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Post by dewryce on Feb 22, 2024 15:21:54 GMT
I just read a great post on X about this topic. Basically the person said they are moving to Alabama and putting 40 frozen embryos in their freezer and claiming all of them on their taxes. Oh…think I can back file? |
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Post by Bridget in MD on Feb 22, 2024 17:34:46 GMT
I just read a great post on X about this topic. Basically the person said they are moving to Alabama and putting 40 frozen embryos in their freezer and claiming all of them on their taxes. I wonder if they can pay child support too on an embryo! |
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Feb 22, 2024 17:51:41 GMT
I just want to ask the women of Alabama who are using IVF to get pregnant, how many of you voted for Republicans? Also, I watched the national news tonight and some old lady was happy about the ban using the old "sanctity of life" statement. I want to ask those people how they feel about guns. It is all so sick. I watch Handmaid's Tale knowing it is fiction. It is less and less fiction all the time. I will say it again. 'They' don't care if their women die or our children die. Both will be easy to replace. Marital rape will no longer be illegal. No contraception, no abortions, no women's health care, no IVF. Back not so long ago, many children died, 'they' just made more. Wives died, 'they' found another and had more children. And remember they all, children and wives worked on the fields and/or factories. Child labor laws are disappearing ... Education is not needed! |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 23, 2024 11:20:04 GMT
They are definitely coming after birth control next. Christopher Rufo is the guy who started the anti CRT movement, also the anti LGBTQ movement. He’s crazy, but also dangerous.
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Post by hop2 on Feb 23, 2024 11:50:02 GMT
This is a bit off topic, but my eyebrows went up when I read it. From this morning’s NYT: “ Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on Tuesday renewed his criticisms of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision recognizing the right to same-sex marriage, saying that people who oppose homosexuality risk being unfairly “labeled as bigots and treated as such.” The justice included his warning in a five-page statement explaining why the court had rejected a request to hear a Missouri case about people removed from a jury after voicing religious objections to gay relationships. The case, Justice Alito wrote, “exemplifies the danger” from the court’s 2015 decision, Obergefell v. Hodges. The ruling, he added, shows how “Americans who do not hide their adherence to traditional religious beliefs about homosexual conduct will be ‘labeled as bigots and treated as such’ by the government.” The statement appeared to offer a glimpse into Justice Alito’s continued discontent with Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the court, by a 5-to-4 vote, guaranteed a right to same-sex marriage, a long-sought victory in the gay rights movement. “ In the years since, Justice Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, who both dissented from the 2015 decision, have appeared to urge the court to reconsider the ruling. The court, they have contended, invented a right not based in the text of the Constitution and said it had cast “people of good will as bigots.”“People of good will.” Let that sink in. Religion trumps all with these people. If you think that they don’t mean to re-open Obergefell, then you are living under a rock. I suppose he’d say the same about civil rights legislation that casts some people as bigots and racists. Is it now the role of the court to withhold rights from some to protect the reputation of others? Alito sounds like he’s too old and unhinged for this job. Too bought & paid for |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 23, 2024 12:01:05 GMT
I hope he’s right
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 23, 2024 12:32:00 GMT
On the connections between boldily autonomy, equal rights and democratic freedoms. www.nytimes.com/2024/02/23/opinion/alabama-embroyo-dobbs-reproductive-freedom.htmlDespite the lofty and expansive rhetoric of his majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito insisted throughout the text that the actual decision was more modest than it might appear. The end of Roe, he said, was not the end of abortion access as much as it was the beginning of a new era of democratic deliberation and decision-making. No longer shackled by a prior dictate of the Supreme Court, the people were free to choose. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” Alito wrote.
But, as the legal scholars Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw (who is also a contributing Opinion writer) argue in a recent article in the Harvard Law Review, it is difficult to square Alito and the Dobbs majority’s paeans to democracy with their pointed hostility to both voting rights and equal representation. “Viewing the Roberts Court’s many interventions in this sphere in tandem,” they write, “it is clear that this is a court that no longer understands itself as largely or primarily functioning to facilitate the exercise of meaningful democracy in these ways; rather, in many instances, it appears to be actively working to undermine these goals.”
There was more at work in the Dobbs opinion than the majority’s disingenuous concern for democratic participation. Alito and his conservative colleagues did not just open the door to new abortion restrictions; they took aim at broader rights to bodily autonomy and personal freedom while laying the groundwork for the divisive notion of fetal personhood — an idea that, for all the court’s talk of democracy, is fundamentally incompatible with any modern notion of equal citizenship.
As Murray and Shaw observe, “The court’s repeated references to ‘fetal life,’ ‘potential life,’ and ‘unborn human being’ may have been designed” to “broadcast receptivity to such claims to litigants and lower courts.” What’s more, some courts have already “eagerly embraced this fetus-forward posture.”
One of those courts, it appears, is the Alabama Supreme Court, which ruled last week that frozen embryos in fertility clinics were “extrauterine children” subject to an 1872 state law allowing parents to sue over the wrongful death of a minor. “Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory,” Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion, in which he also quoted directly from the Book of Jeremiah.
The Alabama court’s decision rests on a broad interpretation of the state law in question. As Justice Greg Cook wrote in his dissent from the 8-1 majority, “I dissent because the main opinion violates this fundamental principle — that is, that the legislative branch and not the judicial branch updates laws — by expanding the meaning of the Wrongful Death Act beyond what it meant in 1872 without an amendment by the Legislature.”
