The war on… Choose Your Own Adventure

At this rate, I’ve cared about more people that I can count…

I’ve struggled with the idea that I’m running out of time on this Earth. I’ve outlived my mother by four years, and in six, I will have outlived my father.

So, hearing the news that Chicken Taco (is that redundant?) decided to bomb Iran put that fear into overtime.

We can’t help Ukraine, but we can get involved in the Middle East? Wait, the orange turd has business deals over there so this will probably help his business prospects. You know, using his public office for personal gain. Which is, of course, illegal. But when you’re surrounded by psychopaths and sycophants it’s a lot easier to do whatever the hell you want. God, the amount of lies he and his staff have told alone would have gotten a Democrat removed from office in their first week… but the people who voted for him fell for every single lie on the campaign trail and every lie since then. It honestly makes me sick that people are that fucking stupid.

I didn’t like Harris, but I voted for her (and would have voted for Biden who I liked even less) because I didn’t want the tangerine twatwaffle’s Project 2025 plans to come into fruition.

And we’re watching them cross off every single item on that list.

But, he didn’t know anything about P2025.

BULLSHIT.

And then there’s the war on women - pick your flavour: trans, cis, masc facing cis, pregnant, infertile, dead.

Let’s talk about that last one, shall we?

ADRIANA SMITH

The story goes that this woman was having headaches and went to the hospital. She sought care and instead she was sent home with meds. That’s it.

No CT scans, no overnight observations.

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t run to the hospital for just a headache. They had to be pretty severe, no?

The next morning, she was finally admitted to the hospital, got her CT scans, got her diagnosis, and died. She was declared brain dead. In FEBRUARY.

And this is where the story goes all Handmaid’s Tale.

Apparently, there was some “confusion” in interpreting Georgia’s anti-abortion laws.

So… The family says that doctors told them they had to keep Smith on life support until the fetus was viable. The family did not have a choice in that matter. They won’t say what they would have chosen as a family, but the end result is that the hospital kept this dead woman on life support so that she could serve as an incubator. They just performed a C-Section (abortion, autopsy… it’s been described a dozen ways.) to remove the baby from her. It is June 22nd. Do you know why they had to remove the baby?  Because after four months and three days on life support, her body was starting to decompose. Supposedly, but I wouldn’t doubt it. Also… how can that be good for the baby? It’s getting pumped full of chemicals and shit.

The reason the doctors kept the corpse as an incubator: Georgia abortion law. Specifically the LIFE Act. You cannot have an abortion after the heartbeats become detectable. That’s around six weeks. She was eight or nine weeks pregnant when she died. There’s also the small matter of 2007’s law that doctors can’t remove life support from a pregnant woman unless the child isn’t viable or there was the pregnancy equivalent of a DNR…

We need to get rid of the fetal personhood laws at a fucking minimum. A fetus is a fucking parasite. (Vocab lesson: Parasites are organisms that depend on a host to survive.) Until that baby comes out it has absolutely zero fucking rights. I’m sorry. Taking her off of life support would not have been an abortion… like, what would have happened if she didn’t make it to the hospital and died at home? If the host dies, the parasite dies, too. That’s the way it should be. That’s the way nature works.

But no.

Now we have a one pound baby in the NICU who may or may not make it. And if they make it, what’s that going to look like in terms of care required? You can’t tell me that this kid is going to be 100% OK. There has to be some sort of issues. They already thought the kid might have fluid on the brain and might be blind, assuming that the baby was even viable.

In the meantime, do you know who’s paying all these hospital bills? Not the state. Not the hospital. The fucking family. Again, nobody knows what they would have done, given the choice. Especially them, but they deserved the right to choose.

It’s absolutely ridiculous how the hospital and the state handled this. It’s cruel. It’s unfathomable. It’s immoral. It’s a law written by men for men.

Nobody fucking cares about the women involved.

And the kicker in all of this?

She was black. Black women already have less access to health care… if she were white, would the hospital have taken her concerns seriously during her first trip? Honestly? I think so.

The end result out of all of this:

Who would have thought you need to declare that you don’t want to be kept alive as an incubator if you should die while pregnant? (Apparently, that was the way out of this mess. Again, it had to be declared ahead of time, like a DNR or organ donation.) WHO THE FUCK WOULD THINK ABOUT THAT?

(Also, this exact situation was an episode of the Handmaid’s Tale. If you really want to understand how little women are valued in the US today, just watch that. It’s on Hulu. I’ll gift you a subscription.)

So yeah. I’m all worked up and pissed off. It’s also pouring so I can’t take all my trash outside… I can’t even go to the garage and get the ceiling fan without getting soaked. I guess I’ll tear up the carpet and worry about the electrical later? I have to call someone in about the closet in that room anyway. Since I’m hiring a handy man, maybe they can finish swapping out the fixtures, switches, and outlets???

Well, I’m starving and I still haven’t found a pizza place, so I guess the frozen one in the fridge will have to do.