Prolapsed umbilical cord. Septic shock. Ruptured amniotic sac. Hysterectomy.
These, the gruesome reality of pregnancy loss, are not words we often hear during Supreme Court oral arguments, buttoned-up proceedings where the justices prefer theory and abstraction to blood and organs.
It’s almost as if they don’t really care about women’s health at all, huh? What a bunch of despicable theocrats appointed by a corrupt Senate Majority leader (not Schumer) and the most corrupt president we have ever had the displeasure of living through.
It takes one to know one.
Un-F-ing-believable!!! This whole thing really pisses me off!! I hope to God that Biden has a work around or will consider expanding this Corrupt Court!
Beautifully written, Kate.
I thought he had a commission to obfuscate the issues so he wouldn’t have to do anything like that.
I wonder how the legal machinery would respond to a manslaughter charge, maybe 2nd degree murder, when a women is left to get “nearer death” before medical intervention, and then, whoops!, she actually dies? I’m guessing this would have to be a civil suit. Everybody involved from the hospital corporation to the triage team would need to be included. Maybe the state legislators too.
*…where not only do exceptions work, but that the narrowest ones will amenably stretch to cover all the sympathetic cases. *
…their best Wednesday to both perpetuate and paper over.
isakindamagic beat me to it – because I was snipping faves – but really nice writing, Kate.
Sotomayor and Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar peppered the arguments with similar, real anecdotes, leaving the conservatives to squirm and sigh with palpable and growing anger
It’s not just that they’re frustrated biology is so complicated. They quite literally WANT women to suffer. God decreed that womankind must forever suffer as punishment for being born female. If God wants a woman to survive, she’ll survive. Doctors should not be intervening in God’s decreed destiny for women. Their sacred suffering is divine punishment for being female and is probably good for them
The conservatives on the court are well aware that abortion restrictions will place women’s lives in peril. They are just struggling to figure out how to prevent the lives of wealthy women from being impacted.
“Chief Justice John Roberts, in a rare break with courtroom decorum, interrupted to demand that Turner be allowed to finish after Sotomayor cut him off. (Interrupting a lawyer mid-argument to press a point is a common practice of all of the justices.)”
Just calling balls and strikes, John?
Interrupting a woman to let a man speak is a storied GOP tradition.
As is silencing women on abortion – so that men can speak for them.
Roberts has always been a phony, a hypocrite, and a sexist pig.
What a colossal POS!
On Wednesday, the right-wing justices preferred the safe world of legal abstraction, where they could pretend that Idaho’s abortion ban — which only has an exception to save the woman’s life — won’t inevitably leave women to gruesome suffering.
That’s fine. Women being free from gruesome suffering was not an issue when the Constitution was written.
That’s where the court’s misogynists miscalculated. Medical emergencies are not restricted to the poor, underinsured and POC. Wealthy women experience problem pregnancies, miscarriages, etc. just as the less privileged do. And when they do, they are at the mercy of their local hospital to save their life and health.
I take issue in your pose with the first four words, “It’s almost as if”. Your post would, in my view be more correct if it started with “They don’t really care about women’s health at all”.
It is also wrong in the article to call the Justices wanting to allow the State of Idaho to put its hands in every woman’s womb. The conservative position is that Idaho’s government cannot control a woman’s healthcare decisions made with the advise of her doctor.
What Idaho is doing is literally grabbing every woman by the pussy.
There’s no way these Justices can comprehend the complexity of emergency care. It’s a split second affair with the stakes being another person’s life. Burdening that with religiously driven opposition to what has been a successful Standard of Care and pragmatically derived protocols to save lives will result in hesitation…which is anathema to urgent / critical care. At risk of offending the Legal Eagles that post in here…there is no fucking way SCOTUS fanatics should be involved in medical decisions anymore than I should be involved in spaceship design. It’s not just a different discipline. It’s an entirely different world. There’s no appealing a dead patient. No gavel to order the chaos in a busy ER. No recesses when a patient is bleeding out and no docket… The shit comes in unannounced screaming, bleeding and needing treatment right now. No lost cases. Lost lives. Attorneys do not belong there. Their ideas, biases and “beliefs” have no biz there.
The vile sexism shines and stinks in the moonlit world of bought-off Supremes. Their fantasy bleeds real blood.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse described Roberts as “cagey”. Hillary Clinton voted against Roberts confirmation after interviewing him and learning he had his agenda. Nothing to do with the law or with the wishes and rights of Americans.
I didn’t listen to the argument but I have heard multiple sources indicate their take on where the justices stand. Here the take away is the justices will rule against the federal law 6-3. On MSNBC it was the justices will rule against Idaho by a similar number. I learned long ago that it is hard to figure out how the justices will vote based on what they said in oral argument. I guess we will find out.
“Would you agree with me that if a medical doctor who is an expert in this field were asked bang, bang, bang, what would you do in these particular circumstances which I am now going to enumerate, the doctor would say: ‘This is not how I practice medicine, I have to know a lot more about the individual case?’” he added with an air of incredulity.
I thought medical students were constantly subject to exactly this sort of probing questioning about what they would do, “bang, bang, bang,” when faced with a patient in crisis.
Can appointed-for-life, unaccountable jurists comprehend the loss of the Dr’s practice and career when they make these decisions?