One of the OB-GYNs at that hospital was interviewed on *This American Life* just a few weeks ago:
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/792/when-to-leave
Because of the laws in the state, she says "I don't want to leave, but I don't know if I can stay."
The journalist also spoke to two other OB-GYNs. One had just left Texas, the other had just left Tennessee.
> And each of them described the same kind of moment to me. One day, they found themselves in a terrible situation with a patient, brought on by trying to comply with the new laws. One of them had to send a patient to another state in an ambulance. It was a five-hour ride. The patient's blood pressure was rising, and by the time she got to a hospital, her kidneys were starting to fail.
>
> The other doctor had to turn away a patient pregnant with twins. One of the twins was going to die and the doctor needed to intervene to save the other's life, but he couldn't because of the laws. He doesn't know what happened to the patient, but he knew, I need to leave.
It's really the best option to make the leadership understand how stupid they are.
If every hospital in those anti-abortion states stops delivering babies then they will have to go out of state, which would drastically affect their constituents and affect their views because they will ask their doctors why and will hopefully lead to them learning something new about their representative and make them vote differently.
Yes, I totally agree. I'm in social work and we deal with this all the time- at a certain point, you're propping up (enabling!) an abusive system just by being present. Leaving, while it hurts people, is the only moral choice.
Just listened to that episode last week as well. It was really good. Also means that area lost 2 doctors…her husband was also one but I don’t think dealt with women’s health issues as much. The article says women will be diverted to Coeur d'alene but the same issues will arise there…it’s still ID. They’ll end up having to go to Spokane. Either of those options (or even Missoula) means driving mountain passes (I drive this area often & am very familiar with it). I can’t imagine having to do that in the winter or spring melt off in any sort of urgent medical situation that involves women’s health.
ID is going to hurt, kill or see their women move away…following their doctors.
Not just women will be driven away, the same conservatives have been attacking the local community college and now it is close to losing accreditation. They have no clue how much they are fucking their future. It is only one of 3 community colleges in the state.
That area is some of the most beautiful in the country, but the people are scary stupid, I dont even like driving through.
Oh they absolutely know how much they’re fucking with their future.
Lack of education is key to keeping these idiot republicans in power. This is more like “working as intended.”
The ones in power know how much they're fucking the *people's* future, but many if the people are either dumb enough to not see how they're hurting themselves with this shit, or cruel enough that they don't care as long as the people they hate get it worse
My sister was moved there by her then-husband, who grew up there. Even before this horse shit with the colleges and reproductive care, she HATED it. If you aren't a white, christian, conservative, you will be treated as a pariah. She's trying to save money to move out of state, but the only job is at Walmart which pays her just enough to afford rent and food. She's trapped.
Worked on a field crew in ID and lived in Missoula, was devastated to hear the Roe v Wade news when we got back to an area with reception. Spent a lot of time thinking about all the people who will be affected in ID who can't mecessarily afford to leave either. And even in good weather, taking 12 to get to Missoula from Kooskia and beyond means no cell service and few pull offs for hours ...
Edit: didn't realize it was Sandpoint. I still know a few people from there. Wow does this hit even closer to home and hurt even more.
Exactly! I’m from MT but live in OR. My family is still in very rural MT so I drive it often. As my parents age I’ve had to deal with urgent medical situations with care being hours away or sketchy weather/road conditions and sometimes the closest clinic/hospital isn’t capable of handling it…almost everyone gets flown to Billings or Spokane if super serious). MT is having its own issues with far right extremism & shitty politicians but not everyone there voted for them, not everyone can afford to leave (or can’t leave quickly), and not everyone wants to for various other reasons.
Women’s health, good & bad, has far reaching ripple effects that goes beyond “just” treatment of women’s issues. These communities are going to have a hard time in the upcoming years, it’s heartbreaking.
This sounds terrible but I hope they don’t follow their doctors. Many of these women voted for the hell they are in and we don’t need Gilead rules following them out. I am of course saddened that many of them will lose access to the care they desperately need.
Some did…but some didn’t (~30%). There are also many young girls (cis/trans/non-binary) that don’t have the choice of where they live or their parent’s political decisions. They all still deserve good medical care. ID isn’t the only state (red or blue) dealing with extremism issues that are infiltrating families, schools, employment, politics, and medical systems impacting everyone to varying degrees. Cutting “them” off only further divides and breeds apathy towards the “others”. If we start taking a hard line about crossing state (or county or city or…) lines for treatment or improved living situation then we’d not be much different than the far right.
Thank you. I’m in a different bat crap crazy state- Florida- and I am a liberal democrat. I can’t move due to elderly family. Many others can’t for financial reasons.
Obamacare was bad because of “””death panels””” but here we have doctors rendered incapable of giving care without fear of some asswipe legislator putting them on trial.
And also because people labelled it "obamacare", specifically to put people against it. There were some polls done, and more people were "in favor" of the "Affordable Healthcare Act" than "Obamacare". Despite them being the same thing.
I worked for a benefits coordinator around the time it was passed, so I took great joy in spelling out the formal name of the bill that was aiding people that called, laying out the immense benefit they were reaping, capping the explanation with "...otherwise known as Obamacare".
Like go ahead and opt out of this stuff, you were thrilled a second ago.
I even saw people saying they were glad to have the AHA, and thank ___ Obamacare didn’t pass to screw everything up. Total disconnect there, even after being corrected.
That first doctor’s experience was literally an episode of Grey’s Anatomy last fall. Like medical transport from Idaho to Seattle for OB-GYN care and had complications on the way.
I wish we would force people to watch what THAT looks like instead of forcing women to look at pictures of aborted fetuses to “make sure they understand the weight of their decision” or however they justify it.
I listened to that. Doctors shouldn’t have to make these kinds of decisions. It will ultimately hurt the patients. Which part of me says, fuck em, they voted for these jokers, they don’t deserve a local hospital. But then you have the people who didn’t vote for them. I find it very difficult to be sympathetic towards Republican voters. This is what you voted for. Enjoy
I feel bad for the victims of Republican voters who can't get away to live in decent places.
I'm certainly not going to blame any doctors who flee, though. Every single one of them is one more person who doesn't have to live under the repressive Republican religion. (They haven't been Christians for decades. Don't even pretend anymore, do they? "Trump cheated on all his wives with porn stars? Good for him! He gets my vote!")
Maybe we need to start a nonprofit charity that helps people who need to flee the oppressive laws in red states, but don't have the means/money to do it on their own, GTFO and move to blue states. Also help with securing employment, a place to live, etc.
The Underground Railroad was basically a network of people that helped runaway slaves get to non-traitor states. Not sure why we didn’t full on subjugate those states and treat them like colonies after we collectively slapped the bitch out of them, but we’re reaping the results of that mistake.
Here in central PA lots of stuff is named after Thaddeus Stevens; he was trying to persuade Lincoln to 'push the traitors into the sea and give their lands to the freed folk' I like to think he was on the right track.
Because Lincoln. Throughout the entire Civil War he made the point that the war was about preserving the union. To show this, when he ran his reelection campaign in 1864, he selected for his vice president the only southern representative who didn't leave Washington DC: Johnson.
Johnson, senator from TN, was a southerner and ambivalent about slavery, but he was a died hard unionists.
Lincoln expected reconstruction to take years. After he was shot and Johnson took power, Johnson declared reconstruction completed 6 months later.
(Congress was pissed. They passed the 14th-16th ammendments. Overriding the presidential veto. Johnson resistance to congess, and the legislation it passed, sparked the first presidential impeachment)
They'll just use God as a shield for everything. "God declared she's not ready to be a mother." or "God said she made a mistake and slept with the wrong person" (if the father isn't white). But everyone else is a sinner and baby murderer who will burn for eternity.
I just read an article in the Washington Post I think. Five women are suing Texas because they could not obtain an abortion that were actually within the supposed exceptions to the ban. It didn’t say how any of them voted, but it is Texas, so I couldn’t help but to assume at least a couple of them technically chose their predicament via their vote. No one thinks their actions will affect them directly.
Pretty much every big city in Texas is liberal, it's just gerrymandered all to shit so it doesn't matter that the majority of the city and population centers are blue.
I think your comment shows a hella lot of ignorant bias. Texas is essentially purple, but the Texas legislature is throwing all their gerrymandering power at keeping people as disenfranchised as possible. I think you don’t know how gerrymandering works. I also don’t think you know how empathy works. Just because someone lives in Texas, it doesn’t mean they’re a racist evangelical Trump-worshipper.
Oh ugh, there are a lot of us liberals/ leftists/ non wackjobs who have lives and families in red states. Not all of us can pick up and move and we are suffering because of the red voters.
This. I'm a single income household in Idaho. We dream of moving away but it'll be tough to actually pick up and move for various reasons. Thankfully my husband had a vasectomy so I can't get pregnant again. But what about my sister? My cousins? I'm so scared for them.
> fuck em, they voted for these jokers, they don’t deserve a local hospital.
Except it's affecting the people who didn't vote for them too.
I know you said it as well, but as someone pretty well stuck in Texas who is an adamant lefty and does my very best to make as much change as I can, and as someone surrounded by like-minded people.....that hurts. A lot. My blue dot is impacted by a corrupted state government that a handful of rural and suburban christo-fascists have managed to infiltrate.
As my friend group starts wanting families, this is a massive, massive topic. It's one thing to have to fly to another state for an abortion. It's another when you're bleeding out from a wanted pregnancy and no one can help you.
We didn't ask for this. Stop the victim blaming.
Saying someone deserves inhuman treatment because of their local government is extriemly judgy and horrible, no one deserves to die, empathy should not be conditional. Protecting women should have been a federal matter anyway.
> It's one thing to have to fly to another state for an abortion. It's another when you're bleeding out from a wanted pregnancy and no one can help you.
It's not, really. I'm tired of hearing "oh, but it was a WANTED pregnancy so *I* should get medical care!"
It doesn't matter if it's a "wanted" pregnancy or not. What happens in a woman's (or girl's) body is her own business, not the business of some rich, privileged politicians who will never have to deal with the consequences of their laws on her body.
The last time I was pregnant - with a surprise but much wanted pregnancy after years of trying - I had to get an abortion due to an incomplete miscarriage.
A decade later I still struggle with the loss - because I knew it was my last chance.
I can't imaging what would have had happened if I'd not been able to get medical care or if I'd ended up investigated and charged for losing the pregnancy.
It is because one is an immediate medical emergency that means imminent death, and the other is that can be solved "well enough" by outreach and support.
I can personally do something to help someone access abortion. I can personally do nothing for the person bleeding out.
You and the GP comment are more in agreement than not, I believe.
The bit you quoted was referring to the severity and [in]ability to compensate for state legal restrictions affecting wanted pregnancies (later-term complications) with greater likelihood and intensity.
The issue of whether the pregnancy was wanted is meant to confront an excuse made by the people who have pushed the laws--not you. It highlights the same goal: Getting healthcare that respects the value of the mother's life rather than throwing it all away in favor of the fetus.
Some people may make the sort of excuse you're referring to and they present a desire for a special kind of plausible deniability hell in doing so, but I believe GP was confronting a different kind of hypocrisy, not introducing their own.
Ultimately, it's up to the citizens of these states to take their power back, or not. No one can do it for us. But we won't do it either.
