1). “The New Mommy Wars: Republicans want to pit women against each other over abortion”, Jan 7, 2025, Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day, at < https://jessica.substack.com/
2). “The Deaths and Agonies of Trump’s Abortion Bans: At least four women have died because Roe v. Wade was overturned. Countless others have suffered”, Nov. 4, 2024, Irin Carmon, New York Magazine, Intelligencer, at < https://nymag.com/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction: As usual Jessica Valenti is on the ball looking at the ever evolving Republican Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth tactics and strategies. The current state of affairs includes a strong component of propaganda and disinformation being used by the Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth operations. As Valenti points out in Item 1)., “The New Mommy Wars: ….”, comparing the upheavals from the 1970s to those of today:
“At the heart of it all, though, was the ‘mommy wars’—a cultural wedge driven in between women who worked in the public sphere and those who stayed home. The idea was to diminish the very real policy issues women faced—like the lack of parental leave and affordable child care—and frame them instead as personal issues. ….
“ …. we’re about to see women pitted against each other over abortion—specifically, those who end nonviable or medically fraught pregnancies, and those who choose to carry to term. ….
“The not-so-veiled implication, of course, is that those who decide to end their doomed pregnancies are selfish—unwilling to put in the requisite suffering that ‘good’ mothers take on happily.
“Like the ‘mommy wars’ before it, this deliberately-stoked discord serves a purpose: distracting from conservatives’ dangerous and unpopular abortion bans. What better way to deflect than by once again turning a serious public policy and health issue into a competition over who’s a good mother? ….
“We caught a glimpse of what this ‘mommy war’ judgement looks like when Kate Cox’s story went viral. Twenty weeks into her pregnancy, the Texas mother found out that her fetus had a fatal abnormality and that her pregnancy was endangering her fertility, health and life. Still, the state denied her care. While the primary response from Americans was outrage on Cox’s behalf, many conservatives had a different reaction: They accused Cox—a woman desperate to protect her life and spare her fetus unnecessary pain—of trying to “kill” her 'disabled child.'
“One such denunciation came from writer Rachel Roth Aldhizer. Adhizer, who also received a devastating diagnosis and now cares for a 'profoundly disabled' child, slammed Cox as 'choos[ing] her own comfort over that of a disabled child.'
“ 'Ms. Cox needs to understand that motherhood is not signing up for just the good stuff—kids that get straight A’s, play sports, paint pictures for the fridge, and make us proud because of their accomplishments. Motherhood goes much deeper. Are you willing to give your time, resources, and comfort for the sake of another? If not, don’t seek motherhood.'
“Adhizer’s most telling assertion, however, was one that Republicans desperately need women to believe in post-Roe America—that our 'profound purpose…is only found in the face of great suffering.' ” (Emphasis added). ….
“This disparagement of women who have abortions, even under tragic circumstances, is key to conservatives’ ‘mommy war’ strategy. It doesn’t just shift focus off their draconian laws, but undermines one of Republicans’ most serious political threats: Women who’ve come forward about being denied health- and life-saving abortions.
“After all, anti-abortion lawmakers and activists have been at their weakest when women like Cox—or Kaitlyn Joshua and Amanda Zurawski—have shared their stories and driven public outrage. These are women who draw attention to the horrific real-life consequences of abortion bans, while also upending conservatives’ long-standing lie that women seek abortions out of ‘convenience.’ (Remembering, of course, that what they mean by ‘convenience’ are women who have the nerve to want to go to college, pay their bills, take care of existing children or leave a bad relationship.) ….
“If you have any sort of social media account, chances are you’ve seen a video explaining the supposed dangers of hormonal birth control, or come across the account of some wildly popular ‘tradwife’ who makes cereal and bubblegum from scratch.
“None of that is by accident. I warned in a 2022 column about the rise of social media romanticizing 1950s housewives—or, more accurately, the sanitized depictions of them:
“ 'It’s not a coincidence that this resurgence of housewife iconography comes at the same time abortion rights have been stripped from American women. What better way to quiet the next generation of girls, growing up in a country without reproductive rights, than to tell them it’s actually progress? They’re making sexism aspirational.'
