Thirty-five-year-old Porsha Ngumezi’s case raises questions about how abortion bans are pressuring doctors to avoid standard care even in straightforward miscarriages.

( ProPublica ) – Wrapping his wife in a blanket as she mourned the loss of her pregnancy at 11 weeks, Hope Ngumezi wondered why no obstetrician was coming to see her.

Over the course of six hours on June 11, 2023, Porsha Ngumezi had bled so much in the emergency department at Houston Methodist Sugar Land that she’d needed two transfusions. She was anxious to get home to her young sons, but, according to a nurse’s notes, she was still “passing large clots the size of grapefruit.”

Hope dialed his mother, a former physician, who was unequivocal. “You need a D&C,” she told them, referring to dilation and curettage, a common procedure for first-trimester miscarriages and abortions. If a doctor could remove the remaining tissue from her uterus, the bleeding would end.

But when Dr. Andrew Ryan Davis, the obstetrician on duty, finally arrived, he said it was the hospital’s “routine” to give a drug called misoprostol to help the body pass the tissue, Hope recalled. Hope trusted the doctor. Porsha took the pills, according to records, and the bleeding continued.

Three hours later, her heart stopped.

The 35-year-old’s death was preventable, according to more than a dozen doctors who reviewed a detailed summary of her case for ProPublica. Some said it raises serious questions about how abortion bans are pressuring doctors to diverge from the standard of care and reach for less-effective options that could expose their patients to more risks. Doctors and patients described similar decisions they’ve witnessed across the state.

It was clear Porsha needed an emergency D&C, the medical experts said. She was hemorrhaging and the doctors knew she had a blood-clotting disorder, which put her at greater danger of excessive and prolonged bleeding. “Misoprostol at 11 weeks is not going to work fast enough,” said Dr. Amber Truehart, an OB-GYN at the University of New Mexico Center for Reproductive Health. “The patient will continue to bleed and have a higher risk of going into hemorrhagic shock.” The medical examiner found the cause of death to be hemorrhage.

D&Cs — a staple of maternal health care — can be lifesaving. Doctors insert a straw-like tube into the uterus and gently suction out any remaining pregnancy tissue. Once the uterus is emptied, it can close, usually stopping the bleeding.

But because D&Cs are also used to end pregnancies, the procedure has become tangled up in state legislation that restricts abortions. In Texas, any doctor who violates the strict law risks up to 99 years in prison. Porsha’s is the fifth case ProPublica has reported in which women died after they did not receive a D&C or its second-trimester equivalent, a dilation and evacuation; three of those deaths were in Texas.

Texas doctors told ProPublica the law has changed the way their colleagues see the procedure; some no longer consider it a first-line treatment, fearing legal repercussions or dissuaded by the extra legwork required to document the miscarriage and get hospital approval to carry out a D&C. This has occurred, ProPublica found, even in cases like Porsha’s where there isn’t a fetal heartbeat or the circumstances should fall under an exception in the law. Some doctors are transferring those patients to other hospitals, which delays their care, or they’re defaulting to treatments that aren’t the medical standard.

Misoprostol, the medicine given to Porsha, is an effective method to complete low-risk miscarriages but is not recommended when a patient is unstable. The drug is also part of a two-pill regimen for abortions, yet administering it may draw less scrutiny than a D&C because it requires a smaller medical team and because the drug is commonly used to induce labor and treat postpartum hemorrhage. Since 2022, some Texas women who were bleeding heavily while miscarrying have gone public about only receiving medication when they asked for D&Cs. One later passed out in a pool of her own blood.

“Stigma and fear are there for D&Cs in a way that they are not for misoprostol,” said Dr. Alison Goulding, an OB-GYN in Houston. “Doctors assume that a D&C is not standard in Texas anymore, even in cases where it should be recommended. People are afraid: They see D&C as abortion and abortion as illegal.”

Doctors and nurses involved in Porsha’s care did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Several physicians who reviewed the summary of her case pointed out that Davis’ post-mortem notes did not reflect nurses’ documented concerns about Porsha’s “heavy bleeding.” After Porsha died, Davis wrote instead that the nurses and other providers described the bleeding as “minimal,” though no nurses wrote this in the records. ProPublica tried to ask Davis about this discrepancy. He did not respond to emails, texts or calls.

Houston Methodist officials declined to answer a detailed list of questions about Porsha’s treatment. They did not comment when asked whether Davis’ approach was the hospital’s “routine.” A spokesperson said that “each patient’s care is unique to that individual.”

“All Houston Methodist hospitals follow all state laws,” the spokesperson added, “including the abortion law in place in Texas.”

“We Need to See the Doctor”

Hope marveled at the energy Porsha had for their two sons, ages 5 and 3. Whenever she wasn’t working, she was chasing them through the house or dancing with them in the living room. As a finance manager at a charter school system, she was in charge of the household budget. As an engineer for an airline, Hope took them on flights around the world — to Chile, Bali, Guam, Singapore, Argentina.

The two had met at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. “When Porsha and I began dating,” Hope said, “I already knew I was going to love her.” She was magnetic and driven, going on to earn an MBA, but she was also gentle with him, always protecting his feelings. Both were raised in big families and they wanted to build one of their own.

When he learned Porsha was pregnant again in the spring of 2023, Hope wished for a girl. Porsha found a new OB-GYN who said she could see her after 11 weeks. Ten weeks in, though, Porsha noticed she was spotting. Over the phone, the obstetrician told her to go to the emergency room if it got worse.

To celebrate the end of the school year, Porsha and Hope took their boys to a water park in Austin, and as they headed back, on June 11, Porsha told Hope that the bleeding was heavier. They decided Hope would stay with the boys at home until a relative could take over; Porsha would drive to the emergency room at Houston Methodist Sugar Land, one of seven community hospitals that are part of the Houston Methodist system.

At 6:30 p.m, three hours after Porsha arrived at the hospital, she saw huge clots in the toilet. “Significant bleeding,” the emergency physician wrote. “I’m starting to feel a lot of pain,” Porsha texted Hope. Around 7:30 p.m., she wrote: “She said I might need surgery if I don’t stop bleeding,” referring to the nurse. At 7:50 p.m., after a nurse changed her second diaper in an hour: “Come now.”

Still, the doctor didn’t mention a D&C at this point, records show. Medical experts told ProPublica that this wait-and-see approach has become more common under abortion bans. Unless there is “overt information indicating that the patient is at significant risk,” hospital administrators have told physicians to simply monitor them, said Dr. Robert Carpenter, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist who works in several hospital systems in Houston. Methodist declined to share its miscarriage protocols with ProPublica or explain how it is guiding doctors under the abortion ban.

