I Miscarried in Texas. My Doctors Put Abortion Law First.
ERIN A. SNIDER
From Newsweek: https://www.newsweek.com/i-miscarried-texas-doctors-abortion-law-1861677?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

NEWSLETTER
My Turn

For nearly five hours I alternate between lying in a fetal position on our bathroom floor and curling up against the wall, shivering uncontrollably one moment, and burning up the next.

I vomit three times on the floor. I rock back and forth in tears, repeating out loud, to myself, to God, to my husband and my dog on the other side of the door, to please, please make this stop. The pain is so blinding that I think I’m hallucinating.

It goes on so long, I don’t have the energy to scream, at what feels like every single bone in my body crumbling, my body breaking apart, collapsing into itself. Between each new wave of pain that comes, I try to focus on the broken grout between the floor tiles.

I pass out twice. I am terrified that I will die.

No one should have to fear they may die because of a miscarriage. And yet, for women like me in the United States, in Texas, that fear is very real.

The day before—Labor Day—we had checked into the ER after I began to bleed at work. At nine weeks pregnant, I feared the worst, but hoped it was nothing. Panicking at my desk, I immediately called my best friend, who told me to go straight to the emergency room.

At the ER, that panic deepened. The Dobbs decision, by the U.S. Supreme Court, which overturned a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, had been passed three months earlier and for the first two hours in the waiting room, I could only think of how that decision would now trickle down to me, here.

My brain anxiously cycled through every bad scenario that could happen. My concern wasn’t misplaced.
I was eventually called back for bloodwork and asked questions that were probably standard, but sounded increasingly cold and accusatory, about why I was there. I repeated for what seemed the tenth time that I thought I was having a miscarriage.

Questions, tests, and information collected, I was sent back to the waiting room with my husband. Several hours, a sonogram, and transvaginal ultrasound later, a kind doctor and two nurses told me they were 98 percent sure I was beginning a miscarriage.

There was no heartbeat. There was nothing to save. Miscarriages don’t reverse themselves, despite what politicians may think.

Tired and numb, my husband and I asked what I could expect in the days to come. We had been down this path before, but not in Texas. For years, we struggled with infertility and suffered several pregnancy losses with complications.

I lost my first pregnancy in Washington, DC at 15 weeks. My doctors were wonderful and compassionate and immediately arranged for me to have a D&C—a procedure often used in abortions—because I was too far along to miscarry on my own and to limit the trauma of my loss. The only pain I woke to after that surgery was emotional, not physical.

Back in Texas, the attending doctor in the ER told me I was free to take Advil for pain (when you’re pregnant you can’t take ibuprofen) and that I should return only if I became feverish, filled a heavy pad with blood every hour or was nauseous.

Before we left, I asked him and the nurse if things had changed since the Dobbs decision. Without hesitation, they both said yes, clearly upset. Every OB they knew was trying to leave Texas.

As a woman who has dealt with infertility issues and miscarriages over the last six years, I’ve had my share of bad days. The next day was unnecessarily the worst day of my life.

I began to feel progressively worse. By mid-day, the cramps became debilitating and the bleeding worse. I powered through two phone meetings and then cancelled another when the pain became too much to bear.

An unholy amount of Advil did nothing. I crawled into our bed to rest and watch anything on Netflix to try to distract myself from the pain. That didn’t work. I bolted for the bathroom when I felt like I was going to both vomit and break apart into pieces.I would spend the next five hours on the bathroom floor thinking that this was terrible, but normal, remembering the words of a friend in Texas who had told me about her painful miscarriage at home.

When my husband and I return for the second time to the ER, we explain what happened. The pain is too intense, too deep for me to think about anything else. I’m given a wheelchair this time and I sit weeping in the waiting room, until I’m brought back for more bloodwork, and then finally, to a bed.

A doctor wearing cowboy boots under his scrubs comes in, and asks me if I want “some real pain relief.” A nurse gives me the first of three rounds of fentanyl and jokes that “it’s better than the cartel’s stuff.” Within a minute, the pain vanishes.

Sonograms and a CAT scan are needed to rule out other things. But the technicians that do this are an hour away, so we wait. I'[d] eventually returned to my bed and my husband. Minutes later, the doctor becomes concerned when my white blood cell count skyrockets, fearing an infection.

I remember hearing the rising, alarming series of beeps from a monitor and my husband’s voice fielding calls from our family in Virginia and Oregon. I hear the fear in their voices, asking him to get me out of there and for a flight to California or any safe state—a desperate, hopeful, impossible request.

I also remember processing that phrase “safe state” for the first time, turning it over in my head.
Abortion rights supporters rally at the Texas Capitol on May 14, 2022 in Austin, Texas, before the U.S. Supreme Court came to a majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade.

I’m given more fentanyl as the pain returns and more hours pass waiting. Around 5:30am, the doctor returns. As he opens his mouth to start talking, I stop him and tell him I need the bathroom because I feel something leaving me. That something was my placenta, which the doctor and nurse came in to collect for biopsy. The doctor confirms, to the surprise of absolutely no one, that I’m miscarrying. He prescribes hydrocodone and an anti-inflammatory drug.

Before I’m discharged, I asked him to be frank with me—why wasn’t I offered a D&C—a surgery that clears the uterine lining after a miscarriage and spares women the physical trauma of experiencing what I did over those two days—or misoprostol—a medication used to treat miscarriages, but also used for medicated abortions? Did the Dobbs decision affect how women were now treated in the ER?

