Her Name Was Susan

[CousinIT]

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/15/1857998/-Her-Name-Was-Susan?detail=emaildkre

Her name was Susan. She was young. She was beautiful. She was intelligent. She was articulate. She was dying

Susan was a 23 year old single woman who came to Los Angeles in the early 60’s to pursue her dream to become an actress. She had played the leads in her high school plays somewhere in Utah. She was runner-up in the Miss Utah pageant. She managed to get a couple of walk-on parts in some B-grade Hollywood films. She was a starlet.

A year or so after coming to the West Coast she became pregnant. The father quickly faded away into faceless LA. Her good Christian parents were humiliated, outraged and wanted nothing to do with her. She was on her own. Broke. Friendless. Pregnant. Scared.

So she took the bus to San Diego, walked across the border and headed to a cheap, dirty Tijuana abortion clinic. Four hours later she was back on the other side of the border, in pain, bleeding and completely debased. By the next day, the pain had become unbearable and she was spiking a temperature. She went to a local emergency room and was hospitalized overnight at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. She was subsequently transferred to the Medicine unit at UCLA Medical Center, at that time a small teaching hospital in its embryonic stages.

I was a 3rd year medical student in my first clinical rotation at UCLA. Susan was one of my first patients. We were about the same age. I was embarking on my medical career. Her life was ending

Over the next three weeks, I learned how people die from sepsis. Her uterus was perforated. She had developed gram-negative septicemia. Our knowledge of and access to antibiotics was primitive and limited. Eventually she went into renal failure. She burned with fever. She was racked with abdominal pain. The lovely face become sallow, sparkling eyes sunken, lifeless. Her skin turned a sickly bronze color. Her breath reeked the pungent stench of ammonia. After weeks of agony, her frail body mercifully surrendered.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ My .02 _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Those who seek to deny human females complete reproductive healthcare, including safe, legal abortions are advocating for SLAVERY. Denying another person bodily autonomy is slavery. Forced sex (rape) and forced pregnancy and birth/motherhood is slavery. While rapists and sex traffickers get off scot-free, or get jobs as POTUS and USSC justices, we enslave our female citizens and their doctors by jailing them for having or performing safe, legal abortion procedures. It's sexual & reproductive slavery. While they cry about the "immorality" of birth control, abortion, and women being human ie: having sex without pregnancy, the ignore the bigger immorality - the bigger sin - of denying these females bodily autonomy and seeking to subject them to sexual and reproductive slavery.

An MRA, Republican or evangelical will tell you (right here in this forum) that females are not entitled to any choice about who to have sex with, or when, or how, or why. That rape is just "what happens" and females should just "live with it". They believe the male of the species are entitled to sexually assault any female they wish at any time for any reason under any circumstance. They will also tell you that if a female is impregnated as a result of that assault, she should have no choice in the matter of whether to carry the child or keep the child. All that, says the MRA/Republican/evangelical, should be decided by males. And no doubt a zygote which is likely to be white in color and male in sex would be unspokenly preferred.

It's slavery. With evangelical (Christian extremist) patriarchal doctrine, Republicanism and MRA beliefs, we have a big portion of the country who honestly believe that American female humans (all of them really) should be sexual & reproductive slaves. It can't accurately be called anything but. And these are the people we are currently under rule of in the United States.

Brett Kavanaugh himself is a rapist and will no doubt vote to deny American females such as those he assaulted bodily autonomy once a pregnancy results from the violence inflicted on them. This utter indifference to female humanity and suffering matches the utter indifference shown to African slaves. There's no difference. The opposite of love is not hate. It's indifference. When it came to Kavanaugh or any male committing sexual assault/rape - it's not that they really believe the female victim is lying or "mistaken" or "confused". Those claims are just excuses used to cover up the fact that they really just don't give a damn what happened. They consider themselves entitled to abuse, rape, enslave.

For 50% of the human population of Earth to be considered less than human or to be enslaved like this would in any other context be considered a massive human rights crisis. But -- female homo sapiens are not considered human in most places on this planet.

Maybe the current ecological implosion is an earned one. Humans deserve it -- because those who are indifferent to female humans are often the same ones who are so indifferent to Earth as female - as a Mother and giver/sustainer of all human life. They are above all the ones rushing to rape her of every iota of life she has and they believe themselves entitled to do so -- without a thought of how they'll live when she finally liberates herself from the parasitic infestation of homo sapiens destroying her ability to sustain them any longer - an eventuality that is roaring at all of us like a freight train now.