It should be said here that the majority’s decision was possible only because of Dobbs, since to free states to outlaw abortion is also to free them to touch an even larger set of rights and freedoms.
That’s all the more true because the goal of the anti-abortion movement was not to return the question to the states, but to outlaw the practice, as well as roll the clock back on reproductive freedom writ large. Within a week of the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, for example, an anti-abortion congressman, Representative Lawrence Hogan of Maryland, proposed a Human Life Amendment that would extend the rights of personhood to the fetus. More recently, in the immediate aftermath of the court’s decision in Dobbs, conservative lawmakers across the country began to introduce laws and state constitutional amendments that would establish fetal personhood, rendering abortion permanently illegal, with no exceptions.
As we’re now seeing in Alabama, the concept of fetal personhood does more than outlaw abortion; it effectively outlaws in vitro fertilization as well. The University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System, for example, has now paused its I.V.F. treatments in response to the state Supreme Court’s ruling.
Fetal personhood also touches contraception, potentially outlawing those forms of hormonal birth control that prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg into the uterine lining. (Anti-abortion activists already describe those medications as “abortifacients” despite the fact that preventing a pregnancy isn’t an abortion.) It’s practically inescapable that a standard that ties personhood to the moment of conception — the creation of a single-celled zygote — is a standard that may well make it illegal to take any form of birth control that alters the hormonal balance of the patient to reduce the odds of pregnancy.
Added up, the main effect of fetal personhood is to rob women of their right to control their own reproductive capacity and make a choice about when and whether to give birth. It subordinates the actual personhood of a woman or a teenager — as captured in her ability to think and reason and act of her own volition and for her own purposes — to the potential for personhood found in an embryo. It is, in effect, a profound attack on the dignity and equality of women. Proponents of fetal personhood may speak in the language of rights, but this particular right is freedom retracting, not freedom enhancing.
You cannot disentangle abortion from reproductive rights. You cannot disentangle reproductive rights from bodily autonomy. And you cannot disentangle bodily autonomy from basic questions of equal rights and democratic freedom.
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 23, 2024 15:23:12 GMT
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 23, 2024 15:26:42 GMT
Love this! From the Democratic governor of PA
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 23, 2024 15:27:50 GMT
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/23/texas-woman-ectopic-pregnancy-abortion/An ectopic pregnancy put her life at risk. A Texas hospital refused to treat her.
The 25-year-old woman and her mother blame the state’s abortion ban for a delay in care that doctors say put her “in extreme danger of losing her life”
ARLINGTON, Tex. — Kelsie Norris-De La Cruz tried not to cry as the doctor in the emergency room delivered one of the most frightening diagnoses a pregnant woman can receive.
The 25-year-old college senior was told she likely had an ectopic pregnancy, a highly dangerous condition where the embryo implants outside of the uterus. Without immediate treatment, the fallopian tube can rupture — and the patient can die.
The law that has prohibited abortions in Texas since Roe v. Wade was overturned now explicitly allows doctors to treat ectopic pregnancies. But when doctors at Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital evaluated Norris-De La Cruz last week, they refused to terminate the pregnancy, saying there was some chance the pregnancy was still viable, Norris-De La Cruz recalled. Instead, they advised her and her mother to go home and wait, according to medical records reviewed by The Washington Post.
Norris-De La Cruz ultimately received emergency surgery about 24 hours later at a different hospital in the area, at which point her ectopic pregnancy had already started to rupture. The OB/GYN who performed the procedure said that, if Norris-De La Cruz had waited much longer, she would have been “in extreme danger of losing her life.”
“I was scared I was going to ... lose my entire reproductive system if they waited too long,” Norris-De La Cruz said in an interview two days after her surgery. “I knew it could happen at any moment.”
Her case highlights a chilling reality of post-Roe America: Medical exceptions to abortion bans have not stopped doctors from turning away patients with significant pregnancy complications, often with harrowing consequences. Their stories underscore the messy collision between abortion laws and medical diagnoses — and the struggles of doctors and hospitals to navigate what many say are inadequate legal protections to treat women with life-threatening conditions.
In the nearly two years since Roe fell, dozens of women have come forward with stories of medical care denied because of abortion bans, with the changes in treatment bringing some close to death or affecting patients’ future fertility. Several dozen women across the country who experienced pregnancy complications have challenged their state abortion bans in court.
Two friends were denied care after Florida banned abortion. One almost died.
The Post learned of Norris-De La Cruz’s case when her mother, seeking advice, called a Houston reproductive health clinic when a reporter was present. To corroborate Norris-De La Cruz’s account, The Post reviewed dozens of pages of medical records, sonogram images, photos and text messages, and conducted interviews with many of the people involved in the case.
Four OB/GYNs who reviewed Norris-De La Cruz’s medical records for The Post, with Norris-De La Cruz’s permission, said she should have been offered emergency surgery. They said they suspected Texas’s abortion ban played a role in how she was advised.
“That should have been a bread and butter slam dunk diagnosis,” said Clayton Alfonso, an OB/GYN at Duke University. “It doesn’t make sense to me that they would send her away, unless they had a fear that the surgery … could be perceived as causing an abortion.”
Kimberly Walton, the director of media relations for Texas Health, said the hospital’s top priority is “providing our patients with safe, high-quality care.”
“Treatment decisions are individualized based on a patient’s clinical condition and we believe the care provided to the patient in this case was appropriate,” she wrote in a statement.
