#so as someone who DOES want to limit abortions by doing all those things I was like 'wow fuck you people'

[silvermoon424]

I just watched John Oliver's video on abortion rights and it was nice to see that my favorite game of "let's see how long it takes for 'pro-life' people to admit they hate women" is still relevant.

It only took a couple of comments for anti-choicers to devolve into "women need to keep their legs shut." Absolutely no blame directed towards men who impregnate women because as we all know pregnancy only requires one person. Also, it was awesome seeing people defend the fact that anti-choicers don't support social welfare policies because "why should we have to pay for the consequences of you opening your legs?"

#every day I thank the universe that I snapped out of being pro-life #I was HEAVILY indoctrinated in Catholic school and it took me YEARS to stop being so stubborn about it #what got me out of it was becoming more leftist and feeling disgusted at how most 'pro-life' people do not support policies #that provide social safety nets for families and single mothers #nor do they actually seem to give a shit about children once they're born #NOR do they support contraception and sex ed #so as someone who DOES want to limit abortions by doing all those things I was like 'wow fuck you people' #'I'm going to go hang out with the pro-choicers who actually DO support those policies' #pro choice #bodily autonomy #abortion rights #reproductive rights

[newdog14]

I want to talk to everyone who's still saying "I know Biden is bad, but Trump is worse, so just vote Blue."

I know that American Politics sucks right now. Everyone is a bad option and every year our options get worse. I get it, and it sucks, but here's the thing: If we keep saying "Vote Blue no matter what!" then the Democratic party is never going to get better. In fact, it'll probably get worse, because if ignoring the voices of their voter base doesn't lose them votes, then why bother listening?

If you want things to get better, if you want politicians that you can vote for without feeling like you've betrayed your ethics, then we need to show that we WILL stop voting for people who we don't agree with. We need to show that the American people have heard Biden's Administration say "There are no red lines for Israel" and we do not agree.

Politicians only care about us for our votes. If supporting genocides demonstrably loses votes, then politicians will take note and change their policies in accordance. But if we vote Biden no matter what, if we vote Blue no matter what, then they aren't going to listen to us when we call and protest and scream.

Now, some of you may be thinking, what about Trump?

There is a chance he won't be able to run after all; he's currently in a legal shit storm that got his ability to do business in New York revoked. And with many of his co-defendants and associates pleading guilty things aren't looking good for him. Even if he can dodge the numerous felony fraud charges he's been hit with, this is going to be an expensive, embarrassing, dragged out process that will severely limit his time and funds for campaigning.

That doesn't mean he won't find his way onto the ballot anyway, but he hasn't won the Republican nomination yet. Even if he does though, sticking by Biden doesn't mean you're putting someone better in the White House. Given the ever climbing death toll that Biden is not just ignoring but enabling, it’s getting increasingly difficult, at least for me, to believe that Trump is actually worse. They’re both bad, and they’re both hurting people, so instead let’s look at why so many are clinging to the democratic party, even in the face of a genocide.

I know the biggest reason so many folks are hesitating to cut support for Biden is that they're worried about what that means for those of us in the United States.

Who will stop the anti-trans bathroom bills that keep popping up? Who will keep abortion bans off the books? Who will prevent censorship in schools?

Well, in point of fact, not your president!

Think about it. Did Biden being president put a stop to Florida's "don't say gay" bill? No. He had zero impact there.

Is he what stands between Virginia and the Abortion Ban currently being proposed for the state? Also no. He's not involved at all.

Has Biden stopped the bans on Drag Shows so many states are trying to implement? No, the Federal Courts have been doing that, including judges who were appointed by Trump.

See, the President of the United States is all about the big picture. Their opinions matter, and they can set a tone for their party, but they don’t control everything. Their impacts on the governing of states come from the people they appoint, like judges, but even then, most people will still do their jobs over pleasing the person who got them that job. Especially so because federal judges are actually really difficult to remove, and that only really happens if they’re so bad at following the rules that congress gets rid of them.

I’m not sure if Biden can’t stop states from making laws or if he just wouldn’t, but either way he’s not protecting us. 

The President honestly can’t do a hell of a lot to the American people, especially not in just four years. That’s why we survived Trump’s first presidency, and it’s why we as a whole would survive it if he got a second term.

The place where a President’s influence is immediately and drastically felt, however, is in the international sphere. The American people are protected, the citizens of the world are not, and with that fun little “well we’re not declaring war” workaround, the President, aka the Commander in Chief of the US Military, can do a hell of a lot of damage.

The people of Palestine may not survive another four years of Biden’s presidency. If things carry on like they are, they may not survive the remaining one year of his term.

So we the American people need to show that we will not stand by a president that endorses genocide. We need to show that we will not stand by a party that endorses genocide. We need to start talking, and loudly, about how we will not be voting for Biden next year. We need it to be clear that it is specifically his foreign policy that has lost his support, and that we will not be willing to just switch him out for a newer model who reminds me of no one so much as a modern day Aaron Burr.

There are a lot of things that we can do to express our displeasure for Biden, and for Israel, and there are a lot of people who can help you call for change, plan boycotts, organize marches, and determine where to aim direct action to have the greatest impact. But all of that needs to be done while putting our votes where our voices are, or else all of that rage will burn out and nothing will really change, just like it has in the Black Lives Matter movement.

In this case, as we do not currently have a better option, the place to put our presidential votes is with no one.

It’s not an ideal solution, I know. After all the years we’ve spent saying, “Vote! Vote no matter what! Vote or else you can’t complain about what happens!”, not voting feels like one of the most counterproductive moves to make. The reason we have to do it though, is because voting in the same sort of people and hoping they’ll make things better isn’t working, and we’re never going to get new options if we keep supporting the old ones. Cutting support for Biden, for Democrats on the national level, without a viable alternative isn't an easy choice to make. It's scary and I admit that it's kind of a gamble. No one has ever tried it before, not the way I'm hoping you all will.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?” It’s time for us to break. No more unconditional blue votes. 

We have to force the Democratic party to recognize that their voting base will not just mindlessly support them, and that the candidates they put forth will be expected to hold up a certain moral standard. Our democracy is skewed to favor the opinions of corporations and the mega rich, but politicians do still need the masses to vote them into office, just like companies need us to buy things so that they can make money in the first place, and voting margins are tight enough that just like in the Speaker of the House vote, it won’t actually take that many of us to throw a wrench in the party’s bottom line.

We might not be able to win, but we can make sure that they lose until they shape up and start making meaningful changes.

And you may be thinking, won’t that just leave us in the hands of Republicans?

I want you to scroll back up. Look at all the bills I brought up that Biden didn’t stop. We are already in Republican hands, and the majority of Democrats are not willing to actually stand up to them.

That said, not voting across the board isn’t what I’m asking you to do. 

Our choices for President may be shot to hell, but there will be other people on that ballot in 2024. Local people, who will very directly affect your hometown and not much outside of it. Vote for your local sheriff, for your school board members, for your mayor and your state delegates. 

These are the people who control whether or not your senator can pass a drag show ban. These are the people who enable or block bills that hurt LGBTQ+ students. These are the folks who vote on whether or not to pass abortion bans. And in local elections? Your vote really, truly counts in a way that it just can’t on a national level.

And it’s not just people who wind up on your ballots. Local initiatives for conservation, funding for infrastructure, redistricting drives, and changes to your state’s constitution appear on your ballots too, and those are things that you’re going to want to have a say in.

There’s more to this mess than just voting or not voting, of course. There is always going to be more than one step we have to take to force change. That's why we cannot and do not vote inside a vacuum. We still have to make calls, and go to protests, and put our money where our morals are. Change isn't easy, and when you're fighting a decades old machine it's not quick either. But the longer we drag our feet about pushing back, the longer we keep betting on the lesser evil to change, the worse our options will get.

It might feel hopeless right now. Like our voices don't matter, and that we're screaming our lungs out alone. We can't give up though. We can't give into despair, and we can’t let up the pressure before new voices step forward, even if it takes time, and even if it takes more effort then checking a box or sharing a post.

One step will never be enough on its own, but every step we take adds up, and when we take those steps together we magnify our voices into something that cannot be ignored.

This is how we force our politicians to change: consequences and losses. If we start up early enough we might even get better options who could actually win the presidency, but we can't balk if we don't.

I know you might be scared to lose this election. As I write this, it feels counterintuitive, and it's something I never could have imagined saying years ago. But we can't change our political options unless we force politicians to change, and that only happens if they can't get elected as they are.

So don't elect them, and make sure they know that you're doing it on purpose and for a reason.

#american politics #us politics #political #vote #free palestine #palestine

[olfoartz]

I’m deciding to do a “get to know me” type post, it will cover the name I want to be called, my bday, what I support and don’t, what I like, online info, and a little bit of irl me.

If anyone does wanna make silly art of my OCs / Fursonas my art tag would be Olfo Artz -will be on this post-

Am i active rn? Nah, wont be uploading for a while. Ive been drawing my OC stuff recently and no one sees it or cares for it so im just posting on insta until i draw moon again. Im working on OC lore and the world build and shit before i write the book on AO3

Requests

So I wont do sing request since I cant draw all the characters (rn) but I can do fursona requests as long as they are a cat, fox, wolf, tiger, lion (basically any wild cat and canine) and maybe even moths. Idk about insects because I can’t even draw a simple spider but I can always try.

I could try moon requests but I am very limited on what I can draw, but examples are poses, eating, food, drinking, cups, bowls, basically every object, and a few other things related to those.

Name/names, pronouns, and sexuality.

I mainly like being called Olfo as it’s the name I put in all my usernames but I also have the names of Snow and Alpha. I used to mainly use Alpha -it was only used as a name not a role- but I don’t use it anymore (unless someone wants to) because the rude kids in my grade found out about it and kept calling me that. They know I’m a furry as well so it made it worse 😭 some people call me Snow Alpha which is cute and a lot of adults im friends with call me Snowy or snow ball which I find funny

For pronouns and sexuality -w- I use she/him and I’m straight (possibly bi) and asexual :,]

Bday

March 7th

Do and don’t support

I support ALL LGBTQ+. No, that does not mean I support Zoophiles, Pedophiles, and anyone like that as they are not apart of any community.

I support all fandoms except the ones involving the 2 things i just mentioned.

I do NOT support the pro-life stuff. I am pro-abortion.

I am fine with the anime community as long as you don’t like lolis. I dotn support people who age up characters so that their ships work or so that they can draw their character how they want unless said character is already an adult.

I do support therians and people who do Quadrobics ^w^

Online Information

This one might be long QwQ

All my online names have Olfo in them.

I have Twitter but I DON’T use it. Ima list the apps I use and the names I have on them

Instagram: olfo_artz

Here: olfoartz

MinecraftPE: OlfoShadow

MinecraftJAVA: OlfoArt(s or z I forgot)

Steam: olfo_steam

Clash of clans: Olfo #LR9U0PJ2P or O if 0 doesn’t work -rarely play-

Wildcraft: zAlphaYT and my alt is zAlphaAlt

Deviantart: OlfoArtz

Roblox: JJneeder-Olfo_Artz

|| I do play Bloodline hero but idk how to find my information ||

YouTube: olfo_YT-olfo_artz with my wolf fursona as PFP

Pinterest: Olfo_Artz -I dont upload-

Discord: realolfo_artz and alt is olfo_artz

Brawl Stars: Olfo #RR8C992YQ

Kitty Cat Resort: Olfo with black cat PFP

Wolf Online: I also dont know how to find my info for this game

Wolf Online 2: I am not in a guild -yet- and I mainly use a White wolf named Olfo

Sky: If anyone wants to be friend on Sky you can always DM me and I can send Invite

I do INFACT play Genshin Impact but I don’t use my account rn because of low storage

Do and Don’t like

For Animals ide say it goes from Koalas, Wolves, Cats -of any kind- and any type of wild canines including foxes.