How stupid are these people? They will be the death of all humanity. It's the absolute height of sadism and immorality. And abortion has nothing to do with it.

Yet, it is all connected. And nobody gets it. Or nobody cares. What a sad, dying place we live in now. ALL because the World is so utterly indifferent to female life in all its forms.

We can't survive this way. And we shouldn't be able to either. It's vastly and immeasurably immoral. And no God of mine intended for it to be this way.

[dalton99a]

1. Kick

[CountAllVotes]

2. K&R !!!

& recommend !!!!!

[katmondoo]

3. brought me to tears

[dlk]

4. We Live in a Country that Has a History of Slavery - Dehumanizing Women is Part of This Legacy

When people are thought to be "less than," it makes it easier to exploit and abuse them. These new laws are nothing less than the codified abuse of women and girls, and turning control of their bodies over to politicians and the government. Pretty slick for the party that has claimed they want to get government "off the backs of Americans." This is part of the much larger misogyny that irrationally fights against equal rights or even equal pay for women. If nothing else, Trump's presidency has taught us we are far from the tenets of freedom and equality we purport to believe in. It especially demonstrates how very selfish the patriarchy is and how far they are willing to go to maintain their iron grip on power. They have no intention, whatsoever, of ever sharing beyond a token gesture here and there, and only then when forced to. Women and the men who truly care about them must stay united to fight this malignancy in our democracy.

[CousinIT]

5. Damn right. I've posted this article so many times everywhere I can post it...

...because it deals with just that:

https://www.thenation.com/article/reproductive-rights-and-long-hand-slave-breeding/

. . .

Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually exploited. Yes, many of the founders of this great nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US depended on human beings not just as labor but as reproducible raw material is not part of the story America typically tells itself. That women had a particular currency in this system, prized for their sex or their wombs and often both, and that this uniquely female experience of slavery resonates through history to the present is not generally acknowledged. Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm X’s distinction between “the house Negro” and “the field Negro,” erases the female experience, the harrowing reality of the “favorite” that Harriet Jacobs describes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

We don’t commonly recognize that American slaveholders supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade; that they did so to protect the domestic market, boosting their own nascent breeding operation. Women were the primary focus: their bodies, their “stock,” their reproductive capacity, their issue. Planters advertised for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen.They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and had their physicians exploit female anatomy while working to suppress African midwives’ practice in areas of fertility, contraception and abortion.Reproduction and its control became the planters’ prerogative and profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins or jump out a window—abortion by suicide, except it was hardly a sure thing.

This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Tom’s Cabin that my eyes fell upon while we were preparing to arrange books on her new shelves: “’If we could get a breed of gals that didn’t care, now, for their young uns…would be ’bout the greatest mod’rn improvement I knows on,” says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice flows.

The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the building blocks of Bridgewater’s argument, which continues thus. “If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.”

Constitutionally, the fundamental civil freedom is enshrined in the Thirteenth Amendment. The amendment’s language is unadorned, so it was left to the political system to sort out what the abolition of slavery meant in all particulars. In a series of successive legal cases, the courts ruled that in prohibiting slavery the amendment also prohibits what the judiciary called its “badges and incidents,” and recognized Congress’s power “to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all [of those] in the United States.”

Bridgewater argues that because slavery depended on the slaveholder’s right to control the bodies and reproductive capacities of enslaved women, coerced reproduction was as basic to the institution as forced labor. At the very least it qualifies among those badges and incidents, certainly as much as the inability to make contracts. Therefore, sexual and reproductive freedom is not simply a matter of privacy; it is fundamental to our and the law’s understanding of human autonomy and liberty. And so constraints on that freedom are not simply unconstitutional; they effectively reinstitute slavery.

[hedda_foil]

20. Thank you! I'm going to use it in a women's history class I teach.

[marieo1]

6. Brutally Honest

This is a brutally honest, sad and thought provoking message. It is sad to know that we have exactly these kind of men in the Whitehouse and on the Supreme Court. Where are the decent, kind respectable trustworthy men - why don't they call these kind of pukes out? And.....then, of course, there are the stupid women that defend them. This should be broadcast over and over again all across our country!!

[Oppaloopa]

7. What is MRA?

[Collimator]

9. MRA stands for Men's Rights Advocates

There is a huge sub-culture of men who loudly complain about how rough men have it in today's world.

[SunSeeker]

11. I consider MRA a hate group, against women. nt

[SunSeeker]

12. Remember Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista shooter?

Rodger was reportedly involved with the online men's rights movement: allegedly active on one forum and said to have been following several men's rights channels on YouTube. The language Rodger used in his videos against women – like referring to himself as an "alpha male" – is common rhetoric in such circles.

