Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed a near-total abortion ban into law. The law, the “Heartbeat Protection Act,” prohibits “physicians from knowingly performing or inducing a termination of pregnancy” after six weeks — before many even know that they are pregnant.
When you reference so-called heartbeat bills, please remind readers that a fetus has a detectable electrical “pulse” long before it has an actual heart or heartbeat.
Has anyone actually thought through the ramifications and realistic consequences of this new abortion bill? Who is going to care for these unwanted babies...perhaps all the women and men that support this legislation (that has little to no affect on their lives) will step up and support and care for these children through college age...if they support more children, they should be required to support the resulting unwanted children born to the unfortunates who can't afford to travel or move out of state.
If you are going to scream to protect unfortunates from themselves, you have to step up and take the responsibility for your actions over the lives of others you so desperately want to protect...otherwise you would have to be considered to be hollow, soulless, irresponsible, whining, childlike idiots...or Trump/DeSantis/Graham/Gulliani...etc... cultists.
You think there are too many homeless now? You think there are too many drug users. Too many shootings? Well do something constructive then instead of adding to the problem...sign a pledge to adopt all these unwanted children and prove why it is so important to SAVE lives that can be productive and law abiding citizens of your MAGA country. Prove that here is true long term concern behind your stated convictions. Educate, feed and care for these 15,000 plus per year infants, Mr and Mrs Floridian DeSantis supporters, to the tune of $20,000 plus per infant per year for 21 years. With 3% inflation per year that would work out to...lets see...15,000 times $20,000 for the first year equals 300,000,000 at the end of the first year. By the end of the 2nd year $900,000,000. By the end of the 3rd year, 2.1 Billion dollars. ( inflation not factored in) These babies you want to save don't just live 1 year, they accumulate and still need to be fed, housed, clothed, monitored, educated, cared for...so they don't end up on the street to survive. Adding to the homeless population problem and cluttering up your life and so on.
Do the math... it's elementary addition 1+3+9 and so on.... and all you have to do is add 0's...hope you have a lot of $'s to afford all those 0's...because once they are born you are going to have to pay for them 21 years going forward....
Face it, the law is not a near total ban, it is a total ban. And as with so much of this crap, it's based on junk science and evangelical Christian dogma. The state is already being sued by a group of Jewish women claiming that the 15 week ban violated their religious freedom as we know in Judaism life begins at birth and the life of the mother is always preferred over the life of the fetus. We'll see what happens when the Trumpist judiciary is confronted with a religious freedom case that does not involve the least persecuted group in America - angry, white evangelicals.
As a retired OB/GYN nurse practitioner who went to work at a large teaching hospital in AL in 1969, let me describe the never mentioned consequences of these anti-abortion laws especially in rural, poor Southern communities of which I am familiar. Recall that education has taken numerous hits as well and that young girls, teenagers have little knowledge or understanding of body processes as a rule most especially the underprivileged. How many of these “advanced” legislators recall the raging hormones of their middle to late teenage years resulting in trysts resulting in conception behind the football stands, in cars, even homes; the bedrooms of youngsters “studying” together perhaps but without supervision. Remember those parents of said teenagers are likely working two jobs to support families including the now geriatric populations who have no group homes to go to in post Covid World. I was fortunate to work under the mentorship of leading OB/GYN physicians in their field who saw the need for medically supervised safe abortions for young women in need; let’s forget all the qualifiers as to how the pregnancy happened and just agree they do and will regardless of laws in place especially since contraception is next on the hit list of women’s rights. Once pregnancy is apparent likely later than sooner these young innocent girls (they’re only human; don’t dare bring religion into this conversation; it has no place here) then these young women found abortion in 1969 from the hands of profiteers of human suffering, so called midwives with no training who had access to a folding table and other paraphernalia used to induce a high risk abortion for money 💰. Recall the film “Dirty Dancing” anyone? It was life in those years. When the procedure was accomplished often