What explains my absence from not posting a blog entry this month so far?
The real answer is procrastination…but it feels better to blame the Texas legislature and Texas Governor for writing and signing the Texas Heartbeat Act (SB 8/HB 1515), which was assigned into law on May 19th, 2021 and became effective on September 1st, 2021.
This law is the first six-week abortion ban in the United States, and the first of its kind to rely on enforcement by private individuals through civil lawsuits, rather than by the government through criminal or civil enforcement. The act establishes a system in which members of the public can sue anyone who performs or facilitates an illegal abortion for a minimum of US$10,000 in statutory damages.
Think bounty hunting. Vigilantes.
Instead of civilians encouraged to hunt for slaves escaping to seek freedom, it will be civilians hunting for anyone who supports women seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies – be it physician, clinic, driver who took the pregnant woman to the clinic, etc.
ABC News reports that the Texas law bans abortions after embryonic cardiac activity can be detected, which can be as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. Remember, however, back in June I noted:
Obstetricians say the term “fetal heartbeat” is misleading, and that this scientific misunderstanding, among countless others, may contribute to negative public opinion toward abortion, reports The Cut.
Robyn Schickler, OB/GYN and Physicians for Reproductive Health fellow explained to The Cut that what is detectable at or around six weeks can more accurately be called “cardiac activity. She and others argue that what doctors can detect is essentially communication between a group of what will eventually become cardiac cells.
Jennifer Kerns, an OB/GYN and professor at the University of California in San Francisco (UCSF), added:
These are cells that are programmed with electrical activity, which will eventually control the heart rate — they send a signal telling the heart to contract, once there is a heart.” It is this early activity which ultrasounds detect — not a heartbeat.
Also, the law requires minors have parental consent to obtain an abortion, which may be difficult to come by in cases of incest. Texas minors can get judicial approval to get an abortion without parental consent, but it may not be realistically feasible for a teen to confirm a pregnancy, go through the court system for a judge’s sign-off, and book an abortion appointment within two weeks of a missed period after being raped.
Perhaps the scariest aspect of the bill is that there are no exceptions for cases of rape, sexual abuse, incest, and fetal anomaly diagnoses.
Well, to me anyway, that is not only scary and stupid, but also disrespectful to more than half the population of America.
Oh yes, let’s not forget that five of the six conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court denied the emergency motion filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights on August 30, 2021, seeking to block the Texas Heartbeat Act from going into effect. So I’m a bit pissed at those justices, too.
Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s more liberal members, Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor, all wrote or joined dissents. In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sotomayor wrote that “presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand”.
Hear, hear, Justice Sotomayor!
This Texas Heartbeat Act business has gotten me tied up in a knot of fury!
I’ve said before that I passionately believe Uncle Sam needs to stay out of every woman’s womb. Who wants the government to interfere with one’s intimately personal affairs? Who wants the government to interfere with a woman’s medical visits with her health provider?
Do YOU want anyone other than yourself telling you when and whether you ought to have offspring?
And if you do not, and you unexpectedly became pregnant, do you want the government and society to force you to carry the pregnancy to term, regardless of YOUR circumstances – in effect, having strangers who know absolutely nothing about you dictate to you what to do with YOUR body?
These politicians who dream up anti-abortion bills to control women’s reproductive choices and the governors who sign said bills into laws in the name of “pro-life” – do they ever imagine what it might be like to have Uncle Sam interfere in THEIR private lives? Could they imagine if someone wanted or needed a vasectomy or an erectile dysfunction medication that he had to jump through invasive, non-medically necessary procedures and interrogations deemed mandatory by medically-ignorant politicans?
And could they imagine if someone decided to seek a procedure because they didn’t want to be a father anymore, there might be a posse of civilians who thought otherwise about his reproductive choice and hunt down anyone (e.g. physician, clinic, driver) who supported this individual – with lawsuits, greenlighted by the state?
Methinks they would neither appreciate nor approve that!
You do notice that the White House, Congress, and state and local legislatures around the country are still predominately comprised of white males to this day, right? They don’t possess a uterus. And I don’t think they have a clue what a woman feels when she’s pregnant, or what she’s endured if she’s been brutally violated – let alone have any clue about menstrual cycles and the myriad reproductive health issues that can occur monthly or during a pregnancy.
