Do you really think you wanna challenge women?
From our sisters in South Korea.
🔹 Bihon (비혼) - No marriage
🔹 Bichulsan (비출산) - No childbirth
🔹 Biyeonae (ë¹„ì—°ì• ) - No dating
🔹 Bisekseu (비섹스) - No sex with men
Showing posts with label war on women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war on women. Show all posts
Nov 10, 2024
Nov 8, 2024
Nov 1, 2024
Today's Jessica
Women are dying because of all this fucked up Republican "policy" on abortion.
A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms
It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted Nevaeh Crain, 18, as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.
Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.
Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.
The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.
Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.
By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.
Hours later, she was dead.
Fails, who would have seen her daughter turn 20 this Friday, still cannot understand why Crain’s emergency was not treated like an emergency.
But that is what many pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans, doctors and lawyers have told ProPublica.
“Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor emerita at George Washington University.
Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions, but still, doctors told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients with complications.
In states with abortion bans, such patients are sometimes bounced between hospitals like “hot potatoes,” with health care providers reluctant to participate in treatment that could attract a prosecutor, doctors told ProPublica. In some cases, medical teams are wasting precious time debating legalities and creating documentation, preparing for the possibility that they’ll need to explain their actions to a jury and judge.
Dr. Jodi Abbott, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University School of Medicine, said patients are left wondering: “Am I being sent home because I really am OK? Or am I being sent home because they’re afraid that the solution to what’s going on with my pregnancy would be ending the pregnancy, and they’re not allowed to do that?”
There is a federal law to prevent emergency room doctors from withholding lifesaving care.
Passed nearly four decades ago, it requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients in medical crises. The Biden administration argues this mandate applies even in cases where an abortion might be necessary.
No state has done more to fight this interpretation than Texas, which has warned doctors that its abortion ban supersedes the administration’s guidance on federal law, and that they can face up to 99 years in prison for violating it.
ProPublica condensed more than 800 pages of Crain’s medical records into a four-page timeline in consultation with two maternal-fetal medicine specialists; reporters reviewed it with nine doctors, including researchers at prestigious universities, OB-GYNs who regularly handle miscarriages, and experts in emergency medicine and maternal health.
Some said the first ER missed warning signs of infection that deserved attention. All said that the doctor at the second hospital should never have sent Crain home when her signs of sepsis hadn’t improved. And when she returned for the third time, all said there was no medical reason to make her wait for two ultrasounds before taking aggressive action to save her.
“This is how these restrictions kill women,” said Dr. Dara Kass, a former regional director at the Department of Health and Human Services and an emergency room physician in New York. “It is never just one decision, it’s never just one doctor, it’s never just one nurse.”
While they were not certain from looking at the records provided that Crain’s death could have been prevented, they said it may have been possible to save both the teenager and her fetus if she had been admitted earlier for close monitoring and continuous treatment.
There was a chance Crain could have remained pregnant, they said. If she had needed an early delivery, the hospital was well-equipped to care for a baby on the edge of viability. In another scenario, if the infection had gone too far, ending the pregnancy might have been necessary to save Crain.
Doctors involved in Crain’s care did not respond to several requests for comment. The two hospitals, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas and Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth, declined to answer detailed lists of questions about her treatment.
Fails and Crain believed abortion was morally wrong. The teen could only support it in the context of rape or life-threatening illness, she used to tell her mother. They didn’t care whether the government banned it, just how their Christian faith guided their own actions.
When they discovered Crain was pregnant with a girl, the two talked endlessly about the little dresses they could buy, what kind of mother she would be. Crain landed on the name Lillian. Fails could not wait to meet her.
But when her daughter got sick, Fails expected that doctors had an obligation to do everything in their power to stave off a potentially deadly emergency, even if that meant losing Lillian. In her view, they were more concerned with checking the fetal heartbeat than attending to Crain.
“I know it sounds selfish, and God knows I would rather have both of them, but if I had to choose,” Fails said, “I would have chosen my daughter.”
“I’m in a Lot of Pain”
Crain had just graduated from high school in her hometown of Vidor, Texas, in May of 2023 when she learned that she was pregnant.
She and her boyfriend of two years, Randall Broussard, were always hip to hip, wrestling over vapes or snuggling on the couch watching vampire movies. Crain was drawn to how gentle he was. He admired how easily she built friendships and how quickly she could make people laugh. Though they were young, they’d already imagined starting a family. Broussard, who has eight siblings, wanted many kids; Crain wanted a daughter and the kind of relationship she had with her mom. Earlier that year, Broussard had given Crain a small diamond ring — “a promise,” he told her, “that I will always love you.”
On the morning of their baby shower, Oct. 28, 2023, Crain woke with a headache. Her mom decorated the house with pink balloons and Crain laid out Halloween-themed platters. Soon, nausea set in. Crain started vomiting and was running a fever. When guests arrived, Broussard opened gifts — onesies and diapers and bows — while Crain kept closing her eyes.
Around 3 p.m., her family told her she needed to go to the hospital.
Broussard drove Crain to Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas. They sat in the waiting room for four hours. When Crain started vomiting, staff brought her a plastic pan. When she wasn’t retching, she lay her head in her boyfriend’s lap.
New here?
A nurse practitioner ordered a test for strep throat, which came back positive, medical records show. But in a pregnant patient, abdominal pain and vomiting should not be quickly attributed to strep, physicians told ProPublica; a doctor should have also evaluated her pregnancy.
Instead, Baptist Hospitals discharged her with a prescription for antibiotics. She was home at 9 p.m. and quickly dozed off, but within hours, she woke her mother up. “Mom, my stomach is still hurting,” she said into the dark bedroom at 3 a.m. “I’m in a lot of pain.”
Fails drove Broussard and Crain to another hospital in town, Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth. Around 4:20 a.m., OB-GYN William Hawkins saw that Crain had a temperature of 102.8 and an abnormally high pulse, according to records; a nurse noted that Crain rated her abdominal pain as a seven out of 10.
Her vital signs pointed to possible sepsis, records show. It’s standard medical practice to immediately treat patients who show signs of sepsis, which can overtake and kill a person quickly, medical experts told ProPublica. These patients should be watched until their vitals improve. Through tests and scans, the goal is to find the source of the infection. If the infection was in Crain’s uterus, the fetus would likely need to be removed with a surgery.
In a room at the obstetric emergency department, a nurse wrapped a sensor belt around Crain’s belly to check the fetal heart rate. “Baby’s fine,” Broussard told Fails, who was sitting in the hallway.
After two hours of IV fluids, one dose of antibiotics, and some Tylenol, Crain’s fever didn’t go down, her pulse remained high, and the fetal heart rate was abnormally fast, medical records show. Hawkins noted that Crain had strep and a urinary tract infection, wrote up a prescription and discharged her.
Hawkins had missed infections before. Eight years earlier, the Texas Medical Board found that he had failed to diagnose appendicitis in one patient and syphilis in another. In the latter case, the board noted that his error “may have contributed to the fetal demise of one of her twins.” The board issued an order to have Hawkins’ medical practice monitored; the order was lifted two years later. (Hawkins did not respond to several attempts to reach him.)
All of the doctors who reviewed Crain’s vital signs for ProPublica said she should have been admitted. “She should have never left, never left,” said Elise Boos, an OB-GYN in Tennessee.
Kass, the New York emergency physician, put it in starker terms: When they discharged her, they were “pushing her down the path of no return.”
