When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it claimed to be removing the judiciary from the abortion debate. In reality, it simply gave the courts a macabre new task: deciding how far states can push a patient toward death before allowing her to undergo an emergency abortion.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit offered its own answer, declaring that Texas may prohibit hospitals from providing “stabilizing treatment” to pregnant patients by performing an abortion—withholding the procedure until their condition deteriorates to the point of grievous injury or near-certain death.
The ruling proves what we already know: Roe’s demise has transformed the judiciary into a kind of death panel that holds the power to elevate the potential life of a fetus over the actual life of a patient.
And pregnancy can be incredibly hard on a woman. My wife’s pregnancy was really tough. Especially with morning sickness, which she had for the whole nine months. She wanted a child as much as I did, but I never even broached the subject of having another kid, because of how hard it was for her to have the first one.
Some people love pregnancy. Some pregnant women go through their pregnancy feeling terrific. They’re the lucky ones.
I’d like a lot of these anti-abortion people to look up what an episiotomy is. And watch a video of a C-section. Even safe pregnancy in a medical setting is really unpleasant and painful in so many ways.
Slight tangent that I feel worth mentioning. There is recent good news for women like your wife. After being ignored by medical science for who knows how long, a more solid understanding of the underlying cause of pregnancy sickness has been reached. The hormone human chorionic gonadotropin or sensitivity to it.
The lead researcher has a pretty tragic past due to having severe, intractible pregnancy sickness. I heard an interview the other day with her where she recounted being so ill that she was unable to even speak. At the same time, she was told by her doctor that it was all in her head and she was doing it for attention. Her pregnancy sickness got so bad that she was unable to carry to term and was very much at risk herself.
But out of her fucked up situation came her drive to prove that the cause was biological and, with this breakthrough, there are now targets for medications and therapies that can be explored.
Ah well. We’re in our middle forties. Too late for her now (not technically, but not a good idea). I’m glad other women will not go through it though.
Yeah. Likely late for my wife as well but, still nice to know that it is a definitively biological thing and that there is real hope for it to be treated for others.