laws when it discharged Nusslock — with an offer of a bucket and towels — to go elsewhere for what he described as standard medical care. Bonta also filed a motion for a preliminary injunction in Humboldt County Superior Court, asking that it require Providence to treat anyone with an emergency medical condition. "The need for immediate relief is about to intensify," the motion said. That’s because Mad River Community Hospital, where Nusslock ultimately got care 12 miles up the road, is slated to close its birth center this month.

The case involving Anna Nusslock is similar to a situation that I wrote about in January of 2011:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2011/01/

Here are the main points:

 

The National Catholic Reporter newspaper put it best: “Just days before Christians celebrated Christmas, Jesus got evicted.”

Yet the person giving Jesus the heave-ho in this case was not a Bethlehem innkeeper. Nor was it an overzealous mayor angering conservatives by pulling down Christmas decorations. Rather, it was a prominent bishop, Thomas Olmsted, stripping St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix of its affiliation with the Roman Catholic diocese.

The hospital’s offense? It had terminated a pregnancy to save the life of the mother. The hospital says the 27-year-old woman, a mother of four children, would almost certainly have died otherwise.

Bishop Olmsted initially excommunicated a nun, Sister Margaret McBride, who had been on the hospital’s ethics committee and had approved of the decision. That seems to have been a failed attempt to bully the hospital into submission, but it refused to cave and continues to employ Sister Margaret. Now the bishop, in effect, is excommunicating the entire hospital - all because it saved a woman’s life.

 

Make no mistake: This clash of values is a bellwether of a profound disagreement that is playing out at many Catholic hospitals around the country. These hospitals are part of the backbone of American health care, amounting to 15 percent of hospital beds.

Already in Bend, Ore., last year, a bishop ended the church’s official relationship with St. Charles Medical Center for making tubal ligation sterilizations available to women who requested them. And two Catholic hospitals in Texas halted tubal ligations at the insistence of the local bishop in Tyler.

The National Women’s Law Center has just issued a report quoting doctors at Catholic-affiliated hospitals as saying that sometimes they are forced by church doctrine to provide substandard care to women with miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies in ways that can leave the women infertile or even endanger their lives. More clashes are likely as the church hierarchy grows more conservative, and as hospitals and laity grow more impatient with bishops who seem increasingly out of touch.

 

Catholic hospitals like St. Joseph’s that are evicted by the church continue to operate largely as before. The main consequence is that Mass can no longer be said in the hospital chapel. Thomas C. Fox, the editor of National Catholic Reporter, noted regretfully that a hospital with deep Catholic roots like St. Joseph’s now cannot celebrate Mass, while airport chapels can. Mr. Fox added: “Olmsted’s moral certitude is lifeless, leaving no place for compassionate Christianity.

Since January of 2011, I have written two additional articles about the topic:

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2018/07/roe-v-wade-is-in-news-again.html

https://tohell-andback.blogspot.com/2022/04/the-day-of-unborn-child_3.html

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, a number of states have passed restrictive abortion laws, and the bans in Texas and Florida are among the most severe. Naturally, women have died because of these laws.

The link below has a graph that shows which states have limitations or bans on abortion:

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/texas-abortion-ban-deaths-pregnant-women-sb8-analysis-rcna171631

29 states (more than half of all states) have either restrictions or bans, much to the detriment of women living in those states, and Texas is one of the worst states.

The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds.

From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.

“There’s only one explanation for this staggering difference in maternal mortality,” said Nancy L. Cohen, president of the GEPI. “All the research points to Texas’ abortion ban as the primary driver of this alarming increase.” 

“Texas, I fear, is a harbinger of what’s to come in other states,” she said.

The SB 8 effect

The Texas Legislature banned abortion care as early as five weeks into pregnancy in September 2021, nearly a year before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — the case that protected a federal right to abortion — in June 2022. 

At the time, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, lauded the bill as a measure that “ensures the life of every unborn child.”

Texas law now prohibits all abortion except to save the life of the mother. 

The passage of Texas’ Senate Bill 8 gave GEPI researchers the opportunity to take an early look at how near-total bans on abortion — including cases in which the mother’s life was in danger — affected the health and safety of pregnant women. 

The SB 8 effect, Cohen’s team found, was swift and stark. Within a year, maternal mortality rose in all racial groups studied.

Among Hispanic women, the rate of women dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after increased from 14.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2019 to 18.9 in 2022. Rates among white women nearly doubled — from 20 per 100,000 to 39.1. And Black women, who historically have higher chances of dying while pregnant, during childbirth or soon after, saw their rates go from 31.6 to 43.6 per 100,000 live births while maternal mortality spiked overall during the pandemic, women dying while pregnant or during childbirth rose consistently in Texas following the state’s ban on abortion, according to the Gender Equity Policy Institute.

“If you deny women abortions, more women are going to be pregnant, and more women are going to be forced to carry a pregnancy to term,” Cohen said.

Beyond the immediate dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, there is growing evidence that women living in states with strict abortion laws, such as Texas, are far more likely to go without prenatal care and much less likely to find an appointment with an OB-GYN.