So why the hell are politicians making laws governing women’s bodies?
If men were impregnated by a rapist or family member, would they happily accept Uncle Sam and society telling them they HAVE TO carry the pregnancy forward, NO EXCEPTIONS?
Why don’t these anti-choice politicians get off their high holy horse and stop fucking with women’s lives? They scream freedom and independence until it comes to controlling women. They don’t want freedom and independence for women? (or perhaps, only for the women in their families, but not poor and minority women?) Most of them are not doctors! And the few who are and who also endorse regulating women’s reproductive choices…well, they’re beneath comment.
Do these “pro-life” (mostly male) politicians know anything about women’s reproductive health?
Granted, probably a lot of us aren’t wholly familiar with the intricate details of female reproductive health and pregnancy, but the difference between everyday citizens and sanctimonious politicians is that the latter have publicly made morons of themselves by expounding on their “knowledge” of women.
Recall these lovely gems:
“From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist.”
~former Representative Todd Akin (R-MO), on pregnancy caused by rape. August 2012
“It [the new law] doesn’t require that [carrying a rapist’s baby to term] at all, because, obviously, it provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion.”
~Texas Governor Greg Abbott, on being asked why a rape victim would have to carry a pregnancy to term. September 8, 2021
Gestation, as an ABC reporter recently clarified, is measured from a person’s last menstrual period, and ovulation – when a person can become pregnant – occurs about two weeks after that. So the new Texas Heartbeat Act, in reality, gives a person about four weeks after conception — or two weeks after a missed period — to confirm a pregnancy and book an appointment for an abortion within that tight timeframe.
Moreover, some victims of rape or incest are young and may not yet have a full understanding of or familiarity with their menstrual cycles to be able to so quickly identify a pregnancy.
Leave women alone, dammit! It’s their bodies, their lives. Especially leave them alone if you don’t support taxpayer-funded safety net programs to help these women raise their children. Allow me to indulge by reposting the following comment I take to heart:
“I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”
~Sister Joan Chittister, Benedictine nun, 2004
A woman’s body is hers alone. What’s her pregnancy and reproductive choice got to do with your lives, Mr./Ms. Anti-choice politician?
It’s not like pregnancy is a highly transmissible virus and an imminent threat to public health.
Her body, her choice.
Worry about your own morality and look in the mirror first, please, dear elected “pro-life” officials.
Sources
ABC News
CNN
Wikipedia
Planned Parenthood
Huffington Post – Todd Akin on Abortion: Legitimate Rape …
The Cut
NBC News
NPR
The Guardian
PoliticusUSA
Media Matters
Huffington Post – No, Virginia’s Governor Did Not Endorse Killing Babies
A Governor’s Sense of Entitlement & Disrespect for Women
Last week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced he would resign amid allegations of sexual harrassment by 11 women. Another woman has come forward since then with similar allegations. According to an explosive investigation into the allegations by the New York Attorney General’s office, the governor’s office was a “hostile work environment for women” in which he sexually harassed several current and former employees over years.
For an elected leader who has seemingly prided himself on standing with women and signing into law important bills like the 2019 Reproductive Health Act, a key component of his 2019 Justice Agenda – as well as legislation in later that year to to beef up sexual harassment protections for women in the workplace. This is bad optics, at the very least, for an elected leader.
It’s good he decided to step down (though not for 14 days from the time he made the announcement), right?
According to the New York Attorney General office’s investigation report:
In an instance involving one of Cuomo’s unnamed executive assistants, the governor was found to have “reached under her blouse and grabbed her breast.”
The same woman also recounted a circumstance in which “the governor moved his hand to grab her butt cheek and began to rub it. The rubbing lasted at least five seconds.”
Governor Cuomo responded,
“I take full responsibility for my actions. I have been too familiar with people. My sense of humor can be insensitive and off-putting. I do hug and kiss people casually — women and men. I have done it all my life,” Cuomo said.
