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How many children has the US helped kill this week in the Middle East? It’s hard to keep track, but Unicef reports that more than 1,800 children in the region have been killed or injured since the US and Israel started a war with Iran on 28 February.
In Lebanon, a US-backed Israel is killing or wounding a classroom’s worth of children every day, Unicef’s deputy executive director told Reuters. That’s just after killing more than 20,000 children in Gaza in two years, all with the help of US taxpayer dollars.
Classrooms full of massacred children sounds pretty shocking to any normal person. But remember, when it comes to the Middle East, the situation is always complicated. Certainly, our lawmakers aren’t losing any sleep over dead brown kids.
“I’m willing to live with that report,” Donald Trump shrugged after being informed the US was responsible for bombing an elementary school in Iran. And, to be fair, dead American schoolchildren don’t seem to bother many of our politicians much either; not enough to do anything about school shootings anyway.
No, the lives that really matter for the party of family values, as we all know, are the ones that haven’t actually started yet. Ever since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, emboldened anti-abortion extremists have been doing everything they can to punish any woman who so much thinks about ending a pregnancy.
In the two years after Roe fell, prosecutors initiated at least 412 cases charging pregnant people with pregnancy-related crimes, the reproductive justice group Pregnancy Justice found.
The latest alarming example of this ongoing crusade to criminalize abortion comes from Georgia, where 31-year-old Alexia Moore was recently charged with murder after allegedly taking pills to induce an illegal termination.
If prosecutors move forward with the charge brought by local police, it will be one of the first cases of a woman being charged for terminating a pregnancy in Georgia since it passed a 2019 law banning most abortions after around six weeks. (A woman was charged in 2015 with murder after inducing an abortion by taking pills but that was later dropped.) Women in states including Texas, South Carolina and Kentucky have also faced criminal charges for inducing abortions.
The details of Moore’s case are not completely clear. But, according to court records, Moore went to hospital in December with severe pain. Moore told medical staff that she’d taken the opioid painkiller oxycodone and misoprostol, a medication that, along with mifepristone, is commonly known as the abortion pill. She then gave birth to a premature fetus who was suffering from health issues and died within a couple of hours. Moore was not charged with a crime until last week, and is currently in jail without bond.
Again: a lot of the details of this case are not clear including how many weeks pregnant Moore was. According to one arrest warrant, Moore allegedly told a friend she believed she was within a 14-week time frame. The Washington Post, meanwhile, reports that the fetus was 22-to-24 weeks along. Still, while some details are murky, one thing is clear: nobody should be charged with murder for having an abortion.
Another thing that we can say for certain: making it practically impossible to have a safe and legal abortion doesn’t result in fewer abortions. Privileged women will go abroad to seek care, and desperate women will risk their lives and health trying to get terminations.
One can certainly argue that it was unwise for Moore to take misoprostol outside of the 10-week window approved by the FDA, but she may have found herself without many other options. Georgia makes abortion illegal after cardiac activity can be detected, which is usually around six weeks of pregnancy.
Talking about “six weeks of pregnancy” is also misleading. Medical professionals date pregnancy from the first day of your last period rather than the date of conception. So being six weeks pregnant means the embryo is actually only around four weeks old. Many women have no idea they’re pregnant then because it’s only a couple of weeks after a missed period, and not everyone has regular periods.
As for that cardiac activity these so-called heartbeat bills are based on? While talking about a fetal heartbeat is emotive, they are sporadic electric impulses rather than anything you’d recognize as a heart. The Guardian has published some very illuminating photos of pregnancies before 10 weeks: there are no tiny fetuses, just microscopic tissue.
In short: if you need to terminate a pregnancy in Georgia, or another state with a similarly dystopian abortion ban, you have almost no time to do it safely and legally. You are still allowed to leave the state to get an abortion elsewhere if you can afford to travel – but several Republican-led states are trying to crack down on that as well.
Increasingly, you’re either forced to carry a pregnancy that might kill you, have a child that you are unable to care for, or be thrown in prison for trying to find a way out. The land of the free, eh? Perhaps instead of bombing Iran to “liberate” people from an autocratic religious regime, the US could try liberation closer to home.
Republican senator helpfully explains he’s ‘married to a married woman’
Senate Republicans are working overtime this weekend to try and pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (Save America Act), which Trump has called “one of the most IMPORTANT & CONSEQUENTIAL pieces of legislation in the history of Congress, and America itself”. He’s not entirely wrong there: if the Save America Act passes it would make it much harder for certain groups, including married women, to vote. On Thursday, Republican senator Rick Scott dismissed concerns that the legislation’s new paperwork requirements would make voting difficult for women who changed their names after marriage. “They say: ‘Married women, it’s gonna disenfranchise married women,’” Scott said. “I’m married to a married woman. I have two daughters that are married … They can figure this out. So, any Democrat that says that women can’t figure this out, they’re stupid.” Thanks for that, senator.
Be careful who you go hiking with
There have been a string of recent stories about men ditching their female partners while hiking together, leading TikTok to coin the phrase “alpine divorce”.
One of Trump’s buddies asked Ice to detain the mother of his child
Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent who is now a special envoy of the President, has been in a longstanding custody battle with his Brazilian ex-girlfriend, Amanda Ungaro. The New York Times reported on Friday that, after Ungaro was arrested on fraud charges, Zampoli reached out to Ice agents and ensured she was put in detention and then deported.
Israeli police kill two young Palestinian boys and their parents in West Bank
The Israeli police shot a mother, father, a five-year-old boy, and a seven-year-old boy in the head and face while they were driving back from shopping for Eid. The Guardian writes: “Asked what threat was posed by four young children and their unarmed parents, or whether the shooting violated Israeli rules of engagement, the police and military declined to comment.”
A ‘Pints and Ponytails’ class teaches dads how to braid their daughters’ hair
They should expand this very wholesome class to include mums who can’t braid hair. Whenever I try to style my four-year-old’s hair, she gives me a failing grade and demands that her other mother do it instead.
The week in pawtriarchy
You’ve heard about the bull in a china shop, but what about the possum in a gift shop? Travellers browsing a souvenir store at Hobart airport in Australia this week were surprised to see a real life possum hiding out among a row of stuffed animals. The marsupial was escorted out of the airport before any tourists could take it home. This is not the first time something like this has happened at Hobart airport: a snake and an echidna have been rescued from the runway in recent years. Australia really is wild.
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The assault on freedom with Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi
On Monday 8 June, join Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi to discuss the current seismic changes in geopolitics, the alarming rise of populism and nationalism, and its global implications. Live in London and livestreamed worldwide. Book tickets here or at guardian.live
