Because We Need a Report, In Triplicate, That Will Be Public Record
They are growing them hateful in Kansas lately.
Meet State Senator Mary Pilcher-Cook, who wants to be a uterus monitor. Apparently we have a real shortage of people wanting to check to make sure that a miscarriage is really a miscarriage. Doctors estimate that 15% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage.
A bill advancing in Kansas would mandate reporting for miscarriages at any stage in pregnancy, the first step along the path to criminalizing pregnant women’s bodies. Under an amendment attached to HB 2613 — which was originally intended to update the state’s procedure for issuing birth certificates for stillborn babies — doctors would be required to report all of their patients’ miscarriages to the state health department.
I mean, how do we know it was really a miscarriage? And shouldn’t all that be public information? I mean, hell, why leave it at that? Why not take out billboards and newspaper ads listing all the women who had miscarriages that month because Mary Pilcher-Cook thinks they might have done something wrong.
I hate these people. I seriously do. I try not to. I just can’t help myself.
Thanks to everybody for the heads up.
I’ve quit trying. You should too. They deserve our scorn.
1What’s the matter with Kansas? Apparently an especially nasty toxic strain of American conservatism.
2Aggieland liz, you’re correct. Such willful ignorance in the age of science deserves all the scorn we can heap on it. Mary Pilcher-Cook is incompetent to manage her own doctor/patient relationship. I sure don’t want her managing my wife’s right to doctor/patient privilege.
3When people try to tell you that “slippery slope” is not a valid argument when it comes to fighting for our freedoms, here is a prime example.
The goal, the end-state, is THEOCRACY, folks. And just in case you were wondering, in case it crossed your mind, in case you thought there might be an inkling that they didn’t, please jump in the Wayback Machine and have Sherman set the controls for 1861.
“We, the people of the Confederate States, each state acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity — invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God — do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America.”
Seven-score and nine years since we kicked their collective white supremacist ass, and everything you need to know about their platform is right there in the history books that they want to use as tinder for the next round of autos-da-fe.
Sovereign and independent states, and Almighty God: the two “improvements” they made on the original Consitution. But it kind of changes the whole meaning of “the blessings of liberty for ourselves and OUR posterity,” don’t it?
4Having experienced a miscarriage and loss of my baby, I could not imagine having to undergo the third degree from some government flunkey as to whether I deliberately caused that death. Anyone who advocates such law is completely insensitive to the rights and feeling of others and TOTALLY INSANE.
5Pilcher-Cook is mentally wearing hobnail boots. Her thinking would turn Kansas into a police state. A poll among Republican women of child bearing age would probably not be in her favor. These Repugs come up with the damndest things aimed at scuttling liberty in order to save the country. This is right in line with the male Rethug who called women’s bodies “host”. Not one of these glass bowls has even thought about how such a law could be enforced and where the money would come from to do so. Oh, wait! I know! They would rob the education budget in their state! Ya know, they will give you A to Z about what is wrong with this country. It ain’t their “what”. Its their “how” and the “how” makes them terrorists.
6What’s the difference between right-wing, conservative christianists and taliban/al-qaeda? Body count. And the taliban/al-qaeda are working on that.
7Yes, how can government possibly make it any more difficult for a mother who lost her baby to a miscarriage? Sign here, here… and here.
8“Now you understand if another miscarriage is reported, we will have to escalate your crime, pardon me, medical situation, to a Level 2 Incident?”
I want to go to Kansas and I want to make this woman listen to me while I tell her how shameful and hurtful her actions are. Not that I expect it would make any difference. She’s too immersed in playing with The Big Boys because if she plays just right, they won’t throw her out of the clubhouse.
maryelle, I think the same thing. I had two miscarriages and was devastated both times. I can’t imagine having a law like this piling on more pain.
9Next thing you know, they’ll be monitoring your toilet.
10Careful now … comments along these lines could prove contagious from state to state. Imagine the Texas DPS confiscation of tampons and maxi pads from State Senate visitors becoming the new modus operandus for “Troop K” – the Capitol Police detachment of the Kansas Highway Patrol. Can’t be too cautious, you know, about dangerous womenfolk bringing “lethal objects” into the legislative galleries!
11Does this mean that if Aunt Flo is late this month that a lady must report it to a duly authorized authority?
12I’d go for that law as long as every man who “spilled his seed upon the ground” or any place that wasn’t an acceptable married-to-him female reproductive tract also had to report it to the authorities each and every time.
