!Mothers day march --- agk's diary 14 May 2022 @ 15:33 UTC --- written on GPD Win 1 with PuTTY on couch with baby asleep on me while birds chirp outside --- This semester is Pediatric Nursing. I'll do nine weeks on the floor at Children's Hospital and one in the neonatal intensive care unit. In simulation my team'll care for a little manikin we'll pretend was admitted with an asthma exacerbation. Lectures, of course, will be endless videos and Elsevier Sherpath interactive learning modules, like what hospitals make you do for continuing ed and regulatory compliance. My little ped's hair is coming in looking like Slim Shady, the rapper. She can stand unassisted for 30 seconds and take a few steps before sitting. She used to work out all the time. Now she's more into being held all the time. Hobbies: Dumping the dregs of your coffee. Playing reverently in the cream and coffee puddle. Banging on stuff while whoop-grunting like a pretend gorilla. Tearing up leaves. Squatting and clapping. Pulling hair. Going up steps. Going down steps. Feeding all her food to the dog. Yelling. > It has always been around, > it will always have a niche, > but they'll make it a privilege, not a right, > accessible only to the rich. ---Digable Planets I took her to her first big protest last weekend. We were in Chicago for Evy's conference. Some thousands of people, enough to pack the streets for a few city blocks protested. Lots of babies. Fancy and I ran into streetmedic friends, one visiting from Europe. We talked to the attorney who guessed Migs'd be entrapped and told Fancy he died. Mother's day's a good day to protest legalizing state abortion bans. Moms are about half of abort- ion patients. It's the most reliable, if potential- ly most drastic, birth control. Even abstinence fails sometimes. In the ancient world, abortions were common enough a major Libyan port's primary export for 300 years was an abortion drug. A 13th-century pope was first a doctor who definitely did abortions before becoming pope. It only became taboo for Catholics in the early modern era. I don't know why. Maybe something to do with repopulating after the black death? In my country, Ben Franklin put instructions for medical abortion in his reader which was univers- ally used to teach literacy and as a reference. Thomas Jefferson publicly wrote his admiration of the skill and botanical knowhow of a Delaware (native) abortion provider. State criminal abortion laws were written in my country by 1900. Medicine and surgery profession- alized and were regulated, unlicensed midwivery outlawed. Except in Catholic Louisiana, state- licensed providers could do therapeutic abortion. The risk of oversight by a criminal jury dampened many physicians' willingness. Referral services directed women to providers. Despite regulation, abortion, contraception, and divorce remained taboos exclusive to Catholics in the 1960s. A conservative evangelical organization referred pastors to abortion providers for women in their congregations. In the 1970s, Nixon's Republican party recruited elements of the Democrat base who were not on board with racial civil rights policy. These in- cluded Catholics, former slave-state Protestant Dixiecrats, and eventually gun enthusiasts. "States rights" was one of the movement's rallying cries. If locally-powerful oligarchs wanted to segregate public life, what right did the federal government have to undermine their time-tested strategies for dividing and disciplining the work- force? The party's public relations strategy was brill- iant. They identified the family as what was under attack by "bureaucrats" and various bogeymen: empowered blacks, feminists, homosexuals, publish- ers, public health measures, medical procedures, unions, artists, criminals, communists, regulations. They studied the cultural paranoid style of the new left, and switched referents. They propagandized a war of "life" vs freedom, and recruited soldiers to fight freedom under the banner of life. They built the durable political base to deregulate, financial- ize, and loot institutions, industry, and society in which my country stored value during its prosperous 1945-1972 period. Unions were broken, pensions robbed, schools mostly resegregated, gulags built and filled with 1% of our population, debt ballooned, cities abandoned, public health emergencies like AIDS allowed to bloom, and the thieves got very rich. The abortion bogeyman, it turned out, did more than recruit Catholic Democrats. It had extraordinary pro- paganda power for organizing a multigenerational evangelical bloc of single-issue voters devoted to "states rights"---that is, repealing federal protect- ion of some peoples' hard-won freedom. Prayer services, volunteer opportunities, retreats and summer camps, clinic pickets, rallies, prisoner support, and a million other cultural actions main- tained a sense of urgency. This is how you build a movement. They dependably elected the programs of thousands of candidates over 50 years on promises to erode Roe. Democrats, meanwhile, needed abortion threatened for bread-and-circus "culture war" campaign prom- ises, so never legislatively codified federal pro- tections. Obama didn't convince Justice Ginsburg to retire when she could be replaced by another neutral judge. Democrats got all bipartisan during confirmations of anti-Roe justices. Who could blame them? On this, they represent the majority, but the other side's more determined and better organized. My baby went to her first big protest, in Illinois, a state that won't immediately outlaw abortion. The governor even spoke at the rally (we couldn't hear him). Our state, and every state except Virginia and Illinois bordering us, will automatically outlaw abortion when Roe is overturned. When she starts getting periods, we'll teach her menstrual self-extraction. We pray God move hearts of justices and legislators to compassion for actually- existing ordinary families. We'll keep misoprostol and mifepristone and, sadly, be careful who we help. --- NOTE---The 20th-century legal status of abortion in my country was reviewed by Buell, "Criminal abortion revisited." New York University Law Review, 1991.