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OT Texas

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Matthew Kruk

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Sep 4, 2021, 11:14:18 AM9/4/21
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Welcome to Texas, one of the most socially backward states in the world. Who
gives a damn about our fellow human beings. Go uber!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/texas-abortion-ban-lyft-uber-fight-back-1.6165045


Kenny McCormack

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Sep 4, 2021, 12:11:00 PM9/4/21
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Yeah, you rite. It's great to see that lyft and uber see this as a threat
to their livelihood, and they've got the big money to fight this in court.

I like the idea that blue states are going to start passing similar laws,
providing bounties for people ratting out people buying guns.

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Lenona

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Sep 4, 2021, 1:04:28 PM9/4/21
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I was hoping Bill Maher would talk about the bill at length, but from what I can tell, he only made one quick joke about it.

"You can have an abortion as long as you know you don’t need one...That is so Texas."

In the meantime, as I said in 2018:

How many people would really even want to look their sister, daughter, niece, or granddaughter in the eye and say "I don't care if you become a single mother and lose any chance at a real education or job, and I don't care if you are forced to give birth, choose adoption and end up shattered for life as a result. I still will never let you or anyone else get an abortion even in the first 30 days, if I can get the law on my side."

Plenty of clinic workers will tell you stories of anti-abortion protesters who either come in for abortions themselves or bring their daughters in, after all.

(Yes, the new law puts the cut-off at six weeks, but many - most? - women don't even know for sure that they're pregnant before then.)

Some think it's possible the law will get overturned, since even most Texans don't necessarily approve of it. But, if it doesn't, I'll be interested to know whether men's rights activists take a lot more interest in providing FINANCIAL support for the male contraceptive barrier method, Vasalgel, which still isn't available in the U.S. (As I remember, they don't take any one stand on abortion - but they certainly complain a helluva lot about women who don't do whatever men ORDER women to do, as if women were robots.)

MJ Emigh

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Sep 4, 2021, 1:20:00 PM9/4/21
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On Saturday, September 4, 2021 at 12:04:28 PM UTC-5, Lenona wrote:
> Some think it's possible the law will get overturned, since even most Texans don't necessarily approve of it.

Having lived to Texas for the last 12 years, I can tell you that people here are pretty complacent. They will complain, but you can forget about any action being taken. No one is quite sure whether the Governor is insane or just your everyday run-of-the-mill moron. Unfortunately, neither he nor that current baseball commissioner can simply be ignored.

Lenona

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Sep 4, 2021, 1:39:44 PM9/4/21
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More of what I posted in 2018:

About those hypocritical protestors: "The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion":

https://www.prochoiceactionnetwork-canada.org/articles/anti-tales.shtml
(Multiple, separate stories)

As the anti-abortion Orthodox speaker Frederica Mathewes-Green said (not about those protestors in particular):

“No woman wants an abortion like she wants an ice cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion like an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg.”

So, I suspect that she, at least, understands that most ADULTS seeking abortions would be only be too glad to get them as early as possible - if there weren't so many roadblocks in the way. Such as poverty, needing weeks to build up the funds for gas money and the motels, and not being allowed to take a week off from work without getting fired - which might require a more expensive plane trip. Of course, the week is what it might take to travel both ways, stay in a motel, and go through the mandatory waiting period.

(There's a Catch-22 for pro-choicers, unfortunately; if teens don't use contraception carefully, the anti-abortion people see that as an excuse to ban abortion, but when they DID start using it well, the abortion rate dropped to an all-time low in the U.S. - which is ALSO seen as an excuse for the anti-abortion people to shut down more and more clinics in states like Texas.)

More on adoption. Since more and more women are admitting that it's a lifelong trauma (whereas abortion is only a long-term trauma for women who don't believe in it to begin with, so they don't HAVE abortions), very few single women with unplanned pregnancies choose adoption now. (In the 1990s, among teens at least, only 3 percent of pregnant white girls and 1 percent of pregnant black girls chose it.) Besides which, since fertility clinics just keep improving every year, there aren't nearly as many adoptive couples as you might expect. (Any week, you can see foster kids begging on local TV to be adopted. I'd say half of them are white. Imagine how much worse their chances would be if there were a lot more healthy babies available - and there would likely be too MANY babies to be adopted!)

