The thought of pregnant teens getting jacked into carrying pregnancies to term by a shitty lottery draw via the judicial bypass system is so horrifying to me. I’ve heard the “school nurse won’t give my kid an aspirin without my permission, why should they be able to get an abortion” arguments and I’m sorry, the idea of forcing a human to give birth against their will is utterly morally repugnant, whatever their age:
The records I reviewed show that if a judge doesn’t want to grant a petition, she will find a reason to deny it. One 17-year-old in Alabama tried to satisfy the state’s requirement that minors be well informed by asking six people—a woman who’d had an abortion, a family friend, two nurses, and staffers at Planned Parenthood and the local health department—about the procedure. In court, she described the procedure in detail, naming the surgical instruments used. When the judge asked the girl—a straight-A student bound for college on two scholarships—if she felt emotionally ready to have an abortion, she replied, “I am. I’ve been strong-minded about all of this.”
The judge then denied her petition because she hadn’t spoken to the doctor who would perform the procedure. (The girl said the doctor refused to talk to her; clinics often limit contact with minors before their bypass hearing.)
“I’m a mother,” said the judge, who is not named in the court documents. “These people are interested in one thing, it appears to me, and that is getting this young lady’s money…This is a beautiful young girl with a bright future, and she does not need to have a butcher get ahold of her.” A divided appeals court upheld the judge’s denial.
my trick to not looking ignorant is that when I don’t know anything about a particular subject I simply don’t speak out of ignorance
— An Amazon Wishlist (@ShrillCosby) September 17, 2014
When the police are forced to get serious about their reporting numbers, rape stats go up.
McSweeney’s becomes a non-profit publishing house.
It gave me great pleasure to witness Kate Harding supporting affirmative consent AND explaining why Danny didn’t rape Mindy, so:
When you become sexually active, you quickly learn that sex as it’s practiced in the real world nearly always demands small, quick renegotiations as you go along. Sometimes a long-term partner wants to try something new in bed, and sometimes even the old things hurt if you do them at the wrong angle. Sometimes the person on the bottom wants to be on top, or somebody’s arm gets squished, or a head bashes into the headboard. Sometimes, an act that felt great when your partner started it actually makes you feel sore after a couple of minutes, and you need it to stop, even though you enthusiastically consented to the act before and loved what was happening up to that point. Real people having real sex deal with this shit all the time. Practicing affirmative consent means being cognizant of how your partner’s responding to everything that happens, doing everything you can to make sure you’re both happy, and respecting the other person’s boundaries even when they conflict with your immediate desires. In other words, it’s what decent people already do, without being told.
I have become the last person in the world to begin watching American Horror Story (like, I just watched the first three episodes of the first season with my cousins, my husband was like “no i will not follow u there gonna watch the base-ball instead i put up with so much of your nonsense already”) and WELL. Well. that shit is wiiiild.
a longread on orlando OKAY!!!!!
With Orlando, the narrator begins to describe how the passage of time works on the young man (“He saw the beech trees turn golden and the young ferns unfurl; he saw the moon sickle and then circular”), then breaks off: “but probably the reader can imagine the passage which should follow and how every tree and plant in the neighborhood is described first green, then golden; how moons rise and suns set; how spring follows winter and autumn summer,” and so forth. Woolf takes a casual jab at her previous masterworks: the narrator concludes that one might just as easily summarize the passage of time with “the simple statement that ‘time passed’ (here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever happened.”
there actually are stupid questions:
The best example might be the woman who, after finding out what Red Umbrella Project does, asked us, “But if your organization is made up of current and former sex workers, how do you keep the current ones from recruiting the former ones?” The member who she asked was floored as he tried to explain that that has never been a problem. How could you explain to someone with that view of sex work that no, our organization is not partially made up of unscrupulous hookers lurking around trying to sucker recovering trafficking victims back into a life of drug-addled degradation? We all tried to explain, taking varying tacks with forced cordiality. We explained that RedUP is made up of sex workers from all walks of life and varying circumstances, that our main goal is to give our members the tools to tell their own stories and advocate for themselves, and would you like to take a look at our literary journal of sex worker memoirs? It was exhausting, but it felt important for us to be there, no matter how much teeth-gritting it took.
My heart just breaks for that teenage girl. She was as well prepared as anyone could have been, and they still denied her the right to decide over her own body and future.
I have a slew of teenage nieces and this makes me so concerned for them.
