Why does Alabama hate women?

Yesterday my co-blogger provided an overview of the abject anti-Choice situation in the US.

Today, there's news via state media and triumphallists at Lies-Site regarding a decision from the Alabama Supreme Court.

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled today that the state’s chemical endangerment of a child law also pertains to unborn children.

The law was intended to target situations in which children were exposed to conditions such as methamphetamine labs, but women also have been prosecuted for harming their children by using drugs during their pregnancies.

The court’s ruling upheld the convictions of two of those women, Hope Ankrom of Coffee County and Amanda Helaine Borden Kimbrough of Colbert County.

While the law itself makes no mention of unborn children, the court held in its decision that “the plain meaning of the word ‘child’ in the chemical endangerment statute includes unborn children.”

Alabama is one of the most chemically polluted regions in the US.  The rate of miscarriages and mutagenic birth defects is disgusting.  The poverty level, the lack of educational and employment opportunities as well as the shameful absence of adequate health services in that state, are shocking.

Funny how that goes. Hundreds of "unborn" are affected by the greedy, profitable corporations that malevolently poison the air, the ground and the water of Alabama yet the state chooses to criminalize and prosecute individual pregnant women.

Perhaps some enterprising folks should help women and families, who provide care to children with birth defects caused by environmental "chemical endangerment", to lawyer up for the purpose of litigating against corporations that have damaged fetal development in those gestated and born in Alabama.

If that were to start happening, you can bet that "christian" legislators aka wealthy businessmen & politicians, would tweak the application of their Supreme Court decision, to ensure that corporate entities be exempt from any form of accountability, fetal harm and endangerment be damned!

Note: I had considered posting photographs of infants and babies with mutagenic birth defects, à la SUZYALLCAPS for blunt force emotional manipulative effect; after perusing some Google images, I could not.

Are there *good* and *bad* abortions?

First, read this to understand the particular meaning I'm addressing when I use the terms *good* and *bad* with regard to the medical termination of a pregnancy.

I am making a decision.

The only thing that makes my abortion decision different from anyone else’s abortion decision is that some people who are against abortion will think that my abortion is acceptable.

Some. Not all. Maybe not even most. I honestly have no idea. My life is not in danger, after all. I have not been raped. I merely think that I might not want to sit around, feeling the symptoms of pregnancy, for god knows how long, until a heartbeat stops and the ripping pain kicks in and the blood starts flowing on its own.

Let me be clear. I have options. It’s just that they all suck. That’s kind of how bad news related to pregnancy works.

If you are pregnant, and do not want to be, all of your options suck.*

If you cannot seem to get pregnant, and want to be, all of your options suck.**

If you are pregnant, and won’t be soon, all of your options suck.

There is no universal good option. There is no universal bad option. But for each individual there is an option that is the least bad. Here is why I am pro-choice. If someone has to make a decision and the best they can hope for is the least-bad option, I don’t believe I have any business making that choice for them.

This is the decision that CON CPC MP Stephen Woodworth would want to criminalize.

Instead of letting a woman and her attending physician determine why a pregnancy might be terminated, Woodworth wants to debate how the government would legislate to control these decisions.

Such as anti-choice legislators in Georgia are currently doing.

In addition, if a woman were in the same situation as the author describes in her plight, and she chose to let "nature take its course", her miscarriage could be investigated by police to ensure that she had not engaged in any criminal activity that would have caused the embryo or fetus to be expelled from her uterus prematurely.

This is the inevitable outcome when legislators decide what is the "right" gestational period, when "personhood" commences and who owns women's reproductive capacity.

Ladies: Send your menstrual detritus to MP Woodworth!

To quote the fightin' words of JJ at unrepentant old hippie, that would be: CPC MP Stephen Woodworth, Pride of Kitchener’s K of C and another crotch-nosing fetus fetishizing Womb Cop who believes government should be juuuuust small enough to crawl up your vagina and police your uterus.

Woodworth, who is a fundamentalist Catholic who believes "life" starts at the moment of conception, wants to police Canadian women's sexual and reproductive autonomy by criminalizing abortion. This is what we should all do, so he can determine through forensic analysis how many zygotes & embryos we are sluttishly allowing to slip out of our bodies every month.

Depending on the "strength" of your menstrual flow, you should be able to cram all your pads and strained uterine detritus - such as suspicious clots - into one 9 x 12 bubble-wrap-lined enveloppe.

Mail it to Stephen Woodworth, c/o the House of Commons, Ottawa K1A 0A6. You don't have to pay postage to send MPs or the PM (hint, hint) mail.

It sounds gross, but if we don't ACT UP and speak out against Woodworth's project, this is what may soon happen in Canada.

Workers at the Stamford wastewater treatment facility on Harbor View Avenue discovered a dead human fetus while sifting through sewage Saturday morning.

Police do not know exactly how old the fetus is or its sex.

The fetus has been taken to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, where an autopsy will be conducted, Lupinacci said. Police plan to investigate further after they have received a report from the medical examiner.

"We're hoping on some DNA and we're going to have to somehow check pregnancies and whatnot," Lupinacci said. "It could even possibly be a miscarriage. We don't even know if it's a legal fetus at this point."

A fetus is considered viable if the pregnancy lasts beyond 24 to 25 weeks, said Dr. John Morris, a gynecologist who practices in Stamford. A fetus that is about 4 inches in length is probably pre-viable, meaning it most likely could not survive outside the mother's body, he said.

"Viability is kind of a gray area," Morris said. "Most people will give you between 24 and 25 weeks as an age limit. Before that, the lungs won't be developed enough and you have all other sorts of issues."

Nobody in their right correct mind would want this investigated, you say? You would be wrong.

We cannot allow the CONtempt Party to criminalize women, health care providers and abortion.

Creekside: #TellAntiChoiceMPsEverything

Oh, Alison at Creekside: #TellAntiChoiceMPsEverything is toying magnificently with CON MP Stephen Woodworth.

Think of a sleek, muscled BC mountain lioness tossing a grubby bug around the landscape.

Misogynist lawmakers are the truly "depraved".

Rennie Taria Gibbs was 15 years old in 2006 when she got pregnant. When she miscarried at 36 weeks of gestation, prosecutors "discovered" Gibbs had a cocaine habit - which makes you wonder which antichoice busybody at the hospital violated her confidential medical records -and they charged her with murder under Mississipi's rarely used "depraved-heart" law.

Her trial - continued multiple times since 2006 - was scheduled to commence in February 2012.

Rennie Gibbs is accused of murder, but the crime she is alleged to have committed does not sound like an ordinary killing. Yet she faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child.

Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby. But her case is by no means isolated. Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.

"Women are being stripped of their constitutional personhood and subjected to truly cruel laws," said Lynn Paltrow of the campaign National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW). "It's turning pregnant women into a different class of person and removing them of their rights."

She is not alone. Christian Sharia (state religious law) in the US exists, and it is used to punish women.

It should come as no surprise that Rennie Gibbs is Black, as repressive laws in the US mostly target, and are applied to, Latino and Afro-Americans.