Tuesday, August 02, 2022

"I Feel Like These Stories Should All Name Sam Alito"

Madison Underwood was lying on the ultrasound table, nearly 19 weeks pregnant, when the doctor came in to say her abortion had been canceled.

Nurses followed and started wiping away lukewarm sonogram gel from her exposed belly as the doctor leaned over her shoulder to speak to her fiancé, Adam Queen.

She recalled that she went quiet, her body went still. What did they mean, they couldn’t do the abortion? Just two weeks earlier, she and her fiancé had learned her fetus had a condition that would not allow it to survive outside the womb. If she tried to carry to term, she could become critically ill, or even die, her doctor had said. Now, she was being told she couldn’t have an abortion she didn’t even want, but needed.

“They’re just going to let me die?” she remembers wondering.

In the blur around her, she heard the doctor and nurses talking about a clinic in Georgia that could do the procedure now that the legal risks of performing it in Tennessee were too high.

She heard her fiancé curse, and with frustration in his voice, tell the doctor this was stupid. She heard the doctor agree.

Just three days earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had overturned the constitutional right to abortion. A Tennessee law passed in 2020 that banned abortions at around six weeks of pregnancy had been blocked by a court order but could go into effect.

Your daughter.  Your niece.  Your cousin.  Your friend.  Your significant other.

She and Mr. Queen had gone back and forth for days before deciding to terminate the pregnancy. She was dreading the abortion. She had cried in the car pulling up to the clinic. She had heard about the Supreme Court undoing Roe v. Wade but thought that since she had scheduled her abortion before the decision, and before any state ban took effect, the procedure would be allowed.

Tennessee allows abortion if a woman’s life is in danger, but doctors feared making those decisions too soon and facing prosecution. Across the country, the legal landscape was shifting so quickly, some abortion clinics turned patients away before the laws officially took effect or while legal battles played out in state courts.

Century-old bans hanging around on the books were activated, but then just as quickly were under dispute. In states where abortion was still legal, wait times at clinics spiked as women from states with bans searched for alternatives.

It was into this chaos that Ms. Underwood was sent home, still pregnant, and reeling. What would happen now? The doctor said she should go to Georgia, where abortions were still legal up to 22 weeks, though that state had a ban that would soon take effect.

Somebody want to tell Ms. Underwood she should have had the baby, a baby fated to die and to kill her? If so, you might as well tell her to avoid the polio vaccine, the vaccines every schoolchild has to get, and go play in the traffic, because God has determined when she will die, and you can't go against God's will.  I mean, if you're that stupid and your ideas of God are that evil and corrupt.  You think I'm exaggerating.

Ms. Underwood had to make a trip to Georgia to save her life:

The Georgia clinic’s staff warned the family about protesters outside. As they pulled into the parking lot, they drove by a man with signs showing dead fetuses.

“Are all of you OK with killing babies?” he shouted into a megaphone.

He approached Ms. Underwood’s parents’ car, and her mother rolled down the window.
“We’re on the same side of this as you,” her mother said. “We don’t support abortion, but the doctors said our baby is going to die.”

“You trust doctors more than God?” he replied.

I'm an ordained minister, and I don't presume to speak for God.  Who is this dipshit?

Let's call him "Sam Alito." 

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