Abortion: more American insanity

[Pewpewbarneymcgrew]

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/12/08/us/texas-abortion-ruling-attorney-general-petition/index.html
Just horrific

Meant to put this in feminism chat 🤷🏻‍♀️

Shows 'pro life' for the lie it is.

If you report your OP you can ask MNHQ to move it, but it's fine on this board too.

If this poor woman suffers harm because of this appalling man's dogma, I hope there's some way he can be held responsible.

BBC news article says she’s now left Texas to get the abortion she needs elsewhere. She shouldn’t have to, but at least she could.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-67687349

The article states that some parts of Texas have made it illegal to transport a woman so that she could leave the area for an abortion. How long before that leads to pregnant women finding their access to transport restricted just in case?

Leave it here where the thread will be read OP. I'm so shocked and saddened by this, it's fucking disgraceful.

The fetus was suffering a fatal genetic condition.

Pro life doesn’t give a shit once the fetus is born.

I hope she's now managed to get the abortion wherever she has had to go, but for fuck sake we are nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century she shouldn't be having to go through all this crap.

It's wrong! It's just wrong.

I’ve been following this and was disappointed but not surprised to see this. Also disappointed but not surprised to see the Center for Reproductive Rights use the phrase “pregnant people”.

There is no Texas-wide law prohibiting travel outside of the state for an abortion, but some counties have passed such restrictions in recent months. In October, Lubbock County became the largest county to enact such a measure, making it illegal for anyone to transport a pregnant woman through the county, or pay for her travel, for the purposes of obtaining an abortion.

From The BBC article. This is really scary stuff.

And yet, awful as it is, surely it's precisely these Texas-style right-wing nutters and Trump fans who are the only ones to stand up for separate women's spaces and so on (and being praised for it on other MN threads). Whatever their motives. We're heading in a similar direction here, but the US as usual is more polarised.

All that shows is that life is complicated, which we already know. The Trumpians and other nutters want a return to sex-segregation because they believe in strict gender roles and want little boys to have short hair and no access to dolls, little girls to have long hair and compulsory dolls in preparation for a life as wives and mothers first and foremost. Very few people on this board would agree with that world view. We want sex-segregation when women are vulnerable because of male violence. We don't want a return to strict gender roles. Those two sentences are not incompatible.

duc748 I’m guessing there is pretty much nobody in the world who has exactly the same set of preferences & beliefs as I do, or as you do. We can still group together when we find common ground. The alternative is tribal, polarised, and ultimately undemocratic society (as described in the current Reith lectures)

I hope we all agree that abortion is healthcare and women should absolutely have the right to choose

Yes, definitely, and they really shouldn’t have to travel so far away from their homes & support to access that healthcare

This brave woman should get every woman of the year award going for choosing to be a test case in the fight against anti-abortion legislation.

It’s sheer coincidence that the ‘Howdy-Arabians’ (as I heard them referred to
on tiktok earlier) advocate for separate women’s spaces.

Or actually, just a reflection of how ordinary and mainstream single sex provision is as an idea. And how weird it is that gender ideologues have made anyone think otherwise. Of course, it plays into the hands of those ideologues to pretend that it isn’t mainstream and it’s like banning abortion or prosecuting women for drinking on some Schrödinger's pregnancy pretext or whatever else.

But it’s not the same thing. The people looking to ban abortion and prevent women from even travelling to where it’s legal may also share various banal and mainstream opinions. They might, for example, think roast chicken tastes quite nice or believe the earth is round. That doesn’t make either of those weird ‘right wing’ positions.

I don’t think the UK is heading towards banning abortion. Certainly, the women loudly protesting about SPS policy etc would likely protest equally loudly about any attempts to prevent women from
accessing abortion.

I wasn't meaning to imply that the UK is moving towards further abortion restrictions, (although I remember US liberals assuring worried Brits for years that Roe v Wade was rock-solid, and there was no need to worry about it), rather that the reluctance of UK voters to support the Tories, even when they present much better on the gender issue than Labour (as shown in a current MN thread) is multiplied ten-fold if you are trying to convince US liberals to vote for Trump, or de Santis, or, indeed, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.