Georgia’s abortion ban killed a young mother. The Christian right now blames the victim

[Pelican Press 0]

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Georgia’s ********* ban ******* a young mother. The ********** right now blames the victim

Pro-choice activists warned in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that the subsequent cascade of ********* bans would ***** women. Two years after the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, we’re not finding out that it didn’t take long.

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 28, ***** on August 19, 2022, less than a month after Georgia passed its draconian ********* law that banned the treatment that could have saved her life. While the doctors and nurses tasked with her care did not speak to ProPublica, who first reported on this ****** this week, a 10-member committee set up to examine maternal mortality cases has deemed Thurman’s ****** “preventable,” and ruled she would have likely lived if doctors had used the protocols that had been in place before the Georgia law made them a felony.

But Republicans and ********** right activists don’t want to take responsibility for the loss of this healthy young mother of a 6-year-old boy. Instead, they’re casting blame on everyone else: the doctors in the Georgia hospital, ********* providers in North Carolina, and, though they will deny doing so, they’re blaming Thurman herself. Thurman chose *********. They’re blaming her choice for her ******.

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, anti-choice activist Lila Rose repeatedly emphasized how she believes Thurman did this to herself, declaring she “***** from sepsis after taking legally obtained ********* pills.” Acknowledging that Thurman “sought out an *********” and traveled to North Carolina for the pills, Rose insists, “********* ******* Amber Thurman. ********* ******* Amber’s twin *******.” She also blames Thurman for waiting “days before seeking medical care.” While Rose will pretend otherwise, the victim-blaming is not subtle.

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.

Rose’s finger-pointing is dishonest to a grotesque extreme. Thurman’s ****** is not due to her choice to take medication *********,

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, which is 1 in every 377,000 cases. (

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.) Thurman, as the report makes clear, would have almost certainly survived if she had received the pre-Dobbs standard of care, which is an immediate removal of an incomplete miscarriage.

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. As ProPublica explained:

It prohibits doctors from using any instrument “with the purpose of terminating a pregnancy.” While removing fetal tissue is not terminating a pregnancy, medically speaking, the law only specifies it’s not considered an ********* to remove “a ***** unborn child” that resulted from a “spontaneous *********” defined as “naturally occurring” from a miscarriage or a stillbirth.

Anti-choicers are lying about this,

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. As anyone can see, no exception is made to cover emergency care for a woman who deliberately induced her own miscarriage. ********* opponents are insisting the doctors would not have gotten in legal trouble for saving Thurman’s life. However, this is not how the law is written. But even if it was, doctors still had every reason to be afraid. If Thurman had received timely medical care and survived, a right-wing prosecutor could argue she wasn’t that ***** to begin with. That’s the double bind of these supposed “exceptions.”

Rose is far from the only one shifting the blame from *********** legislators to the deceased victim.

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 “this tragedy began with ********* drugs” and lamented that Thurman’s “twins deserved better,” ignoring that Thurman did not want to have twins. The 

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the “drugs were the root cause” of her ******, even though it would have been safe to take these drugs in a state where ********* was not banned.

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, “She and her twins should be here today,” again implying that Thurman did something wrong by not wanting to give birth at this point in her life.

Of course, anti-choice activists deny that they’re blaming Thurman for her ******. They pretend to blame the “********* industry,” which they paint as forcing ********* on women. This argument assumes women are too ******* to make choices about their bodies. In this case, it’s adding insult to injury. It’s clear from the reporting that Thurman was smart and capable. She wasn’t a passive vessel controlled by the mythical “********* industry.” She followed the news, hoping ********* advocates would get an injunction on the ban quickly. When that didn’t happen, she scheduled an appointment in North Carolina, took time off work, got a babysitter, and marched through a crowd of anti-********* protesters. Even the most diehard skeptic of female autonomy will struggle to deny that this is a story of a woman taking charge of her life.

The ********** right contempt for Thurman is not hard to spot.

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, “A woman pregnant WITH TWINS took Chemical ********* Pills,” which is clearly meant to demonize Thurman. That’s the general tone across the anti-choice efforts to spin this case. They ping-pong between insinuating Thurman was a bad person for not wanting to have twins and suggesting she was too ***** to understand what ********* even is. At no point is there an understanding that she was a person who made a perfectly rational choice for herself and her family, and persevered despite misogynist lawmakers trying to stop her.

Now there’s a second story from the same batch of Georgia reporting at ProPublica. 

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, had been told by doctors that “having another baby could ***** her.” Miller “had lupus, diabetes and hypertension and didn’t want to wait until the situation became dire.” She took ********* pills ordered online, but, like Thurman, had an incomplete *********. In pre-Dobbs Georgia, this would not be a problem, because she could go to the emergency room and walk out a few hours, safe and pregnancy-free. Instead, she ***** in bed, afraid and in pain. The state committee that reviewed her case “immediately decided it was ‘preventable’ and blamed the state’s ********* ban.”

The ********** right spinning on Miller’s ****** is just as disgusting. The 

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, declaring doctors in Georgia could “help if her pregnancy threatens her life.” This is false. As ProPublica points out, the Georgia law’s “life of the mother” exception is exceedingly narrow and limited to acute emergencies. Miller’s conditions were chronic. Miller was smart to want to abort her pregnancy before it got to the point where she was near ******. Anti-********* activists talk about her like she didn’t understand the situation, when in fact, she understood perfectly well that the law wouldn’t allow her a legal ********* until severe and likely irreversible damage had been done to her already fragile body.

The same anti-********* activists insisting they’d honor these phony “exceptions” to ********* law are also currently pumping out endless *********** insisting that women who have medically indicated abortions are liars. They especially hate Kate Cox, a Texas woman who had to travel out of state to abort a pregnancy because the fetus had a rare genetic disorder that usually ****** the baby within a few days of birth. Cox’s health was also imperiled, but because, like Miller, she hadn’t yet reached ******’s door, the doctors couldn’t legally justify it. Unlike Miller, Cox got a legal and medically supervised ********* and survived. Her reward is she is now subject to

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denying that her ********* was medically necessary.

That’s the bind the ********** right puts women in. If you ****, they say it’s your fault for not having ****** in the “exceptions.” If you complete your ********* and live, they accuse you of being a liar and a ********* and insist the exceptions should not have covered you. As we see in these two cases, not only will conservatives pass laws that ***** women, they will defame them in ****** by painting them as reckless and *******. However, anyone who reads Miller and Thurman’s stories can see that they made the smartest decisions they could have made under impossible circumstances.

Republicans always knew ********* bans would ***** women. They just don’t care. Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, has made it quite clear with his relentless ranting about “**********” and “sociopathic” women who are childless “cat ladies.” The ********** right believes that women’s purpose on earth is to make *******. In this view, any woman who declines a pregnancy — whether out of choice or necessity — has no right to exist.

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#Georgias #********* #ban #******* #young #mother #********** #blames #victim

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