Said Amanda Zurawski at a press conference yesterday, quoted in "'Sick and Twisted': Women Describe Losing Pregnancies, Nearly Dying Because of Texas Laws Five women are suing Texas, asking the state to clarify what constitutes a 'medical emergency' under its abortion bans" (Rolling Stone).
Her cervix had dilated prematurely, and not long after, her water broke. Without amniotic fluid to protect her, Zurawski and her husband were informed Willow would not survive.... Because Willow’s heart was still beating, the Zurawskis were told they had to wait until she could get treatment. Three days later, she was checked into an intensive care unit with sepsis — an infection that nearly killed her....
The doctor’s fears was well-founded: In addition to facing steep penalties — up to 99 years in prison, $100,000 in fines — for providing abortion care, health care providers (or anyone for that matter: friends, family members, uber drivers, TSA agents) can open themselves up to lawsuits if they help a Texan obtain an abortion....
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82 comments:
Medical incompetence. A handmade tale brayed... and rolling stones.
I'm not going to read this trash, but is the speaker really characterizing abortion as "the respectful passing of our baby?"
Really?
well rolling moss is a servant of moloch, no surprise there
hombre said...
I'm not going to read this trash, but is the speaker really characterizing abortion as "the respectful passing of our baby?"
Really?
3/8/23, 10:07 AM
Be respectful of her murdering her own child.
Doctors jeopardizing the health of patients only to score political scare points is disgusting.
It doesn't say how far along the woman was, but when my water "broke" at week 22, I was told that I would likely miscarry w/in 24-48 hours.
In my case, I didn't lose all of the amniotic fluid and things healed up. So, I was more fortunate than this woman, but even so, something isn't making sense if the baby was still breathing 3 days later.
I’ll be less quick to reserve judgement but it does sound like a scenario invented for political expediency.
Be respectful of her murdering her own child.
It's a wicked solution... a human rite performed for social, redistributive, clinical, political, criminal, and fair weather progress. It's a democratic choice (i.e. "murder") past six weeks when baby meets granny in legal state.
The Pro-Abortion ‘Life Of The Mother’ Argument Is A False Flag Operation
Women face many possible illnesses during pregnancy, but intentional feticide is never necessary even in the worst-case scenarios.
>>Five women are suing Texas, asking the state to clarify what constitutes a 'medical emergency' under its abortion bans".<<
The purpose of that lawsuit seems entirely reasonable to me. Who could fault it? (I don't have a dog in the abortion fight.)
The doctors are incompetent or she's lying. If labor cannot be stopped, then the baby will be born and pass away because it cannot survive in the womb. The story says she was in the middle of her second trimester, which means the child might have survived birth. So is the issue that the woman didn't want to go through labor with the chance of a developmentally delayed child? Because either way, there would have been labor. In one case, the child comes out in pieces, in another whole.
Five women are suing Texas, asking the state to clarify what constitutes a 'medical emergency' under its abortion bans"
Actually, that sounds like a modest prayer for relief, not a broader constitutional holding.
Your empathy is impressive.
I know this story is BS because I'm apart of the most childbearing demographic in the US today and I know a lot of women who've had many, many children.
In addition, my mom worked at a prolife OBGYN for decades and I know from her how something like this would have been handled. The office didn't even give out referrals for doctors who would perform abortions and my mom recalls how one woman, who had done IVF wanted to eliminate one of the multiples she was carrying. The doctors told her she needed to find another doctor and she berated the front office girl for being so small minded.
I don't have empathy for liars.
First, "Rolling Stone' is one of the biggest pieces of trash publications on the planet, so they have that going for them.
Second, how far along was the pregnancy? That's context.
Third, if you don't like the politics/laws of your state, you are free to move somewhere else...
>>Five women are suing Texas, asking the state to clarify what constitutes a 'medical emergency' under its abortion bans".<<
The purpose of that lawsuit seems entirely reasonable to me. Who could fault it? (I don't have a dog in the abortion fight.)
Not sure they can ask for "clarification" - the court can either find the statute unconstitutionally vague (and to the extent that it provides criminal penalties, the law should be pretty clear) or that it is fine as written.
It sounds like she had an incomplete miscarriage (a term I just made up, but I expect you know what I mean). Once her water broke, why couldn't the doctors induce labor? Why did she have to wait until sepsis set in? It's hard to believe that's a reasonable interpretation of the law and, if it is, then the law needs to be changed.
