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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   32652 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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I need to fisk this article.

Recently I have been faced with repeated assertions by people in my social circles, both offline and online, that "at this point the only possible reason to not vote for Kamala Harris is that you're an irredeemably evil human being." Now, I'm no stranger to extreme political rhetoric! Demonizing "the other side" is nothing new. But in the past month or so I have been getting it from people who are not usually prone to that sort of thing, even in an election year. These are people who have tended to say things like "I wouldn't vote for Trump, but I understand why someone in $CIRCUMSTANCE might." They are people who have at other times bemoaned growing partisanship and the death of discourse, or praised charitable reading and balanced presentation. Somehow, after making it through 2016 and 2020 without ghosting me and blocking me on social media (like a fair few others in my life), somehow 2024 has finally managed to convince them that Trump is a political emergency against which no exigency is forbidden.

I say "somehow" but truly, for most of them I think the real explanation is Dobbs. Or rather--not Dobbs itself, but the absolutely panicked response the progressive news media is having over the existence of any corner of the country in which any baby in utero, and a not-insignificant number of babies ex utero, is protected from destruction against its mother's wishes or whims.

I am myself weakly pro-choice, in the libertarian "decriminalize but don't legalize" sense--at least in the first few weeks of pregnancy. I oppose any sort of government spending on abortions, but I tend to oppose government spending on damn near anything, so that shouldn't surprise anyone. However, I simply will not vote for anyone who advocates abortions in the third trimester, much less the euthanization of born-alive botches. I find that level of pro-abortion sentiment to be astonishingly ghoulish.

So: the article. When I saw the headline "2 women die in Georgia after they couldn't access legal abortions and timely care," my first thought was, "Damn, seriously? That's really surprising!"

My second thought was--"Wait a minute..."

In her final hours, Amber Nicole Thurman suffered from a grave infection that her suburban Atlanta hospital was well-equipped to treat.

She’d taken abortion pills and encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body.

Ohhhh. So the headline could literally have been, "woman in Georgia killed by abortion pills" with no noticeable loss of information?

She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear it from her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C.

But just that summer, her state had made performing the procedure a felony, with few exceptions. Any doctor who violated the new Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

How do we know it wasn't too late, 20 hours earlier? Answer: we don't! Of course, I'm happy to point a finger at government bureaucracy as a contributing cause, as was the committee from which these two women's stories very conveniently leaked:

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school,

Lest ye be tempted to believe we're talking about a low-value citizen! She was gonna be a nurse someday, probably maybe!

should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

Tasked with examining pregnancy-related deaths to improve maternal health, the experts, including 10 doctors, deemed hers “preventable” and said the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure had a “large” impact on her fatal outcome.

Their reviews of individual patient cases are not made public. But ProPublica obtained reports that confirm that at least two women have already died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state.

There are almost certainly others.

Did you catch that? There are almost certainly others! That's the sound of a journalist telling you "I could find no evidence that my beliefs are true, so I'm going to make shit up instead."

Thurman’s case marks the first time an abortion-related death, officially deemed “preventable,” is coming to public light. ProPublica will share the story of the second in the coming days. We are also exploring other deaths that have not yet been reviewed but appear to be connected to abortion bans.

Why would we report the news today, when we can drip-feed you artificially inflated horror stories once a week from now until the Fifth of November? Why would we tell you the facts we know, when we can wait for an unnamed "official committee" with unknown political biases to give us speculative inquiry into the hot topic du jour? Stay tuned for your daily dose of rage bait! (I say without a hint of irony, surely.)

Doctors and a nurse involved in Thurman’s care declined to explain their thinking and did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

No fucking shit they declined to explain their thinking, even if HIPAA didn't exist they probably wouldn't have deigned to defend their medical judgment to a muckraker.

Communications staff from the hospital did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Good.

Georgia’s Department of Public Health, which oversees the state maternal mortality review committee, said it cannot comment on ProPublica’s reporting because the committee’s cases are confidential and protected by federal law.

Shocking.

But Republican legislators have rejected small efforts to expand and clarify health exceptions — even in Georgia, which has one of the nation’s highest rates of maternal mortality and where Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women.

Remember, it's not enough to be pro-choice; you have to be anti-racist. But let's not be unsympathetic, here: a woman is dead, and so is her baby. Or, it turns out, babies--

Thurman, who carried the full load of a single parent, loved being a mother. Every chance she got, she took her son to petting zoos, to pop-up museums and on planned trips, like one to a Florida beach. “The talks I have with my son are everything,” she posted on social media.

