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Official Thread for Abortion Demagoguery


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https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/16/health/abortion-texas-sepsis/index.html

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Another woman has come forward with the harrowing details of how the Supreme Court’s decision four months ago to overturn Roe v. Wade put her life in danger.

CNN has told the stories of several women – including one from Houston, one from central Texas and one from Cleveland – and what they had to do to obtain medically necessary abortions.

Now, a woman from Austin, Texas, has come forward because she nearly died when she couldn’t get a timely abortion.

This is her story.

The loss of a ‘miracle’ baby

Amanda Eid and Josh Zurawski, both now 35, met in 1991 at Aldersgate Academy preschool in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and dated in high school.

“Josh always tells me he’s been in love with me since we were 4 years old,” Amanda said.

Three years ago, they married in Austin, Texas, where they both work in high-tech jobs.

They tried to have a family but failed. Amanda had fertility treatments for a year and a half and finally became pregnant.

 

Amanda Eid became pregnant after a year and a half of fertility treatments.

Amanda Eid became pregnant after a year and a half of fertility treatments.

Courtesy Amanda Zurawski

“Very excited to share that Baby Zurawski is expected in late January,” Amanda shared on Instagram in July. The post included a picture of her and her husband in “Mama” and “Dad” hats, Amanda holding a strip of ultrasound photos of their baby girl.

“The fact that we were pregnant at all was a miracle, and we were beside ourselves with happiness,” she said.

But then, 18 weeks – just four months – into her pregnancy, Amanda’s water broke.

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The amniotic fluid that her baby depended upon was leaking out. She says her doctor told her the baby would not survive.

“We found out that we were going to lose our baby,” Amanda said. “My cervix was dilating fully 22 weeks prematurely, and I was inevitably going to miscarry.”

She and Josh begged the doctor to see if there was any way to save the baby.

“I just kept asking, ‘isn’t there anything we can do?’ And the answer was ‘no,’ ” Amanda said.

Texas anti-abortion laws

When a woman’s water breaks, she’s at high risk for a life-threatening infection. While Amanda and Josh’s baby – they named her Willow – was sure to die, she still had a heartbeat, and so doctors said that under Texas law, they were unable to terminate the pregnancy.

“My doctor said, ‘Well, right now we just have to wait, because we can’t induce labor, even though you’re 100% for sure going to lose your baby,’ ” Amanda said. “[The doctors] were unable to do their own jobs because of the way that the laws are written in Texas.”

Texas law allows for abortion if the mother “has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”

But Texas lawmakers haven’t spelled out exactly what that means, and a doctor found to be in violation of the law can face loss of their medical license and a possible life sentence in prison.

“They’re extremely vague,” said Katie Keith, director of the Health Policy and Law Initiative at Georgetown University Law Center. “They don’t spell out exactly the situations when an abortion can be provided.”

In September, CNN reached out to 28 Texas legislators who sponsored anti-abortion legislation, asking them for their response to CNN stories about the woman in Houston and the woman in central Texas.

Only one legislator responded.

“Like any other law, there are unintended consequences. We do not want to see any unintended consequences; if we do, it is our responsibility as legislators to fix those flaws,” wrote state Sen. Eddie Lucio, who will be leaving the Senate at the end of the year.

The Zurawskis participated in an ad for Beto O’Rourke’s unsuccessful Texas gubernatorial campaign.

Going downhill very fast

After her water broke, Amanda’s doctors sent her home and told her to watch for signs of infection, and that only when she was “considered sick enough that my life was at risk” would they terminate the pregnancy, Amanda said.

“My doctor said it could take hours, it could take days, it could take weeks,” she remembers.

Once they heard “hours,” they decided there was no time to travel to another state for an abortion.

“The nearest ‘sanctuary’ state is at least an eight-hour drive,” Amanda wrote in an online essay on The Meteor. “Developing sepsis – which can kill quickly – in a car in the middle of the West Texas desert, or 30,000 feet above the ground, is a death sentence.”

So they waited it out in Texas.

On August 26, three days after her water broke, Amanda found herself shivering in the Texas heat.

“We were having a heat wave, I think it was 105 degrees that day, and I was freezing cold, and I was shaking, my teeth were chattering. I was trying to tell Josh that I didn’t feel good, and my teeth were chattering so hard that I could not even get the sentence out,” she said.

Josh was shocked by his wife’s condition.

“To see in a matter of maybe five minutes, for her to go from a normal temperature to the condition she was in was really, really scary,” he said. “Very quickly, she went downhill very, very fast. She was in a state I’ve never seen her in.”

Josh rushed his wife to the hospital. Her temperature was 102 degrees. She was too weak to walk on her own.

Her temperature went up to 103 degrees. Finally, Amanda was sick enough that the doctors felt legally safe to terminate the pregnancy, she said.

‘I was really scared I was going to lose her’

But Amanda was so sick that antibiotics wouldn’t stop the bacterial infection raging through her body. A blood transfusion didn’t cure her, either.

About 12 hours after her pregnancy was terminated, doctors and nurses flooded her room.

“There’s a lot of commotion, and I said, ‘what’s going on?’ and they said, ‘we’re moving you to the ICU,’ and I said, ‘why?’ and they said, ‘you’re developing symptoms of sepsis,’ ” she said.

Sepsis, the body’s extreme response to an infection, is a life-threatening medical emergency.

Amanda’s blood pressure plummeted. Her platelets dropped. She doesn’t remember much from that time.

But Josh does.

“It was really scary to see Amanda crash,” he said. “I was really scared I was going to lose her.”