Your empathy is impressive.
Some of us reserve our empathy for the millions of unborn children killed for their mother's convivence over the last half century.
Given the selective empathy of the pro-choice religion, we must assume the hostility of the witness, doctors, and brayers to a humane choice. What would a humane doctor do for mother and child? What and how would a humane publisher report the story? Transhumanity may be socially trendy, but it is not popular and it is a disservice to the humanarchy. That said, they need to stop publishing edge cases to present a handmade tale. People are well aware of evolutionary fragility and human choices.
Back to you, Brand.
I’m for clarity. The laws can be clearer on what constitutes a medical emergency, but then being overly prescriptive causes its own problems.
Speaking of clarity, did “they explain they could do nothing” or did they say “had to wait until she could get treatment”? Was the wait more than three days? Why did Amanda leave medical attention for three days? Could it be they were told there was nothing that could be done to save the fetus and that she had to wait for medical staff that could provide appropriate level of care to arrive? If she was trying to save the baby, it would take a level 3 NICU to care for the fetus, if she could some how continue gestation for another 5 weeks. Was she told this and tried to keep the pregnancy until sepsis forced her back to medical care? Don’t know, because the journalist never approaches those questions. The journalist doesn’t even mention that birth less than 20 weeks is not considered viable or what it means to the pregnancy for the water to break, probably because that clarity would make the medical emergency quite clear.
Mother and baby are a duality by Her, her, and his choice. How would a humane doctor treat granny?
I am not catholic, but my OBGYN is. Like, the we-don’t-prescribe-birth-control type of Catholic. I also live in Florida. I have had 7 pregnancies so far. Three have resulted in living children, 3 were miscarriages between 6-10 weeks, and one was a stillborn child at 40 weeks. The doctors gave me the option of “wait and see” if my body naturally miscarried the early ones, and the option of going home for 24 hours to let everything “sink in” with my stillborn daughter. I waited one week with one miscarriage before asking for a prescription, and I didn’t wait at all with the other two miscarriages. I took the pills that night. With my stillborn, I didn’t want to go home, and they induced me within a few hours. The years of my losses were 2012, 2015, 2020, and 2021. And no pro-life doctor would ever force a mother to risk her life even if the baby was still alive. If the mother’s life were truly in danger, they would induce immediately and try to save both. If mom’s life is truly at risk, wasting time on an abortion only lengthens the time she is in danger. The fastest way to get a baby out is emergency c-section.
I call either BS, incompetence, or purposeful political deception by the doctors.
That does it! The scales have fallen from my eyes! This article has the moral impact that Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for slavery. I am totally convinced that Texas should reverse its law and make abortion available to all women at all times. Women should be taught how to give each other abortions so they don’t rely on potentially patriarchal doctors. Abortions should be celebrated like gender reveal parties (although public school may help the kid change later). Better still, teach elementary school girls how to perform abortions on each other and let them practice. Pass out Plan B in rainbow Pez dispensers so people of pregnancy can share easily with their friends.
“In my case, I didn't lose all of the amniotic fluid and things healed up. So, I was more fortunate than this woman, but even so, something isn't making sense if the baby was still breathing 3 days later.”
——————————————————————————
“The fetus is connected by the umbilical cord to the placenta, the organ that develops and implants in the mother's uterus during pregnancy. Through the blood vessels in the umbilical cord, the fetus receives all the necessary nutrition, oxygen, and life support from the mother through the placenta.”
—————————————————————————-
The baby gets its oxygen from the mothers blood, not amniotic fluid. If I’ve misunderstood your comment, please excuse me.
Let's assume this is a case where some form of abortion is necessary to protect the life of the mother and there is no way the fetus/unborn human can survive.
This became an issue in the Society for Biblical Literature (and American Academy of Religion?) which is a large umbrella organization for scholars of Bible-and-related-stuff (and religion). The Coordinating Council issued what is basically an apology for scheduling Annual Meetings in the state of Texas. (And it's in Texas much more than any other state.) Because - and this was the argument being advanced - is puts scholars (and graduate students) at risk *if* they are pregnant and run into a medical problem. They might not get the life-saving care they need.
My first reaction to this was that it's a bunch of progressives who are just pissed off at Texas because Texas isn't cooperating with the progressive agenda. Then I found out one of my best friends is a member of the Coordinating Council. That gave me pause.
