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Over the weekend, I screen-grabbed this headline from The Guardian.
Todd Blanche, the new Attorney General for the United States, also reiterated his intention to go after abortion nationwide in recent days. By stopping the shipment of abortion drugs and enforcing the Comstock Act on the mailing of abortion tools and supplies, he can institute a backdoor ban. Jessica Valenti offers more here:
Today, let’s cover what both of these reports get wrong and how my reporting is different. Buckle up.
While many women sounded the alarm about dangers to abortion access for decades, the majority of Americans do not take women seriously. This prejudice - I’ll call it ingrained misogyny across all genders, political modalities, and cultural groups - means a white man or group of white men must tell Americans something for it to be believed.
Journalists generally do not want to read what people say they will do, take them at their word, and project ahead to what that could mean for a reader or a population. Especially when those journalists are women. No matter what evidence we present, we are overreacting, ridiculous, and hysterical.
With that background, let’s read what a White Christian Nationalist manifesto on Biblical Medical Ethics - written by WCN medical professionals - says about abortion:
35. Beginning Of Human Life
We affirm that individual human life begins with the fertilization of the human egg with the human sperm (Genesis 4:1; Numbers 11:12; Psalm 51:5).
We deny that the embryo conceived by this process must meet any other criteria to attain the full ethical and legal status of a person (Psalm 51:5; Matthew 18:8-10).
36. Abortion
We affirm that induced abortion is murder except to save the physical life of the mother, and that participation at any level is sin (Exodus 20:13; 23:22-25; Psalm 51:5; 139:13-15; Jeremiah 1:5).
We deny that the choice of the mother takes precedence over the life of the unborn child, and that detection of abnormalities or defects in the unborn child is grounds for induced abortion (Exodus 20:13; Psalm 139:13-15).
I don’t know how anyone can read the words above and say oh, they’ll never go that far. Yet millions and millions of Americans read these words and think they’re too crazy to be believed, too far-out to be taken seriously, too fringe to ever be law.
Still. After Dobbs. After stories of women dying in parking lots, losing their fertility, and being kept alive for a fetus. After numerous women have been arrested for having miscarriages, other people have been charged with aiding and abetting, and doctors have been sued for mailing drugs across state lines.
Most Americans don’t believe what this means even when the person who is one heartbeat from the presidency and the person behind him are both committed to the WCN words above. According to PRRI, roughly 56% of Republicans are WCN adherents or sympathizers, which could indicate how many are in Congress. (Source HERE) In today’s climate, both groups would embrace the above language about abortion, a woman’s right to her own body, and the consequences for aiding, abetting, performing, or obtaining an abortion.
For decades, the anti-abortion industry has been engaged in a forever war. Their end goal has ALWAYS been forcing United States law to conform to the religious statements above. In the process of passing and enforcing these RELIGIOUS laws, they have radicalized millions of Americans.
If they had to concede a larger point for a small move to their end goal, they did. Then, they came back and attacked the next obstacle and the next.
When they had to lie to achieve their end objective, they gaslit. They prevaricated. They said things like oh, we’d never go that far don’t be ridiculous and knew they were lying. Because to many White Christian Nationalists, lying is never wrong if it leads to more WCN power and control.
The WCN end goal isn’t the banning of abortion nationwide. It is tracking every pregnancy to a live birth, and investigating every pregnancy that does not result in a live birth.
Project 2025 called for converting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention into a PREGNANCY surveillance unit, and the regime has been systematically implementing it. Over the weekend, they got closer to this goal by confirming a new CDC director who is dedicated to this mission and a new Attorney General who has vowed to use every tool at his disposal to make abortions impossible to administer or obtain.
I link the whole 21 March 2024 newsletter below, but I’m reproducing the relevant section here:
Data Collection. The CDC’s abortion surveillance and maternity mortality reporting systems are woefully inadequate. CDC abortion data are reported by states on a voluntary basis, and California, Maryland, and New Hampshire do not submit abortion data at all. Accurate and reliable statistical data about abortion, abortion survivors, and abortion-related maternal deaths are essential to timely, reliable public health and policy analysis.
Because liberal states have now become sanctuaries for abortion tourism, HHS should use every available tool, including the cutting of funds, to ensure that every state reports exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method. It should also ensure that statistics are separated by category: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.