As Porsha waited for Hope, a radiologist completed an ultrasound and noted that she had “a pregnancy of unknown location.” The scan detected a “sac-like structure” but no fetus or cardiac activity. This report, combined with her symptoms, indicated she was miscarrying.

But the ultrasound record alone was less definitive from a legal perspective, several doctors explained to ProPublica. Since Porsha had not had a prenatal visit, there was no documentation to prove she was 11 weeks along. On paper, this “pregnancy of unknown location” diagnosis could also suggest that she was only a few weeks into a normally developing pregnancy, when cardiac activity wouldn’t be detected. Texas outlaws abortion from the moment of fertilization; a record showing there is no cardiac activity isn’t enough to give physicians cover to intervene, experts said.

Dr. Gabrielle Taper, who recently worked as an OB-GYN resident in Austin, said that she regularly witnessed delays after ultrasound reports like these. “If it’s a pregnancy of unknown location, if we do something to manage it, is that considered an abortion or not?” she said, adding that this was one of the key problems she encountered. After the abortion ban went into effect, she said, “there was much more hesitation about: When can we intervene, do we have enough evidence to say this is a miscarriage, how long are we going to wait, what will we use to feel definitive?”

At Methodist, the emergency room doctor reached Davis, the on-call OB-GYN, to discuss the ultrasound, according to records. They agreed on a plan of “observation in the hospital to monitor bleeding.”

Around 8:30 p.m., just after Hope arrived, Porsha passed out. Terrified, he took her head in his hands and tried to bring her back to consciousness. “Babe, look at me,” he told her. “Focus.” Her blood pressure was dipping dangerously low. She had held off on accepting a blood transfusion until he got there. Now, as she came to, she agreed to receive one and then another.

By this point, it was clear that she needed a D&C, more than a dozen OB-GYNs who reviewed her case told ProPublica. She was hemorrhaging, and the standard of care is to vacuum out the residual tissue so the uterus can clamp down, physicians told ProPublica.

“Complete the miscarriage and the bleeding will stop,” said Dr. Lauren Thaxton, an OB-GYN who recently left Texas.

“At every point, it’s kind of shocking,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, San Francisco who reviewed Porsha’s case. “She is having significant blood loss and the physician didn’t move toward aspiration.”

All Porsha talked about was her devastation of losing the pregnancy. She was cold, crying and in extreme pain. She wanted to be at home with her boys. Unsure what to say, Hope leaned his chest over the cot, passing his body heat to her.

Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay

At 9:45 p.m., Esmeralda Acosta, a nurse, wrote that Porsha was “continuing to pass large clots the size of grapefruit.” Fifteen minutes later, when the nurse learned Davis planned to send Porsha to a floor with fewer nurses, she “voiced concern” that he wanted to take her out of the emergency room, given her condition, according to medical records.

At 10:20 p.m., seven hours after Porsha arrived, Davis came to see her. Hope remembered what his mother had told him on the phone earlier that night: “She needs a D&C.” The doctor seemed confident about a different approach: misoprostol. If that didn’t work, Hope remembers him saying, they would move on to the procedure.

A pill sounded good to Porsha because the idea of surgery scared her. Davis did not explain that a D&C involved no incisions, just suction, according to Hope, or tell them that it would stop the bleeding faster. The Ngumezis followed his recommendation without question. “I’m thinking, ‘He’s the OB, he’s probably seen this a thousand times, he probably knows what’s right,’” Hope said.

But more than a dozen doctors who reviewed Porsha’s case were concerned by this recommendation. Many said it was dangerous to give misoprostol to a woman who’s bleeding heavily, especially one with a blood clotting disorder. “That’s not what you do,” said Dr. Elliott Main, the former medical director for the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative and an expert in hemorrhage, after reviewing the case. “She needed to go to the operating room.” Main and others said doctors are obliged to counsel patients on the risks and benefits of all their options, including a D&C.

Performing a D&C, though, attracts more attention from colleagues, creating a higher barrier in a state where abortion is illegal, explained Goulding, the OB-GYN in Houston. Staff are familiar with misoprostol because it’s used for labor, and it only requires a doctor and a nurse to administer it. To do a procedure, on the other hand, a doctor would need to find an operating room, an anesthesiologist and a nursing team. “You have to convince everyone that it is legal and won’t put them at risk,” said Goulding. “Many people may be afraid and misinformed and refuse to participate — even if it’s for a miscarriage.”

Davis moved Porsha to a less-intensive unit, according to records. Hope wondered why they were leaving the emergency room if the nurse seemed so worried. But instead of pushing back, he rubbed Porsha’s arms, trying to comfort her. The hospital was reputable. “Since we were at Methodist, I felt I could trust the doctors.”

On their way to the other ward, Porsha complained of chest pain. She kept remarking on it when they got to the new room. From this point forward, there are no nurse’s notes recording how much she continued to bleed. “My wife says she doesn’t feel right, and last time she said that, she passed out,” Hope told a nurse. Furious, he tried to hold it together so as not to alarm Porsha. “We need to see the doctor,” he insisted.

Her vital signs looked fine. But many physicians told ProPublica that when healthy pregnant patients are hemorrhaging, their bodies can compensate for a long time, until they crash. Any sign of distress, such as chest pain, could be a red flag; the symptom warranted investigation with tests, like an electrocardiogram or X-ray, experts said. To them, Porsha’s case underscored how important it is that doctors be able to intervene before there are signs of a life-threatening emergency.

But Davis didn’t order any tests, according to records.

Around 1:30 a.m., Hope was sitting by Porsha’s bed, his hands on her chest, telling her, “We are going to figure this out.” They were talking about what she might like for breakfast when she began gasping for air.

“Help, I need help!” he shouted to the nurses through the intercom. “She can’t breathe.”

“All She Needed”

Hours later, Hope returned home in a daze. “Is mommy still at the hospital?” one of his sons asked. Hope nodded; he couldn’t find the words to tell the boys they’d lost their mother. He dressed them and drove them to school, like the previous day had been a bad dream. He reached for his phone to call Porsha, as he did every morning that he dropped the kids off. But then he remembered that he couldn’t.

Friends kept reaching out. Most of his family’s network worked in medicine, and after they said how sorry they were, one after another repeated the same message. All she needed was a D&C, said one. They shouldn’t have given her that medication, said another. It’s a simple procedure, the callers continued. We do this all the time in Nigeria.

