Be careful about traveling to Republican states if you can get pregnant

The situation in states with near-total abortion bans is horrible, and the goal of the anti-abortion movement is to make it even worse in as many places as possible while being dishonest about their goals:

Now onto the bad and the wild. First, the wild. ProPublica has gotten ahold of audio from a strategy session meeting of Tennessee lawmakers and major anti-abortion groups. As you probably already know, Tennessee has come under fire for their extreme abortion ban which doesn’t even have an exception for women’s lives: Doctors are expected to break the law and then affirmatively prove that they had cause to break it. In response, some state lawmakers have talked about ‘softening’ the legislation; the anti-abortion groups on this call are trying to convince them not to.

Here is Katie Glenn, state policy director at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, for example, complimenting Tennessee for their extreme affirmative defense mandate…

The other controversial piece of Tennessee’s law has been questions over whether IVF doctors would be prosecuted. The state attorney general came out recently to promise that IVF wouldn’t be impacted, but here is Stephen Billy, the vice president of state affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, telling lawmakers that they just need to wait a little bit before going after fertility doctors (and contraception??)…

There is so much more in the piece: Read the whole thing. But the short version is, they don’t give a fuck about women or our lives, and they want these laws to be as extreme as possible.

Now onto some horrible, but not unexpected news: I told you last week about a woman who wrote a letter to the editor about her daughter who was denied care in Ohio and nearly died. Well, it looks like her daughter has gone to the press. Christina Zielke is from Washington, DC, but was in the state for her brother’s wedding. She had found out a few weeks prior that her pregnancy was ending in a miscarriage, but she had just started bleeding once she got to Ohio—and heavily. But even though an ultrasound showed no heartbeat and Christina was filling up diapers with blood, the hospital emergency room refused to treat her. Christina told NPR, “They said they needed to prove there was no fetal development. I was told that I could come back in two days for a repeat hormone test to confirm I was miscarrying.”

They didn’t even change course when Christina told them she had lab confirmation from her DC doctor that she was miscarrying.

Strange that there’s no audio of these ghouls pushing lawmakers to provide more medical care to pregnant women and mothers. Must be an oversight!

In completely unrelated news, since we could all use some comic relief right now here you go:

If the bird site is going down, at least it’s in a blaze of glory!