Minnesota Set To Become ‘Abortion Access Island’ In The Midwest, But For Whom?

TPM Article Topics
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I actually appreciate the single-string format. It feels more inclusive to me, whereas sub-threaded discussions trail off into the distance . . . .

ETA (I’m doing a lot of this today): I think it’s easier to come across good content in this format. If I see a top of a thread I’m not interested in, I’m probably going to skip the next dozen comments under it, even if one of them might have been really interesting to me. Since we’re dealing with a generally pretty sharp community of commenters here, the odds that any one rando comment might be interesting are rather higher than Reddit or whatever.

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Nannybot is up there with mosquitoes on my shit list

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I didn’t take it being written as a scolding. I read it as this is why their patient make-up is mostly white.

But there is something in here that concerns me about the funds some organizations give to help women travel to get an abortion. In a Wapo article the NAF, National Abortion Federation is requiring women who are getting a medication abortion to spend an extra day in the city/state where there are receiving the two-part regimen that includes mifepristone and misoprostol. The first drug mifepristone is taken in clinic, while the misoprostol is taken 24-48 hours later.
I can understand their concern about be prosecuted if the woman is traveling from a state where they have enacted such strict laws that they’re even trying to go after women who get these drugs mailed to them. But it is going to make it harder on low income women, women who already have children, migrant woman who don’t have proper state ID to board a plane, and women who may not be able to take that much time off.

And in either case the winter weather has to be taken into consideration too.

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I read the WaPo article with interest. It is one of the first to deal with the unmanageable problems of trying to legislate medication abortions that can’t easily be constrained within state lines (as if a person’s reproductive freedom should depend on what state you live in, but I digress). It was somewhat irritating that they went on forever about how NAF was somehow being unreasonable before acknowledging in the last few paragraphs that they were trying to avoid liability from states that can be applied to organizations that operate in multiple states.

Related issue, of course, is laws that attempt to criminalize travelling out of state to obtain an abortion where it is perfectly legal.

See also Texas threatening the law licence of a national firm that provides support for employees in all states. This is all going to get so messy.

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Yes I had the same reaction.

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I really don’t understand why you feel the need to go off on this tangent. I know a lot of trans men and they have ovaries and uteruses and are often concerned about whether, when and how to become pregnant. There is a lot of research interest in the ability of trans men to become pregnant (it is quite possible for them to do so) after going off HRT. And, btw, trans men can also get ovarian cysts and ovarian cancer, etc. (And trans women can get prostate cancer and breast cancer.). The medicine is a bit different. And better med schools now have electives in transgender medicine.

Trans men don’t want to be called pregnant women. They really don’t. What’s the harm in being inclusive? “Pregnant people” is an accurate phrase (I mean, aren’t women people?). And, trans men probably account for a good deal more than 1 in 10,000 pregnancies. Trans people are roughly 0.5 to 1% of the population. So, basically, 1 in 100 people you run into are trans male, trans female or EnBy. But there just aren’t good data on how many pregnancies are carried by trans men.

Live and let live, ok? Trans people are not a threat to anyone.

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Because pregnancy and abortion are overwhelmingly gendered issues, and the trans-inclusive language serves to deny that fact and obscures the misogyny that is the basis of all anti-abortion sentiment.

And just to be clear, I have nothing whatsoever against trans men. If they want abortions, they should absolutely be able to obtain them.

And I would never refer to them as such.

Nope. Statistics are sparse, but Australia indicates mid-double digits out of roughly 300,000 births, which adds up to somewhere between 0.01% and 0.02%.

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Can I say that this decision is a slap in the face of every woman who previously had to wait 24 hours for no reason?

(A friend was in that situation years ago, and thankfully the doc she called to make an appointment with said "Oh, and by the way, this constitutes your first consultation and the beginning of your 24-hour waiting period.)

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Maybe you wouldn’t look so silly had you done a wee bit of research, like, uh, read the article?

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The important point I think this article makes as a political matter is the burden this puts on White women, particularly rural White women, to obtain the health care they need and will it cause them to act differently in the voting booth.

When I was a student at UW Madison, the running joke was that as you went north or west of Milwaukee there were not enough Black people in the state to have a good basketball team, the UW team sucked. More recently, I was visiting my brother who lives in Green Bay and we went to the local amusement park, Bay Beach, (its claim to fame is it has a roller coaster, very small by most standards, that was owned by Elvis and was for a time at Graceland) and it was obvious not much had changed.

Furthermore, as the article points out, if you lived in or south of Milwaukee, east is lake Michigan, you are an an hour or less from Illinois.