Since Porsha died, several families in Texas have spoken publicly about similar circumstances. This May, when Ryan Hamilton’s wife was bleeding while miscarrying at 13 weeks, the first doctor they saw at Surepoint Emergency Center Stephenville noted no fetal cardiac activity and ordered misoprostol, according to medical records. When they returned because the bleeding got worse, an emergency doctor on call, Kyle Demler, said he couldn’t do anything considering “the current stance” in Texas, according to Hamilton, who recorded his recollection of the conversation shortly after speaking with Demler. (Neither Surepoint Emergency Center Stephenville nor Demler responded to several requests for comment.)

They drove an hour to another hospital asking for a D&C to stop the bleeding, but there, too, the physician would only prescribe misoprostol, medical records indicate. Back home, Hamilton’s wife continued bleeding until he found her passed out on the bathroom floor. “You don’t think it can really happen like that,” said Hamilton. “It feels like you’re living in some sort of movie, it’s so unbelievable.”

Across Texas, physicians say they blame the law for interfering with medical care. After ProPublica reported last month on two women who diedafter delays in miscarriage care, 111 OB-GYNs sent a letter to Texas policymakers, saying that “the law does not allow Texas women to get the lifesaving care they need.”

Dr. Austin Dennard, an OB-GYN in Dallas, told ProPublica that if one person on a medical team doubts the doctor’s choice to proceed with a D&C, the physician might back down. “You constantly feel like you have someone looking over your shoulder in a punitive, vigilante type of way.”

The criminal penalties are so chilling that even women with diagnoses included in the law’s exceptions are facing delays and denials. Last year, for example, legislators added an update to the ban for patients diagnosed with previable premature rupture of membranes, in which a patient’s water breaks before a fetus can survive. Doctors can still face prosecution for providing abortions in those cases, but they are offered the chance to justify themselves with what’s called an “affirmative defense,” not unlike a murder suspect arguing self defense. This modest change has not stopped some doctors from transferring those patients instead of treating them; Dr. Allison Gilbert, an OB-GYN in Dallas, said doctors send them to her from other hospitals. “They didn’t feel like other staff members would be comfortable proceeding with the abortion,” she said. “It’s frustrating that places still feel like they can’t act on some of these cases that are clearly emergencies.” Women denied treatment for ectopic pregnancies, another exception in the law, have filed federal complaints.

In response to ProPublica’s questions about Houston Methodist’s guidance on miscarriage management, a spokesperson, Gale Smith, said that the hospital has an ethics committee, which can usually respond within hours to help physicians and patients make “appropriate decisions” in compliance with state laws.

After Porsha died, Davis described in the medical record a patient who looked stable: He was tracking her vital signs, her bleeding was “mild” and she was “said not to be in distress.” He ordered bloodwork “to ensure patient wasn’t having concerning bleeding.” Medical experts who reviewed Porsha’s case couldn’t understand why Davis noted that a nurse and other providers reported “decreasing bleeding” in the emergency department when the record indicated otherwise. “He doesn’t document the heavy bleeding that the nurse clearly documented, including the significant bleeding that prompted the blood transfusion, which is surprising,” Grossman, the UCSF professor, said.

Patients who are miscarrying still don’t know what to expect from Houston Methodist.

This past May, Marlena Stell, a patient with symptoms nearly identical to Porsha’s, arrived at another hospital in the system, Houston Methodist The Woodlands. According to medical records, she, too, was 11 weeks along and bleeding heavily. An ultrasound confirmed there was no fetal heartbeat and indicated the miscarriage wasn’t complete. “I assumed they would do whatever to get the bleeding to stop,” Stell said.

Instead, she bled for hours at the hospital. She wanted a D&C to clear out the rest of the tissue, but the doctor gave her methergine, a medication that’s typically used after childbirth to stop bleeding but that isn’t standard care in the middle of a miscarriage, doctors told ProPublica. “She had heavy bleeding, and she had an ultrasound that’s consistent with retained products of conception.” said Dr. Jodi Abbott, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University School of Medicine, who reviewed the records. “The standard of care would be a D&C.”

Stell says that instead, she was sent home and told to “let the miscarriage take its course.” She completed her miscarriage later that night, but doctors who reviewed her case, so similar to Porsha’s, said it showed how much of a gamble physicians take when they don’t follow the standard of care. “She got lucky — she could have died,” Abbott said. (Houston Methodist did not respond to a request for comment on Stell’s care.)

It hadn’t occurred to Hope that the laws governing abortion could have any effect on his wife’s miscarriage. Now it’s the only explanation that makes sense to him. “We all know pregnancies can come out beautifully or horribly,” Hope told ProPublica. “Instead of putting laws in place to make pregnancies safer, we created laws that put them back in danger.”

For months, Hope’s youngest son didn’t understand that his mom was gone. Porsha’s long hair had been braided, and anytime the toddler saw a woman with braids from afar, he would take off after her, shouting, “That’s mommy!”

A couple weeks ago, Hope flew to Amsterdam to quiet his mind. It was his first trip without Porsha, but as he walked the city, he didn’t know how to experience it without her. He kept thinking about how she would love the Christmas lights and want to try all the pastries. How she would have teased him when he fell asleep on a boat tour of the canals. “I thought getting away would help,” he wrote in his journal. “But all I’ve done is imagine her beside me.”

* Lizzie Presser covers health, inequality and how policy is experienced at ProPublica. She was previously a contributing writer for The California Sunday Magazine, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, This American Life and others. Her story “The Dispossessed,” published in partnership with The New Yorker, won the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting and the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism in 2020. She is a two-time finalist for the Livingston Award and the National Magazine Award.

* Kavitha Surana is a reporter at ProPublica.

ProPublica

Donald Trump has flip-flopped on the issue of abortion for decades, from declaring himself “very pro-choice” in the 1990s and “pro-life” in 2011 to hinting this year that he’d support a national abortion ban.

“Trump Patriarchy,” Digital, Dream / Cartoon v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Abortion is a topic of huge importance in American politics this year: it could decide the United States presidential election, and the way states regulate abortion access will have life-or-death consequences for women.

Apart from Trump’s preposterous claim that Democrats support the execution of babies after birth — infanticide, in other words, which is illegal in all 50 American states — Trump did concede during the recent presidential debate that he supports abortion access for certain reasons: pregnancy arising from rape or incest, and to save “the life of the mother.”

