abortion classic or dud?

i honestly don't know anything about hospital protocol when it comes to these matters but i was kind of amazed the hospital let them even take the fetus home with them in the first place?

honestly i don't know, but i feel like human society has the whole spectrum of practices surrounding death.

i honestly don't know anything about hospital protocol when it comes to these matters but i was kind of amazed the hospital let them even take the fetus home with them in the first place?

― badtz-maruizm (donna rouge), Wednesday, June 15, 2011 6:09 PM (6 seconds ago) Bookmark

well they dipped it in rubbing alcohol first. /gallows humor

my bio prof in college had a fetus in a jar that he would bring into class when it was broadly relevant.

omg I probably shouldn't say that but I have a number of very Catholic conservative relatives who miscarried and wouldn't DARE do that. It's a sad occasion and holding the miscarried child just seemed kind of morbid and theatrical to them. I hope I don't offend.

would actually be interested to know if that kind of... dress up your fetus/stillborn baby ritual has any precedent in (world?) culture

yeah thats the only precedent i could think of. i suppose viewings operate on a slightly similar level? but theres a level of ritual and distance there that separates it from... cuddling with the corpse

again tho ive never been in that situation, so

it's sorta awkward that this whole thing is pinned on the specific case study of that one couple, let alone that they're a couple tangled up in the guy's distasteful pro-life bs, because trying to understand the actual feelings & attitudes & intentions involved is impossible, whatever kind of external impression you have of them. like, devoid of any of the context of who they are and what meaning they attach to it, i can understand having some sort of reflex to involve your family in this having happened; if you have young kids & have been talking them through an on-going pregnancy and it ends prematurely and everything's changed, then, while in this case it seems graphic enough to be inappropriate, i can sort of see why showing them the foetus is a part of that ongoing process, of the narrative of 'you're going to have a sibling' -> no you aren't, this is what happened. to me, the narrative in that scenario is, this would've been your little brother & it didn't ever make it to personhood in the way it would've, rather than, this is a fully formed person, get this kid a social security number stat, etc, but to each their own (while outside of the legislature). i don't buy in to notions of foetal personhood, at all, but i feel like this is more about the existing family unit & the effects of a big change, maybe. carrying a foetus around day after day and then things ending, i think trying to get over the deep physical & metaphysical meanings of that is gonna be a pretty heavy undertaking sometimes.

like - i don't know at what point this becomes a matter of degrees; it wouldn't be as alien to you to consider the couple having some time alone with a foetus after delivery, in the hospital, would it? with that being sorta i'd imagine not at all uncommon (although maybe, i am guessing, moreso after stages as early as 20 weeks), is it only becoming weird that there's this element of transport & clothing & photos & so on? because yeah they end up taking you to a weird place but some of them i can sorta see how you get there - clothing so the thing isn't naked, transport to get to yr family, etc.

i don't know why i am going to bat here. the '20-week baby' thing is sorta beyond, to me. & the thrust of the original article re: the guy's hypocrisy is obviously otm.

As are you.

I mean that you're otm obv - didn't mean to imply any hypocrisy.

well put, schlump.

i think a couple wanting to have some time alone with a fetus/stillborn baby serves a similar kind of function as a viewing might (whatever that function is). but--yes--there is a line that gets crossed (to me) when the baby is clothed and driven several hours and photographed, and--this was the bit that really got me--played with... i dont know. i should stop speaking in generalities, there are likely "bring the corpse home" situations where id feel uncomfortable passing judgment, or less comfortable at any rate. id like to think its possible to be open to the myriad ways grief manifests itself without being "anything goes"

yeah, sure; i think it is strange, and i think the debate over 'anything goes' has to butt up against the other concerns that are raised by it being a weird situation, like whether it's the best thing for everyone involved.

& no sweat erica!

xps to max:

this isn't really the same thing but -
my grandfather was maori and when he died, a tangi (funeral) was held. his body was prepared, placed in an open casket and taken to his marae (i don't really know how to explain what a marae is, not very articulately anyway, but it's sort of the the center of your community if you're maori. his body was placed in the main hall, and i (as well as other close family members and friends) hung out there and slept there with his body for several days. a female had to be on either side of his body at all times (protocol).

we would touch his face and hands and talk to him, visitors would come all day every day to pay their respects, kiss his face etc. in the evenings, everyone at the marae would come into the main hall with him/us and we would tell stories about our experiences with him, play music and sing.

it's def not the same as 'playing' with a fetus, but there's a certain transitioning that takes place when you spend that much time with the body of a person you loved very much. i don't know if it really 'helps' - my grandfather's death was sudden but he had been ill for a long time, and while the tangi was v positive and comforting, it didn't really help me deal with the loss.

wikipedia has a pretty good description of marae.

that does make me feel a little more comfortable w/ the concept, i suppose. ty.

i think there is a turn here in santorum's actions that prevent me from being too compassionate.

i'm going to make a leap here: frankly i think that the act of bringing a dead fetus home to be considered a brother and child for a certain amount of time was driven by his intense loathing of abortion. as in, he doesn't love babies so much that in result he can't abide abortion, he loves babies because he can't abide abortion. he is so deeply invested in the disgust with these medical procedures that he had to perform some kind of act of "empersoning" on the fetus. i think it was a political act as much as familial. especially since he and his wife had crossed a major red line.

it is weirdly moving tho, very much so, and horrifying

I don't know, I would like to think that's true because he's a repellent individual in so many ways, but it feels like projection on our part.

