If this is happening to an upper middle class white woman what chances does a poor- middle class white women, black or POC women have when it comes to life threatening pregnancy … scary times.
This is what a lot of women don’t understand. They think “oh, that won’t affect me, if I really need an abortion, *I* will be able to get one because these laws are just for those irresponsible women who don’t really need abortions, it doesn’t apply to *me*.”
And then they’re horrified and shocked when it turns out, no, you’re actually not special and it doesn’t matter what you need. Your life doesn’t matter to these people either.
I once heard this referred to as the "Shirley Exemption." The mythical exemption or loophole or deference that surely kicks in when a reasonable edge case (or even just an obviously predictable situation the person didn't see coming) crops up that a supporter of a given policy assumes will just snap into being.
Surely the officer will just give me a written warning.
Surely there's a different set of rules for someone special.
Shirley there's a way for good girls to get an abortion that rule's supposed to be for the sluts!
If we follow Wilhoit's Law as the definition of conservatism, this is the quintessential conservative mindset: laws and rules exist to bind the little people, and protect the "good" people, and "good" is always defined as people who already have wealth, power, beauty, status - often, because the system jumps to protect them, by these very rules.
It's easy to win a game when you have a stacked deck and all the staff are your friends or employees. Conservatives think the whole world is not only run this way, but that it's the only way the world can work. It's a terribly squalid way of understanding humanity.
> Waldorf didn’t oppose abortion, but she had never considered that the law could apply to her. Her father was a doctor. This was the hospital where she had worked for the past six years. The OB-GYN team treating her had delivered her daughter, and some of them lived blocks from her parents. She was a highly educated 38-year-old woman with connections to the governor. As she lay in a hospital bed, worried that infection could enter her uterus at any moment, she finally understood the ban now applied to anyone losing a baby.
Big "never thought leopards would eat my face" energy. Even if she didn't vote for this, she didn't think it mattered that much, when all the data was already there for her to know exactly how dangerous these laws are for anybody pregnant in these states now.
This is strongly hinted at in the article itself:
“How could an abortion ban aimed at women who wanted to end their pregnancies keep doctors from helping a woman who didn’t?”
A purity test. If you “want” your baby, you pass. If you are in circumstances that prevent you from caring for a child, you fail.
I think ProPublica generally does good work but I think they pulled some punches here: the fact that she identifies as Baptist and Republican, the fact that she and her sister were in the same sorority as the governor and invited to political events, the grandfather gastroenterologist who seem totally unaware of what the state has mandated, the step grandfather who pulls the bumper sticker off of his car.
I would bet substantial amounts of money that the embers of this family all voted for this, then ran into the consequences of what they voted for. They didn’t care about the cruelty until it applied to them. And bc of their social position, and race, it gets played as a sympathy piece.
Would she have cared about the woman in Atlanta if she hadn’t been in the same medical condition? Would she have noticed at all? Where are these voices when they are not actively being harmed by the policies they voted for?
Finally, as a Coloradan, I find it WILD that Kansas was the sanctuary state here. I cannot tell you how much our women’s health providers have been stretched over the last couple of years being the state of last resort for the Midwest and mountain west.
> Finally, as a Coloradan, I find it WILD that Kansas was the sanctuary state here. I cannot tell you how much our women’s health providers have been stretched over the last couple of years being the state of last resort for the Midwest and mountain west.
From Chicago here and I'm beginning to worry that 1/10th of the GDP of our southern counties is generated by the abortions from nearly every neighboring state.
> , I find it WILD that Kansas was the sanctuary state here. I
Kansas is startlingly pro-choice whenever abortion comes up as a ballot measure before voters. Based off of Pew research polls, the only states wherein the majority of residents are pro-life are in the Deep South + Idaho. The western/midwestern states vote Republican for a lot of other reasons and I don't think that's why Kansas is still deep red
At 17 weeks pregnant, Emily Waldorf learned her baby’s foot was dipping out of her cervix.
Doctors told her that the longer her cervix remained open and her uterus exposed to bacteria, the higher her risk of developing a life-threatening infection. The standard of care, they explained, would be to quickly empty her womb.