American legislators should look to Ireland to understand the real-life consequences of a ban on abortion, the chilling effect on health-care professionals of an exception only in cases of a threat to the life of the pregnant woman, and the significant problems with attempting to legislate abortion access only for certain reasons, like rape and incest.

Tragic repercussions

In the early 1980s, the Irish people voted by referendum to insert a provision into the country’s constitution, known as the Eighth Amendment. In explicitly inserting, for the first time, constitutional protection for a right to life of the unborn — stated to be equal to that of the right to life of the mother — the amendment operated as a near-blanket ban on abortion for more than three decades.

This constitutional ban did not prevent abortion from taking place in Ireland: it simply drove women who could afford it to other countries to access abortion services.

Others ordered abortion medications on the internet and took them alone, without medical supervision. An unknown number of vulnerable women were forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

The ban also impacted women with much-wanted pregnancies. The Savita Halappanavar case concerned a young woman who was happy to be pregnant with her first baby. But she began experiencing an inevitable miscarriage and ultimately died in hospital after her medical team hesitated to intervene while a fetal heartbeat was still being detected.

Halappanavar’s death led to an outcry for action to lift the constitutional ban on abortion and ensure that all pregnant women could have access to appropriate medical care.

Another tragic Irish case involved a pregnant woman who was looking forward to welcoming her third child but sadly suffered brain-stem death during her pregnancy. She was subjected to extraordinary life support measures in an effort to save her fetus, even as her body had already begun to decompose.

The woman’s family had to launch legal action against the Irish health service to secure an order for the withdrawal of treatment to allow their daughter to die with a measure of dignity. The court heard how medical staff felt compelled to keep the dead woman on life support, for legal reasons, as the fetus still had a heartbeat.

Making health care dangerous

In the run-up to Ireland’s 2018 abortion referendum, the public debate and opinion polls were focused on the possibilities of providing access to abortion for certain reasons, such as those identified by Trump at the debate: when the pregnancy is posing a risk to health, or the pregnancy arose from rape or incest.

The citizens’ assembly established by the Irish government to review the abortion issue in 2016 did a comprehensive examination into the provision of abortion services. It shone a light on the substantial problems of specifying reasons and developing processes for pregnant women to establish their eligibility for an abortion.

Statistics tell us that most sexual assaults go unreported; prosecutions often result in acquittals; and prosecuting a sexual offence can take years. So how can a pregnant woman prove her rape to access a legal abortion, and from a humanitarian perspective, why should she be required to?

Imposing conditions around the prescription of abortion pills and the ability of doctors to carry out certain procedures also impacts women who are miscarrying and whose lives and health may be put in grave danger by a pregnancy that is ending but will not pass naturally.

Anti-abortion measures cost lives

Politicizing the issue of abortion, instituting bans, carving out abortion from the wider reproductive experience, limiting access to abortion medication and surgeries for certain reasons that must be policed and adjudicated: Ireland’s experiences have shown that none of these actions makes health care safer for pregnant patients. Nor do they provide sensible guidance for their doctors.

In fact, anti-abortion measures make pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion and the entire spectrum of reproductive health care exponentially more dangerous, more stigmatized and much lonelier. These actions, instituted for political reasons and not for better patient care, cost lives.

Many Canadians tuning into the Trump/Harris debate — or listening to various U.S. politics over the past eight years — may feel relief that abortion is not a top political issue here and does not seem to have caused the same level of polarization.

But with a federal election looming, there’s little stopping the issue from becoming a political football in the years ahead.

It’s estimated that one in three women in Canada will have an abortion in their lifetime, so now is the time to learn lessons from other countries, especially the U.S. and Ireland, on what not to do.

Seána Glennon, Postdoctoral Fellow, Constitutional Law, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Texas is trying to ban the use of its roads by people seeking care outside the state — and even dispatching right-wing vigilante groups to chase them.

By Jim Hightower | –

( Otherwords.org ) – Here’s our big word of the day: extraterritoriality. It expresses a sketchy legal theory asserting that rulers in one state have a right to enforce their laws in another state.

Its most prominent was in the infamous Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which required officials in Northern anti-slave states to capture and return escaped slaves to their plantation “owners” in the South, thus applying Southern slave laws in Northern jurisdictions. This abomination was finally repealed in 1864.

Katie Couric Video: “”I was forced to carry my child full term”: Texas abortion plaintiff”

But 160 years later, here comes another faction of right-wing zealots trying to revive the slave-law concept of extraterritoriality — this time applying it to any and all American women who dare to make their own reproductive health decisions.

I’m ashamed to say that this repressive use of the doctrine is being led by my state’s misogynistic governor, Greg Abbott, and our corrupt attorney general, Ken Paxton. These two tyrannical men have already saddled Texas women with the most draconian abortion ban in the country, including piously forbidding abortion in cases of rape and incest.

For women to exercise their inherent right to control their own bodies, they’re forced to travel to nearby states. But Texas’s brutal extremists bark that “we’ll ban that, too!” They’ve pushed a flagrantly unconstitutional scheme to outlaw the use of public roads to drive out-of-state for care. And they’ve even sanctioned right-wing vigilantes to follow suspected medical travelers to doctors beyond our borders.

And, going full-tilt totalitarian, the Abbott-Paxton posse has demanded that out-of-state-care groups hand over the names and addresses of Texas women they’ve helped outside of Texas.

Talk about government overreach! Big Brother isn’t just watching… he’s stalking you. To oppose this brutish repression — and to keep it from coming to your state — contact RewireNewsGroup.com/abortion.

Jim Hightower

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.

Via Otherwords.org

He’s also provided some of America’s favorite headlines and jokes, even for progressives like me. As one fictional mom quipped in a Saturday Night Live skit at the end of his term in office, “If he’s gone, what am I supposed to do? Focus on my kids?” She was also mockingly lamenting the possibility that startling headlines like “‘Grab ‘em by the pussy” would disappear from our all-American world.

It turns out she needn’t have worried! It seems the media is far more eager these days to cover the former president’s endless missteps (or are they just steps?) than highlight the investments made by President Biden’s administration, which have finally started to pay off in terms of higher wages, more jobs, and lower carbon emissions. Big as we are on short-term gratification (or gloom) and the latest polls, we seem so much less interested in examining what presidents actually do.

Among Us

With the 2024 election heading toward us the way that asteroid hurtled toward the dinosaurs, while our sensationalistic political culture shows little sign of changing anytime soon, I’d suggest that we turn the conversation from the crazy stuff “Orange Jesus” loves to say to the fact that Trump and his supporters are, for the foreseeable future, going to be among us. Isn’t it time, imagining the worst to come, to start talking about what an anti-Trump resistance would look like?