“In fact, just in November, Hannah Neeleman—one of the country’s most popular ‘tradwives,’ with tens of millions of followers—graced the cover of Evie, an anti-contraception propaganda machine masquerading as a magazine.”
The abortion rights and reproductive health-cared battle has become more subtle and deceptive than anything we have seen before. Thank you Jessica for digging in to these various issues.
Item 2)., “The Deaths and Agonies ….” was published the day before the election, and is therefore not cutting edge news. However it does a fine job of briefly examining many of the abortion deaths and horrific injuries that had already occurred before Trump “won” the election and started getting ready to assume the throne. I have stated before and will repeat here that the Trump Abortion Bans, that came into being after the Dobbs Decision overturned Roe v. Wade, have led to the TORTURE AND MURDER OF AROUND 1,000 AMERICAN WOMEN. These women were the victims of the Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth policies that are now the law in about 20 states. The leaders of the Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth will never be photographed wearing their leather aprons and wielding tools of torture. Nonetheless they are culpable in the horrifying deaths of these approximately 1,000 American women.
A note, the figure of 1,000 Women Tortured and Murdered, over the past year and a half, is an approximation. However it is based on an educated guess. There is no doubt that in 2022 an extra 42 pregnant women died in Texas, 42 higher than the figure would have been had the previous maternal death rate continued, rather than the 56% increase in maternal deaths in Texas. This dovetails with the approximately 12% rise in the U.S. overall maternal Death Rate.
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The New Mommy Wars
History is about to repeat itself.
In the 1970s, women entered the workforce in record numbers—by the end of the 90s, their labor participation rate had gone from 40% to over 60%. But women’s progress never goes unpunished in America, so we were treated to a massive cultural backlash in return: Articles declaring that working women of a certain age were more likely to be killed by a terrorist than find a husband, myths that feminism made women miserable, and a full-blown moral panic over daycare. (They weren’t just called dangerous, but perhaps even fronts for Satanic child abuse dens. I wish I was kidding.)
At the heart of it all, though, was the ‘mommy wars’—a cultural wedge driven in between women who worked in the public sphere and those who stayed home. The idea was to diminish the very real policy issues women faced—like the lack of parental leave and affordable child care—and frame them instead as personal issues. Catfighting, even.
Now, on the precipice of another Donald Trump presidency and halfway through the country’s third year without Roe, new ‘mommy wars’ are about to drop. But they won’t be about whether mothers work outside the home, breastfeed or formula feed, or whether or not moms vaccinate their kids. Instead, we’re about to see women pitted against each other over abortion—specifically, those who end nonviable or medically fraught pregnancies, and those who choose to carry to term.
I’m dreading the passive aggressive Instagram comments and TikTok battles, but can see them clearly already: Conservative women sharing stories of refusing abortions in spite of fatal or devastating fetal diagnoses, all of them steeped in the language of mommy martyrdom. We’ll see social media captions insisting motherhood is about sacrifice, and columns explaining that risking their mental and physical health—or even their lives—is simply what good mothers do.
The not-so-veiled implication, of course, is that those who decide to end their doomed pregnancies are selfish—unwilling to put in the requisite suffering that ‘good’ mothers take on happily.
Like the ‘mommy wars’ before it, this deliberately-stoked discord serves a purpose: distracting from conservatives’ dangerous and unpopular abortion bans. What better way to deflect than by once again turning a serious public policy and health issue into a competition over who’s a good mother?
Valorizing women who carry doomed pregnancies also lets Republicans reframe their cruel laws as a good thing. They’re not forcing women into suffering—they’re giving them the chance to be the ultimate mothers!
Women who keep doomed pregnancies get something in return, too: permission to judge those who don’t make the same choice.
Republicans know their laws mean more women—whether by choice, force, or circumstance—will carry nonviable pregnancies and give birth to seriously- or fatally-ill newborns. These women will need somewhere to put their understandable anger and disappointment; better for Republicans that it’s at the feet of other women.
That illusion of moral superiority gives their pain much-needed meaning: They’re the good mothers who did the right thing—not like those ‘bad’ women who refuse to righteously suffer.