Now, if you put the stillborn kid in the freezer and take it out when you miss it, that would be really fucked up.

(sorry, after relating a similar story about a dog earlier today I couldn't resist)

yeah it's pretty project-y, sure

I really think for some people, possibly the Santorums, death and dead people, and even by extension dead bodies, hold almost as much fascination as the living and dealing with the divide is so emotionally disruptive that it defines a large portion of life.

this bit of the wapo article about santorum is what stops me from feeling any compassion at all

He and Karen brought Gabriel's body home so their children could "absorb and understand that they had a brother," Santorum says. "We wanted them to see that he was real," not an abstraction, he says. Not a "fetus," either, as Rick and Karen were appalled to see him described — "a 20-week-old fetus" — on a hospital form. They changed the form to read "20-week-old baby."

Karen Santorum, a former nurse, wrote letters to her son during and after her pregnancy. She compiled them into a book, "Letters to Gabriel," a collection of prayers, Bible passages and a chronicle of the prenatal complications that led to Gabriel's premature delivery. At one point, her doctor raised the prospect of an abortion, an "option" Karen ridicules. "Letters to Gabriel" also derides "pro-abortion activists" and decries the "infanticide" of "partial-birth abortion," the legality of which Rick Santorum was then debating in the Senate. The book reads, in places, like a call to action.

It's gotta feel really great to know that the choices you made were the only right choice and that you can put yourself on a pedestal as an example

wonder how much time mr santorum has spent changing the diapers of his seven children

though i loathe rick santorum's politics, and it's hard not to see this an an extension of that, i'm not sure what to think abt the santorum family and their "baby gabriel" business. what families in that position do w their grief is not, generally speaking, something i care to judge.

we americans have become extremely skilled in the art of shielding ourselves from the unpleasant reality of death, but i'm by no means sure that's always such a good thing. it's the success of our defensive shielding that makes this story seem so grotesque, imo, not the fact that there's anything terribly wrong with the santorums' actions. the discomfort we feel is the product of their violation of a comfort-preserving taboo.

I feel discomfort because they made a very personal choice to deal with an event in their family in the way they did and seem to think that their ideas about life and death and babies should be pushed on the population at large.

http://www.lamebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/just-KIDdin1.jpg

on a lighter note

i think its basically insanely gross and weird, i want to be compassionate and kind but i cant

nb the importance of the right to choose abortion is huge for me everybody knows that right but I mean - here's how to be compassionate about this behavior, which is totally weird and macabre to me too don't get me wrong but - when a family wants to have a baby and they've been to the first sonogram and listened to the heartbeat and then a couple weeks later felt the first kicks and then a few weeks after that started to feel the kicking & wriggling even harder - if you're planning on carrying that pregnancy to term, you start to think of the fetus as your kid. I think you find out the sex at 12 or 16 weeks so then it's not just your kid, it's your "son" or "daughter," and you're maybe spending a lot of time thinking "what am I going to call this little dude, I cannot wait to meet him." The Santorums, in the 19th week, having maybe* spent three-plus months going through the really profound thing that people are going through when they're in that state, go get a routine sonogram, just another happy appointment in the journey to their new baby, & when you're planning on carrying the pregnancy to term the techs don't refer to it as "the fetus" they say "the baby," so their techs/doctors say "bad news. If we don't do intrauterine surgery on the baby, he's going to die." And they get the surgery, only the wife spikes an insane fever, and high fever during pregnancy is really dangerous to the fetus, can damage its neural pathways permanently, and they have to induce. This is one of those "any way that people respond in this situation, no matter what that response is or who those people are, makes sense if you think about how acute the pain must be."

scenarios exactly like the Santorums', by the way, is one of the reasons why the NC law passed yesterday, the most restrictive mandatory-sonogram law in the country as of right now, is so inhuman. you need to terminate your pregnancy because the sonogram showed irremediable birth defects, there's zero chance of a healthy baby? ok cool - first you have to wait 24 hours and get "counseling" tho - also, I know that sonogram was traumatic but the law says I have to give you another one and that I have to describe it to you and you have to listen.