by inserting gauze into the uterus with a coat hanger or other means as I was never privy to witness one of these procedures, the child was on her own until she painfully passed the material and fetus and then developed a fever and life threatening infection which brought her finally to thee attention of the doctors who early on could do no more than try to salvage the lives of these young, initially pretty, soft skinned naive young girls. My heart breaks 💔 as I recall the faces of so many brown and white now dead young people who were victims of overwhelming infection, sepsis, and died after enduring weeks of antibiotics having had in most instances had their reproductive organs surgically removed in last ditch efforts to save their lives; the battles raged for weeks of pain and suffering beyond the imaginations of anyone who has not witnessed this phenomenon personally. If you imagine for even a second that this cottage industry of illegal abortion will not spring back to life you are sadly mistaken. A determined, desperate young woman will go to any means necessary to rid herself of the shame, rejection of loved ones and promise of a baby she cannot care for to avoid carrying the baby to term for adoption or other avenues of support. I was fortunate to work for forward thinking physicians who thought this tragic waste of human suffering and life was an abomination and so in the early seventies they came together to find solutions to offer safe, medically supervised and legal abortions to this population by starting with panels much like juries who listened to the stories these young women had to tell about how they found themselves in such hellish predicaments and voted (in the early years to approve abortions on individual bases) while setting up planned parenthood to avoid repetition of such scenarios. Now just one of you high minded legislators, many of you with daughters I assume, tell me: what would you do when your daughter finds herself in a remote back alley with that “folding table and dirty knife” right out of “Dirty Dancing” enduring an illegal abortion at the hands of a profit motive provider of such illegal services? What will you say at her funeral? You think not in America? BULLSHIT. We’ve been there already 50 years ago and we’ll be there again if you keep your high minded thinking on the path before us. All rights for girls and women in healthcare, education, the workplace are eroding faster than we can count. This nation has more women than men and we will take you down in the voting booths. The earth 🌎 already has 8 billion people
it cannot support in years ahead so you would force more? I DEMAND THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT BE INCLUDED AS A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT NOW. It’s been over a hundred years. Giving women the right to vote was never enough. I never in my long career was paid equal money for equal work; still would not be. Just one more thing; how did you manage to photoshop that image of smiling women and girls even including a lovely brown face? HORSEFEATHERS. IT’S FAKE. I call on women everywhere to exercise the few rights remaining to you to stand up and let your voices against oppression be heard now! For the sake of the teenager in your house who would never let her own raging hormones color her judgement. PLEASE! STOP THE MURDER OF THE CHILDREN WE ALREADY HAVE.
The gross ignorance and negligence at work in state legislatures still knocks the wind out of me. Clearly, the men (and sadly, women) who are voting against women are willfully blind to how a woman's body operates and how a fetus progresses (have they no women in their lives that have gotten pregnant?) and the current state of medical care. Getting any appt quickly with a provider can be difficult and getting test results usually requires chasing the provider's office. I suspect the time is coming where the large majority of the country that finds this hideous rejection of science and medicine to be abhorrent will need to protest in large numbers at state legislatures and courts, as well as in DC.
Here in Texas, our foster care system has rampant sexual and physical abuse as well as neglect and overcrowding. And yet our legislature & governor implemented a 6 week ban on abortions. These ghouls are pro-birth, not pro-life.
This bill is pure base red meat and overt prejudice (hatred even?) against the poor and the unconnected. Every one of these cynical lawmakers will have the access and means to get an abortion when their 17 year old daughters get pregnant. Florida is led by some pretty awful human beings. I realized these past years that no one should ever again get away with referring to themselves as “pro-life” *unless* they are equally up in arms about our wobbling education system, our third world permissive gun laws, foster care system, and our for-profit prison system. If you aren’t equally involved in fixing those dire issues, then you are not pro-life. You are anti-abortion. Let’s be clear about this.