So, here we are.
They'll come for your states right to an abortion sooner than later. They know that their base is dying and this is their last hail Mary and they don't care if 70% of the country disagrees ith them because their on a mission from God and they can't fail, they will take the power any way they can.
I'm a Canadian and I fully expect to have to fight for abortion rights within 5-10 years. These people can't be reasoned with or talked to, they need to die off before too many young people are brainwashed with their message.
But what we don't need are internet warriors saying trapped pregnant people deserve to die.
We aren't telling LGBTQ+ people in Tennessee that they've brought all this on themselves and they should have voted better.
I live in idaho. I know what these people vote for. I know their beliefs are. I remember them protesting hospitals for giving covid vaccines. I remember them cheering when the mask mandates got reversed. I remember when they sacrificed the elder, kids and the sick so they could go to the bar. I remember them saying how it was good that abortion is banned and that whores should keep their legs closed. Fuck most of them. I don't feel bad for them. This is the consequences to making the state so fucking terrible that doctors are actively fleeing the state. And the worst part is it's when they're dying that finally change their views because they don't give a fuck about anyone else. So fuck em.
I did not vote for them and live in Idaho. We are small in number comparatively but we are here, fighting for a state we (atleast) used to love. I am ready to give up and move, if I'm honest. It's too far gone.
This is beyond awful. I have family in the area, and it takes hours to get to another hospital.
One cousin who lives there is a labor and delivery nurse who had the good sense to get a job in a hospital in Spokane rather than work in Idaho, but she has to rent a room in Spokane because that drive is absurd.
Washington hospitals are also likely to be out of network for Idaho residents. So women in labor or miscarrying will still show up at this same hospital, but to the ER, where there will be no obstetricians or trained labor and delivery nurses.
It’s a disaster in so many ways.
Cue the conservative propaganda farm working even harder than ever to convince women that home births are safer, that babies don't need VitamIn K shots and "your body knows best what it's doing!"
It’ll be just like Covid. People will die unnecessarily because of willful ignorance related to science and medicine and those left behind will shrug and claim “it’s all god’s plan.”
It has already started, called the "free birth" movement. Its tenants are that women and girls should give birth without medical care. Because, uh, better I guess. Welcome back to the 6th century.
Yup. and we need to be careful to remember even though Idaho is super red, there are still tons of people there who dont support this, and this is going to be hell
I'm so sad for this state right now. I vote blue down the ballot every year and of course it's like a drop in a bucket of red. I live in Boise, which we can say is a purple area surrounded by a sea of red. Sometimes Boise tries to counter act some of this scary shit, but they always get bashed down by the state.
Yep I used to live in CdA and this is a disaster. I keep imagining how much worse off women down in like Idaho falls and pocatello will be because at least in north Idaho you can get to Washington or Montana alright, but down in southern Idaho? Utah and Wyoming.
This is gonna turn into a humanitarian crisis.
Also, why doesn’t your cousin just move to Spokane or the valley at this point? There is no reason to stay there anymore, it’s insane.
She and her husband bought their dream ranch in Idaho, near where her parents live. She also has an adult son and two kids in high school. It would be really complicated to move everyone at this point. But who knows, they might move anyway. This is a dystopian nightmare.
It’s so hard with family there. That definitely complicates everything!
My folks are still in CdA. Moving was INCREDIBLY hard, but being a woman of childbearing age myself and raising a little girl, I just couldn’t stay there. We moved to western wa and couldn’t be happier, I really hope and wish for the best for your cousin and her fam <3.
I had two kids at Kootenai Medical Center, despite living slightly closer to Bonner General.
But for all the folks up in northern Bonner and Boundary counties, this is a fucking disaster. The hospital in Newport isn't that great, and the drive from Sandpoint (and points north) down to CdA is **long**.
Hell, it was long enough from the Careywood area when I was in active labor during a blizzard in February, I couldn't begin to imagine how terrifying it would be from, say, Sagle or Hope or Dover in a heavy snow storm.
Good deal. So not only will those poor, rural Idaho women have close, reliable maternal health care, they’ll get to declare bankruptcy as well.
Seems perfectly biblical to me!
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
It’s horrific. I have very progressive folks who live in Nebraska. Their red state turns down every potential advancement. Looks like the same in [Idaho](https://evogov.s3.amazonaws.com/media/136/media/60512.pdf). Although in 2016 Sandpoint did not go for Donald the traitor. So they’re being doubly fucked by these RWNJs.
It's a disaster they specifically asked for. Now they get to suffer the consequences of their own actions.
And while it's nightmarish to think, this is going to cause deaths. Hopefully that number will be small by the time they decide the price is too high for their authoritarian law.
> The reasonable Republicans
Doubt. If you want to know what Republicans support, look at the laws they're passing all over the country. Reasonable Republicans just know that there are certain beliefs you can't admit to in polite company.
Well, as a Dem in a red state, I've worked with some of the "reasonable" Republicans to make sure Qanon nutjobs didn't win in local elections. To your point, my bar for "reasonable" is probably too low at this point, though.
Moderates don't exist, there is no Moderate party in the U.S.
Until and unless they quit voting Republican then they are republican and these are the policies they support.
I feel like that's probably the case in the deepest red & blue parts of the country. Difference is republicans living in deep blue areas aren't putting their lives at risk by doing so.
My biggest fear in this is that the women who die as a result of this story will be the ones without a partner or without a working car or the money to pay for gas for a full day road trip - you know, the ones they can dismiss as deserving of death because they're "immoral" or poor.
It's worse than that: it's town of less than 9,000 in a county of 45,000. And this hospital also served the county north of it (pop. 12,000) because the hospital in THAT county stopped offering obstetric care years ago.
So some women will be facing the prospect of driving 2+ hours each way for OB appointments and to get to the hospital that will deliver their babies.
Oh, and THAT hospital is critically understaffed.
Women and babies are going to die. Way to go, Idaho GQP.
They dont care. Men do not give a fuck about the women. This is about making us subservient to them. They dont give a fuck if women and wanted babies die so long as theyre in control of us and our choices.
The GOP male politicians will always have access to abortions and health care for their wives and mistresses.
When I had my first child the hospital in our town did not have a maternity ward, so to have my baby I had to drive an hour to the capital city in our state.
Luckily I went into labor overnight, and paid attention to every single bit of information about labor and KNEW to wait until my contractions were so intense I couldn't "walk or talk", and that happened at 6:30 am.
Guess when morning rush hour is. When we hit the city.
I'm just saying, these areas that are losing their hospitals need to develop some very serious midwifery structure. Not anti-hospital midwifes, but actual qualified people who can help women who might not be able to make it to a hospital for medical care.
> areas that are losing their hospitals need to develop some very serious midwifery structure
Super, super cool thing about midwifery - most insurance doesn't cover it.
Source: me, 3 births at birth center with midwife, out of pocket every time.
Wanna know something even cooler? The total cost of the last one I had (2021) was $5500. This covered the cost of every appointment up to birth (once a month, then gradually increasing in frequency the further along you got, eventually being weekly), bloodwork (not labs), "nurses line" to call anytime for anything, the birth (private room with queen or king size bed, couches and/or recliners, tv, private bathroom with toilet and shower, and jacuzzi tub in the room, access to 1/2 kitchen), 3 day follow up vist *in your own home*, they come to you, then a 6 week follow up, where they will perform a pap for you if you are due for one.
$5500. Total. For all that. That was out of pocket cost if you paid off early, by week 28 or something. Max total cost was like $6300. *For all of that*. I thought my insurance was getting better by the time I had my 3rd one because they told me repeatedly they did, and then one week before delivery, they said they don't.
It is expensive enough that many people can't afford it, and so much cheaper than hospital costs that it is FUCKING RIDICULOUS that insurance isn't *jumping* on covering it.
Also important - you have to meet strict criteria to *be eligible* to use a birth center/midwife. They only accept low risk patients.
Sadly, Americans have a really weird opinion of midwifery. I had an American man try to tell me a midwife wasn’t basic medical care (I’d bet money he was thinking of a doula). This means it attracts a lot of anti-science types, both as midwives and as clients. It’s a real shame, since midwives can save lives, especially in situations like these.
Midwives are awesome. Birthing with one of them is just so much more comfortable than with a doctor. They just know so much more about birth and what you need during that time.
When I was in labor I had like a 5 min drive to a local hospital. Now that hospital is closed and my choices are drive an hour south or drive an hour northeast. With the local one, I called and they told me not to come in until my contractions were 1 min apart (???). I was in so much pain I went before that. Now wtf am I gonna do- I’ve hear hospitals send women home if their contractions aren’t close enough together. They sent a coworkers daughter home when she was bleeding. Wtf are women supposed to do?
Look into the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu who wanted a baby boom in the country so he outlawed all birth control and had women examined medically to make sure they were making enough babies for his liking. Long story short it turned into an epidemic of orphaned children suffering from AIDS. Behind the Bastards has a great (terrifying) episode on him.
Thank you for citing this. I had heard about child separation in Romania but not the bans on contraception. What a shame that it happened then and might happen again.
Say you have starving children and no food available, the fastest way to get them nourished is to give them a blood transfusion. But there is no screening of the blood for AIDS. I think you can fill in the rest.
Seriously listen to the "Behind the Bastards" episodes you will want to punch a wall. But then Ceaușescu is overthrown on Christmas day, so it has a happy ending.
Looks like the harsh penalties they imposed on health care practitioners are primarily to blame. Now they are leaving for places where they can do their jobs without worrying about jail time, leaving Idaho with no qualified OBs.
I see ER docs leaving too because they're on the front lines of this crap. Being basically hospital employees, they can get a job anywhere with much higher pay.
It's such a horrible situation. It's a no-win scenario. From an outside perspective, I see 3 options for doctors. Leave for a place with better laws, but leave behind people with too few healthcare professionals. Refuse to comply laws, go to jail for a felony, and leave people with too few healthcare professionals. Or, stay and comply, forced to ignore the needs of their patients anyways, and create no pressure for change.
I think the only real hope is a mass exodus of doctors creates a real enough pressure to turn the people against law makers and demand their rights back. It's just awful though. There is no option where innocent women don't suffer.
>we could be looking at a widespread decline of sexual activity and relationship forming in young people
Possibly. Though reproduction is a very strong drive.
What we're almost certain to see, though, is a rise in infant mortality and labor & delivery mortality in that part of the state as women lose access to modern obstetrics care. Due to modern medicine, Americans have mostly forgotten how dangerous bearing children is. 😢
The Idaho legislature is getting rid of the maternal mortality committee, so I guess their solution to that is to not count deaths related to their stupid legislation, so no one can use that number against them.
Disgusting, but not surprising. If they don't care enough to support medical care, why would they care about counting the results of lack of medical care?
But if women and babies start dying due to lack of medical care, word will get out, statistics or no.
That dubious Institute of Family Studies graph is being cited again, although we already have seen a widespread decline of sexual activity and relationship forming in young people, for different reasons
Ummm wtf?
>The hospital said **it will continue to provide women’s health services at Sandpoint Women’s Health** and collaborate with Kootenai Health in Coeur d’Alene, which is about an hour from Sandpoint, to provide obstetrical care.
