Roe v Wade overturned

[yourhairiswinterfire]

Fucking devastating.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-us-canada-61709865

Perhaps this has already been shared but it bears sharing again

amp.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/jun/22/us-woman-left-traumatised-after-malta-hospital-refuses-life-saving-abortion

Why will they target contraception next?
Because this is the religiously-backed patriarchy and they hate women, and they see sex outside marriage as essentially sinful and therefore punishable for women. (But OK/forgivable for men, because men are always right in the patriarchy). Pregnancies and birth from sinful sex are a price that women must pay. Not men. The concept and shame of illegitimacy for kids will come back in, creating a two-tier hierarchy for children, with disastrous consequences for the welfare of illegitimate children.

And in this patriarchal world view, women having sex in marriage is for women having babies, so for them, having access to contraception is not necessary.

Women having sex outside marriage shouldn’t have any access to contraception because it will only tempt/encourage/unfairly allow them to get away with doing something sinful without punishment. So contraception for unmarried women is not necessary. Contraception is unnecessary.

Honestly I think we can’t even imagine how far this could go. My utmost sympathy to American women. Whichever US state they are in this will affect them more or less acutely, because it’s going to cause political chaos, social division and female death.

Remember how we all posted on here in sympathy last summer for Afghan women after the Americans left and the Taliban just strolled back in to take power and then they’ve immediately banned women from jobs, girls from school and god knows what else that we don’t even hear about? This feels very similar.

And the US is extremely culturally influential on the rest of the world. As is the political figure of Trump, whose legacy all this chaos and death will be.

Here in the UK we have currently Nadine Dorries who brought a vote to Parliament to take abortion down to 12 weeks, flourishing in her career as a cabinet minister and key cheerleader for Boris Johnson. She’s toned down her evangelical Christian links these days but that’s how she originally first got herself noticed as an anonymous backbencher.
Jacob Rees Mogg I assume also might like to cut abortion rights in the UK for religious reasons? And Johnson has been signaling that he could remove the Human Rights Act here. Women’s rights are human rights.

Politicians across the world who can see good solid careers being built by their peers on smashing up women’s rights may be tempted to copycat. Trump’s rigging of the Supreme Court will be incredibly complex and politically destabilising to undo, if that is even possible. Countries who disapprove of extremist misogyny might cut economic ties with somewhere like Afghanistan.. but nobody will do that with the US. So this will go essentially unpunished politically.

I am horrified by what has just been done to women. And the idea that women rights, such as they were, have just been thrown back so far in time that a generation of women will probably spend their remaining adult years trying to protect women and girls against this.

That’s going to hugely limit female achievement and flourishing for decades. It’s a green light to bring in all sorts of further misogyny, politically. I have no idea how America can undo this move without waiting for more Supreme Court judges to die and be replaced by someone pro-choice, but it’s going to be unbelievably divisive and take far longer than women and girls have got.

Identity politics is self-limiting and divisive politics, but the actual villain here is Trump and his perversion of the Supreme Court judiciary to gain political advantage for himself. He did this to women. Women have been let down by US party politics on all ends of the spectrum since the Roe v Wade judgment in the 1970s. None of them have legally shored up women’s rights to protect against this happening.

It appears to be a battle of extremes now

NY alone has raised £3m in 24 hours to pay for women to travel from other states

It is reported that it will be an election issue for democrats to put it in legislation federally

Hearing US women protesting made me cry a bit, so hard for them

Listening to radio, hope I heard it all correctly dc a bit noisy

@darcyesque can you provide more information about that? Im interested to know more details for when I'm turfing my very binary thinking friends who still think Corbyn would have been Jesus incarnate.

I'm so, so angry. Angry for American women and girls, of course, but the posturing on social media is winding me up hugely. I need to step away from LinkedIn especially, with all the wailing over "people with uterii" going on I want to scream. Women are dehumanised enough as it is - and now we are just an amalgamation of random body parts, walking around with a brain somehow attached. 🤬

Why anyone would sanely import or adopt any moral or social learnings from the US this decade is beyond my comprehension...