13I say let’s be proactive and mail pads/tampons to her for analysis.
14Mississippi is working on the same kind of law. The stoopid is spreading rapidly
15You’re scaring me, Rhea! Remember, I’m on your side ladies. Please don’t give these uptight Xtian fascists any new ideas. Holy Gohmert nightmare, armed Xtians doing home-bedroom invasions.
16stacey campfield tried the same thing here in east teabaggistan (rocky top for college sports fans), but even the nuts in the teapublican’t super majority tennessee allegislature were relatively sane enough to shoot it down, figuratively of course. ammo is too expensive to waste on campfield missives.
17How do people like Mary Pilcher-Cook keep getting elected? Who are the people, especially women, who vote for the likes of Mary Pilcher-Cook? What kind of mind set votes for republicans who continually enact laws that harm women?
Nate Silver says the Dems will lose the Senate in 2014. Don’t understand how this is possible.
18I googled koch brothers and mary pilcher-cook. Feel free to do likewise. This is an ALEC law being passed around among a bunch of legislatures. I’m about to have some special insights on how it all works but it’s still simmering. And some of the GOP in Kansas is pretty mad about Pilcher-Cook. I don’t hate them but they scare me. So do the Kbros who happen to live in Wichita, Kansas, where I was born and lived back when folks acted fairly decently and cared for one another.
19And Ellie I’d love to schlep to Kansas with you and help you speak firmly to that lady, Ms. Pilcher Cook.
20Twenty plus years ago, when I was still trying to pregnant, an acquaintance and I were talking about our respective difficulties in the pregnancy business. She recently had lost a pregnancy at 10 weeks. I had never gotten that far, but had once been two and a half weeks late and was devastated when a pregnancy test at the doctor’s office showed that I wasn’t pregnant; the next day I got my period. My acquaintance worried that she was having trouble getting and staying pregnant because she wanted a baby so much that she became extremely emotional whenever she saw pregnant woman or a mother with a newborn. I worried that my fertility treatments were unsuccessful because I DIDN’T become emotional whenever I saw a pregnant woman or a mother with a newborn. She eventually had a baby girl, and I moved on to becoming the world’s best godmother and babysitter. I’m furious that this “person” in Kansas and her ilk want to subject women in similar circumstances to such outrageously obtrusive questioning. I’ve known a great number of women who have lost pregnancies around that 10 week mark. This “person” and her like must be stopped in their tracks!
21My goodness, what happened to this woman in her life. I just don’t understand.
22I don’t understand all the provisions of HIPAA, but would a state law be allowed which would nullify women’s rights to privacy the way this one would?
23The Koch family has been back mooring elections, since their early days when Daddy Fred funded Robert Welch and his John Birch Society. They say it takes 2-3 generations to develop a psychopath. From Prescott to Dubya, I rest my case.
Credit the Kochs. They sure can spot the crazies. Sharron Angle, Sue Lowden, Mary Pilcher-Cook, and their latest dingbat from Iowa, Joni Ernst. They don’t care if they top Palin for crazy, the Kochs want to disrupt government. Loopy Louie is perfect for their purposes. Fund the crazies and write the legislation for them.
So whatever Nate Silver is predicting, until he has an algorithm for crazy his numbers won’t mean jack, if the Democratic Party gets out the vote. Unless we want to go Russian with oligarchs and fringe fundamentalists, let’s put some energy into 2014.
24In a sane world, Rosemary, you are correct that HIPAA would be the rule of law governing these whack-o-bird state laws invading women and their right to doctor/patient privilege.
But the ruling of the Roberts court in Citizens United set the hounds of nullification loose via the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson funding ALEC to write the legislation and the candidates to enact it.
25About 20 years ago I went to Kansas on a business trip. When I came home I told my husband..”I don’t like Kansas.” When asked for an explanation, the best i could come up with was, “I do’t know; they are just so smug.” I guess I should have added stupid.
26If you go to her webpage, you can read all the bills she sponsors and backs and proposes. She’s a serious head case, and as such, deserves our pity…NOT. I wrote her an ugly letter telling her that I don’t understand her ideas of small government, seeing as how she is all up in the business of other women’s most private issues with their own bodies. There is something completely off about her, and she deserves every speck of “hate mail” that she gets. How in the hell do these people get elected, unless it is that she is the canary in the coal mine that tells us exactly what her constituents are like… Yet another state to NEVER visit.