Walton did not answer a written question about whether the delay in Norris’s care was related to the abortion law. The doctors who sent Norris home did not respond to requests for comment.
A Republican state senator who has spearheaded much of Texas’s antiabortion legislation said he was surprised and frustrated to hear about Norris-De La Cruz’s case.
“I don’t know what the excuse would be for a Texas doctor not treating an ectopic pregnancy, because that’s not the law,” said Sen. Bryan Hughes, who sponsored a law last year specifying that Texas doctors are permitted to treat ectopic pregnancies, a follow-up to Texas’s abortion ban meant to prevent cases like this one.
But many doctors consider even Hughes’s follow-up law, which took effect in September, to be an inadequate tool for treating patients like Norris-De La Cruz amid a complicated post-Roe landscape. Ectopic pregnancies in the fallopian tube, which never survive to term, can be hard to diagnose on an ultrasound with 100 percent certainty, several doctors said — and if the diagnosis is wrong, a doctor might fear potential legal repercussions for terminating a viable pregnancy.
After the first of two OB/GYNs at Arlington Memorial refused to treat Norris-De La Cruz, her mother, Stephanie Lloyd, immediately thought about Texas’s abortion ban.
“Does this have anything to do with the abortion law?” she remembered asking the doctor.
When he didn’t answer, Lloyd recalled, she had to restrain Norris-De La Cruz as her daughter tried to launch herself at him.
“Whenever I f---ing rupture,” Norris-De La Cruz said, “I’m giving my lawyers your f---ing name.”
Norris-De La Cruz had not wanted to lose her pregnancy.
When she got a positive test in early January, she said, she and her boyfriend immediately started to imagine who their child might become.
“We made jokes all the time like, ‘Maybe he’ll be a competitive chess player,’” Norris-De La Cruz said. “We thought the possibility of creating something that was a unity of us was really beautiful."
It was just one week later that Norris-De La Cruz started to cramp and bleed.
She went straight to the emergency room on Jan. 14, where doctors measured her pregnancy hormone levels, performed an ultrasound and told her to return in 48 hours. By her second appointment two days later, her pregnancy hormone levels had dropped precipitously, according to medical records — leading the doctors to suspect a “failed early pregnancy,” although they acknowledged in the records that they could not entirely rule out the possibility of an ectopic.
Over the next few weeks, Norris-De La Cruz said, she still didn’t feel well — experiencing bouts of abdominal pain so severe that she struggled to stand. Thinking she might have appendicitis or a urinary tract infection, she went to the health center on her campus at the University of Texas at Arlington, around noon on Feb. 12, where a nurse told her to go straight to the emergency room.
Then came the frightening diagnosis at the Arlington Memorial ER.
After her confrontation that day with the OB/GYN, Norris-De La Cruz spoke with a different doctor on call who specialized in emergency medicine and had also reviewed her tests and ultrasound scans. He disagreed with the OB/GYN’s decision to discharge her, according to medical records. While he said he was not permitted to do the surgery himself — that required an OB/GYN — he recommended she remain in the hospital overnight.
“I do not feel comfortable discharging her home and do not think that is in her best interest,” the emergency room doctor wrote in her records.
The following morning, Norris-De La Cruz was turned away by a second OB/GYN, who determined that there was “no operation warranted,” according to records. The OB/GYN discharged her and told her to follow up in 48 hours.
As Norris-De La Cruz prepared to leave the hospital around 10 a.m. on Feb. 13, her mother was standing outside in the parking lot, begging a woman at a New Mexico abortion clinic over the phone to help terminate her daughter’s ectopic pregnancy.
The woman seemed confused, Lloyd said.
“Texas should be able to help you,” Lloyd recalled the clinic staff member saying. “Why do you want to come here?”
She gave Lloyd the number for another office — a former abortion clinic in Houston that provides ultrasounds and out-of-state referrals. But they didn’t know what to say, either.
“You could come to a Houston hospital but they might tell you the same thing,” Marjorie Eisen, a patient advocate at Houston Women’s Reproductive Services, told Lloyd when she called, in an exchange observed by The Post. “We’ve had luck with our county hospitals sometimes and sometimes not.”
Houston Women’s Reproductive Services has consulted with three other patients in similar situations since Jan. 1, said Kathy Kleinfeld, the clinic’s administrator — all women who she said have been turned away from hospitals with ectopic pregnancies.
Eisen suggested Lloyd talk to a doctor she knew in Dallas.
“I’m so sorry you’re dealing with this,” Eisen said. “It’s a nightmare.”
Lloyd started to panic, pacing back and forth as she tried to figure out what to do next. Her daughter was going to die, she recalled thinking to herself: Why wouldn’t anyone help her?
Back inside the hospital, Norris-De La Cruz got a call from her best friend, Monica Perez, whom she’d been texting with updates throughout the night.
“I’m on my way to my OB/GYN,” Perez recalled saying as she drove to one of her regular appointments. “Do you want me to tell the nurses and see if they can squeeze you in?”
Norris-De La Cruz immediately texted her friend a picture of her sonogram, hoping the image would be enough to convince them.
Perez called back 20 minutes later.
“They can see you at 2 o’clock,” she said.
As soon as Perez’s OB/GYN, Jeffery Morgan, reviewed Norris-De La Cruz’s ultrasound scans, he immediately identified an ectopic pregnancy.
All the textbook signs were there, he said in an interview a week after the consultation: A large mass on the right side of her pelvis. Elevated levels of pregnancy hormone with no visible pregnancy inside the uterus. Fluid in the abdomen.