That having been said, when I saw reactions on social media - I follow many scholars and graduate students in my field - they had a mixture of ostensible concern for women's physical health and the usual left wing taking points about trans women (?!?), LGBTQ+ rights, Texas is evil and backward, and so on. So maybe the Coordinating Council was not taking a partisan stand in the Kulturkampf - but many left-wing and progressive leaning scholars interpreted the apology through a very partisan lens.
I privately wondered how many pregnant scholars and students travel to the Annual Meetings but even if there is only one it still raises a concern.
A scholar in Australia pushed back and boy did the ad hominem knives come out. Basically "he's not much of a scholar". That only makes me more suspicious of the motives for the concern about academic conferences in Texas.
All that having been said, it's possible the Texas law (which put the legal status of elective abortion back with the states) is genuinely flawed, genuinely makes doctors nervous about medically necessary abortion (here, defined as necessary to protect the medical health/life of the mother), and gives progressives an opening to attack the abortion restrictions in Texas.
Why didn't they just go to another Dr. or state? I mean they had three days...
Sepsis is not an infection. At least get the medical details right if you're going to try to make an argument like this.
When I've been faced with making a difficult decision that may have legal implications, I ask myself whether my actions are defensible. It might not matter but my expectation would be that, in court, a "reasonable person" would find that decision to be rational.
If the doctors induced labor before 21 weeks or so, the baby would most likely not survive and under Texas law could the doctor be accused of abortion? It sounds like they were waiting for a miscarriage to happen spontaneously.
“Sepsis is not an infection. At least get the medical details right if you're going to try to make an argument like this.”
“Sepsis body's extreme response to an infection. It is a life-threatening medical emergency. Sepsis happens when an infection you already have triggers a chain reaction throughout your body. Infections that lead to sepsis most often start in the lung, urinary tract, skin, or gastrointestinal tract.”
Did this victim get pregnant while being raped on broken glass?
I agree with catatonic. What's the good-faith argument that this kind of situation is not a medical emergency? (For the purposes of this lawsuit, I would also count anything that a conservative prosecutor or Texas lawmaker said as a good-faith interpretation of the law.)
In the instant case, she underwent over a year of fertility treatments.
Pretty strong evidence she wanted this child, and nothing was elective about this.
Did the doctors involved even have an abortion practice susceptible to any kind of abuse?
We should always be careful about how the law impacts individuals, whether they be J6 defendants, pregnant women or their physicians.
"Five women are suing Texas, asking the state to clarify what constitutes a 'medical emergency' under its abortion bans"
These women who are suing, are they alive?
I'm just asking, because the law allows for an abortion if it's necessary to save the life of the mother. If they're alive, an abortion wasn't needed.
If there are some women who died as a result of not being able to obtain an abortion, their family would have a cause of action against the doctor or hospital.
@Leland at 11:13 asked the questions I also had.
I clicked through to the article, and it sounds like all 5 women were pregnant via IVF. Is that relevant to the danger of miscarriage or the mother's health? Is the women's increased risk an exemption a doctor could defend? RS didn't ask.
I don't like RS using incomplete reporting to try to elicit sympathy.
@Althouse, once feminists started pushing for post-partum abortion (e.g., Governor Ralph Northam, Glenn Youngkin’s predecessor here in Virginia) the pendulum was going to swing back hard. And in Texas it swung way too far. It will take a while for the Texas pendulum to center itself, but it should eventually do so.
And no, Althouse, I have very little empathy for a woman whose cervix dilated and bag of waters broke, and who didn’t try desperately to give her baby every possible chanc at life. 23s and 24s have made it. Why not her baby? Sounds as though she didn’t really want the baby and was happy to have an excuse to get rid of it. Poor little unloved baby.
The statute places much of the decision making in the hands of doctors and "the exercise of reasonable medical judgment." See section (b)(2).
These women needed better doctors, or really, just better people caring for them.
This dangerously assumes that a Rolling Stone article on abortion has even a small element of truth.
Also, this is a situation where the State Medical Board should have been involved from the beginning to clarify the type of issues raised by these cases.
Maybe they did and someone is playing dumb. Lot of that going around.
Miscarriage is a process. For this woman, it began when the amniotic sac ruptured and would have ended when the fetus was removed either through labor or surgery. The doctors were not waiting for a miscarriage to happen, because it already began.
REMEMBER! if it's in the ROLLING STONE.. By DEFINITION: it is TOTALLY TRUE!!!
they have NEVER lied or slanted or misinformed people.. EVER*!