To do so, we’d first have to take a closer look at what some of his most influential supporters are planning for the next time around. You may have noticed that a set of conservative think tanks and scholars, who call themselves Project 2025, have drafted a nearly thousand-page blueprint for a hypothetical Trump second term. It’s a document labeled Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (though all it really purports to conserve is an abiding American focus on funding our military-industrial complex). The document covers everything from how a Trump administration ought to handle federal staffing to how it could restructure military and federal law enforcement agencies to its own benefit. Let me flag a few parts of that document that I find particularly concerning and suggest small ways in which you and I might act to preserve democratic values in a country that seems either to take them all too much for granted or care about them less and less.

“Taking the Reins of Government”

When it comes to the plans of Trump’s advisers to reshape the executive branch in an autocratic fashion, should he be reelected, the title in the relevant section of their document — “Taking the Reins of Government” — perfectly catches the top-down approach to power they envision. For years now, the Orange Jesus has made no secret of his urge to launch retribution against those in the Washington bureaucracy who opposed him and ensure that tens of thousands of career public service positions in federal agencies and the White House will, in (his) future, be held by people vetted for their loyalty to him (and only him!). So reads the first major section of that Mandate, which outlines how a second Trump administration would assert far more direct White House control over this country through the federal bureaucracy.

In fact, the document’s authors advocate that an incoming Trump administration circumvent the Vacancies Reform Act, which establishes standards for congressional vetting of temporarily appointed federal personnel. They suggest instead indefinitely using acting personnel in vacant positions, particularly ones the first Trump administration was hostile to like State Department diplomatic posts.

Buy the Book

Notably, the document is remarkably explicit about its recommendation to appoint acting personnel in departments already known for their abuse of American civil rights. (Think: Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials kidnapping Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland during the summer of 2020.) A chilling example is the Mandate’s discussion of how a Trump White House could appoint acting personnel at DHS from scratch to “guarantee implementation of a Day One agenda.” I can’t help thinking: Is this what Trump meant when he told a Fox News Town Hall that he would be a “dictator” only on day one? Ostensibly, he could make many of the worst decisions immediately and then leave his goons to carry out the rest of the dirty work, Putin-style.

Given such a topsy-turvy reality, if you were hoping that journalists would still be close at hand to help call out any disastrous lapses in integrity, think again. Because count on something else: serious journalists wouldn’t be allowed within a country mile of Donald Trump and his closest advisers. In fact, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the authors of the Mandate suggest the White House should have a very different relationship with its press pool, if there even were to be one at all. In describing a future Trumpian White House Office of Communications, the Mandate reads, “No legal entitlement exists for the provision of permanent space for media on the White House campus, and the next Administration should reexamine the balance between media demands and space constraints on the White House premises.”

Right! A Trump White House undoubtedly wouldn’t have space for all too much. At another point, in a paragraph on how Trump’s future communications director would need to “navigate the mainstream media” to advance the president’s agenda, the authors write, “The new Administration should examine the nature of the relationship between itself and the White House Correspondents Association and consider whether an alternative coordinating body might be more suitable.”

An “alternative coordinating body” organized by Donald Trump and crew? What could possibly go wrong?

In fact, just imagine a Trumpian future in which those with the president’s ear on every topic will be chosen by and aligned with that very same unhinged person, while his administration attempts to transform the media into its own propaganda arm, while repressing anything that might prove hostile to him in any way. In a second Trump White House, supporting an independent media would mean more than just subscribing to the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and local newspapers that will undoubtedly come under existential threats. It’s also going to mean providing an actual safe space for journalists whose exposés of government abuse will make them prime targets for the Orange Jesus’s followers. Think, for an analogous example, of murdered Russian war correspondent Anna Politkovskaya, who exposed abuse by Russian security forces against Muslim minority communities in the south of that country.

Now imagine, in an unhinged second Trump presidency, what sorts of doxing and other nightmares writers and their families might have to endure. We’ll all have to be ready to let such figures (or their threatened children and spouses) into our homes, lock the doors, and tell no one that they’re there. Meanwhile, the rest of us would have to protest — and get others to join us – when journalists and other oppositional figures start to be arrested under bogus charges or attacked by thugs. In a second Trump era, it will be of crucial importance for the rest of us to stand with those who continue to insist on telling the truth, even if you don’t agree with them politically.

It will be no less important to elevate and celebrate the writing of people who describe acts of resistance and heroism, be it their own or of others. I’m thinking about people like Washington Post columnist and author Jennifer Rubin or former Republican politico (and truthteller) Liz Cheney, who have made a point not just of critiquing the fascists aligned with Trump but of describing how to build life-affirming new policies that would serve the very constitution a second Trump term would undoubtedly try to toss into the gutter.

“The Common Defense”

Those would-be Trump presidential advisers have been remarkably detailed in describing their hopes for how a second Trump presidency could transform the U.S. military, and that section of their Mandate, I must admit, initially sounded okay to me. After all, they seemed to want to keep this country out of yet more foreign conflicts, while making the Pentagon accountable for how it spends its money. They also want more employment and financial support to be offered to military families (like mine!). In other words, many of the things I’ve been writing about at TomDispatch for years.

I was even initially impressed that they claimed to want the military to deprioritize “manufactured extremism” — until I realized that what they’re evidently referring to is the Pentagon’s plan (largely stalled at this point) to screen new and existing servicemembers for alignment with Nazi-style and white supremacist ideologies. In fact — I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn — their blueprint goes on to describe a military remade in the very image of those Project 2025 leaders as white, cisgender, and heterosexual men, and they want to start ’em young, too. The Mandate recommends standardized testing in all federally funded schools to check kids’ aptitude for military service. They want, in other words, to offer the Pentagon increased access to children for the purpose of recruitment. And the proposal only gets “better” after that. In fact, Trump’s future would-be advisers go on to support expelling people with gender dysphoria from that very military.

How are we then to trust that the Department of Defense won’t be used against the American people, if our troops are distinctly shaped not to reflect our exploding diversity? In fact, The Donald has called the 2024 election “the final battle” and has already suggested that he might take out after his foes (“vermin”), even possibly invoking the Insurrection Act to use the military to do so. And then, it seems, the rest of us would have to live with a military that embraced the very types who sought to tear down our elected government on January 6, 2021.