“It’s bullshit,” Fails said as Broussard rolled Crain out in a wheelchair; she was unable to walk on her own. Fails had expected the hospital to keep her overnight. Her daughter was breathing heavily, hunched over in pain, pale in the face. Normally talkative, the teen was quiet.
Back home, around 7 a.m., Fails tried to get her daughter comfortable as she cried and moaned. She told Fails she needed to pee, and her mother helped her into the bathroom. “Mom, come here,” she said from the toilet. Blood stained her underwear.
The blood confirmed Fails’ instinct: This was a miscarriage.
At 9 a.m, a full day after the nausea began, they were back at Christus St. Elizabeth. Crain’s lips were drained of color and she kept saying she was going to pass out. Staff started her on IV antibiotics and performed a bedside ultrasound.
Around 9:30 a.m., the OB on duty, Dr. Marcelo Totorica, couldn’t find a fetal heart rate, according to records; he told the family he was sorry for their loss.
Standard protocol when a critically ill patient experiences a miscarriage is to stabilize her and, in most cases, hurry to the operating room for delivery, medical experts said. This is especially urgent with a spreading infection. But at Christus St. Elizabeth, the OB-GYN just continued antibiotic care. A half-hour later, as nurses placed a catheter, Fails noticed her daughter’s thighs were covered in blood.
At 10 a.m., Melissa McIntosh, a labor and delivery nurse, spoke to Totorica about Crain’s condition. The teen was now having contractions. “Dr. Totorica states to not move patient,” she wrote after talking with him. “Dr. Totorica states there is a slight chance patient may need to go to ICU and he wants the bedside ultrasound to be done stat for sure before admitting to room.”
Though he had already performed an ultrasound, he was asking for a second.
The first hadn’t preserved an image of Crain’s womb in the medical record. “Bedside ultrasounds aren’t always set up to save images permanently,” said Abbott, the Boston OB-GYN.
The state’s laws banning abortion require that doctors record the absence of a fetal heartbeat before intervening with a procedure that could end a pregnancy. Exceptions for medical emergencies demand physicians document their reasoning. “Pretty consistently, people say, ‘Until we can be absolutely certain this isn’t a normal pregnancy, we can’t do anything, because it could be alleged that we were doing an abortion,’” said Dr. Tony Ogburn, an OB-GYN in San Antonio.
At 10:40 a.m, Crain’s blood pressure was dropping. Minutes later, Totorica was paging for an emergency team over the loudspeakers.
Around 11 a.m., two hours after Crain had arrived at the hospital, a second ultrasound was performed. A nurse noted: “Bedside ultrasound at this time to confirm fetal demise per Dr. Totorica’s orders.”
When doctors wheeled Crain into the ICU at 11:20 a.m., Fails stayed by her side, rubbing her head, as her daughter dipped in and out of consciousness. Crain couldn’t sign consent forms for her care because of “extreme pain,” according to the records, so Fails signed a release for “unplanned dilation and curettage” or “unplanned cesarean section.”
But the doctors quickly decided it was now too risky to operate, according to records. They suspected that she had developed a dangerous complication of sepsis known as disseminated intravascular coagulation; she was bleeding internally.
Frantic and crying, Fails locked eyes with her daughter. “You’re strong, Nevaeh,” she said. “God made us strong.”
“The Law Is on Our Side”
Crain is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, ProPublica found.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has successfully made his state the only one in the country that isn’t required to follow the Biden administration’s efforts to ensure that emergency departments don’t turn away patients like Crain.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the administration issued guidance on how states with bans should follow the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. The federal law requires hospitals that receive funding through Medicare — which is virtually all of them — to stabilize or transfer anyone who arrives in their emergency rooms. That goes for pregnant patients, the guidance argues, even if that means violating state law and providing an abortion.
Paxton responded by filing a lawsuit in 2022, saying the federal guidance “forces hospitals and doctors to commit crimes,” and was an “attempt to use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”
Part of the battle has centered on who is eligible for abortion. The federal EMTALA guidelines apply when the health of the pregnant patient is in “serious jeopardy.” That’s a wider range of circumstances than the Texas abortion restriction, which only makes exceptions for a “risk of death” or “a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”
The lawsuit worked its way through three layers of federal courts, and each time it was met by judges nominated by former President Donald Trump, whose court appointments were pivotal to overturning Roe v. Wade.
After U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix, a Trump appointee, quickly sided with Texas, Paxton celebrated the triumph over “left-wing bureaucrats in Washington.”
“The decision last night proves what we knew all along,” Paxton added. “The law is on our side.”
This year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the order in a ruling authored by Kurt D. Engelhardt, another judge nominated by Trump.
The Biden administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, urging the justices to make it clear that some emergency abortions are allowed.
Even amid news of preventable deaths related to abortion bans, the Supreme Court declined to do so last month.
Paxton called this “a major victory” for the state’s abortion ban.
He has also made clear that he will bring charges against physicians for performing abortions if he decides that the cases don’t fall within Texas’ narrow medical exceptions.
Last year, he sent a letter threatening to prosecute a doctor who had received court approval to provide an emergency abortion for a Dallas woman. He insisted that the doctor and her patient had not proven how, precisely, the patient’s condition threatened her life.
Many doctors say this kind of message has encouraged doctors to “punt” patients instead of treating them.
Since the abortion bans went into effect, an OB-GYN at a major hospital in San Antonio has seen an uptick in pregnant patients being sent to them from across Southern Texas, as they suffer from complications that could easily be treated close to home.
The well-resourced hospital is perceived to have more institutional support to provide abortions and miscarriage management, the doctor said. Other providers “are transferring those patients to our centers because, frankly, they don’t want to deal with them.”
After Crain died, Fails couldn’t stop thinking about how Christus Southeast Hospital had ignored her daughter’s condition. “She was bleeding,” she said. “Why didn’t they do anything to help it along instead of wait for another ultrasound to confirm the baby is dead?”
It was the medical examiner, not the doctors at the hospital, who removed Lillian from Crain’s womb. His autopsy didn’t resolve Fails’ lingering questions about what the hospitals missed and why. He called the death “natural” and attributed it to “complications of pregnancy.” He did note, however, that Crain was “repeatedly seeking medical care for a progressive illness” just before she died.
It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted Nevaeh Crain, 18, as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least two Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.
Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.
Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.
The first hospital diagnosed her with strep throat without investigating her sharp abdominal cramps. At the second, she screened positive for sepsis, a life-threatening and fast-moving reaction to an infection, medical records show. But doctors said her six-month fetus had a heartbeat and that Crain was fine to leave.
Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care.
By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.
Hours later, she was dead.
Fails, who would have seen her daughter turn 20 this Friday, still cannot understand why Crain’s emergency was not treated like an emergency.
But that is what many pregnant women are now facing in states with strict abortion bans, doctors and lawyers have told ProPublica.
“Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor emerita at George Washington University.
Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions, but still, doctors told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients with complications.
In states with abortion bans, such patients are sometimes bounced between hospitals like “hot potatoes,” with health care providers reluctant to participate in treatment that could attract a prosecutor, doctors told ProPublica. In some cases, medical teams are wasting precious time debating legalities and creating documentation, preparing for the possibility that they’ll need to explain their actions to a jury and judge.
Dr. Jodi Abbott, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Boston University School of Medicine, said patients are left wondering: “Am I being sent home because I really am OK? Or am I being sent home because they’re afraid that the solution to what’s going on with my pregnancy would be ending the pregnancy, and they’re not allowed to do that?”