Ever* well, except for EVERY ISSUE
Was the doctor's name Havan Monoughan?
Blogger Ann Althouse said...Your empathy is impressive.
Did they not tell her she was going to be a political prop? I feel bad for her…
It is abundantly clear that medical providers in support of abortion will sacrifice and refuse to treat pregnant women in a medical crisis, under the false pretense that any intervention would be illegal or that the law is ambiguous, just to advance their talking points.
This is a story with about a 1/4 of the information/reporting, required to be complete and understandable.
Interview with a lawyer knowledgeable of the Texas Abortion law.
Interview with ObGyn/s. Their clinics written protocol for dealing with death of a fetus. Finding at least one women that has gone through the same emergency, but had a different experience.
Interview a law professor, in Texas. A person that can talk freely using hypothetical.
My sister-in-law suffered through the loss of her fetus. It is a family tragedy. Without a lot more details, its impossible to understand any of these circumstances and the fears, the mothers claim the doctors were guarding against.
The case noted here with a loss well into the 2cnd trimester, why a delivery was not induced comes across as weird. There must be more to the story, and feels like it was a choice of the mother.
"Rolling Stone" was enough for me.
Your empathy is impressive.
Empathy is nice. Empathic people are nice.
Empathic people thoughtlessly agree with anything I say or do. Yaaaay Me!
Or do I have this empathy thing all wrong?
TV shows today like to rip stories from the headlines today
Watched an episode of the Good Dr last night. It was in the DVR so aired sometime in the last few weeks.
The thread of the story was a pregnant women coming to the ER for excess bleeding, with at least on kid in tow. Preliminary exam tests, suggested a fetus in danger of dying, and they explained it all to mother. But after tests and research the Dr's found that some special care would get the pregnancy to term. That upset the mother because she really didn't want another child. So the carrying empathetic Dr's told her they had cause, and could in fact do an abortion.
So the happy ending was a healthy fetus killed in the womb.
"First, "Rolling Stone' is one of the biggest pieces of trash publications on the planet, so they have that going for them."
Does she mention whether she was pregnant as a result of being raped by six or eight guys on a pile of broken glass in a frat-house?
I only have empathy for people that tell the truth, and none for propagandists like Rolling Stone. What, didn't Mother Jones find out about it? Maybe they could have filmed her abortion and shown it on the View. When does the cruel neutrality kick in?
Does she mention whether she was pregnant as a result of being raped by...
Or the underage girl raped by her mother's illegal alien boyfriend, who waited, traveled to a sanctuary state in order to abort the "burden" of evidence.
”One of the other plaintiffs, Amanda Zurawski, learned at 17 weeks of pregnancy that she was miscarrying and at a high risk for infection. But the fetus still had a heartbeat and her life wasn’t in danger, so she was sent home until she became septic.”
It appears that the doctors were waiting for her to miscarry spontaneously within a period of time in which she was still safe from sepsis. Her uterus did not expel the baby before she became septic. This sounds like poor care. Was the doctor afraid of being accused of performing an abortion or was this malpractice, or both?
The Pro-Abortion ‘Life Of The Mother’ Argument Is A False Flag Operation
As an obstetrician-gynecologist who used to provide abortions early in my training, I know that intentional feticide is never necessary even in the worst-case scenarios.
Take this example. A mother’s amniotic sac breaks prematurely at 14 weeks. While her doctor may offer elective abortion as an option, she does not need it. She and her baby have a better option. Mom and baby can be treated with antibiotics and close observation and even have a good chance of stabilization. If they make it to 22 weeks or more, the baby has a good chance of survival outside the womb.
The medical goal should be to care for both patients and to get them both as far along in the pregnancy as possible as long as the mom and baby are doing well.
But imagine the mother develops an infection before her baby reaches the age of viability. Unfortunately, this means she will have to have a preterm delivery. The doctor must empty the womb by early induction in order to attack the infection — similar to draining an abscess. The unborn baby may not survive because it’s not yet viable outside the womb. But ending the life of the unborn child was never the direct intention in treating the infection.
Treating mother and child in duality. An equal right to self-defense through reconciliation.
"I asked what can be done to ensure the respectful passing of our baby..."
I detect a distinct tone of skepticism in the Althouse commentariat. Am I psychic, or what?
