This guy heads up our health department

 

She should be in surgery if her baby is in her placenta.

"Highly likely.' No studies.  Just RFKJ's brainworms out for a walk.

Jesus Christ

Everything I've been reading about Tennessee lately is just one horrible story followed by a worse one.  What the fuck, Tennessee?

Countering abortion misinformation

New York Attorney General Letitia James today sued anti-abortion group Heartbeat International, Inc. (Heartbeat) and 11 self-professed “pro-life pregnancy organizations”—more commonly known as “crisis pregnancy centers”—throughout New York for using false and misleading statements to advertise an unproven treatment they call “Abortion Pill Reversal.” Heartbeat and the crisis pregnancy centers—whose mission is to prevent people from obtaining abortions—advertise “Abortion Pill Reversal” (APR) as a safe and effective treatment that they claim can “reverse” medication abortions. In reality, abortion cannot be “reversed,” and there is a glaring lack of scientific evidence to support APR’s safety and effectiveness. The only clinical trial conducted to evaluate APR had to be halted due to concerns about patient safety. Major medical associations, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) have cautioned that APR is not backed by science and does not meet clinical standards.

  New York AG

"Crisis centers" preying on desperate, pressured, and uninformed women.

Laws to counter laws

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

It's Sunday

In his opinion [giving rights to incubated embryos], Parker wrote: “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. [Alabama’s Sanctity of Life statute] recognizes that this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life—that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

  Elie Mystal @ The Nation

This is in the decision of a Alabama Supreme Court justice. Tom Parker

The word “God” appears 41 times in [Justice Tom] Parker’s opinion, which also liberally quotes from the Bible, specifically the Book of Genesis, and theologians like Thomas Aquinus and John Calvin. In an interview, Parker said he supports the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” which is a code for imposing Christian rule based on biblical precepts on the rest of society.

[...]

The decision came out on Friday, and less than a week later two Alabama clinics, including the state’s largest hospital, have stopped offering IVF because they cannot assume the legal liability that could arise from discarding the unused, unwanted embryos IVF treatments produce.

[...]

Do the icicle babies get a Social Security number? Can their mothers count them as dependents on their taxes? Do their fathers have to pay child support? Are we all nine months older than we think and, if so, do 17-year-olds get to vote in the upcoming election?

[...]

This is clearly unconstitutional. The Alabama ruling, on its face, violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. The court is privileging one religious sect—dominionist Christians—over all others, and it is doing this to extract legal payments from others, namely hospitals and clinics, that don’t share the justices’ religious viewpoint. Using the power of the state to force others to live in accordance with a particular religious belief is the very definition of state-sponsored religion.

[...]

What’s troubling to me is the extent to which the rest of the country has just accepted that we live under the rule of theocrats in robes and there’s nothing we can do about it. Establishment politicians, media figures, and even non-theocratic judges just kind of shrug and pretend that scripture is a reasonable basis for judicial pronouncements in a free society. If these judges and justices were establishing any religion other than fundamentalist Christianity, people would lose their minds.

[...]

I don’t know how we combat the Christian takeover of the judicial branch—a takeover that has largely already happened—when most people in power won’t even acknowledge that a theocratic takeover of the judicial system is bad and out of step with the principles the country was literally founded on.

[...]

The priests and deacons and ministers of our time are using the bully pulpit of the judiciary to impose their version of God’s will on the rest of us, and their God is spiteful, bigoted, and misogynist.

We are entering a new Dark Age, one where, like the last one, science, education, and facts mean nothing, and Christian myths and legends are given the force of law. I don’t know how to stop them, but I think the first step is to recognize and name what they’re doing.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 03/07/2024:

Extrauterine children

In a case originating from Mobile, LePage v. Mobile Infirmary Clinic, Inc., the [Alabama] Supreme Court held in a 7-2 decision that parents of frozen embryos killed at an IVF clinic when an intruder tampered with an IVF freezer may proceed with a wrongful death lawsuit against the clinic for alleged negligence.

[...]

[T]he defendants and their amicus devote large portions of their briefs to emphasizing undesirable public-policy outcomes that, they say, will arise if this Court does not create an exception to wrongful-death liability for extrauterine children.

[...]

On appeal, the Supreme Court has now reversed the trial court and held that a human frozen embryo is a “child,” which is “an unborn or recently born person,” within the plain meaning of the Act and under prior judicial decisions recognizing that unborn children are protected by Alabama law.

[...]

That life is sacred because every human being is made in the image of God, noted Chief Justice Parker, and the People chose to make that a clear matter of constitutional law. As to the effect of the Sanctity of Life Amendment, Chief Justice Parker reasoned that it “does much more than simply declare a moral value that the People of Alabama like. Instead, this constitutional provision tilts the scales of the law in favor of protecting unborn life.”

  1819 News

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 02/22/2024:

And what did those IVF clinics do with the frozen embryos they already have?  "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Doe, We are closing our clinic; come pick up your children."

UPDATE 02/22/2024:

UPDATE 02/23/2024:

UPDATE 02/24/2024:

If corporations are people, why not embryos?

UPDATE 02/25/2024:

UPDATE 03/07/2024:

It's Sunday

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

COVID-19 and pregnancy

Boys born to mothers who got COVID-19 while pregnant appear nearly twice as likely as other boys to be diagnosed with subtle delays in brain development.

That's the conclusion of a study of more than 18,000 children born at eight hospitals in Eastern Massachusetts. Nearly 900 of the children were born to mothers who had COVID during their pregnancy.

In the study, boys, but not girls, were more likely to be diagnosed with a range of developmental disorders in the first 18 months of life. These included delays in speech and language, psychological development and motor function, as well as intellectual disabilities.

[...]

"As part of the body's effort to fight the virus, it produces proteins known as cytokines, which regulate the immune system.

[...]

But cytokines, unlike most pathogens, can cross the placenta and cause inflammation in a fetal brain. And animal studies suggest that this inflammation has a greater impact on the brains of male fetuses than female fetuses, and results in different behavioral abnormalities after birth.

[...]

The Harvard researchers plan to continue assessing the children in their study for several more years. That will allow them to see whether the early delays in boys persist or result in a diagnosis like autism spectrum disorder.

[...]

The finding is just the latest to suggest that a range of maternal infections can alter fetal brain development, especially in male offspring. For example, studies have found links between infections like influenza and cytomegalovirus, and disorders like autism and schizophrenia.

[...]

With influenza or COVID-19, the risk to a fetus appears to come primarily from the mother's immune response to an infection, not the infection itself.

[...]

But the effect from COVID-19 appears to be modest, Perlis says. "Most children of moms who have COVID during pregnancy won't have neurodevelopmental consequences even if there is some increase in risk.

  NPR

But why just males? Is it connected to genes on the missing arm on the Y chromosome?  Or what?  (That missing arm is what I blame all undesirable male traits on.  It's handy.)

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.