I’m thinking today about Savita Halappanavar, an Indian dentist living in Ireland, who in 2012 suffered a partial miscarriage of her first pregnancy. Doctors refused to perform an abortion to expel the foetus as it still had a detectable heartbeat. She developed sepsis and died. She was 31.
About Agnieszka T, a Polish woman who was pregnant with twins. She miscarried one foetus but was refused an abortive procedure. 6 days later her second foetus died. She had to wait 2 further days to be given a termination. She died 3 weeks later of septic shock. She had a husband and 3 other children. She was 37.
About Izabela, a Polish woman whose foetus was found to have several abnormalities, but who was determined to carry to term. When her waters broke in the 22nd week of pregnancy she was told she had to wait until her foetus had no heartbeat before they could induce her or perform a c-section. She died leaving behind a husband and nine year old daughter. She was 30.
About Andrea Prudente, an American woman on a ‘babymoon’ in Malta where she suffered an incomplete miscarriage. Due to Malta’s complete ban on abortion, she was denied an abortion that would save her life. She asked her husband to punch her in the stomach as hard as he could to either induce labour or stop the foetal heartbeat. She was medically evacuated to Spain where they safely performed the procedure needed to end her pregnancy and save her life. This happened on Thursday.
Restrictive abortion bans harm anybody who can get pregnant. They harm planned pregnancies, as much as unplanned ones. They harm residents and non residents. If you’re reading what’s happening in America and thinking ‘Well at least it’s not my country’, sorry to say there’s every chance you could still end up affected one day. Abortion is basic healthcare, and basic healthcare is a basic human right. All these women were denied theirs, and these are just the tip of the iceberg. The last 3 all happened within the last year. Rather than these women being a sign of the past, instead they’re now very much a sign of what’s to come in America and that’s terrifying.
Y’know what, I’ve let it slide for a while, but if I get one more notification of someone tagging this with “Correction, it’s women actually” or something similar, I might actually scream.
Do you want to know what the 10 year old in Ohio case proved? That it’s not “just women”. It’s girls, it’s children, and yes, sorry terfs, it’s trans and non-binary folk too. It’s anyone who has the ability to get pregnant.
You might think you’re being clever, and you’re somehow owning the trans and non-binary community by excluding them, but what you’re actually doing is reducing how far reaching this harm is. 10 year old girls are not women, and people trying to treat them as such is part of the problem.
there are many, many things that drive me insane about the pro-life crowd - all of the above included. but something I think bears mentioning in addition is their absolute refusal to play by their own rules.
specifically: if you believe,100% truly and really believe, that a fetus at any stage of development is a person, and if, at the same time, you can acknowledge that a specific pregnancy, due to whatever heartbreaking set of circumstances, is 100% going to kill the person who’s pregnant unless an abortion happens - and that’s far from being a hypothetical scenario; it is, in fact, a very real one, especially in the case of ectopic pregnancies - logically, by your own argument, it should be morally impossible for you to decide which one of them gets to live. it’s a literal trolley problem: pull the lever to save one person, or do nothing and watch the other die? if both those lives are of equal weight, then morally, there’s no correct answer. saving the baby is not more “right” than saving the pregnant person, because your founding logical principle is their equal humanity. if both count the same, then whatever moral judgement might apply to abortion applies equally to letting the pregnant person die. it’s just a horrible, impossible choice a person or a family has to make, and in which outsiders should have no logical say.
but pro lifers don’t want to acknowledge the trolley problem, even when it’s one entirely of their own creation. they want things to be clear-cut. simple. absolutely without exception. and so they put their thumb on the scales, inflating the value of the fetus by ascribing it Moral Innocence. “the adult should die for the baby, because the baby is Innocent and the adult is Sinful and Imperfect” is not a thing they’ll usually come out and say in so many words, but they’ll yell and scream and shout about the Innocence of the Unborn as though it’s a trump card; as though the fact that the pregnant person whose life they’re willing to sacrifice is fundamentally unworthy in comparison goes without saying, even when that person is a terrified child whose pregnancy is the product of rape. because they absolutely cannot admit to the existence of any situation or context where the pregnant person’s life matters more than fetal innocence, because doing so would reveal the fact that their entire ideology is based, not on protecting innocent lives, but on control.