For games I like Open world ones mostly. I like any with animals in it even if they can only be pets.

A little about the apps I use / me

I draw wolves, cats, foxes, and characters I like if I can find a way to draw them. You’re probably gonna see a resemblance in my drawings no matter the species. (Specifically the top of the head)

Some communities im in:

Furry, sing, FNAF, Quadrobics, art, gaming, LEGO movie and the community itself, Bobs Burgers, and Pokemon.

I love / have a SHIT tone of stuffed toys and I will continue to buy them. They are all stuffed animals -w- my aunts boyfriend doesn’t want me to even have toys because he thinks I’m to old and that toys are stupid so I have to keep them in a bin in my closet. I have little figures of wolves, lionking characters, MHA MC Deku and some wolf stuff.

I do paint, crazy. But I hate painting so it’s rare.

I use IbisPaint for my drawings :}

I am indeed still in high school so if you have beef with me just remember you are beefing with a child 💀

I do traditional and digital drawing.

I read fan fics of the shows I like and when doing so I specifically look for angst / drama hehehehe. I do NOT read smut. Imo smut ruins the story, anyone who reads books just for the smut are in fact PORN ADDICTS.

MUSIC‼️‼️‼️‼️🤤🤤🤤🤤 here are some people / Bans I listens to :>

Twenty One Pilots

Boy With Uke

My Chemical Romance

Pierce The veil

CG5 -fnaf songs-

Imagine Dragons

NF

Two Door Cinema Club

Nessa Barrett

BlackLite District

Billie Eilish

AURORA

HAYD

YungBlud

I DONT KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME

Madilyn Mei

Sam Tinnesz

Songs from the show “Bobs Burgers”

Darren Rita

Olivia Rodrigo

Queen

Elvis Presley

Vacations

The Hoosiers

Zack Callison

MXMTOON

Tally Hall

Ricky Montgomery

Sub Urban

Tame Impala

Eminem

ThxSoMuch

Vundabar

Dawko

XXXTENTACION

Oliver Tree

That’s all -w- I can answer any questions in comments and add them to the list. Also if anyone listen to any of those artist PLEASE recommend me some songs or artists QwQ I need more

#about myself #Olfo Artz #get to know me #get to know the blogger #get to know the person behind the blog #get to know the artist

[thepro-lifemovement]

Speaking for Unborn (11)

Abortion is best for society and best for unwanted babies.

Argument 47 and 48: “Every child should be wanted.” “Better for a baby to be aborted than to be unwanted, unloved, and a burden.”

First Rebuttal: It isn't an act of love or fairness or compassion to kill someone simply because they're unwanted. How can killing an unborn child—dismembering him while in the womb—ever be for his own benefit? The most uncompassionate, unkind, and unloving thing you can do to a child is to kill him. 

Second Rebuttal: We need to be clear about the terms we are using here. An "unwanted pregnancy" is not the same thing as an "unwanted child." Currently, an estimated two million families are waiting to adopt children. So many of these "unwanted pregnancies" are, in fact, carrying "wanted children." Source.

Argument 49: “Better to be aborted than to end up in the unhappy foster care systems of many states.”

Rebuttal: What you are really saying is that it's better to eliminate the sufferer than to eliminate the suffering. Instead of improving foster care and the adoption process, we should just kill the child. How did killing a child become an act of kindness? Ref.

Argument 50: “It’s better to have an abortion than to bring a significantly handicapped or deformed child into the world, because their lives would be sad and limited—and they would be a terrible burden on others.”

First Rebuttal: So, you're making an argument for eugenics—improving the species and society by eliminating undesirable traits. That's a decision you might want to rethink, because it puts you in the company of groups you would never want to be associated with—like Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. They also wanted to eliminate "inferior" people and those that might be a burden on others. And where does eugenics stop? Are we—are you—ready to eliminate those unborn, who through genetic testing, we know may have a low IQ or will likely become diabetic? All human beings have inherent dignity and it's simply not our role to decide who deserves to live or die. I think we should leave such callous and cold-hearted statements to the Nazis and the KKK.

Second Rebuttal: Abortion for deformity or severe handicap accounts for only a small minority of abortions. Nearly 95% of abortions are performed on the healthy babies of healthy mothers. So arguing for sweeping, unrestricted abortion rights based on this argument is faulty logic. 

Third Rebuttal: The majority of handicapped children are happy and glad to be alive. John Merrick, the severely handicapped "Elephant Man," said it best: "I am happy every hour of the day. My life is full because I know I am loved." Did his life have so little value that he should not have been permitted to be born? He thought his life was very worthwhile. Ref.

Fourth Rebuttal: Let's be honest. When we kill a handicapped child in the womb, we really aren't doing it for his own good. We're doing it for what we perceive to be our own good. We are never protecting a child by killing her. We are only trying to protect ourselves.

Fifth Rebuttal: Do you know what group of people most disagree with this argument? People with disabilities, and their parents. Those with disabilities don't like it when people tell them that their lives are not worth living. They don't like it when people tell them that ending their lives is the most compassionate thing someone could do for them. They and their parents would tell you that that's the least compassionate act they could ever imagine. Ref.

Argument 51: “Abortion is best for society because it helps decrease unwed birth rates, child abuse, and crime.”

Rebuttal: This is simply untrue. Legalizing abortion has done nothing to reduce unwed births, child abuse, or crime. To the contrary, all have significantly increased since Roe. For example, The National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect has demonstrated that child abuse and neglect have increased over 1,000% since Roe. Unwed births for black children have skyrocketed to 73%. So if decreasing rates of unwed births, child abuse, and crime are your arguments for abortion, you might want to reconsider your position. Source1. Source2.

Argument 52: “Restricting abortion is unfair to the poor and minorities, who need it most.”

First Rebuttal: Let's be clear: abortion advocates are not worried about helping the poor or minorities, but they are happy to help them abort their children. In fact, Planned Parenthood, the most prolific killer of the unborn, places the majority of its abortion centers in minority neighborhoods. And its founder, Margaret Sanger, was an outspoken racist who wanted to eliminate “indiscriminate breeding" by minorities, whom she considered "human weeds." And her plan has worked remarkably well: abortion is now the number-one killer of black lives in America-more than heart disease, cancer, and gun violence combined. Source.

Second Rebuttal: Let me tell you about Planned Parenthood and minorities: Planned Parenthood was founded by a proud racist, Margaret Sanger, who wanted to eliminate "indiscriminate breeding" by minorities, whom she called "human weeds." Her goal was to decrease the black and minority populations, and she actually advocated for the killing of babies. As she famously said in 1920, "The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it." Planned Parenthood has faithfully pursued Sanger's dreams, as the majority of babies now being disposed of are poor and dark skinned. That's Planned Parenthood. Source.

Argument 53: “Abortion is an important method of population control in our overcrowded world.”

Rebuttal: Even if we agreed that we have an overpopulation problem, killing off a segment of the population would never be an acceptable solution. Solutions based on killing innocent human beings are never OK.

Credit.

#speaking for the unborn #rebuttals #racism #unwanted #ableism #foster care #adoption #eugenics #nazis #kkk #child abuse #lowering crime #crime #handicapped #burden #poor #minorities #Margaret Sanger #planned parenthood #pp #population control #prolife #pro life #pro-life #abortion #anti-abortion #prochoice arguments #prolife rebuttals

[they-are-a-prolife-autist]

“Abortion protects my right to consent”

Okay, let’s just get one thing clear before I dive into this. Consent to sex is important. Nay - fundamental. No one wants you to be raped or forced to get pregnant, and no one is denying that you are the owner of your body. Period. End of story. No ifs ands or buts.

On the topic of “continual consent” in regards to a pregnancy, allow me to use an analogy.

If you grab a rope and hold it for somebody while they rappel down a cliff, you can't just let it go and let them fall before they get to the bottom. Despite the fact that you are choosing to using your body and your strength for their benefit- if you withdraw then you have committed an act of murder. You have killed them. If you made a decision or performed an action that caused someone’s life to become dependent on yours, it’s not only unthinkably selfish to “withdraw consent” while this person depends on you; in the case of abortion, it is murder. (Yes I used the word murder. Killing your child is murder regardless of the fact that it’s legal. Don’t be pedantic, it’s childish.) By taking part in a reproductive activity you have to acknowledge that reproduction might occur. This process is not a disease, and it’s not something gone wrong. It’s the correct function of sex and the reproductive system. At that point someone else’s life attached to yours because of circumstances outside of their control, but completely within your own. You’re holding the rope. No one wants to force you to pick up a rope, but once you’re holding it, you’re holding it. We should be willing to support you holding it, to help, to make it easier, and to defend you from discrimination or attack from people who want you to stop holding the rope. But letting go after you’ve chosen to pick it up is wrong.

Which brings us to “abortion is healthcare.”

The first error in this statement is treating pregnancy as if it is a health concern or abnormality. It is not. Pregnancy is a perfectly normal and correct biological function of women, to produce offspring.

Because a woman’s body is affected (sometimes negatively) by being pregnant, preventing or limiting those effects would be healthcare. Healthcare during pregnancy would be ultrasounds to make sure mama and baby are okay, and preventative measures to make sure nothing goes wrong for either of them. In extreme situations, healthcare might mean emergency surgery to attempt to save one or both lives. Health care is never abortion. (If one more person brings up ectopic pregnancies istg… not a single prolifer is arguing that those should be allowed to kill the mother.)

Calling abortion healthcare is funtementally twisted. It’s not healthcare the same was murdering a person who causes you mental or emotion problems isn’t mental health care. The true purpose of a healthcare provider is to protect the life and health of ALL of their patients, to do no harm, and not to play God in taking life. (Detailed here * and here *) Caring for your health should never involve actively, intentionally, maliciously destroying the existence of a smaller weaker human being. That is the height of exploitation and oppression.

Furthermore,

Over a thousand OB-GYNs and maternal healthcare experts joined together to affirm this reality in the Dublin Declaration, which states: “As experienced practitioners and researchers in obstetrics and gynecology, we affirm that direct abortion – the purposeful destruction of the unborn child -- is not medically necessary to save the life of a woman. We uphold that there is a fundamental difference between abortion, and necessary medical treatments that are carried out to save the life of the mother, even if such treatment results in the loss of life of her unborn child. We confirm that the prohibition of abortion does not affect, in any way, the availability of optimal care to pregnant women.”

This is how the so-called “healthcare” procedure takes place. The living human will slowly bleed to death as it is torn limb from limb. It can, however, survive for a time while its limbs are being torn off. . . The process is not quick, and it is not painless according to a new study published a month ago by people on both sides of the abortion debate that shows evidence of the unborn feeling pain from at least 12 weeks gestation.

“Overall, the evidence, and a balanced reading of that evidence, points towards an immediate and unreflective pain experience mediated by the developing function of the nervous system from as early as 12 weeks.”

At the end of the abortion, after the larger pieces of the child have been torn off with forceps and the remaining pieces sucked out with a vacuum, the abortionist is left with a tray containing a dismembered human corpse.

Some people advocate for using it as population control. Again, the height of exploitation and oppression.

The concept of intentionally exterminating the weak, sick, poor, needy, and/or underdeveloped for the supposed greater good is similarly unthinkable and undeniably holocaustic. It’s dehumanizing to the human fetus, and to every underprivileged person on the planet. Killing a human, ANY human, based on their quality of life, is not an acceptable form of population control and takes focus away from actually solving the issues that cause suffering on our planet. I say this as a poor, disabled, sexual and physical abuse survivor. My life is still worth living, stop using me and mine to justify grotesque acts of violence against the youngest and weakest members of society.