*I don't know them personally & everybody's different & plus I consider them genuinely evil people so maybe they spent those three months just worshipping the devil every day, idk

^^^realest of talk

someone i am v close to miscarried and still (rightfully imo) considers it the loss of her son, not some other, different, kind of loss

*I don't know them personally & everybody's different & plus I consider them genuinely evil people so maybe they spent those three months just worshipping the devil every day, idk

^^ basically a generous, balanced appraisal of these guys when factoring in poster's exposure to entire days of repro legislation broadcasts on c-span

aero v much otm

Some good news! Indiana's law, one of the more repellently creative attempts to choke women's services out of existence, will be contested by the DOJ!

don't often find myself going "fuck yeah Department of Justice" but fuck yeah DOJ

ready to be really, really offended?

http://images.floridaindependent.com/2011/06/Radiance-Foundation1.jpg

details here

this has been an ongoing tactic for a while but this is really stepping up the "I can't believe you're actually saying that" quotient

Planned Parenthood was founded by someone into eugenics and they still want to abort all black babies, fyi

Texas upping the ante

the more this shit happens the more my sighs turn into teeth gritting

like really wondering just how close we are to overturning Roe v. Wade. like if taht ever happens I'm going to seriously have to reconsider whether I want to continue living here. my company has offices overseas.

(obv I realize it's not on the horizon or anything, but I mean a decade or so in the future, if Dems don't have the White House and the Senate)....

overturning Roe isn't really on their dance card at all because they're having incredible success at the state and county level. the current state-and-county attacks disperse what little resistance there is; you might mobilize some national pro-choice support around defending Roe, but it's hard to rally enough people to stop this stuff from happening. Post on Facebook & try to get people to call governors of states they don't even live in to veto legislation like this...in NC, the (Democratic) governor's probably going to veto the 24-hour-waiting-period/mandatory ultrasound with description/mandatory "counseling/handmaid's tale bill that just passed, but it's thought that there are enough Republicans & anti-choice Democrats to override the veto.

I've given my schtick before about how I don't think they'd actually overturn Roe even if it was a lead pipe cinch - that'd be like throwing political capital away. as long as they can shame, humiliate, frustrate and hopefully force poor and middle-income women to carry pregnancies to term, they're happy.

"Post on Facebook & try to get people to call governors of states they don't even live in to veto legislation like this" sc. "and see where it gets you"

Has there been much stealth radical tightening and rewriting of rules in blue states, or is this mostly a red state phenomenon right now? I remember when they tried to pull a fast one in ... South Dakota, right? And there was a voter revolt once people realized how far the legislation went. I wonder if something like that would/could ever be in the cards for a traditional conservative state like Texas.

NC's governor is a Democrat who plans to veto the bill (and will be overridden). When the state senate is too blue to play along, they do it at the county level (cutting off insurance funding for county workers if the health care plan offers reproductive services of any kind) until they can get their act together at the state level. NY & California aren't really on the table but there's stuff in something like 14 states at this point, success in South Dakota & Nebraska really got them motivated as does the weakness of the national party on the right to abortion.

Voter revolt is hard to imagine because Democrats conceded the ideological ground on this years ago & focus on fetal defects, health of the mother, etc., instead of on a woman's right to an abortion, guaranteed by Roe. Winning back that ground would involve a pretty unimaginable combo of dedicated charismatic leadership & a well-orchestrated rhetorical shift.

Voter revolt is hard to imagine because Democrats conceded the ideological ground on this years ago & focus on fetal defects, health of the mother, etc., instead of on a woman's right to an abortion, guaranteed by Roe.

this is the bit that makes me see red

trying to get data on which states have anti-choice bills passed or in play right now - first three months of 2011 saw 512 anti-choice bills introduced at the state level, according to some of the pro-choice blogs

Voter revolt is hard to imagine because Democrats conceded the ideological ground on this years ago & focus on fetal defects, health of the mother, etc., instead of on a woman's right to an abortion, guaranteed by Roe.

I was like this once -- had a debate on a message board where some guy (teh actual guy who ran the board) kept using 'retarded' and 'mongoloid' and other variances as insults, and I and others finally called him out on it, and he backpedaled by saying he thought mothers should just get abortions when their kid was determined to be at risk for retardation.

and even though I was kinda revolted at the thought of someone merely terminating a pregnancy for that reason, y'know, that IS what pro-choice means...being able to abort your pregnancy for whatever reason.

if there is anything growing in my gut, I'm gonna be damned if I'm gonna let a buncha elder wrinkly white dudes tell me I'm not allowed to do anything about it if I decide I don't want it. REGARDLESS of why.

at which point conservatives want to paint you as "Pro-Death".

hell not even just conservatives

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/25/us/25indiana.html

A federal judge ruled Friday that the State of Indiana could not cut off money for Planned Parenthood clinics providing health care to low-income women on Medicaid.