Post-Dobbs, Republicans Would Have Murdered My Wife
A miscarriage is a terrible thing to live through. Republicans would have killed Debra for having one.
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It’s been a while since I’ve written about the back-to-back miscarriages Deb and I dealt with in 2006. But since I am new to the vast majority of you, I’ll be filling you in on the details of my life over the next several months (years).
There’s an entire story about how Debbie and I got engaged, married, and started trying to have a baby because one of our friends asked me to be a donor for her and her partner. That’s for another day.1 Today we are going to focus on the horrorshow of 2006.
Marriage + Tragedy = Fuck You, 2006
Deb and I were married in early 2006 and it was a great wedding. I had a terrible haircut and Debbie had been browbeaten into letting her mother put makeup on. Debbie rarely puts on any makeup at all and her mother did an awful job. We just smiled and made the best of it. Everything else was great.
As Deb was walking down the aisle, her aunt (we think) kicked a plug out and the music stopped. My brother started whistling “Here Comes The Bride” and everyone joined in. It was funny as hell and absolutely perfect.
Debbie was pregnant within a few months and 2006 was looking to be a hell of a year for us. And it was. Just not the way we were hoping for.
In the third month of the pregnancy, something went wrong and the placenta started to break down. That early in the pregnancy there’s not a goddamn thing medical science can do. Maybe a century from now but today? Nothing.
We were told to go home and wait for the miscarriage to pass. The doctor said it would be like a heavy period. But that’s not what happened. Instead, Debbie woke up in the middle of the night in a pool of blood. She had begun to hemorrhage.
We went to the emergency room where they gave her a large pad and had us sit in the waiting room. Debbie had already been bleeding for a while and it wasn’t slowing down. After sitting in a bloody mess for twenty minutes or so, we went up to the desk and complained. The nurse became extremely motivated as soon as she looked at Debbie’s face which was white as a sheet and saw the amount of blood she was losing. Debbie was admitted a few minutes later.
To save her life, Debie received a D&C, a dilation and curettage. This procedure is identical to an abortion and if Republicans had their way, it would be illegal.
I want to be clear here: Debbie was actually bleeding to death. Republicans would have forced her to wait until she was at death’s door, or had one foot through it, before allowing the doctors to do something.
If they had waited another hour, maybe she would have gotten an infection. Maybe her uterus would have been damaged. Jesus, maybe they would have sent her home because, fuck you, it’s “God’s will” and maybe a miracle will occur.
It’s very important to understand this miracle nonsense is part of the twisted reasoning behind denying women an abortion while their fetus is dying and inflicting great harm on them. As long as the fetus is still in the woman’s body, there’s a chance of a miracle that will reverse the miscarriage and the baby will be born perfectly healthy. Sure, it’s never happened ever in all of recorded history but there’s always a first time. Therefore, we should sacrifice as many women as possible.
But mostly, abortion bans are just about cruelty and hatred of women.
What does that look like in real life? It looks like this:
That could have been Debbie if Republicans had had their way in 2006.
You and I see the nightmare that Josh and Amanda are living through and it breaks our hearts. We feel anger for what was done to them and we hope it never happens to anyone else.
I promise you, right now, Republicans are circulating their name and address online and a campaign of domestic terrorism is being organized. Because when a Republican sees this, they have two thoughts:
How many more women can they force to suffer like this?
How much pain will they need to inflict on Josh and Amanda so no one else will dare come forward to speak out?
I have to assume Josh and Amanda are prepared to have their lives dragged through the mud by monsters and god help Republicans when they try to “expose” a grieving couple. They don’t have a shred of moral decency so they don’t understand how they appear to people who do. It’s why they’re always so surprised when their evil turns around and bites them on the ass.
As for Debbie and myself, if this was all 2006 had in store for us, that would have been bad enough. But it wasn’t.
No, really, fuck you, 2006
A few months after the miscarriage, we were given the all-clear to try again and Debbie got pregnant almost immediately. We held our breath for three months, hoping we would get past the first trimester.
And we didn’t.
The exact same thing happened. Turns out that Debbie needed a simple and inexpensive shot to thin her blood and everything would have been fine. This is why we have Jordan and Anastasia. The blood test to find this out was also simple and inexpensive but it wasn’t covered by insurance so the doctor never told us about it after the first miscarriage. Thus, while the first one was unavoidable (it’s not a common thing so no reason to check beforehand), the second one was 100% unnecessary. Eat shit, American healthcare, the “greatest in the world.”
We didn’t know this yet but we knew the miscarriage was happening. Rather than wait to see if it would pass on its own or if Debbie would almost bleed to death again, we went to the hospital and insisted on a D&C immediately.
And that brings us back to the Republican war on women yet again.
Even knowing that Debbie’s previous miscarriage had resulted in a life-threatening hemorrhage, Republicans would have forced doctors to send her home and wait. The last time Debbie started to bleed, it was the middle of the night. What if she had not woken up for another 20 or 30 minutes? She might not have woken up at all.
What if the next time, her miscarriage had stalled and become septic like Amanda’s? Numerous women have had this happen to them throughout Republican-controlled states already. They’ve lost the ability to have children. Some of them have possibly died.
If you’re wondering why these stories have not been massive front-page headlines for weeks on end, you should know the answer by now. Doing so would require discussing why these women are suffering and dying and that would require pointing the finger, unerringly, at Republicans.
But we don’t do that in America’s press. We will run hundreds of above-the-fold articles about a “crisis” at the border to terrorize racist white people but talk about how Republicans are literally maiming and killing women? No, thank you. That would be biased.
Fortunately for Debbie, we had our children pre-Dobbs and in a blue state. We were safe. But what about Anastasia? What about Lila? What happens if the Republican extremists on the Supreme Court decide that, eh, maybe they like the idea of a national ban after all? What if Trump wins and his Republican congress bans abortion within the first week like they so clearly want to do? How many more women have to die or live through the pain that Amanda lives with every day because Republican misogyny has become the law of the land?
If that’s not enough to vote against Trump and his party of sadists, just admit that you’re as soulless and heartless as the GOP.
There are 208 days until the 2024 election. Vote blue like your life depends on it.
It’s a fantastic story and you’ll love it. I promise to write about it soon.
I’m so sorry you & your wife went through that hell, and happy you were able to have your two children. I’m well past my childbearing years, but I suffered 3 miscarriages. One was due to trisomy 18, the other from an infection, & the third unknown cause. Each time I needed a D&C, which were performed quickly and legally. Unfortunately, I am childless. The pain of those 3 ordeals haunts me to this day. And I’m furious & horrified about this war against women. Women’s lives will be lost in an inexcusably cruel way. It is barbaric, and I can’t wait to vote these despicable people out.
These are the stories that will help illustrate the inhumanity behind the ostensibly (if not Orwellian) "life respecting" policies that Republicans and their Christian Taliban supporters are in some places succeeding in putting into law and practice. We need to call this Republican revanchist effort out for what it is - the attempt to trap women into roles and responsibilities that hope to keep them silent and sequestered to prevent them from competing as individuals in the workplace, academia, and the political sphere. I reject that position (and those results) wholly and vociferously on behalf of my spouse, my children and my grandchildren. Republican gender terrorists are about to discover (again!) that America's women will not yield all that they have fought and bled for their entire lives. May women be as merciless at the polls as these reactionary abusive cretins have been in the legislatures.