I feel like DeSantis is the reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy with new issues. Are we really going to have to rehash all that again, I wonder? It seems like history is not something that is taught well in this country.
The dating of pregnancy is based on a historical quirk. It is timed from the beginning of the woman’s last menstrual period. Since women do not ovulate until 2 weeks after their menses and an egg cannot be fertilized until after the woman ovulates a woman who we refer to as “6 weeks pregnant” has in reality been pregnant only 4 weeks.
I'm "liking" this post for its reporting, not the content. Anyone who saw the mostly white and female group of people around the governor signing this law would think he had handed out free college vouchers rather than a death sentence on vulnerable women. It must not stand.
Florida Constitution, SECTION 23. Right of privacy.—Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person’s private life except as otherwise provided herein. This section shall not be construed to limit the public’s right of access to public records and meetings as provided by law.
History.—Added, C.S. for H.J.R. 387, 1980; adopted 1980; Am. proposed by Constitution Revision Commission, Revision No. 13, 1998, filed with the Secretary of State May 5, 1998; adopted 1998.
As an older woman, I must admit that I have spent much of my life fighting for the rights and privileges that men enjoy in work and life. I have supported Planned Parenthood and marched and if honest, I have been a pain in the butt about the testicularly violent planet on which we all have watched much endless suffering. My mother had FIVE children that she did not want. There was no birth control available in those days. We were extremely poor as a result, my father moved to the UK to avoid paying child support, my mother was miserable and drank heavily and was abusive in the extreme. The trauma experienced by myself and my surviving siblings has followed us through life. Statistically, most of the occupants of our prison system are from backgrounds of poverty and/or neglect and abuse.
Yet Republicans want to force women to have babies that they may not be able to care for or support or even don't want. We are not breeding machines.
Most of the comments here indicate that these curbs on the rights of women's bodily autonomy are not supported by THE PEOPLE. Why the hell we women, over 50% of the planet, are not rioting in the streets is my question? WTF!
When you reference so-called heartbeat bills, please remind readers that a fetus has a detectable electrical “pulse” long before it has an actual heart or heartbeat.
Has anyone actually thought through the ramifications and realistic consequences of this new abortion bill? Who is going to care for these unwanted babies...perhaps all the women and men that support this legislation (that has little to no affect on their lives) will step up and support and care for these children through college age...if they support more children, they should be required to support the resulting unwanted children born to the unfortunates who can't afford to travel or move out of state.
If you are going to scream to protect unfortunates from themselves, you have to step up and take the responsibility for your actions over the lives of others you so desperately want to protect...otherwise you would have to be considered to be hollow, soulless, irresponsible, whining, childlike idiots...or Trump/DeSantis/Graham/Gulliani...etc... cultists.
You think there are too many homeless now? You think there are too many drug users. Too many shootings? Well do something constructive then instead of adding to the problem...sign a pledge to adopt all these unwanted children and prove why it is so important to SAVE lives that can be productive and law abiding citizens of your MAGA country. Prove that here is true long term concern behind your stated convictions. Educate, feed and care for these 15,000 plus per year infants, Mr and Mrs Floridian DeSantis supporters, to the tune of $20,000 plus per infant per year for 21 years. With 3% inflation per year that would work out to...lets see...15,000 times $20,000 for the first year equals 300,000,000 at the end of the first year. By the end of the 2nd year $900,000,000. By the end of the 3rd year, 2.1 Billion dollars. ( inflation not factored in) These babies you want to save don't just live 1 year, they accumulate and still need to be fed, housed, clothed, monitored, educated, cared for...so they don't end up on the street to survive. Adding to the homeless population problem and cluttering up your life and so on.
Do the math... it's elementary addition 1+3+9 and so on.... and all you have to do is add 0's...hope you have a lot of $'s to afford all those 0's...because once they are born you are going to have to pay for them 21 years going forward....