…and for a totally bullshit reason, too. I mean, Ms. Judge, believe what you want about abortion, but follow the law and don’t deny access by spouting nonsense about money-grubbing butchers.
the whole article is horrifying tbh. i read it when it was posted and it was nightmaresville at my desk at work, reading between my fingers. how could those judges do that??? is this real life or a dystopia??? etc etc etc
(what i have a very hard time understanding is that the girls had an accident, basically, and got pregnant when they didn’t want to. they know that for whatever reason, they aren’t equipped to care for a baby right now and possibly the pregnancy itself will be dangerous – it isn’t for everyone, but some of the stories these girls were telling showed that for them it is. so the judges or whatever moral authority decide the girls need to be punished for doing sex by making them stay pregnant and give birth, which is where my brain can’t understand because it’s not just punishing the girl (and why should a baby be punishment?) but also the baby if the pregnancy goes all the way to the end, and the girls aren’t able to afford to care for the baby, so then we have them relying on welfare and other social security things, which the judges are ALSO against (since usually that goes hand-in-hand with anti-abortion), and augh. i hate it all so much. just let the girls have the damn abortions they need!)
the sad but key truth is that real life IS a dystopia in the US at this point, for most people anyway.
Guys the actual Decemberists posted the Decemberists article from yesterday on Facebook. It made me very happy.
Colin Meloy retweeted it, too!
Of all the bizarre ideas pro-lifers have about abortion providers, “abortion providers are only in it for the money” is preeetttty high on the list
I think the most bizarre is “you’re too immature/irresponsible for an abortion (but totes ready to HAVE A BABY).”
Because everyone knows that babies and children take no maturity or responsibility to raise. They are like dolls, you can put them in a box in the closet for a few hours when you’re done.
[please don’t do this with babies, dolls OK]
Depends on the doll–some of them get really angry about this. Especially around Halloween.
When my Family Studies class did the robot baby assignment, one of my classmates actually did toss his “baby” in the garage and watch football because he couldn’t figure out how to make the damn thing shut up.
So much this. Just urgh.
Right? The sheer evil glee they take in murdering the unborn is payment enough for them, surely.
And yet if we suggest that people are, say, dumping toxic chemicals in groundwater to maximize profits, these same people look at us like we’ve just crawled out of an alternate universe dystopia. Because who would do that?! Nobody wants to see anyone get sick!
I’m pretty damn cynical, but it seems like the first rule of “follow the money” is, you know, *find* the money. You know who’s not filthy rich? Gynecologists.
When I worked at an abortion clinic, I went home every night and rolled around in my piles of money. That’s why my rent was sometimes late. The rolling in money.
I’m reading the abortion article and I think my brain exploded once I got to the part where Alabama and Florida allowed the appointment of lawyers for the girls’ fetuses, to ARGUE AGAINST THEM. So these girls trying to exercise their legal rights get shut down and pushed back every step of the way, but the fetus gets a lawyer?
Agreed. I was highly repulsed that the fetal attorneys (ugh) name the fetus in a bunch of the cases!
I put up with my clients acting like big babies, but I draw the line at fetuses.
Excuse me while I BREAK EVERYTHING.
May I help?
Clubs are in the umbrella rack; axes are in the closet down the hall.
Perfect.
IT IS THE ONLY WAY TO BE SURE
I definitely thought that longread was going to be about the city of Orlando, or Orlando in As You Like It. I can’t decided if I’m disappointed that it’s neither.
I was thinking it was about Orlando, Home Of Disneyworld and when it wasn’t I was thoroughly confused.
I have a friend who has wanted to write an article on Orlando, Home of Disneyworld for a very long time.
I would read your friend’s article, probably more than once.
That piece about judges and teen abortion has infuriated me. Mr. B_Ham’s cousin is a judge in Florida. I have never met the woman, but I want to call her up and demand that she grant EVERY ONE of the petitions she ever gets. (I have no idea if she’s even the kind of judge that would be petitioned. In my fantasy world, she is, and she does, and women whisper to each other, “Try to get Judge ___; she’ll help you out.”)
Aiiigggg, I hope so, but that phrase reminds me of a documentary on abortion pre-legalization – where careful abortion providers would try to time their abortions to when the sympathetic doctors were on shift so that if something went wrong, going to the hospital wouldn’t mean that everyone went to jail.
Woman bleeding in the backseat “Try to get Dr. ___; he’ll help you out.”