But they couldn’t do that. The baby still had a detectable heartbeat, and stopping it would run afoul of Arkansas’ strict abortion ban. They needed to wait until Waldorf went into labor on her own or showed signs of a dangerous infection, or until the fetal heartbeat ended.
Texas, another abortion ban state, has amended its law to make clear that doctors don’t need to wait for infection in similar cases. Arkansas and other states have not.
Waldorf came into this fight with more resources than most: Her father was a doctor. She worked at the intensive care unit at the hospital. She was highly educated and well-connected. Yet even meeting the hospital’s CEO, calling the governor and hiring a lawyer would not be enough.
For five straight days, she laid in a hospital bed, waiting for her situation to get dire enough that doctors — and the hospital's lawyers — would act. On the third night, she came across our article about the death of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old medical assistant who died of infection in Georgia after doctors delayed emptying her uterus. It terrified her.
“Are they going to let me die?” she asked her sister.
Washington Regional, the hospital where Waldorf was receiving care in Arkansas, declined to comment on its policies. Both the hospital and Waldorf’s doctors declined to comment on her case.
In Ireland, there were two cases that shifted public opinion gradually towards legal abortion.
The first was the X Case in 1992 where a fourteen year old girl was raped by a neighbor. The family planned to go abroad for an abortion (which was common at the time—the UK isn’t so far) and contact the police like “Oh, hey we heard about DNA. How should we get the doctors to preserve some of the DNA as evidence in this on-going rape case?” And the police were like uhh this is above our pay grade, it went all the way to the Attorney General who got an injunction to stop the family from taking the girl out of the country for the abortion. The highest court ended up ruling since the pregnant fourteen year old girl was suicidal, she could have the abortion to save her life, because life of the mother was built into the law. She miscarried anyway. The rapist father (in his forties) seems to have gotten sentenced to four years in prison, and was released early. He went on to sexually assault another girl a few years after he got out. The whole thing was a big scandal. It literally led directly to two constitutional amendments, which basically let people get abortions abroad, more or less.
Twenty years later, the death of Savita Halappanavar was the second case that really moved the nations. Halappanavar lived in Galway, she was married and had a wanted pregnancy, but she had miscarriage. She died of sepsis while in the hospital because the doctors felt they couldn’t perform the abortion that would save her while there was a fetal heart beat. Since the X Case, the law had been clear that you could perform an abortion to save the mother’s life, but how close does she have to be to dying before doctors can save her? The Irish voters decided not close at all, and again amended the constitution, this time to allow abortion broadly. (There were also the A, B, and C cases at the European Court of Human Rights, but they had less of direct impact on voters, it seems.)
Since the Dobbs decision came down and old abortion laws got reinstated in several Red States, I’ve just kept thinking that some time in my life time there’s going to be some poor woman in an awful situation, whether from rape or medical emergency, and we’re all going to end up knowing her name, or at least her story, like Rosa Parks, or Emit Till, or Rodney King, or George Floyd. It’s not necessarily going to be the first one woman who dies or is forced to carry her rapist’s baby to term, but in my life time I’m sure that at least one of these stories will eventually shock the conscience of the nation. I don’t think there’s going to be another way.
You assume that those parts of our nation have a conscience. They are medieval; they have a Calvinist sense of predestination that there are those that are elect and those that are predestined by god to hell.
Whatever happens to you is a comment on your righteousness and further confirms their belief that they are chosen. It is treating luck as though it is divinely ordained. You don’t get through to those people — someone’s else’s misery confirms their purity , rather than stoking their sympathy.
As the other commenters pointed out, Americans simply don't care if women die. They don't care about other people dying period, so long as it's not them personally.
The only reason the woman profiled in this article cares is because it was her who was about to do the dying.
If this country wasn't pro-disease and pro-death, we wouldn't have ended up with what we've got.
This is why the U.S. will not sustain as a country for much longer. Societies where people hate each other this much, or at least just don't care if other members of the society die, rot from the inside out.