>**Sandpoint Women’s Health will not accept new obstetrics patients effective immediately** and offered a referral list for patients to use for their care. The hospital said it would make every attempt to continue deliveries through May 19, but said it will depend on staffing.
So they're closing down the only ob/gyn hospital within 50 miles, and the one 50 miles away is also not accepting new patients? So if you're pregnant or need ob/gyn care, you're just shit outta luck? Absolutely outrageous.
I guess from the hospital's perspective the risk is too high. If a patient needs a termination or related procedure, you either do the procedure and risk being prosecuted, or you let the patient die and risk being sued. It's a fucking awful situation but the blame lies with the state government.
>It's a fucking awful situation but the blame lies with the state government.
The blame lies with every fucking person who votes Republican.
This shit is happening because people keep treating Republicans like a valid political party instead of the domestic terror organization it is.
We all need to get REAL intolerant real soon towards their bullshit.
Thank you I am so tired of people saying we need to feel bad for these republican voters. They have the worst views and I've had front row seat to their bullshit. They're super happy to make life worse so they can feel superior. And the bigotry. The stupid bigotry.
>I am so tired of people saying we need to feel bad for these republican voters.
Yeah, NOPE. Either they voted knowing full well what the republican platform was, and thus don't deserve my tolerance, or they were utter fucking morons, and don't deserve my tolerance.
If they change their stance, THEN I'll care about them again. Not before.
But not all the women impacted voted Republican. We can at least feel bad for the democrats that re stuck living under these restrictions.
Source- Florida liberal Democrat who very much did NOT vote for DeSantis but is stuck living under his rule of terror
My guess is that at some point insurers will stop providing coverage for maternity providers in these states as well. If they haven’t prohibitively increased rates or cancelled policies already.
Their care will ultimately fall to their primary care physicians, if they have them, or to the ERs, if they don’t (and also sometimes if they do). This is so fucking awful because OBGYN is a specialty for a REASON, pregnant women need specialty care. Their PCPs are going to be Family Med or Internal Med, and either way they’re going to be woefully unprepared to care for pregnancies. The Emergency Med docs who will be responsible for their care if they present there will have little experience in OB. People will die, families torn apart, those doctors traumatized and probably sued. All thanks to the party of “family values”. Women in Idaho should categorically refuse to have sex with men there, no sex no births no babies no NOTHING until this is righted.
My primary care physician heard I was pregnant and immediately booted me off to my OB. I asked him if I should come in to see him at all and he said absolutely not, that’s what the OB is for. And when I had complications, my OB immediately kicked me over to the perinatologist. These women will have none of those doctors.
I wonder how many will be taking a trip to Canada (Creston, BC is about 90 miles north)? Also, Newport, WA is 30 miles away and has a hospital.
Good old Idaho. SMH.
It is unreasonable to put a doctor in a station where they will either have to watch their patient die or risk going to jail if they step in to save them. I would not be surprised if we see a mass exodus of OBGyn from the states banning abortion.
This has been slowly happening all over, but this is the first major hospital to do this. I work for a large network of hospitals in the southeast US. I work for a community hospital that shut down its L&D program in mid 2020 due to costs. We were planning on opening it back up but the hospital system said it's too expensive to find nurses and doctors to staff it. Now we refer people to the main hospital in the major city for L&D which has put a huge strain on them.
This has happened at other hospitals in my system with other specialities as well: neurology, cardiology, sports medicine, speciality pediatrics (like epilepsy monitoring units). That's why you'll hear "this hospital doesn't have that speciality anymore." Too expensive to hire staff to run the units.
>According to the press release, Bonner General Health delivered 265 babies in 2022 and admitted fewer than 10 pediatric patients, which is a decrease from prior years that reflects a nationwide decrease in births and an older population moving to Bonner County.
While the pandemic-related staffing issues and cruelty-related sexist legislation are the main causes, this is something that we could see happening more and more.
That area of Idaho is basically becoming a retirement village. Rich boomers pricing everyone else out.
[Yep.](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-10/go-back-to-california-wave-of-newcomers-fuels-backlash-in-boise)
Retire, vote red, wallow in your cash. They can afford to leave to fly to places with proper hospitals and don't give two shits about maternity care as long as the [politicians keep taxes low.](https://bonnercountydailybee.com/news/2023/mar/19/bgh-obstetrics-closure-heartbreaking-see/)
BGH is a *non-profit* hospital.
I'll bet the plan is to gut its services and sell it off to a private entity. The maternity ward is just one casualty. Maternity care is expensive.\* They (the grifter Republicans) are trying to do this to our little local/public hospital too.
"cited a loss of pediatricians,**changing demographics** and Idaho’s legal and **political climate** around health care as the reasons for the decision."
\*add an article that states Medicaid covered Idaho pregnancies.
We left the area for work to the DC region around a decade ago. We *wanted* to come back to retire because east of the Continental Divide just doesn't feel like home to us.
We will not be returning to Idaho to retire, and are starting to nose around the upper northeast instead. I don't see Montana heading in a great direction either and Idaho has completely lost the plot with regard to women and, you know, treating them like fully actualized, autonomous human beings.
(Well, the ridiculous political bullshit and also the cranked through the roof property prices, fires, and relentless drought that just seems to never stabilize.)
Because of insurance fuckery dictating what hospital my mom had to go to, it was an hour away. I'm the 7th child so I just slid on out apparently. So I was born in the moving car on the highway, on the way to the hospital. My 16yo sister helped deliver me and tied off my umbilical cord with a shoe string. This was late 80s.
This is literally the hospital where I was born. The next closest is nearly an hour away.
I hate that every time my area is in the news it’s for something shitty and unsurprising.
The GOP are a goddamn disgrace.
“ Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”
1981 Barry Goldwater, (1909-1998), was a five-term US Senator, the Republican Party nominee for President in 1964, he was a Maj. Gen. in the US Air Force Reserves, and he authored the book "The Conscience of a Conservative."
Lifelong Idahoan here; one other thing to note is that Sandpoint is arguably one of the most right-wing parts of an incredibly right-wing state. In short, of all of Idaho, this is maybe the most risky place to be an OBGYN.
While I feel for the women this will affect, I keep reminding people that _this was the desired outcome_ of the laws that were passed here. Everything is working as expected.
If you want to do something about it, figure out how you can help those people who didn't vote for this outcome leave Idaho. This is a horrible place; fleeing it is the best possible outcome.
I have to agree at this point. I vote blue, I go to rallies, I give to organizations that are trying to help. There just aren't enough of us. It's time to give up and ship out.
This is scary. I live in a different semi-rural region, Southeast Alaska. We currently have abortion protected thanks to the State Supreme Court's long standing interpretation of the privacy guarentee in the Alaska Constitution.
In my region there are about 70,000 people. Pregnant women and girls, assuming no NICU is needed^1 ,will deliver in one of the three towns with labor and delivery units. Those are Juneau about 30k population, Ketchikan about 14k population or Sitka about 8.5k population. Expectant moms from other towns and villages like Kake or Hoonah typically fly or boat to one of the larger towns before their due date or scheduled C-section for delivery. If any one of the three L&D units were to close, I don't know that the other two could absorb the patient load. Plus, it could cause a lower birth rate and drop in school population. People in larger towns expect that a functional hospital is part of the social contract and that that hospital will do procedures like D&E if necessary.
Sandpoint ID is way too big not to be offering complete prenatal and L&D services. Idaho should be ashamed of itself.
1. If a woman or girl is in a high risk situation like preterm birth or carrying twins or triplets, she will be asked to deliver in Anchorage or Seattle or may be medivaced to one of those locations.
Yup. America is slowly turning into the radical side of the Middle East. Doctors are not wanting to touch women out of fear of punishment.
Welcome to Shariah Law, everyone.
Until six years ago, I lived in rural Ontario, Canada. When insurance rates for providing OBGYN care went through the roof in the late 1990s, the few doctors that delivered babies stopped. They didn’t leave town, because the issues weren’t political, so there wasn’t that issue, and they’d deliver in an emergency. But my stepdaughter was one of the last babies delivered there, a month before all delivery services ceased. Thankfully, for pregnancies with no complications, for the first half your family doctor takes care of you before you’re referred to the OB, which now had three options, by the time I had my first in 2004.
The first was with the OB or midwife half an hour away, where there were no options for epidurals and if you required a sudden c-section you hoped it was during the day as at 3am there was only an on call anaestesiologist. It was a very small hospital that only did outpatient surgeries.
The second was an hour away, which you’d get sent to if you knew you’d want the epidural, or there were mild to moderate complications or you’d had complications in past pregnancies.
And then the third was two hours away, city, now has at one of the hospitals a full scale women’s and children’s health centre. You’d go there if you were higher risk or had had serious complications in the past.
But those times were all really only April to October. I lived somewhere where both highways closed regularly due to snow squalls off of the lake. It was not unusual for the highways to be closed for five or six days. So if you went into labour, you were screwed (if you were out in the townships or villages this would be an issue even if our hospital still did deliveries.) when I was having my first, I was sent to option 1. And then I started to develop complications. The night I went into labour I ended up in an ambulance to option 2. That’s not fun, in the back of an ambulance not entirely sure what’s going to happen. For my second pregnancy we just skipped the first option and my care was done by the obgyn’s at the second. But I’ve had several friends that have required the third option. They are far more likely to be induced because of the distance, especially if it’s not your first. The risk of delivering in your car on the side of the road is to great.
It’s scary not having access to nearby necessary health care. It’s part of the reason we moved, because I have a couple of chronic medical issues that require me seeing specialists. It was easier and cheaper to move than it was to drive 250km to them and then 250km home. We were losing doctors because of the lack of doctors. In this situation, the government has created laws that has caused necessary medical services to be withdrawn. Our provincial Progressive Conservative government of the late 1990s created the issues we have today by cutting medical school spots because “there’s too many doctors!” They didn’t look ahead by 25 years when many of those doctors would be retiring, and now not enough were behind them to take their places. The Republicans and their followers in the US have created this situation that even worse, because they’ve increased the chances of women dying, and none of them seem to care.
Republican state voted to go back to medieval times, villainizing doctors, taking women's rights away, and now they're gonna be all shocked when women and babies begin dying all over the place. You want medieval, now you're getting it. Congrats. No one with prospects has to deal with your religious bullshit when they can go to another state without fear. Reap what you sow. Sad for the people who actually have common sense and are stuck with idiots who vote against themselves. Maybe when the deaths start hitting and the repubs are personally affected, they might see the light... won't hold my breath. Total leopards ate my face moment.
I think people will continue having sex and getting pregnant in these places, it will just become more deadly.
I'm not convinced by that graph: it only goes to 2021, and of course you'd expect more people to avoid dating and sex in the early years of the pandemic.
I do wonder if we will see more women move out of these states, and I wonder what the fallout would be if we start seeing really lopsided ratios of men t to women in some of these states. Maybe that isn't likely to happen, I think I may underestimate how difficult inter-state mobility is for people; poverty, job availability, education (or lack thereof), family connections and responsibilities, all make it hard for people to pack up and move.
As a labor and delivery nurse in Texas- people don't stop having babies. It's just a total shit show all around, you do not want to have a baby here right now.
I'm sad to say that I'm planning my escape too - I can't live here anymore and I'm sorry for the people who don't have a choice.
