Trump's pitch to women is getting weirder and weirder
It's like he's trying to hypnotize people into forgetting he took away their rights.
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Having realized people aren’t thrilled with the lack of abortion access for millions of people in the country, Donald Trump’s campaign has been flailing to explain his stance on the issue.
One of his latest attempts is to scream at women in all caps on Truth Social: If he wins in November, “YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION.”
In case that message, or lack thereof, wasn’t clear, he weirdly read his own post nearly verbatim at a weekend rally in North Carolina.
According to Trump, under the Biden-Harris administration, women are “more stressed and depressed,” but if he wins, “I will fix all of that, women, I will fix all of that. And at long last, this national nightmare that we’re going through will be over. Women will be happy.” (Watch below.)
Things took an even weirder turn during last night’s Trump rally in Pennsylvania, where the adjudicated rapist addressed women directly and made a cultish attempt to hypnotize them into believing he’s something he most definitely is not.
“I am your protector,” he said. “You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger … you will no longer be thinking about abortion.” (Watch below.)
It comes as no surprise that Trump has no actual plan as to how he’ll make people stop thinking about abortion or how he will rescue women from the ostensibly crushing depression of the past four years. Indeed, he really has no plans at all except brutal mass deportations, tariffs that will send costs skyrocketing but still not fill the hole he’ll blow in the federal budget with giveaways to the rich, and whipping up racist and transphobic hatred.
But when it comes to abortion, Trump’s problem goes beyond his overall inability to detail specifics. Instead, Trump — and the entire GOP, really — are victims of their own success.
The GOP fought for decades to overturn Roe v. Wade, and Trump has been more than happy to take credit for its demise. Unfortunately for them, everyone can see that in states where abortion is unavailable, the consequences are literally deadly. Everyone can also see that despite JD Vance’s obsession with fertility and his belief that people without children don’t have a “direct stake” in the country, the GOP also wants to make it much harder to access fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization.
In both instances, it’s evidence of a party wholly committed to robbing people of their bodily autonomy.
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Trump’s abortion bans are killing people
Last week, ProPublica reported on two women in Georgia who died because of the lack of abortion care in that state, deaths that maternal health experts who were part of an official state committee concluded were preventable.
One woman, Amber Thurman, sought care after she took abortion pills prescribed for her in North Carolina, but her body failed to expel all the fetal tissue. The fix for that is a routine, safe procedure called dilation and curettage, or D&C. However, in conjunction with passing a six-week abortion ban, Georgia had made performing D&Cs a felony in most instances. So Amber Thurman died a slow, horrible, preventable death while doctors and administrators in a suburban Atlanta hospital dithered for 20 hours over whether to perform the D&C.
(Kamala Harris has been highlighting Thurman’s tragic story and the role Georgia’s abortion ban played in her death on the campaign trail. Watch what she said about Thurman during her speech Friday in Wisconsin below.)
Another Georgia woman, Candi Miller, had lupus, diabetes, and hypertension, all of which can increase the dangers of pregnancy, and she had been warned becoming pregnant again was dangerous. After learning she was pregnant, Miller attempted to self-manage her abortion in the face of Georgia’s six-week ban. She obtained abortion pills from AidAccess, an overseas provider, but after suffering excruciating pain, she took a cocktail of drugs, including fentanyl, which ultimately killed her. The state’s maternal health experts concluded that Miller’s death was also preventable and that the state’s abortion ban was to blame, as it influenced Miller’s decision not to seek medical care.
Things look even worse when you zoom out. Texas has functionally had a complete ban since September 2021, nine months before Roe was overturned. Over the three years since, the rate of maternal mortality in the state — deaths during pregnancy, during childbirth itself, or shortly after — has skyrocketed. From 2019 to 2022, rates for white people almost doubled, going to 39.1 from 20 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births. Hispanics saw the maternal death rate increase to 18.9 from 14.5 during that same time. Black people, who face disparate rates of maternal mortality all across the South, went to 43.6 from 31.6 maternal deaths in Texas per 100,000 live births from 2019 to 2022.