But when she learned she was pregnant with twins in the summer of 2022, she quickly decided she needed to preserve her newfound stability, her best friend, Ricaria Baker, told ProPublica.

We're talking about a woman who was already raising one baby on her own, so there's no question that she understood the consequences of sexual activity. Imagine if someone had suggested to her that she could "preserve her newfound stability" by finding a stable partner before engaging in sexual activity. Here is another equally-accurate alternative headline: "woman dies in Georgia as a result of premarital sex!"

On July 20, the day Georgia’s law banning abortion at six weeks went into effect, her pregnancy had just passed that mark, according to records her family shared with ProPublica.

Thurman wanted a surgical abortion close to home and held out hope as advocates tried to get the ban paused in court, Baker said. But as her pregnancy progressed to its ninth week, she couldn’t wait any longer. She scheduled a D&C in North Carolina, where abortion at that stage was still legal, and on Aug. 13 woke up at 4 a.m. to make the journey with her best friend.

On their drive, they hit standstill traffic, Baker said. The clinic couldn’t hold Thurman’s spot longer than 15 minutes — it was inundated with women from other states where bans had taken effect.

Perhaps the headline should be "woman dies in Georgia after getting stuck in traffic?" Or maybe "woman dies in Georgia after being turned away from a legal abortion clinic?"

Instead, a clinic employee offered Thurman a two-pill abortion regimen approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, mifepristone and misoprostol. Her pregnancy was well within the standard of care for that treatment.

Getting to the clinic had required scheduling a day off from work, finding a babysitter, making up an excuse to borrow a relative’s car and walking through a crowd of anti-abortion protesters. Thurman didn’t want to reschedule, Baker said.

"I would kill my twin babies to preserve my newfound stability. But only if it's super convenient."

And of course: Thurman is given a legal option "well within the standard of care." It would appear that she accessed a "legal abortion" with no difficulty at all! Right, ProPublica?

Deaths due to complications from abortion pills are extremely rare.

Deaths due to complications from anti-abortion laws are extremely rare.

This was the point where I knew I had to react to this article in a public way. I recognize that ProPublica is an advocacy group and that RawStory is like, maybe on the level of the Daily Wire in terms of ideological bias and propagandizing. But the only reason I saw the article was that it was being shared by a couple of the aforementioned friends in my social feeds--people who I might even have described, in the relatively recent past, as political moderates. This is the new narrative, same as the old (pre-Roe) narrative: all restrictions on abortions are woman-killing laws!

Except, you know...

Baker and Thurman spoke every day that week. At first, there was only cramping, which Thurman expected. But days after she took the second pill, the pain increased and blood was soaking through more than one pad per hour. If she had lived nearby, the clinic in North Carolina would have performed a D&C for free as soon as she followed up, the executive director told ProPublica. But Thurman was four hours away.

On the evening of Aug. 18, Thurman vomited blood and passed out at home, according to 911 call logs. Her boyfriend called for an ambulance. Thurman arrived at Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge at 6:51 p.m.

Look, I'm not a physician, but if you are bleeding through more than one pad per hour you go to the fucking hospital. This woman was bleeding like crazy and just didn't do anything about it for days.

But sure--anti-abortion laws are what prevented her from getting timely treatment, totally. And I've got a bridge you might want to invest in.

ProPublica obtained the summary narrative of Thurman’s hospital stay provided to the maternal mortality review committee, as well as the group’s findings.

Apparently not a HIPAA violation?

The narrative is based on Thurman’s medical records, with identifying information removed.

Well that's alright then! But ProPublica somehow managed to identify her anyway. Interesting.

At least we finally got the name of the committee! Not that there's much information on the web about it. Who are its members? What are their politics? How often do they provide conveniently timed confidential medical information to partisan "investigative" reporters?

The world may never know. Also:

The committee does not interview doctors involved with the case or ask hospitals to respond to its findings. ProPublica also consulted with medical experts, including members of the committee, about the timeline of events.

Here I will excise the precise timeline of the woman's hospital experience. If any of our physicians would care to comment on it, I'd be interested to know what a medical mind makes of the timeline as presented. It sounds harrowing, but mostly it sounds to me like the primary causes of this woman's death were, in descending order of contributory effect: poor life choices, abortion pills, poor self-care, medical bureaucracy, and then maybe legal bureaucracy. Georgia's particular abortion laws barely have any role to play at all in this tragedy.