“In my mind, I’ve never crossed the line with anyone. But I didn’t realize the extent to which the line has been redrawn,” he said. “And I should have. No excuses.”
Okay, so you’re a hug-and-kiss man, Governor; you say it’s what you’ve done all your life, what your parents taught you, what Italians do (kiss on both sides of the cheek). But apparently you don’t have a sense of boundaries – of when to stop making contact with others, like inappropriately touching women’s bodies without their consent.
All the good you have done for New Yorkers through signing of landmark laws for greater equality for women, workers, and the LGBTQ community, as well as guiding New York in the first weeks of the pandemic, will now be overshadowed by these serious allegations of sexual misconduct.
Publicly championing the rights of women and others doesn’t excuse your despicable behavior. Other men on the left have been called to accountability for sexual harassment or misconduct and resigned: former New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman; former Senator Al Franken of Minnesota; and former Representative Anthony Weiner of New York, thanks to his sexting to multiple women – at least one who received an unsolicited photo of his junk and the same to a minor – for which he went to federal prison for 21 months and had to register as a sex offender. Those are just a few to name; how many others are there whose sense of entitlement and lack of respect for women caused harm to others?
Having political power does not entitle you to have limitless access to other people’s bodies to make you feel good, Governor Cuomo.
How do you think YOU would feel if a powerful elected official groped your wife, daughter, son, relative, or friend, or better yet – yourself, just because he (or she) felt like it?
And then you or your loved one are told by the perpetrator’s henchman (or henchwoman) to keep your trap door shut about the violation? And if you choose not to stay silent, your perpetrator publicly gaslights you by telling investigators that you processed what you heard through your own filter, and that it was “often not what was said and not what was meant”.
Y’know what Governor? There’s probably many other people who share your political beliefs who DO NOT inappropriately touch others without their permission or make lewd comments and who have the necessary experience and skills to run for office .
The same can be said for politicians on the right who have been accused of sexual misconduct, such as, of course – our former President “Grab them by the pussy” Trump, no less.
However, because you’ve championed women’s rights and signed laws to support more than half of America’s population, your actions are particularly egregious.
To my mind, the only way forward is for you to be held accountable for every complaint made against you. The women who have accused you of inappropriately touching them and making lewd comments to them deserve to be heard.
That’s 12 women who’ve now come forward. Are there more? The NY AG’s investigation interviewed 179 witnesses and reviewed 74,000 items including emails and texts. That sounds like they mean serious business.
“I do it with everyone,” you said in response to the testimony of one of the 11 women, Anna Ruch, who testified that she felt “distraught and uncomfortable” at a 2019 wedding party when you (whom she says had never met), cupped her face in your hands and said: “May I kiss you?”
As CNN’s Chris Cillizza observed, “‘I do it with everyone’ is an interesting defense of sexually inappropriate behavior.”
Sounds like disrespect toward Ms. Ruch to me. And entitlement – reaching out (literally!) to any young woman who strikes your fancy.
Reports have you responding to the accounts of your accusers with a potpourri of outright denial, appeals to failing memory, suggestions that the women had “misunderstood” your actions, and darker insinuations that they and the investigators were motivated by political or other animosity towards you.
Making defiant denials, gaslighting your accusers, and appealing to a myriad of excuses is not leadership.
I’m glad and relieved you stepped down. You’ve potentially left a painful mark on the lives of 12 women – something they’ll have to live with for the rest of their lives. They consented to do their jobs, not to be your plaything.
And to anyone dissing the governor’s accusers with lame comments like “the women just want the money” or “the women just want their 15 minutes of fame” or belittling them with name-calling, I ask you:
Just TRY imagining for a moment if someone in a position of power put their hands on your ass, your junk, or your breasts without your consent. Would you enjoy it? You’d have to live with that moment of violation forever.
Likewise, how do you think you’d feel if a powerful elected official violated your loved one? Would you start blaming your loved one for how she dressed or where she was? Or would you focus on the perpetrator and seek justice for your loved one?
Think about it.