“There are times when it’s really early in the process when it can be hard to know if it’s ectopic — but that honestly would have been weeks before where she was in the pregnancy,” Morgan said, adding that he was 98 percent sure Norris-De La Cruz had an ectopic when he initially examined her.
At his clinic, Morgan told Norris-De La Cruz and her mother that he recommended surgery as soon as possible.
As soon as they heard that, they both started to sob.
“Wow,” Norris-De La Cruz recalled thinking as she looked up at the doctor. “I don’t have to make my case. You see it. You understand that this is an emergency.”
Norris-De La Cruz was scheduled for surgery at Medical City hospital in Arlington three hours later.
Morgan was able to remove the ectopic pregnancy, according to records.
But the mass had grown so large he also had to take most of her right fallopian tube, a loss that could affect her future fertility.
That outcome was likely inevitable, according to most of the OB/GYNs consulted for this story. Norris-De La Cruz probably would have lost her tube even if she had been treated immediately at Arlington Memorial, they said.
Morgan said he never considered delaying or withholding treatment because of the abortion ban, which he says clearly allows Texas doctors to treat ectopic pregnancies. He said he was shocked to learn that Norris-De La Cruz had been turned away.
“Honestly, it baffles me,” Morgan said. “Any kind of ectopic, anything like that is excluded.”
In the days since the surgery, Norris-De La Cruz and Lloyd have thought a lot about Texas’s abortion law, which they both believe factored into the delay in Norris-De La Cruz’s care.
When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, the two had argued fiercely about what a near-total abortion ban would mean for women in the state — with Norris-De La Cruz fearing a loss of personal freedoms, and Lloyd welcoming new protections for babies who couldn’t speak up for themselves.
Initially, Lloyd said, she thought the Texas abortion law would only affect people who decided they didn’t want to be pregnant — never imagining it could prevent women from accessing lifesaving care. Now, she said, she has completely changed her mind about abortion bans.
“I didn’t realize how far it had gone,” she said. “But it has happened to my life now, with my daughter."
“Her life has been in danger and affected by someone who was too afraid to help.”
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Post by Merge on Feb 23, 2024 17:52:59 GMT
www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/23/texas-woman-ectopic-pregnancy-abortion/An ectopic pregnancy put her life at risk. A Texas hospital refused to treat her.
The 25-year-old woman and her mother blame the state’s abortion ban for a delay in care that doctors say put her “in extreme danger of losing her life”
ARLINGTON, Tex. — Kelsie Norris-De La Cruz tried not to cry as the doctor in the emergency room delivered one of the most frightening diagnoses a pregnant woman can receive.
The 25-year-old college senior was told she likely had an ectopic pregnancy, a highly dangerous condition where the embryo implants outside of the uterus. Without immediate treatment, the fallopian tube can rupture — and the patient can die.
The law that has prohibited abortions in Texas since Roe v. Wade was overturned now explicitly allows doctors to treat ectopic pregnancies. But when doctors at Texas Health Arlington Memorial Hospital evaluated Norris-De La Cruz last week, they refused to terminate the pregnancy, saying there was some chance the pregnancy was still viable, Norris-De La Cruz recalled. Instead, they advised her and her mother to go home and wait, according to medical records reviewed by The Washington Post.
Norris-De La Cruz ultimately received emergency surgery about 24 hours later at a different hospital in the area, at which point her ectopic pregnancy had already started to rupture. The OB/GYN who performed the procedure said that, if Norris-De La Cruz had waited much longer, she would have been “in extreme danger of losing her life.”
“I was scared I was going to ... lose my entire reproductive system if they waited too long,” Norris-De La Cruz said in an interview two days after her surgery. “I knew it could happen at any moment.”
Her case highlights a chilling reality of post-Roe America: Medical exceptions to abortion bans have not stopped doctors from turning away patients with significant pregnancy complications, often with harrowing consequences. Their stories underscore the messy collision between abortion laws and medical diagnoses — and the struggles of doctors and hospitals to navigate what many say are inadequate legal protections to treat women with life-threatening conditions.
In the nearly two years since Roe fell, dozens of women have come forward with stories of medical care denied because of abortion bans, with the changes in treatment bringing some close to death or affecting patients’ future fertility. Several dozen women across the country who experienced pregnancy complications have challenged their state abortion bans in court.
Two friends were denied care after Florida banned abortion. One almost died.
The Post learned of Norris-De La Cruz’s case when her mother, seeking advice, called a Houston reproductive health clinic when a reporter was present. To corroborate Norris-De La Cruz’s account, The Post reviewed dozens of pages of medical records, sonogram images, photos and text messages, and conducted interviews with many of the people involved in the case.
Four OB/GYNs who reviewed Norris-De La Cruz’s medical records for The Post, with Norris-De La Cruz’s permission, said she should have been offered emergency surgery. They said they suspected Texas’s abortion ban played a role in how she was advised.
“That should have been a bread and butter slam dunk diagnosis,” said Clayton Alfonso, an OB/GYN at Duke University. “It doesn’t make sense to me that they would send her away, unless they had a fear that the surgery … could be perceived as causing an abortion.”
Kimberly Walton, the director of media relations for Texas Health, said the hospital’s top priority is “providing our patients with safe, high-quality care.”
“Treatment decisions are individualized based on a patient’s clinical condition and we believe the care provided to the patient in this case was appropriate,” she wrote in a statement.