We caught a glimpse of what this ‘mommy war’ judgement looks like when Kate Cox’s story went viral. Twenty weeks into her pregnancy, the Texas mother found out that her fetus had a fatal abnormality and that her pregnancy was endangering her fertility, health and life. Still, the state denied her care. While the primary response from Americans was outrage on Cox’s behalf, many conservatives had a different reaction: They accused Cox—a woman desperate to protect her life and spare her fetus unnecessary pain—of trying to “kill” her “disabled child.”
One such denunciation came from writer Rachel Roth Aldhizer. Adhizer, who also received a devastating diagnosis and now cares for a “profoundly disabled” child, slammed Cox as “choos[ing] her own comfort over that of a disabled child.”
“Ms. Cox needs to understand that motherhood is not signing up for just the good stuff—kids that get straight A’s, play sports, paint pictures for the fridge, and make us proud because of their accomplishments. Motherhood goes much deeper. Are you willing to give your time, resources, and comfort for the sake of another? If not, don’t seek motherhood.”
Adhizer’s most telling assertion, however, was one that Republicans desperately need women to believe in post-Roe America—that our “profound purpose…is only found in the face of great suffering.”
The notion that pain is good for women—necessary even—is a common refrain among abortion opponents, in part because their laws demand so much of it. As another conservative woman wrote in response to Cox’s story, “Suffering is part of life… It’s most assuredly part of motherhood.” The Star-Telegram’s Cynthia Allen added that if faced with a similar diagnosis, “I would have gladly carried that child, if that was the suffering I was intended to endure.”
She, you see, is a ‘good’ mother. It’s a scary state of affairs when Republicans have women vying for who suffered the most.
This disparagement of women who have abortions, even under tragic circumstances, is key to conservatives’ ‘mommy war’ strategy. It doesn’t just shift focus off their draconian laws, but undermines one of Republicans’ most serious political threats: Women who’ve come forward about being denied health- and life-saving abortions.
After all, anti-abortion lawmakers and activists have been at their weakest when women like Cox—or Kaitlyn Joshua and Amanda Zurawski—have shared their stories and driven public outrage. These are women who draw attention to the horrific real-life consequences of abortion bans, while also upending conservatives’ long-standing lie that women seek abortions out of ‘convenience.’ (Remembering, of course, that what they mean by ‘convenience’ are women who have the nerve to want to go to college, pay their bills, take care of existing children or leave a bad relationship.)
Republicans can’t publicly call out women like Cox, Joshua or Zurwaski without seeming cruel. But with a new mommy war in their back pocket, anti-abortion women can do their dirty work for them—dismissing powerful post-Roe horror stories as nothing more than the gripes of bad mothers.
Unfortunately, there’s never been a better time for conservatives to make all of this happen. In fact, they’ve already laid the cultural groundwork. If you have any sort of social media account, chances are you’ve seen a video explaining the supposed dangers of hormonal birth control, or come across the account of some wildly popular ‘tradwife’ who makes cereal and bubblegum from scratch.
None of that is by accident. I warned in a 2022 column about the rise of social media romanticizing 1950s housewives—or, more accurately, the sanitized depictions of them:
“It’s not a coincidence that this resurgence of housewife iconography comes at the same time abortion rights have been stripped from American women. What better way to quiet the next generation of girls, growing up in a country without reproductive rights, than to tell them it’s actually progress? They’re making sexism aspirational.”
In fact, just in November, Hannah Neeleman—one of the country’s most popular ‘tradwives,’ with tens of millions of followers—graced the cover of Evie, an anti-contraception propaganda machine masquerading as a magazine. This comes at the same time that anti-abortion organizations are adopting feminist-sounding rhetoric to soften their misogyny, and as what it means to be a ‘natural’ mother gets more and more alarming. The rise of vaccine skeptics, raw milk enthusiasts, ‘natural’ birth control proponents, and other right-wing pipeline issues have fully prepped the country to accept the idea that a good mother is one who accepts a pregnancy regardless of how dangerous, painful or viable it is.