There is a federal law to prevent emergency room doctors from withholding lifesaving care.
Passed nearly four decades ago, it requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients in medical crises. The Biden administration argues this mandate applies even in cases where an abortion might be necessary.
No state has done more to fight this interpretation than Texas, which has warned doctors that its abortion ban supersedes the administration’s guidance on federal law, and that they can face up to 99 years in prison for violating it.
ProPublica condensed more than 800 pages of Crain’s medical records into a four-page timeline in consultation with two maternal-fetal medicine specialists; reporters reviewed it with nine doctors, including researchers at prestigious universities, OB-GYNs who regularly handle miscarriages, and experts in emergency medicine and maternal health.
Some said the first ER missed warning signs of infection that deserved attention. All said that the doctor at the second hospital should never have sent Crain home when her signs of sepsis hadn’t improved. And when she returned for the third time, all said there was no medical reason to make her wait for two ultrasounds before taking aggressive action to save her.
“This is how these restrictions kill women,” said Dr. Dara Kass, a former regional director at the Department of Health and Human Services and an emergency room physician in New York. “It is never just one decision, it’s never just one doctor, it’s never just one nurse.”
While they were not certain from looking at the records provided that Crain’s death could have been prevented, they said it may have been possible to save both the teenager and her fetus if she had been admitted earlier for close monitoring and continuous treatment.
There was a chance Crain could have remained pregnant, they said. If she had needed an early delivery, the hospital was well-equipped to care for a baby on the edge of viability. In another scenario, if the infection had gone too far, ending the pregnancy might have been necessary to save Crain.
Doctors involved in Crain’s care did not respond to several requests for comment. The two hospitals, Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas and Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth, declined to answer detailed lists of questions about her treatment.
Fails and Crain believed abortion was morally wrong. The teen could only support it in the context of rape or life-threatening illness, she used to tell her mother. They didn’t care whether the government banned it, just how their Christian faith guided their own actions.
When they discovered Crain was pregnant with a girl, the two talked endlessly about the little dresses they could buy, what kind of mother she would be. Crain landed on the name Lillian. Fails could not wait to meet her.
But when her daughter got sick, Fails expected that doctors had an obligation to do everything in their power to stave off a potentially deadly emergency, even if that meant losing Lillian. In her view, they were more concerned with checking the fetal heartbeat than attending to Crain.
“I know it sounds selfish, and God knows I would rather have both of them, but if I had to choose,” Fails said, “I would have chosen my daughter.”
“I’m in a Lot of Pain”
Crain had just graduated from high school in her hometown of Vidor, Texas, in May of 2023 when she learned that she was pregnant.
She and her boyfriend of two years, Randall Broussard, were always hip to hip, wrestling over vapes or snuggling on the couch watching vampire movies. Crain was drawn to how gentle he was. He admired how easily she built friendships and how quickly she could make people laugh. Though they were young, they’d already imagined starting a family. Broussard, who has eight siblings, wanted many kids; Crain wanted a daughter and the kind of relationship she had with her mom. Earlier that year, Broussard had given Crain a small diamond ring — “a promise,” he told her, “that I will always love you.”
On the morning of their baby shower, Oct. 28, 2023, Crain woke with a headache. Her mom decorated the house with pink balloons and Crain laid out Halloween-themed platters. Soon, nausea set in. Crain started vomiting and was running a fever. When guests arrived, Broussard opened gifts — onesies and diapers and bows — while Crain kept closing her eyes.
Around 3 p.m., her family told her she needed to go to the hospital.
Broussard drove Crain to Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas. They sat in the waiting room for four hours. When Crain started vomiting, staff brought her a plastic pan. When she wasn’t retching, she lay her head in her boyfriend’s lap.
New here?
A nurse practitioner ordered a test for strep throat, which came back positive, medical records show. But in a pregnant patient, abdominal pain and vomiting should not be quickly attributed to strep, physicians told ProPublica; a doctor should have also evaluated her pregnancy.
Instead, Baptist Hospitals discharged her with a prescription for antibiotics. She was home at 9 p.m. and quickly dozed off, but within hours, she woke her mother up. “Mom, my stomach is still hurting,” she said into the dark bedroom at 3 a.m. “I’m in a lot of pain.”
Fails drove Broussard and Crain to another hospital in town, Christus Southeast Texas St. Elizabeth. Around 4:20 a.m., OB-GYN William Hawkins saw that Crain had a temperature of 102.8 and an abnormally high pulse, according to records; a nurse noted that Crain rated her abdominal pain as a seven out of 10.
Her vital signs pointed to possible sepsis, records show. It’s standard medical practice to immediately treat patients who show signs of sepsis, which can overtake and kill a person quickly, medical experts told ProPublica. These patients should be watched until their vitals improve. Through tests and scans, the goal is to find the source of the infection. If the infection was in Crain’s uterus, the fetus would likely need to be removed with a surgery.
In a room at the obstetric emergency department, a nurse wrapped a sensor belt around Crain’s belly to check the fetal heart rate. “Baby’s fine,” Broussard told Fails, who was sitting in the hallway.
After two hours of IV fluids, one dose of antibiotics, and some Tylenol, Crain’s fever didn’t go down, her pulse remained high, and the fetal heart rate was abnormally fast, medical records show. Hawkins noted that Crain had strep and a urinary tract infection, wrote up a prescription and discharged her.
Hawkins had missed infections before. Eight years earlier, the Texas Medical Board found that he had failed to diagnose appendicitis in one patient and syphilis in another. In the latter case, the board noted that his error “may have contributed to the fetal demise of one of her twins.” The board issued an order to have Hawkins’ medical practice monitored; the order was lifted two years later. (Hawkins did not respond to several attempts to reach him.)
All of the doctors who reviewed Crain’s vital signs for ProPublica said she should have been admitted. “She should have never left, never left,” said Elise Boos, an OB-GYN in Tennessee.
Kass, the New York emergency physician, put it in starker terms: When they discharged her, they were “pushing her down the path of no return.”
“It’s bullshit,” Fails said as Broussard rolled Crain out in a wheelchair; she was unable to walk on her own. Fails had expected the hospital to keep her overnight. Her daughter was breathing heavily, hunched over in pain, pale in the face. Normally talkative, the teen was quiet.
Back home, around 7 a.m., Fails tried to get her daughter comfortable as she cried and moaned. She told Fails she needed to pee, and her mother helped her into the bathroom. “Mom, come here,” she said from the toilet. Blood stained her underwear.
The blood confirmed Fails’ instinct: This was a miscarriage.
At 9 a.m, a full day after the nausea began, they were back at Christus St. Elizabeth. Crain’s lips were drained of color and she kept saying she was going to pass out. Staff started her on IV antibiotics and performed a bedside ultrasound.
Around 9:30 a.m., the OB on duty, Dr. Marcelo Totorica, couldn’t find a fetal heart rate, according to records; he told the family he was sorry for their loss.
Standard protocol when a critically ill patient experiences a miscarriage is to stabilize her and, in most cases, hurry to the operating room for delivery, medical experts said. This is especially urgent with a spreading infection. But at Christus St. Elizabeth, the OB-GYN just continued antibiotic care. A half-hour later, as nurses placed a catheter, Fails noticed her daughter’s thighs were covered in blood.
