The Unspeakable Cruetly of Banning Abortion

So Senate Democrats barely blocked the repug/freakazoid ban on abortions past 20 weeks.  That is bullshit because it will ban a mere handful of abortions per year.

But it's deadly bullshit because the abortions it will ban are almost all of wanted pregnancies terminated because the fetus is fatally damaged or will kill the woman carrying it.

Only genuine motherfuckers support this bill.

Divine Irony:

I lost a baby brother at something like 14 weeks because he’d attached to the uterine wall backward, and when he started kicking he tore himself away and hemorrhaged to death.

You goddamn “pro-lifers” were ready to let my mother die with him rather than “killing him before God’s time.” He was already dead; it was a matter at that point of him bleeding out. My mother was bleeding with him. My mother was dying with him. And the hospital she was in? That fine pro-life hospital? Refused to let her transfer to another hospital to abort. She had a ten-year-old and an eight-month old at home, but making sure Joey didn’t die “before God’s time” was more goddamn important than making sure my mother survived.

My mother asked the nurse if she’d take pictures, saying that the ultrasound images were really blurry and she’d at least like something to remember him by. The nurse, after Joey was dead and my mom was in recovery, threw pictures on my mother’s bed. This fine pro-life nurse gave my mother pictures of a baby that was jet black where he wasn’t blood red. He didn’t even look human. And she threw the pictures in my mother’s face, like it was her fault that there was a terrible, terrible biological mistake that made it impossible for her baby to survive.

We wanted him. Not that the fact that you’ll notice he already had a name picked out would’ve clued you in. I would have had a baby brother just a year younger than me. My sophomore year in college I spent a lot of time crying alone in the student union, thinking it wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair, I should be taking my brother to dinner with friends or helping him study for his first midterms. I’m a big sister with no little brother to show for it, and there was a year that pain and loss came back eighteen years after the fact to wound me when I least expected it. There was a year when there were songs I couldn’t bring myself to listen to without crying because they reminded me of what I could have had. And I still wish, I still wish, they’d aborted him. Because the end result would have been the same. And my family would have been spared a world of pain believing we were losing brother and mother both. I was in ICU at the time after an allergic reaction that left me unable to breathe. How do you suppose my sister felt? Mother dying, sister dying, brother dead–just a matter of time on that one. Ten years old, watching her entire family struggling to breathe, struggling to live.

And you motherfuckers would call my mom a murderer for this. And you cared more for a baby already dying than you did for the two already born who needed their mom.

Fuck you. You’re not pro-life. You’re anti-woman, anti-family, anti-compassion and anti-love.

Digby:

According to the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, just more than 1 percent of abortions take place at week 21 or later, many because of devastating medical situations like ours. Each of these mothers must battle through her own hell to decide on and find the medical care she needs, gather her friends and family to lean on, and grieve.

Congress should not take this decision away from any woman — any family — who is in need. Banning abortions after 20 weeks would be arbitrary, and its consequences would place an unimaginable burden on women like me.

When an abortion was the best of only horrible options, I was beyond grateful that one was available in a safe, compassionate medical establishment. And that my family could begin to heal. I hope our senators will consider women and families like mine before casting their votes.

These anti-abortion zealots are cruel busybodies who are determined to control women and their families' most intimate decisions. There is no greater intrusion of the government into the lives of individuals than this. Sorry, taxing your income or regulating the water supply doesn't rate up there with making a woman carry a dying fetus with no brain inside of her in order to appease some fanatics who think she should be forced to do it for reasons that make no sense at all.

And yet these people (people like Rand Paul) who fetishize freedom and liberty in every other case, believe that this is the one exception to their rule.

People like to say that those who are anti-abortion are good people and I'm sure they have many good qualities. But this is a heartless and callous encroachment into the most elemental aspect of women's lives and I'm hard pressed to see it as anything but malevolent.