(excerpt) The Texas Maternal Mortality Committee has announced that it will not be reviewing any deaths in the two years after the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and led to Texas passing one of the most restrictive abortion restrictions in the nation.
The Committee will be meeting for the next time on December 6th, where it will begin reviewing maternal deaths in 2024. But, the Committee has announced that it will not go through and review the backlog of maternal deaths in 2022 and 2023, causing a public outcry.
And she makes the incredibly unlikely suggestion that male bodies could be “adapted” to also give birth, “thereby circumventing some potential feminist objections.” Words fail me.
This is in the same category of out-of-the-box genius as suggesting armies could stretch supplies further by eating their fallen comrades. (Male bodies are already perfect for Soylent Green!) It sounds great if you ignore the humanity of everyone involved, presumably because something is missing from yours.
The original suggestion was made by a professor of “practical philosophy”, which I suspect puts her in the same field as Peter Singer. Which is to say, that entire branch of philosophy seems to be systematically doing the equivalent of dividing by zero, and claiming it’s a feature.
Yeah… I don’t know… There are plenty of philosophers who are doing actual good work, focusing on real world problems that face society… Then there are people floating offensive, shit ideas like this…
feels like the entire article is one long argument from the absurd (to attack, among other things, surrogacy, an proposal for doing this to persons in persistent vegetative states, and the harvesting of organs from merely brain dead persons.)
We’re not going to maximize overall utility without some creative thinking here.
The dead don’t experience disutility so of course we should use the dead for all the distasteful work.
If we discover that some of the living experience more utility than others, then of course, we could further increase overall utility by prioritizing their happiness over everyone else’s. And we could research safer highs, so that they can be kept as happy as possible for as long as possible.
One would think that the “pro-life” movement would be alarmed by all the dead babies, moving heaven and earth to make sure pregnant girls and women in desperate circumstances have safe alternatives to giving birth in secret and throwing the baby away. But that would only be true if anti-abortion activists were, in fact, “pro-life.” Instead, the reaction of anti-choice leaders and Republican legislators so far has been a collective shrug, if they bother to acknowledge the problem at all.
There’s one telling detail in the Post report that underscores how much Republicans don’t care the slightest if babies die because of their abortion ban. As Molly Hennessy-Fiske reports, “Republican leaders who control state government have long declined to fund an awareness campaign so that new mothers know where to turn should they decide that they cannot keep their baby.”
Been in this situation (well, 13 yo, not 11 yo, but still…) Sucks fourteen ways from Sunday. Tears, drama, yelling, more tears. Maybe the worst part was “But I don’t even know who the father is!” Damn, that stirs some seriously bad memories.