In addition, CDC should require monitoring and reporting for complications due to abortion and every instance of children being born alive after an abortion. Moreover, abortion should be clearly defined as only those procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life. Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion. Comparisons between live births and abortion should be tracked across various demographic indicators to assess whether certain populations are targeted by abortion providers and whether better prenatal physical, mental, and social care improves infant outcomes and decreases abortion rates, especially among those who are most vulnerable.
The Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 2023 would amend title XIX of the Social Security Act and Public Health Service Act to improve the CDC’s abortion reporting mechanisms by requiring states, as a condition of federal Medicaid payments for family planning services, to report streamlined variables in a timely manner.
The CDC should immediately end its collection of data on gender identity, which legitimizes the unscientific notion that men can become women (and vice versa) and encourages the phenomenon of ever-multiplying subjective identities.
Project 2025, pages 455 - 456
The ONLY WAY to accomplish the above objective is to TRACK EVERY PREGNANCY TO A LIVE BIRTH. Pregnancies that do not result in a live birth will be investigated for classification as outlined above: spontaneous miscarriage; treatments that incidentally result in the death of a child (such as chemotherapy); stillbirths; and induced abortion.
Again, the only way to get to the above is to TRACK EVERY PREGNANCY and INVESTIGATE EVERY PREGNANCY THAT DOES NOT RESULT IN A LIVE BIRTH.
This isn’t abortion surveillance or a back-door ban. It is the full-throated enslavement of everyone with a viable uterus. Again, the regime swore in two key players in this system over the weekend. They are moving toward this outcome whether we believe them or not.
I am not being hysterical. I am not overreacting. I am not being ridiculous. I am reading this crowd’s ACTUAL words and tying them to a WCN medical manifesto, their Christian Nationalist government manifesto, and their actions.
While we will not vote our way out of this, the midterms are our next chance to eject White Christian Nationalists from office. If we have any hope of preventing the above, we must vote out every WCN politician at every level of government.
Eradicating WCN will be our forever war. It won’t be over in my lifetime, but we must still fight it.
This regime has implemented over 50% of Project 2025 after looking us in the face and saying we aren’t going to use Project 2025 at all. Anyone who’s saying that is ridiculous.
Because again, LYING INCESSANTLY TO ACCOMPLISH WHITE CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST POWER AND CONTROL IS NOT SIN; IT IS GODLY AND RIGHTEOUS.
What else you can do NOW:
Have conversations with every female in your life who can be pregnant, no matter where she lives in the US. Make sure she has considered every option to protect her body and her person, including leaving the United States and preemptive sterilization if she knows she does not want to have children.
Make sure your community has a healthcare plan for women who can be pregnant. I am not advising anyone to break laws or offer any form of care that is illegal. With medical facilities closing and ob-gyns fleeing certain parts of the country, community support for reproductive healthcare is going to be vital. Crisis pregnancy facilities that lack trained medical providers and religious medical centers aren’t going to cut it.
Get whatever female healthcare supplies you can obtain legally NOW. This includes over-the-counter pregnancy tests, hormonal birth control pills, condoms, and other standard reproductive healthcare supplies.
Make sure your children and grandchildren know how their bodies work. Don’t rely on public school sex ed classes, especially in red states. These conversations have never been more important in a climate where every viable uterus could be tracked.
DO NOT USE PERIOD TRACKING APPS.
DO NOT TRACK YOUR PERIOD ON A US-BASED ONLINE CALENDAR LIKE GOOGLE CALENDAR.
DO NOT USE A US-BASED COMPANY’S SPREADSHEET OR CLOUD TO TRACK YOUR PERIOD.
Really, pen-and-ink manual period tracking, stored in a secure place, is the only mode I recommend.
When you buy feminine supplies, do not use in-house loyalty programs and pay cash. (I probably sound paranoid, but I’d also recommend shopping at the busiest times, wearing a hat, and donning sunglasses to foil facial recognition cameras. AI-surveillance will be able to guesstimate a woman’s cycle by when she purchases period supplies.)
Even better - Organize a community team to buy these supplies for the community. Assign responsibility for buying these products to willing men who follow the same protocols as above.
In January 2024, I almost did not launch this Substack. Why bother when it won’t make a difference? I said to my husband over dinner the day before I published my first newsletter.
While I didn’t stop what happened in the 2024 election, more Americans understand what’s at stake than they would have BECAUSE OF THIS WORK. Every day, more Americans are waking up BECAUSE OF THIS WORK.
If we never try, we will always fail. NOT TRYING is the failure.
Please try to help your connections match more of these dots. It’s scary and uncomfortable and depressing, but if we don’t try, THEY WILL WIN.
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