because when it comes to scenarios like the one I’ve described? very often, the pregnancies in question are not viable. ectopic pregnancies are not viable. a partial miscarriage isn’t viable. a near-term baby that’s died in utero and is slowly poisoning its parent with fetal mirror syndrome is not viable. a fetus with anencephaly is not viable. no scenario exists in which these pregnancies come to term and produce a living child, and yet pro-lifers will cling to the idea of Innocence to explain why, even though the “baby” they’re protecting can not and will never be born - might even already be dead, in fact - their Innocence still takes precedence over the real human life of the person carrying them. that’s not a trolley problem; that’s having to choose between accepting that one person is already dead and killing a second person, and choosing, in defiance of all logic, to kill the second person.
at nine weeks pregnant, the embryo is so small as to be invisible to the naked eye. the tissue removed during abortions or miscarriages at this level of gestation is so small, you can fit a five week, six week, seven week, eight week and nine week gestational sac in the same petri dish and still have room left over. THAT’S how small we’re talking. recently, a republican politician claimed - incorrectly - that fetuses begin to feel pain at 15 weeks; according to the american college of obstetricians and gynecologists, however, a fetus cannot feel pain until around 27 weeks. now, personally, I’m inclined to trust the ACOG on this one - but EVEN IF they were wrong, that 15 week mark is still five weeks after the point at which, even according to pro-lifers, 80% of abortions take place: namely, at 10 weeks or earlier. and even if an ability to feel pain was the deciding factor here - why? the pregnant person feels pain, too, and let me tell you, speaking from personal experience: giving birth HURTS, and that’s before you factor in the potentially lifelong health complications that can come from it. so, what - it’s morally wrong to inflict momentary pain on a fetus too underdeveloped to even be aware of its own existence, but morally correct to inflict, at absolute minimum, HOURS of excruciating pain on a fully sentient pregnant person? how does that make sense?
but what about that other 20% of abortions, I hear you cry! the ones that happen after the 10 week mark? if any of this data has swayed you to think that early abortion is maybe okay, but the whole thing has to be restricted because of those later examples, I need you to to consider two important things.
thing the first: free and easy access to abortion is pivotal to enabling early abortion. if you restrict abortion to only a handful of clinics - if you make it hard to access - then the limited number of appointments available and the distance many people will have to travel to reach them means that, even if someone decides to terminate at the early-as-possible 5-week mark, they’ll be forced to wait. if you think early abortion is fine, late abortion bad? then you need to make abortion easy to access, or you’ll always end up getting more of the latter than the former.
thing the second: remember that thing we discussed above, about pregnancies going wrong? yeah. even more than lack of access, that’s the reason for the vast majority of abortions happening later: because the pregnancy is a wanted one, but something bad happens. maybe the person has a partial miscarriage and needs a D&C at twenty weeks - aka, an abortion - to prevent sepsis from setting in. (this is what would’ve saved savita halappanavar.) maybe the excited parents find out their baby is died in utero at six months along, and they need to perform a D&C - aka, an abortion - to remove the body. (in a pre roe v wade america, actress debbie reynolds - yes, THAT debbie reynolds, mother of carrie fisher - was horrifically made to carry a dead baby to term. the poisoning from it almost killed her, and did so much damage to her body that she miscarried her subsequent pregnancy, too.) maybe the doctors do a scan and discover the baby is missing part of its brain or skull - aka, anencephaly - and can’t survive outside the womb. maybe one of a dozen, a hundred other tragedies.
but you, pro-lifer: you will stand before this person already facing an unimaginable loss, and you will call them a murderer. because magical, beautiful, unborn Innocence is somehow more important than a real, autonomous, living, breathing human. because deep down, the appeal to innocence is a smokescreen. what you REALLY want is to control women’s bodies (and the bodies of people you think are women, even when they’re children or nonbinary or trans men) by locking them into parenthood and taking away their autonomy.
It’s infuriating how so many women were (and still are) discriminated against for being female
she also killed and dissected a rabbit so that her peter rabbit would be as ACCURATE as possible. all the magic of countless children’s childhoods was built upon the bones of a single bunny’s sacrifice. how delightful. how horrific. what necromancer could dream of such impact with a single stroke of their blade.