At 10 a.m., Melissa McIntosh, a labor and delivery nurse, spoke to Totorica about Crain’s condition. The teen was now having contractions. “Dr. Totorica states to not move patient,” she wrote after talking with him. “Dr. Totorica states there is a slight chance patient may need to go to ICU and he wants the bedside ultrasound to be done stat for sure before admitting to room.”
Though he had already performed an ultrasound, he was asking for a second.
The first hadn’t preserved an image of Crain’s womb in the medical record. “Bedside ultrasounds aren’t always set up to save images permanently,” said Abbott, the Boston OB-GYN.
The state’s laws banning abortion require that doctors record the absence of a fetal heartbeat before intervening with a procedure that could end a pregnancy. Exceptions for medical emergencies demand physicians document their reasoning. “Pretty consistently, people say, ‘Until we can be absolutely certain this isn’t a normal pregnancy, we can’t do anything, because it could be alleged that we were doing an abortion,’” said Dr. Tony Ogburn, an OB-GYN in San Antonio.
At 10:40 a.m, Crain’s blood pressure was dropping. Minutes later, Totorica was paging for an emergency team over the loudspeakers.
Around 11 a.m., two hours after Crain had arrived at the hospital, a second ultrasound was performed. A nurse noted: “Bedside ultrasound at this time to confirm fetal demise per Dr. Totorica’s orders.”
When doctors wheeled Crain into the ICU at 11:20 a.m., Fails stayed by her side, rubbing her head, as her daughter dipped in and out of consciousness. Crain couldn’t sign consent forms for her care because of “extreme pain,” according to the records, so Fails signed a release for “unplanned dilation and curettage” or “unplanned cesarean section.”
But the doctors quickly decided it was now too risky to operate, according to records. They suspected that she had developed a dangerous complication of sepsis known as disseminated intravascular coagulation; she was bleeding internally.
Frantic and crying, Fails locked eyes with her daughter. “You’re strong, Nevaeh,” she said. “God made us strong.”
“The Law Is on Our Side”
Crain is one of at least two pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed treating miscarriages, ProPublica found.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has successfully made his state the only one in the country that isn’t required to follow the Biden administration’s efforts to ensure that emergency departments don’t turn away patients like Crain.
After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, the administration issued guidance on how states with bans should follow the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. The federal law requires hospitals that receive funding through Medicare — which is virtually all of them — to stabilize or transfer anyone who arrives in their emergency rooms. That goes for pregnant patients, the guidance argues, even if that means violating state law and providing an abortion.
Paxton responded by filing a lawsuit in 2022, saying the federal guidance “forces hospitals and doctors to commit crimes,” and was an “attempt to use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”
Part of the battle has centered on who is eligible for abortion. The federal EMTALA guidelines apply when the health of the pregnant patient is in “serious jeopardy.” That’s a wider range of circumstances than the Texas abortion restriction, which only makes exceptions for a “risk of death” or “a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”
The lawsuit worked its way through three layers of federal courts, and each time it was met by judges nominated by former President Donald Trump, whose court appointments were pivotal to overturning Roe v. Wade.
After U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix, a Trump appointee, quickly sided with Texas, Paxton celebrated the triumph over “left-wing bureaucrats in Washington.”
“The decision last night proves what we knew all along,” Paxton added. “The law is on our side.”
This year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the order in a ruling authored by Kurt D. Engelhardt, another judge nominated by Trump.
The Biden administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, urging the justices to make it clear that some emergency abortions are allowed.
Even amid news of preventable deaths related to abortion bans, the Supreme Court declined to do so last month.
Paxton called this “a major victory” for the state’s abortion ban.
He has also made clear that he will bring charges against physicians for performing abortions if he decides that the cases don’t fall within Texas’ narrow medical exceptions.
Last year, he sent a letter threatening to prosecute a doctor who had received court approval to provide an emergency abortion for a Dallas woman. He insisted that the doctor and her patient had not proven how, precisely, the patient’s condition threatened her life.
Many doctors say this kind of message has encouraged doctors to “punt” patients instead of treating them.
Since the abortion bans went into effect, an OB-GYN at a major hospital in San Antonio has seen an uptick in pregnant patients being sent to them from across Southern Texas, as they suffer from complications that could easily be treated close to home.
The well-resourced hospital is perceived to have more institutional support to provide abortions and miscarriage management, the doctor said. Other providers “are transferring those patients to our centers because, frankly, they don’t want to deal with them.”
After Crain died, Fails couldn’t stop thinking about how Christus Southeast Hospital had ignored her daughter’s condition. “She was bleeding,” she said. “Why didn’t they do anything to help it along instead of wait for another ultrasound to confirm the baby is dead?”
It was the medical examiner, not the doctors at the hospital, who removed Lillian from Crain’s womb. His autopsy didn’t resolve Fails’ lingering questions about what the hospitals missed and why. He called the death “natural” and attributed it to “complications of pregnancy.” He did note, however, that Crain was “repeatedly seeking medical care for a progressive illness” just before she died.
Last November, Fails reached out to medical malpractice lawyers to see about getting justice through the courts. A different legal barrier now stood in her way.
If Crain had experienced these same delays as an inpatient, Fails would have needed to establish that the hospital violated medical standards. That, she believed, she could do. But because the delays and discharges occurred in an area of the hospital classified as an emergency room, lawyers said that Texas law set a much higher burden of proof: “willful and wanton negligence.”
No lawyer has agreed to take the case.
If Crain had experienced these same delays as an inpatient, Fails would have needed to establish that the hospital violated medical standards. That, she believed, she could do. But because the delays and discharges occurred in an area of the hospital classified as an emergency room, lawyers said that Texas law set a much higher burden of proof: “willful and wanton negligence.”
No lawyer has agreed to take the case.
How Bad?
Pretty fuckin' bad.
JD Vance called for ‘federal response’ to block women from traveling for abortions
VP nominee pushed baseless warning in 2022 that George Soros would pack planes of Black women to get abortions
JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Donald Trump’s running mate, promoted a baseless rightwing talking point in 2022 when he warned of George Soros-funded planes transporting Black women across state lines for abortions.
“I’m sympathetic to the view that like, okay, look here, here’s a situation – let’s say Roe v Wade is overruled,” Vance said in a recently resurfaced podcast interview. “Ohio bans abortion in 2022, or let’s say 2024. And then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity – uh, that’s kind of creepy.”
The US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022. Vance’s statements echo a common anti-abortion talking point accusing abortion providers and their supporters of targeting people of color.
Black women did seek abortions at a higher rate before Roe fell, but public health experts say that this is far from proof of a racist conspiracy. They point to a number systemic factors – for example, Black women are more likely to live in areas where it’s harder to access contraception. They are also disproportionately harmed by abortion bans.
Vance continued: “And, and it’s like, if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening? Because it’s really creepy. And I’m pretty sympathetic to that actually. So, you know, how hopefully we get to a point where Ohio bans abortion in California and the Soroses of the world respect it.”
While Open Society Foundations, which was founded by Soros, does support reproductive rights, the billionaire philanthropist is not directing planes to swoop up Black women for abortions. He has been the target of antisemitic conspiracy theories for years.
Vance’s comments were reported by CNN. On Thursday evening, Kamala Harris’s campaign posted audio of the remarks on X.