Family members flew in from across the country because they feared it would be the last time they would see Amanda.

Doctors inserted an intravenous line near her heart to deliver antibiotics and medication to stabilize her blood pressure. Finally, Amanda turned the corner and survived.

‘These barbaric laws’

But her medical ordeal isn’t over.

Amanda’s uterus suffered scarring from the infection, and she may not be able to have more children. She had a surgery recently to fix the scarring, but it’s unclear whether it will be successful.

That leaves the Zurawskis scared – and furious that they might never have a family because of a Texas law.

“[This] didn’t have to happen,” Amanda said. “That’s what’s so infuriating about all of this, is that we didn’t have to – we shouldn’t have had to – go through all of this trauma.”

The Zurawskis say the politicians who voted for the anti-abortion law call themselves “pro-life” – but they don’t see it that way.

“Amanda almost died. That’s not pro-life. Amanda will have challenges in the future having more kids. That’s not pro-life,” Josh said.

“Nothing about [this] feels pro-life,” his wife added.

In many ways, Amanda feels fortunate. She wonders whether she’d be alive today if it weren’t for her husband, who rushed her to the hospital and made sure she got the best care possible. And they have good jobs with good health insurance and they live in a big city with high quality health care.

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“All of these things I had going for me, and still, this was the outcome,” she said.

She and Josh worry about women in rural areas, or poor women, or young, single mothers in states like Texas. What would happen to them, considering what happened to Amanda?

“These barbaric laws prevented her from getting any amount of health care when she needed it, until it was at a life-threatening moment,” Josh said.

 

Edited by C-Man
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1 hour ago, HenryJames said:

Sorry viagra bros. Your days of consequence-free fucking are over.

What do these people get out of this?  Do they hang around delivery rooms and have celebrations every time a kid is born?  Are they just all about more people on this earth?  It's really weird.

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7 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

What do these people get out of this? 

They're miserable, self-absorbed people whose ideal of ultimate happiness is the sad, tiny summit of making other people's lives worse. When that fails to bring them any lasting, meaningful satisfaction the search for who to blame begins anew. 

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5 hours ago, Bama Chick said:

It’s about controlling women.

We’re not joking when we refer to “The Handmaid’s Tale” as their blueprint.

We’re serious.

This is another one of those books I’d like to read if I had the time but I have other books to get to and I doubt this would tell me much that I don’t basically already know. If someone else wants to read it and write a review, though, I’d read that.

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22 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

 

While broadly horrific, purely from a political standpoint, if they are going to keep going down this path on abortion and contraception and whatever else is next...I guess let em?  Doesn't seem like a winning strategy, as we just saw in the midterms.  

 

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15 hours ago, Biff Tannen said:

While broadly horrific, purely from a political standpoint, if they are going to keep going down this path on abortion and contraception and whatever else is next...I guess let em?  Doesn't seem like a winning strategy, as we just saw in the midterms.  

It’s going to waste a lot of time and taxpayer money, and there is a chance that some states will enact birth control bans (Texas legislators have talked about it).  We are barely 55 years removed from states being able to ban birth control amongst married couples (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griswold_v._Connecticut)

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1 minute ago, lemonlime said:

Well, yeah.  But that fucking NY Times story frames the issue as though the big problem is Alito leaking things.  Not that Alito was wined and dined by wealthy anti abortion activists.

Because many journalists in this country don't understand what their actual job is supposed to be.

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4 hours ago, PenelopeWitherspoon said:

France looking better and better as the US backslides.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63754796

We will have the opposite vote in 2025 if the Rs take over.  I can't imagine an actual amendment, as that would take 2/3rds of the congress and then 3/4 of the states, but they could absolutely pass the legislation.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I don't know where else this goes, but there are obviously some pretty extreme divisions within the anti-abortion movement, as most recently evidenced by the Vatican's decision to defrock a priest for his extremist anti-abortion advocacy.  Umm, yeah--putting an aborted fetus up on the alter is pretty fucking blasphemous.  

Anyhoo--this quote from him really made me chuckle:

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“Instead of supporting and encouraging the pro-life work of the Church, some of these men try to obstruct and hinder it, and abuse their authority to try to intimidate priests and laity who make ending abortion the top priority of our lives,” Pavone writes. “... Cancel culture is alive and well in the Catholic Church.”

"Cancel culture" in the Catholic Church?  Really?

Jan Hus could not be reached for comment.

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On 11/17/2022 at 6:20 PM, Biff Tannen said:

What do these people get out of this?  Do they hang around delivery rooms and have celebrations every time a kid is born?  Are they just all about more people on this earth?  It's really weird.

In the wise words of Mr. Marilyn Manson:

We don't like to kill our unborn
We need them to grow up and fight our wars
We don't like to kill our unborn
We need them to grow up and fight our wars
We believe in everything we say
We say it because we believe it
We believe in everything we say
We say it because we believe it
We're from America, we're from America
We're from America, can you sing it with me?

 

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  • 1 month later...

My company put up to a vote on Teams for what we'll donate our $5/month to wear jeans charity for this year as it's been Relay for Life for a decade or two. Of course doing it on Teams where every Karen in the company spends 6 hours a day pretending it's facebook means that we are now donating to....Care-Net...yay. Guess no jeans for me for the next decade.

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I get the Care-Net issue, but what is this for starters?  Sounds like HR run amok.

$5/month to wear jeans charity

 

Wait, is this some deal where if you kick in $5/month to the company's group charity of choice you can wear jeans to work?

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