Wednesday, December 13, 2023

The Cruelty Is The Point

Well, yeah.
The case of Kate Cox, the 31-year-old mother of two in Texas who sued to end a nonviable pregnancy heaped with health risks to herself, has attracted nationwide horror for its sheer brutality. 
Her fetus, at best, might have a brief and painful life; in the process of giving birth, Cox could be seriously sickened and left unable to have more children in the future.
This, to me, is the deep irony of the case, and also the deep revelation. The Texas Supreme Court opinion is not exactly one for the ages, but even at that it’s “well it’s the law we can’t change that it’s the law!” analysis (I use the term loosely) is laughable. If it didn’t provoke such tragedy.🎭 The point of it is to wash their hands of the outcome and punt down to the Texas Medical Board. And that’s all wrapped around the beating heart of this case, which is the condition of Ms. Cox. Her last child will be her last chance to have a child. Ever. And if she dies from complications of the pregnancy before the abortion, well: nobody could have foreseen. If she died soon after, well: we told you so, abortion is BAD!

Either way, death is all the State recognizes as an out, and if the mother doesn’t die, maybe she wasn’t going to. 🤔 And for the State the only acceptable result is now some OBGYN explaining themselves to a jury of their putative peers because maybe their patient wasn’t that close to death and the abortion wasn’t justified?

And Ms. Cox may never have children again, an outcome the Texas Supreme Court says is according to law, and what’re ya gonna do?

So this is the pro-life position: the woman must bear a dying child and risk never having another child again. Hey, it’s not a risk of death, right? Besides, it’s “within the zone of reasonable medical judgment,” right?  And if the outcome is that the baby is stillborn, or dies shortly after birth, and she is now infertile so that her last chance to have a healthy third child is forever taken from her by the State of Texas, well…that’s freedom, idn’t?

And the “zone of reasonable medical judgment” is subject to review for criminal prosecution by the State. The State which has no interest in the woman’s life, the State which can only say to the dead and mourning “Alas, but cannot help nor pardon.” The State which says it alone can determine the quality of life for a fetus, and brushes aside that question where life of the pregnant mother is concerned. Because, after all, she’s not gonna die, is she? And if she does, why didn’t you tell us? We would have done something! But no, probably not; because who can say, really? It’s so hard to be sure about the future. Better to err on the side of the fetus. And if the woman (never the “mother”!  Let’s not be emotional here!) dies, well, that is too bad.

But the State has to think of the children. Or think like children. Mean, petty, cruel, ignorant children:
In the Texas ban, the combination of subjective, non-medical language — when is a condition “life threatening”? When is a bodily function “at risk” of “substantial impairment”? — and hefty penalties — including first or second degree felony charges, $100,000 fines for each violation and loss of medical license — guarantees that health care providers will read the exceptions narrowly. 
And by stripping the courts of any ability to make that judgment, the state Supreme Court is pretending that providers, lacking any true agency under threat of such dire punishments, have the freedom to make the call in the often quickly shifting and uncertain terrain of emergency health care. 
“The law leaves to physicians — not judges — both the discretion and the responsibility to exercise their reasonable medical judgment, given the unique facts and circumstances of each patient,” the court hand-waved in a Monday night ruling against Cox’s right to get an abortion in-state. 
But it just as quickly invalidated that professional discretion when it flowed against the court’s ideological preference. When Cox’s doctor was brave enough to express her belief that Cox needed an abortion to avoid the serious harms covered by the ban’s exceptions — in a way that protected herself from running afoul of the law, and spoke to the unpredictable state of Cox’s health — the court simply nitpicked her opinion away. 
“By requiring the doctor to exercise ‘reasonable medical judgment,’ the Legislature determined that the medical judgment involved must meet an objective standard. Dr. Karsan asserted that she has a ‘good faith belief’ that Ms. Cox meets the exception’s requirements,” the court wrote, adding: “But the statute requires that judgment be a ‘reasonable medical’ judgment, and Dr. Karsan has not asserted that her ‘good faith belief’ about Ms. Cox’s condition meets that standard.”
And if she had, the State would say: “Sorry, but we don’t think so. And not being doctors or the patient, our opinion counts more.”
If the exemption for a “life-threatening physical condition” and the “risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function” doesn’t apply to Cox — who, per her lawyers, has been in and out of four emergency rooms in the past month and may lose her ability to give birth in the future — who does it apply to? And how can anyone feel confident that a pregnant patient in even more imminent danger than Cox would get an abortion, given how justifiably skittish doctors are in the state?
It doesn’t? I thought we all understood that? Well, we can thank the Court for making that clear.

My God, they said it out loud:
“Every child is uniquely precious and should continue to be protected in law no matter how long or short the baby’s life may be,” Texas Right To Life said in a statement responding to the Cox lawsuit. “The compassionate approach to these heartbreaking diagnoses is perinatal palliative care, which honors, rather than ends, the child’s life.”
"And if the mother is rendered infertile or left with a chronic injury, well: tough shit. Sucks to be you. We have to think of the unborn children.”

Abortion is healthcare; plain and simple. Reconstructive surgery exists to help people recover from disfiguring injury or disease. If some people use it for vanity, is it not still fundamentally healthcare? Abortion is not the sport of “callous, promiscuous women who cavalierly stroll into and out of Planned Parenthood clinics." I even doubt such women exist; certainly not in the numbers of men and women who turn to “plastic surgery” for vanity purposes. Even if 1 such person exists, it is a small price to pay for the healthcare of every woman in this country.

And in the State of Texas, too.
It was never about “compassion for the child,” because once born the “pro-life” movement has no more interest in children. It was always about control; about who’s in charge, and who they can be in charge of.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript:
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