Vance’s record on abortion has come under national scrutiny since Trump picked the Hillbilly Elegy author as his vice-presidential running mate. In 2022, Vance suggested he would support a national 15-week abortion ban with exceptions. But, like other Republicans wary of the political fallout of Roe’s demise, Vance has more recently sought to soften his position and said in an interview that “we have to accept people do not want abortion bans”. He has also expressed support for the availability of mifepristone, a common abortion pill, and said he agrees with Trump’s position that states should decide their own abortion laws. (Trump has flip-flopped on this stance.)
But in January 2023, Vance signed ont o a letter urging the Department of Justice to use the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law, to ban the mailing of abortion pills nationwide. Since Roe’s fall, anti-abortion activists have begun claiming that the Comstock Act remains good law and can be used to enforce a federal abortion ban. Project 2025, a wish list for a conservative administration written by the influential thinktank Heritage Foundation, reiterates this argument.
“Senator Vance has made his position clear: he agrees with President Trump that each state should have the chance to individually set their own abortion laws,” Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Vance, said in a statement. “Desperate attacks from Democrats will not distract voters from the deadly effects of Kamala’s wide-open border, the untenable cost of living caused by her inflationary spending or any other aspect of her far-left, radical agenda.”
JD Vance: from 'never-Trump guy' to vice-presidential candidate – video profile
Vance’s vice-presidential run is off to a rocky start, and he has spent the last week haunted by other resurfaced remarks. In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, Vance said that the United States and the Democratic party wwere run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies, who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too”.
He then named Harris, who has two step-children, as an example, along with Pete Buttigieg (who has since had children) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he said. “And how does it make sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Those comments have provoked an uproar, drawing condemnation even from relatively apolitical celebrities like Jennifer Aniston. Kerstin Emhoff, the ex-wife of Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff, called the attacks on the presumptive Democratic nominee “baseless” and praised her co-parenting. In an Instagram story, Harris’s step-daughter Ella Emhoff posted: “I love my three parents.”
From back in July. Funny how this kinda thing barely sees the light of day.
VP nominee pushed baseless warning in 2022 that George Soros would pack planes of Black women to get abortions
JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Donald Trump’s running mate, promoted a baseless rightwing talking point in 2022 when he warned of George Soros-funded planes transporting Black women across state lines for abortions.
“I’m sympathetic to the view that like, okay, look here, here’s a situation – let’s say Roe v Wade is overruled,” Vance said in a recently resurfaced podcast interview. “Ohio bans abortion in 2022, or let’s say 2024. And then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity – uh, that’s kind of creepy.”
The US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022. Vance’s statements echo a common anti-abortion talking point accusing abortion providers and their supporters of targeting people of color.
Black women did seek abortions at a higher rate before Roe fell, but public health experts say that this is far from proof of a racist conspiracy. They point to a number systemic factors – for example, Black women are more likely to live in areas where it’s harder to access contraception. They are also disproportionately harmed by abortion bans.
Vance continued: “And, and it’s like, if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening? Because it’s really creepy. And I’m pretty sympathetic to that actually. So, you know, how hopefully we get to a point where Ohio bans abortion in California and the Soroses of the world respect it.”
While Open Society Foundations, which was founded by Soros, does support reproductive rights, the billionaire philanthropist is not directing planes to swoop up Black women for abortions. He has been the target of antisemitic conspiracy theories for years.
Vance’s comments were reported by CNN. On Thursday evening, Kamala Harris’s campaign posted audio of the remarks on X.
Vance’s record on abortion has come under national scrutiny since Trump picked the Hillbilly Elegy author as his vice-presidential running mate. In 2022, Vance suggested he would support a national 15-week abortion ban with exceptions. But, like other Republicans wary of the political fallout of Roe’s demise, Vance has more recently sought to soften his position and said in an interview that “we have to accept people do not want abortion bans”. He has also expressed support for the availability of mifepristone, a common abortion pill, and said he agrees with Trump’s position that states should decide their own abortion laws. (Trump has flip-flopped on this stance.)
But in January 2023, Vance signed ont o a letter urging the Department of Justice to use the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law, to ban the mailing of abortion pills nationwide. Since Roe’s fall, anti-abortion activists have begun claiming that the Comstock Act remains good law and can be used to enforce a federal abortion ban. Project 2025, a wish list for a conservative administration written by the influential thinktank Heritage Foundation, reiterates this argument.
“Senator Vance has made his position clear: he agrees with President Trump that each state should have the chance to individually set their own abortion laws,” Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Vance, said in a statement. “Desperate attacks from Democrats will not distract voters from the deadly effects of Kamala’s wide-open border, the untenable cost of living caused by her inflationary spending or any other aspect of her far-left, radical agenda.”
JD Vance: from 'never-Trump guy' to vice-presidential candidate – video profile
Vance’s vice-presidential run is off to a rocky start, and he has spent the last week haunted by other resurfaced remarks. In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, Vance said that the United States and the Democratic party wwere run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies, who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too”.
He then named Harris, who has two step-children, as an example, along with Pete Buttigieg (who has since had children) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he said. “And how does it make sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”
Those comments have provoked an uproar, drawing condemnation even from relatively apolitical celebrities like Jennifer Aniston. Kerstin Emhoff, the ex-wife of Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff, called the attacks on the presumptive Democratic nominee “baseless” and praised her co-parenting. In an Instagram story, Harris’s step-daughter Ella Emhoff posted: “I love my three parents.”
Oct 28, 2024
Oct 25, 2024
Sep 25, 2024
Womenfolk
note: there may be some major problems with the way the numbers are reported, the data is processed, and then what the studies actually are able to conclude.
But that doesn't change the facts on the ground in most instances:
Between 2019 and 2022, the death rate among pregnant women in Texas went up 56%, compared with 11% across the US.
Again, there are discrepancies, etc. But we know the number of women dying during pregnancy is up in a state where there have been some pretty shitty changes in how pregnant women are treated when they present with health problems.
So the question is: How bad does it have to get before we kick in a few doors and make some of these assholes change the fucking law?
Jul 29, 2024
Racist Is As Racist Does
They say "DEI token hire" so they can pretend they're not thinking "ni@@er".
Anybody else think it's a little odd that the Non-Woke, Anti-PC folks are being so woke and PC?
And BTW - are they saying that every women with a job is a DEI case?
- Every employee with brown skin?
- Every disabled vet working a job?
- Every minority in college?
- Every Latina with her own business?
- Every woman with her own mortgage?
- Every Muslim with a car loan?
They might as well be telling us straight out that they think no one is qualified for anything - nobody deserves, or could possibly have earned anything - if they're not a white man.
They get criticized for their racist attitudes, and they defend themselves in the most racist, misogynist, hateful way possible.
When you say ignorant hateful things
about a woman in a position of power
she doesn't hear you.
But your mom hears you
Your sisters hear you
Your aunts and nieces hear you
Your daughter hears you
And it tells them something
about you
Jul 2, 2024
Jun 27, 2024
May 23, 2024
Nov 26, 2022
It's Not About Babies
It was never about babies.
Stacey Freeman was incarcerated for using drugs during pregnancy. But she wasn't pregnant.
Freeman, who lives in Gallant, Alabama, was being investigated by the Etowah County Department of Human Resources (DHR) for alleged drug use in January. During the investigation, one of her daughters told a DHR worker her mother was pregnant, according to a lawsuit Freeman filed against the Etowah County Sheriff's Office on November 7.
A caseworker confronted Freeman, who denied that she was pregnant and offered to take a pregnancy test at the courthouse. She did not get one.