This respectful passing thing reminds me of Pierrepoint, an ITV docudrama about the career of Albert Pierrepoint, the United Kingdom's chief executioner from 1940 to 1956. (In the U.S. the film was titled Pierrepoint: The Last Hangman even though he was hardly the last. I supposed Pierrepoint: The Third from Last Hangman was considered and dropped for lack of punchiness.)
The film when to considerable lengths to express Pierrepoint's respect for the condemned, showing his careful preparation to reduce the natural climate of dread a convict facing his erasure from this world must endure by performing the deed with swift dispatch. Afterward, Pierrepoint is shown carefully and reverently washing the lifeless body.
Albert Pierrepoint achieved international notoriety as Britain's high executioner of Nazi war criminals, thirteen in all, including the infamous Irma Grese, the "Hyena of Auschwitz". In the film, the hangman berates a soldier who contemptuously maltreats the remains of one of the thirteen. Pierrepoint's point, the accused was lawfully tried, found guilty, and punished with the extreme sanction of Common Law. Having paid the price he stands absolved, and his remains deserve the respectful treatment the careless soldier would grant any other corpse. There may be some here who would apply the same reasoning to this abortion. The difference, however, is Amanda Zurawski's baby didn't have its day in court.
Whether these women are lying or not, the law should be clear.
Frankly, I have always assumed there are low skilled doctors who specialize in abortion that will say mom's life is at risk.
Nothing but sympathy for women who experience these things. Crib death for one peripheral, umbilical cord strangled baby two weeks before birth for another, and she had to wait for days before induced labor to deliver stillborn.
I don't know shit about shit and I haven't read the article other than what was posted. But, why wouldn't the doc delivery the baby via c-section and try and keep her alive in a NICU? I can't imagine anyone would have tried to argue that was an abortion under the circumstances. FFS, if you're actively trying to save the life, then, I think anyway, by definition that's the opposite of an abortion.
They obviously should move to Minnesota, where legislation is pending allowing women to abort full term babies up to the moment of birth. The next pro sports team there will be the Minnesota Molochs.
Interesting that pro-choice attorneys are now using the word "baby" in describing the death of a baby.
I wonder if "fetus" will go the way of "negro" -- rhetoric from the 20th century that screams bias and lack of regard.
Elites who go to elite schools love to show off their Latin and lack of emotion. In that arena, you're debating in front of high IQ types, many of whom are on the wrong side of the sociopath spectrum.
In the public arena, where a lot of people didn't make it to the Ivy League, people say "baby," and you have win hearts as well as minds. So the attorneys are attempting to use emotional manipulation to win the war of words, at least in the media.
It's also interesting that it's women suing instead of abortion clinics. That's another huge change.
To me these are vast improvements in abortion litigation. People who are trying to have babies say "baby." I personally am far more interested in issues that pregnant women are having with abortion regulations than I am in alleged "non-profits" trying to protect their billion dollar revenue streams.
Of course these attorneys are crafting this litigation for Texas juries, Texas voters, and Texas judges. It will be interesting to see if we have similar shifts in litigation strategy in other parts of the country. Feminists who care about women might ask themselves if the abortion industry has any biases (hint: money!) that might cause them to want to cut corners on safety regulations.
California, for instance, recently tossed out the requirement that abortionists have to be doctors. Let me know when nurse pill-pushers turn into a "back alley abortion," Governor Newsom. I know you're not a libertarian, brother, so I just wonder who bought you and how much it cost.
When O'Connor made the utterly feminist argument that the state has an interest in protecting the health and safety of women in abortion clinics, feminists howled at her and said she was an evil Republican. Now they cite O'Connor's language and try to avoid quoting Harry for anything.
O'Connor knew that the interests of abortion providers (e.g. Kermit Gosnell) and the interests of pregnant women might seriously diverge. Feminists who don't get how that could happen ought to re-read her. And it wouldn't hurt to pay attention to whose side Ginsburg took in the Kavanaugh imbroglio.
Ginsburg has her own bias, of course -- all the people on the Supreme Court love the Supreme Court way more than any individual citizen! So it's possible that she doesn't actually care if Kavanaugh grabbed a boob when he was 17. But it's also possible that she loathes the partisan circus that Roe v. Wade has caused. (And cynically suspects that some abortion supporters are willing to use rape fears to manipulate people).
I hope smart liberals will take the overruling of Roe as an opportunity to abandon the really fucking arbitrary rules laid out by the dictators in the back room and put a little thought into taking infanticide and rape out of the abortion fight.