Face it, the law is not a near total ban, it is a total ban. And as with so much of this crap, it's based on junk science and evangelical Christian dogma. The state is already being sued by a group of Jewish women claiming that the 15 week ban violated their religious freedom as we know in Judaism life begins at birth and the life of the mother is always preferred over the life of the fetus. We'll see what happens when the Trumpist judiciary is confronted with a religious freedom case that does not involve the least persecuted group in America - angry, white evangelicals.
As a retired OB/GYN nurse practitioner who went to work at a large teaching hospital in AL in 1969, let me describe the never mentioned consequences of these anti-abortion laws especially in rural, poor Southern communities of which I am familiar. Recall that education has taken numerous hits as well and that young girls, teenagers have little knowledge or understanding of body processes as a rule most especially the underprivileged. How many of these “advanced” legislators recall the raging hormones of their middle to late teenage years resulting in trysts resulting in conception behind the football stands, in cars, even homes; the bedrooms of youngsters “studying” together perhaps but without supervision. Remember those parents of said teenagers are likely working two jobs to support families including the now geriatric populations who have no group homes to go to in post Covid World. I was fortunate to work under the mentorship of leading OB/GYN physicians in their field who saw the need for medically supervised safe abortions for young women in need; let’s forget all the qualifiers as to how the pregnancy happened and just agree they do and will regardless of laws in place especially since contraception is next on the hit list of women’s rights. Once pregnancy is apparent likely later than sooner these young innocent girls (they’re only human; don’t dare bring religion into this conversation; it has no place here) then these young women found abortion in 1969 from the hands of profiteers of human suffering, so called midwives with no training who had access to a folding table and other paraphernalia used to induce a high risk abortion for money 💰. Recall the film “Dirty Dancing” anyone? It was life in those years. When the procedure was accomplished often by inserting gauze into the uterus with a coat hanger or other means as I was never privy to witness one of these procedures, the child was on her own until she painfully passed the material and fetus and then developed a fever and life threatening infection which brought her finally to thee attention of the doctors who early on could do no more than try to salvage the lives of these young, initially pretty, soft skinned naive young girls. My heart breaks 💔 as I recall the faces of so many brown and white now dead young people who were victims of overwhelming infection, sepsis, and died after enduring weeks of antibiotics having had in most instances had their reproductive organs surgically removed in last ditch efforts to save their lives; the battles raged for weeks of pain and suffering beyond the imaginations of anyone who has not witnessed this phenomenon personally. If you imagine for even a second that this cottage industry of illegal abortion will not spring back to life you are sadly mistaken. A determined, desperate young woman will go to any means necessary to rid herself of the shame, rejection of loved ones and promise of a baby she cannot care for to avoid carrying the baby to term for adoption or other avenues of support. I was fortunate to work for forward thinking physicians who thought this tragic waste of human suffering and life was an abomination and so in the early seventies they came together to find solutions to offer safe, medically supervised and legal abortions to this population by starting with panels much like juries who listened to the stories these young women had to tell about how they found themselves in such hellish predicaments and voted (in the early years to approve abortions on individual bases) while setting up planned parenthood to avoid repetition of such scenarios. Now just one of you high minded legislators, many of you with daughters I assume, tell me: what would you do when your daughter finds herself in a remote back alley with that “folding table and dirty knife” right out of “Dirty Dancing” enduring an illegal abortion at the hands of a profit motive provider of such illegal services? What will you say at her funeral? You think not in America? BULLSHIT. We’ve been there already 50 years ago and we’ll be there again if you keep your high minded thinking on the path before us. All rights for girls and women in healthcare, education, the workplace are eroding faster than we can count. This nation has more women than men and we will take you down in the voting booths. The earth 🌎 already has 8 billion people
it cannot support in years ahead so you would force more? I DEMAND THE EQUAL RIGHTS AMENDMENT BE INCLUDED AS A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT NOW. It’s been over a hundred years. Giving women the right to vote was never enough. I never in my long career was paid equal money for equal work; still would not be. Just one more thing; how did you manage to photoshop that image of smiling women and girls even including a lovely brown face? HORSEFEATHERS. IT’S FAKE. I call on women everywhere to exercise the few rights remaining to you to stand up and let your voices against oppression be heard now! For the sake of the teenager in your house who would never let her own raging hormones color her judgement. PLEASE! STOP THE MURDER OF THE CHILDREN WE ALREADY HAVE.