Additionally, what people may not realize is that sex trafficking victims are often coerced into abortions by the trafficker so that he or she can continue to make a profit off of them. A ground-breaking study by the Beazley Institute found 66 human-trafficking survivors had a total of 114 abortions — 114 abortions among 66 women. One sex-trafficking survivor described her experience:

“Over the years I had pimps and customers who hit me, punched me, kicked me, beat me, slashed me with a razor. I had forced unprotected sex and got pregnant three times and had two abortions at [a clinic]. Afterward, I was back out on the street again.”

The prevalence of forced abortions is an especially disturbing trend in sex trafficking."- Laura J. Lederer, the Senior Adviser on Trafficking for the US State Department

Abortion is profoundly anti-woman as it enables men to use our bodies as sex objects without any reverence for their reproductive capabilities or responsibility to any new life their actions create. Men aren’t required to take responsibility for their children, and this reduces women from life-givers, to sex dolls. The previously quoted survivor of six abortions incurred severe infections from the scar tissue, necessitating a hysterectomy. She could no longer bear children if she wanted. Abortion is, at its best, 100% not safe for at least one unwilling participant. At its worst, these are the possible complications for the most common form of abortion.

* Incomplete abortion which may necessitate a surgical abortion

* Infection of the uterus

* Excessive bleeding

* Torn cervix

* Infection of Fallopian tubes

* Punctured uterus

* Blood clots in the uterus

* Reaction to anesthesia

* Infertility

The figure above shows the age-adjusted relative risk of death in the year following a birth, miscarriage, or abortion compared to the rate of death among women not pregnant. The results are from a multi-year study of all women in Finland, linking death certificates to central registries for pregnancy outcomes. It clearly shows abortion is associated with an elevated risk of death, while carrying to term is associated with a lowered risk of death.

Many people claim that the fetus, though inarguably a human, cannot be considered a person due to its lack of cognitive or physical ability. This begs the question, at what point in does a born human cease to be a considered person based on physical or mental disabilities. Will we kill the born disabled much as we will the preborn disabled? Does someones physical or mental powers really impact their worth as a member of the human species? Is it not enough to be a living and also to be human?

Newborn with spina bifida born alive after failed abortion attempt dies in his mothers arms. Medics refused to help the baby after he was born alive despite a lethal abortion injection having been administered. <- this is the heartlessness of abortion culture.

And here's a state government website that describes all the different abortion procedures if you can stomach them. Abortion is not pretty. It’s not healthcare. It’s not “a woman’s right” it is ugly because it is the death of a human being.

Now for the "clump of cells" argument. In some cases at least, I think perhaps it comes from people seeing miscarried tissue and confusing the whole thing for the baby when it's actually the gestational sac and some surrounding tissue and the baby isn't identifiable in some cases.

On “self defense.”

https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/children-conceived-in-rape-take-a-beating-from-bush-and-christie-at-gop-deb

https://www.christianheadlines.com/contributors/michael-foust/abortion-is-the-dismembering-of-a-living-child-supreme-court-justice-says.html

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/abortion-is-never-medically-necessary%3f_amp=true

#womens rights #politics #pro every life #i am the prolife generation #pro life #prolife #prolife feminist #feminist #feminism #defend life #end abortion #abortion is not healthcare

[drst]

How to build a world without abortion (US-centric post)

Anyone who is genuinely opposed to abortion should be supporting measures to reduce the number of abortions that occur. If you really believe abortion is a murder, you should be vocally demanding the government take whatever steps it can to reduce the number of abortions no matter what those steps are, as quickly as possible. But you don't. You never have. You convince yourselves you have some sort of moral high ground, but there are a multitude of concrete steps that could be taken right now that could slash the abortion rate, and you oppose them. Almost like you care more about using your moral position as a cudgel than actually reducing abortions.

Case in point: banning abortion? Does nothing. Abortions will still happen. They will just be much less safe.

You don't eliminate abortion by making it illegal. You eliminate abortion by making it unnecessary. Here's how:

Almost all abortions occur for one of two reasons: 1) A pregnancy goes wrong 2) The person didn't want to get pregnant

Banning abortion does nothing to address the root causes. Banning abortion does impact #1 though - it means more people will die because their pregnancy has gone wrong and the hospital and doctors are afraid to do anything for fear of criminal charges or other legal consequences. #Savita

So how do we address cause #1, the pregnancy has gone wrong?

A) Universal healthcare. Every person should have access to whatever medical care (including for their eyes and teeth) they need throughout their lifetime. No $$ limits. The earlier a pregnancy is under a doctor's care, the better. It costs about $10,000 to give birth in a hospital in the US. That's for a healthy birth with no complications. If you don't have insurance to provide you birth control, you sure as hell don't have insurance to cover 10 grand for giving birth. One of the most commonly cited reasons to have an abortion is the cost of pregnancy and child care. If you could cut 40% of abortions by passing a single piece of legislation that also would save billions of dollars and millions of lives, why wouldn't you?

B) Also universal day care and pre-school, as well as free college, and better programs for food and housing assistance, all of which contribute to the cost of raising a child.

C) Free college and a better system for funding medical school than saddling someone with debt. The student loan system is a disaster. We want the brightest and most dedicated people becoming doctors. Requiring them to take on a quarter of a million dollars in debt to do it is not working.

D) Funding. Fund medical schools. Fund training programs for doctors and nurses. Train them better than previous generations steeped in systemic inequities that produce things like the horrific black maternal mortality rate in the US. Build more hospitals. Stop the Catholic takeover of hospitals. Fund research into pregnancy and childbirth, invent new treatments and technologies to make it safer.

This is going to take time, of course. But there are absolutely no downsides to any of these proposals. Better quality of life, healthier population, healthier babies, more doctors and nurses, more hospitals, less debt. It can all be done.

How do we address cause #2, the pregnancy was unwanted?

A) To repeat myself, universal healthcare. Free and unrestricted access to all forms of contraception, including long-acting ones, for everyone. Make it easy for people to avoid an unplanned pregnancy. Make it taboo to have sex without knowing what contraceptives your partner(s) are using and that you are using. Never have sex with someone without knowing what the possible outcomes are.

Fun fact: I want the person who doesn't want kids to have access to whatever contraceptives and interventions they need to ensure they don't have kids AND I want the person who wants 10 kids to have access to whatever medical care they and their kids need forever. You know who opposes this? Republicans. The so-called "pro-life" people oppose getting that woman who wants "as many babies as God gives me" medical care. Which side is really pro-life here?

B) Mandatory health education, no exemptions allowed. Everyone should know exactly how a pregnancy occurs so they know how to prevent it if they want. If they don't want to prevent it so they can have a lot of babies, great, this knowledge helps them too! And no bs religious exemptions on this. Any time someone gets pregnant it should be because they chose to get pregnant, because they took actions they knew were going to lead to pregnancy.

C) Which leads to the other part: end rape, sexual assault, domestic violence, reproductive coercion, and all other forms of sexual violence. Yeah, obviously, this is a HUGE challenge, but we still have to do it. No one should ever get pregnant unless they want to get pregnant, and as long as people are forcing pregnancy on other people, abortion must be available. No rape victim should be punished for months for the fact that another person chose to rape them. No one should have to risk their life and health as a result of someone else's crime against them. Abusers force pregnancy and parenthood on victims to trap them, it's a method of control. That has to end too.

Imagine a world where there is no rape, no abuse. A world where every pregnancy was freely chosen, and every parent was consenting. Imagine what kind of damn utopia that would be, where every child was wanted and every parent was willing. That's the actual goal of the progressives in the US. Building that better world.

Not once in my entire 50 years on this earth have I heard a "pro-life" Republican support ANY OF THIS. Not one Republican has ever supported a single policy that would accomplish any of these things. Not once.

The Republicans' only ideas are "ban abortion" and "tell people not to have sex." Banning abortion accomplishes nothing, as I’ve said here, and never ever in the entire history of the human species has a cranky old man screaming "DON'T HAVE SEX!" actually stopped people from having sex. It would be nonsensical if it wasn't a deadly reality.

Roe is going to be overturned in a few weeks, and the fight to protect bodily autonomy moves into its next stage. Think about which side actually supports “life” and choose accordingly.

#abortion #politics

[iamanathemadevice]

Are you a fan of abortion? Who gives a fuck

I keep seeing this kind of thing

And, like, thanks for supporting the right to choose, but that right or otherwise does not rely on you being a ‘fan’ of abortion or any other medical procedure.

Do people saying this come out with “well, not a big fan of total knee replacements but hey, if it stops you limping” or “not a fan of lung removal, but okay, if you have cancer, that’s fine by me”?

Surgical termination of pregnancy - which is only one way to abort an unwanted foetus by the way - is not something you want to see over your lunch. But neither is a colonoscopy. Or a hip replacement. Its appeal or enjoyability or its fucking fandom is utterly irrelevant to whether it is the right thing for any pregnant person at that point in their lives. Human rights are not pay per view television. You don’t get to only subscribe to the ones you like the most, like wrestling or heavyweight boxing.

Even pro-choice democrats like to say Abortion should be safe, legal and rare. Why the fuck should its rarity be a virtue? There should be exactly as many abortions as are needed, which is one for every unwanted pregnancy. We’re not having them for the entertainment value, or so someone can be a ‘fan’ of a procedure they probably couldn’t describe accurately with a gun to their heads.

I had an abortion because I got pregnant from unprotected sex. I had unprotected sex because I was educated by nuns who gave me exactly one concentrated week of human reproductive biology education in 12 years in Catholic schools, and was raised by a mother who had 3 kids in four years because she had no idea how not to have that happen, and a father who would never allowed her not to be pregnant when she could be. My mother was the only one of her five sisters not to become pregnant before marriage, and both my grandmothers were pregnant by their eventual husbands before marriage. 

Thus, even with good school grades, including in biology, I had a garbled understanding of how not to get pregnant when I finally met a sexual partner who was fertile (none of my partners to that point wore condoms or even asked if I was on the pill, since obviously that was my problem, not theirs, and I had just been extremely lucky). Had I become pregnant in the state where I grew up and not in a country of which I wasn’t even a permanent resident at the time, I would have had to break the law to have an abortion, even if I could have found a provider and been able to afford it.

I was then and still am unfit to be a parent, and have only in the last four years been able to cope with the care and feeding of a cat. If you’d asked me back then if I was a ‘fan’ of abortion, my answer would have been “who cares, just give me the fucking thing”. It’s never about ‘preferring’ abortion. It’s about what someone desperately needs at that time in their life.

So next time you see someone talking about ‘not being a fan of abortion’, ask them if they’re a fan of having anal prolapses repaired. Or ulcers debrided. Or gangrenous toes being removed. 

I’m not a ‘fan’ of any of those things. Being a fan of a medical procedure is not only weird as fuck, but utterly irrelevant. Your disgust at my bodily functions, and how it functions, is just not remotely important at all.

Stop ‘not being a fan’. Start being actively, enthusiastically pro-abortion, pro-contraception, pro-education, pro-choice, and vote for politicians who are the same. No more mealy mouthed half meant platitudes. Next time someone trots out the ‘safe, legal, and rare’ line, ask them what the upper limit is, and what happens to women who are over the monthly allowed number of terminations. Make them tell you how many people exactly are allowed to choose what happens with their bodies, and that the rest of them are shit out of luck.

Fight back. Because this war on non-cis male bodies is for real, and someone you know will be one of the ones who will suffer as a result.

#abortion #abortion rights #reproductive rights

[warrioreowynofrohan]

I'm a long time follower and I wanted to clarify your position before a misunderstanding gets out of hand. I've seen some recent posts by lie-where-i-land that had your name in them? I'm not gonna lie, it kind of worried me what you said, about it being pressuring or whatever. I was hoping to get a fuller picture and maybe see if your intent had been misrepresented by him?