American culture has always needed women to believe that motherhood is about sacrifice and overwhelm. Now, with abortion bans, that bit of propaganda has gotten even more dangerous—deadly, even. After all, conservatives know that their laws won’t just force women to suffer, but to die.
That’s why it’s so vital that we’re pushing back—refusing to valorize one woman’s choices over another’s, supporting laws that allow families to make decisions that are best for them, and pointing out this kind of conservative trickery whenever we see it.
After all, you can’t have a ‘mommy war’ if there are no mommies left to fight it.
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The Deaths and Agonies of Trump’s Abortion Bans
At least four women have died because Roe v. Wade was overturned. Countless others have suffered.
Whatever happened, it’s not their fault. The anti-abortion lawmakers and activists of America insist that their “pro-life” laws aren’t responsible for the suffering that women have experienced in hospitals and clinics across the country in the 26 months since Roe v. Wade was overturned. And in refusing responsibility for this wave of physical and emotional agony, and even death, the anti-abortion movement is also trying to absolve Donald Trump of his role in this catastrophe.
As the evidence mounts, much of the right has been forced to acknowledge that women have been harmed since the Dobbs decision. But instead of admitting that abortion is part of essential medical care, the move has been to point the finger, variously, at pro-choice activists, the media, and doctors themselves, claiming there’s been a coincidental sudden rise in malpractice. In September, after ProPublica reported on the cases of two Georgia women who died after being unable to get legal abortion care in their home state, a spokesman for Governor Brian Kemp blamed “partisan activists and so-called journalists” for “egregious misinformation and propaganda that fostered a culture of fear and confusion.” Later that month, the vice-president of the influential Charlotte Lozier Institute, which styles itself as the data arm of the anti-abortion movement, faulted the abortion pills the two women in Georgia women had taken rather than the abortion ban that had pushed them out of state or online to end their pregnancies, complicating their follow-up care. In late October, without identifying any specific cases, conservative medical groups issued what they called a Women’s Healthcare Declaration, claiming that “life-affirming legislation has been deliberately mischaracterized, leading to confusion and incorrect information among healthcare professionals and patients.”
But the truth, for those who actually want to see it, is plain. As the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists put it in a statement last month: “There is no doubt that abortion bans are preventing ob-gyns and other clinicians from providing health care to their patients, and that those patients and their families are suffering as a result.”
Donald Trump promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would “automatically” overturn Roe v. Wade, and it’s a rare promise that he kept. Without his three justices, the 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — allowing states to ban abortion at any time without mandating any exceptions — could not have happened. Although the number has fluctuated as voters and courts have their say, 13 states currently have total abortion bans with vague or narrow exceptions. A doctor found to have violated these bans can face anything from a loss of license to, in Texas, life in prison.
Now, in many ban states, simply being pregnant and showing up for urgent medical care makes you an undesirable patient, “radioactive to emergency departments,” as one expert put it this spring. Across the United States, anti-abortion activists have zealously fought against attempts to clarify or expand the health exceptions to abortion bans, suggesting that the narrowness and ambiguity of what is allowed is intentional.
Through reporting and litigation, we are beginning to get a partial picture of the harm. Partial because there are lags in official reporting data, and partial because patients and doctors fear prosecution and stigma for sharing their stories. Partial as well because the greatest harms are likely falling on the least visible people in our society. But we know that at least four women have died, that dozens have suffered from severe physical harm, and that there are likely hundreds more.
Defenders of the bans say that the laws simply require that a doctor recognize “two patients”— the pregnant woman and the fetus — rather than one. In practice, however, pregnant women are being refused basic medical care, autonomy, and even, in some cases, freedom of movement. These laws have been forcing women to wait out their own physical decline even when there is no fetal heartbeat (as in the case of one of the women in Georgia) or no chance of a live birth.
