Brynne Musser, a public health advocate from Missouri, joins us for an entire episode on the spate of anti-abortion laws in various US states (it's important, OK?) We cover this ridiculous, self-contradicting legislation and the bad takes it necessarily generated in supporters, including: equating wombs to slums, newborns as criminal evidence, and substituting "early delivery" for abortion. This month's proceeds from http://Patreon.com/miniondeathcult will go to the Nation Network of Abortion Funds, or you can and should donate to them directly at http://abortionfunds.org For Alabama-specific abortion advocacy, donate to http://yellowhammerfund.org and to help organize for reproductive justice in Alabama, visit http://facebook.com/hometownaction Music: Bjork - It's Not Up To You
The liberals are destroying California, and conservative humor gone awry... Conservative humor gone awry is going to fascistphonia today, so stay tuned.
We're going to take a few pictures of the desert and how their policies are actually messing it up.
It's not beautiful when you go across that border.
Stay tuned guys, we'll show you exactly what it looks like when people are going to get yourself.
They're in Boston.
Stay tuned.
I'm Alexander Edward.
And I'm Tony Boswell.
And we are Minion Death Cult.
The world is ending, as usual.
Your uncle's racist, sexist, misogynistic Facebook feed is responsible.
We're documenting it.
Let's just get right into the show tonight.
We have a guest here.
We have Bren Musser here.
How you doing, Bren?
I'm doing just okay.
Just okay.
Is that because of the topic of the show tonight, or you're upset about the end of Game of Thrones?
Oh, I think that there's like a mixture of existential dread that's just culminating in sort of the perfect storm, but I would attribute most of it to the legislating of all of my choices that I want to be making.
Yeah, it seems very real.
It seems, I mean, you know, everything this administration does is bad.
But with each bad decision, and I say bad decision, I mean, it's the right decision that they made intentionally for their purposes.
But yeah, this is a big one.
This is a very big one.
And I said this administration like I was talking about the Trump administration, but Even though these are state bills that have been passed restricting or outright banning abortion, Donald Trump's presidency has obviously played a role in these.
He has nominated and confirmed more judges than anybody else in history at this point in their presidency.
And it is for that specific reason that these state legislatures feel emboldened enough to pass these bills that are intended to challenge the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade.
So they all suck.
They're all bad.
It's wild because they're not even like, that's not even a secret.
I mean these people, these lawyers that are drafted these bills are coming out and saying like, no we've had this bill written since like the 90s.
We just, the math was not in our favor but now we have the right people in and like this is why Kavanaugh and these things were such a huge fucking deal.
It wasn't just like rhetoric.
It was like, no this is going to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Like if this, you know, if we let this have happened.
And here it is.
So it's not a surprise.
Yeah, and even some of these state legislatures, like, I believe it is the Georgia, it's either the Georgia or Missouri bill, includes a backup plan in case their heartbeat bill gets rejected by the courts.
Like, there's written-in fail-safes to at least one of these bills.
So, Bryn, you're from Missouri.
You've been watching everything go down.
You have a background in public health and why don't you tell us a little bit about what's going on in Missouri, how your previous work sort of informs your view of it.
Yeah, so I'm a public health researcher.
I have my background in, I have a master's in public health and also one in geography, and so I kind of just set out to do kind of like the mapping of the spread of disease, do a lot of data work and stuff like that, but during my public health degree I worked for a lab there, a research lab that was the sexual health empowerment lab.
We did a lot of work with justice-involved individuals and visited the jails, did a lot of sexual health education in there, but really had a cohort of people in the community that we helped navigate the social work system.
We helped them navigate their reproductive health system here in town, just giving them access to all of their needs, A lot of them were sex workers, almost all of them were struggling under poverty and So I felt like I went into this with a pretty detailed knowledge of what was already available in Missouri.
If, I don't know if a lot of people know this, but Missouri only has one abortion clinic in the state right now.