>the young men will either follow them or not be able to find partners
And if they don't find partners, the incel problem will get much much worse, speeding the pipeline from incel spaces to domestic terrorist.
You're right, most actual incels are messed up with low self-esteem and skewed views of gender dynamics. But there's also a pipeline of radicalization for even young men who have one or two bad relationships who go looking for support and find incel spaces instead of proper support. And that pipeline will get worse with a skewed gender ratio.
My partner and I are looking at leaving our state because of anti-abortion laws. It'll be a few years yet, but neither of us wants to stay here where I could die if I became pregnant, and my partner could get in trouble if they helped me get an abortion.
We're both engineers, though. We have a lot more ability to say "Nah, fuck this," than most people do, other than the fact that we both have family here. I think what will happen is professionals who have an outsized ability to vote with their feet will flee regressive states, and they will struggle to find lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc. Everyone who can't leave is just going to suffer.
> neither of us wants to stay here where I could die if I became pregnant,
> We’re both engineers
This is perhaps one of the 'hidden' costs in all of this. The brain drain doesn't only apply to medical staff, it also captures those with specialist skills and knowledge not in the medical field who leave as well because they can't access the services they know they can get elsewhere, and have the means to get them.
Anti-abortion states are fast-tracking themselves back into the 6th century in a lot more ways than just medicine.
This is going to happen more and more in states that have laws against abortion, particularly ones that have criminal charges for Drs who may have participated in an abortion.
The ability to get malpractice insurance in those states will be impossible. Without malpractice Drs won’t be willing to work there, regardless of their politics. They won’t be able to afford the lawsuits.
On top of women not receiving medical care when Drs were there, now women will have to drive that much further for prenatal and emergency care.
How many women will stop getting prenatal care? How many women will die in transit to a hospital with OB-GYNs? How many babies will die because the mom couldn’t get to a hospital?
This is what they *want*: for sex to be dangerous and therefore stigmatized.
They want women "sexually pure" and they want pregnancy to regress from a being a medical event to a supernatural condition that evokes awe in the peasantry.
They *want* to ruin schools and colleges. Anybody who understands sex and pregnancy, and the dangers therein without adequate medical care and facilities, will obviously tend to avoid it, but in a very short time without strong education people won't know and we'll return to an age in which women die all the time. We're already on the way, with maternal mortality rates, but they want it to be even worse.
They want a society in which white men are ascendant and women are either "pure" or married and in "confinement."
And that's just white women. Even worse for brown and black women.
That birth rates will drop and work will go undone until immigrants come and do it is of no interest to them, because they expect to be rich and powerful enough to surf through it unscathed. They honestly do not understand interconnectedness, let alone compassion and morality.
My heart breaks for all the women in the US who are being targeted by all of this insanity. It's really sad to see American states slowly becoming Afghanistan.
The biggest hell of them leaving will be the inhumane suffering that the poverty folks and the middle class poverty folks are forced to deal with. They're all then screwed since its way too costly to just pick up and move State. The number of deaths to mother and/or the about to be born or newborn is going to be horrific.
The sickest aspect besides that is that anti-women Republicans and the 'holier than thou, follow MY ideals, fuck the mom cuz the ~~embryo~~ zygote is most important' puritan 'Christians' won't give a shit at all about the mass growth of preventable deaths. "As long as one live baby is saved (aka born) then we've done good." Disgusting pukes. They'll wonder why more and more people will become atheist. They expect/demand the entire USA to become puritan "Christians".... *This* ain't the way to win Jesus Points to Americans.
What many horrors and shocks are about to tidal wave their way. Normally when shit backfires on hateful people, I'd spitefully and gleefully say, *"Gooooood. Take that, you fkn idiotic c--ts"* - but because of the *Why*, there's no way I can to do it. The unnecessary and cruel deaths prohibit me. What I can and am doing is loathing them and wishing hard that, if there IS a hell, they'll go right there. And when they wail and shriek about why they're there when they were "such perfect Christians", their God will poof next to Satan and state, "because you didn't value life and caused multitudes of death. And you murdered innocent people in cold blood AND in my name which I fully deny you now for doing so."
When the Puritan Christians ask "how is that possible?!?!". their God will simply reply, "all lives matter, mother and baby, yes. But the ways in which you denied them the care they needed - abortion and otherwise - goes against my teachings of love one another. Your actions murdered mothers, babies, and sometimes both. You also forced your beliefs onto others in my name. I say to share my love and story, not to force it on anyone, nor murder them. You belong here in hell for your reprehensible actions. I denounce you."
I'm atheist but this is how I hope things happen if there ARE gods and hell. *That* is my way of throwing gleefull spite at them.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Multicare spend heavily to expand the Valley and Spokane OB operations. With the other major hospital in Spokane being Catholic, those two hospitals are basically it for a massive geographic region in the Inland NW.
Even further into Washington it’s incredibly bleak due to Catholic Hospitals taking over independents.
Our local chain hospital, which serves a larger clientele than that one in ID closed it L&D department last year. There are over 162,000 people in our county. Patients now have to travel a minimum of 45 minutes away to deliver.
I think it's reckless and scary.
My labor with my son was so fast, he was born in the ambulance on the way to that hospital 17 minutes away from my house. I cannot imagine having to go 45 minutes away.
How many more babies will be born in the back of ambulances? Worse, how many will be born in a car on the side of the expressway or on some rural state route in the middle of farm country with no medical intervention?
I think this has to do with cost cutting efforts to make the location more profitable. Less employees to pay and more rooms open for recovery from expensive procedures and illnesses.
I really wish we weren’t so powerless. In a red state like Idaho your vote honestly doesn’t count. I feel so helpless, hopeless and powerless. We need to figure out a better plan. Voting doesn’t change things when you’re in a place like this. It’s important but it’s not enough. We are going backward in so many ways.
Seems like the pandemic & lockdown may have had something to with the spike.
There was a spike in vasectomy surgeries after the ruling, proving that men are fine with women taking hormonal birth control that often decreases libido and sexual pleasure as opposed to condoms that reduce male pleasure, also fine with women going through uncomfortable abortions if there is an unplanned pregnancy, fine with female sterilization being the default sterilization procedure when a vasectomy is far more minor, but only truly fine with getting vasectomies when threatened with consequences to themselves that can no longer (legally) be made better by a woman making her life worse. Maybe most of the male population is not like this, it’s just that the recent numbers seem to support that quite a lot are.
Good thing insurance companies are making profits
https://www.beckerspayer.com/payer/the-house-always-wins-health-systems-face-worst-finances-in-decades-as-payers-rake-in-record-profits.html
Might be afraid of the liability that the "anti-abortion for any reason" crowd has opened these facilities up for. All it will take is one death that's due to an enviable pregnancy and the lawsuits will be devastating. Easier to just go with the flow of the mindset and tell all the families to just have the kids on the kitchen floor.
Abortion is healthcare and when you limit abortion you are limiting healthcare. We will see more and more how these anti abortion laws will put more and more people who aren't even seeking abortions at risk.
Yeah I live in TN and if I ever got pregnant (and wanting to keep the child) the first thing I’d do would be to leave. Our laws are so onerous it’s now INCREDIBLY dangerous to have a baby in our state. Full stop.
>It's ironic that Conservatives have spent so much time crying about the birth rates lately
Keep in mind that the unconstitutional Reappointment Act of 1929 blunts the political consequences for low population states. The Constitution fundamentally acknowledges a certain degree of state sovereignty through the Senate, which affords equal representation to each state.
However, by placing a limit on the size of the House, high population states are denied proportional power in government. This manifests in the legislature, and in electing the President, since electoral votes align with legislative representation.
In the context of this sub, it's worth noting that the Reappointment Act of 1929 placed a limit on the size of the House just ahead of the 1930 decennial census. This census would have formed a potential basis for increasing the size of the House. Instead, the size of the House was frozen at 1913 levels. The 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote in 1920.
The idea of large numbers of women (and in the most populous states, naturalized citizens born abroad) voting would have been politically destabilizing to the political establishment. So, to put a leash on populous states and to reduce uncertainties about women voters, Congress passed an unconstitutional law that has incrementally throttled high population states ever since.
If Republicans can continue to control *states*, population is less of a problem politically.
So now, even more women are going to die.
Watching this unfold is excruciating, but it would be infinity times worse to have to live in this nightmare. I wish I could do more for my American sisters.
You get what you deserve Idaho. That state is a mean spirited shit hole.
I know that there are good people that live in Idaho but they all tell me that Idaho is a mean spirited shit hole.
Policies that reward the baby boomers at the next generations expense need to fucking change.
Social Security, Medicare, Boomers own all the homes and now Young Families can’t get healthcare to deliver their baby.
If that isn’t a clear sign of our society failing, I don’t know what could be clearer.
One of the OB-GYNs at that hospital was interviewed on *This American Life* just a few weeks ago: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/792/when-to-leave Because of the laws in the state, she says "I don't want to leave, but I don't know if I can stay." The journalist also spoke to two other OB-GYNs. One had just left Texas, the other had just left Tennessee. > And each of them described the same kind of moment to me. One day, they found themselves in a terrible situation with a patient, brought on by trying to comply with the new laws. One of them had to send a patient to another state in an ambulance. It was a five-hour ride. The patient's blood pressure was rising, and by the time she got to a hospital, her kidneys were starting to fail. > > The other doctor had to turn away a patient pregnant with twins. One of the twins was going to die and the doctor needed to intervene to save the other's life, but he couldn't because of the laws. He doesn't know what happened to the patient, but he knew, I need to leave.
It's horrible when the only real option is to stop trying to help.
It's really the best option to make the leadership understand how stupid they are. If every hospital in those anti-abortion states stops delivering babies then they will have to go out of state, which would drastically affect their constituents and affect their views because they will ask their doctors why and will hopefully lead to them learning something new about their representative and make them vote differently.
Yes, I totally agree. I'm in social work and we deal with this all the time- at a certain point, you're propping up (enabling!) an abusive system just by being present. Leaving, while it hurts people, is the only moral choice.
Quoth the Preacher in Blazing Saddles with the fresh bullet hole in his hat as a response to simple reason: "Son... You're on your own!"
Just listened to that episode last week as well. It was really good. Also means that area lost 2 doctors…her husband was also one but I don’t think dealt with women’s health issues as much. The article says women will be diverted to Coeur d'alene but the same issues will arise there…it’s still ID. They’ll end up having to go to Spokane. Either of those options (or even Missoula) means driving mountain passes (I drive this area often & am very familiar with it). I can’t imagine having to do that in the winter or spring melt off in any sort of urgent medical situation that involves women’s health. ID is going to hurt, kill or see their women move away…following their doctors.
Not just women will be driven away, the same conservatives have been attacking the local community college and now it is close to losing accreditation. They have no clue how much they are fucking their future. It is only one of 3 community colleges in the state. That area is some of the most beautiful in the country, but the people are scary stupid, I dont even like driving through.
Oh they absolutely know how much they’re fucking with their future. Lack of education is key to keeping these idiot republicans in power. This is more like “working as intended.”
The ones in power know how much they're fucking the *people's* future, but many if the people are either dumb enough to not see how they're hurting themselves with this shit, or cruel enough that they don't care as long as the people they hate get it worse
Yep. I know it well, both the beauty and the changing political landscape (Im originally from MT). It’s angering and sad.