In 2016, at a town hall, Trump was asked whether women who get abortions should be punished if the procedure were to become illegal. “The answer is there has to be some form of punishment,” he said. The laws resulting from his decisions have come to punish not only those who want to end their pregnancies but also people who require care for miscarriages and stillbirths. The luckiest — “luckiest” — women who have wanted or needed to end their pregnancies in abortion-ban states since Dobbs have been able to travel elsewhere, scraping together the funds and managing the disruptions at work and home, including caring for any children they already have. They’ve driven for hours through the night or gotten on planes. They’ve ordered pills online — sometimes legally, sometimes outside the law. An untold number have stayed pregnant, such as 12-year-old rape victim Ashley, who gave birth in Mississippi in the fall of 2023. She could have qualified for an exception to the state’s abortion ban, but the process to obtain one was not clear — there may not even be a formal process — and an abortion in Chicago was too far and too expensive.
This fall, Trump has campaigned as the “protector” of women. In September, he said, “As president, I have to be your protector,” and added that women “will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.” In reality, a second Trump term would open the door to much more sweeping restrictions on abortion, this time on a national level.
Pregnancy, in all its medical complexity, rarely offers binary decisions, and in a state where abortion is illegal, tracing what might have been is even harder. But what we do know is wretched. Here is a partial accounting of the damage Trump has wrought.
Texas was the first front: The Supreme Court allowed the state’s six-week abortion ban, with its vague exception for “medical emergency,” to go into effect on September 1, 2021. According to reporting by ProPublica, Josseli Barnica went to the hospital with cramps the next day. She was 17 weeks and four days pregnant. The day after that, she returned to the hospital bleeding, clearly miscarrying. She told her husband that her doctors said it would be a crime to perform the abortion she needed. She died of sepsis caused by a preventable infection.
At the end of that first September, when Kiersten Hogan was 19 weeks pregnant, her water broke. According to the complaint she later joined against the state, Hogan was detained against her will in the hospital: She was told that as long as a fetal heartbeat was detectable, she would be kept there, on bedrest, until she either began contractions or became sick enough to qualify for an abortion. She said hospital employees told her “that if she tried to leave the hospital it would be used as evidence that she was trying to kill her baby; that if she tried to do anything to end her pregnancy, criminal charges could be brought against her.” Four days into her hospital detention, Hogan had a stillbirth in the bathroom.
The following spring, on May 10, 2022, Texan Elizabeth Weller was 19 weeks pregnant when her water broke — too soon for the fetus to survive. She and her husband opted to terminate rather than wait for Weller to get sicker. After a day spent arguing with hospital authorities, Weller told NPR, her OB/GYN wept as she told her, “They’re not going to touch you.” Weller was directed to wait to get sicker, for the fluid she was passing to darken and become so foul it would make her want to retch. She did, and she returned to the hospital with a sample in a Ziplock bag for evidence. Four days into her ordeal, she received permission to finally be induced and give birth to a stillborn daughter.
On August 2, 2022, Missouri resident Mylissa Farmer was told by doctors in both her home state and Kansas that her uterus had drained of amniotic fluid and her fetus would not survive, but that because there was still a heartbeat, and her life wasn’t yet threatened, they could not help her. According to a suit Farmer filed, a doctor at the University of Kansas hospital initially offered to induce labor, but later returned to say her medical judgment had been overridden and deemed “risky” in the “political” environment. Farmer was forced to travel to Illinois for an abortion.
In the summer of 2022, 28-year-old medical assistant Amber Thurman hoped to get an abortion at home in Georgia. But in July, thanks to the Dobbs decision, a state court allowed a 2019 abortion ban to go into effect. On August 13, ProPublica reported, Thurman traveled to North Carolina to obtain a legal abortion. The clinic she went to was swamped with out-of-state patients, and though she had preferred an in-office procedure, she arrived too late for her appointment and was sent home with pills. Five days later, she was brought by ambulance to Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge; she had vomited blood and passed out. Doctors at Piedmont twice discussed that Thurman needed a dilatation and curettage procedure to remove tissue that was causing an infection and that there was no longer a fetal heartbeat, meaning there should have been no legal impediment to saving her life. Nonetheless, she was allowed to deteriorate untreated for 17 hours. When she was finally given the surgery, it was too late, and her heart stopped. Thurman’s last words to her mother had been, “Promise me you’ll take care of my son.” A report by Georgia’s maternal-mortality review committee deemed Thurman’s death preventable.