I once heard from a rabbi who helped women get access to safe abortions pre-Roe. Part of what he did was to provide plausible cover stories (and respectability) in cases where something went wrong and hospitals had to become involved.
*slumps*
“I’m a mother,” NO ONE CARES, DOESN’T MATTER
“These people are interested in one thing, it appears to me, and that is getting this young lady’s money… My god, it’s like they’ve just completely stopped trying to make shit up that even remotely, possibly, in theory, in another universe, makes sense and are just throwing shit at the walls to see what sticks. Rabble, rabble, rabble, money, rabble rabble!
“This is a beautiful young girl with a bright future, and she does not need to have a butcher get ahold of her.” Well, she did have a bright future, until you forced motherhood upon her, you psychopath. Hope she doesn’t get desperate enough to go to, I don’t know, say, an unlicensed abortion provider to save said future!
BACK TO BED I GO.
“This is a beautiful young girl with a bright future, and she does not need to have a butcher get ahold of her.”
Of course by allying yourself with the people who want to make LEGAL abortion a rare and inaccessible commodity instead of the legitimate medical service it is, you’re helping make sure more “girls” will be in the hands of what you’d have to call butchers. Instead of licensed health care professionals with connections to excellent emergency care.
Fucker.
The “butcher” comment knocked me on my ass.
“Practicing affirmative consent means being cognizant of how your partner’s responding to everything that happens, doing everything you can to make sure you’re both happy, and respecting the other person’s boundaries even when they conflict with your immediate desires. In other words, it’s what decent people already do, without being told.”
AMEN.
And someone consciously doing affirmative consent is SEXY. Having not experienced a lot of that in my past (and dealing with a lot of coercion and general sexual assholery), and having an experience recently where the dude made sure that I was wanting to do what we were doing, I was blown away by how much of a turn-on that could be.
Preach! Guy I Am Kinda Seeing is very, very upfront with “is this okay do you want to do this” and I’m floored by it.
And someone consciously doing affirmative consent is SEXY.
Thissssssss.
And it doesn’t even need to be that well articulated! Im pretty sure that I have given, denied and requested consent with a well nuanced grunt.
Oh my god, the “Hot Tub Time Machine 2” alert has now made me aware of some sort of Paddington Bear movie?!!? I can’t watch the trailer right now! Is it terrible?? Is it as bad as I fear?! GET YOUR GODDAMN HANDS OFF PADDINGTON BEAR.
Earth is over, everyone please leave.
Well I heard Colin Firth bowed out, which can’t be good news.
Scott Aukerman is going to be disappointed. He’s been shilling about the Christmas opening for so long with Adam on U Talkin’ U2 2 Me?
I heard a chilling interview on Democracy Now last week with abortion providers and activists in Texas. For undocumented women living in the Rio Grande Valley, getting an abortion will mean having to pass through immigration checkpoints. (Not sure if the clinics serving that area were able to reopen following the SCOTUS ruling this week). The Lilith Fund (http://www.lilithfund.org/) provides financial and logistical assistance to women who are unable to pay for/navigate the steps to getting appropriate and timely care in Texas.
The good news is, at least from my experience, most immigration checkpoints in the Rio Grande Valley are pretty laid back. That is, they do not enforce a detailed level of scrutiny on anybody. Again, that’s been my experience, other people may have awful stories to tell. Unless you are crossing from Mexico to the US, (because of course we have immigration checks inside the state, not just AT the border itself…), everything is much simpler.
I believe there are now a couple of clinics in the Valley (at least one in McAllen) that have been able to reopen. Of course, the Valley is a huge area with a lot of women living in poverty, so the work the Lilith Fund is doing is still incredibly important and necessary, but at least there’s not the immigration hurdle for the time being.
That first article…
“Oh, so you don’t think you’re ready to raise a child? Well, clearly you aren’t mature enough to decide on abortion.”
*fizzing with rage*
Is this a good place to say that @anne_boyer is tweeting lucidly at this moment about caregiving (paid and unpaid) and feminized labor? Anne is terrific and all who use Twitter should follow her. (Fair warning: she is undergoing treatment for breast cancer and tweets about it a lot.)
Thank you! I hadn’t followed her before but labor feminism is my favorite feminism.
That article on consenting sex is pretty fabulous. A+, would read again.
Yeah, I read the article a few days ago and that was the part that really made me bang my head on the desk.
I also hated the judge’s quote from above: “I’m a mother…This is a beautiful young girl with a bright future, and she does not need to have a butcher get ahold of her.”
