It’s not just a lone extremist: The bill has 21 co-sponsors in the state’s House of Representatives
It is religious extremism to say that women deserve to die for a tiny nonviable bundle of cells without a visible embryo. Only belief in a soul beginning at conception makes that make any amount of sense.
See also:
Images of what an early pregnancy looks like rattled through social media recently, creating an unexpected backlash for abortion rights commentators.
@auntiekilljoy #greenscreen they need to show these images at every political debate about abortion #feminism #abortion #fyp ♬ original sound – Jessica Valenti
I took an ethics class in college, and one of our topics was abortion. Tl;dr it’s hard to argue that an unimplanted blastocyst — a tiny bundle of cells that grows for a few days before attaching to the uterine wall — is a human being entitled to the same rights as me, a fully formed adult*. And even after implantation, the tissue doesn’t look like what we’d think of as a human for a long time, per the above TikTok.
* Basically it requires belief in a soul. I don’t believe in souls. So passing laws that prohibit drugs that inhibit implantation — which are based on this belief — means politicians are imposing someone else’s religious beliefs on me. Which is not constitutional.
Basically anti-abortion advocates are lying and manipulating the public by using images from the very small portion of later-term abortions to weigh on people’s emotions and take away women’s right to an abortion before then. They know that it’s hard to show most people that tiny bundle of tissue and tell them it has more rights than they do.
And this is why truth matters.
From the MYA network:
You might be surprised to learn that pregnancies nine weeks and under have no visible embryo. And at six weeks of pregnancy the so-called “heartbeat” is just electrical activity of cells, before an actual heart is formed. Approximately 85% of all abortions in the US happen before 9 weeks of pregnancy.
Google Trends tracked a huge uptick in US searches for ‘vasectomy’, along with the related search terms “Roe” and “abortion”; search volume was even higher in places with trigger laws. A report from telehealth research company Innerbody Research showed searches for “where can I get a vasectomy” increased by 850% in the days after the news, with the biggest jumps in conservative states Texas and Florida. One practice in Florida told CBS News that the number of child-free men getting vasectomies under the age of 30 had doubled since the ruling.
Responsibility for birth control, even for long-term couples, has long fallen disproportionately to women; female sterilisation, oral contraceptives, IUDs and other options for women remain the most common forms of birth control in the US.
Honestly I was surprised at the breakdown of birth control. Nineteen percent rely on getting their tubes tied versus nine percent counting on their partner getting a vasectomy. Thirteen percent are on the pill, and another thirteen use the shot, ring and IUDs. (As of 2017.)
Littlejohn says real societal change will require a different line of thinking. “As long as we see this as something that men are doing to ‘lend a hand to their partners’ and being noble, in service of their partners’ not being able to prevent pregnancy,” she says, it perpetuates a narrative that men aren’t the default responsible party for contraception.
I like that conservatives are all “lol we’re going to make you have all the babies 😂 enjoy poverty suckers” and dudes are like “😳 wait I didn’t sign up for this.” Evangelicals are so out of touch with society they think everyone’s a misogynist like them who wants to treat their women like broodmares and have a dozen kids. Thankfully for women, that is not the case.
I am scared they’re coming for our birth control next, but I doubt they’ll restrict vasectomies because misogyny — they aren’t liable to give up control over their own bodies, they just want to control ours.
Lol ten years ago I wrote a shitty NaNo novel that was like a Hunger Games mashup with forced sterilization and forced birth and it was not nearly brutal enough. I’m someone who’s well off and lives in a blue state and likely will always have access to the contraception of my choice — and it still fucking sucks to live in a USA where I have to question if that will change. So I can see the appeal in a permanent option that would protect my decision not to have kids.
I'm going to weigh in on the "sex in film/TV is mostly unnecessary" debate as a film historian and human.
Get Fucked: A Thread
Sex is a beautiful and wonderful part of humanity and if you think it's unnecessary, I need you to think about why you want access to sex restricted.
— V for Vaughndetta (@gvaughnjoy) May 18, 2022
Sex can serve a valuable narrative function. I think of Watchmen: Dan’s literal impotence in the face of nuclear annihilation, and his virility when he reclaims his agency and takes action, pointless though it may be. Doctor Manhattan’s failure to understand Laurie’s needs as he divides himself to continue his work while they’re making love. These scenes are core to the emotional story, to the characters’ choices and thus the plot. I read a book about writing sex scenes that suggests the characters should have sex in a way that only they could, that reflects where they are in their relationship and each of their arcs. Is she scared of admitting their connection and pushes for a quick fuck, while he keeps the pace slow to keep her from denying there’s more between them than physical attraction? Does she struggle with trusting others, and he says just the wrong thing after they make love?
A lot of the sex we see in movies isn’t used thoughtfully; Hollywood is bad at including romance in stories that aren’t primarily love stories (like action adventure) — it’s not actually enough for two hot people to spend time interacting if there’s no reason for them to like each other besides proximity and adrenaline, and it feels forced for them to bone — at that point the sex is more serving the wish fulfillment / hero gets the girl narrative. So we need better sex in our stories — which honestly probably means longer sex scenes (more foreplay or more afterglow) to allow screentime for characterization and meaning.
Federal judge rules that employers can refuse to cover PrEP
It’s hard to see this and not think that the cruelty is the point. What abomination of a person would deny anyone protection against HIV? Someone who thinks anyone who gets HIV deserves it 🙃
(There’s a lot of other things going on with this particular bad decision — health care shouldn’t be tied to employment, businesses aren’t people and cannot hold beliefs and shouldn’t have the same rights as people, it is not religious freedom to impose your beliefs on others or harm them because of your beliefs — but let’s not get into that here. We’re talking sex.)
The hatred and fear of gay and trans people is growing more aggressive. Religious extremists play off the public’s transphobia and discomfort with sex, gambling that few will come to the defense of queer folks when all LGBTQIA+ people and allies are painted as pedos. But this is only possible when people are skeeved out by other humans having sex, especially sex that’s different than the sex they have, and especially sex that’s for pleasure only. Our society doesn’t value “non-productive” activities in any form. This also ties in with the gross conservative obsession with people having more babies: “sex is for procreation!” No. Sex is normal and healthy behavior for consenting adults who aren’t trying to get pregnant.
We are not subject to the strictures of anyone else’s controlling, shaming religion. This is not a Christian nation and religious extremists cannot impose their moral judgements on everyone else. (Unless they steal power and exert fascism on us.) We need to normalize healthy, safe, consensual, pleasurable sex between partners of all kinds: straight, gay, old, fat, disabled. Let’s tackle all the -phobias and -isms 👏 (Asexuality too, another queer identity religious extremists hate — show healthy relationships without sex.) And that means including sex in our stories, visual and written. There’s a reason conservatives come so hard for books: stories have power.