That is an incredibly distressing read. Holy shit, I am… Wow.
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Yeah… it’s fucked up.
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It’s even worse than that.
All of this was legal due to the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, which ruled that the forced sterilization of a young disabled woman was constitutional.
That would be Buck v. Bell, which had, in one of the arguments, the line “three generations of imbeciles is enough.”
Carrie Buck wasn’t mentally disabled, she was just caught in a system which assumed she was, and refused to treat her as anything else (including by not giving her an education). And she wasn’t “immoral”, she was raped.
Which is to say, what they did to her was abominable whether or not she was disabled. It was abominable whether or not the conception was consensual. But that they used those excuses despite them being trivially provable untrue had they cared makes it worse.
It also means that it was never about disability, it was really about class, and misogyny. Because, as the wiki article points out, when a case came to the Supreme Court about compulsorily sterilizing men, they came to the opposite conclusion.
Like so many of these sorts of things involving the intersection of racism (which eugenics totally is), disability, misogyny, class, and unevenly distributed access to justice, the whole thing is a fractal clusterfuck; equally fucked up at every scale of observation.
Most states threw out their original sterilization laws from the early 20th century shortly after World War II led to public rejection of Nazi ideas like eugenics.Most states threw out their original sterilization laws from the early 20th century shortly after World War II led to public rejection of Nazi ideas like eugenics.
[citation needed]
Virginia’s Sterilization laws, as applied to Carrie Buck, wasn’t repealed until 1974.
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And it looks like women who work with them do better too!
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This is just too devastating. Even the headline is really disturbing, so I am blurring this.
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OK, from a medical standpoint (agree with your blurring, will do the same)
A D&E following a fetal demise is not the same thing as an abortion. Tis is no different than forcing a woman with an ectopic pregnancy to just die rather than remove or expel a nonviable fetus.
Good God, I hate this timeline.
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i have a hyper-religious close relative whose excuse or rationalization of this is along the lines of-- “something something something god’s will.”
edited to add that i find that appalling, even on the basis of biblical teaching, but he’s unwilling to take the theological arguments of a long-term agnostic very seriously.
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It’s upsetting and sad, but I don’t know if we should hide the very real damage anti-choice laws do to women.
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I will even accept that logic for the loss of a wanted pregnancy as a way of rationalizing the trauma and coping. But to subsequently require that the woman must be denied medical care is the same argument antivaxxers use about “thwarting God’s will” and causes me to (repeatedly) bring up the “woman in a flood” story. And this is before we get into , would a man in a similar situation be similarly treated? Of course not!
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The article says (Seriously, this is not for the faint of heart)…
That she was pregnant with twins and one of the fetuses died, but they held off on removing the dead fetus and took a “wait and see” approach until the second fetus died a week later.
I am not a doctor, but what those doctors did seems absurd to me. From your perspective as a doctor, is there any possible way that the second fetus and the mother could have both been saved from taking a wait and see approach? Would it have been possible to remove the dead fetus while keeping the other fetus alive?
I agree with you. But I have also had the experience of discussing medical topics I don’t find distressing at all really upset or trigger other folks. So I try to be sensitive to folks with much different stress points than mine.
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Fair, I’m just less ready to do that on an issue like that for people who don’t think it’s “that bad” what’s happening with Roe… YMMV, natch!
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I went back and read the story again, and I don’t see any indication of how far along she was. If she was over 25 or so weeks, the other fetus would have been better served to be delivered. If less, there was no chance for the baby, but certainly a very good possibility of saving the mom’s life. And saying that “the medical team was guided by nothing but medical considerations,” the possibility of politically motivated legal consequences, including arrest and imprisonment, for treating a woman as a fully fledged human being rather than an incubator would have had to play a role. The whole story is just FUBAR’d.
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As always, thank you for your medical expertise. I thought that was the case, but this kind of thing is well beyond me…
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Don’t forget: there are enough women on this BBS that statistically speaking, quite a few of us have had miscarriages and probably at least one or two have suffered a stillborn or close. My sense was that the blurring was there as a trigger warning for that.
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Let’s see if the music industry gets that memo:
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Ugh.
Multiple trigger warnings here.
Still gotta post these damn things:
not specifically related but in a similar category:
Scam Artists Conned Lovesick Seniors — And Made Them FBI Targets
(Onebox doesn’t seem to work for this link)
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