Instead, the mother was arrested for chemical endangerment of a child and booked into the Etowah County Detention Center. She was left to sleep on the jail floor for 36 hours. Meanwhile, she was undergoing her menstrual cycle and asked for pads, which never came. She was told that her bond would be $10,000.
"It's just not even thinkable you could go off somebody's word to make an arrest of somebody being pregnant," Freeman's attorney Martin Weinberg told Newsweek. "You know, you're criminalizing pregnancy, then you find out they're not even pregnant."
The chemical endangerment of a child charge is based on the principle of "fetal personhood," a provision enshrined in the Alabama constitution. Since 2010, Etowah County has prosecuted more than 150 chemical endangerment cases involving pregnant and postpartum women, according to Weinberg.
Each of these women was held on a $10,000 cash bond and could not leave until they entered a drug rehabilitation program—bail conditions that are unconstitutional, said Freeman's lawsuit.
Over the last 23 years, prosecutors in Alabama have embraced some form of "fetal personhood" to bring criminal charges over a miscarriage or stillbirth in at least 20 felony cases, according to an analysis of court records and medical examiner data by The Marshall Project. Many of these prosecutions ended in lengthy prison sentences for women who were mostly poor and struggling with addiction.
Freeman was finally given a pregnancy test in her jail cell, which determined that she was not pregnant. She was questioned by Etowah County Sheriff Investigator Brandi Fuller for 20 minutes and allowed to leave—but not before the investigator "threatened, warned, and admonished Freeman" that she would be charged if Fuller discovered she was pregnant in the next several months, according to the lawsuit.
Weinberg said that Freeman has struggled with humiliation in her small, close-knit community since she was released.
"It's traumatizing, it's not something that somebody gets over," he said. "It's not a good thing for people to think you're on drugs and pregnant...she would not do that. That's her position, that 'I would not put somebody that I'm carrying to life in that position.'"
Newsweek reached out to the Etowah County Sheriff's Office for comment.
READ MORE
And just where the fuck did anybody think this shit was headed?
Freeman, who lives in Gallant, Alabama, was being investigated by the Etowah County Department of Human Resources (DHR) for alleged drug use in January. During the investigation, one of her daughters told a DHR worker her mother was pregnant, according to a lawsuit Freeman filed against the Etowah County Sheriff's Office on November 7.
A caseworker confronted Freeman, who denied that she was pregnant and offered to take a pregnancy test at the courthouse. She did not get one.
Instead, the mother was arrested for chemical endangerment of a child and booked into the Etowah County Detention Center. She was left to sleep on the jail floor for 36 hours. Meanwhile, she was undergoing her menstrual cycle and asked for pads, which never came. She was told that her bond would be $10,000.
"It's just not even thinkable you could go off somebody's word to make an arrest of somebody being pregnant," Freeman's attorney Martin Weinberg told Newsweek. "You know, you're criminalizing pregnancy, then you find out they're not even pregnant."
The chemical endangerment of a child charge is based on the principle of "fetal personhood," a provision enshrined in the Alabama constitution. Since 2010, Etowah County has prosecuted more than 150 chemical endangerment cases involving pregnant and postpartum women, according to Weinberg.
Each of these women was held on a $10,000 cash bond and could not leave until they entered a drug rehabilitation program—bail conditions that are unconstitutional, said Freeman's lawsuit.
Over the last 23 years, prosecutors in Alabama have embraced some form of "fetal personhood" to bring criminal charges over a miscarriage or stillbirth in at least 20 felony cases, according to an analysis of court records and medical examiner data by The Marshall Project. Many of these prosecutions ended in lengthy prison sentences for women who were mostly poor and struggling with addiction.
Freeman was finally given a pregnancy test in her jail cell, which determined that she was not pregnant. She was questioned by Etowah County Sheriff Investigator Brandi Fuller for 20 minutes and allowed to leave—but not before the investigator "threatened, warned, and admonished Freeman" that she would be charged if Fuller discovered she was pregnant in the next several months, according to the lawsuit.
Weinberg said that Freeman has struggled with humiliation in her small, close-knit community since she was released.
"It's traumatizing, it's not something that somebody gets over," he said. "It's not a good thing for people to think you're on drugs and pregnant...she would not do that. That's her position, that 'I would not put somebody that I'm carrying to life in that position.'"
Newsweek reached out to the Etowah County Sheriff's Office for comment.
May 10, 2022
Today's Tweet
Follow the thread for a little history lesson - one we all should know.
"Justice Alito's invocation of Sir Matthew Hale in his leaked majority opinion is so, so much more fucked up than people realize. I'm a professor with a PhD, and my area of expertise happens to be women and gender in the early modern era (1500-1700). Here is what you need to know
— I'm still wearing my mask (@Kim_Kamensky) May 10, 2022
Sep 30, 2021
The Gov's Loves
Here's the thing: I don't care about this. I care that Kristi Noem is a blindly ambitious Trump-sucking lying sack of shit, and personally, I wouldn't fuck her with somebody else's dick, but she didn't ask me, so it's none of my fuckin' business who she physically fucks - I'm only interested in her not fucking us in ways that are political and financial and a few other figuratives.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem dismisses conservative website’s claims of extramarital affair with former Trump adviser
South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) on Wednesday dismissed a conservative media outlet’s claim that she is having an extramarital affair with Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump adviser who is also advising Noem.
“These rumors are total garbage and a disgusting lie,” Noem said in a tweet. “These old, tired attacks on conservative women are based on a falsehood that we can’t achieve anything without a man’s help. I love Bryon. I’m proud of the God-fearing family we’ve raised together. Now I’m getting back to work.”
A conservative website, American Greatness, published a piece Tuesday claiming that, according to “multiple” sources, Noem has been having an affair with Lewandowski “for months.” The website did not identify any of the sources.
Lewandowski was Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign manager. He was fired by the campaign in 2016 but remains part of the former president’s inner circle and ran the pro-Trump Make America Great Again Action super PAC.
Noem and Lewandowski have traveled extensively together across the country for political events, and he has promoted her to members of the media. At one event in January, they were spotted partying together late in a hotel bar.
Separately, a Trump donor is accusing Lewandowski of repeatedly groping her and making unwanted sexual comments at a charity event in Las Vegas last week.
“He repeatedly touched me inappropriately, said vile and disgusting things to me, stalked me, and made me feel violated and fearful,” the donor, Trashelle Odom, said in a statement provided to The Washington Post.
“Corey bragged multiple times about how powerful he is, and how he can get anyone elected, inferring he was the reason Trump became President,” she added. “Corey claimed that he controls access to the former president. He said he is in charge of the donors and the Super PAC. . . . He also made it clear that if he was crossed, he has the power to destroy anyone and ruin their lives.”
The accusations were first reported by Politico.
Late Wednesday, a spokesman for Trump said Lewandowski has been pushed out of the former president’s political operation after the allegations.
“Corey Lewandowski will be going on to other endeavors and we very much want to thank him for his service. He will no longer be associated with Trump World,” Taylor Budowich, Trump’s director of communications, wrote in a message on Twitter.
Budowich said former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi will run the pro-Trump super PAC.
John Odom, Odom’s husband, said that he wants “accountability now” from Lewandowski and that the couple is exploring their legal options “to make sure he cannot harm anyone else.”
“Corey called me on Monday evening,” John Odom said in a statement. “He sounded distraught and scared. He said he had been intoxicated. He was sorry for his actions, wanted to know how he could make it go away, and that he would do anything to make it right with Trashelle and our family.”