Okay, here’s the clarification of my position. The short version is that I am not your enemy, but you may not like what you hear. This whole discourse is new to me, and I will freely confess that much of what is said on it does not make much sense to me. Based on what I have read and heard, this is what I do think.

I think that there is going to have to be dialogue and mutual understanding on trans issues between people with widely differing viewpoints. There is real hostility, and trans people genuienly are suffering, but I do not think that everyone who views things differently from you hates you or wishes you ill.

I not think that trans women are a threat to cis women. I disagree with women who do think that. But I think it is at least understandable, and worthy of engagement rather than flat condemnation and ostracism, that some women are concerned that if access to women-only spaces (of varying purposes, from changerooms to shelters to women’s prisons) is based solely on the assertion “I am a woman”, it makes it easier for cis men to access those spaces, with some attendant risks. I can understand why women, especially those who have been harrassed or assaulted by men, would be uncomfortable with that; I can understand why they would lash out at people who call them cruel and hateful and evil for feeling so. I think that, with regard to abused women’s shelters, the presence of someone whose physical appearance is that of a man could be traumatic to some people there. And I think that we need dialogue and an attempt at understanding in order to try to find compromises that fit the needs of all our communities. Cis women escaping abusive relationships need to be able to be and feel safe. Trans women escaping abusive relationships need to be and feel safe. I don’t think those things are incompatible, but I do think they require seriously listening to each other and working together. You may think the concern is invalid, but I think it is unwise to decide that anyone who feels it, or even accepts it as understandable, is your inveterate enemy.

A key point: I am not asking you to engage in this discussion or engagement on your tumblr or other social media. It is perfectly fine for your blog to be a safe space where you don’t have to deal with of this, and you have the ability to block people you don’t want to interact with or see posts from.

I’ve also heard other things from trans activists that feel very unreasonable, such as saying that it’s bigoted not to date people who are a sex you’re not attracted to. If a person, male or female, isn’t into penises, then they have every right not to date or have sex with someone who has one, regardless of that person’s gender identity. (They do not - this shouldn’t need to be said, but given the prevalence of hate crimes, does - have the right to become violent because someone’s body is not what they expected.) Likewise, it doesn’t seem strange or bigoted to me that some marriages would break up when one partner transitions. This seems to me to be of a piece with accepting the concept of sexual orientation. This viewpoint, too, which to me seems trivially obvious, I have seen called cruel and hateful.

Just from my cursory sense of social media, I find the term ‘terf’ overused towards people who aren’t radical feminists by any definition. (For reference, if you intend to use it about me, know that the radical feminists wouldn’t have me; I’m pro-life [on everything: anti-death-penalty, anti-euthanasia outside very limited cicrcumstances, anti-abortion - and pro-adoption, and supportive of giving single mothers all the health care and financial support they need to raise their child; against wars of choice; anti-poverty], which they would comsider an instant disqualification. I’m also not a ‘tradfem’; I haven’t married, don’t currently plan to, never want children, and am extremely glad to live in a time when I can do work that I enjoy and am good at and live largely as I please. I am a fairly normal, mundane feminist who cares about issues like, but not limited to, wage inequality, employer discrimination, and workplace sexual harrassment, as I expect many of you do.)

So, as a consequence of the above, the phrase “this person is a terf” has become something I regard with a degree of skepticism unless I can read and assess the person’s statements for myself, in context; and I very likely have a different standard for what I consider condemnable (or worthy of ostracism) than you do. It feels less like a meaningful description, and more like a cudgel.

I didn’t like what lie-where-i-land had to say, not at all, nor their tactics of vaguing about venwe without providing any clear statements of anything objectionable (stating that sex exists is about as simple a statement as saying that humans breathe oxygen; I’m certainly not going to shun someone for that) and then resorting to guilt-by-association (I don’t, and I expect most people don’t, vet all the political opinions of either the OP or other rebloggers before I reblog something by them; and I have followed and do follow people who I have strong political disagreements with on issues that are very important to me). And I really don’t like them doing it about someone brave enough to consider risking their safety by protesting against a brutal dictatorship. It feels reductive; as though a person can have dozens of good principles and actions, but if they are wanting on one note, they must be condemned and shunned.

Moreover, and finally: I’m not going to rigidly limit my friends or the blogs I follow based on their political opinions. I unfollow a blog if my aggravation from the things I disagree with outweighs the enjoyment of the things I do agree with, but I can follow a person while disagreeing strongly with them on some things. I have red lines, but they are not likely to be the same as yours; and I don’t think that I am obligated or to banish anyone who crosses your lines from the public sphere, or that you have a right to demand that I do so. I’m not even comvinced it’s healthy to do so - people won’t generally become less radicalized as a result of everyone but their fellow radicals refusing to speak with them. If you want me to stop interacting with someone because they have been personally harrassing you by, for example, posting hateful things on your personal posts, that’s reasonable; but none of the accusations made came anything close to that.

There’s a lot else I could say, but I’ll leave things here; I have at least tried to speak delicately and sensitively, though frankly, on the matter, and have held back a lot of frustrations that could be more strongly voiced. Given what I’ve seen elsewhere on tumblr, I suspect that posting this will turn out have been the most unwise thing I have yet done on this site; but you asked for clarification, so here it is.

#politics

[sailormoonandme]

Usagi’s Evolution as a Healer Goddess

The other day I saw a post discussing the evolution of Usagi’s fuku and it occurred to me how Eternal Sailor Moon’s costume was her first Senshi uniform to ditch the tiara. 

That in turn led me to consider how that kind of makes Usagi weaker as it removes a very useful weapon for her. After all, if you include the movies, Usagi uses some variant of Moon Tiara Action in practically every season prior to Stars.

However, dwelling more upon it I realized how this tiny change was all too appropriate for Usagi’s character development.

Firstly, by supplanting the Tiara with her Moon planetary symbol, Eternal Sailor Moon more closely resembles both Queen Serenity, her own Princess Serenity form and her future self as Neo-Queen Serenity. 

Since all three are objectively more powerful than Usagi typically is as Sailor Moon I think the change emphasises how she has ‘levelled up’ in her Eternal form. When combined with the angel wings, Eternal Sailor Moon shifts Usagi visually closer to her future self as NQS, which in the anime is implied to be her most powerful incarnation.* It is almost as though the visual was communicating that the Divine Miracle Magic that she’d previously drawn upon as Princess Serenity in Classic-SuperS had now become ingrained in her standard Senshi form and thus was more accessible to her. 

It was in thinking of her previous efforts as Princess Serenity that I inevitably recalled her duel with Metalia/Beryl in episode 46 and realized that Eternal Sailor Moon was the first time since Classic that Usagi’s default attack was a healing  technique not a destructive one. 

Moon Healing Escalation was Usagi’s first healing technique but until Starlight Honeymoon Therapy Kiss (and it’s later upgrade, Silver Moon Crystal Power Kiss) it was also her only healing technique. 

Between regaining healing techniques and ditching her tiara/other destructive attacks/weapons, I think this represents her subtle growth in both her power and status. After all, it is a sad fact of life that it is easier to destroy something rather than fix it, thereby making the latter far more impressive.**

This skewing towards healing power rather than destructive power is also (arguably) thematically appropriate given the nature of Sailor Moon as a female power fantasy as (rightly or wrongly) the act of healing is typically coded as feminine. 

We can even take this further by examining things from the ‘opposite direction’ as it were.

Consider that in the climactic final episodes of Sailor Stars, Eternal Sailor Moon’s healing technique actually fails her when used against Galaxia. In later episodes, upon adopting her Princess Serenity form (complete with larger and more obviously angelic wings), she uses a sword to duel Galaxia.

Obviously a sword is, at least predominantly, an offensive weapon and can therefore be viewed as symbolic of aggression; let’s leave any Freudian or gendered interpretations alone for today. Her use of the sword is highly uncharacteristic (in the anime). Even her explicitly offencive weapons (like the Cutie Moon Rod or Spiral Moon Heart Rod) weren’t as clearly aggressive nor obviously violent. Desperate times calling for desperate measures? Perhaps, but we might also speculate it was her subconsciously reacting to grief. Not only can grief make you act in ways you wouldn’t normally, but a sword after all was a weapon wielded by her lover in his Prince Endymion incarnation. Her lover whom Usagi had just learned Galaxia had murdered. In other words, amidst her grief she reacts by going too hard in the other direction after healing her enemy proves ineffective.

However, when all is said and done the sword fails her.*** Ultimately is simply escalates the conflict by prompting Galaxia to become Chaos Galaxia and thereby make Usagi’s chances of victory all the slimmer. If we wished to stretch things, you could perhaps say that this is a commentary about how war and violence ultimately begets yet more war and violence.

Even if that is an over extrapolation though, it still served to emphasis the point that a sword is not befitting of Usagi, that she was doomed to lose if she continued to battle with destroying her enemy as the end goal.

In fact, her road to real victory begins when she not doesn’t attack Galaxia but makes it easier for herself to be attacked. In the end, Usagi doesn’t confront her most powerful enemy as the God-Queen of the future, the demi-goddess Princess of the distant past, the sailor-suited soldier of love and justice in the present, nor even a humble school girl.

She does it by literally stripping herself of all those things, of stripping herself of everything in fact.

Her weapons? Gone.

Her other items, like her Tiare? Gone.

Her comrades? Gone, and they’d be powerless against Galaxia anyway.

And finally, even her clothes? Gone!

Beyond the Silver Crystal (an outward visualization of her heart/soul) and the angel wings (symbolic of her role as a saviour) she is completely (but tastefully) naked.

Usagi visually and quite literally is more vulnerable  than she’s ever been, even more so than on her first night as Sailor Moon.

And yet this is Usagi at her actual most powerful.

It is her distilled to her absolute essence as a person, all other trappings removed. She’d just one person showing another they will categorically not harm them, that they bear them no malice and they have nothing to hide. That openness and compassion is what ultimately enables her to connect to the good within Galaxia and pull her away from the darkness that had corrupted her.

Usagi in this moment completely fulfilled her character arc.

·      In the Dark Kingdom arc Usagi destroys (or seals away depending upon your POV) Beryl/Metalia.

·      In the Hell Tree arc, Usagi resolves the over all plot via a healing technique (although it is functionally similar to a destructive attack). However, that only happens because the Hell Tree both instructs Usagi to do that and because it lets her. It is the equivalent of a sickly doctor instructing a nurse on what to do to make them better. The nurse might have the power but their agency as a healer is limited.

·      In the Black Moon arc, Usagi, with help, destroys Wiseman/Death Phantom. 

·      In the Death Busters arc, Usagi does save Hotaru and ‘purify’ her. However, like the Hell Tree, that was something Hotaru wanted. Additionally, her purification functioned as a way to heal the body of someone sick and who wanted to sacrifice themselves, not someone actually evil. The evil in question was Pharaoh 90 and it is presumed that Usagi destroyed him (although it might’ve been Hotaru or the pair of them together). 

·      Forgive me for skipping the Dead Moon Circus arc as Chibiusa is the real protagonist there, and Usagi’s role is chiefly as a rescuer. It therefore doesn’t really apply, although the Nehelenia mini-arc from Stars is a different story. There, Usagi was a healer again, but she did it with the help of her loved ones and with the aid of her Tiare device. Nevertheless, we can see by this point Usagi’s capacity as a healer heroine had been gradually growing until we get to the battle with Galaxia.

By the end of series, Usagi has successfully healed Galaxia and it is neither with the aid of her comrades, nor with the power of a weapon or device, nor with any instructions from her ‘patient’ or any other third party.