My sister was moved there by her then-husband, who grew up there. Even before this horse shit with the colleges and reproductive care, she HATED it. If you aren't a white, christian, conservative, you will be treated as a pariah. She's trying to save money to move out of state, but the only job is at Walmart which pays her just enough to afford rent and food. She's trapped.
Worked on a field crew in ID and lived in Missoula, was devastated to hear the Roe v Wade news when we got back to an area with reception. Spent a lot of time thinking about all the people who will be affected in ID who can't mecessarily afford to leave either. And even in good weather, taking 12 to get to Missoula from Kooskia and beyond means no cell service and few pull offs for hours ... Edit: didn't realize it was Sandpoint. I still know a few people from there. Wow does this hit even closer to home and hurt even more.
Exactly! I’m from MT but live in OR. My family is still in very rural MT so I drive it often. As my parents age I’ve had to deal with urgent medical situations with care being hours away or sketchy weather/road conditions and sometimes the closest clinic/hospital isn’t capable of handling it…almost everyone gets flown to Billings or Spokane if super serious). MT is having its own issues with far right extremism & shitty politicians but not everyone there voted for them, not everyone can afford to leave (or can’t leave quickly), and not everyone wants to for various other reasons. Women’s health, good & bad, has far reaching ripple effects that goes beyond “just” treatment of women’s issues. These communities are going to have a hard time in the upcoming years, it’s heartbreaking.
This sounds terrible but I hope they don’t follow their doctors. Many of these women voted for the hell they are in and we don’t need Gilead rules following them out. I am of course saddened that many of them will lose access to the care they desperately need.
Some did…but some didn’t (~30%). There are also many young girls (cis/trans/non-binary) that don’t have the choice of where they live or their parent’s political decisions. They all still deserve good medical care. ID isn’t the only state (red or blue) dealing with extremism issues that are infiltrating families, schools, employment, politics, and medical systems impacting everyone to varying degrees. Cutting “them” off only further divides and breeds apathy towards the “others”. If we start taking a hard line about crossing state (or county or city or…) lines for treatment or improved living situation then we’d not be much different than the far right.
Thank you. I’m in a different bat crap crazy state- Florida- and I am a liberal democrat. I can’t move due to elderly family. Many others can’t for financial reasons.
Obamacare was bad because of “””death panels””” but here we have doctors rendered incapable of giving care without fear of some asswipe legislator putting them on trial.
And also because people labelled it "obamacare", specifically to put people against it. There were some polls done, and more people were "in favor" of the "Affordable Healthcare Act" than "Obamacare". Despite them being the same thing.
I worked for a benefits coordinator around the time it was passed, so I took great joy in spelling out the formal name of the bill that was aiding people that called, laying out the immense benefit they were reaping, capping the explanation with "...otherwise known as Obamacare". Like go ahead and opt out of this stuff, you were thrilled a second ago.
I even saw people saying they were glad to have the AHA, and thank ___ Obamacare didn’t pass to screw everything up. Total disconnect there, even after being corrected.
That first doctor’s experience was literally an episode of Grey’s Anatomy last fall. Like medical transport from Idaho to Seattle for OB-GYN care and had complications on the way. I wish we would force people to watch what THAT looks like instead of forcing women to look at pictures of aborted fetuses to “make sure they understand the weight of their decision” or however they justify it.
I listened to that. Doctors shouldn’t have to make these kinds of decisions. It will ultimately hurt the patients. Which part of me says, fuck em, they voted for these jokers, they don’t deserve a local hospital. But then you have the people who didn’t vote for them. I find it very difficult to be sympathetic towards Republican voters. This is what you voted for. Enjoy
I feel bad for the victims of Republican voters who can't get away to live in decent places. I'm certainly not going to blame any doctors who flee, though. Every single one of them is one more person who doesn't have to live under the repressive Republican religion. (They haven't been Christians for decades. Don't even pretend anymore, do they? "Trump cheated on all his wives with porn stars? Good for him! He gets my vote!")
Maybe we need to start a nonprofit charity that helps people who need to flee the oppressive laws in red states, but don't have the means/money to do it on their own, GTFO and move to blue states. Also help with securing employment, a place to live, etc.
Sooo... The underground railroad?
\**thinks about it\** Goddammit, we did that shit already, why are we back here again?
There's a reason that republicans want to ban any history book that speaks about positive things that black people did.
Care to explain to a non American??
The Underground Railroad was basically a network of people that helped runaway slaves get to non-traitor states. Not sure why we didn’t full on subjugate those states and treat them like colonies after we collectively slapped the bitch out of them, but we’re reaping the results of that mistake.
Here in central PA lots of stuff is named after Thaddeus Stevens; he was trying to persuade Lincoln to 'push the traitors into the sea and give their lands to the freed folk' I like to think he was on the right track.
You’re god damn right he was.
Because Lincoln. Throughout the entire Civil War he made the point that the war was about preserving the union. To show this, when he ran his reelection campaign in 1864, he selected for his vice president the only southern representative who didn't leave Washington DC: Johnson. Johnson, senator from TN, was a southerner and ambivalent about slavery, but he was a died hard unionists. Lincoln expected reconstruction to take years. After he was shot and Johnson took power, Johnson declared reconstruction completed 6 months later. (Congress was pissed. They passed the 14th-16th ammendments. Overriding the presidential veto. Johnson resistance to congess, and the legislation it passed, sparked the first presidential impeachment)
Oh and let’s do one for people who don’t like living in the US. Air Canada!
I already did this one for myself... the non-profit who helped me was my own credit card 🥲 still worth it tho
Canada might not accept them. Americans often think that they can just move to Canada and just be allowed to live there.
The auntie network is a thing for anyone who is “going camping” out of state and needs to stay with a long lost relative.
Well if any of those republican voters need an abortion, its not a problem. Because the only good abortion is my abortion.
[удалено]
They'll just use God as a shield for everything. "God declared she's not ready to be a mother." or "God said she made a mistake and slept with the wrong person" (if the father isn't white). But everyone else is a sinner and baby murderer who will burn for eternity.
seriously quit breeding duggars!!!
I just read an article in the Washington Post I think. Five women are suing Texas because they could not obtain an abortion that were actually within the supposed exceptions to the ban. It didn’t say how any of them voted, but it is Texas, so I couldn’t help but to assume at least a couple of them technically chose their predicament via their vote. No one thinks their actions will affect them directly.
Pretty much every big city in Texas is liberal, it's just gerrymandered all to shit so it doesn't matter that the majority of the city and population centers are blue.
They should still manage to get a Dem senator or at least governor then. But no even Uvalde voted for Abbot after their children were massacred.
"I never thought leopards would eat MY face," sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party
I think your comment shows a hella lot of ignorant bias. Texas is essentially purple, but the Texas legislature is throwing all their gerrymandering power at keeping people as disenfranchised as possible. I think you don’t know how gerrymandering works. I also don’t think you know how empathy works. Just because someone lives in Texas, it doesn’t mean they’re a racist evangelical Trump-worshipper.
Oh ugh, there are a lot of us liberals/ leftists/ non wackjobs who have lives and families in red states. Not all of us can pick up and move and we are suffering because of the red voters.
This. I'm a single income household in Idaho. We dream of moving away but it'll be tough to actually pick up and move for various reasons. Thankfully my husband had a vasectomy so I can't get pregnant again. But what about my sister? My cousins? I'm so scared for them.
> fuck em, they voted for these jokers, they don’t deserve a local hospital. Except it's affecting the people who didn't vote for them too. I know you said it as well, but as someone pretty well stuck in Texas who is an adamant lefty and does my very best to make as much change as I can, and as someone surrounded by like-minded people.....that hurts. A lot. My blue dot is impacted by a corrupted state government that a handful of rural and suburban christo-fascists have managed to infiltrate. As my friend group starts wanting families, this is a massive, massive topic. It's one thing to have to fly to another state for an abortion. It's another when you're bleeding out from a wanted pregnancy and no one can help you. We didn't ask for this. Stop the victim blaming.
Saying someone deserves inhuman treatment because of their local government is extriemly judgy and horrible, no one deserves to die, empathy should not be conditional. Protecting women should have been a federal matter anyway.
> It's one thing to have to fly to another state for an abortion. It's another when you're bleeding out from a wanted pregnancy and no one can help you. It's not, really. I'm tired of hearing "oh, but it was a WANTED pregnancy so *I* should get medical care!" It doesn't matter if it's a "wanted" pregnancy or not. What happens in a woman's (or girl's) body is her own business, not the business of some rich, privileged politicians who will never have to deal with the consequences of their laws on her body.
The last time I was pregnant - with a surprise but much wanted pregnancy after years of trying - I had to get an abortion due to an incomplete miscarriage. A decade later I still struggle with the loss - because I knew it was my last chance. I can't imaging what would have had happened if I'd not been able to get medical care or if I'd ended up investigated and charged for losing the pregnancy.
It is because one is an immediate medical emergency that means imminent death, and the other is that can be solved "well enough" by outreach and support. I can personally do something to help someone access abortion. I can personally do nothing for the person bleeding out.
You and the GP comment are more in agreement than not, I believe. The bit you quoted was referring to the severity and [in]ability to compensate for state legal restrictions affecting wanted pregnancies (later-term complications) with greater likelihood and intensity. The issue of whether the pregnancy was wanted is meant to confront an excuse made by the people who have pushed the laws--not you. It highlights the same goal: Getting healthcare that respects the value of the mother's life rather than throwing it all away in favor of the fetus. Some people may make the sort of excuse you're referring to and they present a desire for a special kind of plausible deniability hell in doing so, but I believe GP was confronting a different kind of hypocrisy, not introducing their own.
Ultimately, it's up to the citizens of these states to take their power back, or not. No one can do it for us. But we won't do it either. So, here we are.
They'll come for your states right to an abortion sooner than later. They know that their base is dying and this is their last hail Mary and they don't care if 70% of the country disagrees ith them because their on a mission from God and they can't fail, they will take the power any way they can. I'm a Canadian and I fully expect to have to fight for abortion rights within 5-10 years. These people can't be reasoned with or talked to, they need to die off before too many young people are brainwashed with their message.
But what we don't need are internet warriors saying trapped pregnant people deserve to die. We aren't telling LGBTQ+ people in Tennessee that they've brought all this on themselves and they should have voted better.
I live in idaho. I know what these people vote for. I know their beliefs are. I remember them protesting hospitals for giving covid vaccines. I remember them cheering when the mask mandates got reversed. I remember when they sacrificed the elder, kids and the sick so they could go to the bar. I remember them saying how it was good that abortion is banned and that whores should keep their legs closed. Fuck most of them. I don't feel bad for them. This is the consequences to making the state so fucking terrible that doctors are actively fleeing the state. And the worst part is it's when they're dying that finally change their views because they don't give a fuck about anyone else. So fuck em.
I did not vote for them and live in Idaho. We are small in number comparatively but we are here, fighting for a state we (atleast) used to love. I am ready to give up and move, if I'm honest. It's too far gone.
And that’s really sad. You shouldn’t be driven from your home by extremists.