‘Women are dehumanised enough as it is - and now we are just an amalgamation of random body parts, walking around with a brain somehow attached. 🤬’

Some of us have a brain attached. Not all.

This.

One thing that the assault on our rights under the guise of trans rights has taught me is that nothing can be taken for granted when it comes to women's sex based rights - constant vigilance and defence of them is probably always going to be necessary.

Depressing but true, I think.

Already seeing lots of posts about how we shouldn’t say American women have lost their reproductive rights because it’s exclusionary and we should just say ‘people’ (they’re not calling us womb carriers anymore - that goes down like a lead balloon and they can at least see that).

No. We’re women. Transmen and non-binary people can call themselves whatever they like but we are fighting for their rights as well when we say “women”.

Can i just point out that abortion is not available to all women in the UK. Women in Northern Ireland, despite the law being changed, do not have access to abortion services as they have not been commissioned. Last year hundreds of women had to travel to England. Just imagine what happened during the pandemic.

You might not be able to change things in America, but you might be able to closer to home. Write to your MP, and the secretary of state for health.

Yes. Abortion has been decriminalised in NI but they won’t commission services to provide it there to all legal gestations and Westminster politicians haven’t intervened to make them.
Definitely worth writing about that. But also Scotland in some places don’t provide above about 15 weeks. The latest on cases are often the most vulnerable women and girls in very complex or just very difficult situations stacked very high against them.

Elizabeth Warren has just released a video. It's all "pregnant people ". For. Fuck's. Sake. It's WOMEN. Fucking say it. If you are too scared to say it you are too weak to fight. So fuck off with this "we have to stick together " bullshit as a way of shutting women down. Two sides of the same fucking coin.

Well said

Woman. it’s not hard to say until apparently it is

so bad

💐to @GrinitchSpinach and other US posters and the hundreds of millions of women in the US states who are busily forcing birth on them. You have a brilliant, messy, fascinating country; someone mentioned the Centre for Reproductive Rights, I hope the brilliant US women activists with their occasional male allies succeed in overturning this horrible decision.

I will sign the letter to Liz Truss, she is probably as useful as a chocolate teaspoon herself but if it influences the Foreign Office than that means it influences their diplomacy and what they say and fund for the UN and WHO. It’s probably important to show that women round the world are in solidarity with each other on this issue. That used to be a thing, didn’t it?

Devastating day and of course as with everything the US does it will influence the debate in other places.

Sickened by this. Equally sickened by the left wing misogynists crying over pregnant ‘people ‘ losing their rights. If you cannot name the sex class affected by this then please just sit the fuck down and leave the campaigning to those of us who know what a woman is.

PomegranateOfPersephone
You can find out more here about what abortion involves. www.bpas.org/abortion-care/what-to-expect-on-the-day/

If you look into it, the pro choice argument isn’t - quite rightly- that the very few women and girls who need a (legally, in UK terms) very late in gestation abortion, should have to give birth to a live, viable baby. That wouldn’t be an abortion, which by definition won’t result in a living baby.

In abortions say from 22-24 weeks (the upper limit legally in the uk is that the abortion must be completed before the first day of the 24th week starts) sometimes feticide is needed, in which the doctor injects the fetal heart to stop it, then they remove the fetus surgically, so there is no live birth. During this, the woman can have general anaesthetic.

If there’s no surgeon to provide that method or she doesn’t want it, she must go into induced labour to deliver vaginally, for which she will be need to remain all too awake and conscious obviously. At the gestations closest to the legal limit, feticide can also be needed in advance of inducing the delivery.

So I guess that’s partly why anti-choice people are so focused on heartbeats as a tangible symbol of fetal life and why they talk about abortion stopping beating hearts etc.

The desperation that would force women and girls to undergo either of those (heavy understatement) not pleasant options, is why pro-choice people are so focused on defending the rights of women and girls in extreme circumstances. Because those are the only circumstances in which anyone would have an abortion at a gestation very close to the legal limit. I can’t remember the statistics but I think each year it’s literally a handful of women having abortions in this time bracket in the UK.