So the burden of overturning Roe on women in Wisconsin will mostly be felt by White women in rural areas who, like White men in rural areas, vote in big majorities for Republicans. So will this affect how rural woman, I’d say rural White women but when talking about rural Wisconsin the White is redundant, vote. We will find out very soon.

But we need to add it is not just important swing state Wisconsin.

I think even more than Wisconsin, it will affect White women in Texas and Florida. For example it is no secrete that the favorite beaches for White Evangelical women in Florida are in Pensacola. It is no coincidence that Pensacola was also is home to many of the abortion clinics in that area.

So again, the question is will White women, who as a group are no less hypocritical than anyone else, or will they decide they actually prefer the beaches in Kansas.

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Comments used to be threaded like that here, and it didn’t take long for them to reach the point where they were impossible to follow. Besides the frequent topic-shifts and replies to multiple posts, the sub-sub-subs would get indented so far to the right that it was one word per line. Plus, if there were several replies, it was very difficult to find the proper indent to see replies to a particular post.

Given the way commenters here behave, this is actually a much easier format. It took some getting used to, but I see the wisdom of letting each reply have equal weight.

My wish list though includes a better way of bookmarking as you scroll through, because sometimes I follow a particular reply thread and then get lost finding my way back home. The “back” only takes you to the latest post you saw.

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My doctor wants me to interview a team of surgeons at Cleveland Clinic, and he was really concerned about scheduling the trip while the weather is still nice.

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May I be inclusive by using the phrase “pregnant women and trans men”?
My brain gets hung up when I hear “pregnant people,” trying to work out the subtext of what isn’t being said. Younger generations will do it fluently but I doubt I ever will.

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I generally like the format, but the implementation would have gotten a ‘C’ (at best) back when I was teaching programming. I regularly am presented with “New” articles outlining something from the Romney campaign against Obama or Newt’s comments on something from back when he was relevant, I also will note that when I post a reply, suddenly everything between the article I replied to and my post are marked “read”. Not to mention, certain articles “lose” their thread counts and present me with just “total articles read” but no hint at how many more to go. All in all, it just feels “sloppy”.:roll_eyes:

And of course, tagging threads would be nice (as you suggest) or perhaps a way to toggle between “front page” and “this thread of replies”, and (of course) discobot is evil incarnate.

As I’ve expressed in the past, I do appreciate certain articles here, and am impressed with certain journalists (HI, Josh Kovensky!) but pretty much the only reason I hand over the subscription money is the community here in the comments and it drives me nuts how poorly they treat the entire experience. I fear that the other Josh just doesn’t realize what he’s actually selling here (or perhaps I should have typed “what people are actually buying here”?)

I’ll admit that after they went “Pay or no Play” I hesitated for a while, but eventually forked over the fee because this is where I like to hang out when I have a few minutes (which are currently sadly lacking, as I transplate “chez rowlf” to Quebec). Still, I do expect things here to settle down and I’m going to keep paying, but as I’ve tried to suggest to Josh #2, since you already solicit funds for your reporters, why not solicit funds for “software upgrades to the Commenting System”? Me, I’d chuck in a measureable chunk of change for that, but sadly have never been given the chance, :cry:

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Gender ≠ sex
Sex = “parts”; gender ID is fluid.

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Gender = Sex. It’s right there is the fucking dictionary.


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Of course, you can use whatever phrase you like.

But perhaps ask yourself, to paraphrase Frank Zappa, “who are the gender police?”

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Why is pregnant an adjective to begin with - shouldn’t it just be a pronoun? We’re here to help the pregnant who seek abortions.

Anyway, I kinda wonder about the stats of all this. I would have guessed that fewer Hispanics seek abortion due to their typical religious affiliation with Catholicism. But it appears in African Americans are overrepresented in abortion statistics - not sure why that might be: https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/state-indicator/abortions-by-race/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel={"colId":"Location","sort":"asc"}

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Dictionary dot com is A dictionary [not “the … dictionary”], and like all dictionaries, defines terms on the whims of its editors. Not all dictionaries (and not all people) keep up with changes in language/usage.

From the AP Stylebook, 2022 edition:
Gender refers to internal and social identity and often corresponds with but is not synonymous with sex. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only males and females, that can vary by society and change over time.

Sex refers to biological characteristics, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive anatomy, which can also vary or change in understanding over time, or be medically and legally altered.

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Eat linguistic shit. Gender = Sex in any fucking dictionary.

Why do you deny the linguistic existence of women?

I do not deny the linguistic existence of trans men.