Mike Pence wants to ban abortion, even when pregnancies aren’t viable
Mike Pence will never be president for one simple reason: he’s extremely creepy. Members of the former vice-president’s own political party find him unappealing. His general demeanor is so off-putting and unsettling that he even gives horror-writing legend Stephen King the creeps.
Despite the fact that he’s an unpopular candidate, Pence is still set on running for the 2024 presidential nomination. His strategy for drumming up support is an unusual one: lean into extremist views about abortion that are unpopular among most Americans. While the Republican presidential field is, of course, full of people who are anti-abortion, Pence has positioned himself as the most anti-abortion candidate out there. He is the only major candidate supporting a federal ban on abortion at six weeks, for example.
Pence, an evangelical Christian, has now gone even further in his crusade to force women to give birth against their will. In a recent interview with the Associated Press (AP), Pence declared that he would ban abortions even when the pregnancy wasn’t viable. He would force women to give birth to babies they knew would die. He would force women to risk their lives and their mental health in order to birth a child with no chance of survival. All, of course, in the name of being pro-life.
“I’m pro-life. I don’t apologize for it,” Pence told the AP. “I just have heard so many stories over the years of courageous women and families who were told that their unborn child would not go to term or would not survive. And then they had a healthy pregnancy and a healthy delivery.”
In other words? The former vice-president thinks you should base policies that affect millions of people on anecdata. He thinks he should be able to regulate women’s bodies based on a couple of stories he supposedly once heard.
Since Pence is apparently so keen on listening to women’s stories, I wonder whether he’s heard Kylie Beaton’s story? Earlier this year Beaton, who is based in Texas, found out that her desperately wanted fetus had a rare brain condition which meant it would probably only survive a few days; the child’s life and death would be painful. Typically, a physician would recommend an abortion but, because of Texas’s draconian abortion laws, she was told she had to carry the baby to term or wait until she was at risk of dying and an abortion is allowed. “To have a woman go through so much torture along the way that’s going to stay with them forever,” Beaton told ABC News.
I wonder if Pence has heard Mayron Hollis’s story? Last year the Tennessee woman had to have a lifesaving emergency hysterectomy, after she says she was denied medically necessary abortion care for life-threatening complications in her pregnancy. She won’t be able to give birth to any more children now because anti-abortion zealots banned her from the medical help she needed.
Perhaps Pence would like to hear the story of Izabela, a 30-year-old woman, who reportedly died of septic shock in Poland in 2021. Doctors wouldn’t perform an abortion even though her fetus was lacking amniotic fluid. She is thought to be the first person to die as a result of Poland’s restrictive new abortion laws.
Or perhaps Pence would be interested in the story of Savita Halappanavar? In 2012, the 31-year-old died of sepsis in Ireland after being denied an abortion. Halappanavar was undergoing a protracted miscarriage and there was no way her baby would survive. But because there was a fetal heart beat, doctors opted against an abortion. Here, at least, there was some good news at the end: outrage over Halappanavar’s death helped spur a 2018 referendum in which Irish voters overwhelmingly voted to overturn the country’s abortion ban.
There are endless stories like this from all around the world. Stories of women dying horrible and unnecessary deaths because religious extremists forced them to carry babies who would never live. In a post-Roe America, these stories are going to keep on coming. And people like Pence, of course, will refuse to listen to them.
Italian man cleared of groping because it lasted less than 10 seconds
Apparently, it’s not harassment if you make it quick! What makes this case even more infuriating is that the victim was a teenager: a 66-year-old school caretaker in Italy confessed to groping a 17-year-old student’s buttocks but minimized the incident, saying it was a joke. The judge agreed that it wasn’t serious because it only lasted a “handful of seconds”. While this is appalling, it’s also on brand: Italian judges have a history of saying wildly misogynistic things. In 2017, for example, three female judges in the Italian city of Ancona cleared two men of rape because the alleged victim looked “too masculine” to rape. And back in 1999 an Italian high court suggested that a woman cannot be raped if she is wearing jeans because they’re hard to take off. It took almost a decade for that ruling to be overturned.
Elon Musk’s new AI company exclusively staffed by men
Back in March Musk signed an open letter calling for an immediate pause on the creation of “giant” AIs until the dangers of those systems could be properly assessed. It seems like Musk wasn’t so concerned about AI’s threat to humanity as he was about getting his competition to slow down while he hurried to create his own AI venture. This week he unveiled a new AI startup called xAI: its first 12 employees are all men.
The FDA has approved over-the-counter birth control pills
That’s a big deal. The big question now is how much those pills are going to cost and whether health insurance will cover it.
The week in paw-triarchy
Woke ideology is so powerful that the gay agenda has even pervaded the primate world. A recent study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution found that an enormous number of monkeys are bisexual. Seventy-two per cent of male monkeys, in a group of 236 rhesus macaques, engaged in same-sex mounting behaviour. “[This behavior was] more common in males in rhesus macaques, [but] in another related species, the Japanese macaques, same-sex sexual behavior is more common in females,” one of the paper’s authors noted.
All that monkeying around wasn’t just for fun, it provided an evolutionary advantage: “males that mounted each other were also more likely to back each other up in conflict”. These monkeys aren’t particularly special, same-sex behaviour is widespread across the animal kingdom. It’s a reminder that homosexuality is natural, homophobia isn’t.
