feminism

I want to see and feel the heat of your rage.

Do not let the GOP keep torturing and murdering us.

Irene Kaoru

21 Mar 2024 — 5 min read

It’s come to my attention that many of my friends, even well-informed ones, do not know the extent of the horror that extremist misogynist zealot politicians have managed to bring to American women. I think about this way too much, so allow me to share some fresh hell with you.

Republicans have gleefully ushered in a new era of normalized torture of American women. This isn’t hyperbole.

A new report from Life Louisiana, a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for reproductive health, rights and justice, details the impact of the state’s abortion bans, via extensive research and primary interviews with medical professionals and patients.

The current abortion ban is having a wide-ranging, terrorizing, and chilling impact on women and providers of pregnancy healthcare, as was always clearly part of the plan if you ask ghouls like Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry.

The findings in the report are bad as can be:

“The research shows how Louisiana’s abortion bans violate federal law meant to protect patient access to emergency care, disregard evidence-based public health guidance, degrade long-standing medical ethical standards, and, worst of all, deny basic human rights to Louisianans seeking reproductive health care in their state. The bans’ narrow and ill-defined exceptions create confusion, uncertainty, and fear for both pregnant patients and clinicians, who face significant professional, civil, and criminal penalties for providing the patient-centered and compassionate care they were trained for and could legally offer before Roe v. Wade was overturned.”

NPR reports that “doctors are using extreme caution to avoid even the appearance of providing an abortion procedure.”

A while back, I wrote about my own abortions. I had two miscarriages, you see. I longed and hoped and tried for a child, and before I had one, I lost two. Each time, the miscarriage was detected at an early, routine prenatal appointment, before 20 weeks — comfortably before the time when a fetus could survive outside the womb. More of a collection of cells than a baby. Mine were “silent” or “missed miscarriages” which means the pregnancy fails but the tissue is left inside.

In those sad but routine early appointments, I was given the choice to take medication, wait a while to see if the tissues would discharge from my body on their own, or have a D&C, also known as an abortion procedure, which involved a few minutes of scraping to clear out the dead tissue to speed up healing and prevent infection.

I chose the D&C, and both times the procedure was depressing and uncomfortable, but I was healthy and healed quickly, ready to try again within a few months. My story has a happy ending: I got pregnant again and had a smooth natural delivery of my healthy, happy daughter.

If I’d had those miscarriages in Louisiana today, my options would be quite different; that is, I would not have any options. I would be forced to ensure a risky, major abdominal surgery, against all logic, reason, or standards of medicare care.

Says NPR:

In one of the most extreme examples of how pregnancy care has changed, doctors described cases of women who experienced preterm premature rupture of membranes (when the "water breaks" early in pregnancy, before the fetus is viable). Some of these women were forced to undergo Cesarean section surgeries to empty their uterus and avoid infection, instead of receiving an abortion procedure or medication.

"Which is ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous," said Freehill. "The least safe thing that we do, no matter if it's early in pregnancy or full-term at your due date, is a C-section."

To put a finer point on it, monsters like Republican Jeff Landry and the Louisiana Right to Life (an anti-choice group that boasts “54 years of helping moms!” on their website) would explicitly rather see mothers cut open against their will, suffering, risking their lives and future fertility, than allow them to access standard, safe, sane medical care.

I cannot stress enough how frightening, nauseating, and alarming this is to me and should be to anyone who considers themselves even a little bit of a feminist, liberal, or ally to women and marginalized people. There are no words that seem strong enough to express my rage, to express the wrongness of it all.

Of course, some of us aren’t surprised. We knew — I knew — that this was coming. This is a logical next step for the American right wing, intent on stripping women of our bodily autonomy, our freedom of movement, our human rights, our independent lives, our very possibilities as human beings with civic and personal lives.

The absence of surprise should not lead to an absence of rage. We simply can’t allow these sadistic psychopaths to normalize the brutalization and torture of women under the twisted doublespeak of “protecting life.”

Living in a deep blue city, I’m surrounded by people who seem complacent and calm about the state of politics in the U.S. but I am telling you that you cannot be. They have already crossed the boundary of forcing dangerous, unnecessary surgeries on women whose only crimes have been to miscarry. They have taken off the masks: They don’t care if you were raped, or if you want children or not, or if getting pregnant was your “fault” or plan; they want you to suffer, to behave like property because that’s how they see you. They want you to shut up, and do what you’re told. We need to stop these monsters. At the very least, we need to stay informed about the terror and devastation they are creating.

The report, Criminalized Care: How Louisiana’s Abortion Bans Endanger Patients and Clinicians, is free, ungated, and available to download from Lift Louisiana.