Walton did not answer a written question about whether the delay in Norris’s care was related to the abortion law. The doctors who sent Norris home did not respond to requests for comment.
A Republican state senator who has spearheaded much of Texas’s antiabortion legislation said he was surprised and frustrated to hear about Norris-De La Cruz’s case.
“I don’t know what the excuse would be for a Texas doctor not treating an ectopic pregnancy, because that’s not the law,” said Sen. Bryan Hughes, who sponsored a law last year specifying that Texas doctors are permitted to treat ectopic pregnancies, a follow-up to Texas’s abortion ban meant to prevent cases like this one.
But many doctors consider even Hughes’s follow-up law, which took effect in September, to be an inadequate tool for treating patients like Norris-De La Cruz amid a complicated post-Roe landscape. Ectopic pregnancies in the fallopian tube, which never survive to term, can be hard to diagnose on an ultrasound with 100 percent certainty, several doctors said — and if the diagnosis is wrong, a doctor might fear potential legal repercussions for terminating a viable pregnancy.
After the first of two OB/GYNs at Arlington Memorial refused to treat Norris-De La Cruz, her mother, Stephanie Lloyd, immediately thought about Texas’s abortion ban.
“Does this have anything to do with the abortion law?” she remembered asking the doctor.
When he didn’t answer, Lloyd recalled, she had to restrain Norris-De La Cruz as her daughter tried to launch herself at him.
“Whenever I f---ing rupture,” Norris-De La Cruz said, “I’m giving my lawyers your f---ing name.”
Norris-De La Cruz had not wanted to lose her pregnancy.
When she got a positive test in early January, she said, she and her boyfriend immediately started to imagine who their child might become.
“We made jokes all the time like, ‘Maybe he’ll be a competitive chess player,’” Norris-De La Cruz said. “We thought the possibility of creating something that was a unity of us was really beautiful."
It was just one week later that Norris-De La Cruz started to cramp and bleed.
She went straight to the emergency room on Jan. 14, where doctors measured her pregnancy hormone levels, performed an ultrasound and told her to return in 48 hours. By her second appointment two days later, her pregnancy hormone levels had dropped precipitously, according to medical records — leading the doctors to suspect a “failed early pregnancy,” although they acknowledged in the records that they could not entirely rule out the possibility of an ectopic.
Over the next few weeks, Norris-De La Cruz said, she still didn’t feel well — experiencing bouts of abdominal pain so severe that she struggled to stand. Thinking she might have appendicitis or a urinary tract infection, she went to the health center on her campus at the University of Texas at Arlington, around noon on Feb. 12, where a nurse told her to go straight to the emergency room.
Then came the frightening diagnosis at the Arlington Memorial ER.
After her confrontation that day with the OB/GYN, Norris-De La Cruz spoke with a different doctor on call who specialized in emergency medicine and had also reviewed her tests and ultrasound scans. He disagreed with the OB/GYN’s decision to discharge her, according to medical records. While he said he was not permitted to do the surgery himself — that required an OB/GYN — he recommended she remain in the hospital overnight.
“I do not feel comfortable discharging her home and do not think that is in her best interest,” the emergency room doctor wrote in her records.
The following morning, Norris-De La Cruz was turned away by a second OB/GYN, who determined that there was “no operation warranted,” according to records. The OB/GYN discharged her and told her to follow up in 48 hours.
As Norris-De La Cruz prepared to leave the hospital around 10 a.m. on Feb. 13, her mother was standing outside in the parking lot, begging a woman at a New Mexico abortion clinic over the phone to help terminate her daughter’s ectopic pregnancy.
The woman seemed confused, Lloyd said.
“Texas should be able to help you,” Lloyd recalled the clinic staff member saying. “Why do you want to come here?”
She gave Lloyd the number for another office — a former abortion clinic in Houston that provides ultrasounds and out-of-state referrals. But they didn’t know what to say, either.
“You could come to a Houston hospital but they might tell you the same thing,” Marjorie Eisen, a patient advocate at Houston Women’s Reproductive Services, told Lloyd when she called, in an exchange observed by The Post. “We’ve had luck with our county hospitals sometimes and sometimes not.”
Houston Women’s Reproductive Services has consulted with three other patients in similar situations since Jan. 1, said Kathy Kleinfeld, the clinic’s administrator — all women who she said have been turned away from hospitals with ectopic pregnancies.
Eisen suggested Lloyd talk to a doctor she knew in Dallas.
“I’m so sorry you’re dealing with this,” Eisen said. “It’s a nightmare.”
Lloyd started to panic, pacing back and forth as she tried to figure out what to do next. Her daughter was going to die, she recalled thinking to herself: Why wouldn’t anyone help her?
Back inside the hospital, Norris-De La Cruz got a call from her best friend, Monica Perez, whom she’d been texting with updates throughout the night.
“I’m on my way to my OB/GYN,” Perez recalled saying as she drove to one of her regular appointments. “Do you want me to tell the nurses and see if they can squeeze you in?”
Norris-De La Cruz immediately texted her friend a picture of her sonogram, hoping the image would be enough to convince them.
Perez called back 20 minutes later.
“They can see you at 2 o’clock,” she said.
As soon as Perez’s OB/GYN, Jeffery Morgan, reviewed Norris-De La Cruz’s ultrasound scans, he immediately identified an ectopic pregnancy.