The Odoms’ statements were provided by a public relations person representing them. The couple themselves could not be reached for comment.
David Chesnoff, a Las Vegas-based attorney for Lewandowski, said in an email Wednesday afternoon: “Accusations and rumors appear to be morphing by the minute and we will not dignify them with a further response.”
Noem, who is considered a potential 2024 GOP vice-presidential contender, has recently come under scrutiny for a meeting she organized for her daughter and the state employee charged with leading the agency that moved to deny her application to become a certified real estate appraiser. The meeting prompted allegations of abuse of power among some state lawmakers, and South Dakota’s attorney general, Jason Ravnsborg, is reviewing the matter.
It’s not clear what steps Ravnsborg plans to take, and his office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.
Noem reportedly organized a meeting in her office on July 27, 2020, to discuss “appraiser certification procedures” that included her daughter Kassidy Noem-Peters; Sherry Bren, head of the South Dakota Department of Labor and Regulation’s appraiser certification program; Bren’s supervisor; and South Dakota Labor Secretary Marcia Hultman.
While Noem’s daughter secured her certification months later, in November 2020, Bren says she was subsequently pushed to retire in a conversation with Hultman. That’s according to an age-discrimination complaint Bren eventually filed against the Department of Labor and Regulation.
Bren settled with the state for $200,000 on March 31, but the department did not admit fault, and she agreed not to disparage it in public, according to a copy of the complaint shared by South Dakota Public Broadcasting.
That said, it's always a little interesting to watch when these weird little spats break out.
WaPo: (pay wall)
South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R) on Wednesday dismissed a conservative media outlet’s claim that she is having an extramarital affair with Corey Lewandowski, a former Trump adviser who is also advising Noem.
“These rumors are total garbage and a disgusting lie,” Noem said in a tweet. “These old, tired attacks on conservative women are based on a falsehood that we can’t achieve anything without a man’s help. I love Bryon. I’m proud of the God-fearing family we’ve raised together. Now I’m getting back to work.”
A conservative website, American Greatness, published a piece Tuesday claiming that, according to “multiple” sources, Noem has been having an affair with Lewandowski “for months.” The website did not identify any of the sources.
Lewandowski was Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign manager. He was fired by the campaign in 2016 but remains part of the former president’s inner circle and ran the pro-Trump Make America Great Again Action super PAC.
Noem and Lewandowski have traveled extensively together across the country for political events, and he has promoted her to members of the media. At one event in January, they were spotted partying together late in a hotel bar.
Separately, a Trump donor is accusing Lewandowski of repeatedly groping her and making unwanted sexual comments at a charity event in Las Vegas last week.
“He repeatedly touched me inappropriately, said vile and disgusting things to me, stalked me, and made me feel violated and fearful,” the donor, Trashelle Odom, said in a statement provided to The Washington Post.
“Corey bragged multiple times about how powerful he is, and how he can get anyone elected, inferring he was the reason Trump became President,” she added. “Corey claimed that he controls access to the former president. He said he is in charge of the donors and the Super PAC. . . . He also made it clear that if he was crossed, he has the power to destroy anyone and ruin their lives.”
The accusations were first reported by Politico.
Late Wednesday, a spokesman for Trump said Lewandowski has been pushed out of the former president’s political operation after the allegations.
“Corey Lewandowski will be going on to other endeavors and we very much want to thank him for his service. He will no longer be associated with Trump World,” Taylor Budowich, Trump’s director of communications, wrote in a message on Twitter.
Budowich said former Florida attorney general Pam Bondi will run the pro-Trump super PAC.
John Odom, Odom’s husband, said that he wants “accountability now” from Lewandowski and that the couple is exploring their legal options “to make sure he cannot harm anyone else.”
“Corey called me on Monday evening,” John Odom said in a statement. “He sounded distraught and scared. He said he had been intoxicated. He was sorry for his actions, wanted to know how he could make it go away, and that he would do anything to make it right with Trashelle and our family.”
The Odoms’ statements were provided by a public relations person representing them. The couple themselves could not be reached for comment.
David Chesnoff, a Las Vegas-based attorney for Lewandowski, said in an email Wednesday afternoon: “Accusations and rumors appear to be morphing by the minute and we will not dignify them with a further response.”
Noem, who is considered a potential 2024 GOP vice-presidential contender, has recently come under scrutiny for a meeting she organized for her daughter and the state employee charged with leading the agency that moved to deny her application to become a certified real estate appraiser. The meeting prompted allegations of abuse of power among some state lawmakers, and South Dakota’s attorney general, Jason Ravnsborg, is reviewing the matter.
It’s not clear what steps Ravnsborg plans to take, and his office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Post.
Noem reportedly organized a meeting in her office on July 27, 2020, to discuss “appraiser certification procedures” that included her daughter Kassidy Noem-Peters; Sherry Bren, head of the South Dakota Department of Labor and Regulation’s appraiser certification program; Bren’s supervisor; and South Dakota Labor Secretary Marcia Hultman.
While Noem’s daughter secured her certification months later, in November 2020, Bren says she was subsequently pushed to retire in a conversation with Hultman. That’s according to an age-discrimination complaint Bren eventually filed against the Department of Labor and Regulation.
Bren settled with the state for $200,000 on March 31, but the department did not admit fault, and she agreed not to disparage it in public, according to a copy of the complaint shared by South Dakota Public Broadcasting.
Cynical Mike says there's prob'ly not much beyond the sound and fury of it all, but that doesn't really matter. It's easy to see how maybe Lewandowski was tasked with wheedling his way in, getting kinda close with Noem - then making sure people picked up on how they seemed "a bit too close", which then creates a very convenient opportunity to slam a woman who's been making noises about challenging Trump for supremacy in the GOP.
Ain't it kinda funny:
Dems will fight each other hammer-n-tong about policy and approach, while Republicans seem to spend their time and energy concentrating on what everybody's doing with their slippery parts.
And also too - there's something oddly reassuring about how this story just ain't got the legs. Like maybe all this Make-Her-A-Slut-And-Then-Shame-Her-For-It nonsense is starting to lose its oomph as a political weapon. Worth pondering.
BTW - #BothSidesDont
Dec 14, 2020
Today's Fallacy
Along the same lines, I gotta ask myself - how come we've seen the First Lady's tits, but not the president's tax records?
Today in unasked-for opinions offered apropos of nothing: One man is so agitated over Jill Biden’s designation as a doctor of education that he recently wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed advising her to “forthwith drop the doc.” Entitled, “Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not If You Need an M.D.,” the essay’s author — Joseph Epstein, formerly the editor of the American Scholar — argues that Biden’s title “sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” By his own admission, Epstein lacks “a doctorate or any advanced degree,” but seems to consider himself an expert on the matter nonetheless.
“Madame First Lady — Mrs. Biden — Jill — kiddo,” he opens his address to Biden, a 69-year-old woman. In short, Epstein believes “no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child.” He also suggests that Biden’s Ed.D. inherently holds less prestige than a Ph.D., a degree that has in turn been “diminished by the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university education generally.” (At least in Epstein’s eyes.) And don’t even get him started on the purported farce that is the honorary doctorate!
To be clear, though, Biden’s doctorate is not honorary. She earned it, along with two Master’s Degrees, and plans to continue working as a community college professor during her time as First Lady, just as she did when she was Second Lady. No other FLOTUS has continued her pre-existing career while in office, and critics of the op-ed have decried it as emblematic of sexism in academia. On Twitter, where the piece has been trending after its publication on Friday, soon-to-be First Gentleman Doug Emhoff speculated that “this story would never have been written about a man.”