Additionally, Galaxia (unlike Hotaru) wasn’t someone’s who was saved from a noble self-sacrifice or had a physical ailment that needs to be addressed. In Galaxia’s case, her very soul had lost it’s way and become corrupted. She had lost who she was supposed to be and her purpose in life had been perverted.****

When combined with how powerful Galaxia always was, how Chaos and the Star Seeds empowered her further, Usagi’s victory here cannot be understated.

Her ‘patient’ was more powerful than all her other adversaries, was in need of more healing than her other ‘patients’ and was more resistant to being healed. Not to mention, since she’d directly murdered her beloved friends (and indirectly aborted her future daughter), Usagi would’ve been forgiven for not  even trying to salvage Galaxia 

And yet, with no weapons, no backup and just the power of her heart and soul basically, Usagi succeeded. 

After Stars the idea that Usagi could heal the entire planet after a global catastrophe and reshape it into a fairy tale crystalline utopia was all too believable.

What’s healing one planet when her ability to empathise had already healed a whole galaxy?

Who needs a tiara to reduce evil to dust when you can simply convince evil to be good?

*This is arguably symbolized by baby Hotaru’s vision of NQS transforming into Eternal Sailor Moon in episode 1 of Stars.

In fact, we might argue that a low-key subplot running through all of Stars (both the Nehelenia and Galaxia portions of it) is gradually transitioning Usagi closer to the person she is destined to become as Neo-Queen Serenity, hence why the first episode features the most explicit reference to her fate as Queen since R. 

**Personally I am an atheist, but nevertheless I and others like me can grasp why  deities in most major religions through history weren’t simply capable of mass scale destruction, but also of essentially manipulating reality to create  things too.

By that same token, it’s little surprise that perhaps the widest spread religious figure in history was Jesus Christ who rarely (if ever) engaged in aggression or destructive acts, predominantly employing divine healing powers.

I suspect the attraction of such figures to human beings lies in the fact that on some level we know that, given the right time and resources, we mere mortals would be capable of destroying anything. Given time it’s all but certain we will develop the technology to even destroy planetary bodies. On the flipside, I think we also intuitively grasp that  reversing  such damage, of reattaching a limb, of stanching bleeding, etc, is far more difficult if not impossible. Hence we attributed the ability to do such things to larger than life Divine Entities.

*** Now that I think of it, it’s also poignant that Usagi tries and fails to defeat Galaxia with a sword when we take Sailor Uranus into consideration. 

Uranus is of course associated with her weapon, the Space Sword and, like Usagi, tried and failed to use such a weapon against Galaxia.

Giving Uranus a sword is symbolically appropriate given her role as the leader of the more aggressive branch of the Sailor Team. Having her fail against Galaxia and Usagi consequently fail by in some way ‘mimicking her tactics’ is equally symbolically appropriate. Not only because of their ideological conflict in Sailor Moon S but also their tensions in Sailor Stars itself. In both situations Usagi’s more open, less aggressive, ideology was ultimately proven correct. 

Thus in using a sword against Galaxia it represented how Usagi was always doomed to fail by taking the aggressive/destructive route and how she was arguably not being true to herself in that moment. 

****It’s not to dissimilar to Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker now that I think about it. 

#My Essays #Sailor Moon #bishojo senshi sailor moon #pretty guardian sailor moon #pretty soldier sailor moon #usagi tsukino #tsukino usagi #princess serenity #neo queen serenity #Neo-Queen Serenity #eternal sailor moon #Sailor Galaxia #Galaxia #queen nehelenia #nehelenia #Sailor Uranus #tenou haruka #HARUKA TENOH #Queen Beryl #Dark Kingdom #Hell Tree #Wiseman #Death Phantom #pharaoh 90 #Sailor Saturn #hotaru tomoe #professor tomoe #Queen Serenity #Darth Vader #Anakin Skywalker

[ceasarslegion]

Whenever I hear the moral panic about liberal agendas or whatever the fuck I think about my childhood

For all the faults my family has and the issues i have with my parents, I will say that I never grew up in an environment that limited my access to the outside world. What I mean by that is that I was raised sex positive, alcohol was never a taboo but just something to exercise some care around, weed and psychedelics weren't even considered drugs, none of my media was limited (save for appropriate age restrictions when needed) or considered corruptive, and even the conversations around hard drugs were pretty open. In summation, I was told "what someone does to take the edge off is their business. As long as they don't hurt anyone because of it, you can't make moral judgements on the things they do that only affect them."

I didn't realize how rare that was until i started growing a bit more. To me, that was just the way of the world because I wasn't taught any different. No one hid what sex was from me, or kept me from listening to that Satanic Heavy MetalTM, and instead of just being told something was wrong and bad, I was told the whole truth about things like drugs and alcohol and allowed to make my own informed decisions on them when I got older. Hell, just yesterday while we were looking for a new fridge, my dad joked about how one of the compartments would be perfect for storing my weed and then called me a dopehead.

And then I grew a bit more comprehensive. In a pretty small and very homogenized conservative town. In the most conservative province in Canada. I knew what religion and god was being from a Jewish family, but I was told that was my decision to make and that no one else could tell me what I believed in, and no one's beliefs were any better or worse as long as they weren't hurting anyone. Many of my teachers and classmates disagreed on that, and everything else I was taught.

Suddenly I had teachers and peers telling me that if I didn't believe in jesus that I was going to hell. Suddenly I had other kids' parents yelling at me and my parents because their kid told me that babies came from storks and I told them the truth. Suddenly the other kids weren't allowed to play with me because I was "corrupting" them. So I hung out with the very few and far between other kids from progressive families, but even then, I had an elementary school teacher send us to detention for trading pokemon cards at recess because she claimed that they were demons we were letting possess us.

Thing is, if it was just other kids parroting their parents' shitty beliefs, I could write that off and forgive pretty easily now, at 22, having matured quite a bit since my primary school days (I'd hope). But the fact that TEACHERS, adults who knew they had a certain amount of authority over the children in their care, abused that authority by indirectly punishing the kids that didn't conform to what they wanted precisely because they didn't makes this shit more than just a question of kids being their parents' mouthpieces.

I remember my days of early sex ed. I'm sure the conservative hell province that is Alberta would be happy to toss the very idea of it out of schools altogether, but it's federally mandated, so they had to teach it. But the federal government doesn't dictate what's in those curriculums, that's up to the province. Which goes about as well as you'd think in a province like that. My parents pulled me out of it after I came home parroting pro-life bullshit because they told us in class that the clitoris doesn't exist, and that abortions work by poisoning a full-term baby to death. If that makes me the first Albertan kid to get pulled out of sex ed because it was too conservative, I don't want that title.

This is all an extremely long winded way for me to say that if you honest-to-god believe that there's any such thing as a "liberal agenda" then you've never been a kid from a liberal family in a conservative town. However, as I've pointed out here, there is definitely, undisputedly a conservative agenda. And if you think about it for more than 2 seconds, you'll notice that all these things they tried to impose upon me were based on lies. My parents fully researched everything they taught me and didn't insult my intelligence by hiding things from me if I asked. I remember asking them things and they'd sometimes say "I don't know, let me find out for you" but that's what you're supposed to do, not just repeat the conservative propaganda that's been fed to you all your life. But every single thing that others took issue with was because of lies and puritan pearl-clutching. They had to build this "liberal agenda" strawman to justify their attacking a family who raised their kid on factual evidence instead of bullshit. And honestly, I think the self-projection hit them a little hard ie attacking a child for not hurting anyone in a way they didn't like and then claiming I was "shoving my liberal rearing down their throats."

#long post but needs to be said i think #shut up dames

[therealvinelle]

Submasterpost: Harry Potter

Last updated: 24th of December

Thoughts on the books:

Why I don't think they're good

Thoughts on JKR and Meyer's strengths and weaknesses

Were there significant changes in the movies?

How would the Muffin have ended them?

Tom Riddle:

“Burn, baby, burn!” - Tom Riddle, ca. 1970

Tom Riddle: A Reasonable Man Living In an Unreasonable World

Now What’s a Dark Lord Like You Doing With a Crippling Depression Like That?

Lord Voldemort Is The Dread Pirate Roberts

Lord Voldemort Also Flinches Upon Hearing His Name, But For a Different Reason

Tom Riddle Was Not Illiterate

Tom Riddle and Muggles

Why One Should Always Picture Tom Riddle With a Rose Between His Teeth and Poetry Under His Arm

Tom Riddle/Hermione Granger, Misery style

How truthful were the memories Dumbledore showed Harry of Tom Riddle?

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ‘T’ IN VOLDEMORT?

Because bi not

Why did he go after Harry and not Neville?

What if Tom created Twilight vampires?

What if Tom Riddle was a god?

On Tom Riddle being able to create a horcrux, or: on intelligence and horcruxes

What if Tom Riddle waited for Dumbledore to die before doing anything?

On fanon Tom

Were there anybody he cared about?

Tom’s bogart and patronus

Would Tom enjoy immortality?

Is he more Walter White or Jimmy McGill?

What if the horcrux connection was a two-way mirror, allowing Tom insight into what Harry was up to?

Tom is reborn, and must redo his life. What does he do?

Tom Riddle is adopted by Muggles. Would this change things?

Albus Dumbledore:

He’s misogynistic

How did his time period influence him?

Great with kids

Other characters who don’t get their own category:

Thoughts on Cedric Diggory, Cho Chang, Marietta Edgecombe, and Colin Creevy

Could the cast of Harry Potter catch Kira? What about Tom Riddle and Lily Evans in a buddy cop AU?

Who should have killed Bellatrix?

Madeye Moody lives in a world with Twilight vampires (or thinks he does). How does he cope?

What if Petunia wasn't jealous of Lily?

What if Sirius didn't die?

Worldbuilding:

A History of Magic: Why It’s All Made Up (Featuring Helena Ravenclaw, a Con Artist)

Knights of Walpurhisnicht

Why do they marry so early?

Do wizards understand science?

On turning Muggleborns against Muggles

A fabricated, yet plausible history of magic

Is there an upper limit to magic? What even is it?

Is the DADA position cursed?

Why did no one interfere when Harry was being abused?

The movies:

Anon wants a fancast but doesn’t get one

Ships:

Albus Dumbledore/Tom Riddle:

Could it happen? (NOPE)

The Muffin is forced to write a fic. How would she go about it?

Albus Dumbledore & Tom Riddle:

No, Dumbledore was never going to like Tom

Harry/Peter:

Could it happen? (JESUS CHRIST WHY DO YOU WANT THIS ANON)

Harry/Sirius:

Y/N? (N!!!!!)

Harry/Tom:

What if Harry and Tom Riddle were soulmates?

Hermione/Dumbledore:

Could it happen?

Hermione/Ron:

Hermione/Ron: Boring Boat

What do they each look for in a partner?

Hermione & Umbridge

How was their relationship affected by the end of Order of the Phoenix?

Lily & Petunia:

Explaining their relationship

Movies:

Thoughts on the Movies

Who would I cast as Voldemort?

Other:

What the Hell Is the Cused Child

Art and Meta Combo for How the Muffin Visualizes Harry, Hermione, Ron, Draco, and Tom Riddle

Thoughts on the Death Eater McGonagall theory

What would a CW adaption of Harry Potter look like?

Thoughts on the epilogue

On accents 

One of the main HP characters has a squib child. What shenanigans ensue?

Visualizing Tom Riddle, Cedric Diggory, and Sirius Black

Might the Potters have survived if Dumbledore hadn't taken the invisibility cloak?

What if the prophecy was misinterpreted, and someone other than Harry was the chosen one?

What happens to the souls of those kissed by dementors?

Hermione, Ron, and Harry fight. Who wins?