Later that same month, on August 23, Austin, Texas, resident Amanda Zurawksi’s water broke at 17 weeks, well before viability. Doctors told her to go home and monitor herself for infection; infection came, eventually sending her into septic shock and putting her in the ICU for three days. The resulting scar tissue permanently closed one of her fallopian tubes.
The next month, front-desk staff at Sacred Heart Emergency Center in Houston refused to admit a pregnant woman in distress. She was forced to miscarry in a restroom toilet in the hospital’s lobby as her husband called 911.
In the fall of 2022, Candi Miller, a mother of three in Georgia, realized she was pregnant. She had been previously told that with her lupus, hypertension, and diabetes, another pregnancy could kill her. In November 2022, Miller took abortion pills she’d ordered online, which failed to completely expel all pregnancy tissue. Her son later said she was too afraid to seek follow-up care for an apparent infection because she believed she could be prosecuted. A few painful days later, ProPublica reported, “her husband found her unresponsive in bed, her 3-year-old daughter at her side.” Although a medical examiner was unable to definitively say what caused Miller’s death — she had also taken painkillers — the state’s maternal-mortality review deemed Miller’s death preventable and, in interviews, directly blamed Georgia’s abortion ban.
In February 2023, ER doctors in Texas told Kyleigh Thurman to “let nature take its course,” denying her treatment for an ectopic pregnancy, which is never viable. It took four visits to ERs and her OB/GYN begging with the hospital for help for Thurman to be treated, but it was too late to prevent the ectopic pregnancy from rupturing. She survived, but her right fallopian tube had to be removed, endangering her future fertility.
In March 2023, Oklahoman Jaci Statton was diagnosed with a cancerous molar pregnancy, an abnormal cell growth that would never result in a live birth. Medical staff told her, in her recollection, “We cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack.” She was bounced between three different hospitals in Oklahoma until finally getting an abortion three hours away in Kansas.
In April 2023, Kristen Anaya was already showing signs of infection when she went to the hospital in Texas miscarrying at 16 and a half weeks, but her fetus, which she and her husband had named Tylee, still had a heartbeat. It took 22 hours for doctors to get permission from administrators to end her pregnancy, even as she got sicker and sicker. She spent five days in the hospital. She recalled, “My husband and I are being told that ‘not only did we lose Tylee, but now you’re gonna go into sepsis and there’s nothing we can do about it other than watch you because of the abortion laws in Texas.’”
Due to life-threatening chronic medical conditions, Cristina Nuñez was advised to never become pregnant. In June 2023, after trying in vain to leave Texas for an abortion, her arm turned black from blood clots, and emergency-room doctors in Texas refused to terminate. Eleven days later, after herculean effort from Nuñez — who faced a language barrier — and advocates, she finally got an abortion at a different hospital under the medical exception.
In October 2023, in Texas, Nevaeh Crain, 18 years old and six months pregnant, made three separate visits to hospitals seeking care for what turned out to be a miscarriage and sepsis. On her third visit, when she was critically ill, doctors delayed her emergency care by ordering a second ultrasound to potentially comply with Texas’s abortion ban. Crain was dead within hours. Her mother told Good Morning America: “I felt like the doctors were more concerned about the baby than her life.”
Texan Kylie Beaton was forced to continue her pregnancy an additional 15 weeks after doctors found that her fetus had a rare and likely lethal brain disorder. “To have a woman go through so much torture along the way, that’s going to stay with them forever,” Beaton told ABC News. Because of the delay, she needed to have a cesarean — riskier than an abortion procedure — because the baby’s head had expanded too much from the condition.
In March 2023, Samantha Casiano, a resident of East Texas and a mother of four, was told her fetus had a condition incompatible with life. Casiano could not afford to travel to New Mexico or Arizona for an abortion, so four months later she was forced to give birth to a baby who lived for four hours. When she testified in court about what she’d gone through, she vomited on the stand.
At the end of October, Trump told a rally audience that he’d gotten pushback from his advisors on all his talk about protecting women. “I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not,’” Trump said. “I am going to protect them.”
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