Oh, and even better news! The Mandate writers also propose increasing the number and size of American companies producing munitions here in the U.S., funding arms acquisition and training at more universities, and increasing the power of the arms production industry even further.

They also propose — and what could possibly go wrong here? — that the government should enhance its ability to deploy special forces and conduct irregular (nonstate) warfare “across the spectrum of competition, crisis, and conflict.” Hmmmm…. It’s hard for me not to recall a recent response by a Trump lawyer to a question by a federal judge in which he claimed that a president should be immune from prosecution for ordering a special forces unit to assassinate a political opponent. Welcome to 2025 and Trump 2.0!

All You Need Is Love

If former President Trump listens to his all-too-well-prepared advisers — and many think he would be more disciplined in doing so a second time around — there would be far less of a buffer of reasonable civil servants loyal to the Constitution between him and the rest of us. Given that, I’m suggesting that those of us in military communities tell our loved ones to defy any orders to brutalize other Americans who pose no violent threat to the rest of us — those exercising freedom of assembly and speech, running for public office, writing the truth. And even though this may sound counterintuitive to some of you, get rid of your guns! If the Trumpian security state that might arise did everything its would-be advisers advocate, there would be no point in taking up arms against it. After all, civil wars are the bloodiest forms of human conflict, with the worst impact on civilians.

But don’t give up either. Make sure in every way you can that elections continue, and show up to vote. Volunteer to get people to the polls and inform them of their rights as voters. Become an election worker or volunteer. Do your damnedest to keep a non-Trumpian world alive.

Change is afoot, and it could be bad, but who knows? It’s also possible that election 2024 will prove to be white supremacy’s dying gasp. Think of how readily Trump’s supporters scuttle away when the candidates he endorses lose elections. And if our very own Orange Jesus is more decisively denied access to power through a jail sentence or another big election loss, maybe all the planning of his toadies won’t mean a tinker’s damn. But that will only be true if we all show up and act, starting now.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

Staunchly against bodily autonomy for women, Johnson supports a nationwide ban on abortion which he considers, “a holocaust.” This inexperienced, soft-spoken Ned Flanders suggested that abortion activists want to kill babies that are “half way out of the birth-canal,” and voted against Americans having access to purchase legal contraception. The most powerful Republican in Washington insisted that, if only women would bear more “able-bodied workers,” he wouldn’t be forced to cut trillions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Hostile towards gay and transgender people, Johnson called them “dangerous” and “deviant” threats to the American way of life and defended laws that criminalized homosexual relations between consenting adults that he called “inherently unnatural.” He warned that same-sex marriage was a “dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.”

Last year, Johnson introduced legislation that would prohibit the use of federal funds for providing education to children under 10 that included LGBTQ topics — a national version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. He also is working to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide in 2015.

Johnson is a virulent Christian Nationalist, an ideology modeled on Hungarian president Victor Orbán’s program of “illiberal democracy,” and defense of Christendom against Muslims, progressives, and the “LGBTQ lobby.” Johnson “pushed all kinds of hateful anti-LGBTQ bigotry while at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian Nationalist legal outfit that wants to drag this country back to the 5th century,” warns Andrew L. Seidel, civil rights attorney and author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American. For nearly twenty years, Johnson served as senior legal counsel and spokesman for the ADF.

Designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the ADF is a legal advocacy organization that not only supported “re-criminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults,” but has also defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people and contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia. Johnson and the ADF claim that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society.

Politicon: “James Carville explains everything about Mike Johnson”

The ADF, according to the New York Times, is the “largest legal force of the religious right.” They would go on to successive Supreme Court victories, most notably rolling back abortion rights in the Dobbs decision, undermining LGBTQ rights in the (purported) same-sex wedding website case 303 Creative, allowing employer-sponsored health insurance to exclude birth control, and twelve other cases related to curtailing the civil rights of women and LGBTQ people.

Johnson’s rise to the speakership is best understood in terms of the ongoing white Christian nationalist takeover of the American government through MAGA rather than, as the mainstream press suggested, the quirky, exhausted and embarrassed result of a bickering caucus. Since the rise of the Tea Party, the primary driver for both the GOP’s dysfunction and its incipient fascism is the political might of organized right-wing Christianity, successfully redeployed especially in primaries, to wrest control from establishment “Republicans in Name Only” (“RINOs”).

As the former political director of the AFL-CIO Michael Podhorzer wrote, “the political muscle provided by white Christian nationalism’s extensive church-based infrastructure in congressional districts, and its national reach through Christian broadcasting and national organizations, has turned MAGA into a ruthlessly successful RINO-hunting machine.”

Still, Johnson’s loathsome ideology and religious zealotry were not the main reasons for his elevation to the speakership — most Republicans share his repulsive worldview. Rather, the MAGA cult embraced his tireless advocacy on behalf of despotic Donald’s seditious attempt to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Most House Republicans voted to back the Fabricator’s lies about the election; but few had worked as diligently as Johnson to foist fraudulent conspiracy theories, such as “rigged Dominion voting machines,” on Americans. A constitutional lawyer who uses the law to subvert democracy, Johnson enlisted dozens of fellow-members to support a sham Texas court case seeking to cancel the election results in battleground states.

Johnson’s role, neglected at the time, was such that the Times later called him “the most important architect” of the campaign to block congressional certification of the Electoral College results and thus overturn Trump’s defeat. Circulating his hollow rationale to the party, Johnson reminded them that Trump “anxiously awaited” their support. Proudly exhibiting a bizarre religious devotion to the Un-Christian Trump, Johnson helped plot the Jan. 6 attempted coup while calling the insurrection a “peaceful protest” and defending the Seditionist at both of his impeachment hearings.

At a time when Trump’s co-conspirators, probably including his Chief of Staff, admitted they lied about the election being stolen, House Republicans handed the reins of power to someone who showed no hesitation to help overturn American democracy. Johnson was given a powerful government position by people in the government who don’t believe in government — and installed an unrepentant election-denier leader two heartbeats away from the presidency.

In his first major initiative as House speaker, Johnson pushed through a bill to provide $14 billion in military assistance to Israel. Before the vote, he declared, “Israel doesn’t need a cease-fire.” However, Palestinians do. Israel’s aerial and ground offensive, ostensibly targeting Hamas infrastructure, has killed over 11,000 people while those who managed to flee Israel’s attack in northern Gaza now encounter a scarcity of food and medicine in the south. “Residents wait hours for a gallon of brackish water that makes them sick,” reported the Times of Israel. Scabies, diarrhea and respiratory infections rip through overcrowded shelters.” 

