Texas’ elderly male dominated Senate
Have red state, mostly elderly, conservative, white male legislators, unchecked by popular overrides, turned their medical doctors into “unethical,” uncaring, insensitive butchers? Has Texas law turned the nation’s largest, highly rated, medical complex (in Houston) into a second (or lower) rated hospital where women, seeking emergency care, unwittingly go to die? Are women in Texas, particularly those unable to afford a trip to a state with rational healthcare for women’s reproductive rights, now avoiding pregnancy even if they want a child?
What in God’s name – this means you who use religion to control women and push them to second rate citizenship behind “men” – gives untrained legislators the right to exercise their “beliefs” to supersede top-of-the-line physicians with decades of experience dealing in very personal healthcare decisions shared with their patients? Profound insecurity bolstered by radical biblical interpretation?
This male machismo ethos, reinforced by the same man who was recorded in 2005 saying “if you grab them by the p*****y,” “boasting at public events and in social media posts that he would ‘protect women’ and make sure they wouldn’t be ‘thinking about abortion.’ At a rally Wednesday [10/30] evening near Green Bay, Wis., Trump told his supporters that aides had urged him to stop using the phrase because it was ‘inappropriate’ … He told the crowd that he told aides: ‘I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.’” Los Angeles Times, October 31st. Hapless women? Seriously? Just stop killing them!!!
The October 31st Houston Chronicle provides a salient example of Texas’ sacrificing women on their false altar of statutorily mandated misogyny (Senate Bill 8 known as the “Heartbeat Act” passed in September of 2021) “after doctors delayed performing emergency services on her out of fear of being prosecuted under the state's strict abortion laws… Josseli Barnica, a 28-year-old mother of one, was 17 weeks pregnant when she began to miscarry, but doctors at a Houston hospital were unwilling to perform emergency services until her baby's heartbeat was undetectable, according to ProPublica's investigation. Doctors delayed providing her care out of fear of being civilly prosecuted under Senate Bill 8… It requires physicians to not intervene unless there is no fetal heartbeat, or there is a ‘medical emergency,’ which is not defined in the law's text…
“Barnica's doctors were concerned about the law's gray area, and because she was in ‘stable’ condition, she remained in a hospital bed with a dilated cervix, according to ProPublica. Experts told reporters that she was left with her uterus exposed to bacteria and an increased risk of developing an infection. Barnica died of infection three days after delivering her 17-week-old child.” Every minute of delay amplifies the risk of sepsis, which took Barnica’s life in the end. But even in red counties and cities in otherwise blue states where abortion is still allowed, local officials and hospital administrators have taken it upon themselves to replicate those red state laws… on their own. As pregnant women face high risks, even death, the impact infant mortality is even more telling. Religious beliefs remain the standard excuse.
The October 30th Los Angeles Times reports a September lawsuit, filed by the state’s attorney general that alleged that, “in February, Providence St. Joseph Hospital [a Catholic facility in very conservative Humbolt County] denied a patient emergency care when her water prematurely broke while she was 15 weeks pregnant with twins. It allegedly placed her life at risk by telling her to drive to Mad River Community Hospital, a smaller critical access hospital 12 miles away, armed with a bucket and towels, while she was hemorrhaging… Mad River Community Hospital is scheduled to close its birth center at the end of the month, leaving Providence St. Joseph Hospital as the only labor and delivery unit in Humboldt County. [That] Catholic hospital in Eureka has agreed to provide emergency abortion services after a state lawsuit said it had refused to give abortions to pregnant patients in life-threatening emergencies.”
The Trump-reconfigured Supreme Court – his appointments specifically recommended by rightwing, anti-abortion political organizations who recently have become filters for Republican judicial nominees, including that highest court – reversed Roe v Wade in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization… and the maternal and infant mortality rates in states that subsequently severely limited or totally banned abortion slowly rose to “horrible.” As Karen Kaplan writes for the October 22nd Los Angeles Times, those negative statistics took time to rise, but within “months of the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade in June 2022, researchers found a significant increase in the rate of deaths of infants in the United States born with severe anatomical problems…
“By the end of 2023, there were six months when the death rate for infants with severe anatomical problems was significantly higher than in the years leading up to the high court’s decision. The researchers also identified three months when the nation’s overall infant mortality rate had increased… The findings, reported … in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, were seen as a clear sign that the Dobbs decision has prevented some women from terminating pregnancies that otherwise would have ended in abortion.
“‘There’s a really straightforward mechanism here,’ said Alison Gemmill, a demographer and perinatal epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who wasn’t involved in the study… ‘Prior to these abortion bans, people had the option to terminate if the fetus was found to have a severe congenital anomaly — we’re talking about organs being outside of the body and other things that are very severe and not compatible with life,’ Gemmill said… However, if women in these situations had no choice but to continue their pregnancies, ‘those babies would die shortly after birth,’ she said.
“Gemmill said the new findings are in line with her own research, including a study published in June that documented a nearly 13% increase in infant mortality in Texas in the wake of a 2021 state law that banned abortions after about the sixth week of pregnancy. Deaths due to congenital anomalies in particular rose by 23% while they were falling in the rest of the country, that study found.” Texas has been a purple state for a while now, gerrymandered severely red. We have become a very cruel and vindictive nation, exacerbated by red state attorneys general threatening to track their own citizens who travel to states with less or no restrictions on women seeking control over their own bodies. When do we make the bad, elderly legislators and jurists, stop?
I’m Peter Dekom, and I am deeply saddened by insecure men, seemingly searching for a redefinition of “masculinity,” willing to use religion as an excuse to stop the rise of strong and competent women who are giving them a real run for their money.
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