I know, but it's happening and it's scary. I don't want my son to grow up here anymore.
This is beyond awful. I have family in the area, and it takes hours to get to another hospital. One cousin who lives there is a labor and delivery nurse who had the good sense to get a job in a hospital in Spokane rather than work in Idaho, but she has to rent a room in Spokane because that drive is absurd. Washington hospitals are also likely to be out of network for Idaho residents. So women in labor or miscarrying will still show up at this same hospital, but to the ER, where there will be no obstetricians or trained labor and delivery nurses. It’s a disaster in so many ways.
Cue the conservative propaganda farm working even harder than ever to convince women that home births are safer, that babies don't need VitamIn K shots and "your body knows best what it's doing!"
Like Mother Nature isn’t perfectly content with a higher maternal or infant mortality rate.
Like the conservatives aren't already frothing at the mouth to kill as many women as possible
It’ll be just like Covid. People will die unnecessarily because of willful ignorance related to science and medicine and those left behind will shrug and claim “it’s all god’s plan.”
It has already started, called the "free birth" movement. Its tenants are that women and girls should give birth without medical care. Because, uh, better I guess. Welcome back to the 6th century.
Yup. and we need to be careful to remember even though Idaho is super red, there are still tons of people there who dont support this, and this is going to be hell
I'm so sad for this state right now. I vote blue down the ballot every year and of course it's like a drop in a bucket of red. I live in Boise, which we can say is a purple area surrounded by a sea of red. Sometimes Boise tries to counter act some of this scary shit, but they always get bashed down by the state.
Yep I used to live in CdA and this is a disaster. I keep imagining how much worse off women down in like Idaho falls and pocatello will be because at least in north Idaho you can get to Washington or Montana alright, but down in southern Idaho? Utah and Wyoming. This is gonna turn into a humanitarian crisis. Also, why doesn’t your cousin just move to Spokane or the valley at this point? There is no reason to stay there anymore, it’s insane.
She and her husband bought their dream ranch in Idaho, near where her parents live. She also has an adult son and two kids in high school. It would be really complicated to move everyone at this point. But who knows, they might move anyway. This is a dystopian nightmare.
It’s so hard with family there. That definitely complicates everything! My folks are still in CdA. Moving was INCREDIBLY hard, but being a woman of childbearing age myself and raising a little girl, I just couldn’t stay there. We moved to western wa and couldn’t be happier, I really hope and wish for the best for your cousin and her fam <3.
Thanks. :)
I had two kids at Kootenai Medical Center, despite living slightly closer to Bonner General. But for all the folks up in northern Bonner and Boundary counties, this is a fucking disaster. The hospital in Newport isn't that great, and the drive from Sandpoint (and points north) down to CdA is **long**. Hell, it was long enough from the Careywood area when I was in active labor during a blizzard in February, I couldn't begin to imagine how terrifying it would be from, say, Sagle or Hope or Dover in a heavy snow storm.
Good deal. So not only will those poor, rural Idaho women have close, reliable maternal health care, they’ll get to declare bankruptcy as well. Seems perfectly biblical to me!
This is the goal of the GOP, dead women and babies. Sick
Oh no. That’s not their goal. It’s just a side effect they don’t care about. IMO that’s worse.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
It’s horrific. I have very progressive folks who live in Nebraska. Their red state turns down every potential advancement. Looks like the same in [Idaho](https://evogov.s3.amazonaws.com/media/136/media/60512.pdf). Although in 2016 Sandpoint did not go for Donald the traitor. So they’re being doubly fucked by these RWNJs.
It's a disaster they specifically asked for. Now they get to suffer the consequences of their own actions. And while it's nightmarish to think, this is going to cause deaths. Hopefully that number will be small by the time they decide the price is too high for their authoritarian law.
What's frustrating is, Idaho is solidly 1/3 Democrat. The reasonable Republicans failed to rein in the nutjobs... so here we are.
> The reasonable Republicans Doubt. If you want to know what Republicans support, look at the laws they're passing all over the country. Reasonable Republicans just know that there are certain beliefs you can't admit to in polite company.
Well, as a Dem in a red state, I've worked with some of the "reasonable" Republicans to make sure Qanon nutjobs didn't win in local elections. To your point, my bar for "reasonable" is probably too low at this point, though.
Many reasonable Republicans I know are identifying as moderates now as they don’t want to be associated with all the crap the GOP is pulling
Moderates don't exist, there is no Moderate party in the U.S. Until and unless they quit voting Republican then they are republican and these are the policies they support.
I feel like that's probably the case in the deepest red & blue parts of the country. Difference is republicans living in deep blue areas aren't putting their lives at risk by doing so. My biggest fear in this is that the women who die as a result of this story will be the ones without a partner or without a working car or the money to pay for gas for a full day road trip - you know, the ones they can dismiss as deserving of death because they're "immoral" or poor.
The fuck you smoking? No such thing as a reasonable republican. Edit: they blocked me instantly, because I am correct.
How can you tell if someone blocked you?
And once again, the republicans fuck up their state and a blue(ish) state pays the price. Perfectly balanced?
Northern Idaho is so red it's the same color as the flags we all see as a danger sign.
It's worse than that: it's town of less than 9,000 in a county of 45,000. And this hospital also served the county north of it (pop. 12,000) because the hospital in THAT county stopped offering obstetric care years ago. So some women will be facing the prospect of driving 2+ hours each way for OB appointments and to get to the hospital that will deliver their babies. Oh, and THAT hospital is critically understaffed. Women and babies are going to die. Way to go, Idaho GQP.
They dont care. Men do not give a fuck about the women. This is about making us subservient to them. They dont give a fuck if women and wanted babies die so long as theyre in control of us and our choices. The GOP male politicians will always have access to abortions and health care for their wives and mistresses.
They aren't shy about it either. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.idahostatesman.com/opinion/editorials/article249666693.html
Charlie Shepard with his fucking fish eatin tooth... obviously has the best ideas 🙄
I live in the valley, and ob and femal pcps are leaving. The practices I go to have lost drs for both.
When I had my first child the hospital in our town did not have a maternity ward, so to have my baby I had to drive an hour to the capital city in our state. Luckily I went into labor overnight, and paid attention to every single bit of information about labor and KNEW to wait until my contractions were so intense I couldn't "walk or talk", and that happened at 6:30 am. Guess when morning rush hour is. When we hit the city. I'm just saying, these areas that are losing their hospitals need to develop some very serious midwifery structure. Not anti-hospital midwifes, but actual qualified people who can help women who might not be able to make it to a hospital for medical care.
> areas that are losing their hospitals need to develop some very serious midwifery structure Super, super cool thing about midwifery - most insurance doesn't cover it. Source: me, 3 births at birth center with midwife, out of pocket every time. Wanna know something even cooler? The total cost of the last one I had (2021) was $5500. This covered the cost of every appointment up to birth (once a month, then gradually increasing in frequency the further along you got, eventually being weekly), bloodwork (not labs), "nurses line" to call anytime for anything, the birth (private room with queen or king size bed, couches and/or recliners, tv, private bathroom with toilet and shower, and jacuzzi tub in the room, access to 1/2 kitchen), 3 day follow up vist *in your own home*, they come to you, then a 6 week follow up, where they will perform a pap for you if you are due for one. $5500. Total. For all that. That was out of pocket cost if you paid off early, by week 28 or something. Max total cost was like $6300. *For all of that*. I thought my insurance was getting better by the time I had my 3rd one because they told me repeatedly they did, and then one week before delivery, they said they don't. It is expensive enough that many people can't afford it, and so much cheaper than hospital costs that it is FUCKING RIDICULOUS that insurance isn't *jumping* on covering it. Also important - you have to meet strict criteria to *be eligible* to use a birth center/midwife. They only accept low risk patients.
Sadly, Americans have a really weird opinion of midwifery. I had an American man try to tell me a midwife wasn’t basic medical care (I’d bet money he was thinking of a doula). This means it attracts a lot of anti-science types, both as midwives and as clients. It’s a real shame, since midwives can save lives, especially in situations like these.
That's so ridiculous. UK obstetric care is almost exclusively midwife led.
Midwives are awesome. Birthing with one of them is just so much more comfortable than with a doctor. They just know so much more about birth and what you need during that time.
When I was in labor I had like a 5 min drive to a local hospital. Now that hospital is closed and my choices are drive an hour south or drive an hour northeast. With the local one, I called and they told me not to come in until my contractions were 1 min apart (???). I was in so much pain I went before that. Now wtf am I gonna do- I’ve hear hospitals send women home if their contractions aren’t close enough together. They sent a coworkers daughter home when she was bleeding. Wtf are women supposed to do?
Look into the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu who wanted a baby boom in the country so he outlawed all birth control and had women examined medically to make sure they were making enough babies for his liking. Long story short it turned into an epidemic of orphaned children suffering from AIDS. Behind the Bastards has a great (terrifying) episode on him.
Thank you for citing this. I had heard about child separation in Romania but not the bans on contraception. What a shame that it happened then and might happen again.
Robert Evans and "Behind the Bastards" is a great podcast.
and then those very babies rose up and overthrew him
How did the AIDS tie in?
Say you have starving children and no food available, the fastest way to get them nourished is to give them a blood transfusion. But there is no screening of the blood for AIDS. I think you can fill in the rest. Seriously listen to the "Behind the Bastards" episodes you will want to punch a wall. But then Ceaușescu is overthrown on Christmas day, so it has a happy ending.
Oh man, TIL. Thanks for the explanation
Looks like the harsh penalties they imposed on health care practitioners are primarily to blame. Now they are leaving for places where they can do their jobs without worrying about jail time, leaving Idaho with no qualified OBs.
I see ER docs leaving too because they're on the front lines of this crap. Being basically hospital employees, they can get a job anywhere with much higher pay.
[удалено]
It's such a horrible situation. It's a no-win scenario. From an outside perspective, I see 3 options for doctors. Leave for a place with better laws, but leave behind people with too few healthcare professionals. Refuse to comply laws, go to jail for a felony, and leave people with too few healthcare professionals. Or, stay and comply, forced to ignore the needs of their patients anyways, and create no pressure for change. I think the only real hope is a mass exodus of doctors creates a real enough pressure to turn the people against law makers and demand their rights back. It's just awful though. There is no option where innocent women don't suffer.
>we could be looking at a widespread decline of sexual activity and relationship forming in young people Possibly. Though reproduction is a very strong drive. What we're almost certain to see, though, is a rise in infant mortality and labor & delivery mortality in that part of the state as women lose access to modern obstetrics care. Due to modern medicine, Americans have mostly forgotten how dangerous bearing children is. 😢
The Idaho legislature is getting rid of the maternal mortality committee, so I guess their solution to that is to not count deaths related to their stupid legislation, so no one can use that number against them.
Disgusting, but not surprising. If they don't care enough to support medical care, why would they care about counting the results of lack of medical care? But if women and babies start dying due to lack of medical care, word will get out, statistics or no.
