Hekate
Hekate's JournalAs community hospitals have closed over the past 20+ years, Catholic hospitals have filled the gap
As you probably know by now, the old non-profit model has been pretty much wiped out. Without going in to all the reasons why that has been the case, it has left a lot of people in the lurch.
The Roman Catholic Church — or rather various orders within it — see medical practice as part of their charitable mission. Of course, in order to financially survive, they can’t do this for free and have to deal with insurance companies and all the rest just like everybody else. But to give them credit, they are there when others have gone away.
HOWEVER, when a hospital is run by a religious organization, it follows that religion’s doctrines. Thanks to every Republican president from Reagan on, they have been given tremendous latitude to do exactly that in regards to women’s health care needs. If a woman wants good prenatal care and a good birthing experience, she’ll very likely have that. If she wants contraception, Plan B, Morning After, or any form of pregnancy termination, she is SOL.
The rest if the family — the men and the children — can expect all their medical needs to be met. Women will also actually be well taken care of as long as they don’t expect reproductive rights.
I am 100% certain that he “sold to them specifically” because they were they only ones who would step in, out there hundreds and hundreds of miles from anywhere else.
When put to an actual vote by the electorate, these extreme bills fail. That's why legislatures did
… the dirty deed themselves — and that’s why voter suppression bills were taken to state legislatures as well.
That’s also why the extreme RW has worked so hard for so long to get “their kind” onto the Supreme Court.
The one thing that keeps me from completely giving up on this country is that time after time the actual majority of its citizens votes for the Democrat for POTUS.
The thing that makes me utterly despair is how corrupted the system has become, and how very much we have fallen into a rule by minority.
I know. When I reference Bush the Lesser, know that my early years at DU were littered with brave...
… pronouncements about this being “my country” since the 1600s and how I’m not giving up and/ or leaving.
But that was long ago, in what amounts to another country, and besides, Dame Liberty is on her deathbed.
It’s not just America, either — we see outside better than we see ourselves, surely. There is a wave of authoritarianism/autocracy sweeping the globe, including in nations that once, in the 20th Century, looked to the US to supply leadership and soldiers to help them bring down the fascists, by whatever name. Only now our own democracy hangs by a thread, and we women are just the latest target.
I’m sorry to be a downer. We need people to still believe and still fight, and I hope you are one — indeed I hope your name is Legion.
How we got here. What is at stake today in the SCOTUS
All of the advances that women have made in the last 50 years actually will go away if the Right Wing gets what they want out of this court.
How, you ask? Because anti-choice is, at first and last, anti-woman, and that means all our choices are in the mix. Contraception, birth control, welfare assistance, childcare, parental leave, jobs and career advancement — all of it.
They’ve been laying the social groundwork forever by redefining the most popular and effective contraceptives as abortifacients. They’ve been lying to teenagers for decades, saying condoms are completely ineffective against both disease and pregnancy.
They’ve laid legal groundwork by making sure that the US Congress inserted “conscience clauses” into every piece of health legislation — so that employers/insurers, hospitals, doctors and pharmacists all have a legal out for not only refusing to provide for abortions but for refusing to cover/provide Plan B, Morning After, contraceptive pills and contraceptive devices. The Hyde Amendment was introduced as a compromise, and somehow it has never gone away.
Legal groundwork at the state level has included “personhood” laws, and when that was too direct they did an end-run by defining the murder of a pregnant woman as a double-homicide. They’ve intruded on the health crisis that is addiction, not by providing support to beat the addiction but by imprisoning pregnant women for endangering their fetuses. They’ve worked to broaden the definition of what endangers a fetus — where there is a miscarriage, there must be a woman at fault.
Are you beginning to get the picture now?
It goes further. When Roe vs Wade was decided, it superseded state laws — but state legislatures saw no need to actually remove those old laws from the books. It may have been lazy thinking at the time, but at some point someone realized that if Roe goes away, the old laws come back automatically unless they have since been overturned by the state — and by that time the culture wars were in full swing.
They have been relentless, in part because Gawd is on their side and in part because women are just too uppity for their own good, but hey, same thing in the end. When one legislative maneuver fails, they try another in a different state, then return and try again.
That’s all I can say for now. There’s so much more.
I was in college when Roe became law. I was glad, and at the same time conflicted. At some point I came to understand that the anti-abortion hysteria was not all about nasty entitled women aborting fully-formed adorable Gerber babies (as the RW likes to portray the situation, thus trying to make every one of us ashamed to speak out in support of abortion), but it was truly about contraception and the ability to prevent pregnancy in the first place. And contraception is foundational to absolutely every advance we women have made in the last century. That’s where we are going.
All of the advances that women have made in the last 50 years actually will go away if "they" get...
…what they want out of this court.
How, you ask? Because anti-choice is, at first and last, anti-woman, and that means all our choices are in the mix. Contraception, birth control, welfare assistance, childcare, parental leave, jobs and career advancement — all of it.
They’ve been laying the social groundwork forever by redefining the most popular and effective contraceptives as abortifacients. They’ve been lying to teenagers for decades, saying condoms are completely ineffective against both disease and pregnancy.
They’ve laid legal groundwork by making sure that the US Congress inserted “conscience clauses” into every piece of health legislation — so that employers/insurers, hospitals, doctors and pharmacists all have a legal out for not only refusing to provide for abortions but for refusing to cover/provide Plan B, Morning After, contraceptive pills and contraceptive devices. The Hyde Amendment was introduced as a compromise, and somehow it has never gone away.
Legal groundwork at the state level has included “personhood” laws, and when that was too direct they did an end-run by defining the murder of a pregnant woman as a double-homicide. They’ve intruded on the health crisis that is addiction, not by providing support to beat the addiction but by imprisoning pregnant women for endangering their fetuses. They’ve worked to broaden the definition of what endangers a fetus — where there is a miscarriage, there must be a woman at fault.
Are you beginning to get the picture now?
It goes further. When Roe vs Wade was decided, it superseded state laws — but state legislatures saw no need to actually remove those old laws from the books. It may have been lazy thinking at the time, but at some point someone realized that if Roe goes away, the old laws come back automatically unless they have since been overturned by the state — and by that time the culture wars were in full swing.
They have been relentless, in part because Gawd is on their side and in part because women are just too uppity for their own good, but hey, same thing in the end. When one legislative maneuver fails, they try another in a different state, then return and try again.
That’s all I can say for now. There’s so much more.
I’m your age. At some point I realized it was not all about nasty entitled women aborting fully-formed adorable Gerber babies (as the RW likes to portray the situation, thus trying to make every one of us ashamed to speak out), but it was truly about contraception and the ability to prevent pregnancy in the first place. And contraception is foundational to absolutely every advance we women have made in the last century. That’s where we are going.
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Gender: FemaleHometown: Central Coast, California
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