Harry as the son of Rodolphus and Bellatrix, or: Bellatrix gets an abortion

Crossovers:

Tom Riddle and Light Yagami attend Hogwarts at the same time. Shenanigans?

What does Dumbledore make of the budding Tom-Light friendship?

Darth Vader is transported into the Harry Potter universe

Harry is reborn as Anakin Skywalker

#masterpost #harry potter #long post

[obeymebutnotlikethat]

The woman on the Supreme Court, Amy, suggests forced pregnancy is fine because that's why we have adoption according to the Daily Beast.

Let me clarify one thing: forced pregnancy is different from forced birth based on one part. Forced pregnancy is a person getting pregnant without their consent or in terms "without sought or desire." Forced birth is forcing a person to carry the baby to term and give birth. Both can intersect with each other.

Second; that is not a reason why we have adoption. That is a messed up reason saying "I can make you have a baby because you can just give it away like its a second hand toy."

I've seen in circles that people think putting babies up for adoption is wrong and those people should be forced to care for the child or not have gotten pregnant at all. 1: if the baby isn't put up for adoption it may end up in the trash, abandoned, neglected, or dead. 2. This is high to ask when many Americans are not given access to contraceptives or even taught what they are. Some do not know what can come out of sex or about safe sex because not everyone is taught the same sexual education.

3. Adoption is for people who want to be pregnant but cannot care for the child or want it. This is an option when the person does not want or is unable to have an abortion.More adoption laws will not make a large impact when giving birth puts more people in financial debt than an abortion does.

You know the meme : if my mom aborted me I wouldn't have even known. I want that part ebbed in the mind not for any sick reason. The debate has been around fetus and children already born. Children who have already been born are not things to just discard. There are so many kids in the system already and just having adoption be the go to is not ok.

I just hate that these systems already with problems are not being fixed but people keep using them as a fall back plan. As if already born children have the same process as a fetus. As if they won't feel anything.

So:

A list of side-effects to forced pregnancy and forced birth

Baby in trash

Attempted abortion

Praying for miscarriage

Home abortions

Attempted suicide

Suicide

Overdose

Domestic violence strong hold. Limiting available access to abortion, planned parenthood that helps in reproductive rights, and proper education can trap someone is a domestic violence situation or worsen it. More likely than not the baby will be used over the person and the baby is kept/brought up into a domestic violence situation.

Trauma

PTSD

Financial debt looking at a few grands in hospital fees.

P.S

They had a clause this year about a woman would have no say in her reproductive health. Her rapist would have a say if she could have an abortion but not her. When you are saying a rapist has more rights to his victims body than the victim then you are on the wrong side. Its also the laws written out this year to allow your rapist custody too.

I mean one state just closed their "if you got drunk on your on you cannot take your rapist to court" law.

There was a senator in 2017 or 2018 that said he does not care about IVF fetuses because they aren't inside a woman. In 2011-2012 the Republican handbook looked to discard IVF in whole but make a person have their rapist baby.

Greg Abbott vetoed a bill that would teach about domestic violence, child abuse, and dating violence to children and teens( that could prevent unwanted pregnancies).

Stop writing legislation that hurts us and punishes us but congratulates and lets our rapists get more control over us.

Edit: Not only women can get pregnant. Its good to be inclusive when discussing this topic as it affects so many people.

#abortion #tw forced pregnancy #adoption #tw suicide #america #supreme court #roe vs. wade #reproductive health #rights #social justice #tw rape

[uncloseted]

there's a part of me that still thinksa bortion is murder. i act like i support it to fit in but deep down i dont. please just listen. i think forcing someone to go through a pregnagncy they don't want is inhuman but it also feels inhuman to kill a baby and i dont like thsi idea that if youre 4 weeks pregnant and you want it its a baby but if youre 4 week pregnant and dont want it then its just a clump of cells thats just not how scence works. so theres this woman who was forced to get an .

Anonymous asked:

abortion and she was 6 months pregnant and apparently th baby waws born alive but it died shortly after from ashpyxia and i just dont know what to think. i know forcing smeone to get an abortion is just as bad as forcing them to give birth and that theres no such thing as a six month abortion and at least wher e i live abortions are only available until week 14 but like wwhat if someone is 15 or 16 weeks or 7 months, do they not have a choice anymore? please dont think im a bigot im not im so

Anonymous asked:

sorry i just dont want to be brainwashed by ANYONE, pro life or pro choice and im just so easily influenceable i just want to support whats right you know

No worries at all! I don't think you're a bigot and I'm glad that you want to engage with this issue critically. I'm happy to give you the facts as they stand and offer you my perspective on the issue. Apologies in advance that this is a bit long, but please try to stick with me until the end! All of this is important in understanding the different sides of this discussion.

There are a few main categories I want to talk about in this answer: legal, science, politics, and culture. For now, I'm going to avoid delving into any religious or metaphysical questions about what is and isn't considered "a person", since while those conversations are interesting, I don't think they're particularly useful in the context of discussions about abortion. As Harry Blackmun wrote in the court opinion for Roe v. Wade, "we need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate."

Legality

Starting with legal issues, there are a few points I think it's important to make in order to get a sense of how we relate to abortion. Abortions are legal in 98% of countries. 34% of countries, including the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand most European countries, and China, allow abortions on the basis of a the pregnant person's request, without needing to prove that there is risk to life, risk to health, risk to the fetus, economic or social reasons that abortion is a necessity, or extenuating circumstances (such as the pregnancy being a product of rape or incest). The vast majority (93%) of countries with highly restrictive abortion laws, such as outlawing abortion except in cases where the pregnant person is endangered, are in developing regions. There are five countries that completely outlaw abortion. These are: Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Malta, Nicaragua, and the Vatican City, all countries where the Catholic church has significant influence.

Of the countries that do allow abortion, there is always a limit on how far into a pregnancy a person can be when they choose to terminate. Beyond that limit, the person doesn't have a choice anymore, and must carry the pregnancy to term (except in extenuating circumstances). The most common limit is 12 weeks (3 months), although some countries allow abortion up to the point of "viability", where the fetus can live outside the mother's womb with artificial aid. Typically, the point of viability is around 24 weeks (6 months). In the US, 87% of abortions are performed before 12 weeks, and 92.2% were performed at 13 weeks or fewer. For reference, pregnancies are typically around 40 weeks long.

Forced abortion is illegal in almost every country, including the US and the UK, and it is considered an act of violence against women. It is just as bad as forcing someone to give birth, which is why all countries do their best to prevent it from happening. While forced abortions can and do happen, particularly to victims of sex trafficking, I think the solution to this issue is to put policies into place that protect vulnerable women, instead of trying to ban abortion entirely.

Science

So, most countries allow abortions up to 12 weeks. What does that actually look like in terms of the fetus? Here's a timeline of fetal stages of growth:

Weeks 1-4: at this stage, the "baby" is actually an embryo. It starts out as just a fertilized egg. The amniotic sac forms around it, and the placenta develops. The eyes, mouth, lower jaw, and throat are in very early development. Blood cells are taking shape. By the end of week 4, the embryo is smaller than a grain of rice. It is very literally "just a clump of cells" at this point.

Weeks 5-9: the "baby" is still an embryo. Its facial features begin to develop, folds of skin that will eventually become ears grow, tiny buds that will eventually grow into arms and legs form, the neural tube, digestive tract, and sensory organs all begin to develop. Bone starts to replace cartilage. At about 6 weeks, a heart beat can be detected. After week 8, the baby is considered a fetus instead of an embryo, at which point the fetus is about one inch long.

Weeks 9-12: the fetus' arms, hands, fingers, feet, and toes are fully formed. It may be able to open and close its fists and mouth. Ears are formed, and its reproductive organs begin to develop. By the end of week 12, the fetus has all of their organs and limbs, and their circulatory and urinary systems are working, but everything needs to continue to develop in order to become functional. At the end of week 12, the fetus is about 4 inches long.

It is important to know that the miscarriage rate is highest in the first trimester (before week 12). Among women who know they're pregnant (typically further along than 6 or 7 weeks), 10-20% will miscarry. 30%-50% of all fertilized eggs miscarry.

Other important developmental markers include:

During month 4 (weeks 16-20), you can see the sex of the fetus.

During month 5 (weeks 20-24), the fetus starts moving around.

Between week 22 and week 24, brain waves appear in the cerebral cortex.

At week 24, the fetus may be able to survive if it is born prematurely, provided it has intensive care.

Somewhere between week 26 and week 30, the fetus may be able to feel pain, although we don't know that for sure.

A fetus is not capable of thinking, communicating, reasoning, self-motivation, feeling emotions, or consciousness. They don't have a concept of the self, and they don't know that they exist. They are essentially sedated for the entirety of the pregnancy. Since we use "brain death" as the primary criteria for death, it makes sense to me that we might consider "brain life" (the point where a fetus exhibits brain activity) as the point at which a fetus becomes a person.

While some people will refer to an embryo as a "baby" from the time they discover they're pregnant, scientifically, it is a clump of cells, whether that clump is allowed to continue to grow or not. It's not something we would recognize as a baby, or be able to interact with as if it were a baby. An embryo is a precursor to a baby, kind of like how a seed is a precursor to a plant.

Some other arguments

I want to quickly touch on some other arguments for abortion rights that people make. I'm not going to delve deeply into them, but it didn't feel right to leave them out entirely. These are arguments that don't depend on whether or not a fetus can be considered a person.

Bodily Rights

There are many situations in which we prioritize individual bodily rights over the right of someone else to live. For example, we don't force people to donate organs to people who are dying, even though a donated organ would save their life. Advocates for abortion rights argue that those same bodily rights should be extended to a pregnant person.

Deprivation

This argument usually looks something like, "but what if that fetus was going to cure cancer when it grew up!" Basically, it's saying that abortion is morally wrong because it deprives the fetus (and the world) of a valuable future. To me, this completely ignores the deprivation that already exists by forcing a person to carry and birth a baby they don't want, and potentially the deprivation that comes with raising that child. People who make this argument never seem to ask, "what if the pregnant person was going to cure cancer?"

Slippery Slope

Some people argue that normalizing and legalizing abortion may lead to people also accepting euthanasia. I am unconvinced by this for two reasons. 1. Slippery slope is a logical fallacy and 2. I absolutely do think we should legalize euthanasia for certain situations.

Religion

I don't want to dig too far into this one, but what I will say is that the US is a country that (at least nominally) has a separation of church and state, and the religious beliefs that other people hold should not infringe on a person's rights to make choices about their own life.

History and Politics

The practice of abortion itself is incredibly old. The Sanskrit epic Ramayana, which dates to the 7th century BCE, describes abortion being practiced by surgeons and barbers. In the Assyrian Code of Assura, circa 1075 BCE, a woman is allowed to procure an abortion except when it's against her husband's wishes. The first recorded evidence of induced abortion is from the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus in 1550 BCE. Japanese documents show records of induced abortion from as early as the 12th century, and it became more prevalent during the Edo period. It is considered to be unlikely that abortion was punished in Ancient Greece or ancient Rome. All major Jewish religious movements allow abortion in order to save the life or health of a pregnant woman, and often support abortion for other reasons as well. Christianity has a more complicated relationship to abortion, for reasons that I'll go into in a bit, but for now let's just note that there very much were ancient Christians who believed abortion was morally permissible at least some of the time. Before the 19th century CE, first-trimester abortion was widely practiced and was legal under common law throughout the English speaking world, including the US and UK.

