just collecting some anecdotes here
i finally found a place online (besides reddit /r/boston) that has some live info, https://www.facebook.com/PSLBoston/
roe v wade
still thinking about this one person I met and we started talking abortion, and he asked me “but are there benefits to being against abortion” and fortunately I’m older and wiser than when I first discovered feminism (last year of college) and could recognize when someone was playing devil’s advocate to show how smart and rational they are. with recognition I knew to not engage.
nice spring day.
trying to not give in to anger or pessimism. this doesn’t have to consume my life or mean that I can’t achieve my goals.
the supreme court. the hypocrisy is so clear – can’t confirm the same election year, but can confirm less than a month after RBG passed right before elections. illegitimate. (how does this compare to other crazy times in history? are we living through a particularly turbulent period? or am I just unaware of how crazy a world war is, etc.)
though, I don’t like a lot of the reddit comments. very much “those other people are idiots” which, we’re all idiots to some extent. but it’s very poor strategy, to not try to understand where other people are coming from (the argument about how anti-choice is hypocritical about killing women – but not if dying in childbirth is justified punishment for having pre-marital sex). i don’t have to engage / try to change minds. but it’s helpful to see others as humans worthy of engaging.
anecdotes
can’t get my shaarli (del.icio.us open source clone) back up easily, but had a quote a while back that opened my mind a bit. that the people who have late term abortions are people who have usually picked a name, bought a crib, painted a room for the baby.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/uibsh8/pro_life_is_not_pro_life/
shannamarie91 The first appointment showed it didn’t have a heartbeat and was told it would come out on its own. After three days they gave me a pill. That didn’t work either so I had to drive almost 2 hours to the nearest abortion clinic to have a D7C done because my body wasn’t letting the fetal body go. I was lucky to be able to have an abortion because otherwise I would have become infected and possibly died from the fetus not being removed.
DorisCrockford I feel you. I lost one that way at 18 weeks. They could have given me drugs to make me go into labor, but I just couldn’t face going through labor and no baby, plus I had a nursing toddler at home and I didn’t want to leave her overnight. There were three doctors in town who did that kind of work, two were away for the holidays, and one was injured. I had to wait two weeks, making sure that if I got a fever I’d go the the ER. People think it’s rare, but it really isn’t. Complications happen all the time.
Ra_In However, the language doesn’t appear to cover potential emergencies, so doctors may be forced to wait for the pregnant person to actually have life threatening symptoms before proceeding with the abortion. Pregnant people will still die (see what happened in Ireland).
Catinthehat5879 Yep. In practice, all of these pro life “life exceptions” mean that you have to be hours from death. If you’re not septic yet, you don’t qualify.
This one was just so visceral and ouch.
MarshallApplewhiteDo I know four women who would be dead if they hadn’t had abortions because of reasons like these. Two were ectopic, and two wouldn’t release when they miscarried. My own wife isn’t one of them, but dealt with a lot more pain when she had to waffle-stomp her miscarriage down the shower drain the day after an appointment where she found out there was no hearbeat. She had the option to have it surgically-removed by professionals, but wanted to wait another day or two.
This was me. Lost twins in the first trimester. Did the pills twice and no luck passing naturally. Insurance wanted $4500 to do surgery, but Planned Parenthood would do it for $400. I waded through protestors telling me that God loves my baby, and my baby has a name, while on the way in. Then was told that, due to TX law, I had to be shown my ultrasound image, and wait 11 days to confirm that the heartbeat hadn’t come back.
TXpheonix I developed a fever, chills, and kept getting worse through the 11 days I waited. My 5 year old laid in bed with me to watch his favorite movies. The whole time, I wondered if I was going to die and leave him alone.
jo-el-uh The same religious people who are celebrating that striking down Roe v Wade will “save babies” are the ones who patted my hand and told me that my dead son was “part of God’s plan.” I have been fortunate enough to have 2 more healthy boys since my loss, but without my medically necessary abortion, I don’t know that I would have. Abortions are Healthcare.
macarmy93 Because the last time many doctors took to the streets to protest, they were getting killed. Look up abortion related murders in the 90s. Executed in their homes, the streets, their place of work; churches. Its fucking wild.
SciencyNerdGirl You may not, and next time you’ll just have to die. How frickin scary is that?
socialdistanceftw Doctors aren’t going to stand by and let that happen. It’s like if they made appendectomies illegal. We’re not going to just watch someone die. Goes against all our training. The AMA will protect doctors that follow standard of care for ectopic pregnancies. There’s zero argument there. Either way they will die. It’s just a question of if mom is going down too.
StarktechJanitor What if the doctor is a conservative who thinks the mother is a lying slut who tried to illegally give herself an abortion? Happened in Australia with a nurse.
Shanashy It happened recently in Texas. She was initially charged with murder after having a miscarriage, but the charges were dropped after a major public outcry.
StarktechJanitor And not every woman will get the privilege of a public outcry.
American women are more than three times as likely as Canadian women to die in the maternal period (defined by the Centers for Disease Control as the start of pregnancy to one year after delivery or termination), six times as likely to die as Scandinavians. In every other wealthy country, and many less affluent ones, maternal mortality rates have been falling;
By standardizing its approach, Britain has reduced preeclampsia deaths to one in a million — a total of two deaths from 2012 to 2014. In the U.S., on the other hand, preeclampsia still accounts for about 8 percent of maternal deaths— 50 to 70 women a year. Including Lauren Bloomstein.
But in the U.S., maternal deaths increased from 2000 to 2014. In a recent analysis by the CDC Foundation, nearly 60 percent of such deaths are preventable.