(celebrated children’s fantasist) diana wynne jones said that she once wandered into beatrix potter’s yard by accident as a kid and got chased off because beatrix potter disliked children, which really fits into the rest of this quite neatly
Can someone please translate this I feel like it’s important
“look: i’m a sphinx”
you’re right that was important
Bienvenue mes anges etranger. So, apparently the weirdos took back Tumblr and I missed it? This makes me happy, because Tumblr is the written word, IG is video, and Twitter is my, “You will pry it from my cold, de*d hands.” (FB can go play in traffic. I do miss myspace, though. ) I’m likely not going to be super active unless Twitter becomes nonfunctional, but as I’m fond of reminding folks, “I aten’t dead.”
I’m gonna go ahead and be mad that AMC actually managed to make Interview with the Vampire more Queer, bloodier, and so much less white, while also turning it into a treatise on domestic abuse and DEGLAMORIZING it instead of treating it like the ideal gothic romance. But I’m gonna be glad that it did it while Ms. Rice can no longer fuck fandom over, too. She traumatized too many people with lawyers. Am I also glad I got the 2year deal on AMC+ last winter? Yep.
now that everyone from twitter has joined tumblr overnight, it’s time to lay a couple ground rules:
1. it’s not called a “retweet”, it’s called a “reblog”, but if you’re REALLY cool, you refer to it as a “rebagel”
2. if someone has fewer followers than you, it is totally fair to call them “irrelevant”, but it is actually more stinging to call them “irrelephant”
3. if you see someone irl that you think might have a tumblr, you’re supposed to say “i like your shoe laces”. the correct response, which any true tumblrite would know by heart, is “thanks, i stole them from the president”
4. there is a particular phenomenon that happens after 12am EST called “nightblogging”, and everything after this point is the fault of the australians
5. tumbeasts
So…As Twitter is a slow- motion car crash, I’m still here.
i’ve noticed in the dracula daily tag that a lot of people are assuming that by “solicitor” the book means that jonathan harker is something like a real estate agent, and while i appreciate the jokes, i would like to offer a correction:
this man is a LAWYER.
solicitors can deal in things like property law. when jonathan notes in his journal that mina wouldn’t like him calling himself a mere clerk because he passed the examination and is now a solicitor, he’s likely talking about the bar exam for lawyers. this man is licensed to advise on laws.
i tell you this because reading about this man refusing to ever question anything weird happening to him while blue fires and wolves circle around is much funnier when you know this man is theoretically practiced in law. he’s an educated man but such a dumbass that all you need to do to stop him from leaving a spooky castle is feed him roast chicken. he can list off property laws but shrugs at the fact that his new client count dracula is the weirdest motherfucker around. jonathan my good sir please get a clue.
The first time I read Dracula, I was 6 and my mom had the 1979 movie tie-in edition (with pictures. And yes, I realize 6 is a weird age to read Dracula, I had no appropriate parental supervision.) This, is better.
so i just googled the phrase “toeing out of his shoes” to make sure it was an actual thing
and the results were:
it’s all fanfiction
which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic
idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick
i wish i knew more about linguistics so i could actually talk about it in an intelligent manner, but yeah i thought that was kinda cool
Ha! Love it!
One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. <3
To me it’s still the quintessential “two dudes doing each other” phrase.
I think different fic communities develop different phrases too! You can (usually) date a mid 00s lj fic (or someone who came of age in that style) by the way questions are posed and answered in the narration, e.g. “And Patrick? Is not okay with this.” and by the way sex scenes are peppered with “and, yeah.” I remember one Frerard fic that did this so much that it became grating, but overall I loved the lj style because it sounded so much like how real people talk.
Another classic phrase: wondering how far down the _ goes. I’ve seen it mostly with freckles, but also with scars, tattoos, and on one memorable occasion, body glitter at a club. Often paired with the realization during sexy times that “yeah, the __ went all they way down.” I’ve seen this SO much in fic and never anywhere else
whoa, i remember reading lj fics with all of those phrases! i also remember a similar thing in teen wolf fics in particular - they often say “and derek was covered in dirt, which. fantastic.” like using “which” as a sentence-ender or at least like sprinkling it throughout the story in ways published books just don’t.
LINGUISTICS!!!! COMMUNITIES CREATING PHRASES AND SLANG AND SHAPING LANGUAGE IN NEW WAYS!!!!!!!
I love this. Though I don’t think of myself as fantastic writer, by any means, I know the way I write was shaped more by fanfiction and than actual novels.
