Another day in Republican paradise
By 
Let’s check in on how the post-Dobbs Republican turn to social democracy and maternal healthcare is going:
The last day Byron Stribling spent with his wife, Harmony, was the Fourth of July in 2021. A great day, he always says.
The holiday fell on a Sunday. The congregation at their church in Belzoni, a small town in the Mississippi Delta, blessed the couple and prayed for a safe delivery for Ms. Ball-Stribling. She was eight months pregnant and scheduled to have a C-section five days later.
At a barbecue, the Striblings feasted on ribs, collard greens, potato salad and cornbread. But around midnight, Ms. Ball-Stribling threw up and said her chest hurt. “She wanted to lay down, but I told her, ‘We need to go somewhere,’” Mr. Stribling, 32, recalled.
Ambulances in the Delta are unreliable, and the only hospital in Belzoni closed over a decade ago. So they piled into his car and sped toward Yazoo City, Miss., the closest town with an emergency room, about 30 miles away.
On the way, Ms. Ball-Stribling had a seizure. Panicked, Mr. Stribling called 911. The dispatcher told Mr. Stribling to pull over and start CPR, so he slammed on the brakes and pumped her chest on the side of the road until an ambulance came. But he already knew he had lost her, there on the shoulder of Route 49-W.
What killed Harmony Ball-Stribling? The death certificate says the cause of death was complications of pre-eclampsia, a life-threatening blood pressure disorder that can develop during pregnancy, exacerbated by hypertension and hardening of the arteries. But that’s not the whole story.
Because even though Ms. Ball-Stribling was just 30, married and had health insurance, the odds were against her: She was a Black woman in America, where pregnant women of color die at almost three times the rate of pregnant white women.
She lived in a rural health care “desert,” a county with no obstetrician or certified nurse midwife and no hospital that delivered babies — in a state with the worst maternal and infant mortality rates in the country, and the lowest life expectancy.
Barney Frank’s ancient dictum that for Republicans life begins at conception and ends at birth was, in fact, far too charitable. Other than using state coercion to force women to carry pregnancies to term, the not-give-a-shit is a seamless web that starts at fertilization.