Know Your Century: 1800s or 2000s

For every step women take forward, there are always men trying to bring us back

Oct 24, 2024

Moderates don’t realize how bad right wing America has gotten, how bad it’s always been. “I’m not left or right.” “I don’t really care about politics.” For this story I searched out several moderates who fit that description. These women insisted they were neither pro-choice nor pro-forced birth. (For their sake I called it pro-life.)

Sometimes I’m overly optimistic, but I like to dream that if moderate women were just told what is truly at stake, that perhaps they will join the fight for reproductive freedom.

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I targeted women from Missouri and Idaho.

I chose these states for a reason.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, Idaho Attorney General Raúl R. Labrador and Attorney General of Kansas Kris W. Kobach recently filed a suit in federal court against the FDA over the abortion drug mifepristone. Essentially they are upset over the FDA’s elimination of the requirement for in-person administration of mifepristone, physician supervision, and patient follow-up. Women can travel from states where abortion is illegal to receive the pills and then bring them back to their home to take them. They are also being sent in the mail to women who need them in states where abortion is illegal.

These men, they just care so much about women. They are only worried about our safety. “Chemical abortions in particular have devastating mental health effects for women who experience physical trauma at home and without a doctor or other support person present.” Chemical abortions are less safe than surgical, that’s why we should allow surgical, they said.

Or wait.

No.

They said chemical abortions are less safe than surgical, and if women aren’t allowed access to surgical, they will choose chemical. Since they aren’t allowed to see a doctor in their home state where abortion is illegal, and likely they can’t afford to stay out of state for weeks, they take the pills home to have the abortion alone. That’s why we need to keep it illegal, so these women can keep suffering alone.

The FDA eliminated all these safeguards that these men say kept women safe. Yet, if the FDA had kept the safeguards, they wouldn’t have used them. They wouldn’t let women see doctors for their reproductive heath care, that’s illegal. If they aren’t actually upset at not having requirements for women to see a doctor for an abortion, what are they upset about?

The states are having to pay for healthcare for women and that’s absurd. “Idaho Medicaid paid for her medically necessary dilation and crettage procedure.” The states are paying even more than we know! “The actual numbers are higher. Given that miscarriage symptoms can greatly resemble symptoms from complications created by abortion drugs, and given that some patients will not disclose the cause of their complications, many procedures paid for through state Medicaid programs are not lied as expenses related to abortion complications.”

They aren’t just paying for healthcare for women, they are paying for healthcare for minor girls. If mifepristone is prescribed to a teen girl in foster care, and she has a bad side effect and has to go to the emergency room, that “inflicts substantial economic injury” upon the states. Again, we can’t really know how much injury it caused because of those lying abortion girls.

The states are just caring parents. “Each Plaintiff State is the legal parents or guardian of many minor girls of reproductive age.” They love their girls, their minor girls of reproductive age. “Plaintiff States actively enforce and administer their rights to decide whether these children obtain medical care.” It’s unfair that these loving parents can’t stop their girls from receiving medical care.

These girls have already been through so much. They’ve suffered the trauma of what led them to foster care. They suffer trauma in foster care. As a result, “minor girls in the foster care system or other state facilities are susceptible to pregnancy and to seeking abortions.” “These girls are protected by state laws providing for state control of their medical care and by state laws restricting or prohibiting abortion.” Thank goodness the state will protect them from healthcare.

Why then, if it isn’t because they actually want to have these safeguards in place for abortion, why do these men not want the girls and women of their state to not have abortions?

Population.

“Plaintiff States also suffered injuries from the loss of fetal life and potential births, leading to a resulting reduction in the actual or potential population of each state.”

“Defendants’ actions are causing a loss in potential population or potential populations increase. Each abortion represents at least one lost potential or actual birth.”

Specifically, they note the loss of population potential from aborted teen pregnancies. Teenagers “aged 15-19” don’t show “an increase in births” as they should. “One explanation may be that younger women are more likely to navigate online abortion finders or websites ordering mail-order medication to self-manage abortions. This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected.”

“A loss of potential population causes further injuries as well: the States subsequent ‘diminishment of political representation’ and ‘loss of federal funds’’’ such as potentially “losing a seat in Congress or qualifying for less federal funding if their populations are reduced or their increase diminished.”

The teens, they must give birth so the state can have more money and more political representation.

It was never about their health.

People from Missouri will have the option to vote on the state’s near-total abortion ban in this election. On November 5th, Missourians have the ability to vote yes on Amendment 3 which would remove the ban on abortion, allowing abortion up until fetal viability at which point it could be restricted or banned except to protect the life or health of the woman.