I wish pro-life people and pro-choice people could rally around Plan B and acknowledge that this emergency birth control (the chemical equivalent of swallowing two birth control pills) is vastly superior to abortion. Morally, spiritually, ethically, financially, Plan B is a far better alternative than abortion.
A bipartisan commitment to Plan B would largely remove a lot of rape fears from the fight over abortion. And it would also be nice if pro-choice people could think of ways of taking infanticide out of the abortion debate. (Hint: We have unanimous agreement in our society for when people die -- it's not hard to find this out if you are trying to answer the question).
Infanticide and rape will never disappear, because we all have free will. But it would certainly help our society for the government to recognize these evils, acknowledge them, and take these fears out of the debate. The failure of our Supreme Court to do that is why our abortion fight is still a shit-show, 50 years after Roe v. Wade.
Jake at 3:45
ditto
Allegations can be true but they can also fall apart under cross, which is why due process has always had cross-examination.
“I don't know shit about shit and I haven't read the article other than what was posted. But, why wouldn't the doc delivery the baby via c-section and try and keep her alive in a NICU? I can't imagine anyone would have tried to argue that was an abortion under the circumstances. FFS, if you're actively trying to save the life, then, I think anyway, by definition that's the opposite of an abortion.”
The woman was 17 weeks pregnant. At 17 weeks there is not going to be a NICU that can save that child. If the doctor had induced labor the child would be born at 17 weeks. Induction of labor would be considered an abortion under a Texas law. Am I mistaken?
She/he still would not have survived. Why perform a C section, induced labor would have allowed the child to be born vaginally and alive. As soon as the umbilical cord ( his/ her source of oxygen) was cut, the lungs being too immature, would not have allowed a breath. A baby that premature would most likely not survive the care it would require to keep her/him alive. Either way the baby was not far enough along in its development to live even if it went to the NICU.
Inga asked:
The baby gets its oxygen from the mothers blood, not amniotic fluid. If I’ve misunderstood your comment, please excuse me.
In my situation, my amniotic sac "broke" and I was immediately sent to the local hospital that had a NIC 3 unit. They determined that I had not lost all of the fluid (est. was 50/50) but I was likely to "miscarry" in 24-48 hours because small contractions had begun. A complicating factor: I was carrying twins. It was the worst night of my life.
My miracle was that after two weeks in the hospital flat on my back, I was no longer leaking fluid - somehow the sac had healed. Sent home - to stay flat on my back, lol and two healthy babies (boy/girl) born just 10 days before my due date.
Inga, if I recall correctly, you are a nurse. If you still have questions or if my terminology is inaccurate, please do not hesitate to ask.
wendybar said...
hombre said...
I'm not going to read this trash, but is the speaker really characterizing abortion as "the respectful passing of our baby
--
Buried lede...
Overton window flung open.
Incredibly scattershot collection of reasons this woman (or any like her) should not get the care she clearly needed. To select a few:
She's a murderer
No Texas DA would prosecute
It's not abortion, it's preterm delivery where the doctor empties the womb like draining an abscess (which is not abortion)
She wasn't raped on broken glass (twice -- Big Mike stuck to the glass, Jupiter raised the bar by adding frat boys)
Actually she just wanted to get rid of the baby she got pregnant with after months of IVF
She should have used contraception, which would have prevented her miscarriage of the baby she tried to have via IVF
Doctors are abortion advocates taking advantage of lack of clarity in the law
Whatever the law says, everyone knows what it means! (Related to DA not prosecuting, and doctors taking advantage)
Woman 14 weeks pregnant should be forced to put her life at risk for at least 8 weeks to get to some miniscule to zero chance of making it to viability
She didn't die, only got sepsis due to delayed care, so she didn't need an abortion.
Seems like people are flailing.
All of this was entirely predictable and entirely predicted -- both the risk to her life and the convolutions anti-abortion advocates would go through to make this seem fine, or her and her doctors seem terrible, or media be complicit, or or or.
Blame everything and everyone, shotgun style, except for the law and your own position.
“My miracle was that after two weeks in the hospital flat on my back, I was no longer leaking fluid - somehow the sac had healed. Sent home - to stay flat on my back, lol and two healthy babies (boy/girl) born just 10 days before my due date.”
I’m so happy for you that your amniotic leak wasn’t a complete rupture and that it sealed and you didn’t get an infection. Good thing you got plenty of rest before the birth of your twins!
Ah yes Rolling "#istandwithjackie" Stone.
