cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/64729688
Dr. Erica Schwartz, who on Wednesday became the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, made some alarming comments about abortion care during her confirmation hearings and signaled a potential increased surveillance of abortion patients.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked Schwartz if she would commit to collecting better data on abortions, pointing to the CDC’s annual report of how many abortions are done each year in the U.S. The data program is voluntary, meaning some states like California, Maryland and New Jersey choose to not report annual abortion numbers to the federal agency. However, 44 states currently have some form of required reporting system for abortion care.
“Abortion surveillance is absolutely a critical component of what the CDC is currently doing,” Schwartz responded.
“I also want to make sure that certain states are not conflating emergency services and hiding abortions in that emergency services case definition,” she added. “We need to make sure we’re pulling out true abortions and making sure that we’re really having clear case definitions regarding abortions so the data is actually accurate.”
There is no evidence that states are purposefully misclassifying abortion care when reporting statistics to the CDC. The implication that certain states are hiding abortion services behind the label of emergency care services is particularly egregious given that many women have died or nearly died after physicians denied them miscarriage care due to state-level abortion bans.
This is really doing the important work the American people need these people to be doing.
JFC.
“Leave it to the States…” ???
I remember an avalanche of gaslighting assholes acting like it was hysterical to call the states with trigger laws “Gilead States”.
They were and are totally full of shit, of course. And of course they don’t plan on allowing free states to do what they want. Or have people from Gilead states travel to free states to do what they want.
The comments of the new CDC Head spell out in plain terms that the bottom line for the anti-abortion political stance is sexual control. These people absolutely cannot stand sexual freedom, and consequence-free or harm-reduced sexuality. To them, sexual pleasure is a societal resource to be managed, policed, capitalized, and bestowed to the socially “worthy”.
I am convinced that policing access to abortion care is a form of sexual abuse because of the inevitable consequences those policies impose:
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It demonizes and punishes sexuality and sexual autonomy under implicit threat of possible injury or death from lack of medical care.
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It exerts sociopolitical leverage over a person by legislating their internal and automatic biological functions of sexuality and pregnancy, for the nebulous whims of people they will never even meet.
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It forces victims of rape to consider and be subject to their rapists’ control long after the assault has been committed, including custody disputes or forced child rearing if a pregnancy is carried to term.
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It subjects women and females to invasive surveillance, de-facto suspicion, and financial burdens that restrict freedom of movement, living conditions, and quality of life.
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It endorses and normalizes a toxic and fear-based culture that enthusiastically spreads false and coercive information about complex, private, and deeply personal issues.
These are all aspects of the tactics that sexual abusers use to abuse, rape, control, and extract economic and social control over their victims. Any philosophy that brutalizes and discards the rights of a person for the crime of becoming pregnant has no place in civilized society.
This has always been the case. You could hear it in the language these assholes would use - the way they’d sneer out phrases like “on demand abortion” (how else would you get one? The implication is that it was not a decision run by them). Or snarl about women using abortion as contraception.
You could just tell that most of them hated the idea of women having autonomy and any decorative bullshit about “babies” was just window-dressing. Most of them could not give a flying fuck about actual babies, so their hysterics about fetuses was obviously bullshit.
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“Abortion surveillance is absolutely a critical component of what the CDC is currently doing,” Schwartz responded.
“I also want to make sure that certain states are not conflating emergency services and hiding abortions in that emergency services case definition,”
A miscarriage is listed as “spontaneous abortion” in medical terms.
wanna bet this new cdc person does not understand that. ?
There is no evidence that states are purposefully misclassifying abortion care when reporting statistics to the CDC. The implication that certain states are hiding abortion services behind the label of emergency care services is particularly egregious given that many women have died or nearly died after physicians denied them miscarriage care due to state-level abortion bans.
Wait, why would the CDC be enforcing state-level laws?
Not “enforcing”. Just “narc’ing”.