Like the doctor the previous night, he sighed heavily: “Yes.”
He said that doctors now felt pressure because of lawyers and that today, because my HCG levels were going down (confirming pregnancy loss) he was in a better position to recommend to an OB what the attending doctor the previous night could not.

Lawyers, not women’s lives, were now the overriding concern.

In Texas, doctors who perform abortions face fines of up to $100,000 and life in prison. Texas has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country and while it allows exceptions when the patient’s life is in danger, the law is vaguely worded, making doctors hesitant to do anything that may jeopardize their career.
I was devastated and angry when the Dobbs decision came out three months earlier. My brother had said to me, in solidarity: “I can’t imagine what it’s like to wake up and suddenly be considered only half a citizen in this country. I’m so sorry.”

I’m a scholar of democracy and authoritarianism in the Middle East. I’ve always felt strongly against sharing details about my personal life in class. I’d rather not talk about my uterus with my graduate students or colleagues. But on my first day back, I thought they deserved to know the details of what’s happening in their state.

I told them the real reason I cancelled class. I told them that I was terrified that I would die. And I told them that if they or a woman in their life found themselves in such a situation, what questions they should ask and with whom they should speak. Democratic erosion and authoritarianism aren’t abstractions happening elsewhere I told them—this is a reminder that they’re happening in Texas and in other states.

A male student told me after class: “Thank you for telling us, and thank you for treating us like adults.”
That was 14 months ago. My story pales in comparison to countless women and girls who’ve faced far worse since trigger laws restricting abortion in Texas came into effect with the repeal of Roe v. Wade. We only know their stories because they’ve had the courage to share their trauma.

As a recent report in the Guardian suggests, statistics in Texas don’t capture how many women have left the state for life-saving care or those who’ve nearly died in emergency rooms because lawyers and politicians, not doctors, governed decisions about their life.

It’s impossible to quantify the quiet horror many of us feel in this state, where any pregnancy—wanted or not—carries a potential death sentence.

Our lives do not matter. That was demonstrated yet again last month when the Texas Supreme Court ruled against Kate Cox.

Cox had asked the courts for permission to end her pregnancy after learning her fetus has full trisomy 18, a lethal fetal anomaly. Continuing the pregnancy, her doctors said, threatened both her life and future fertility. Cox left the state for an abortion shortly before the court delivered its ruling.

Hearing her story utterly shattered me. I can’t begin to imagine the anguish for Cox and her family and that felt by so many others without the resources to leave this state for health care.

What is very clear to me though is that sharing the most intimate details of the horrors we face with strangers, hoping for a change, doesn’t matter. Conservative politicians running this state have shown, time and again, their utter disregard for women’s lives.

Cox was pushed into the unimaginably cruel position of having to beg for her life. When asked to comment on her story, our U.S. Senators in Texas, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, refused to do so.

Recently, the situation for women became more dire. A federal appeals court ruled that emergency rooms in Texas aren’t required to perform life-saving care, including abortions. The ruling is a devastating blow for women.

A long-standing national emergency law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, requires doctors and hospitals to treat emergency conditions like mine or risk fines and civil lawsuits.

That law was one of the few remaining protections for women in the wake of the Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade.

This ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit—one of the most conservative courts in the nation—is a death sentence for women, unequivocally showing disregard for our lives.

Texas remains dangerous for women, and I fear, is a precursor of what’s to come for women in other states.
Erin A. Snider is a former professor at Texas A&M University and fellow with the New America Foundation. She is the author of Marketing Democracy: The Political Economy of Democracy Aid in the Middle East.

Here, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley, in the midst of America’s most productive agricultural region, many people are hungry. The need varies throughout the year, but for a significant portion of our population, hunger is a daily reality. For over 37 years, through the hospitality and hosting of the Episcopal Church of the [Savior] Soup Kitchen, many of Hanford’s needier residents have found a safe, climate controlled place to enjoy a nourishing meal. Meals are served Monday through Saturday and include soup, salad, bread, dessert and a beverage and a sack lunch on Sundays.. The Ministry was started in 1986 by the Episcopal Church of the Savior as a way of expanding its service to the local community. At that time there were no other services to provide food for the hungry of this community, so the parish decided that the soup kitchen would be a wonderful ministry opportunity.

Members of the Kings County Democratic Central Committee have been enlisted by church staff to help the cause. Each 3rd Monday of the month is our slot, our day to give along with other organizations on the ECoS team, participating in providing a noon meal to those who have little or no means to eat a meal on any given day. If you would like to help, just stop by the church. If you’d like to help in a financial capacity, stop by the church or click here.

From Thom Hartmann, The Hartmann Report

It’s dizzying: in this one week we learn that there’s a witness to Reagan’s 1980 treason to seize the presidency, and that Donald Trump, who gave the Russians a spy in his first week in office (among other treasons), will be indicted for the crime that helped him avoid losing to Hillary Clinton. This is on top of Nixon’s well-documented treason with Vietnam and Bush’s explicit lies about Iraq.

It’s now a certainty that the last legitimately elected Republican president who wasn’t a traitor to the United States was Dwight D. Eisenhower. In aggregate, this should be the biggest story in the media.

Read more here and here.

“…of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners reveals that 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive.” -The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.

More dialogue on liberal messaging can be found here; conservative radio targets Latino communities too. Rush Limbaugh is no longer with us but the industry he created is alive and well, sadly..

Anyone know of any billionaire Liberals who might buy up some radio & TV networks for us to use?? It just might help to make activist folks’ job quite a bit easier.

Cartoon courtesy of Tom Tomorrow via Daily Kos.