Overall, the Texas maternal mortality rates rose at nearly five times the rate nationwide in those three years. And make no mistake — our nationwide maternal mortality rate is already the highest in the world among high-income countries. In 2022, the US had 22 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with 14.3 in Chile, 5.5 in the UK, 2.8 in the Netherlands, and zero in Norway, just to name a few. The US rate for Black pregnant people is more than double the overall national rate, with 49.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births.
There are two easy ways in which states could even maintain bans yet decrease the risk of people dying during pregnancy. One is to increase overall healthcare resources available to pregnant people. The other is to clearly define which conditions constitute a life-threatening emergency and provide explicit protections for doctors who perform abortions to address those conditions. Unsurprisingly, conservative states have done neither of these things.
States with the strictest abortion bans are the same states that provide very little support to low-income families. Take Idaho, where abortion is completely banned unless it is to save the life of the pregnant person or the pregnancy is the product of a rape or incest that has been reported to the police. That state has also refused to expand postpartum Medicaid coverage, has no paid family and medical leave, has a very low income cutoff for childcare assistance, and a higher-than-average rate of the population lives in maternity care deserts, where OB/GYN care is difficult to obtain. States with severe restrictions or bans also generally make it much harder for pregnant people, children, and families to get any sort of income assistance.
States with bans have also refused to define when doctors can perform an abortion to save the life of the pregnant person. In May, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in favor of the state and refused to clarify which medical conditions constitute a life-threatening medical emergency. In South Dakota, which only allows abortions when necessary to save the life of the pregnant person, Republican Gov. Kristi Noem’s administration was required by law to produce a video explaining that medical exception. The video did list some medical conditions known to be deadly to pregnant people, such as severe preeclampsia, but went on to say it wasn’t legally binding and wasn’t legal advice. In other words, it provides no meaningful protection to doctors in the state, so they still won’t feel safe making the call to perform an abortion.
Burdened by what has been
For those people who desperately want children but need fertility assistance, never fear — the GOP is terrible about that as well. Senate Democrats have been trying to pass a bill that would protect IVF access nationwide, but Senate Republicans voted in near-lockstep against the measure twice last week while at the same time insisting that they fully support IVF.
Hardcore anti-choicers are opposed to IVF because they believe the additional embryos produced during the process are persons entitled to complete legal protection, known as fetal personhood. That stance got traction in an Alabama Supreme Court decision earlier this year, one which called frozen embryos “extrauterine children.”
Trump has floated the absurd notion he would force insurance companies or the government to pay for IVF were he elected. The first time he was in office, though, he helped anti-abortion activists wage war on the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate, letting employers refuse to provide birth control if they found it morally objectionable. There’s no reason to take seriously the notion he’d defy his base and require conservative employers to cover IVF or, even more ridiculous, the idea his administration would go to court to defend an IVF requirement against the inevitable challenge from a conservative state or group.
Trump is, as Harris put it when she campaigned in Georgia and spoke about the death of Amber Thurman, the “architect of this crisis.” Since Trump loves owning the demise of Roe, he also owns the deaths of Thurman and Candi Miller. He owns the spike in maternal mortality. He owns the unworkable, ridiculous idea of fetal personhood becoming enough of a conservative mindset that fertility treatments are at risk.
He can yell all he wants, and make all the absurd promises he can, but nothing will change the fact that Trump and the GOP have no plan to fix the mess they’ve made.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
These people think it’s our duty to die for pregnancy. It’s our job. We’re supposed to be martyrs for maternity & be happy about it.
"Overall, the Texas maternal mortality rates rose at nearly five times the rate nationwide in those three years. And make no mistake — our nationwide maternal mortality rate is already the highest in the world among high-income countries."
This part of this excellent piece is haunting. Hubris can be self-destructive and American quality of life is falling to levels that should make us question our definition of "developed." It is sad that we have let narrow-minded, anti-intellectual movements dictate our policy and political culture for so long. The impact is felt in all of the needless maternal deaths.