The reason I bring all of this up is because the political debate over abortion isn't really that old, and the debate tends not to actually be about the morality of abortion as an act so much as it is a proxy for other issues. The first backlash against abortion in the English Speaking world was in the 19th century, and was a direct reaction to the women's rights movement, which was starting during that time. In the US, anti-abortion laws began to appear as early as the 1820s, but picked up in earnest by the late 1860s. These laws were introduced for many reasons, including the fact that abortions were being provided by untrained people who were not members of medical societies and concerns about the safety of abortifacients. By 1900, abortion was a felony in every US state, but they continued to become increasingly available. By the 1930s, licensed physicians performed an estimated 800,000 abortions a year.

Jumping forward a little bit, let's talk about the history of abortion in the US just before Roe v. Wade. It's estimated that in the 50s and 60s, between 200,000 to 1.2 million abortions were being performed per year, even though they were illegal. Throughout that same time, the second wave feminist movement was growing, and was increasingly advocating for birth control and liberalized abortion laws. As a reaction to second wave feminism, a number of anti-abortion organizations, primarily led by Catholic institutions, cropped up to mobilize against the legalization of abortion. It should be noted that, at the time, abortion was not an issue for evangelical Christian groups. In the 1960s, 17 states legalized abortion for a variety of different circumstances. Then in 1973, Roe v. Wade happens, ruling that a pregnant woman has the right to choose to have an abortion without excessive government restriction. The ruling was 7-2 in favor of legalizing abortion. Even after Roe v. Wade, Christian Evangelicals were neutral to positive on the ruling. It's only after 1980 that Evangelical Christians started to organize around abortion as a political issue and joined the Catholics to form what we now think of as the Christian Right. There's a lot to say about that and why that switch happened, but for the sake of brevity, just know that the evangelical backlash against legalized abortion in the US started not as a moral crusade, but as a way of convincing people to vote for Ronald Regan instead of Jimmy Carter (who wanted to de-segregate schools). No political debate happens in a vacuum, and it's important to understand what other factors might have been at play when looking at where these debates come from and how the sides formed.

Culture

Lastly, let's talk a little bit about the cultural impacts of banning or legalizing abortion. The right to have or not have a child is necessary in order for women to achieve equality with men. Countries with high gender equality, such as Iceland, Finland, Norway, New Zealand, and Sweden, also have easily accessible abortion options. Criminalization of abortion disproportionately impacts poor women and women of color, and does nothing to address the systemic issues that may cause them to require abortions in the first place.

Researchers from the WHO and University of Massachusetts found that banning abortion is an inefficient way to reduce abortion rates; in countries where abortions were restricted, the number of unintended pregnancies actually increased, and the proportion of unintended pregnancies ending in abortion also increased. When abortion is banned, women aren't not having abortions; they're having illegal abortions that are done unsafely.

There is also some evidence to suggest that legalized abortion actually decreases crime rates. 20 years after the legalization of abortion in the US, there was an unprecedented nationwide decline of the crime rate (including murders, incidentally). The drop in crime is thought by some to be a result of the fact that individuals who had a higher statistical probability of committing crimes (people who grew up as unwanted children in poverty) were not being born.

Which brings me to my next point- the majority of people who are "pro-life" (at least in the US) aren't really pro-life. They're pro-birth. If they were truly pro-life, they would be interested in making sure that all of those babies had their needs met after they're born. They would be interested in making sure those babies can lead long, healthy, safe, and productive lives. They would be for universal healthcare, expanded social safety nets, parental leave from jobs, universal basic income, raising the minimum wage, mandated vacation time, increasing funding for public schools, decriminalizing drugs, abolishing prisons or at least reforming the police. They would be against the death penalty (ironically, some of them are actually for the death penalty for women who have had abortions), and for increased access to birth control, comprehensive sex-ed in schools, increased gun legislation, against war and nuclear weapons, for enforced mask wearing to prevent people from needlessly dying from a global pandemic... but those issues don't factor into their "pro-life" stance. They're for "the baby gets born and then has to pull itself up by its bootstraps like the rest of us."

Closing Thoughts

Look. I'm not super jazzed about abortions. I understand how they can feel like an ethical issue. I think we should do what we can to reduce the number of abortions that are performed- teaching comprehensive sex-ed in schools, making birth control and emergency contraceptive options widely accessible, letting men know that reversible vasectomies are an option. I think we should make abortion easier to access, so those who do need it can make the decision early in the pregnancy. But I also think that it's a very personal decision, one that's irreversibly life altering, and the person who's going to experience the life altering event should be the one who decides what happens. 65 year old conservative, Christian white men who will never be pregnant (and frequently don't really know how the female body works) shouldn't get to make that decision for them. As someone for whom pregnancy would be life threatening, I want to know that I have options should that situation present itself someday.

[humanransome-note]

Having a uterus is scary again.

I know it’s a draft opinion and it hasn’t gone through

But it’s a 98 page draft and the first major leak from the court ever. The Supreme Court does not leak, not during Bush v Gore, not during the Obamacare deliberations, never.

So whoever leaked it thought one of two things:

This is an egregious and drastic change of a fifty year precedent, and I cannot, in good faith, let this be discussed by only a handful of people, several of which have openly said they would like to overturn Roe v Wade

This is can be a rallying cry for those who are against abortion, and give them a light at the end of the tunnel

Now the second one is much less likely, but it’s something I would consider if I was going to let something out.

I’m on birth control, and I bet that’s one of the things they are going to go after next.

Or LGBTQ+ rights like

Marriage

Discrimination protections

Health services

Gender affirming care

We may see the return of sodomy/obscenity laws

The basis for Roe is the constitutional right to privacy, and the expectation of privacy in regards to medical information and treatment.

The arguments against it are based in “right to life” arguments.

But I cannot, truly cannot, see those arguments as good faith.

Because when you ask follow up questions like things regarding quality of life, they don’t care.

You can’t afford a kid? You’re in a situation that isn’t good for a kid? You know you can’t meet that child’s emotional needs?

To bad, figure it out.

Foster care?

I’d believe it if they actually put in time and focused on policies that improve the foster care system. But since all of that falls under social safety nets they’d rather butcher the funding.

When I was in 4th grade(? I don’t remember exactly, I just remember crying as he was on the phone) my dad drove me to child services to make a complaint against my mother because I hadn’t taken a proper shower in 4 days (I cleaned up in the sink, I remember being exhausted and figuring I’d do it properly the next day)

He actually walked me into the building, into the lobby, and up to a receptionist, and I had no idea where we were or why we were there until he talked to the receptionist asking to make a claim of child abuse against my mother.

They told him to grab a pamphlet and make a call.

It was crowded, it was loud, it was gloomy, the floor may have been sticky. Most of that part of the memory is just shapes and feelings.

Sometimes I think about DCF or hear about it and I get sick, there was a good month where I just kept waiting for someone to take me away from my mom, and even in my twenties I still sometimes get anxious about it.

But I know that’s just because of what happened to me specifically. Logically I know they have much more important things to worry about, that statistically I had nothing to worry about because my father is black and my mother is white, and my mother occasionally worked with DCF too.

And logically I know these people are overworked and underpaid stretched beyond their limits to meet a quota because of a lack of funding.

If they were properly funded and staffed I may not have had to worry about anything because someone would have probably called my mom, she didn’t know that he called DCF on her until I mentioned it in like high school or something.

That’s just going to get worse.

And people who don’t want kids, what about them? There are people who have them in the hopes that they’ll end up loving them and find out it doesn’t always happen like that. That not everyone immediately adores the thing growing inside them when they see a positive sign on a test stick.

That’s a cruelty I don’t understand. (All of these things are cruelties mind but people don’t talk about the last one as much)

Did my father call DCF because I didn’t shower for four days? Yes. Does that mean he loves me? No.

He just likes the appearance of being a good father, he wasn’t emotionally invested in me or my life, not beyond appeasing his own mother.

When I was seventeen he tried to report me as missing because I didn’t answer the phone, because it was that or admit to his family that we hadn’t spoken in two years.

The emotional detachment/disinterest, a kid may or may not notice it, but if they do it will fuck them up.

I tried to figure out what to do to make my dad actually love me, I never talked, I never disagreed, hell there was one time I peed myself because I didn’t want to ask him where the bathroom was because I didn’t want to bother him.

I was about ten when I realized there wasn’t anything I could do, and that him not loving me wasn’t because I did something wrong, but because he didn’t think through the consequences of a shotgun marriage with a woman his family only tolerated.

There are people who are already alive that are going to be fucked up by this. There are going to be children forced into an existence barely built with them in mind if at all that are going to be fucked up by this

An I know there are a bunch of other aspects that I didn’t touch on but I’ve got a headache and I’ve been crying for twenty minutes now

#wurds #bastard sperm donor

[the-autisticats]

How capitalism harms disabled & autistic people.

This topic is a long-awaited one, and something that not everyone will understand immediately. That’s okay. This post is here for you to learn from, even if you have to return to it more than once and do your own independent research in the meantime.

Before you read this, it’s probably relevant for you to know that I was raised in an anti-capitalist household. My mom has a PhD in Sociology, and her dissertation focuses heavily on the way that female re/productive labor is exploited under capitalism. She has been heavily influenced by the academic work of Silvia Federici, and Chris Knight (an anthropologist).

For over a decade, I’ve been in constant conversation with her on these issues. It has taken me an incredibly long time to fully understand everything, but now I have an understanding deep enough to debate her, educate her, and sharpen both of our knowledge. One of the key things I’ve educated her about is the way that disabled and autistic people fit into the big picture of capitalist exploitation. Now, I will do the same for you.

I think the best thing to do is to give you the general framework for understanding, and then provide you with specific examples that fit into the big picture. That way, you’ll know what you’re looking at when I give you the examples.

First, you need to know what capitalism is, and how it relates to every other system of oppression. Capitalism is an inherently authoritarian, patriarchal economic system, characterized by private ownership of the means of re/production, and the exploitation of re/productive labor to create surplus product/profit for the owners of an enterprise. Under capitalism, everyone is expected to reproduce, to create new workers. Additionally, economic growth (the creation of surplus/profit) has to be exponential, constantly increasing, in order for the system to survive. This means that the ecological boundaries of the planet are exceeded, because the Earth (coded female, of course) is assumed to have an infinite amount of resources to extract and create profit from.

This economic structure necessitates a binary reproductive class system, with reproductive females as the “working class,” and pregnancy as the labor required to produce the end product, new workers. This is why abortion is often heavily criminalized in patriarchal/capitalist societies. It is also why same-sex attracted and gender nonconforming or trans people are criminalized and stigmatized: we don’t conform to the re/productive expectations associated with our sex at birth.

Ethnicity has also been weaponized as a tool to create class categories that we now refer to as “race.” People racialized as white are afforded economic benefits. People racialized as Black are severely economically exploited. In order to fully understand the way that American capitalism developed, you have to understand slavery as the origin point. You must also understand that “race” is a tool that the ruling class employs to keep the working class divided. Because they know that if working-class white people joined forces with Black people and other POC, it would be over for them. MLK understood that, and was assasinated right after the Memphis Sanitation Strike, which was a major part of the the multiracial Poor People’s Campaign (which still exists today, btw!).

It is also important to realize that capitalism, characterized by private ownership, is not the only predatory/authoritarian/patriarchal economic system out there. There were older forms, like feudalism. And the USSR, China, and North Korea are good examples of the way that States can co-opt the role of private ownership and turn an entire country into one large corporation. It is therefore much more accurate to describe those countries as demonstrating a system called “state capitalism” rather than “communism.”

So what does all of this have to do with disabled people? And what does it have to do with autistic people specifically?

Well, under capitalism and other predatory economic systems, everyone is expected to be able to work in a manner that serves the ruling class by producing surplus/profit. If someone is not able to work at the same pace as everyone else, or perform the work required of them, they are no longer of value to the system. In an economy like this, people’s productivity is the only measure of their worth in society.