Some jagoff wrote an OpEd piece for WSJ that said, basically, Jill Biden should stop being so gosh darn smart with her high-falutin' credentials and all.
Of course the False Equivalence fallacy comes in, because corporate media need desperately to keep us convinced that it's all the same - both sides - if the left can slam Melania for being an apparent gold-digging, mail order sex doll dressed up as a fashion model when actually she's most likely a Kremlin plant to help them wrangle Donald Trump, then the right gets to bash a woman of real substance, and OK, we'll call it a draw.
It's just such bullshit. All day every day.
First:
Maybe the guy isn't someone to be referred to as "some jagoff", but sorry not sorry - you pull the kinda shit that guy pulled, and you demote yourself to the status of "some jagoff". That's not on me.
Today in unasked-for opinions offered apropos of nothing: One man is so agitated over Jill Biden’s designation as a doctor of education that he recently wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed advising her to “forthwith drop the doc.” Entitled, “Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not If You Need an M.D.,” the essay’s author — Joseph Epstein, formerly the editor of the American Scholar — argues that Biden’s title “sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” By his own admission, Epstein lacks “a doctorate or any advanced degree,” but seems to consider himself an expert on the matter nonetheless.
“Madame First Lady — Mrs. Biden — Jill — kiddo,” he opens his address to Biden, a 69-year-old woman. In short, Epstein believes “no one should call himself ‘Dr.’ unless he has delivered a child.” He also suggests that Biden’s Ed.D. inherently holds less prestige than a Ph.D., a degree that has in turn been “diminished by the erosion of seriousness and the relaxation of standards in university education generally.” (At least in Epstein’s eyes.) And don’t even get him started on the purported farce that is the honorary doctorate!
To be clear, though, Biden’s doctorate is not honorary. She earned it, along with two Master’s Degrees, and plans to continue working as a community college professor during her time as First Lady, just as she did when she was Second Lady. No other FLOTUS has continued her pre-existing career while in office, and critics of the op-ed have decried it as emblematic of sexism in academia. On Twitter, where the piece has been trending after its publication on Friday, soon-to-be First Gentleman Doug Emhoff speculated that “this story would never have been written about a man.”
Second:
"In this world, a woman has to be two things -
who & what she wants."
Doctorate:
A doctorate (from Latin docere, "to teach") or doctor's degree (from Latin doctor, "teacher") or doctoral degree, is an academic degree awarded by universities, derived from the ancient formalism licentia docendi ("licence to teach"). In most countries, it is a research degree that qualifies the holder to teach at university level in the degree's field, or to work in a specific profession. There are a number of doctoral degrees; the most common is the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), which is awarded in many different fields, ranging from the humanities to scientific disciplines.Mar 5, 2020
Well, Crap
...kinda crap anyway. I'm going to make a radical assumption and say she'll be around to aggravate the fuck outa people who desperately need the fuck aggravated out of them for quite a while.
Hope so.
As for Elizabeth Warren? “When I hear her talk, I want to slap her, even when I agree with her.”
A version of that sentiment—Warren inspiring irrational animus among those whom she has sought as constituents—was a common refrain about the candidate, who announced today that she was suspending her campaign after a poor showing on Super Tuesday. This complaint tends to take on not the substance of Warren’s stated positions, but instead the style with which she delivers them. And it has been expressed by pundits as well as voters. Politico, in September, ran an article featuring quotes from Obama-administration officials calling Warren “sanctimonious” and a “narcissist.” The Boston Herald ran a story criticizing Warren’s “self-righteous, abrasive style.” The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, in October, described Warren as “intensely alienating” and “a know-it-all.” Donny Deutsch, the MSNBC commentator, has dismissed Warren, the person and the candidate, as “unlikable”—and has attributedher failure to ingratiate herself to him as a result, specifically, of her “high-school principal” demeanor. (“This is not a gender thing,” Deutsch insisted, perhaps recognizing that his complaint might read as very much a gender thing. “This is just kind of [a] tone and manner thing.”)
It never fails. When somebody starts with "This is not a gender thing..." you know good-n-goddamned well it's a gender thing - so fuck you Donny Deutsch.
The money quote:
When I hear her talk, I want to slap her, even when I agree with her.
We're not doing ourselves any favors by foreclosing on half the available talent pool.
Jul 12, 2019
Quiet Reminder
It's about making it harder for "lower class" women - poor women.
WaPo:
Even if the blue-noses manage to re-criminalize abortion, I can be on a plane to Montreal with my pregnant daughter tomorrow and get back with my un-pregnant daughter the day after that.
Women of means - ie: white middle class Republican women - will not suffer as much under the rule of these Daddy State assholes (or so they believe).
But make no mistake, all of us will suffer because of the fallout and "unintended" consequences of the special regulations imposed only on women, but designed to keep us all under control.
WaPo:
Even if the blue-noses manage to re-criminalize abortion, I can be on a plane to Montreal with my pregnant daughter tomorrow and get back with my un-pregnant daughter the day after that.
Women of means - ie: white middle class Republican women - will not suffer as much under the rule of these Daddy State assholes (or so they believe).
But make no mistake, all of us will suffer because of the fallout and "unintended" consequences of the special regulations imposed only on women, but designed to keep us all under control.
May 17, 2019
Today's Beau
The Fifth Column - Justin King
Numbers, Chapter 5:
11 Then the Lord said to Moses, 12 “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘If a man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him 13 so that another man has sexual relations with her, and this is hidden from her husband and her impurity is undetected (since there is no witness against her and she has not been caught in the act), 14 and if feelings of jealousy come over her husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure—or if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure— 15 then he is to take his wife to the priest. He must also take an offering of a tenth of an ephah[c] of barley flour on her behalf. He must not pour olive oil on it or put incense on it, because it is a grain offering for jealousy, a reminder-offeringto draw attention to wrongdoing.
16 “‘The priest shall bring her and have her stand before the Lord. 17 Then he shall take some holy water in a clay jar and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water. 18 After the priest has had the woman stand before the Lord, he shall loosen her hair and place in her hands the reminder-offering, the grain offering for jealousy, while he himself holds the bitter water that brings a curse. 19 Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you.20 But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”—21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[d] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. 22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”
“‘Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”
Numbers, Chapter 5:
11 Then the Lord said to Moses, 12 “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘If a man’s wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him 13 so that another man has sexual relations with her, and this is hidden from her husband and her impurity is undetected (since there is no witness against her and she has not been caught in the act), 14 and if feelings of jealousy come over her husband and he suspects his wife and she is impure—or if he is jealous and suspects her even though she is not impure— 15 then he is to take his wife to the priest. He must also take an offering of a tenth of an ephah[c] of barley flour on her behalf. He must not pour olive oil on it or put incense on it, because it is a grain offering for jealousy, a reminder-offeringto draw attention to wrongdoing.
16 “‘The priest shall bring her and have her stand before the Lord. 17 Then he shall take some holy water in a clay jar and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water. 18 After the priest has had the woman stand before the Lord, he shall loosen her hair and place in her hands the reminder-offering, the grain offering for jealousy, while he himself holds the bitter water that brings a curse. 19 Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you.20 But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”—21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[d] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. 22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”
“‘Then the woman is to say, “Amen. So be it.”
May 16, 2019
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