All the textbook signs were there, he said in an interview a week after the consultation: A large mass on the right side of her pelvis. Elevated levels of pregnancy hormone with no visible pregnancy inside the uterus. Fluid in the abdomen.
“There are times when it’s really early in the process when it can be hard to know if it’s ectopic — but that honestly would have been weeks before where she was in the pregnancy,” Morgan said, adding that he was 98 percent sure Norris-De La Cruz had an ectopic when he initially examined her.
At his clinic, Morgan told Norris-De La Cruz and her mother that he recommended surgery as soon as possible.
As soon as they heard that, they both started to sob.
“Wow,” Norris-De La Cruz recalled thinking as she looked up at the doctor. “I don’t have to make my case. You see it. You understand that this is an emergency.”
Norris-De La Cruz was scheduled for surgery at Medical City hospital in Arlington three hours later.
Morgan was able to remove the ectopic pregnancy, according to records.
But the mass had grown so large he also had to take most of her right fallopian tube, a loss that could affect her future fertility.
That outcome was likely inevitable, according to most of the OB/GYNs consulted for this story. Norris-De La Cruz probably would have lost her tube even if she had been treated immediately at Arlington Memorial, they said.
Morgan said he never considered delaying or withholding treatment because of the abortion ban, which he says clearly allows Texas doctors to treat ectopic pregnancies. He said he was shocked to learn that Norris-De La Cruz had been turned away.
“Honestly, it baffles me,” Morgan said. “Any kind of ectopic, anything like that is excluded.”
In the days since the surgery, Norris-De La Cruz and Lloyd have thought a lot about Texas’s abortion law, which they both believe factored into the delay in Norris-De La Cruz’s care.
When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, the two had argued fiercely about what a near-total abortion ban would mean for women in the state — with Norris-De La Cruz fearing a loss of personal freedoms, and Lloyd welcoming new protections for babies who couldn’t speak up for themselves.
Initially, Lloyd said, she thought the Texas abortion law would only affect people who decided they didn’t want to be pregnant — never imagining it could prevent women from accessing lifesaving care. Now, she said, she has completely changed her mind about abortion bans.
“I didn’t realize how far it had gone,” she said. “But it has happened to my life now, with my daughter."
“Her life has been in danger and affected by someone who was too afraid to help.” I can’t put into words the rage I feel at people who were too stupid and arrogant to imagine exactly this scenario. |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 23, 2024 18:39:15 GMT
Me too. I'm angry at the white men in power trying to control women's bodies, relegating women to 2nd class citizens and recklessly putting women's lives in danger. Angry at all those people who said Roe was established precedent and wouldn't get overturned. And then when Roe was in fact overturned, the concerns about access to health care and access to birth control were dismissed as being overly dramatic. www.nytimes.com/2024/02/23/opinion/alabama-embroyo-dobbs-reproductive-freedom.htmlDespite the lofty and expansive rhetoric of his majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito insisted throughout the text that the actual decision was more modest than it might appear. The end of Roe, he said, was not the end of abortion access as much as it was the beginning of a new era of democratic deliberation and decision-making. No longer shackled by a prior dictate of the Supreme Court, the people were free to choose. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” Alito wrote.
But, as the legal scholars Melissa Murray and Kate Shaw (who is also a contributing Opinion writer) argue in a recent article in the Harvard Law Review, it is difficult to square Alito and the Dobbs majority’s paeans to democracy with their pointed hostility to both voting rights and equal representation. “Viewing the Roberts Court’s many interventions in this sphere in tandem,” they write, “it is clear that this is a court that no longer understands itself as largely or primarily functioning to facilitate the exercise of meaningful democracy in these ways; rather, in many instances, it appears to be actively working to undermine these goals.”
There was more at work in the Dobbs opinion than the majority’s disingenuous concern for democratic participation. Alito and his conservative colleagues did not just open the door to new abortion restrictions; they took aim at broader rights to bodily autonomy and personal freedom while laying the groundwork for the divisive notion of fetal personhood — an idea that, for all the court’s talk of democracy, is fundamentally incompatible with any modern notion of equal citizenship.
As Murray and Shaw observe, “The court’s repeated references to ‘fetal life,’ ‘potential life,’ and ‘unborn human being’ may have been designed” to “broadcast receptivity to such claims to litigants and lower courts.” What’s more, some courts have already “eagerly embraced this fetus-forward posture.”
One of those courts, it appears, is the Alabama Supreme Court, which ruled last week that frozen embryos in fertility clinics were “extrauterine children” subject to an 1872 state law allowing parents to sue over the wrongful death of a minor. “Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory,” Chief Justice Tom Parker wrote in a concurring opinion, in which he also quoted directly from the Book of Jeremiah.
The Alabama court’s ruling rests on a broad interpretation of the state law in question. As Justice Greg Cook wrote in his dissent from the 8-to-1 decision, “I dissent because the main opinion violates this fundamental principle — that is, that the legislative branch and not the judicial branch updates laws — by expanding the meaning of the Wrongful Death Act beyond what it meant in 1872 without an amendment by the Legislature.”
It should be said here that the majority’s decision was possible only because of Dobbs, since to free states to outlaw abortion is also to free them to touch an even larger set of rights and freedoms.
That’s all the more true because the goal of the anti-abortion movement was not to return the question to the states, but to outlaw the practice, as well as roll the clock back on reproductive freedom writ large. Within a week of the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, for example, an anti-abortion congressman, Representative Lawrence Hogan of Maryland, proposed a Human Life Amendment that would extend the rights of personhood to the fetus. More recently, in the immediate aftermath of the court’s decision in Dobbs, conservative lawmakers across the country began to introduce laws and state constitutional amendments that would establish fetal personhood, rendering abortion permanently illegal, with no exceptions.