Until she got the call from the hospital, her mother had no idea Thurman had been pregnant. She recalled her daughter’s last words before she was wheeled into surgery — they had made no sense coming from a vibrant young woman who seemed to have her whole life ahead of her:

“Promise me you’ll take care of my son.”

There is a “good chance” providing a D&C earlier could have prevented Amber Thurman’s death, the maternal mortality review committee concluded.

Which she would apparently have received if she'd driven four hours to the followup she was duly informed might be necessary. When people die because the steps required to stay alive seem so inconvenient that a 28 year old woman with a son cannot even communicate the situation to her mother, it seems wildly irresponsible to suggest that the problem is with the law. Especially when you drop this nugget:

It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C to Thurman, though the summary report shows they discussed the procedure at least twice in the hours before they finally did.

"The law totally did this! Well, in fact we have no evidence whether the law had anything to do with any of this. But you stopped reading eighteen paragraphs ago, so now we'll mention that fact for completeness. Wouldn't want a lawsuit to interfere with our 'reporting!'"

ProPublica asked the governor’s office on Friday to respond to cases of denied care, including the two abortion-related deaths, and whether its exceptions were adequate. Spokesperson Garrison Douglas said they were clear and gave doctors the power to act in medical emergencies. He returned to the state’s previous argument, describing ProPublica’s reporting as a “fear-mongering campaign.”

Sounds like Garrison Douglas knows what's up.

Thurman’s family members may never learn the exact variables that went into doctors’ calculations. The hospital has not fulfilled their request for her full medical record. There was no autopsy.

For years, all Thurman’s family had was a death certificate that said she died of “septic shock” and “retained products of conception” — a rare description that had previously only appeared once in Georgia death records over the last 15 years, ProPublica found. The family learned Thurman’s case had been reviewed and deemed preventable from ProPublica’s reporting.

If there were any HIPAA violations involved, well... I wouldn't count on an investigation from the federal government. I'm sure they've got their hands full shadowing James O'Keefe.

The sting of Thurman’s death remains extremely raw to her loved ones, who feel her absence most deeply as they watch her son grow taller and lose teeth and start school years without her.

They focus on surrounding him with love but know nothing can replace his mother.

On Monday, she would have turned 31.

Her twins, had they survived, would be nearly 2 years old.

So this woman suffered a complication from legal abortion. It’s unclear whether the hospital screwing up the treatment caused it to turn fatal or whether she wouldn’t have survived. Either way, hospital care was indisputably legal.

This is, as you accurately note, 0% about Georgia’s abortion laws. But, of course, just like Kate Cox was going to die if she didn’t get an abortion(she wasn’t), that’s the narrative the media has to run with. And it’s right before an election, so the media needs to ham it up, constantly lying, for 6 weeks. Left wing misinformation it is.

Well as the right is so often doing, they are 'directionally correct', abortion bans do cost the lives of mothers the world over.

This is the first time the news media is claiming a woman died from an abortion ban. It is, of course, a lie- this doesn’t have anything to do with Georgia’s abortion law- but there seemingly haven’t been any previous cases of women dying in ways more plausibly connected to red state abortion laws.

When you get down to it, pro-choice arguments that women are dying are some sort of unfalsifiable motte retreated to when an individual woman turns out to be dead of her own bad decisions(as with this woman’s decision not to seek medical care during multiple days of bleeding through her pads hourly). If there are women dying from red state abortion laws, show me the receipts. The media’s eagerness to- falsely- tie this to Georgia’s heartbeat law is evidence that there aren’t any.

It might not be the perfect case, but maybe black people shouldn't have ride in the back of the bus.

  • -15

What the fuck does that have to do with anything? By all appearances of the case, this woman would still be dead if the same scenario happened in New York State.

My point was you won't always have the most sympathetic or logical subject to prove your policy goal. You just take what you've got and run with it. Blocking abortions does indeed kill mothers, even if it didn't in this case.

Blocking abortions does indeed kill mothers

Again, show me the receipts. The fact that the media hasn’t already done so points to it being because there aren’t any.

There is a history of famous cases of women in pro-life jurisdictions dying of pregnancy related complications, and without exception the care that would have saved them was legal, it just wasn’t administered either due to malpractice(the Irish case used as justification for repealing the 8th) or the woman’s own poor decisions(if this woman had gone to the hospital when she started experiencing complications she would probably be alive right now). The media clearly wants to point to unambiguous cases of pro-life laws killing women and it’s not doing so; the most plausible reason is because there aren’t any.

Wait what? Every abortion ban country has a ton of related deaths. What are you on about?

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