And personally I find the 24 week limit ethically arbitrary because the girl or woman’s need for abortion doesn’t go away magically at the point of fetal viability with the most advanced cutting edge extremely invasive medical intervention possible, or closer to birth over the next 16 weeks. So yes, I think the law should be ‘as early as possible and as late as necessary’. The cut off point ethically for me, should be birth. In practice this up until birth limit would never be used at those late stages, but it’s a principled argument that makes explicit the idea that ‘not the church, not the state, women should decide their fate’.

And finally, if you look into this, there isn’t a consistent European position on abortion that you can point to. Several countries have on demand to 12 weeks but very restricted legal availability after: which doesn’t support all women who need it. Then there’s places like Poland and Malta. UK is a humane outlier with our law for the last 50+ years. reproductiverights.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/European-abortion-law-a-comparative-review.pdf

Some women in NI and Scotland still have to travel, which for some absolutely does mean they can’t get the abortion at all. It’s not OK that women and girls will be getting into debt to get the abortion they need only by travelling either.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/22/abortion-hierarchy-uk-lack-of-services-scotland-northern-ireland-england-terminate-pregnancy

There's a video of Megan Rapinoe doing the rounds where she talks about intersectionality and how this abortion development will disproportionately affect 'poor women, black women, brown women', you can almost hear her having to restrain herself from omitting 'transwomen', as they have always managed to insert themselves into that sort of list. She also uses 'women' throughout her speech.

I have to say I am getting sick of TRAs (some of whom we know frequent here for screenshots, hiiiiii!) weaponising this as 'ha ha, we told you so, see that your allies are anti-abortion, look how pro-choice we are'.

Like, just fuck off. We are well aware how much men hate us thank you very much. You know fuck all about abortion, it doesn't affect you, it will never affect you, it's just a handy tool for you to beat women with even more. Stay in your lane and sit the fuck down.

All this has done is emphasise even more how much women are hated from both left wing and right wing men.

Like, just fuck off. We are well aware how much men hate us thank you very much. You know fuck all about abortion, it doesn't affect you, it will never affect you, it's just a handy tool for you to beat women with even more. Stay in your lane and sit the fuck down.

All this has done is emphasise even more how much women are hated from both left wing and right wing men.

Well said.

Looking at twitter, one of the most woman hating 'women' is absolutely gleeful about this

It's actually quite disgusting to see.

Can i just point out that abortion is not available to all women in the UK. Women in Northern Ireland, despite the law being changed, do not have access to abortion services as they have not been commissioned. Last year hundreds of women had to travel to England. Just imagine what happened during the pandemic.

You might not be able to change things in America, but you might be able to closer to home. Write to your MP, and the secretary of state for health.

This is really important.

TRAs on Twitter have entered their ‘how can you even care about being called “womb carriers” after the repeal of Roe” phase.

Thank you for the helpful information Slothtoes.

I also found this on gov.uk which confirms what you say about only a tiny proportion of abortions happening after 24 weeks.

The proportion of abortions that are performed at under 10 weeks has continued to increase since 2010. In 2020, 88% of abortions were performed under 10 weeks, increasing from 82% in 2019 and 77% in 2010.
In comparison, abortions performed at 10-12 weeks decreased from 9% in 2019 to 6% in 2020. The percentage performed at 20 weeks and over decreased from 2% in 2019 to 1% in 2020. (Table 3a.il)
The legal limit for a woman having an abortion is 24 weeks gestation. This is the point at which the fetus is viable outside the mother's body. Abortions may be performed after 24 weeks in certain circumstances, for example, if the mother's life is at risk or the child would be born severely disabled. Abortions where gestation is 24 weeks or over account for a very small number of abortions (0.1% of the total). There were 236 such abortions in 2020.

I currently feel in agreement with this position. Apart from making medical termination easier to access in the first 10 weeks I don’t think I would change anything about the UK position.

I would remove the need for two doctors to have to sign off, and make it like any other health care procedure. Take it out of the criminal law basically and make it a health care decision. Although I would prefer there to be no specified limit, I can understand that would not be acceptable to many and so would not argue for a change to the 24 week limit at the moment. I would strongly resist any attempt to lower that limit.

Bernie Sanders has named "women" in his statement.