I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.
The coherency isn’t lost, it just marries itself to the reader in a different way. A way that shapes that reader/writer and I find that so beautiful.
FASCINATING
and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?
we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?
I’m sure someone could start researching this even now, with writers like Rainbow Rowell and Naomi Novik who have roots in fandom. (If anyone does this project please tell me!) It would be interesting to compare, say, a corpus of a writer’s fanfic with their published fiction (and maybe with a body of their nonfiction, such as their tweets or emails), using the types of author-identification techniques that were used to determine that J.K. Rowling was Robert Galbraith.
In an earlier discussion, Is French fanfic more like written or spoken French?, people mentioned that French fanfic is a bit more literary than one might expect (it generally uses the written-only tense called the passé simple, rather than the spoken-only tense called the passé composé). So it’s not clear to what extent the same would hold for English fic as well – is it just a couple phrases, like “toeing out of his shoes”? Are the google results influenced by the fact that most published books aren’t available in full text online? Or is there broader stuff going on? Sounds like a good thesis project for someone!
We are doomed as a country if it is this easy to cripple our infrastructure
Power is logistic
Block everything
Feels like a good time to remind y'all that when Chelsea Manning smuggled a CD with classified information out of a military base by hiding it in a Lady Gaga CD case.
Friendly reminder that the section image in OP has never actually been verified. While phishing is a common way in, the truth of the matter is that most infrastructure computer terminals are older, aren’t updated, aren’t protected - so they are extremely vulnerable. (And making it so that people can manage facilities remotely only makes matter worse - if you want secure infrastructure, those computers shouldn’t have internet access at all)
Doesn’t/Didn’t England/GB/UK run like…nuclear subs or something on Windows ‘96 as of about 2 years ago? That is…yeah, infrastructure tech is basically the equivalent of our water infrastructure where all the pipes are rusted/rotting and most of America thinks that Flint is a worst case scenario and EVERY MUNICIPALITY is actually Flint, we just don’t know it yet.
**PLEASE read, trans woman needs help escaping domestic violence**
Hi, I’m Miriam. I’m a 22 year old trans woman and I’m in desperate need of help.
I am stuck in a physically abusive relationship. I was cut off by my family long ago for being a gay man, as that’s how I used to identify. My partner has effectively isolated me over the last 2 years of our relationship and I no longer have any close friendships IRL, and I’m not out to most people. My partner knows I am trans, but I’m being exclusively misgendered and deadnamed by him, as well as being generally demeaned and ridiculed for being trans on a near-daily basis.
The abuse has been escalating since quarantine started and even more so since I came out. I’m starting to fear for my life, even though I know that sounds a little dramatic. On my blog, I have pinned a post with proof of physical injuries, in case anyone would like to be sure.
All of this has been super debilitating to my mental and physical health to the point where I have become suicidal and I can’t sleep at night anymore out of fear and anxiety. I’m constantly on the verge of tears. The stress I’m under is causing my hair to fall out, which is causing me a ton of dysphoria. I have no college education and no savings whatsoever and I suffered a massive loss of income due to corona. I feel extremely helpless right now.
I hate to do this. I’m afraid to do this. I’m scared of posting this because I’m terrified of my partner finding it and recognizing me. But I don’t know what else to do anymore.
I’m trying to save up money so I can get out of here as soon and as safely as possible. Here’s what I’m aiming for:
Secure a safe place to live (deposit, first + last month’s rent)
Transport / preferably getting my car fixed or get a new one, whatever’s cheapest
Possible therapy/counseling to help me exit this relationship and/or deal with the aftermath
Pay for several ER/medical bills that have been piling up
Preferably start transitioning somewhere down the line, but this is lower on my list of priorities as I need to tend to my physical safety first :(
I’m honestly reaching my breaking point here. All I can do is humbly ask for donations. Anything would help, even just a dollar here and there. I NEED to start getting out of this situation.
tldr; I’m a young trans woman trapped in a severely abusive relationship with no resources and no means of getting out.
If you can donate, please donate to this pool I set up with a friend, as I can’t risk my deadname getting out and effectively doxxing myself.
You can do so anonymously and without having a Paypal account!
If you can’t, please reblog. I know these are rough times for a lot of people, so I’m not demanding anything. Every reblog has the potential to help. Thank you so much. ❤️