Sources
MSN
State of New York, Office of the Attorney General
NBC
The New York Times
The Guardian
CNN
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo – The Reproductive Health Act
Governor Andrew M. Cuomo – Legislation to Protect the Rights of New York’s Working Men and Women
Wikipedia -Anthony Weiner
Salon
LegalMatch
News 12 Connecticut
No Badge Needed
Last Monday, February 1st, 2021, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Congresswoman from New York, shared on Instagram her harrowing experience on living through the January 6th, 2021, insurrection on the Capitol. In part, she said:
These folks who tell us to move on, that it’s not a big deal, that we should forget what’s happened, or even telling us to apologize. These are the same tactics of abusers. And I’m a survivor of sexual assault.
~Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), 2/1/21
Take in that last line: And I’m a survivor of sexual assault.
A number of people have taken offense to that, saying that she, as a politician, was using her experience as a sexual assault survivor as a tool to manipulate the public in some way or to make herself the center of attention.
The Spectator writer Amber Athey wrote:
This is gross manipulation, and AOC should be ashamed. Not for sharing that she was sexually assaulted — I have no way of knowing whether or not her story is true and, ultimately, it’s irrelevant to the issue of the storming of the Capitol.
The real story here is that AOC used her alleged trauma as a cudgel against her political opponents. She has weaponized her alleged experience to silence anyone who criticizes her and even went so far as to compare them to the person or people who abused her. This type of behavior cheapens sexual assault.
To which conservative media personality Rush Limbaugh added during his February 2nd radio show:
And to show you how it’s working, I have a friendly supporter who calls and says, “You better be real careful what you’re saying here. It’s obvious you’ve never been abused.” How is it obvious? Maybe I should be proud that I don’t wear that around. That’s also something generational. You just didn’t talk about things. You just lived your life. You dealt with it as it happened.
Now, you wear the badge. Generational changes, generational shifts. But Amber Athey believes that AOC “weaponized her alleged experience to silence anyone who criticizes her.” I know the left does that. They have become champions at that, in fact.
Badge?
There’s no fucking badge. Except in your head.
Generational changes, yes, Mr. Limbaugh. Generational shifts. You said it. Many people change their thinking on different matters over time, like sexual assault and rape. Thanks largely to social movements like #MeToo, survivors of sexual assault can feel safe that they are not alone – that they have the option to reveal they’ve experienced horrific violation, either publicly or privately – rather than burying their emotions.
In more survivors coming forward, they build solidarity in numbers and in shared experiences, so that society, rather than constantly blaming and dismissing them, begins to respect and believe them. And importantly, survivors expose and hold to account their perpetrators.
And maybe you are actually fine with that, I don’t know. But I’m gonna pick on you because you have a record of debasing women to your audience over many years. Notably, women who speak up for themselves: women who might talk about an intimately painful experience in their past, women with whom you disagree politically, or women whom you perceive to be an obstacle to the advancement of your favored person’s position (like a judge or a president). Does the name Sandra Fluke ring a bell? Dr. Christine Blasey Ford?
And now you cast aspersions on Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
You started your broadcast on February 2nd introducing her Instagram video with “Have you seen this video, folks …If you haven’t, it’s amazing acting.”
ACTING?!
So most people besides Amber Athey aren’t gonna have the guts to properly characterize this. But you ought to see this video if you haven’t. I mean, it’s filled with acting and gyrations of the body in order to transmit the nature of the assault she feared was happening all over again. And it was a sexual assault that she was being reconnected to.
So you have no right to be critical, because this is a traumatic event, and so forth and so on.
But when did you ever hear Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez say that you can NOT criticize her for revealing she is a sexual assault survivor?
Those are YOUR words, dude.
YOUR WORDS.
Later in your broadcast, a caller implied AOC and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford were pretending (acting?) when they revealed their traumatic experiences:
CALLER: Right. So when you have Christine Blasey Ford and AOC as someone, you know, pretending — and what they did to Justice Kavanaugh — what it does to people who really lived through it.
RUSH: Oh, yeah.
CALLER: — is it minimizes or diminishes —
RUSH: What a great example.
CALLER: — those of us who go through it.
RUSH: What a greatly [sic] example. Christine Blasey Ford and all these people piling on Kavanaugh.
