[W]omen’s health specialists from states where abortion is criminalized are beginning to relocate to places like Washington state, which has strong abortion rights laws.
“[W]e are legally unable now,” explains an exiting Idaho doc, “to prevent harm to patients.”
Another: “This isn’t a safe place to practice medicine anymore.”
Not safe. Which has UD thinking along the following lines: With the removal of virtually all gun laws in some of these same states, we begin to see emerging what I guess these states have always wanted: The return of frontier life. Ain’t got no docs out here. Don’t need no docs. You’re on your own.
These same states tend to be, you know, also our big anti-vax states, our big anti-science states (schools should teach creationism, not evolution), our big anti-gay and (Idaho certainly!) our big anti-Jew/anti-black states, our big secession states… Obviously these attitudes aren’t out there everywhere in all of these places, but you can just see many maternal-death-before-abortion legislatures determined to rid their states of anything at all, say, associated with the Enlightenment.
It’s really queer, if I can transfer that term from gay provenance to, uh, the provinces. Radically queer.
“If I don’t act fast enough to save your life, prevent you from getting septic, I could be liable for civil cases … malpractice. But if I act too quickly and I’m not 100% certain that the patient is going to die from the complication she’s sustaining, then I could be guilty of a felony.”
… [Idaho] allows certain family members of a patient to sue providers who perform an abortion for at least $20,000 if the procedure breaks the abortion law.
Doctors in those cases also face suspension of their medical license, felony charges and even prison time.
Beyond that, Idaho’s governor also signed a law that says anyone helping a minor travel out of state to terminate a pregnancy – without parental consent – is guilty of a crime.
… [F]ive of the nine remaining full-time maternal-fetal medicine physicians in the state will have left by the end of this year.
… Jim Souza, the chief physician executive at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Boise, told CNN: “We’re at the beginning of the collapse of an entire system of care.”
… And because there are no ob-gyn residencies in Idaho, finding doctors willing to relocate given the abortion laws on the books is a real challenge.
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But God never closes a door without opening a window! Idaho will soon be America’s ground zero for diploma mill grads! Recent graduates of the Lake Natron School of Medicine will flock to the state, where desperate hospitals will snap them up. And all will be well.
A recent Gallup poll gives greater detail to a back and forth UD and her buddy Rita had not long ago about whether college applicants might begin avoiding schools in states with medieval abortion laws. Looks as though they well might.
“The fact that 74% of Republican unenrolled adults say, ‘I would consider enrolling [in] a state that had greater access’ is, I think, a really impressive number,” [an official at the Lumina Foundation, which cosponsored the poll,] said.
And, you know, it ain’t just abortion. Some representatives in zero-abortion, lock ‘er up, execute her, states are now moving on to trying to ban non-standard sexual practices, contraception… And what sort of … emotional reality do you suppose pertains in campus health clinics in the nation’s Junior Anti-Sex League territories? Many students show up with an STD now and then – or maybe anxiety about an STD – and I wonder how comfy they’ll be discussing such matters with whatever medical crew hasn’t yet run off to New York? With a crew that thinks zygotes have voting rights and unmarried women who aren’t virgins are sinners? This isn’t about abortion only; it’s about sex, sexual ethics, sexual ethos, sexual conversation, sexual atmosphere. “[T]he University of Idaho [has warned] employees that promoting abortion while on the job could be viewed as a felony offense.”
“If you go to a state that doesn’t allow you to have autonomy over your body, then that is not only not appealing, that is offensive to many women,” [the Lumina official] said.
UD ain’t denying that there’s a minority of women who’d revel in the repression of their bodily autonomy, who’d get off on lectures from campus doctors about the importance of keeping their legs clenched. But she thinks it’s a very small minority.
[C]ollege applicants are looking closely at the cultural climate of places where they could spend four—or likely more—years studying and exploring their lives as young adults. Red states were already having a tough time attracting talent among students and professors alike, and veering to the right on abortion is only going to make retaining their rankings and prestige more difficult.
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[An] exodus of college students from states with abortion bans could join a string of other consequences that abortion bans have brought, amid reports the laws have also driven physicians out of states where they face the threat of felony charges for providing care, impacted recruitment and training at medical schools and caused employees to seek transfers to different states.
Idaho is mainly in the news lately for the collapse of its statewide ob/gyn facilities; but the Western Theocratic Territory commands attention for many other reasons. HeerespfarrerYenor, for instance, inspires that state’s Christian nationalists from his academic appointment at Boise State, an actual university (though largely a jockshop), and this startles the Guardian newspaper.
I mean, the Guardian‘s startled that a respectable academic institition lends its reputation to a man whose howls about liberty, women, free thought, and other abominations I will not share here because obscenity laws forbid it.
Nobody’s startled by the bad boys hiding out in the brush outside of Boise, but, well, a professor.
Gun laws and regulations are among the most impactful policy factors [in college choice], with 80 percent of students saying these are at least somewhat important in their college choices, and 84 percent of those said they prefer campuses that restrict firearms… Reproductive healthcare policies are [also] a significant consideration, with 71 percent of students citing its importance to their college choice. Of this group, eight in 10 prefer states with fewer restrictions on reproductive healthcare.
It’ll be interesting to watch enrollment trends in, for instance, Idaho, with utterly unrestricted gun laws and utterly restricted abortion laws. Ob/gyns are fleeing the state as fast as their specula can carry them. Let’s see how many female applicants find that attractive.
The soul-searching natalists of Ohio could do worse than keep UD‘s little ditty up there in mind as they survey the hulking ruins of their best-laid anti-abortion plans.
Here’s the deal: The US is really strongly distinctly not a theocracy, but it sure looks as though the activist core of the No Abortion Even For Nine Year Old Rape/Incest Victims Or For Any Other Human Atrocity You Can Think Of movement is composed of theocrats.
Now, a few anti-abortion people are not theocrats and they are looking directly away from the ruins of Ohio toward the land o’ compromise. But they can forget it. When you’re taking orders from God, you’re in no mood to fuck with compromise. Compromise will compromise you right out of heaven, and you’re not going to miss your salvation.
In a perfect world, the theocrats would shut up and content themselves with mini-theocracies like Idaho, where they can pursue a heaven-bound life unmolested by rapidly secularizing Americans. But their faith makes that impossible; they must always pursue the impossible dream of absolutely no reproductive rights up and down this great land of ours. Good luck with that.
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LOOSE WOMEN
“Republicans spent half a century working to overturn Roe, yet they weren’t prepared for the democratic policy debate when that finally happened in Dobbs last year. Now they’re seeing abortion regimes as loose as Roe, or potentially looser, imposed by voters even in conservative states. This political liability will persist until the GOP finds an abortion message that most voters can accept.”
[A]bortion-rights groups may yet encounter an electorate that they cannot sway. But for now and for the foreseeable future, the energy and democratic will is on their side. Americans in general have been fairly clear for years that they did not support overturning Roe v. Wade. Roe’s demise strengthened that position instead of diminishing it.
You know the old English proverb: Be careful what you wish for. The radical anti-abortionists in Idaho made it so women have to have babies – babies babies all the time! – and now we see the rather odd result: Ob/gyns can’t leave the state fast enough; and now an entire hospital has shut down its obstetric unit.
Ain’t dat funny? If you live in Sandpoint, you can’t have a baby or get any kind of natal care there! Wonder where the regional hospital that has some ob/gyns plus the budget to pay for all the lawsuits is.
And hey how bout that death penalty for mothers idea? That‘ll incentivize women to make babies babies all the time too!