So, and there's also a 72-hour waiting period after you, so if you want to go get an abortion and you have a, which is really difficult, so if you live on the other side of the state, you know, let's say you live... Gotta make two trips.
Right, yeah.
Are you expected to take off three days of work?
What's realistic for people that work a job that they can't take sick days from or can't really get childcare for that amount of time?
Well, which is even more ironic considering, you know, what we talked about yesterday is how reproductive rights in general, but especially abortion, has been a gateway towards If not lifting people out of poverty, at least helping them manage it slightly better or, you know, help them work their way out of poverty.
So yeah, it's doubly ironic that just that process in and of itself creates a further burden on people who are already struggling.
Yeah.
Tell us a little bit about this Missouri bill.
Is it a heartbeat bill?
It is a heartbeat bill, which is a misleading term because it's more like a vibration.
There's no heart tissue, there's no heart form.
It's just an electrical impulse among a cluster of cells that will eventually become a heart.
Correct, yeah.
It bans abortions after 8 weeks, which is I mean, I'm preaching to the choir here, but we all know that most women don't know, or most people with uteruses don't know that they're pregnant at that point yet.
It does make an exception for medical emergencies, but one of the things that's like, you just like, you know, they make us lose our dignity at every turn here because
If there is a medical emergency and they do induce an abortion or do they do call for an abortion there has to be another doctor besides the one that's performing the abortion that will like pull out whatever's coming out like whatever stage the fetus is at and will be like it's just somebody there to double check to make sure that it's not viable and they don't need to start performing surgery or like giving it medical care it's just like Jesus Christ.
I like that because that sounds like a union thing.
Like, oh no, we need a guy to hold the boom mic and then we also need another guy to hold that guy's legs to make sure that he's stable or she is stable while they're using the boom mic.
So it's jobs.
I like that.
As a lazy teamster myself, I like that.
All hands on deck, really.
There's no exception for rape or incest in the bill.
What's unbelievable too, I mean not unbelievable really, but when it came back through the House after it passed through the Senate, Somebody had proposed an exception for rape and incest and they did not approve it.
So there was supposed to be an amendment in there for that.
One of the things that's like sort of getting overlooked for this that I think is worth mentioning is that, so as I said Missouri has one abortion clinic.
It's in St.
Louis.
There are 104 what's called Pregnancy Crisis Centers.
I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, but basically they're like the old bait-and-switch for the vulnerable Pregnant people where you kind of show up and like if you google, at least for me, I was googling abortion just to see what would come up and I think there's one called Rachel's House.
Well, let's edit that out because I don't want to give away any free publicity.
Not that anybody listened to that one.
patron them but uh bad time to uh announce our sponsor for the there's there's all these like pregnancy crisis centers and so even though they did not do the um the amendment they did so they didn't do the amendment that would include the exceptions for rape and incest.
What they did manage to get in when they brought it back through the House, so they slipped in even more tax incentive for donating to the pregnancy crisis centers.
So prior to this bill, 50% of your tax or 50% of your donation to a pregnancy crisis center is a tax deductible with a cap at 2.5 million dollars.
Now, under this new, like, part of this new heartbeat bill, um, 70% of your donation to the Pregnancy Crisis Centers, and now there's no longer a cap on the amount.
Wow.
Whoa!
We're in the wrong business over here!
You stop podcasting and start prevent- preventing pregna- pre- helping pregnancies?
I don't know, something about pregnancies.
You just, you know, all you would have to do is you make it so that your Google gets you to the top, you lure vulnerable pregnant people to your place of business, and then you just shame them into abstinence.
You line up a bunch of actors posing as hopeful adoptive parents and then you say, these people are just waiting for you.
They're waiting for you to give birth to this child.
Yep, yep, correct.
Well, you also have to build, which this is something I learned by listening to the call-in show of Street Fight last week, the ABCD call-in show, which I highly recommend.