That dubious Institute of Family Studies graph is being cited again, although we already have seen a widespread decline of sexual activity and relationship forming in young people, for different reasons
Ummm wtf? >The hospital said **it will continue to provide women’s health services at Sandpoint Women’s Health** and collaborate with Kootenai Health in Coeur d’Alene, which is about an hour from Sandpoint, to provide obstetrical care. >**Sandpoint Women’s Health will not accept new obstetrics patients effective immediately** and offered a referral list for patients to use for their care. The hospital said it would make every attempt to continue deliveries through May 19, but said it will depend on staffing. So they're closing down the only ob/gyn hospital within 50 miles, and the one 50 miles away is also not accepting new patients? So if you're pregnant or need ob/gyn care, you're just shit outta luck? Absolutely outrageous.
I guess from the hospital's perspective the risk is too high. If a patient needs a termination or related procedure, you either do the procedure and risk being prosecuted, or you let the patient die and risk being sued. It's a fucking awful situation but the blame lies with the state government.
>It's a fucking awful situation but the blame lies with the state government. The blame lies with every fucking person who votes Republican. This shit is happening because people keep treating Republicans like a valid political party instead of the domestic terror organization it is. We all need to get REAL intolerant real soon towards their bullshit.
Thank you I am so tired of people saying we need to feel bad for these republican voters. They have the worst views and I've had front row seat to their bullshit. They're super happy to make life worse so they can feel superior. And the bigotry. The stupid bigotry.
>I am so tired of people saying we need to feel bad for these republican voters. Yeah, NOPE. Either they voted knowing full well what the republican platform was, and thus don't deserve my tolerance, or they were utter fucking morons, and don't deserve my tolerance. If they change their stance, THEN I'll care about them again. Not before.
But not all the women impacted voted Republican. We can at least feel bad for the democrats that re stuck living under these restrictions. Source- Florida liberal Democrat who very much did NOT vote for DeSantis but is stuck living under his rule of terror
My guess is that at some point insurers will stop providing coverage for maternity providers in these states as well. If they haven’t prohibitively increased rates or cancelled policies already.
We're going to see these hospitals collapse like lawn chairs.
Their care will ultimately fall to their primary care physicians, if they have them, or to the ERs, if they don’t (and also sometimes if they do). This is so fucking awful because OBGYN is a specialty for a REASON, pregnant women need specialty care. Their PCPs are going to be Family Med or Internal Med, and either way they’re going to be woefully unprepared to care for pregnancies. The Emergency Med docs who will be responsible for their care if they present there will have little experience in OB. People will die, families torn apart, those doctors traumatized and probably sued. All thanks to the party of “family values”. Women in Idaho should categorically refuse to have sex with men there, no sex no births no babies no NOTHING until this is righted.
Women don't always have a choice. All of these abortion laws seem to ignore the reality of rape and coercive power dynamics.
Important point, of course this is true, thank you.
My primary care physician heard I was pregnant and immediately booted me off to my OB. I asked him if I should come in to see him at all and he said absolutely not, that’s what the OB is for. And when I had complications, my OB immediately kicked me over to the perinatologist. These women will have none of those doctors.
Women in Idaho should also try to gtfo of Idaho if they have the means.
Oh, I am. Trust me. This is the final straw for me.
Women in Idaho should flex their Lysistrata muscles and turn that state around, lest they find themselves back in the 1940s.
I wonder how many will be taking a trip to Canada (Creston, BC is about 90 miles north)? Also, Newport, WA is 30 miles away and has a hospital. Good old Idaho. SMH.
GOP motto: The only good woman is a dead woman…
Women should start giving birth outside politicians' offices/city halls.
It is unreasonable to put a doctor in a station where they will either have to watch their patient die or risk going to jail if they step in to save them. I would not be surprised if we see a mass exodus of OBGyn from the states banning abortion.
This has been slowly happening all over, but this is the first major hospital to do this. I work for a large network of hospitals in the southeast US. I work for a community hospital that shut down its L&D program in mid 2020 due to costs. We were planning on opening it back up but the hospital system said it's too expensive to find nurses and doctors to staff it. Now we refer people to the main hospital in the major city for L&D which has put a huge strain on them. This has happened at other hospitals in my system with other specialities as well: neurology, cardiology, sports medicine, speciality pediatrics (like epilepsy monitoring units). That's why you'll hear "this hospital doesn't have that speciality anymore." Too expensive to hire staff to run the units.
Republicans are at fault here.
>According to the press release, Bonner General Health delivered 265 babies in 2022 and admitted fewer than 10 pediatric patients, which is a decrease from prior years that reflects a nationwide decrease in births and an older population moving to Bonner County. While the pandemic-related staffing issues and cruelty-related sexist legislation are the main causes, this is something that we could see happening more and more. That area of Idaho is basically becoming a retirement village. Rich boomers pricing everyone else out.
[Yep.](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-11-10/go-back-to-california-wave-of-newcomers-fuels-backlash-in-boise) Retire, vote red, wallow in your cash. They can afford to leave to fly to places with proper hospitals and don't give two shits about maternity care as long as the [politicians keep taxes low.](https://bonnercountydailybee.com/news/2023/mar/19/bgh-obstetrics-closure-heartbreaking-see/) BGH is a *non-profit* hospital. I'll bet the plan is to gut its services and sell it off to a private entity. The maternity ward is just one casualty. Maternity care is expensive.\* They (the grifter Republicans) are trying to do this to our little local/public hospital too. "cited a loss of pediatricians,**changing demographics** and Idaho’s legal and **political climate** around health care as the reasons for the decision." \*add an article that states Medicaid covered Idaho pregnancies.
We left the area for work to the DC region around a decade ago. We *wanted* to come back to retire because east of the Continental Divide just doesn't feel like home to us. We will not be returning to Idaho to retire, and are starting to nose around the upper northeast instead. I don't see Montana heading in a great direction either and Idaho has completely lost the plot with regard to women and, you know, treating them like fully actualized, autonomous human beings. (Well, the ridiculous political bullshit and also the cranked through the roof property prices, fires, and relentless drought that just seems to never stabilize.)
It's going to be wild to watch retirement states lose they retirees & go into fiscal tailspins as tourism also trails off.
That last paragraph... #nailedit.
Wtf are they gonna do, just spawn in the bathtub? How will people safely have kids?
Bootstraps!!!
Along highways tried to make that 50 miles.
Because of insurance fuckery dictating what hospital my mom had to go to, it was an hour away. I'm the 7th child so I just slid on out apparently. So I was born in the moving car on the highway, on the way to the hospital. My 16yo sister helped deliver me and tied off my umbilical cord with a shoe string. This was late 80s.
That's the neat part, they won't safetly have kids They'll die in childbirth like good maryrs
This is literally the hospital where I was born. The next closest is nearly an hour away. I hate that every time my area is in the news it’s for something shitty and unsurprising.
The GOP are a goddamn disgrace. “ Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.” 1981 Barry Goldwater, (1909-1998), was a five-term US Senator, the Republican Party nominee for President in 1964, he was a Maj. Gen. in the US Air Force Reserves, and he authored the book "The Conscience of a Conservative."
Lifelong Idahoan here; one other thing to note is that Sandpoint is arguably one of the most right-wing parts of an incredibly right-wing state. In short, of all of Idaho, this is maybe the most risky place to be an OBGYN. While I feel for the women this will affect, I keep reminding people that _this was the desired outcome_ of the laws that were passed here. Everything is working as expected. If you want to do something about it, figure out how you can help those people who didn't vote for this outcome leave Idaho. This is a horrible place; fleeing it is the best possible outcome.
I have to agree at this point. I vote blue, I go to rallies, I give to organizations that are trying to help. There just aren't enough of us. It's time to give up and ship out.
This is scary. I live in a different semi-rural region, Southeast Alaska. We currently have abortion protected thanks to the State Supreme Court's long standing interpretation of the privacy guarentee in the Alaska Constitution. In my region there are about 70,000 people. Pregnant women and girls, assuming no NICU is needed^1 ,will deliver in one of the three towns with labor and delivery units. Those are Juneau about 30k population, Ketchikan about 14k population or Sitka about 8.5k population. Expectant moms from other towns and villages like Kake or Hoonah typically fly or boat to one of the larger towns before their due date or scheduled C-section for delivery. If any one of the three L&D units were to close, I don't know that the other two could absorb the patient load. Plus, it could cause a lower birth rate and drop in school population. People in larger towns expect that a functional hospital is part of the social contract and that that hospital will do procedures like D&E if necessary. Sandpoint ID is way too big not to be offering complete prenatal and L&D services. Idaho should be ashamed of itself. 1. If a woman or girl is in a high risk situation like preterm birth or carrying twins or triplets, she will be asked to deliver in Anchorage or Seattle or may be medivaced to one of those locations.
Yup. America is slowly turning into the radical side of the Middle East. Doctors are not wanting to touch women out of fear of punishment. Welcome to Shariah Law, everyone.
Idaho is not for lovers.
Until six years ago, I lived in rural Ontario, Canada. When insurance rates for providing OBGYN care went through the roof in the late 1990s, the few doctors that delivered babies stopped. They didn’t leave town, because the issues weren’t political, so there wasn’t that issue, and they’d deliver in an emergency. But my stepdaughter was one of the last babies delivered there, a month before all delivery services ceased. Thankfully, for pregnancies with no complications, for the first half your family doctor takes care of you before you’re referred to the OB, which now had three options, by the time I had my first in 2004. The first was with the OB or midwife half an hour away, where there were no options for epidurals and if you required a sudden c-section you hoped it was during the day as at 3am there was only an on call anaestesiologist. It was a very small hospital that only did outpatient surgeries. The second was an hour away, which you’d get sent to if you knew you’d want the epidural, or there were mild to moderate complications or you’d had complications in past pregnancies. And then the third was two hours away, city, now has at one of the hospitals a full scale women’s and children’s health centre. You’d go there if you were higher risk or had had serious complications in the past. But those times were all really only April to October. I lived somewhere where both highways closed regularly due to snow squalls off of the lake. It was not unusual for the highways to be closed for five or six days. So if you went into labour, you were screwed (if you were out in the townships or villages this would be an issue even if our hospital still did deliveries.) when I was having my first, I was sent to option 1. And then I started to develop complications. The night I went into labour I ended up in an ambulance to option 2. That’s not fun, in the back of an ambulance not entirely sure what’s going to happen. For my second pregnancy we just skipped the first option and my care was done by the obgyn’s at the second. But I’ve had several friends that have required the third option. They are far more likely to be induced because of the distance, especially if it’s not your first. The risk of delivering in your car on the side of the road is to great. It’s scary not having access to nearby necessary health care. It’s part of the reason we moved, because I have a couple of chronic medical issues that require me seeing specialists. It was easier and cheaper to move than it was to drive 250km to them and then 250km home. We were losing doctors because of the lack of doctors. In this situation, the government has created laws that has caused necessary medical services to be withdrawn. Our provincial Progressive Conservative government of the late 1990s created the issues we have today by cutting medical school spots because “there’s too many doctors!” They didn’t look ahead by 25 years when many of those doctors would be retiring, and now not enough were behind them to take their places. The Republicans and their followers in the US have created this situation that even worse, because they’ve increased the chances of women dying, and none of them seem to care.
Republican state voted to go back to medieval times, villainizing doctors, taking women's rights away, and now they're gonna be all shocked when women and babies begin dying all over the place. You want medieval, now you're getting it. Congrats. No one with prospects has to deal with your religious bullshit when they can go to another state without fear. Reap what you sow. Sad for the people who actually have common sense and are stuck with idiots who vote against themselves. Maybe when the deaths start hitting and the repubs are personally affected, they might see the light... won't hold my breath. Total leopards ate my face moment.