Idaho will not be voting on abortion in November, but they could in the 2026 midterm elections. The proposed policies would establish a right to contraception, fertilitity treatments, and legalize abortion with limits. If approved signatures will need to be gathered.

(Kansas is not voting and abortion is already legal with limits there so I didn’t pick anyone from Kansas.)

Recently I read “The great crime of the nineteenth century: Why is it committed? Who are the criminals? How shall they be detected? How shall they be punished?” written in 1867 by Dr. Edwin Hale. In it he shared some very similar sentiments to today’s Attorney Generals. (As a quick note at that time abortion referred to miscarriages as well, but here he is specifically referring to “criminal abortion,” or what we would now call abortion.)

Is it 1867 or 2024? We don’t want to go back.

By asking in Facebook groups, I found 4 Missouri women who don’t care about abortion rights either way and were willing to talk to me, and 2 women from Idaho. All of these women say they don’t align with any of the political parties. Actually, to make sure I found women who truly didn’t care about politics, I only posted in non-political groups. (I also got banned from a few for doing so. Oops.) Full disclosure, so that these women would be willing to spend time talking to me I told them I was doing this for a class. It’s you, you’re my class.

I chose no women for this who already said they would vote yes to legalize abortion with limits. Here’s how the 6 women split up between whether they would vote at all, were undecided or would vote no.

Here’s how they felt on the progress of women’s reproductive rights.

My hope was at the end of this, I might be able to include a yes row to these polls.

Keeping in mind that all of these women said they are moderates who aren’t interested in politics, here’s how they plan to vote in this upcoming election.

Know Your Century: 1800s or the 2000s?

A few notes:

I won’t include screenshots of answers from everyone and the screenshots will be from any of the 6 people I asked. If I do include screenshots from multiple people in a reply, I’ll separate them with a divider.

The profile I used for this was the same fake conservative profile I use to talk to the men. I actually think having the women think I’m a conservative while telling them all this was beneficial, despite none of them being conservatives themselves. If it’s bad enough that a conservative finally thinks women’s rights are in trouble, they must really be.

A) Abortion “lessens the population of a state or country, to an appalling degree. The ratio of births over deaths of all kinds, is rapidly decreasing. Only among the foreign population are the births increasing. At this rate, if the ratio of total deaths over birth goes on increasing, it will not be long before the Americans left on American soil, will be few and far between.”

B) Abortion is bad because it causes states to have less population. It causes “injuries from the loss of fetal life and potential births, leading to a resulting reduction in the actual or potential population of each state.”

A) “Pregnancy is not a disease”

B) “Pregnancy is a natural condition”

A) “A young woman falls victim to the false promises of a man. She loses her virginity. A pregnancy follows and she is left alone with her great shame.” She gets an abortion.

B) Abortion is “depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers.” This is bad because “a loss of potential population causes further injuries,” like “diminishment of political representation and loss of federal funds.”

A) Doctors do abortions in the “ninth month.” They “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, on the final day.”

B) Women are having abortions “in the last month [of pregnancy] much more frequently than even in the first or second.”

A) A bill passed in which an adult who helps a minor get an abortion will face two to five years in prison, and the minor’s parents and siblings can sue, as can the person who impregnated the minor and children of the minor. Even in cases of rape, someone who helps a minor obtain an abortion can be charged.

B) “Shouldn’t the father, husband, relative or friend be punished in some manner, for keeping the abortion hidden from the authorities? Shouldn’t the doctor or nurse also be punished?”

A) People want abortion legal “so that kids can get abortions. [So that] A 1 year old could get an abortion.”

B) A woman who has an ectopic pregnancy (a nonviable pregnancy that will not result in the birth of a child but could kill the mother) should be imprisoned a minimum of 10 years.

A) “If you want to go after the rapist, let’s give him the death penalty. Absolutely, let’s do it, but not the innocent person caught in-between that, by God’s grace, may even be the greatest healing agent you need in which to recover from such an atrocity.”

B) “Even the best doctors can’t look at a victim of rape without feeling sympathy. That they have performed abortions is not surprising, but doctors need to remember ‘thou shalt not kill,’ is as binding here as elsewhere.”

A) “I would hope that when a woman goes into a physician, with a rape issue, that that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage, or was it truly caused by a rape."

B) We should “issue [doctor’s] licenses” based on “proof of moral standing.” Only doctors that won’t perform abortions should be allowed.

A) Pro-choice advocates support abortion after birth. “The baby will be born, and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby.”

B) “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways of shutting that whole thing down.”