27I had a miscarriage at 2 1/2 months of a very much wanted baby; it would have been our first. That was bad enough.
(I was so sick at the beginning of my second pregnancy that my doctor thought I was worrying myself sick for fear of another miscarriage. Fortunately he brought me through that and I gave birth to a healthy daughter. We had known couples who had several miscarriages before finally adopting, and feared such for ourselves.)
I hate to think how much worse it would have been with such a law on the books.
28Simple: Someone needs to go to this woman and ask/DEMAND to know if she has had a miscarriage. When/if she refuses to answer, remind her that she is forcing every mother and father that has lost a child to miscarriage to make the occurrence a matter of public record. Would this include the results of the morning after pill, or even normal menstruation?
Yeah, no big government, EXCEPT in our pants 🙁
29Nothing says small government quite like having a woman’s doctor report to the state Bd of Health that she has had a miscarriage. These folks have no shame. In most cases, a miscarriage is devastating for the pregnant woman. How dare they make a sad situation worse by questioning whether she did something to harm her unborn child or not! These tools are some of the biggest liars and hypocrites on the planet because, although they say they believe in small government, the bills they pass say the opposite. A bill of this sort is a huge invasion of privacy and comes between a patient and her doctor—something the RWers have said about Obamacare, which does not do this.
30Ladies, I’m a man so I’m not certain I’m qualified to say this, but…
Whenever I see a Tea/Republican type come up with this stupid kind of legislation, I DO see the War on Women in a way most people don’t. Namely, their idea of a woman is so “one-size-fits-all”: every woman is the same, every pregnancy is the same, every birth is the same. There are no complications or difficulties, oh, and if there should be, they are always limited in scope and frequency.
What incredibly insufferable blockheads!
I’m with JJ on this one and have been for years: I TRULY do HATE these people. I know, I know, that’s an unChristian way to feel but even Jesus had His moment when He dealt with the moneylenders.
31Another disturbing case study as to why abortion should be retro-active and mandatory. She’d at least be confined if she had rabies.
32When I said “hobnailed” in my previous response, I damn well meant it and frankly it is linked to what I learned about Romania when I was in grad school. The Coucescous (spelling?), dictator and his wife, ran Romania like a concentration camp. State mandated pregnancies were the rule under him and his equally evil wife. No family planning anywhere. Birth rate was so high that there were often 5 newborns to a crib in hospital neonatal units. And, yes, miscarriages were under the law and eye of the State and doctors were forced to exam and report on women who had miscarriages. Women of child bearing years were also forced to see the doctor a certain number of times a year to prove she was not using any kind of contraception or had undergone an abortion, as in “back alley”. Romania was also an impoverished country. They exported their very best, namely, ham to the rest of the world at an outrageous level. Asked the professor where all that ham came from and he replied “One enormous pig.”
Pilcher, I swear, is the spiritual spawn of Couceascou. And the wicked fairies that stood around her cradle at birth were the K-brothers et al. No way can these people be allowed to win a political seat. Remand them to a locked room at home where they can natter all the anti-women hate they want until they get tired of hearing themselves sputter.
33As Todd Akin famously mentioned in 2012, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Is a legitimate miscarriage anything like legitimate rape?
34And all ethnics will require a follow-up blood test to see if any illicit substances are in their blood. Then a decision will be made if said ethnic will be charged with murder.
This isn’t snark: that is what they will do.
35When uteruses are outlawed, only outlaws will have uteruses. Which is just about how the radical right sees it anyway.
36I have come to the conclusion that in order to belong to the GOP one has to be an insensitive, sadist, sociopathic, inhumane ass that gets a lot of enjoyment out of adding to people’s suffering. That can be the only explanation for why they would cut school lunches, unemployment, food stamps etc and try to pass laws that would only add to the grief of people that have lost a baby.
37Ms Juanita Herownself,rest easy,I’ll hate them for you. Not a problem for me.
38I’m a little late to the conversation, however @ Rhea (13)– you said what I was, and have been thinking throughout these ‘women only reproductive’ issues. Takes male & female contributions to create reproduction.
39The reason elder sister is five years older, and younger sister five years younger than I is because our mother lost two pregnancies, one to stillbirth (parents had to name and bury him), and one to miscarriage. Miscarriage is common, and if one believes in God, should be viewed as god’s way of sparing many mothers of having to deal with a non-viable human.
Another Kochsucker, Kansas variety.
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