As we’re now seeing in Alabama, the concept of fetal personhood does more than outlaw abortion; it effectively outlaws in vitro fertilization as well. The University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System, for example, has now paused its I.V.F. treatments in response to the State Supreme Court’s ruling.
Fetal personhood also touches contraception, potentially outlawing those forms of hormonal birth control that prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg into the uterine lining. (Anti-abortion activists already describe those medications as “abortifacients” despite the fact that preventing a pregnancy isn’t an abortion.) It’s practically inescapable that a standard that ties personhood to the moment of conception — the creation of a single-celled zygote — is a standard that may well make it illegal to take any form of birth control that alters the hormonal balance of the patient to reduce the odds of pregnancy.
Added up, the main effect of fetal personhood is to rob women of their right to control their own reproductive capacity and make a choice about when and whether to give birth. It subordinates the actual personhood of a woman or a teenager — as captured in her ability to think and reason and act of her own volition and for her own purposes — to the potential for personhood found in an embryo. It is, in effect, a profound attack on the dignity and equality of women. Proponents of fetal personhood may speak in the language of rights, but this particular right is freedom retracting, not freedom enhancing.
You cannot disentangle abortion from reproductive rights. You cannot disentangle reproductive rights from bodily autonomy. And you cannot disentangle bodily autonomy from basic questions of equal rights and democratic freedom.
It is not a coincidence that the lawmakers spearheading the assault on abortion are also the lawmakers spearheading the assault on other forms of bodily autonomy — like the right of transgender Americans to exist in public as themselves. They are also the same lawmakers waging a broader campaign to restrict the ability of people in their states to live and think as they please.
Justice Alito wanted the public to believe that he was striking a blow for democracy when he led the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to overturn Roe v. Wade. But the truth is that the path away from abortion rights is less a move toward greater freedom than it is a step toward its negation. |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 25, 2024 14:34:31 GMT
Great perspective on the Alabama decision that brings up a lot of questions. It will be interesting to see how different states handle this, if at all. Will there be exceptions? How will they justify life begins at conception if they allow embryos to be destroyed? If the Alabama case is appealed and the Supreme Court decides to hear it, how will they rule? joycevance.substack.com/p/life-starts-at-conception-but? ‘When a lady is two or three successful pregnancies and these are left over, it’s just time to make sure that they aren’t penalized for success,’ he said.”
Apparently, disposing of an unwanted frozen embryo, which, like abortion, results in terminating the viability of a fertilized egg, is okay if you’ve already had a couple of babies.
the reality is that unless women want to watch their ability to make their own choices slip away—perhaps even about issues like birth control—they need to vote like their futures depend upon it. Because they do.
Fetal personhood bills may violate both state and federal religious freedom laws—not all religious traditions believe life begins at conception. Challenges are beginning to percolate in the lower courts on this basis. But their success is by no means assured. The Alabama Supreme Court has already made its views clear. And before she became a judge, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett publicly supported a group that promotes the belief that life begins at the moment of fertilization and that discarding unused embryos created during the IVF process should be criminalized. Might there be five votes for that view on this Supreme Court? It’s impossible to rule out that possibility. |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 25, 2024 14:39:40 GMT
On the role of religion in the Alabama decision joycevance.substack.com/p/when-scotus-leaves-it-up-to-the-states…Religious freedom exists as a shield to protect religious minorities, and should never be used as a sword to discriminate. Weaponizing a personal religious belief to create law for millions is not just unconscionable, but unconstitutional.”
The decision includes the word “Bible” three times. “God,” “godliness,” or a similar word appears 41 times. The word “sacred,” five times. None of this is accidental. During a recent interview that you can read all about here, Chief Justice Parker said he is in favor of the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a theological approach that calls on Christians to impose fundamentalist values on all aspects of American life. Parker said that “God created government” and that it’s “heartbreaking” that “we have let it go into the possession of others.”
The First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a national religion, and that same prohibition applies to the states through the 14th Amendment. What’s heartbreaking in Alabama this week is its Supreme Court Justices’ decision to abandon the Constitution and laws they took an oath to serve, in favor of advancing a religious agenda. |
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Post by revirdsuba99 on Feb 25, 2024 18:25:29 GMT
Nothing about this ruling was unintended!
It was totally deliberate!!