Doctors say the feeling among would-be moms is fear.

“Fear is something I’d never seen in practice prior to Senate Bill 8,” said Dr. Leah Tatum, an OB-GYN in private practice in Austin, Texas. Tatum, who was not involved with the GEPI study, said that requests for sterilization procedures among her patients doubled after the state’s abortion ban.

That is, women prefer to lose their ability to ever have children over the chance that they might become pregnant following SB 8.

“Patients feel like they’re backed into a corner,” Tatum said. “If they already knew that they didn’t want to pursue pregnancy, now they’re terrified.”

Because the law in Texas makes absolutely no sense, 20 women are currently suing the state:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/11/15/1213188342/20-women-sue-texas-over-abortion-laws

Amanda Zurawski is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights against Texas. Here, she arrives at the Austin courthouse where a hearing was held on July 20.

SUZANNE CORDEIRO/AFP via Getty Images

Cristina Nuñez's doctors had always advised her not to get pregnant. She has diabetes, end-stage renal disease and other health conditions, and when she unexpectedly did become pregnant, it made her extremely sick. Now she is suing her home state of Texas, arguing that the abortion laws in the state delayed her care and endangered her life.

Nuñez and six other women joined an ongoing lawsuit over Texas's abortion laws. The plaintiffs allege the exception for when a patient's life is in danger is too narrow and vague, and endangered them during complicated pregnancies.

 

 

The case was originally filed in March with five patient plaintiffs, but more and more patients have joined the suit. The total number of patients suing Texas in this case is now 20 (two OB-GYN doctors are also part of the lawsuit). After a dramatic hearing in July, a district court judge agreed with the plaintiffs that the law needed to change, but the state immediately appealed her ruling directly to the Texas Supreme Court. That move allows Texas' three overlapping abortion bans to stand.

In the July hearing, lawyers for the Texas Attorney General's office argued that women had not been harmed by the state's laws and suggested that their doctors were responsible for any harms they claimed.

For Cristina Nuñez, after she learned she was pregnant in May 2023, her health quickly worsened, according to an amended complaint filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, the organization bringing the case. Nuñez had to increase the amount of time she spent in dialysis, and suffered from painful blood clots. She told an OB-GYN that she wanted an abortion, but was told that was not possible in Texas. She called a clinic that provides abortion in New Mexico, but was told she could not have a medication abortion because of her other health conditions.

Her health continued to deteriorate as the weeks went on and her pregnancy progressed. In June, when one of her arms turned black from blood clots, she went to a Texas emergency room. She was diagnosed with a deep vein thrombosis, eclampsia and an embolism, but the hospital would not provide an abortion. She worried she would die, the complaint says.

She finally received an abortion 11 days after going to the E.R., only after finding a pro-bono attorney that contacted the hospital on her behalf.

Also joining the lawsuit is Kristen Anaya, whose water broke too early. She developed sepsis, shaking and vomiting uncontrollably, while waiting for an abortion in a Texas hospital. The other new plaintiffs are Kaitlyn Kash, D. Aylen, Kimberly Manzano, Dr. Danielle Mathisen, and Amy Coronado, all of whom received serious and likely fatal fetal diagnoses and traveled out of state for abortions. The Texas Supreme Court is set to consider the Center's request for a temporary injunction that would allow abortions in a wider range of medical situations. That hearing is scheduled for Nov. 28.

 

Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, a number of states have voted on whether abortion should still be legal. In every case, abortion rights one – even in conservative states like Kansas.

The measure is now on the Arizona ballot in November, as proposition 139. Since 58% of the Arizona voters support the measure, it should pass.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/us/politics/arizona-abortion-ballot-measure.html

There is little difference between religions about abortion.

The latest survey conducted by the Alan Guttmacher Institute, was completed by more than 10,000 women. Staffers in hospitals, clinics and physicians’ offices where abortions are performed distributed the questionnaire. The Guttmacher Institute, which researches sexual and reproductive health worldwide, says it used the survey data along with data on the number of abortions performed nationally to estimate abortion rates and the size of certain demographic groups. The institute found that more Protestant women obtained abortions than Catholics: Forty-three percent of women over age 17 in the 2000-2001 survey said they were Protestant, while 27 percent said they were Catholic. But Catholics were more likely to get an abortion: The abortion rate for Catholic women was 22 per 1,000 women; the rate for Protestants was 18 per 1,000 women, according to study author Rachel K. Jones.

Abortion has been an emotionally charged topic for more than 50 years. For most of those years, it has been a key issue for many voters. Even though every newspaper in the country said Donald Trump was not fit for office in 2016, many women voted for him because they could not support a candidate (Hillary) who felt that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.

This election, abortion will again be a key issue, but this time it will work AGAINST the Republican party, just as it did in 2022. J.D. Vance believes that women are only valuable if they have children, and the more the merrier - an attitude of the Catholic church from the 1950’s.

To quote Kamala Harris, “we not going back”.

“We Are Not Going Back” Wasn’t Written to Be a Campaign Catchphrase. Kamala Harris Voters Had Other Ideas. | Vanity Fair