Marlena Stell, founder and CEO of Makeup Geek Cosmetics, tells a harrowing story of what it’s like to have a wanted pregnancy go terribly wrong. In her case, it was the second time a pregnancy ended in miscarriage and required medical intervention. (Without it, there was a strong possibility that she’d suffer an infection that could have rendered her infertile at an age when many are already struggling to get pregnant by choice.)
It’s bad enough to have a miscarriage in the best of circumstances, but Texas and its six-week “heartbeat” law are NOT the best of circumstances. They’re pretty damn near the worst. Just Marlena’s struggle to find an obstetrician who would see her bears that out: She had to call a dozen doctors before finding even one who would take her on as a patient. (Or, as they call it, a “client”!)
So why would that be? Why, in a state that claims to be all about “protecting life” as soon as there’s a “heartbeat”, would they be so callous to a woman who is already alive, and who already has a heartbeat, but whose heart is aching because her fetus has gone MIA due to what’s poetically called a blighted ovum?
Well, maybe it’s because they don’t care about human life at all. Not even at the earliest stages of its development. Because if they did care, they wouldn’t make it so hard for a person whose wanted pregnancy isn’t going right to get treatment — in this case, a D and C, which is also a procedure that happens to be used for some first-trimester abortions. (Yeah, surprise, God doesn’t make every pregnancy — much less every baby — perfect. Why do you think we have ob-gyns?)
And since they don’t really care about life at all, they don’t even care if there is no baby in there. Nope, it’s all about punishing women for having sex — or getting raped. And that means logic goes right out the window, and unconstitutional, inhumane bullshit gets written into law. It doesn’t even matter if the pregnancy was wanted and worked for, and worked for HARD. All that matters is punishing imaginary sluts for imaginary sins, while very real pregnant people — most of them cis-women — suffer very real pain and complications. Complications that could, if left untreated, lead to infertility or even death.
But shit, what’s one more dead woman as long as “life”, as right-wing men and their useful idiots define it, is “protected”?