1. Why does it matter that she is beautiful? Would you be more willing to grant an abortion to a girl you find less pretty?
2. Her bright future is probably going to get a lot less bright when she has an unwanted child. An abortion would be much more likely to keep her on the path to her bright future.
3. Apparently you weren’t listening when the mature teen described the procedure in detail, since you are referring to the medical professional performing the procedure as a “butcher”.
4. Hey, I’m a mother too! (That doesn’t have anything to do with my comment, but you said it when it didn’t have anything to do with your ruling, so I figured I’d throw it in too.)
And not to mention that the girls forced into getting the Judge’s permission are already dealing with very stressful home environments or they would not be there.
Would you be more willing to grant an abortion to a girl you find less pretty?
Well, I mean, you don’t want people having ugly babies, do you?
That quote set my hair on fire! “I’m a mother.” What the hell does that mean? ‘Cause I am also a mother, and I would walk across broken glass to get my daughter an abortion if she needed one.
I once had a Male Professor in a college class say that women who had never been pregnant had no more insight into the abortion question than men, which is just terrible because even women who have never been pregnant face the threat of pregnancy just a wee bit more than men (trans men excluded, of course). He was a pro-lifer, so his implication was that pregnancy would naturally make you realize that abortion is horrible. Hoo boy, I wish I could go back with my current giant belly and a toddler in my arms and tell him that I have never been as pro-choice as when I am pregnant. And I’m not even someone who really hates being pregnant! It’s just kind of life-altering and really should be a strictly volunteer gig.
SERIOUSLY. Personally, nothing brought home for me that a fetus is not a baby like HAVING AN ACTUAL BABY.
Just going to erupt in anger that a man told a woman that she couldnt possibly know her own feelings on abortion until another strictly female event occurred in her life.
Right? And, of course, that once that blessed event occurred, she would come around to the right way of thinking, which happened to be the opinion of a childless man.
That guy was a piece of work.
Depending on how things shake out at my office today, I may not be around for Open Thread, but I thought it was important that all the Kristen Stewart lovers knew about this Elle magazine pic.
Were you saying something. Sorry, I was distracted by Claudia Black.
HELP
Oh god. I was already thinking I wasn’t emotionally prepared to read this article this morning, and this just clinched it.
(That isn’t to say I wasn’t gonna read it anyway, but now I EXTRA know that if you need me I’ll be in a puddle of rage and sadness under my desk.)
It is so horrifying! These are girls that are so vulnerable that they dont have support from their parents and the they are made to fight the law and then perhaps bring up a child. The system is bullshit.
ShrillCosby’s ignorance tweet is basically my life motto. A+++
Same. Actually my life motto is more like “you don’t need to have an opinion on everything, and you SHOULDN’T have an opinion about something you don’t know shit about.” This is good for not wasting mental energy or other people’s time, and a positive side effect is that it cuts down on the number of dumb things I say.
Nicole, I am SO HAPPY you’re watching American Horror Story. Murder House is the best.
It took me a couple tries to get into it because I was afraid it would be too much about Dylan MacDermott’s manpain after boning his student and cheating on Connie Britton. Luckily, my hairdresser (who is my go-to guy to discuss anything horror-related) convinced me otherwise!
I may or may not have shouted “Dude, shut uppppp!” at the TV and ragequit initially.
This gif is so important.
Oh wow, I had no idea people watched that Mindy ep and were like, “DANNY TRIED TO RAPE HER.” Like, that exact thing has happened to me…many times. Sometimes it really is an accident!
The episode bothered me not because of the slipping scene, but because of pretty much everything that came after it. “I hate the idea of this sex act, I’m going to drug myself to endure it!” Bleh. (love this consent article though)
I felt the same way – and then the very last scene is about how it’s ~unsexy~ to ask for consent. blech.
Also the whole, “Nooo, I’m not gross, I would NEVER do butt stuff!” :/
Yeah, that was the part that grossed me out, not what Danny did. Sometimes I miss her girl friends from the first season, because like, your women friends are the first people to be like, “You’re being ridiculous, and it’s 2014 and butt stuff is perfectly normal.”
As an occasionally sexually active but seriously repulsed asexual that episode made me feel ill. Mindy drugging herself up makes so much sense to me and if I had a friend like Morgan I probably would have already done that. The whole thing was way too realistic for comfort.