The thing is, the majority of us *do* care, but we're not the ones making the choices anymore. We the people have very little power and that's by design.
Gerrymandering and the EC are certainly contributors, but the fact remains that 1/3 of the population voted directly for this, and another 1/3 either chose not to vote (I'm not talking about people who can't vote, but people who won't) or voted third-party.
So 1/3 of the population wants this, and another 1/3 doesn't care either way.
I don't see this profoundly sick society sustaining. It's rotting from the inside out.
A majority voted tor Trump, voted third party despite knowing what Trump is, or stayed home. A majority wanted this outright or didn’t care if it happened.
> “Our hands are tied behind our backs,” Dr. Erin Large later told her, according to a journal Waldorf began keeping on her phone and shared with ProPublica. “Tell your friends to vote differently.”
To me the implication is that there is a good chance she's not going to be around to vote.
What an absolute prick that hospital executive Thomas Olmsted is.
“We can’t provide you the standard of care to save your life because we’re pathetic cowards who have no understanding of how a woman’s body works and we just write the rules on vibes with no basis in reality. Even though you could die on the way there, we need to send you four hours out of state to get basic care to save your life. But you need to verbally request it and then when you want compensation for this I’m going to say ‘wait a minute you said you didn’t want care from us’ and argue it’s a ridiculous request.”
Of course a heartless coward like that makes it into leadership, since you can’t have any scruples in that kind of position. The only way to rectify this is to start suing the hospitals denying care to these mothers. What I find interesting is they’re not worried about repercussions for medical neglect if the mother dies while they “wait” for some arbitrary threshold that grants them permission to act. How is it not medical neglect in those cases? As much as I didn’t like Biden or Obama with their memberships to the “big club” and countless war crimes, they at least presented a few outwardly initiatives for improving some of the unfair conditions that have persisted in certain sectors of society. I detest with all my heart and then some the administration in place now. The big orange clown at the top is a pathetic loser creep with tiny hands and tiny everything else no doubt.
> The only way to rectify this is to start suing the hospitals denying care to these mothers. What I find interesting is they’re not worried about repercussions for medical neglect if the mother dies while they “wait” for some arbitrary threshold that grants them permission to act.
That won't help. They have insurance to pay the lawsuits. The administrators don't want to go to jail, which the abortion bans have as a punishment.
For medical neglect to be criminal there needs to be evidence of gross negligence, willful endangerment, or an extreme disregard for a patient's life. Since they are following the current law no prosecutor will charge them with medical neglect as they have a clear affirmative defense.
Intrepid-Oil-898 | 6 hours ago
If this is happening to an upper middle class white woman what chances does a poor- middle class white women, black or POC women have when it comes to life threatening pregnancy … scary times.
thatturtletouch | 6 hours ago
This is what a lot of women don’t understand. They think “oh, that won’t affect me, if I really need an abortion, *I* will be able to get one because these laws are just for those irresponsible women who don’t really need abortions, it doesn’t apply to *me*.”
And then they’re horrified and shocked when it turns out, no, you’re actually not special and it doesn’t matter what you need. Your life doesn’t matter to these people either.
kylco | 5 hours ago
I once heard this referred to as the "Shirley Exemption." The mythical exemption or loophole or deference that surely kicks in when a reasonable edge case (or even just an obviously predictable situation the person didn't see coming) crops up that a supporter of a given policy assumes will just snap into being.
Surely the officer will just give me a written warning.
Surely there's a different set of rules for someone special.
Shirley there's a way for good girls to get an abortion that rule's supposed to be for the sluts!
If we follow Wilhoit's Law as the definition of conservatism, this is the quintessential conservative mindset: laws and rules exist to bind the little people, and protect the "good" people, and "good" is always defined as people who already have wealth, power, beauty, status - often, because the system jumps to protect them, by these very rules.
It's easy to win a game when you have a stacked deck and all the staff are your friends or employees. Conservatives think the whole world is not only run this way, but that it's the only way the world can work. It's a terribly squalid way of understanding humanity.
