But we know, we fucking well know, with the experience of the entirety of human history, that pregnancy is not a smooth trip from fucking to birth. It's absurd to even have state that. It's fucking absurd to have to say that pregnant people's bodies change in ways that are often permanent, and that's if everything goes fine. It's fucking absurd to have to say that even a minor issue with a pregnancy can cause all kinds of permanent shit to the pregnant person, starting with an episiotomy or bladder issues and moving up through death. And a c-section is fucking surgery. Going through that when you want the pregnancy is one thing. Going through it when you don't? What kind of fucking monsters would do that to someone? But obvious shit apparently has to be said all the goddamn time now because the only way you can pass the laws outlawing nearly all abortions at 15 weeks or 6 weeks or any time. You either have to ignore the obvious shit or you get off on torturing pregnant people. And I'm seriously thinking it's the latter in Florida and Texas and all the other states that pretend to give a fuck about the fetus.
And I'm saying "pretend to give a fuck about the fetus" because you can't say you care about the fetus when it's going to die horribly within a couple of hours of being born after suffering in the womb. That's the case for Deborah Dorbert, whose fetus is suffering from Potter syndrome, which leads to multiple underdeveloped organs: "Babies with Potter syndrome often die before they are born when their umbilical cords become trapped between their bodies and the wall of their mother’s uterus. Those that survive the birth process typically suffocate within minutes or a matter of hours." Fucking nightmare, right? At 24 weeks, the Dorberts decided they wanted to go through with an abortion because they didn't want the fetus to suffer. But Dorbert is in Florida, and there's an almost total ban after 15 weeks and Deborah's doctors, all of whom have given the same diagnosis, are afraid they will run afoul of the harshly punitive law that could destroy their careers or put them in prison. And the Dorberts can't afford to go to another state, which would mean South or North Carolina at this point, to get the procedure done. Instead, Deborah is going to have to carry her fetus to term and give birth to a child that will desperately gasp for air for a little while and die.
If you think your god wants that to happen, your god is a dick and no one should give a shit what you or your god wants.
On and on the cases go. Amanda Eid in Texas almost died because she couldn't get an abortion for a fetus when her water broke at 18 weeks until she was too sick to function. The same thing happened to Texan Elizabeth Weller. In Idaho, Carmen Broesder documented on TikTok how a hospital's ER rejected helping her remove the fetus that she was miscarrying over the course of 19 days. She also nearly died. In Ohio, Beth Long's fetus had its organs growing outside its body, but because she works for the state and Ohio bars the state health insurance from covering abortions with just a few exceptions, she would need to pay for the complicated termination of her pregnancy. It took the Longs weeks to make arrangements to go out of state for a less expensive procedure, which made the abortion that much more difficult. Anabely Lopes, a woman from Florida denied an abortion even though her fetus was going to die, was Debbie Wasserman Schultz's guest at the State of the Union, where President Biden should have said a hell of a lot more about this horror show Republicans have brought on. But on and on it still goes.
The trauma that these pregnant people already suffer is magnified because the medical system and the doctors they trust are unable to give them the care they know is needed. It's fucking horrific. The state is adding trauma on top of trauma. And that's for pregnancies that are wanted, that are planned, where families are preparing for a new child. It's another kind of torture.
And the assholes who passed the laws that are destroying pregnant people body and mind are the ones who should be prosecuted, not the caregivers trying to help patients while being forced to watch their backs and certainly not the pregnant people, whether they want to be pregnant or not. Abortion isn't cruel. Stopping people who want or need an abortion is cruel. And it's become a tool of torture and control for the savage anti-choicers.
(Note: I used "women" at the beginning because that's the binary way those who wrote the laws view procreation. But trans men and nonbinary people can get pregnant, too, as can young girls. So, yeah, "pregnant people" is way more accurate unless talking about a specific person.)