Yes, let us all listen to a magazine found guilty of libel with malice.
The lead example, where the woman's water broke, is completely inadequate in its explanation. We need a lot more facts, because it doesn't make sense as it is.
My understanding is that most states that have passed these new abortion bans do make an exception in the law for termination where 1) the mother's life is in danger, and/or 2) the fetus is suffering from a fatal deformity.
If the Texas law is too vague, that should be fixed.
The woman was 17 weeks pregnant. At 17 weeks there is not going to be a NICU that can save that child. If the doctor had induced labor the child would be born at 17 weeks.
The counting of weeks in a pregnancy is incredibly imprecise. Doctors have no idea the moment conception happens. Many doctors -- strangely in my view -- count "weeks" from the last menstrual pregnancy. Others add two weeks from the last menstrual pregnancy, on an assumption that this is the point when a woman is most fertile.
Then consider that some women have light periods. Or have only a vague idea of the date of their last period.
17 weeks is a guess, not a fact.
Some abortion doctors use ultrasounds, and attempt to guess the age of the baby via that video. Other abortion doctors don't do ultrasounds and feminists, famously, hate the ultrasound and accused Republicans of being rapists for requiring ultrasounds in abortion clinics.
So I wouldn't write down "17 weeks" like it's Moses coming down from the mountain. More like, "13 weeks to 21 weeks, somewhere in there, don't really give a shit, next patient."
I clicked through to the article, and it sounds like all 5 women were pregnant via IVF. Is that relevant to the danger of miscarriage or the mother's health? Is the women's increased risk an exemption a doctor could defend? RS didn't ask.
Excellent point, Kate!
Our feminist media routinely misleads girls about the pregnancy window. I read somewhere that most of a woman's eggs are gone by the age of 30, and your odds of getting pregnant steadily decrease throughout your 30's.
This is a shock to a lot of people who were indoctrinated in a birth control culture. The idea that it might be hard to get pregnant is not something that your average single girl is taught.
A lot of women miss out on motherhood because they were indoctrinated and lied to about basic biology. A lot of people haven't had sex education -- they've had birth control indoctrination.
The IVF industry is kind of like the abortion industry -- these industries exist because women (and men) have been fed a whole narrative about sex and birth control, and the biological realities of reproduction have been downplayed or ignored altogether.
Ann Althouse said...
Your empathy is impressive.
I have no empathy for liars. I have no empathy for willing political tools.
Her water broke? it was all gone? Then induce labor.
Oh, wiat, they didn't want to do that? Why?
Could it be because inducing labor would produce a living baby, and the end of Roe meant the doctors could simply no longer kill that baby (see every single Democrat in the Senate voting against the "Born Alive Infant's Protection Act"), and mommy wanted a trophy baby, not a "damaged" one, so she kept the baby inside until he / she died?
And now that she achieved that killing, she wants sympathy?
Sorry, but no one pushing a left wing position ever gets the slightest benefit of the doubt, because they've consistently established their total dishonesty.
So, they report:
1: How far along the pregnancy was
2: Why they didn't induce labor
3: What were the probabilities if they had induced labor
And basically answer every question brought up here BEFORE we have to ask them (because they're pretty much all obvious questions), or else we know they're lying sleazy hacks.
What they did was try to give a tear jerker story without any of the facts behind it. And that means they're lying scum
Dudes are often clutter re this blog and re the comments at this blog.
But we see a nice girl back and forth in this thread.
An opportunity to remember that it’s not a bad idea to hit the pause button before lashing out. Sympathy may be impossible, but let’s at least try for empathy.
Inga in this thread is commenter perfection: facts and questions sans ideological boringness .
IMHO.
The Pro-Abortion ‘Life Of The Mother’ Argument Is A False Flag Operation
Advocates of the wicked solution display a gross lack of empathy for abortion victims, women, and girls advised to take a knee to social progress, and an almost gay embrace of the twilight faith, the Pro-Choice ethical religion, and liberal ideology for profit.
Abortionists need to justify their support for elective abortion, the wicked solution, which is neither a good nor exclusive nor necessary Choice, and the present and progressive risk to women, girls, and "our Posterity" in both clinics and with social progress.
The woman was 17 weeks pregnant. At 17 weeks there is not going to be a NICU that can save that child.
@Inga, from where did you get 17 weeks? The information I had from the article was “middle of the second trimester,” or roughly 20 weeks. As long as the fetal heartbeat is maintained shouldn’t a competent hospital be able to keep the mother and child alive to at least 22 and probably 24 or 25 weeks?
