politics

There's a lot of concerns about the investigation. The police arrive to 3 dead children and a woman with catastrophic injuries and the husband saying she did it. The husband's phone or phone records weren't seized, as far as I can work out his clothing wasnt seized, her apple watch wasnt seized, blood on the bedroom door knob wasn't swabbed, there's a roughly 15 minute gap in the timeline where he's not accounted for, and multiple other things. His phone should have been seized cos apart from anything else, the cops may not have been able to get into hers.

The children deserved a high quality investigation and didn't get it. A lot of people have understandable concerns about the evidence.

Women's healthcare has been neglected for a long time. Health studies routinely treat women as smaller men. That includes during pregnancy and postpartum care. There are many, many women who have struggled with postpartum depression, and some psychosis, and did not receive any help from their doctors, husbands, families, etc.

The maternal mortality rate in the US is the highest of any developed nation.

So there are thousands to millions of women who desperately needed help, who were drowning while having to care for a newborn and possibly other children, with very little to no help at all. They were forced to tough it out. Sometimes being forced to tough out getting scant hours of sleep each night and healing from birth and dealing with postpartum depression leads to mental breaks and psychosis.

Many mothers can empathize with that feeling of being abandoned and having to put everything ahead of taking care of themselves to their own detriment. We're often told to lose weight, we're hysteric, we just need to take a break, whatever when we seek help for women's health issues. Women are often not taken seriously when we report symptoms.

Have you read the Lemon Clot story? It is focused on having to entertain guests during the postpartum period, but it's an eye-opening look at some of the physical ailments women deal with immediately after birth:

You will be leaking out of places you don’t want to leak out of. Do you really want to stand up from the couch and have your father’s parents see that not only have you bled through your pad, but the blood is now running down your leg. Do you really want to say, “honey, can you come with me to the bathroom, I am bleeding all over and I feel a huge bloodclot coming out”… in front of them? Contrast that to “mom, I need your help please, now, I’m bleeding all over!” Does your husband really understand the volume of stuff that will be coming out of you, the possibility of lemon-sized clots of blood? Not 2-dimensional lemon-sized, but huge, round, 3-dimensional lemon-sized?

How many bathrooms do you have? If only one, do you REALLY want to have to make it “guest-level clean” every time you leave it? Do you really want this gang of people ogling your diaper-sized pads, peribottle, tucks pads, and all the other supplies that will be in the bathroom? Even if you have two bathrooms, that means you can’t use the main bathroom, because you still have to leave it “guest-level clean” every time you use it.

Do they really plan to do something other than hold the baby, pass the baby around, and sit around expecting you guys to wait on them? Are they going to sit and stare at you? Thirty minutes after they arrive, and baby wants to breastfeed, are they going to quickly and willingly LEAVE your home so that you can breastfeed in the privacy and comfort of your space? Or are they going to hang around outside, waiting for you to be done, and knocking every so often wanting to know if they can come back in? Yeah, that’s great for breastfeeding.

Or better yet, are they going to blow you off, saying “it’s no big deal”, and expect you to breastfeed in front of them? Even experienced moms need several weeks of practice to get good at it, so to speak, so that they can breastfeed wherever they want. Learning to breastfeed is not a time for people to ogle and stare at you.

When your breasts are engorged and painful and you want NOTHING to touch them, what then? Does your [dear husband] think it will be okay for his dad to stare at your huge naked breasts as you walk around topless?

What if your birth is smack in the middle of their trip? So what are they going to do the first few days, before baby? Are they going to sit and stare at you, waiting for the big moment? Then what? Are they going to camp out in your hospital room every day, all day? Yeah, that’s great for resting. What happens when you leave the hospital and they beat you to your own home, and all you want to do is lay down in your own bed? Are they going to leave graciously, or are they going to sit in your living room, eating your food, messing up your house, and making noise, so you can’t nap?

Does your [dear husband] understand ANY of these things?? Does he not understand that it is NOT about entertaining guests, but about recovery from a major medical procedure (either vaginal or c-section)? Does he not understand that you just grew another human being in your body, and will have just gone through the process of getting it out?? This is going to be an exhausting, messy, wildly hormonal time. Does he not get that??

Conservatives will use whatever excuse is available to try to strip women of their rights. I think it’s lazy to shrug this issue off as just another way for conservatives to exert control even if there’s some truth to it. Because when you assert that the reason so many people are invested in this is because of bad actors, you’re ignoring the very real women and allies that are shouting from the roof tops about the issues with women’s healthcare.

Why not wrangle this topic to push the conversation about improving health outcomes for women instead of telling others to be quiet because conservatives might use our concerns to subjugate us?