ShotFromGuns | 4 hours ago
> Waldorf didn’t oppose abortion, but she had never considered that the law could apply to her. Her father was a doctor. This was the hospital where she had worked for the past six years. The OB-GYN team treating her had delivered her daughter, and some of them lived blocks from her parents. She was a highly educated 38-year-old woman with connections to the governor. As she lay in a hospital bed, worried that infection could enter her uterus at any moment, she finally understood the ban now applied to anyone losing a baby.
Big "never thought leopards would eat my face" energy. Even if she didn't vote for this, she didn't think it mattered that much, when all the data was already there for her to know exactly how dangerous these laws are for anybody pregnant in these states now.
Remote-Letterhead844 | 2 hours ago
She didn't "do" politics
MountainPlanet | 5 hours ago
This is strongly hinted at in the article itself: “How could an abortion ban aimed at women who wanted to end their pregnancies keep doctors from helping a woman who didn’t?”
A purity test. If you “want” your baby, you pass. If you are in circumstances that prevent you from caring for a child, you fail.
I think ProPublica generally does good work but I think they pulled some punches here: the fact that she identifies as Baptist and Republican, the fact that she and her sister were in the same sorority as the governor and invited to political events, the grandfather gastroenterologist who seem totally unaware of what the state has mandated, the step grandfather who pulls the bumper sticker off of his car.
I would bet substantial amounts of money that the embers of this family all voted for this, then ran into the consequences of what they voted for. They didn’t care about the cruelty until it applied to them. And bc of their social position, and race, it gets played as a sympathy piece.
Would she have cared about the woman in Atlanta if she hadn’t been in the same medical condition? Would she have noticed at all? Where are these voices when they are not actively being harmed by the policies they voted for?
Finally, as a Coloradan, I find it WILD that Kansas was the sanctuary state here. I cannot tell you how much our women’s health providers have been stretched over the last couple of years being the state of last resort for the Midwest and mountain west.
kylco | 4 hours ago
> Finally, as a Coloradan, I find it WILD that Kansas was the sanctuary state here. I cannot tell you how much our women’s health providers have been stretched over the last couple of years being the state of last resort for the Midwest and mountain west.
From Chicago here and I'm beginning to worry that 1/10th of the GDP of our southern counties is generated by the abortions from nearly every neighboring state.
flakemasterflake | 2 hours ago
> , I find it WILD that Kansas was the sanctuary state here. I
Kansas is startlingly pro-choice whenever abortion comes up as a ballot measure before voters. Based off of Pew research polls, the only states wherein the majority of residents are pro-life are in the Deep South + Idaho. The western/midwestern states vote Republican for a lot of other reasons and I don't think that's why Kansas is still deep red
Arkansas is the most pro-life at 57%.
[OP] propublica_ | 7 hours ago
At 17 weeks pregnant, Emily Waldorf learned her baby’s foot was dipping out of her cervix.
Doctors told her that the longer her cervix remained open and her uterus exposed to bacteria, the higher her risk of developing a life-threatening infection. The standard of care, they explained, would be to quickly empty her womb.
But they couldn’t do that. The baby still had a detectable heartbeat, and stopping it would run afoul of Arkansas’ strict abortion ban. They needed to wait until Waldorf went into labor on her own or showed signs of a dangerous infection, or until the fetal heartbeat ended.
Texas, another abortion ban state, has amended its law to make clear that doctors don’t need to wait for infection in similar cases. Arkansas and other states have not.
Waldorf came into this fight with more resources than most: Her father was a doctor. She worked at the intensive care unit at the hospital. She was highly educated and well-connected. Yet even meeting the hospital’s CEO, calling the governor and hiring a lawyer would not be enough.
For five straight days, she laid in a hospital bed, waiting for her situation to get dire enough that doctors — and the hospital's lawyers — would act. On the third night, she came across our article about the death of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old medical assistant who died of infection in Georgia after doctors delayed emptying her uterus. It terrified her.
“Are they going to let me die?” she asked her sister.
