Bay 12 Games Forum

My mom had a 100% normal pregnancy/childbirth with me and her face was paralyzed from Bell's palsy, meaning that for like the first five years or so of my life, my mom smiled at me very little.

Bell's palsy is a normal consequence of labor.


So's fistula! Or a ripped perineum!


This is part of why, among the ancient ... Romans, I think, the life expectancy for a woman was about 30, and the life expectancy for a man was about twice that. Childbirth, alone.


The people who are getting grossed out by discussion of the, yes, normal discussions of normal consequences of labor should really think about that before discussing whether abortion should be permitted or not. People who join the army need to have some kind of idea that they're going to be asked to kill other people, and comprehensive sex ed requires an understanding of what pregnancy is and entails before we run our mouths off making traumatic medical decisions for other people.

My girlfriend really wants to be pregnant for some reason, so if we have kids, she will be giving birth to them. I will not. Conveniently, she's also a gender that matches the whole childbirth thing more conventionally, whereas I usually go through my thought process of "where and how to get an abortion" about once a week and have since middle school, because I desperately don't want to be pregnant. I desperately do not want to be pregnant. I'm starting martial arts again partly because if abortions become unavailable, I need to become a lot better at fighting off attackers ... just in case. Because as aforementioned: I desperately do not want to be pregnant. The best thing along with supporting abortion is making it so I'm a harder target.


I am now going to use the "woman" language throughout because in my experience it invokes more sympathy than including the trans people who are actually more likely than cisgender women to experience sexual assault.

The thing about means testing is that it requires proof that the events in question have happened: proof that the sex in question was rape, which delegitimizes the pregnancy, or proof that it was incest. Proof that a fetus is abnormal is generally super-easy, but not the other two, because it jeopardizes a man's reputation as part of the proof.

We know that virtually all rapes are not prosecuted. It's really "nice" to imagine that a person will be able to:

0. Know she is pregnant
1. Get to safety
2. Prove that she was raped to a court or medical provider, providing viable evidence of such which was collected safely somehow, and not just her word (the problem here among other things is that it becomes a criminal proceeding and you need to call witnesses, so 1 must occur before 2)
3. Get an abortion

all in the timeline of "not a squicky late-term pregnancy."

Let's look at our current legal system: do you think that this is likely to work out?

(Please also remember that violence overwhelmingly comes from partners, not stranger danger. So it is usually harder to access things like a rape kit, which are easier to get when you don't, say, live with the boyfriend who pretended to use a condom, or whatever)

One more thing is that previously, receiving an abortion was not the criminal matter. It was giving the abortion. Now, they are working on prosecuting abortions as homocide on the part of the recipient. Miscarriages, which end about 1/3 of all pregnancies at this point, can look a lot like the aftereffects of an early-term abortion and often require medical aftercare (abortion) to evacuate the remains inside the uterus, because otherwise they can rot inside the woman.

So now, if we have a miscarriage, especially if we are a member of a marginalized group and not "just" a woman, we have to debate whether we go to get our needed care, or if we just tough it out at home, because we don't want to have to deal with potential murder charges on top of our grief.


You are fighting once again over whether or not abortion should be legal while the entire fucking city built on top of its legality burns down around your ears and people are suffering. For those in other countries, fine. Whatever. I paid for abortifacients to be droned into Poland some time ago. For the Americans: seriously??

And for those who say: "It should be illegal because I enjoy the fruits of her labor:" double-seriously? When we outlaw abortion, we legalize theft. Theft of a woman's body, often her profession, perhaps her sense of safety, or health, for the wellbeing of another -- not just the child, but the wellbeing of other people who wanted her to make that child for them, and who might be disappointed by that woman refusing to do her unpaid labor.

If a woman wants to have a child, that is an amazing and wonderful thing. Forcing her into working for her family or the society, should she find it against her own wishes, is deeply immoral.

No forced labor. At-will employment. Work for pay.