In addition, Johnson engineered the House censure of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian serving in Congress. The censure resolution is “rife with propaganda, fake history, and racism,” said Juan Cole on Informed Comment. 

In his first public appearance, the newly-elected Christian Zionist told a crowd of Jewish Republicans in Las Vegas: “We are going to stand like a rock with our friend and ally, Israel.” He boasted that his first act as speaker was passing the pro-Israel resolution in spite of “no” votes from several democrats, including Rashida Tlaib, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar. Their opposition was due to the bill’s failure to recognize Palestinian victims and call for a cease-fire. Johnson maliciously and deceitfully blamed their defiance on an “alarming trend of antisemitism” enabled by “academia and the mainstream media, and fringe government figures.”

The evangelical Christian’s rise to power is the biggest political victory for the evangelical movement to date and his connections to Israel reflect the movement’s deep ties to the Israeli far right. “God is not done with Israel,” said Johnson cryptically. He gushed that his 2020 visit to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount was the “fulfillment of a biblical prophecy.”

This remark references the Christian Zionist end-times belief, derived from a literal reading of the Bible, that Israel is God’s chosen nation and that its 1948 creation will lead to the Second Coming of Christ. In the real world, they rabidly support the state of Israel and its policies, especially regarding the expansion of settlements, the annexation of territories in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

In the biblical narrative, Christ will defeat Evil, or the Antichrist, in an apocalyptic battle that will take place in Israel at Har Megiddo, or Armageddon. Along with Christian believers and converts who have ascended to heaven in the Rapture, Christ will rule from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem for a thousand years. Fueled by these fantasies of a cataclysmic war in the Middle East, Christian Zionists maintain that literal war is not something to be avoided, but inevitable, desired by God, and celebrated. These zealots condemn those that oppose Israeli occupation as being evil, aligned with the “Antichrist.”

The Bible becomes a script for those millennial Christians in power, like Mike Johnson — a self-fulfilling prophesy of violence and destruction that portends an apocalyptic foreign policy. In some warped minds, the current battle in Israel may be hastening the coveted dooms-day of reckoning. In a bizarre twist to the end-times prophecy, those Christian Zionists who are the most passionately pro-Israel also believe that those Jews who do not convert to Christianity will not be raptured, and if they don’t convert during the horrific cataclysm at Har Megiddo, they will be condemned to suffer eternally in the “lake of fire.”

Eager to visit the Christian holy land, Johnson traveled to Israel with his pal Gym Jordan. Jordan, who was considered an aggressive and confrontational jerk, was rejected by his party for the speakership. Yet Jordan apparently served as a spiritual mentor to Johnson, who has guest-hosted Jordan’s national radio show Washington Watch, and praised Jordan as a “great friend and leader” and “a guiding light” on his podcast Truth be Told with Mike and Kelly Johnson.

Along with their wives, Jordan and Johnson’s week-long pilgrimage was sponsored by the New York-based 12Tribes Film Foundation, a small outfit that that describes itself as “online warriors for truth about Israel and the Jewish people.” The organization’s CEO Avi Abelow — an arch-Zionist — lives in the West Bank settlement of Efrat.

Johnson’s first stop on his Abelow-organized visit was to receive a briefing from the Kohelet Policy Forum, a far-right Israeli think tank that would later help cultivate the Netanyahu administration’s despised plan to weaken the country’s judiciary. The itinerary included meetings with Israeli military officials, business owners, and political leaders including Netanyahu, current Israeli U.N. envoy Gilad Erdan, and other members of the far right Likud Party.

At the Golan Heights, the pair posed and smiled in front of a sign for “Trump Heights,” the name of an Israeli settlement honoring Trump for moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Located in occupied territory claimed by Israel, it is widely considered to violate international law.

Johnson also visited the Temple Mount compound — the Palestinian Aqsa Mosque complex — alongside Abelov, a Temple Mount activist, and Yehudah Glick — an Orthodox rabbi and former Likud lawmaker, who has led the fight to change the legal status quo and permit Jewish prayer at this Palestinian national symbol, the third holiest shrine in the Muslim world, and one of the most sensitive flashpoints in the world. In 2023 during Ramadan, Israeli forces repeatedly invaded the sacred al-Aqsa Mosque, in an act of “state terrorism,” where they beat and expelled Palestinian worshipers on behalf of Jewish extremists.

This visit to Israel, led by right-wing extremists, influenced the future speaker’s views regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During a video made of the trip, Johnson declares — without traveling to Gaza or meeting with Palestinian leaders or activists — that the Palestinian and Israeli people were “working well together” and that there was a “great cohesion of the people” in the West Bank. He blamed “activists and the leftist groups” for “pushing” the narrative that there was conflict, implying that Palestinians enjoyed life under Israeli occupation.

Johnson called Netanyahu, in his first talk with a foreign leader, during which he echoed the premier’s comments that Israel’s war is one of good vs. evil and light vs. darkness. “I assured the prime minister of our own unwavering support of Israel and the people in our Congress and under my leadership, we will be there until the end, we will be there until the end of this conflict.” He opposes basic human rights for Palestinians as well as many Americans.

In an appearance with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Johnson described himself as “a Bible-believing Christian” and said that to understand his politics, one only need to “pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.” This is cultish nonsense that threatens democracy.

Democracy means that the candidate ordained by God, in Johnson’s view, lost an election, so he forsook his oath to the Constitution to keep a corrupt, seditious demagogue in power. Democracy also leads to abortions and gay marriage. Under democracy, Johnson also believes that white Christians are being “replaced”— by immigrants, by Muslims, by trans kids, by drag queens, and by a whole litany of scapegoats. So, perhaps, the only way to save the U.S. and white Christians is to end democracy.

In a potentially horrifying scenario, suppose Trump loses the 2024 election but again claims he won and the GOP demands his “victory” to be certified, House speaker Johnson is positioned to do so. A devout apostle to the Pagan Coup Plotter, MAGA Mike is prepared to subvert democracy in deranged obedience to Trump and his biblical fanaticism.

Dr. Jenna Beckham

Dr. Erica Pettigrew

Health care providers face similar confusion also. We are now having to constantly wonder if the evidence-based, standard of care we know we should provide to our patients is, in that moment, legal and/or if it fits within the narrow yet often vague confines of poorly written legislation. We are having to call our hospital and clinic attorneys, consult with ethics committees, and at worst times, turn patients away or defer care.  Some are even unable to refer or transfer patients elsewhere for care due to concerns for repercussions of “aiding and abetting”. As physicians, we completed numerous years of education and training in order to take care of patients. We did not go to medical school and complete residency training to find ourselves spending hours in meetings with lawyers about patient care, but that is what hundreds of doctors have had to do over the last year since the Dobbs decision has allowed states to further interfere with reproductive healthcare.