This has obvious and far-reaching implications for disabled people. So now, let’s get into the specifics that I told you I’d talk about earlier. I can’t think of a way to do this chronologically, and I don’t know how to organize everything I’m about to tell you. But hopefully you’ll be able to pick these pieces up and put them into the framework I’ve provided.

Disabled people are often killed, discarded, and left to die. This is a problem that exists worldwide, because patriarchy/capitalism are systems that exist worldwide. One notable example is the Aktion T4 program in Nazi Germany, which ended up being the precursor to the Holocaust. In this “euthanasia” program, which started in 1939 and continued until around 1945 (even though it technically ended in 1941), around 300,000 disabled people were killed across Germany, Austria, and Poland.

During this program, Hans Asperger (the man who gave Asperger Syndrome its name), saved autistic people he deemed “valuable” to society (for their ability to work under capitalist expectations), and sent other autistic people (who he saw as “unworthy of life” bc of their inability to work in the ways desired by the Third Reich) to die in gas chambers and death camps. This dark history is why the vast majority of autistic people despise the term “Asperger Syndrome,” as it promotes the idea that autistic people who conform to capitalist notions of productivity and intelligence are inherently superior to (and more worthy of life than) autistic people who can’t or don’t conform to those standards.

And you know how I talked earlier about how patriarchy/capitalism want everyone to reproduce? Well, the main exception to that rule is disabled people, because disability is often genetic and inheritable. The system hates it when more “defective” workers are produced. So, beginning in the United States around the 1910s and continuing into the present day, forced sterilization of disabled people became commonplace. Between 1909 and 1963, there were around 20,000 forced sterilizations in California alone.

The main reason given for these eugenics practices was to save money and limit the amount of resources spent on caring for “undesirable” people. Because after all, caring for people who won’t in turn produce surplus for you is just an impractical drain on resources /s. Now, I want you to turn this critical lens to these modern issues:

It is still legal in the United States to pay disabled workers below minimum wage. For example, Goodwill pays its disabled workers as little as 22 cents an hour. (Because even when we do work, our work is not seen as valuable)

Disabled people often lose all of our disability benefits if we get married, even if our spouse doesn’t have the financial means to support us. This means that many disabled people who rely on social security are completely unable to get married. (Because someone else should be taking care of us, we shouldn’t be wasting the government’s money with our existence /s)

The main focus of ABA therapy is on molding autistic children into employable adults. This means making them perform as many neurotypical “skills” as possible, in the hopes that they will be hired to work as “productive members of society.” Regardless of the methods used to try and achieve this goal, it is misguided to try and force autistic people to conform to the expectations of an exploitative system that was not built for us.

There’s so much more that I can and should talk about, but for now I’ll leave you with some things to Google and research:

Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan, Rojava / The Federation of Northern Syria, Democratic Confederalism / Liberterian Municipalism

Cooperation Jackson

The Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico

Crip Camp / the American Disability Rights movement

Extinction Rebellion

The Poor People’s Campaign

10 Principles of Disability Justice by Sins Invalid

“Ancient Bones That Tell a Story of Compassion,” from the New York Times

Mutual Aid as a political and economic theory & strategy

Matrilineal societies and the “gift economy”

Thank you for listening and learning with me. In love and solidarity,

Eden 🐢

#actually autistic #autism #autistic #ableism #autismacceptance #anthropology #history #sociology #capitalism #patriarchy #disability #disability rights #disability justice

[liveshaunted-moved]

headcanon dump; sally jackson

sally loves her children so fucking much

most of sally’s books get published in the font Dyslexie and in fact, she uses this font when she writes on her computer, therefore making it easier for percy or annabeth or any demigod easy to read when she get’s them to preview it

sad thought of the day…. sally and percy only being able to give affection when gabe wasn’t around because he hated it, so that meant when she would drop him off to school ( bc she sent him to boarding schools to protect him from gabe you will have to pry that headcanon from my cold dead hands ), and pick him up. or at her work if she could.

and then, them still not being able to adjust to it after gabe is gone and when paul does come along, they do kind of ‘hide’ it until they realise that paul isn’t gabe. because yes they know he isn’t but there are still micro things that they do have to re/unlearn

sally is proud supporter of percy & who ever makes him happy

sally and percy are so much a like. most of his traits, he shares with her, not poseidon, for sally was the one who raised him. his stubbornness and loyalty? from her. his need to protect those he cares about, even if it means he gets hurt? that’s so from sally.

because percy is so much more then posideon’s son, he is also sally’s son.

his love of blue food is from SALLY not POSEIDON, sally loved blue and it happens to be percy’s favourite colour too. blue is a sally&percy thing

sally had a miscarriage, and she is one of the very few where it was welcomed. not because she didn’t want another child, she had always imagined herself with more then one child, but the idea of having another child under gabe’s care frightened her and she couldn’t afford / get access to an abortion. this had happened while percy was in school ( a boarding one ) so he doesn’t know about it

it should be known that sally never sought for percy’s approval of paul, she already knew off the bat that paul was a good person. there was no reason for doubt for her, unlike with gabe when there was a little bit of doubt even before she saw gabe’s true colours. the only reason percy didn’t know right away was because she was still figuring it out, she hasn’t dated since she married gabe, it’s a hard thing to navigate.

sally will never have any ill feelings towards poseidon. she took everything in stride, so he wasn’t going to raise percy with her, she didn’t care because she would do her best to give her son the best that she can with what she had.

she never accepted any of poseidon’s offers, because she learnt that you have to earn things. and she was just a ‘summer’ fling for poseidon, that hadn’t earned a place in his home under the sea. and she wouldn’t have felt right accepting it knowing that poseidon had a wife.

she just needed to know if paul and percy would get along, and it was just a matter of when she was ready to let percy know.

when hades had captured her, she was right before her death. she was meant to die, but asked thanatos to bring the mother of percy back to him, alive. it was going to be a way to get his helmet back, as that was also stolen, and believed to have been stolen along side the master bolt. sally was kidnapped for leverage for the son of poseidon.

sally was alive, and for the most part was in mobile, but she of everything going around her. she heard the whispers of hades, of the ghost and how he was accusing her son of such a crime. of how hades has a plan, that if what he thinks is going to happen, that he’d get ahead of it.

her time in the underworld was at least a month, and for a mortal being in the underworld and not being dead can be harmful and it was to sally’s mental health. but, for years, she’s always put on a brave face for her son. and honestly, this why she flinched when gabe raised a hand towards her. usually she could hide her fear of her husband from her son, but the mental toll of having been in the underworld and being made inmobile did a lot.

when she was mobile, it was when hades favoured someone else that wasn’t working for him to talk too. sally would take this time to tell him that he is mistaken. her son would never, ever do such a thing.

sally would often, after finding gabe’s true nature, take percy to her work whenever she could. this is why she sent him to boarding schools too, so he has limited exposure to gabe and his nasty ways

ever since she got her scar on her hip, she when she swims where a fullbody swimsuit & a pair of shorts because she didn’t want to let percy know how badly gabe has hurt her. this scar had happened when percy was seven and in a boarding school, and it healed just before he came home in time for their usual trip.

sally is everyone’s mother? you want a mother figure, sally offers herself up. she’ll bake you cookies and muffins and homemade meals. give you a blanket to keep you warm.

sally also totally asks, and pays for, rachel to do artwork for her books.

sally supports all her children. all demigods are now her children, i will says this until i die

this is just in, your friendly reminder that, sally jackson is in fact, by definition a murder who is getting away with that fact. she placed medusa’s head in front of gabe. she was feed up with his abuse, and feared that he would go back on his promise and actually hit percy because of everything that’s happened. she feared for her son’s safety more then ever.

sally totally uses dyslexic friendly font on her computer, and for her writing. she also, once she gets published, fights for her books to only be printed in dyslexic friendly fonts.

sally has always been able to see through the mist. very clearly. at school. was once even mistaken to be a demigod, only for the satyr to realise that sally was in fact mortal. this has also lead to a very young sally to be labelled as someone with a very creative imagination.

and that label, got her interested in reading and writing, and her want to be a writer.

the wedding was small, nothing too big. just those close to her and paul.

this was her wedding dress, it just showed up the day of the wedding - she knows it was a gift from posideon

she totally invited annabeth, tyson & thalia

this just in, sally wore blue laced wedding dress. it had blue accents in it

sally, sung often to percy when he was a baby, and when he had nightmares.

sally would have never allowed gabe to stay as long as he did if he laid a hand on percy. herself, that was a different story. that was a set rule between the two, that gabe keep his hands off of percy, and sally would stay with him.

gabe was drunk, and sally can be very petty at times. this was how the whole blue thing came about. gabe was drunk and having a fight, while sally was making a cake, with blue food colouring because percy was coming home soon from his first time at school. and somehow they were on the topic of food not being able to be blue. so, it was from then on, sally decided she will go out of her way to make sure that she will get any food blue, and when it comes to cakes and the like of homemade things, blue food dye was right at the ready. and she loved it so much. because it became an inside thing with her son.

sally and poseidon lasted longer then just the summer., bu a few months after that and that is when percy was conceived. and poisdeon had to go because sally was in more danger now that they were going to have a child. sally understood, and let him go. holding no bitterness towards the sea god. she has made it this far in life without the help of others, she can do it again, even with a child.

she absolutely HATES the idea of someone not feeling safe, or having a place to call home. maybe it came from her having a child that could be in danger, or that is just the way she is. but, after gabe was gone, she would always be willing to lend a hand out to those in need ( mainly demigods ). most of the time just for a place to sleep and crash, and a place to feel SAFE and know that they can trust her.

despite her parents dying in a plane crash, sally never truly actually feared flying. she only ever ‘feared’ it when she had percy, for zeus might want to strike her son out of the sky and THAT is what scares her the most.

SALLY WOULD DIE FOR HER CHILDREN BEFORE SHE WILLINGLY PUTS THEM IN HARMS WAY. she knows the demigod life comes with a harsh reality which is part of why she didn’t want percy to go, why she held it off for so long having known about it since percy was like 3 years old.

sally sent percy away to boarding schools, to protect him. to get him as far away from gabe as possible. it was a way she could protect him, sending him away defeated the purpose of her marrying gabe - but, she hoped and prayed that the times that percy was home, that gabe’s sent lingered on her son for just long enough to keep him safe

gabe, for the first few months of his relationship with sally was nice, to her. her tried to woo her, despite him not smelling well. that was always with him, he never knew how to shower properly and sally counted that as a plus, because it would mask her son’s scent as a demigod. they got married quickly, and that seemed to be when gabe’s behaviour would change. she would refuse things, refuses to do things in the bedroom and he would get mad at her. he started to show his true colours as a awful human being, that is wasn’t just a bad smelling person, but the smell matched the personality. gabe was a verbal & emotional abuser.

she never divorced him. because he masked percy’s scent and because he was NEVER physically abusive towards PERCY, her on the other hand. that is a different story. gabe has hit her a few times and she did her best to hide it away from percy.

she stayed with gabe purely & solely to protect percy, because in her eyes, percy’s health & safety comes way before her own.

sally will fight for her son, she HAS fought for her son. there is nothing in the world that will ever stop sally from doing her best to protect percy, even if it means putting herself in danger. her son, always came before her. his needs came before her own. if they could only afford so much food, it would go to percy before it would go to her

honestly, the moment percy had called her, sally nearly collapsed from pure relief. her son was alive, THAT was the main thing, her son being alive. she knows his life can be dangerous, she knows it may not be long, but that doesn’t take away the fear and make it any less painful knowing that his life is in the hands of the fates.

#why be blah when there is aquamarine ( sally canons ) #we're standing on the edge of queue #abuse tw #miscarriage tw #long post tw