Trauma, bleeding, trickery and abandonment
Unintended consequences ain’t necessarily unforseen consequences. Just yesterday, a friend mentioned fallout from a GOP effort in North Carolina to change how school board members are elected. The change would in theory make it easier to elect Republicans either by making the elections partisan or (in my county) by redrawing school district lines. Try explaining the latter to kids who suddenly find themselves assigned to different schools. Partisan-inspired chaos ensues.
Fallout from the Dobbs decision was not unforseen either. GOP-led states are rushing to ban abortion. Women’s lives are put at risk. In Texas, for example (The New Republic):
Women who suffered medical complications after being denied abortions in Texas are now having to relive the trauma of their injuries and dead babies as they plead their case against the state. Welcome to the Republican Party’s America.
On Wednesday, women who are part of a 15-person (both patients and doctors) lawsuit against the state of Texas, returned back to court to challenge the state’s extreme abortion ban.
Texas implemented a near-total abortion ban in September 2021, even before Roe v. Wade was overturned by a Supreme Court now found to have nearly half its jurists embroiled in scandal and corruption. The ban prohibits anyone from getting an abortion unless their life is at risk—no exceptions for a fetus developing an anomaly that would prevent it from surviving past birth. Doctors face life in prison and fines of up to $10,000 if they are found supporting an abortion procedure.
The women challenging the ban were essentially forced to relive their trauma, and at one point, the court was forced to take a break after a plaintiff began vomiting on the witness stand while recounting her own experience.
Samantha Casiano vomited while retelling the story of how she was denied access to an abortion after her baby was diagnosed with anencephaly, a birth defect in which a baby is born without parts of the brain and skull. Casiano said she had to watch her baby die after giving birth.
Yes, there was more.
One of the lead plaintiffs, Amanda Zurawski, testified that she was initially excited to become pregnant. But her water broke prematurely at about 18 weeks, meaning the fetus wouldn’t survive—and her life was at risk if she couldn’t get an abortion. Under the repressive new laws, a Texas hospital refused to help her until she became much sicker. Thanks to the Republican-made delay, Zurawski developed sepsis. People who suffer from septic shock have a mortality rate of up to 40 percent, and even after recovering, sepsis still carries a fatal risk.
In other words, Republicans are directly responsible for Zurawski’s life being on the line even today.
This is your country on patriarchal GOP tribalism.
This week’s installment of Rachel Maddow’s Déjà News recounts the grinning cruelty of southern conservatives using nonwhite people as pawns in a political stunt. It involved using buses to internally deport them to northern cities where they’d be abandoned, penniless, propertyless, and without support. No, not now. Not Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas. This happened in the 1960s to Black victims. Today it’s happening with immigrants.
There are photos.