Susinko I had that happen to me too. No heartbeat, nothing alive. I was devastated. My body refused to let it go so I had to take the pills. My doctor warned me that some could consider it an abortion despite it already being dead. These people confuse and horrifying me.
icedChaiplz I am so sorry for your loss.
I had an anencephaly diagnosis. (no skull) There is no chance for survival for this case. Yet I had many people telling me I could have given it a chance to live and it could have been another Tim Tebow story…. Tim Tebow wasn’t lacking bone structure.
I don’t get it either and I am sorry for those of us who not only have to endure the loss, but the stupidity of others who think they know better.
Dragonpixie45 I had this happen, almost same story. I was 12 weeks along and the hospital kept insisting to me I was 9 weeks and did a D&C because I had a infection and was bleeding very heavily and in an immense amount of pain.
I talked to my regular obgyn and he explained that I wouldn’t have been able to do anything if I was 12 weeks and he thinks that is why they kept insisting I was 9 weeks. It’s also why they sent me home the first night I went to the ER. It messed with my head for a long time.
hat-of-sky The D&C procedure has started and the doctor casually announces to his students that the patient misinformed them, she’s not 9 weeks but closer to 12. Then he continues the procedure. Trixie is shocked! It’s illegal! But what really makes her mad is that it’s so unfair that the rich women can get this done so easily while poor women are denied it! She’s not anti-abortion, she’s seen how much more the poor women need to be able to limit the size of their families.
Anyway it’s pretty clear the doctor knew the woman wasn’t only 9 weeks pregnant. He just waited until he’d got her dilated before he pretended to notice.
Dragonpixie45 It’s sad it really is and what shocks me is people are absolutely clueless about it. I had a friend go on a pro life rant with me and I shared my story and she was like yeah but that isn’t a abortion so doesn’t count and I assured her to the law it doesn’t matter.
The whole experience was absolutely horrific for me. The doctor that performed the procedure very clearly said it was my fault I had a infection.
AssistanceMedical951 because they can’t imagine that bad things can happen to “good” people. God is Santa Claus and if you’re good these things won’t happen to you.
Dragonpixie45 It’s willful ignorance and a peek into how people look at abortion and manage to justify how it doesn’t apply to them or people in their circle not realizing the law doesn’t freaking care!
Dragonpixie45 but when my friend went off on baby killing and how she was ok with abortion just not after a certain time I went off. I mean do people really truly people women are getting abortions when they are late term just cause they changed their minds?
And that’s not even taking into account it shouldn’t be any of their damn business anyway!
to watch malnutrtion spike this year due to ukraine war and covid. two decades of growing up optimistic, drastic declines in extreme poverty. overcoming hiv/aids. decline in conflicts in africa. it does kind of shatter my understanding of the world.. call me naive but maybe it will just give me the endurance of will to fight for a better world !
trying not to care too much. there’s a reason i try to FIFO limit my memory, i remember when the anger (angry feminism) on the one hand, made me some friends and had the energy to work on things like hack4fem. on the other hand, painfully cut me off from many other friends i really valued. i broke friendships with people who were basically same page as me, because i was such a raw wound of hurt.
anger. have to remember to direct it not at those around me. i should be glad to be able to carry the torch for them, just as they carry the torch for me in caring about other matters (eg ukraine war). it’s good that we are diversified, not a hive mind.
forgetting – at the same time the cost is that i forget many of the happy memories from those times. i wonder what it will take for me to think fondly of my past? i’m actually somewhat confident that I’ll look back at my current life and think, those are the good old days.
my life is so uncomplicated right now. i think about this every time i buy a frozen pizza which has been frequently this past 2 weeks XD;
i may be living in the good old days right now
a thought from stoicism – on hidden brain. that these travails are a challenge to us from a Stoic gods.
https://hidden-brain.simplecast.com/episodes/minimizing-pain-maximizing-joy-YQiVnRGw Minimizing Pain, Maximizing Joy | December 14th, 2020
covid exposure
i had a possible exposure wed evening traveling with someone who had a PCR sample noon the next day come back positive (pre-symptoms). caused a surprising amount of turmoil. seems like no more PCR on weekends for uni. the kind of exposure that pre-tests I would have just quarantined a week by default. perhaps i still should have – seems to have been infectious on Th. but for me the masks seems to have done their job !
un-interpretable tests
thankful to still have access to free, convenient, next-day at-home PCR tests through uni.
omicron seems to have missed my friends circle but the variant (BA.2.12.1) of a variant (BA.2) of a variant (omicron) of SAR-COV2 has hit hard. my advisor, my friend’s parent, three friends all caught it in the span or 2-3 weeks. the testing is all over the place, now that it’s wildly available, impossible to interpret without nurse.
- advisor – symptoms for 4 days before any tests (pcr or anitgen) came back positive
- friend A – negative PCR (results next day) followed by positive antigen later that day
- friend B – positive PCR (results next day) followed by – Cue (like a 10% PCR, 20 mins instead of 2 hrs of amplification) that evening, – antigen the next day even after symptoms started, and + antigen not until the day after that (also apparently there are saliva tests now)
- meanwhile i’m the weirdo with the repeated + antigen test that didn’t end up having covid
but actually the uncertainty this time around was worse than when I was certain I had COVID (given that I didn’t end up having any symptoms). constantly assessing risk. negotiating that with roommates, friends.
is it worth the stress?
i have zero qualms wearing a n95 around now (minus that it messes up my hair / is unfashionable), so that’s nice lol.
but yea the symptom starts seem to be 2-3 days out, definitely not 4-5 days out as with original COVID.
bike
stolen, RIP bike.