Columnist Katha Pollitt wrote in 1996:

"Maybe more (pregnant teens would choose adoption) if adoption were more fluid and open--a kind of open-ended 'guardianship' arrangement--but that would surely discourage potential adoptive parents. The glory days of white-baby relinquishment in the 1950s and 1960s depended on coercion--the illegality of abortion, the sexual double standard and the stigma of unwed motherhood, enforced by family, neighbors, school, social work, medicine, church, law. Those girls gave up their babies because they had no choice--that's why we are now hearing from so many sad and furious 50-year-old birth mothers. Do we really want to create a new generation of them by applying the guilt and pressure tactics that a behavior change of such magnitude would require?"

She also wrote, in 2008: "even among pregnant women who plan on adoption, 35% change their mind once the baby is born."

Lenona

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Sep 4, 2021, 1:41:34 PM9/4/21
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That's alarming - but why are they complacent?

Lenona

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Sep 4, 2021, 2:06:36 PM9/4/21
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And, what I posted this June:

A response to Ms. Paxton Smith, the Richardson, Texas valedictorian who spoke against the recent Texas abortion bill.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/dear-paxton-smith-abortion-isn-221258303.html

By columnist Cynthia M. Allen.

Allen has some good points, I suppose, but there are also "gems" like this:


"Children are not a barrier to your success, and our culture fails you for not repeating this truth loudly and often."


(Try telling that to all the white, middle-class girls who ended up NOT finishing college or going at all, let alone getting the jobs they would have PREFERRED, because they became teen mothers. Not to mention all the poorer teen mothers who don't even manage to graduate high school. Besides, wasn't it CONSERVATIVES who accused FEMINISTS, fairly or not, of saying that women could "have it all"? So now they're accusing feminists of saying the opposite? Well? Which is it?)


"Having a child at any age, even with ample resources, will require sacrifices. They will be worth it."


(Not when you didn't want the kid - or when you learn to love the kid but your partner never does and you become a single parent. Just because a minority of women CHOOSE to raise children alone even before they get pregnant doesn't mean most mothers would prefer that choice to childlessness.)


"Your worry about failing contraception reminds me of the lamentable reality that women today are not taught to appreciate their bodies. Too few of us are schooled in the knowledge of what our bodies tell us — like the biological markers that let us know when pregnancy is possible."


(What in the world makes anyone think that "natural family planning" should be appealing to non-religious women, in particular? Given the Real Life Failure Rate, which is certainly higher than the 6% failure rate of the Pill, the woman is more likely, with NFP, to be quaking in fear until she gets her period. How does that not ruin the fun of sex? Or is that the point?)


"And I hope that you will come to fully appreciate that motherhood isn’t the end of your dreams and ambitions, but their true fulfillment."


(Again, not if you don't want a kid and/or can't afford one. 60% of women who have abortions ALREADY have children.)


At least - and this is interesting - Allen didn't try to suggest that adoption is the answer.

And, regarding Allen's opposition to artificial birth control, you'd think people like her would be only too happy - and keep quiet - about liberals using those methods. What's stopping conservatives from having extra babies to bring up the birth rate, if they're so worried about it? Maybe even THEY secretly don't want more than two kids, on average? Or, at least, not enough to stand in the way of the middle-class lifestyle?

Btw, while there only seem to be a handful of paranoid conservative columnists who think that American citizens need to start having more babies than they want or think they can afford - for the ECONOMY's sake, I mean - there's no shortage of columnists opposed to illegal immigrants - OR the loosening of immigration laws. I have to wonder what the latter columnists are thinking, assuming they don't secretly agree with the former.


Lenona.

Larc

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Sep 6, 2021, 11:09:31 AM9/6/21
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On Sun, 05 Sep 2021 10:16:53 -0700, Terry del Fuego <t_del...@hotmail.com> wrote:

| On Sat, 4 Sep 2021 11:06:34 -0700 (PDT), Lenona <leno...@yahoo.com>
| wrote:
|
| >And, regarding Allen's opposition to artificial birth control, you'd think people
| >like her would be only too happy - and keep quiet - about liberals using
| >those methods.
|
| You're (probably not even consciously) giving those "people" too much
| credit for self-awareness and can't bring yourself to believe how
| utterly thrilled they are to throw their hypocrisy in everyone else's
| faces.