This is what Waldorf chronicled in her diary: https://www.propublica.org/article/arkansas-abortion-ban-miscarriage-care
Washington Regional, the hospital where Waldorf was receiving care in Arkansas, declined to comment on its policies. Both the hospital and Waldorf’s doctors declined to comment on her case.
mitzi_skyring | 3 hours ago
It's very strange to me that they keep calling it a 'baby'. It's a foetus.
flakemasterflake | 2 hours ago
It's not strange given it's a wanted baby and that's the phrase the parents choose to use
mitzi_skyring | 2 hours ago
It's incorrect.
EmilieEasie | an hour ago
I think this woman has gone through enough without redditors "wElL aCkshULly"ing at her
mitzi_skyring | an hour ago
But they weren't quoting her. Don't be vexed.
EmilieEasie | an hour ago
They were being sensitive and kind, and I don't find that vexing.
yodatsracist | 5 hours ago
In Ireland, there were two cases that shifted public opinion gradually towards legal abortion.
The first was the X Case in 1992 where a fourteen year old girl was raped by a neighbor. The family planned to go abroad for an abortion (which was common at the time—the UK isn’t so far) and contact the police like “Oh, hey we heard about DNA. How should we get the doctors to preserve some of the DNA as evidence in this on-going rape case?” And the police were like uhh this is above our pay grade, it went all the way to the Attorney General who got an injunction to stop the family from taking the girl out of the country for the abortion. The highest court ended up ruling since the pregnant fourteen year old girl was suicidal, she could have the abortion to save her life, because life of the mother was built into the law. She miscarried anyway. The rapist father (in his forties) seems to have gotten sentenced to four years in prison, and was released early. He went on to sexually assault another girl a few years after he got out. The whole thing was a big scandal. It literally led directly to two constitutional amendments, which basically let people get abortions abroad, more or less.
Twenty years later, the death of Savita Halappanavar was the second case that really moved the nations. Halappanavar lived in Galway, she was married and had a wanted pregnancy, but she had miscarriage. She died of sepsis while in the hospital because the doctors felt they couldn’t perform the abortion that would save her while there was a fetal heart beat. Since the X Case, the law had been clear that you could perform an abortion to save the mother’s life, but how close does she have to be to dying before doctors can save her? The Irish voters decided not close at all, and again amended the constitution, this time to allow abortion broadly. (There were also the A, B, and C cases at the European Court of Human Rights, but they had less of direct impact on voters, it seems.)
Since the Dobbs decision came down and old abortion laws got reinstated in several Red States, I’ve just kept thinking that some time in my life time there’s going to be some poor woman in an awful situation, whether from rape or medical emergency, and we’re all going to end up knowing her name, or at least her story, like Rosa Parks, or Emit Till, or Rodney King, or George Floyd. It’s not necessarily going to be the first one woman who dies or is forced to carry her rapist’s baby to term, but in my life time I’m sure that at least one of these stories will eventually shock the conscience of the nation. I don’t think there’s going to be another way.
au_lite | 5 hours ago
I thik there were several cases shortly after the laws went into effect, and then our attention turned to other stuff I guess.
MountainPlanet | 5 hours ago
You assume that those parts of our nation have a conscience. They are medieval; they have a Calvinist sense of predestination that there are those that are elect and those that are predestined by god to hell.
Whatever happens to you is a comment on your righteousness and further confirms their belief that they are chosen. It is treating luck as though it is divinely ordained. You don’t get through to those people — someone’s else’s misery confirms their purity , rather than stoking their sympathy.
rotervogel1231 | 3 hours ago
As the other commenters pointed out, Americans simply don't care if women die. They don't care about other people dying period, so long as it's not them personally.
The only reason the woman profiled in this article cares is because it was her who was about to do the dying.
If this country wasn't pro-disease and pro-death, we wouldn't have ended up with what we've got.
This is why the U.S. will not sustain as a country for much longer. Societies where people hate each other this much, or at least just don't care if other members of the society die, rot from the inside out.
she-dont-use-jellyyy | an hour ago
The thing is, the majority of us *do* care, but we're not the ones making the choices anymore. We the people have very little power and that's by design.