These communities are so virulently misogynist that the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups, has been watching their movements for years.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/24/elliot-rodgers-california-shooting-mental-health-misogyny

[Collimator]

8. That essay was very powerful.

And I am grateful to you that it was posted.

Unfortunately, many people will see the "take away" message of Susan's experience as proof that she should have simply "behaved herself" in the first place. "The wages of sin is death" mentality is buried deep in the American psyche.

Some of the same people who want to end Roe v. Wade also want the world to end. Death is humanity's fate, as far as they are concerned. People who welcome the end of humanity and the death of a living earth in favor of their mythical heaven should not be in charge of running anything of importance here on earth.

[SunSeeker]

10. Thank you for posting!. Yes, this is female slavery.

We are not going back!

[BlancheSplanchnik]

13. Your two cents is worth a billion.

Exactly right.

[BigmanPigman]

14. Amazing that women are actually the MAJORITY in the US

with 51% of the population yet we are treated this was for, well for forever (thousands of years anyway).

[marlakay]

18. A lot of very religious or just pro lifers

In this country. I was staunchly that way myself as a teen and in my early 20’s as youth can make your beliefs seem more powerful.

I was very religious back then going to a right wing kind of church.

It took someone very close to me having a abortion to open my eyes and change my views. I have been strongly pro choice ever since. And my views changed slowly.

I think it’s very hard to change minds unless it hits close to them. When you hold a firm belief that something is murder it’s very hard to change.

[BigmanPigman]

19. A lot of people do not truly empathize with another person

until they are in a very similar situation themselves. Like Atticus said in To Kill A Mockingbird,

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it''...

[saidsimplesimon]

15. Thank you for sharing this.

How stupid are these people? They will be the death of all humanity. It's the absolute height of sadism and immorality. And abortion has nothing to do with it.

[lordsummerisle]

16. k&r n/t

[Tarheel_Dem]

17. K&R

[plimsoll]

21. Is it your god?

And no God of mine intended for it to be this way.

It looks like current crop of Christianity worship a god made in their image.

I'm amused by complaints of relativism, when there is nothing more relativist than "it's all about me." Can you see any hint of a loving god in those anti-abortion laws. I can see petty spite and vindictiveness, but it seems all too human to me. If god is just like the worst aspects of humanity, but with ultimate power to inflict misery on those that displease him, does he want our faith or our submission? (Gendered pronouns because, duh)

[CousinIT]

23. I don't share or know anything of their "God".

If that version of the Great "IT" (aka "God) is THE one then I want nothing to do with it. My own morals won't allow it. My God is my own sense of decency. The "pro-lifer" contingent HAS no sense of decency and their objective seems to punish someone ELSE for that rather than minding their own morals.

Their "God" is something undistinguishable from the worst sadistic evil humans can dredge up from within themselves. Their penchant for abuse then blaming the target of that abuse for it. WHAT PRIVILEGE! It's a putrid, thick, tarry blackness that they are submerging the rest of humanity into. We're drowning in their sewer of sneering self-centered indifference, ignorance and patriarchal self-righteous self-entitlement | holier than thou "women are to blame for all the world's problems!" crap.

There is no male or "pro-lifer" on this planet that would exist without this planet and all that sustains him on it and without a woman who bore him or her.

You'd think that might command an iota of respect.

But - No.

There's less shit and stench in my cat's litterbox when it's not been scraped for a week than there is in the souls of those ghouls.

There are maggots crawling out of their excuse for a heart and their conscience is a graveyard.

They will NOT lecture me and have no standing to lecture any female about anything having to do with "God" or morality or bad or irresponsible behavior. They are the Kings and Queens of irresponsible behavior and immorality and have the planet's markets cornered on it -- while having been gifted by a twisted society which bought into their ruse, with the privilege of being able to always make someone ELSE pay for *their* sins. More often than not, the "someone else" is female. Pretentious hypocrisy is their hallmark - and a sadism of a depth most decent people can hardly comprehend.

You know what they say: Hell is empty. All the Devils are here. They seek to distract from their own MASSIVE immorality by wagging fingers at their victims for being here to suffer with it. What could be more vile? I'm not sure. And they're well on their way to causing us ALL to become extinguished because of it.

[calimary]

22. What A Great Thread!

I’ve thought sooooooo many of these same thoughts, wondering in the end if Planet Earth and the other life forms on it would all be better off without us.