If these self-righteous jerks are so anxious to prevent abortions, why aren't they at
least equally anxious to assume responsibility — financial and otherwise — for
unwanted babies who are born?

Larc

Lenona

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Sep 6, 2021, 11:33:26 PM9/6/21
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For those who missed Terry's post (one of three):

You're (probably not even consciously) giving those "people" too much
credit for self-awareness and can't bring yourself to believe how
utterly thrilled they are to throw their hypocrisy in everyone else's
faces.

The same governor who signed the moronic Texas bill, then gloated when
the "Supreme" Court didn't block it, personally received a COVID
treatment partially "derived in 1973 from the kidney of an aborted
human embryo of unknown parenthood"
(<https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-regeneron-derived-fetal-tissue-1625354>).

Topic Cop

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Sep 7, 2021, 12:14:50 AM9/7/21
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come on who really cares about this, didn't we know this was coming all along

Kenny McCormack

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Sep 7, 2021, 9:16:40 AM9/7/21
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In article <3ca54618-fc9a-4759...@googlegroups.com>,
I have long felt - and recent events confirm this "in spades" - that
politicians are no more accountable for what they say and do on stage than
are actors. I.e., we don't call, say, <InsertNameOfYourFavoriteMaleActor>,
a "hypocrite" because the things he says and does on stage A) don't make
much sense and B) don't correspond to his real life personality. We all
understand that he is playing a role and being handsomely rewarded for
doing so.

Modern day GOP politicians are exactly the same. And, what's more, the GOP
base loves it.

There really is no "hypocrisy".

--
Hindsight is (supposed to be) 2020.

Trumpers, don't make the same mistake twice.
Don't shoot yourself in the feet - and everywhere else - again!.

Lenona

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Oct 8, 2021, 1:15:14 PM10/8/21
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On Saturday, September 4, 2021 at 1:04:28 PM UTC-4, Lenona wrote:
> I was hoping Bill Maher would talk about the bill at length, but from what I can tell, he only made one quick joke about it.
>
> "You can have an abortion as long as you know you don’t need one...That is so Texas."

I spoke too soon. So far, starting on Sept. 10, there have been at least three videos.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rK6uiTURLfA

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kf4yUhegJGw

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8cmLgVxu8vo

Lenona

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Oct 11, 2021, 12:53:44 PM10/11/21
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Yesterday, the commentators here pointed out quite a few legal details I would never have thought of.

https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2021/10/10

Examples:

nosirrom
"The Texas antiabortion law was written in such a way that the state can not enforce the law. Instead the law authorizes private citizens to bring a civil law suit against anyone who assists a woman (knowingly or not) in obtaining an abortion as a means to enforce a ban on abortions. Couldn’t it be argued that these private citizens are proxies of the state in the way bounty hunters are?

"How are these private citizens going to win the case? These are civil cases not criminal cases. Under HIPAA, unlike criminal cases medical staff can not be compelled to disclose medical information unless the patient consents. And the patient can’t be compelled because they are not a defendant in the case and the law does not allow a civil case to be brought against them.

"The law also says that if the defendant wins they can not sue to recoup costs and attorney fees. I think that this is unprecedented in civil law suits."

https://www.texastribune.org/2021/09/10/texas-abortion-law-ban-enforcement/


salunga
"The whole idea was to make it unprecedented and out of reach of the courts while punishing everyone involved to the fullest extent possible."


Viktor Sirin
"I heard that the Governor and Attorney General of Texas helped some young woman receive an abortion. Perhaps someone should sue them? Whoever does doesn’t have to pay court costs, right. But the person being sued does.

"And technically, any woman who leaves Texas to see medical treatment she desires is doing so because the State of Texas allows her to cross state lines, so all legislators can be sued unless they prevent that, correct?

"I bet some lawyers out there would be willing to try."

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