SteelyEyedHistory | an hour ago
Well whatever the “majority” supposedly wants, they don’t vote that way. And until they do nothing will change.
she-dont-use-jellyyy | an hour ago
That's just patently false. Have you heard of gerrymandering? The electoral college?
rotervogel1231 | an hour ago
Gerrymandering and the EC are certainly contributors, but the fact remains that 1/3 of the population voted directly for this, and another 1/3 either chose not to vote (I'm not talking about people who can't vote, but people who won't) or voted third-party.
So 1/3 of the population wants this, and another 1/3 doesn't care either way.
I don't see this profoundly sick society sustaining. It's rotting from the inside out.
SteelyEyedHistory | an hour ago
This.
jenguinaf | 53 minutes ago
You realize outside of state props and the such Americans don’t vote on issue they vote for people and the president is elected by the states right?
SteelyEyedHistory | 45 minutes ago
A majority voted tor Trump, voted third party despite knowing what Trump is, or stayed home. A majority wanted this outright or didn’t care if it happened.
USMCLee | 5 hours ago
> “Our hands are tied behind our backs,” Dr. Erin Large later told her, according to a journal Waldorf began keeping on her phone and shared with ProPublica. “Tell your friends to vote differently.”
To me the implication is that there is a good chance she's not going to be around to vote.
hollyanniet | 7 hours ago
Why would calling the governor help, it's the Arkansas governor
rotervogel1231 | 3 hours ago
It's adorable how she thought that they'd care if she lived or died.
BigSun6576 | 6 hours ago
Everything in my body belongs to me
theshadowofself | 2 hours ago
What an absolute prick that hospital executive Thomas Olmsted is.
“We can’t provide you the standard of care to save your life because we’re pathetic cowards who have no understanding of how a woman’s body works and we just write the rules on vibes with no basis in reality. Even though you could die on the way there, we need to send you four hours out of state to get basic care to save your life. But you need to verbally request it and then when you want compensation for this I’m going to say ‘wait a minute you said you didn’t want care from us’ and argue it’s a ridiculous request.”
Of course a heartless coward like that makes it into leadership, since you can’t have any scruples in that kind of position. The only way to rectify this is to start suing the hospitals denying care to these mothers. What I find interesting is they’re not worried about repercussions for medical neglect if the mother dies while they “wait” for some arbitrary threshold that grants them permission to act. How is it not medical neglect in those cases? As much as I didn’t like Biden or Obama with their memberships to the “big club” and countless war crimes, they at least presented a few outwardly initiatives for improving some of the unfair conditions that have persisted in certain sectors of society. I detest with all my heart and then some the administration in place now. The big orange clown at the top is a pathetic loser creep with tiny hands and tiny everything else no doubt.
snark42 | 20 minutes ago
> The only way to rectify this is to start suing the hospitals denying care to these mothers. What I find interesting is they’re not worried about repercussions for medical neglect if the mother dies while they “wait” for some arbitrary threshold that grants them permission to act.
That won't help. They have insurance to pay the lawsuits. The administrators don't want to go to jail, which the abortion bans have as a punishment.
For medical neglect to be criminal there needs to be evidence of gross negligence, willful endangerment, or an extreme disregard for a patient's life. Since they are following the current law no prosecutor will charge them with medical neglect as they have a clear affirmative defense.
Odd-Song5052 | 3 hours ago
Nation of ghouls and clowns
penny-wise | 58 minutes ago
I keep saying this over and over: Republicans are disgusting 
Puzzleheaded_Toe3584 | 46 minutes ago
Don't live in Arkansas and get pregnant.
penny-wise | 39 minutes ago
“It all feels quite like the Handmaid’s tale,” she wrote on Sept. 24. “I had to seek refuge, travel by ambulance across borders.”
Because, sister, it is the Handmaid’s Tale.
Admirable-Sink-2622 | 9 minutes ago
Your government is working for themselves - not for you. Vote accordingly. 🤔