!Mothers day march
---
agk's diary
14 May 2022 @ 15:33 UTC
---
written on GPD Win 1 with PuTTY
on couch with baby asleep on me
while birds chirp outside
---
This semester is Pediatric Nursing. I'll do nine
weeks on the floor at Children's Hospital and one
in the neonatal intensive care unit. In simulation
my team'll care for a little manikin we'll pretend
was admitted with an asthma exacerbation.
Lectures, of course, will be endless videos and
Elsevier Sherpath interactive learning modules,
like what hospitals make you do for continuing ed
and regulatory compliance.
My little ped's hair is coming in looking like Slim
Shady, the rapper. She can stand unassisted for 30
seconds and take a few steps before sitting. She
used to work out all the time. Now she's more into
being held all the time.
Hobbies: Dumping the dregs of your coffee. Playing
reverently in the cream and coffee puddle. Banging
on stuff while whoop-grunting like a pretend
gorilla. Tearing up leaves. Squatting and clapping.
Pulling hair. Going up steps. Going down steps.
Feeding all her food to the dog. Yelling.
> It has always been around,
> it will always have a niche,
> but they'll make it a privilege, not a right,
> accessible only to the rich. ---Digable Planets
I took her to her first big protest last weekend.
We were in Chicago for Evy's conference. Some
thousands of people, enough to pack the streets
for a few city blocks protested. Lots of babies.
Fancy and I ran into streetmedic friends, one
visiting from Europe. We talked to the attorney who
guessed Migs'd be entrapped and told Fancy he died.
Mother's day's a good day to protest legalizing
state abortion bans. Moms are about half of abort-
ion patients. It's the most reliable, if potential-
ly most drastic, birth control. Even abstinence
fails sometimes.
In the ancient world, abortions were common enough
a major Libyan port's primary export for 300 years
was an abortion drug. A 13th-century pope was
first a doctor who definitely did abortions before
becoming pope. It only became taboo for Catholics
in the early modern era. I don't know why. Maybe
something to do with repopulating after the black
death?
In my country, Ben Franklin put instructions for
medical abortion in his reader which was univers-
ally used to teach literacy and as a reference.
Thomas Jefferson publicly wrote his admiration
of the skill and botanical knowhow of a Delaware
(native) abortion provider.
State criminal abortion laws were written in my
country by 1900. Medicine and surgery profession-
alized and were regulated, unlicensed midwivery
outlawed. Except in Catholic Louisiana, state-
licensed providers could do therapeutic abortion.
The risk of oversight by a criminal jury dampened
many physicians' willingness. Referral services
directed women to providers.
Despite regulation, abortion, contraception, and
divorce remained taboos exclusive to Catholics in
the 1960s. A conservative evangelical organization
referred pastors to abortion providers for women
in their congregations.
In the 1970s, Nixon's Republican party recruited
elements of the Democrat base who were not on
board with racial civil rights policy. These in-
cluded Catholics, former slave-state Protestant
Dixiecrats, and eventually gun enthusiasts.
"States rights" was one of the movement's rallying
cries. If locally-powerful oligarchs wanted to
segregate public life, what right did the federal
government have to undermine their time-tested
strategies for dividing and disciplining the work-
force?
The party's public relations strategy was brill-
iant. They identified the family as what was under
attack by "bureaucrats" and various bogeymen:
empowered blacks, feminists, homosexuals, publish-
ers, public health measures, medical procedures,
unions, artists, criminals, communists, regulations.
They studied the cultural paranoid style of the new
left, and switched referents. They propagandized a
war of "life" vs freedom, and recruited soldiers to
fight freedom under the banner of life. They built
the durable political base to deregulate, financial-
ize, and loot institutions, industry, and society in
which my country stored value during its prosperous
1945-1972 period.
Unions were broken, pensions robbed, schools mostly
resegregated, gulags built and filled with 1% of our
population, debt ballooned, cities abandoned, public
health emergencies like AIDS allowed to bloom, and
the thieves got very rich.
The abortion bogeyman, it turned out, did more than
recruit Catholic Democrats. It had extraordinary pro-
paganda power for organizing a multigenerational
evangelical bloc of single-issue voters devoted to
"states rights"---that is, repealing federal protect-
ion of some peoples' hard-won freedom.
Prayer services, volunteer opportunities, retreats
and summer camps, clinic pickets, rallies, prisoner
support, and a million other cultural actions main-
tained a sense of urgency. This is how you build a
movement. They dependably elected the programs of
thousands of candidates over 50 years on promises
to erode Roe.
Democrats, meanwhile, needed abortion threatened
for bread-and-circus "culture war" campaign prom-
ises, so never legislatively codified federal pro-
tections. Obama didn't convince Justice Ginsburg
to retire when she could be replaced by another
neutral judge. Democrats got all bipartisan during
confirmations of anti-Roe justices. Who could blame
them? On this, they represent the majority, but the
other side's more determined and better organized.
My baby went to her first big protest, in Illinois,
a state that won't immediately outlaw abortion. The
governor even spoke at the rally (we couldn't hear
him). Our state, and every state except Virginia and
Illinois bordering us, will automatically outlaw
abortion when Roe is overturned.
When she starts getting periods, we'll teach her
menstrual self-extraction. We pray God move hearts of
justices and legislators to compassion for actually-
existing ordinary families. We'll keep misoprostol
and mifepristone and, sadly, be careful who we help.
---
NOTE---The 20th-century legal status of abortion
in my country was reviewed by Buell, "Criminal
abortion revisited." New York University Law
Review, 1991.