"@Inga, from where did you get 17 weeks? The information I had from the article was “middle of the second trimester,” or roughly 20 weeks. "
I looked up “middle of the second trimester" when I was writing the post because I wanted to know if the baby was in the range where it was possible to save it. This is a woman who, we're told, struggled to get pregnant and wanted the pregnancy to succeed, so I had a question. But when I looked it up, I saw that the "middle of the second trimester" can be as early as 14 weeks, so that's why I didn't raise this issue in the post.
@Althouse, thank you, but a trimester is 13 weeks, give or take a week. And middle should be 7, give or take. I get that your sympathies are with the mother, but I cannot get past the beating of that baby’s tiny heart as it struggled to live In the face of catastrophe and a callous mother eager to kill it.
The women wanted a baby. In Ireland, women elect to abort Downs Syndrome babies... fetal-babies. In China, female babies. In America, baby "burdens". Elective abortion or the wicked solution is neither a good nor exclusive nor necessary Choice. We can do better.
Ann Althouse said...
I looked up “middle of the second trimester" when I was writing the post because I wanted to know if the baby was in the range where it was possible to save it. This is a woman who, we're told, struggled to get pregnant and wanted the pregnancy to succeed, so I had a question. But when I looked it up, I saw that the "middle of the second trimester" can be as early as 14 weeks, so that's why I didn't raise this issue in the post.
You are granting good faith to people (the writers at Rolling Stone) who deserve none.
What's the absolute latest "middle of the second trimester" can be? Since they didn't specify, and could, we have to assume that her actual term was much closer to that, than to 14 weeks.
Because if it had been 14 - 15 weeks, that's what they would have wrote. They wrote "middle of the second trimester" to hide facts not in their interest
Daniel12 said...
Incredibly scattershot collection of bullshit, because he can't actually address any of the points people actually raised.
The end product of the Left wing "censor all wrong thought" culture is the Lefties all become functionally idiots, like we see here.
Because even if, for once in your life, you had a valid argument to make, you would have no idea how to make it.
Now, the reality is that the closest thing to a valid argument the pro-abortion side has here starts with "trust the Rolling Stone", and RS has proved repeatedly that you would have to be a moron to trust anything they write.
And the reason why that is is because Rolling Stone chose not to provide the facts a reader would actually need in order to honestly asses the situation (starting with "how many weeks pregnant was she?" If it's IVF, then the doctor KNOWS when the baby was implanted in mom, no guesswork needed. So that number is available to the people making the argument.
The fact that they did not provide the number of weeks, just a vague "middle of second trimester", means the baby was more than 1/2 way through the second trimester, and had at least a somewhat reasonable chance to survive if labor was induced.
But the baby also probably had a significant chance of becoming a special needs child. And apparently mom preferred to kill the baby, to having a special needs child.
I see no need to feel sympathy or empathy for that person. Or is eugenics now "good" again?
As to Rolling Stone, never forget that a fraternity house was vandalized by a raging campus mob and its members put in fear for their lives — while the Charlottesville police did nothing — because of an article published in that magazine based on an entirely fabricated story which could not have withstood even the slightest critical scrutiny. I’m not a great fan of campus Greek culture, but I am even less of a fan of campus mobs. YMMV
At any rate, the chances that Rolling Stone is telling “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” in this case is as near to zero as one cares to calculate. Expect facts inconvenient to the narrative to dribble out over time.
“a callous mother eager to kill it.”
Sheesh, Big M.
How can you write this stuff?
At least throw in an IMO/IMHO. W/o that you are proving that you are insane and/or unable to understand what facts are. The fact is that you do not know that this is a callous mother eager to kill her kid. It’s impossible for you to know that. If your brain likes concocting that explanation for this situation……well, you may want to talk to a shrink about that. Something is going wrong upstairs, for you.
Duh.
@Sprezzatura, of course it’s my opinion. If it wasn’t my opinion, whose would it be?
I’ll tell you what, son. If you can find anything in the article to indicate that Amanda Zurawski did everything in her power to give her baby a chance at life, I will delete my comment and repost with the word “callous” deleted. Okay?
IMO for half a century women have been conditioned to believe that the only response to problems with a pregnancy is abortion. I’m not saying Zurawski faced an easy problem, but where is the indication she tried to fight for her baby’s life?
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