Yes! Sometimes…things…aren’t being aimed at…places…but in the course of…stuff…they get too close to those places by accident. It really does happen!
Yes! I am all for affirmative consent, but also sometimes a “hey, that’s not feeling great today, can you do something else?” is required!
Well maybe sometimes it is, but didn’t Danny admit towards the end that he was lying about it being an accident?
Maybe it’s too early in the morning for me to read the RedUp article – last night I read this http://www.lamag.com/longform/gone-girls/?src=lon… about child prostitution in LA and my head and heart are so confused.
UGH I know that made me so mad/sad. That judge should be fired.
Did anyone else read the story about the spider that crawled into a guy’s appendectomy scar (ok, presumably it wasn’t quite a scar yet but a healing wound) and lived there for 3 DAYS?
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/spider-craw…
Done now, goodbye cruel world *throws self out nearest window*
When is the next spaceship to leave the Earth forever, please, and is there a vacancy?
Unfortunately I read this right after the article about a girl who was backpacking and a leech the SIZE OF HER THUMB worked its way into her nose. afhdskafjhd uhgh
This is right up my alley, Alli.
Welcome to the world of American Horror Story, where just when you’ve decided this is as fucked up as it’s going to get, they surprise in a bad way!
The Mindy Project wasn’t the first show to feature anal sex! It’s happened twice in How To Get Away With Murder: once in flagrante, and once in dialogue: “Today, I want to do *you.*” Right?
Pssssh, gay sex doesn’t count. Because it’s tab A into slot B, not Adam and Steve! Or something.
If I were that girl, I’d have the baby and drop it off on the judge’s doorstep. She loves being a mother so much and feels SO RESPONSIBLE for this fetus’s welfare, she can damn well give up her life to care for it.
If I was a millionaire, I’d create an abortion scholarship, granting funds for medical and travel expenses to women who needed them in order to obtain abortions.
I hope you become a millionaire like, yesterday.
Me too! I would also start a shoe scholarship for myself – abortions and shoes, those are my priorities.
Oh man I saw a stage production of Orlando in New York a few years ago and it was AMAZEBALLS. The lead was Francesca Faridany, and she reminded me of Tilda Swinton, so you can imagine how that went.
Anyone here who lives in Alabama, get your friends, families, pets, and important possessions and migrate, because I am coming for your whole state with a flamethrower.
No, not really.
But man, that judge. Has just changed my opinion from “pro-choice means the pregnant person gets to choose” to “ABORTIONS FOR EVERYBODY.”
MINIATURE AMERICAN FLAGS FOR OTHERS.
This made me laugh which is amazing because I didn’t think anything connected to this story could make me laugh. Also I love how apt your username is now to your comment!
This was meant to be a response to blunderbusst.
Why thank you! I’m always here to make humor out of tragedy…
The "butcher" comment knocked me on my ass.
This made me laugh which is amazing because I didn’t think anything connected to this story could make me laugh. Also I love how apt your username is now to your comment!
This was meant to be a response to blunderbusst.
I know this is nothing compared to the horror of the young lady in Alabama, but at 22 I was deemed to “immature” by my ob-gyn to decide to have an IUD, which “MIGHT lead to scarring and infertility,” as I would obviously want kids someday (thought I told him I planned on none, as it was unadvised). I ended up pregnant (on accident) with my husband and had a baby at 24. It was a terrible, dangerous pregnancy for both me and my son. The doctor refused to tie my tubes, siting my age and inevitable sway in emotions. So we asked for a urologist’s name so my husband could have a vasectomy. The doctor railed and swore, but finally gave the referral, once my husband stepped in. Men are more valuable than women, and certainly know our minds and reproductive systems better than us, even seven years ago.
Fuck the fucking patriarchy. I am 37 FUCKING YEARS OLD, have been married for 11 YEARS, and my (female, btw) ob-gyn still won’t do an IUD because it MIGHT lead to infertility. If I wanted kids, I WOULD ALREADY HAVE KIDS BY NOW, DAMMIT!
The American Academy of Pediatrics just recently started recommending IUDs and implantables for teens – your doctor needs to get out of the 70s (80s? whenever the first round of IUD horror stories were around) and join us in the future. It’s better here.
Yeah, that was the part that grossed me out, not what Danny did. Sometimes I miss her girl friends from the first season, because like, your women friends are the first people to be like, "You're being ridiculous, and it's 2014 and butt stuff is perfectly normal."
I would read your friend's article, probably more than once.