So you agree with the caller that Dr. Ford and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were just pretending about their sexual assaults? Do you think they were making stuff up to grab attention and/or elicit sympathy?
If that’s not making light of one’s experience, I don’t know what is.
Or maybe or a more accurate term for casting aspersions on them is cynical.
Cynical, according to Merriam-Webster, means:
Having or showing the attitude or temper of a cynic: such as
a) contemptuously distrustful of human nature and motives
b) based on or reflecting a belief that human conduct is motivated primarily by self-interest
You apologized for a misunderstanding at first. Namely, that you thought Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez said she was sexually assaulted during the January 6th insurrection. Later, you said your primary point was not disputing that she has been abused and you weren’t making light of it or laughing about it, yet you continued to minimize her experiences she had both during the insurrection and her mention of being sexually assaulted (along with some of your callers).
You know, the question that got all of this started about her divulging that she had been sexually abused — the question that got it all started — was, “Why don’t you guys just move on? The January 6 thing was January 6th. The siege of the Capitol is in the rearview mirror. It happened. Why don’t you just move on?”
That’s what triggered her to talk about her alleged sexual abuse, and that’s when she said (summarized), “Look, these instances of abuse don’t ever go away. They compound on one another,” meaning the impact is added to each new instance of abuse and what she went through during the siege on January 6 was abuse on top of — which she then shared — was her sexual abuse and so forth.
So put another way. She was asked why she can’t move on from January 6, and she said because of her alleged sexual abuse. She politicized it, not me. She did.
“…and she said because of her alleged sexual abuse.” Not.
You conveniently glossed over horrific insurrection by dismissing Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez’ revealation as a sexual assault survivor as she spoke about the fears she experienced that day, comparing the tactics of her some of her naysayers as similar to abusers. And you said she politicized her trauma.
How cynical of you.
According to trauma experts interviewed by USA Today, Ocasio-Cortez’s reaction is normal and expected, and her account aligns with what science shows happens to a mind and body under extreme forms of stress. It’s likely, experts said, that Ocasio-Cortez’s experience with sexual assault intensified what she endured at the Capitol. Clinical psychologist Seth Gillihan told USA Today:
Trauma isn’t processing ‘sexual assault’ or ‘Capitol assault.’ What it’s processing is an overwhelming sense of danger, of feeling powerless, feeling my life is out of my hands. From an outsider’s perspective the sources look different, but inside our bodies and minds … it’s exactly the same message.
People died because of the assault on the Capitol! It was a potentially life-threatening attack on members of Congress, and for Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, it was a trauma compounded by her experience with sexual assault made all the more terrifying by the death threats she has received since she was elected to Congress.
It’s not triggering trauma, it’s trauma overlaid on trauma, Gillihan said.
Experts also said that Ocasio-Cortez’s gender is likely influencing reaction to her emotional disclosures. It’s much easier to suggest Ocasio-Cortez is fragile, oversensitive or even politically motivated than it is to accept the horror of what happened to her. They agreed with AOC and said denial and victim-blaming are common tactics abusers use.
One of the experts, Jennifer Gómez, a psychology professor at Wayne State University stated:
Abusers demand silence. The trouble is such a silence mandate is crazy-making for people who experience the violence and who see the world for what it is: a place that includes such violence just as much as it includes joy.
Screw silence on demand.
I believe as some observers have noted, that Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez spoke in such personal terms in order to reject calls to move on from the events of January 6th. “We cannot move on without accountability,” she insisted. “We cannot heal without accountability.”
Accountability, indeed.
So go take your cynicism to the nearest toxic waste dump where it belongs, Mr. Limbaugh. And throw your imagined badges in there while you’re at it, please.
Y’all stop invalidating @AOC’s experiences because you aren’t hearing about the experiences of other members. Everyone deals with trauma differently, her stories are validating for so many of us with similar experiences and she is showing people that vulnerability is strength.
~ Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Congresswoman, 2/1/21
Sources
Nation
Washington Post
New York Times
Merriam-Webster
Newsmax
The Rush Limbaugh Show
The Spectator
Alternet.org
MSN
USA Today
NY Post
Wikipedia
CBS News
Wikipedia
New York Times
Real Clear Politics
Media Matters