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tincin
Drama Llama
Posts: 5,382
Jul 25, 2014 4:55:32 GMT
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Post by tincin on Feb 25, 2024 19:25:19 GMT
What the hell does their god have to do with any law in this land? Apparently the separation of church and state is something they’ve never heard of. |
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tincin
Drama Llama
Posts: 5,382
Jul 25, 2014 4:55:32 GMT
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Post by tincin on Feb 25, 2024 19:27:59 GMT
MANY states are queueing up to do the same thing. I have 3 IVF grandchildren. The painful fertility journey was incredibly difficult to witness as a mom to my daughter who was devastated so many times. All the old white men in these states can go suck on a bag of dicks. The Abortion Everyday newsletter continuously updates with news of what's happening around the United States. It's hard, but important for us to be aware of what's going on. I don't read it everyday, but I'll play catch up once every week or two. Abortion, Every DayMake that old white GOP men please, don’t lump old white Democrats in there. |
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Post by Merge on Feb 25, 2024 19:29:10 GMT
What the hell does their god have to do with any law in this land? Apparently the separation of church and state is something they’ve never heard of. You know their latest thing is that the first amendment doesn't prohibit states from having official religions and legislating based on them. So as the SC hands every legal protection back to the states to decide, red states will declare themselves "Christian" and legislate accordingly. |
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tincin
Drama Llama
Posts: 5,382
Jul 25, 2014 4:55:32 GMT
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Post by tincin on Feb 25, 2024 19:31:54 GMT
Dumb question. If an embryo is a child or human, and the storage facility screws up and they thaw or whatever and are gone/ dead/ non viable are they responsible for that “murder”? Say they mix up the embryos and implant it to someone else, are they then human trafficking or kidnapping? I’m surprised this didn’t have more pushback from fertility companies because there’s a lot of issues to be had here. Absolutely that’s how this whole damned thing started. Couples suing for the loss of their “children” when some fertilized eggs were accidentally destroyed. |
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tincin
Drama Llama
Posts: 5,382
Jul 25, 2014 4:55:32 GMT
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Post by tincin on Feb 25, 2024 19:35:39 GMT
These points were brought up by The Mamattorney. This basically opens up a legal hellscape. Moms charged with involuntary manslaughter after miscarriage, fertility clinics and physicians sued for wrongful death if embryos don’t take, moms sued by fathers for refusing to implant. Some of these sound crazy, but things that sounded crazy just a few years ago have happened. To all of you who voted republican: you own this just like you own women losing their fertility, health, and sometimes their lives when they couldn’t get therapeutic abortions. Women have been arrested in the pro birth states who have had miscarriages and not contacted authorities to tend to the fetus. |
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Post by scraplette on Feb 26, 2024 16:14:50 GMT
Are these “people” automatic US citizens?
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Post by epeanymous on Feb 26, 2024 16:27:56 GMT
These points were brought up by The Mamattorney. This basically opens up a legal hellscape. Moms charged with involuntary manslaughter after miscarriage, fertility clinics and physicians sued for wrongful death if embryos don’t take, moms sued by fathers for refusing to implant. Some of these sound crazy, but things that sounded crazy just a few years ago have happened. To all of you who voted republican: you own this just like you own women losing their fertility, health, and sometimes their lives when they couldn’t get therapeutic abortions. Women have been arrested in the pro birth states who have had miscarriages and not contacted authorities to tend to the fetus. In the pre-Dobbs era, in a red state, my PD office represented a few very poor women who had miscarriages or stillbirths and were charged with child abuse. I don’t think people realize quite what may be coming for them. |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 26, 2024 16:31:04 GMT
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 26, 2024 16:36:16 GMT
I love that Republicans are getting called out for their contradictory statements and votes on IVF. Actions speak louder than words, especially when no one is looking. Republicans are tripping over themselves to back paddle on IVF.
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 26, 2024 16:51:41 GMT
fox4kc.com/news/missouri-law-says-pregnant-women-cant-get-divorced/JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – As it stands, Missouri judges cannot legally finalize a divorce if a woman is pregnant.
Three other states have similar laws: Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas. While a couple can still file for divorce in Missouri, the court must wait until after a woman gives birth in order to finalize child custody and child support.
When it comes to domestic violence, there’s no exceptions.
“It just doesn’t make sense in 2024,” said State Rep. Ashley Aune, a Democrat representing District 14 in Platte County, and that’s where it becomes a problem for her.
She introduced a bill this legislative session that essentially says pregnancy cannot prevent a judge from finalizing a divorce or separation.
“I just want moms in difficult situations to get out if they need to,” she said.
She agreed that while the law was made with good intentions, like making sure kids are taken care of, she feels it needs to be updated to reflect modern times.
“This legislation could literally save lives,” added Matthew Huffman with the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic & Sexual Violence, which works to ensure its advocates have the resources needed to provide services to rape and abuse survivors. “For abusive partners they might be using reproductive coercion and control to keep their partner pregnant so that they can’t ever actually be granted a divorce.”
Huffman said the current law comes down to two things: paternity and not wanting a child to be born without a determined father along with child custody.
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Post by Merge on Feb 26, 2024 17:09:19 GMT
Women have been arrested in the pro birth states who have had miscarriages and not contacted authorities to tend to the fetus. In the pre-Dobbs era, in a red state, my PD office represented a few very poor women who had miscarriages or stillbirths and were charged with child abuse. I don’t think people realize quite what may be coming for them. One of the most disturbing aspects of the "Project 2025" initiative is the intention to make a federal mandate that every miscarriage is investigated to determine if an abortion pill was used. |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 27, 2024 0:46:35 GMT
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dawnnikol
Prolific Pea
'A life without books is a life not lived.' Jay Kristoff
Posts: 8,555
Sept 21, 2015 18:39:25 GMT
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Post by dawnnikol on Feb 27, 2024 22:38:26 GMT
The side that hates "Cancel Culture" sure does like to get violent.
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Gem Girl
Pearl Clutcher
......
Posts: 2,686
Jun 29, 2014 19:29:52 GMT
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Post by Gem Girl on Feb 27, 2024 22:49:50 GMT
Love this! From the Democratic governor of PA What is he saying/singing? |
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Post by aj2hall on Feb 28, 2024 1:38:40 GMT
Love this! From the Democratic governor of PA What is he saying/singing? He's singing "This ain't Texas" |
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