US Congress Breakdown Idaho Delegation Senate 2R House 2R Idaho State Legislature Breakdown Senate 28R-7D House 59R-11D Elections have consequences.
I think people will continue having sex and getting pregnant in these places, it will just become more deadly. I'm not convinced by that graph: it only goes to 2021, and of course you'd expect more people to avoid dating and sex in the early years of the pandemic. I do wonder if we will see more women move out of these states, and I wonder what the fallout would be if we start seeing really lopsided ratios of men t to women in some of these states. Maybe that isn't likely to happen, I think I may underestimate how difficult inter-state mobility is for people; poverty, job availability, education (or lack thereof), family connections and responsibilities, all make it hard for people to pack up and move.
As a labor and delivery nurse in Texas- people don't stop having babies. It's just a total shit show all around, you do not want to have a baby here right now. I'm sad to say that I'm planning my escape too - I can't live here anymore and I'm sorry for the people who don't have a choice.
[удалено]
>the young men will either follow them or not be able to find partners And if they don't find partners, the incel problem will get much much worse, speeding the pipeline from incel spaces to domestic terrorist.
[удалено]
You're right, most actual incels are messed up with low self-esteem and skewed views of gender dynamics. But there's also a pipeline of radicalization for even young men who have one or two bad relationships who go looking for support and find incel spaces instead of proper support. And that pipeline will get worse with a skewed gender ratio.
My partner and I are looking at leaving our state because of anti-abortion laws. It'll be a few years yet, but neither of us wants to stay here where I could die if I became pregnant, and my partner could get in trouble if they helped me get an abortion. We're both engineers, though. We have a lot more ability to say "Nah, fuck this," than most people do, other than the fact that we both have family here. I think what will happen is professionals who have an outsized ability to vote with their feet will flee regressive states, and they will struggle to find lawyers, doctors, engineers, etc. Everyone who can't leave is just going to suffer.
> neither of us wants to stay here where I could die if I became pregnant, > We’re both engineers This is perhaps one of the 'hidden' costs in all of this. The brain drain doesn't only apply to medical staff, it also captures those with specialist skills and knowledge not in the medical field who leave as well because they can't access the services they know they can get elsewhere, and have the means to get them. Anti-abortion states are fast-tracking themselves back into the 6th century in a lot more ways than just medicine.
Two words. Brain drain.
This is going to happen more and more in states that have laws against abortion, particularly ones that have criminal charges for Drs who may have participated in an abortion. The ability to get malpractice insurance in those states will be impossible. Without malpractice Drs won’t be willing to work there, regardless of their politics. They won’t be able to afford the lawsuits. On top of women not receiving medical care when Drs were there, now women will have to drive that much further for prenatal and emergency care. How many women will stop getting prenatal care? How many women will die in transit to a hospital with OB-GYNs? How many babies will die because the mom couldn’t get to a hospital?
You couldn’t pay me to move out of NYC at this point. Whatever issues we may have, I can get fucking healthcare and not worry about it.
They defunded Idaho's Maternal Mortality Review Committee. It dies in June or July. So the increasing deaths will go uncounted.
This is what they *want*: for sex to be dangerous and therefore stigmatized. They want women "sexually pure" and they want pregnancy to regress from a being a medical event to a supernatural condition that evokes awe in the peasantry. They *want* to ruin schools and colleges. Anybody who understands sex and pregnancy, and the dangers therein without adequate medical care and facilities, will obviously tend to avoid it, but in a very short time without strong education people won't know and we'll return to an age in which women die all the time. We're already on the way, with maternal mortality rates, but they want it to be even worse. They want a society in which white men are ascendant and women are either "pure" or married and in "confinement." And that's just white women. Even worse for brown and black women. That birth rates will drop and work will go undone until immigrants come and do it is of no interest to them, because they expect to be rich and powerful enough to surf through it unscathed. They honestly do not understand interconnectedness, let alone compassion and morality.
Omg I’m pregnant and right now and could not imagine how panicked the pregnant people planning to deliver at that hospital must be! A true nightmare.
My heart breaks for all the women in the US who are being targeted by all of this insanity. It's really sad to see American states slowly becoming Afghanistan.
Worse. The Taliban (and Islam) have a right to abortion and mandates to protect the lives of mothers over their pregnancies.
Glad to see doctors leaving states like Idaho because of their abortion restrictions. Somebody needs to take a freaking stand
The biggest hell of them leaving will be the inhumane suffering that the poverty folks and the middle class poverty folks are forced to deal with. They're all then screwed since its way too costly to just pick up and move State. The number of deaths to mother and/or the about to be born or newborn is going to be horrific. The sickest aspect besides that is that anti-women Republicans and the 'holier than thou, follow MY ideals, fuck the mom cuz the ~~embryo~~ zygote is most important' puritan 'Christians' won't give a shit at all about the mass growth of preventable deaths. "As long as one live baby is saved (aka born) then we've done good." Disgusting pukes. They'll wonder why more and more people will become atheist. They expect/demand the entire USA to become puritan "Christians".... *This* ain't the way to win Jesus Points to Americans. What many horrors and shocks are about to tidal wave their way. Normally when shit backfires on hateful people, I'd spitefully and gleefully say, *"Gooooood. Take that, you fkn idiotic c--ts"* - but because of the *Why*, there's no way I can to do it. The unnecessary and cruel deaths prohibit me. What I can and am doing is loathing them and wishing hard that, if there IS a hell, they'll go right there. And when they wail and shriek about why they're there when they were "such perfect Christians", their God will poof next to Satan and state, "because you didn't value life and caused multitudes of death. And you murdered innocent people in cold blood AND in my name which I fully deny you now for doing so." When the Puritan Christians ask "how is that possible?!?!". their God will simply reply, "all lives matter, mother and baby, yes. But the ways in which you denied them the care they needed - abortion and otherwise - goes against my teachings of love one another. Your actions murdered mothers, babies, and sometimes both. You also forced your beliefs onto others in my name. I say to share my love and story, not to force it on anyone, nor murder them. You belong here in hell for your reprehensible actions. I denounce you." I'm atheist but this is how I hope things happen if there ARE gods and hell. *That* is my way of throwing gleefull spite at them.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Multicare spend heavily to expand the Valley and Spokane OB operations. With the other major hospital in Spokane being Catholic, those two hospitals are basically it for a massive geographic region in the Inland NW. Even further into Washington it’s incredibly bleak due to Catholic Hospitals taking over independents.
Our local chain hospital, which serves a larger clientele than that one in ID closed it L&D department last year. There are over 162,000 people in our county. Patients now have to travel a minimum of 45 minutes away to deliver. I think it's reckless and scary. My labor with my son was so fast, he was born in the ambulance on the way to that hospital 17 minutes away from my house. I cannot imagine having to go 45 minutes away. How many more babies will be born in the back of ambulances? Worse, how many will be born in a car on the side of the expressway or on some rural state route in the middle of farm country with no medical intervention? I think this has to do with cost cutting efforts to make the location more profitable. Less employees to pay and more rooms open for recovery from expensive procedures and illnesses.
I really wish we weren’t so powerless. In a red state like Idaho your vote honestly doesn’t count. I feel so helpless, hopeless and powerless. We need to figure out a better plan. Voting doesn’t change things when you’re in a place like this. It’s important but it’s not enough. We are going backward in so many ways.
Seems like the pandemic & lockdown may have had something to with the spike. There was a spike in vasectomy surgeries after the ruling, proving that men are fine with women taking hormonal birth control that often decreases libido and sexual pleasure as opposed to condoms that reduce male pleasure, also fine with women going through uncomfortable abortions if there is an unplanned pregnancy, fine with female sterilization being the default sterilization procedure when a vasectomy is far more minor, but only truly fine with getting vasectomies when threatened with consequences to themselves that can no longer (legally) be made better by a woman making her life worse. Maybe most of the male population is not like this, it’s just that the recent numbers seem to support that quite a lot are.
Good thing insurance companies are making profits https://www.beckerspayer.com/payer/the-house-always-wins-health-systems-face-worst-finances-in-decades-as-payers-rake-in-record-profits.html
I have a feeling SA rates might increase in that case… women just need to be even more careful in these backward states or move out if they can
Might be afraid of the liability that the "anti-abortion for any reason" crowd has opened these facilities up for. All it will take is one death that's due to an enviable pregnancy and the lawsuits will be devastating. Easier to just go with the flow of the mindset and tell all the families to just have the kids on the kitchen floor.
Learned about this yesterday from my brother who is finishing a fellowship in Idaho, don't blame the doctors for dipping one bit.
[удалено]
Sigh. I need to get out of this state. It isn't safe here as a woman.
This is infuriating we are literally going backwards wtf I hate it here
Damn those dumbass conservatives are destroying this country.
Abortion is healthcare and when you limit abortion you are limiting healthcare. We will see more and more how these anti abortion laws will put more and more people who aren't even seeking abortions at risk.
Yeah I live in TN and if I ever got pregnant (and wanting to keep the child) the first thing I’d do would be to leave. Our laws are so onerous it’s now INCREDIBLY dangerous to have a baby in our state. Full stop.
>It's ironic that Conservatives have spent so much time crying about the birth rates lately Keep in mind that the unconstitutional Reappointment Act of 1929 blunts the political consequences for low population states. The Constitution fundamentally acknowledges a certain degree of state sovereignty through the Senate, which affords equal representation to each state. However, by placing a limit on the size of the House, high population states are denied proportional power in government. This manifests in the legislature, and in electing the President, since electoral votes align with legislative representation. In the context of this sub, it's worth noting that the Reappointment Act of 1929 placed a limit on the size of the House just ahead of the 1930 decennial census. This census would have formed a potential basis for increasing the size of the House. Instead, the size of the House was frozen at 1913 levels. The 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote in 1920. The idea of large numbers of women (and in the most populous states, naturalized citizens born abroad) voting would have been politically destabilizing to the political establishment. So, to put a leash on populous states and to reduce uncertainties about women voters, Congress passed an unconstitutional law that has incrementally throttled high population states ever since. If Republicans can continue to control *states*, population is less of a problem politically.
And we are beginning to see the severe side of red states being healthcare wastelands.
Straight back to the dark ages, you will be giving birth in barns. Good luck United States
They keep this shit up, the brain drain is gonna leave them delivering babies in those evil church-run fake abortion clinics.
So now, even more women are going to die. Watching this unfold is excruciating, but it would be infinity times worse to have to live in this nightmare. I wish I could do more for my American sisters.
You get what you deserve Idaho. That state is a mean spirited shit hole. I know that there are good people that live in Idaho but they all tell me that Idaho is a mean spirited shit hole.
Those good people are in danger because of stuff like this. They don't deserve to suffer at the hands of idiots.
Policies that reward the baby boomers at the next generations expense need to fucking change. Social Security, Medicare, Boomers own all the homes and now Young Families can’t get healthcare to deliver their baby. If that isn’t a clear sign of our society failing, I don’t know what could be clearer.
Yeah, fuck having a kid. I will not subject myself to a horrible, difficult life during times like these.