Republican Abortion Ban Led To The Deaths Of Over 200 Texas Babies
The cruelty of Republican "pro-life" reaches a new level.
Please support this work by becoming a paying subscriber. This newsletter is free and will always remain free but it still takes time and effort to produce. Your support means everything to me. For just $5 a month or $50 a year, you can keep the Opinionated Ogre going. Thank you!
One of the greatest lies the right ever got the press to help them sell is that they are, in any way whatsoever, “pro-life.” This is a political movement obsessed with death and bringing as much pain and suffering into the world as possible. They’re pro-gun. They’re pro-war. They’re pro-death penalty. And now? Now they’re pro-dead babies:
By taking away from Texas residents the option of terminating a pregnancy in the case of a fetal abnormality when they passed Senate Bill 8 in 2021, Republican lawmakers in the state attained a "tragic" result, according to an analysis released Monday: The number of babies who died soon after birth from congenital conditions jumped by nearly 25% in just one year.
Overall, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the state's abortion law, which bans the procedure after just six weeks of pregnancy with no exception for fetal abnormalities, led to a 13% rise in Texas' infant mortality rate from 2021-2022.
It’s really important to understand what’s happening here. Republicans, in their “pro-life” zeal, made sure that women with non-viable fetuses would be forced to carry them to term. This is not guesswork or “maybe the baby will survive.” Medical science has a long way to go but it’s pretty good at detecting when a baby has a fatal abnormality.
Republicans simply do not give the slightest of damns. That baby will be born and its parents will watch it die. Sometimes it will be quick, a matter of hours. A short, brutal life of pain and confusion. Sometimes it will take months of slow, agonizing torture as the baby inevitably succumbs to whatever defect is killing it.
It’s equally important to understand that even if these babies could be saved by heroic medical intervention and expensive procedures, Republicans would rather eat glass than pay for them. These are women who could not afford to leave the state to secure an abortion so they clearly do not have the means to pay for astronomically expensive surgeries. Again, if such intervention is even possible. There are a lot of birth defects that are simply beyond our current capabilities.
Either way, Republicans are fine watching a newborn die. Nothing engages the pleasure center of a Republican more than the cruel suffering they inflict on others.
They will tell you that every child is a blessing and there’s really no way of knowing for sure that a baby will die. A miracle might occur! Praise the fucking lord! We have to protect every life!
And then they vote to cut funding to feed hungry children and vote again to allow guns in elementary schools. Because why the hell should they pay to feed little moochers and, hey, the Second Amendment is WAY more important than a pile of dead kids!
This is how we do pro-life in the GOP!
This is what we are voting against in November. The cruelty. The sadism. The pure evil of the right and their crusade to bring as much suffering into the world as they can in the name of restoring the power of diseased old white men like Donald Trump. If that’s not enough of a reason to vote against them, the blood of those dead babies is on your hands, too. It really is that cut and dried.
There are 132 days until the 2024 election. Vote blue like your life or the life of a baby who doesn’t deserve to suffer depends on it.
I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year. Thank you for everything!
Reinstating Roe would be a good start and better than the status quo, but it is not enough. Even with Roe and related SC rulings (like Casey which included an undefined “no undue burden” standard) women didn’t have full access to abortion across the nation. Access was hampered by:
• Medically unecessary tests.
• Restricting abortions to the first X weeks — many limited to 6 weeks, before most women know they are pregnant, because the point is to deny an abortion to everyone.
• Waiting periods and multiple visits.
• Requiring all multiple visits to be with the same doctor (this makes it harder to get an abortion within the X week limit because the doctor seen on visit one may not be available for visit 2 before the X weeks limit expires).
• Prohibiting tele-health visits so that in-person visits are mandatory; this may require long distance drives and coupled with multiple visits may require overnight stays.
• Doctors required to have hospital admiring privileges and falsely claiming this makes women safer (it doesn’t); also hospital aren’t open to granting admitting privileges and the lawmakers know it.
The bullet points above aren’t a complete list of all the forced birthers’ nonsense, but you get the idea. Make it harder. Make it more expensive. Anything to delay and possibly prevent abortion access.
Republicans never met a burden they felt “undue”; furthermore, Republicans often knew the laws they were passing were unconstitutional (we know because they said so), but they were content to impose impediments and wait for lawsuits. In the meantime, clinics closed and lives were upended. They. Didn’t. Care. Cruelty was the point. And control. Republicans want to control women. Keep us barefoot and pregnant and out of the workforce.
Lawmakers (mostly white, male, and Republican) have shown us complete and total disregard for the health and well-being of women, pregnant women no less. Medical experts warned lawmakers what would happen, how women (and girls) would be harmed. Republicans didn’t listen.
The medical experts were ignored and abortion bans were imposed. Then the horror stories shared by real women started percolating.
Were the Republicans moved to fix the mess they created? No. Backers of abortion bans told us the bans were working “as intended” and they wanted national bans.
Now IVF is under attack and one state high court ruled it illegal. They’ve said they’re coming after birth control. In the interim, Texas is working to put in a travel ban to prevent pregnant women from using roads to leave the state for an abortion. Control. They have to control the women.
There’s much more to the forced birthers twisted tyranny, not room to recite it all.
My point is that lawmakers and the forced birther crowd have proven themselves incapable and unworthy to represent the interests of pregnant women by showing us they cannot be trusted to protect women. It doesn’t look like they’re going to change and suddenly respect women’s rights.
Donald Trump did this. He brags about his 3 SC appointments and how he got Roe overturned. He’s proud of stripping women of our reproductive rights! Donald Trump cannot be trusted to protect women; he was found liable for sexual assault, what the judge on his case called “rape” — so he’s not my idea of a protector of women. He’ll sign any abortion ban the Republicans send him.
Lawmakers should not be deciding who has an abortion. As I said, lawmakers cannot be trusted to make this decision. Roe wasn’t enough to protect access — because even with Roe in place there were many burdens placed on access — see partial list above.
You know who can be trusted? Women. We trust women to raise children. We trusted women for about 50 years to determine when, and if, we have children. We need to trust women. Why? Because it works.
I have a solution to this mess. We don’t need exceptions when we don’t have bans. And we definitely don’t need abortion bans. We need to elect Democrats to pass laws to undue the harm done by the Dobbs decision and fix Roe, so that women have access to abortion without all the medically unnecessary nonsense designed to prevent abortion access. We need to elect Joe Biden to sign those laws.
Abortion on demand and without apology. It just works.
I will never understand the women who believe the forced birth policy is good for them.