A)“In natural, healthy childbirth, there is little or no actual pain. Painless relaxation and childbirth, with no suffering, is a perfectly normal labor. Abortion, on the other hand, always causes a great amount of suffering.”

B) A staggering increase of 56% of maternal deaths, women dying from their pregnancies, was reported.

A) A bill is signed that will allow private parties to sue abortion providers after 6 weeks of pregnancy.

B) “The doctor who neglects to notify the partners of the probability of miscarriage”who “allows the miscarriage to occur, becomes, to a certain extent, a criminal and should be punished.”

A) “I know women who chose to keep the baby and are very satisfied with their child of rape.”

B) “You know how to stop abortion? Require that each one occur with a gun.”

A) All the criminals in cases of abortion should be prosecuted and the law doesn’t need to “require it to be proved that the death of the child was intended.”

B) A bill was filed that would treat fetuses as human beings, which would allow criminal charged to be filed, including charges of murder and manslaughter, against anyone who gets an abortion, helps someone get an abortion or provides abortion care.

A) A woman was forced to carry her dead fetus for two weeks after a miscarriage when doctors feared they would be prosecuted.

B) “A perfectly humane law, framed for the purpose of preventing the destruction of the unborn child, should be so framed as to prohibit marriage in certain cases, and also to make it obligatory on the part of the husband and wife to prevent conception [or else face punishment.]”

C) Maternal death rates in areas where abortion is restricted are 62% higher than states with abortion access.

D) A woman who miscarried in her home was arrested.

E) A woman was at risk of losing her uterus while carrying a non-viable fetus, but doctors still couldn’t help her because they feared they would be prosecuted.

A) An 1873 act against the mailing of obscene matter could be used against the mailing of anything that produces an abortion even where abortion is permitted.

A) States should track “comparisons between live births and abortion.” They would be forced to report “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”

B) The menstrual periods of patients at a medical center were kept track of by the health department without the patients’ knowledge.

C) We should have a “board of registration and examination in every county and large city of the United States” to monitor that abortion is not happening.

A) If a woman has an abortion “from the date of conception to the end of the third month” she should be punished with “not less than seven years.”

B) It should be up to the states whether to prosecute women for abortions or whether to monitor women’s pregnancies.

A) “A life for a life.” Abortion should be punished by death.

B) The woman should be punished if she has more than one abortion. Doctors should be imprisoned.

C) “After the first abortion, women should be sterilized so no more babies can be conceived and murdered.”

D) “There has to be some form of punishment [for abortion]” for women. “I have not determined what the punishment would be.” The guy that gets her pregnant should not be punished.

E) “Murder is murder. Punishment should fit the crime.” “Death Penalty.”

F) We should imprison doctors and Planned Parenthood’s top executives should be given the death penalty.

(In case you missed it at the beginning. I am not a conservative in any way. I just use a satircal conservative profile for my messages.)

The moment of truth. Did anything change? After this quiz I asked them the same polls. Amazingly…

The no vote moved to undecided. One undecided stayed the same and all four others moved to yes!

Here too one no vote moved to unsure and all the others moved to yes.

Continuing the trend, the vote for Donald Trump moved to undecided, one undecided stayed the same and everyone else moved to Kamala Harris.

This is a small sample, and I don’t know how to replicate it on a larger scale. My takeaway is this, there are women out there who truly don’t pay attention to politics. They don’t have time. They aren’t interested.

Other women who referred to themselves as moderates didn’t want to listen when I messaged them as me. They were however willing to help a student with her project. A lot of people are worn out of life. They don’t want to feel like they are being lectured. Still though, I can’t help but feel like if we found some way to get this information to them in a way where they didn’t feel like it was being forced on them, that moderate women might care. Many of them already do care, they just don’t know it’s happening.

How do we reach them?

Share Let’s Not Date

Sources:

(Note: Some of my quotes are not in these sources. I had them collected previously for other reasons. All quotes can be easily verified online.)

State of Missouri; State of Kansas; State of Idaho v. U.S. FDA

The great crime of the nineteenth century. : Why is it committed? Who are the criminals? How shall they be detected? How shall they be punished? Edwin Hale 1867

Idaho group files four initiative proposals to restore abortion access to state with ban Idaho Capital Sun

Abortion-rights measure will be on Missouri’s November ballot, court rules AP News

Chuck Winder, Idaho Lawmaker, Suggests Women Use Rape As Excuse For Abortions HuffPost

MAGA Candidate Says He’s Worried About Babies Who Might Get an Abortion The New Republic

Missouri Republican Proposes Antiabortion Bill That Would Literally Kill Pregnant People

Trump says states should decide on prosecuting women for abortions, has no comment on abortion pill