When loudmouth Ron DeSantis is relatively quiet about something, you know it's bad news.
The gross ignorance and negligence at work in state legislatures still knocks the wind out of me. Clearly, the men (and sadly, women) who are voting against women are willfully blind to how a woman's body operates and how a fetus progresses (have they no women in their lives that have gotten pregnant?) and the current state of medical care. Getting any appt quickly with a provider can be difficult and getting test results usually requires chasing the provider's office. I suspect the time is coming where the large majority of the country that finds this hideous rejection of science and medicine to be abhorrent will need to protest in large numbers at state legislatures and courts, as well as in DC.
Here in Texas, our foster care system has rampant sexual and physical abuse as well as neglect and overcrowding. And yet our legislature & governor implemented a 6 week ban on abortions. These ghouls are pro-birth, not pro-life.
This bill is pure base red meat and overt prejudice (hatred even?) against the poor and the unconnected. Every one of these cynical lawmakers will have the access and means to get an abortion when their 17 year old daughters get pregnant. Florida is led by some pretty awful human beings. I realized these past years that no one should ever again get away with referring to themselves as “pro-life” *unless* they are equally up in arms about our wobbling education system, our third world permissive gun laws, foster care system, and our for-profit prison system. If you aren’t equally involved in fixing those dire issues, then you are not pro-life. You are anti-abortion. Let’s be clear about this.
Welcome to Gilead.
I feel like DeSantis is the reincarnation of Joseph McCarthy with new issues. Are we really going to have to rehash all that again, I wonder? It seems like history is not something that is taught well in this country.
The dating of pregnancy is based on a historical quirk. It is timed from the beginning of the woman’s last menstrual period. Since women do not ovulate until 2 weeks after their menses and an egg cannot be fertilized until after the woman ovulates a woman who we refer to as “6 weeks pregnant” has in reality been pregnant only 4 weeks.
I'm "liking" this post for its reporting, not the content. Anyone who saw the mostly white and female group of people around the governor signing this law would think he had handed out free college vouchers rather than a death sentence on vulnerable women. It must not stand.
Florida Constitution, SECTION 23. Right of privacy.—Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person’s private life except as otherwise provided herein. This section shall not be construed to limit the public’s right of access to public records and meetings as provided by law.
History.—Added, C.S. for H.J.R. 387, 1980; adopted 1980; Am. proposed by Constitution Revision Commission, Revision No. 13, 1998, filed with the Secretary of State May 5, 1998; adopted 1998.
"The cruelty is the point." 😢
As an older woman, I must admit that I have spent much of my life fighting for the rights and privileges that men enjoy in work and life. I have supported Planned Parenthood and marched and if honest, I have been a pain in the butt about the testicularly violent planet on which we all have watched much endless suffering. My mother had FIVE children that she did not want. There was no birth control available in those days. We were extremely poor as a result, my father moved to the UK to avoid paying child support, my mother was miserable and drank heavily and was abusive in the extreme. The trauma experienced by myself and my surviving siblings has followed us through life. Statistically, most of the occupants of our prison system are from backgrounds of poverty and/or neglect and abuse.
Yet Republicans want to force women to have babies that they may not be able to care for or support or even don't want. We are not breeding machines.
Most of the comments here indicate that these curbs on the rights of women's bodily autonomy are not supported by THE PEOPLE. Why the hell we women, over 50% of the planet, are not rioting in the streets is my question? WTF!
too bad DeSantis' mom didn't abort him