The past year has felt somehow simultaneously long and grueling as well as one that has moved at lightning speed with constant blindsides of legislative restrictions, court cases, and worst of all, tragic stories of patient suffering. Abortion is now completely banned in 13 states, numerous other states have enacted new laws with extremely strict restrictions, and on a federal level there are ongoing attempts to revoke the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs in the most common medication abortion regimen in the United States.

In a post-Roe United States, the effects of each state’s abortion policy extends beyond its borders, with broad reaching impacts on abortion access regionally and even nationally. Here in North Carolina, we have seen firsthand the effects of increasing abortion bans and restrictions in many of our neighboring states, and much of the southeast region.  As reported by the New York Times, the “Fall of Roe Turned North Carolina Into an Abortion Destination”.  The Society of Family Planning’s #WeCount project, a national abortion reporting effort that aims to capture the shifts in abortion access, reports that the average difference in abortions post-Dobbs in North Carolina has been an increase of 881 abortions per month, ranking us 3rd of the states with the greatest increase. We now commonly see desperate patients from states like Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida as a direct result of their respective abortion bans.

Come July 1, North Carolina will no longer be a refuge for those in dire need for basic health care, and for doctors who wish to practice in a state that respects the medical profession. Our new abortion ban restricts abortions prior to 12 weeks with medically unnecessary barriers and bans most abortions after 12 weeks. It became law on May 16th, a short 14 days after the public and most members of the legislature were first able read the bill that was introduced late in the night on May 2.

Just two weeks. That’s a shockingly short window of time for any bill to become law, let alone a 46-page monster bill that so negatively affects the practice of medicine. The NC Medical Society, NC Society of OBGYNs, and the NC Academy of Family Physicians are all against the law. The bill did not go through the typical process of vetting and debate which is how confusion over vague wording, contradictions, and uncertain intersections with other laws ended up as statute. And now we are having to do our best to interpret what the law says so that we are not criminally charged or do not lose our licenses for providing the best evidence-based medicine to our patients. A lawsuit filed on June 16 by North Carolina health care professionals highlights a few of the most egregious aspects of the law, but even a successful outcome there will not stop most of the law’s harmful effects.

So what are the consequences of these hastily passed, poorly drafted, medically dangerous laws? Patients are unable to receive the best possible care, or at times any care at all.  Doctors have to choose between medical malpractice and criminal prosecution. Some patients who can come up with transportation and hotel costs, childcare, and time off work are forced to become health care refugees when they have to  leave their own state for less restrictive states. There will also be many who are unable to jump through the hoops and travel to access care, therefore being forced to carry a pregnancy against their will or resort to self-managed abortion (a safe option in some situations but not one that is universally preferred.).

Medical professionals are burned out by the moral injury of turning patients away, and soon new abortion ban states like North Carolina are no longer desirable places to practice medicine. OBGYN applications are down 10% in abortion ban states, and that is only the beginning of this phenomenon. Doctors and medical students look for other places to practice when state politicians interfere with the practice of medicine. This healthcare provider shortage goes far beyond abortion care. Family physicians and OBGYNs providing abortion care often do so as a part of their practice. We also provide prenatal care, deliver babies, and serve as primary care providers. When we move away, those services become harder to find. Maternity care deserts grow, the struggle to find a PCP for diabetes and hypertension care becomes even more difficult, and overall accessibility to high quality, full scope medical care suffers. These harmful laws need to be repealed. Leave the practice of medicine to health care professionals, not politicians.

 

Dr. Jenna Beckham

Dr. Jenna Beckham, MD, MSPH, FACOG, is a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist and abortion provider in North Carolina. She also serves as the chair of the board of ProChoiceNC and board vice president of the ACLU of NC. A North Carolina native, Dr. Beckham completed her education and training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her views are her own.

MORE FROM AUTHOR

Dr. Erica Pettigrew

Dr. Erica Pettigrew is a North Carolina primary care physician, who is board-certified in both family medicine and preventive medicine. She is an associate professor, serves as the medical director of a county health department as well as medical director of Occupational Health Services. She earned her medical and law degrees at the University of North Carolina and a master of public health degree from Portland State. Her views are her own.

Via AZ Mirror

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 .

Sensing just how unpopular their agenda is, anti-choice extremists are attacking reporters for calling their abortion bans “bans.”

( Otherwords.org) – Unfortunately, it’s 1984 again in America.

Not the year. The book. George Orwell’s classic novel tells of a far-right totalitarian clique that uses “newspeak” and “doublethink” to impose their rigid, anti-democratic doctrine on society. 

Their regime held power through mind control — they had a “Ministry of Truth” for perverting language and manipulating facts, while their “Thought Police” enforced ideological purity and suppressed dissent.

Thirty-nine years later, here comes a clique of theocratic extremists in our country using Orwellian manipulation in its crusade to take control over every woman’s personal reproductive rights. 

Having seized the Supreme Court and practically the entire Republican Party, these present-day autocrats are now demanding that state and national lawmakers enforce the group’s ultimate dictate: A total ban on abortions, even in cases of rape and incest.

Image by Mike Ljung from Pixabay

To their amazement, however, the great majority of Americans — including many Republican voters — think abortion ought to be generally available, with each woman deciding what’s best for her. Moreover, the idea of Big Brother imposing a federal ban is massively unpopular.

No problem, say today’s Orwellian newspeakers, we’ll just ban the word “ban” from our PR campaigns. Thus their harsh abortion ban has magically morphed linguistically into a “pro-life plan.” There — feel better?

Doubling down on their propaganda ploy, the abortion truth twisters are also plotting to ban reporters from using what one called “the big ban word.” Anti-abortion agents are now barraging news outlets with warnings that any use of that verb will be considered proof of political bias. 

Sure enough, rather than risk right-wing fury, some scaredy-cat reporters are already caving in, meekly describing bans as “restrictions on procedures.” How nice — a kinder, gentler tyranny!

To keep up with the 2023 version of Orwell’s Thought Police, follow journalist Jessica Valenti’s diligent tracking of anti-abortion trickery at Jessica.substack.com.

 

 

Jim Hightower

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.

Via Otherwords.org