Lucian, I believe it was, they also helped me with some information about how to, where to send money to support the people who are actively engaged in pro-choice organizing.
It's interesting.
But they mentioned that, yeah, one of these things about these pregnancy crisis centers is they build them right across the street from abortion clinics.
They build them across the street from abortion clinics and then they give them, like, they name them with something that's like a word off or a letter different from the actual abortion clinic.
Yep, there's one just, we used to go register people to vote at Planned Parenthood and literally in the exact same strip mall next door would be one of these pregnancy crisis centers and it was just called like Hope Planning or just, it's just not, it's so misleading.
It's like there's a new restaurant in town called Plant Power and like everyone keeps going there on accident.
And getting like vegan milkshakes instead of like assistance with their health needs.
And giving up their babies to like whatever granola couple is sitting in the corner.
I would have thought that would be where I would go to pay my utility bill.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So there was a legislator in the, I believe this was during either the debate or during the passage of this bill in Missouri.
There was a certain state rep named Barry Hovis, which is an amazing name.
Like we were talking about Bryn, this name is incredible.
They try to warn you, you know, these people try to warn you with their names and we just don't listen.
Yeah.
And a state rep named Barry Hovis speaking on the floor says something like, this is a direct quote, let's just say someone goes out and they're raped.
So this is what you were talking about, Bren, when you mentioned they tried to get an amendment to exempt rape and incest survivors from this abortion bill.
This is an argument against that amendment, which was ultimately so persuasive.
Let's just say someone goes out and they're raped or they're sexually assaulted one night after a college party.
Because most of my rapes were not the gentlemen jumping out of the bushes that nobody had ever met, Hovis said.
So I guess it's important right here to mention that Missouri State Representative Barry Hovis is a 30-year veteran of the Cape Girardeau Police Department.
Most of my rapes were not gentlemen jumping out of the bushes that nobody had ever met, Hovis said.
That was one or two times out of a hundred.
Most of them were date rapes or consensual rapes.
Oh, fuck.
Yeah, it's rough.
Well, first, one thing you should know about being a Republican in Missouri, or at least to be in Jeff City, you have to allow Mike Judge to give you a pseudonym.
So that's one thing that is unique about Missouri.
But yeah, Barry Hovis, PhD, Dr. Barry Hovis, it's interesting because they seem to have no idea what consent is, but I was reading through the bill for the fetal vibration law, and they clearly explain exactly what consent to an abortion is, and they use the, this is their phrase,
Consent to an abortion is voluntary and informed and given freely and without coercion.
So it's like clear to me that they do exactly know what consent is.
They just only care about it some of the time.
Correct.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah, I love this.
He went on to say that he misspoke.
Which is, yeah, just an insane... How do you misspeak the phrase consensual rape?
I feel like...
You know, it's sort of an impossible idea.
It's an idea that you cannot hold in your mind because it's a logical impossibility.
It'd be like saying, oh yeah, it appears the suspect committed accidental suicide.
Or like, oh yeah, it appears the suspect kicked the other perp with his hands.
It's like something you can't say accidentally.
But it is horrifying, though, because this person was, like, an officer of the law, and at some point in his career, he probably told somebody, like, oh, no, like, look, right here, you said, no, Brad's hot, and you cannot rape the willing.
You think Brad's hot, so therefore, this is consensual.
Yeah, if you're... Like, that probably legit happened.
If your vagina didn't snap shut like a cartoon clam, what are you coming to me for?
So the sad thing about that too is that Cape Girardeau is, if you can visualize the shape of Missouri, it's kind of like... Totally, I have that.
I know exactly what you mean.
I have that shape vividly in my mind right now.
I'm well aware that you West Coast people really have a very clear understanding of Midwest geography.
I just learned what Missouri was today, so you'll have to cut me some slack.
So Missouri has what's called the Boot Hill that kind of like hangs down below and Cape Girardeau sits in that.
So it's kind of the southernmost part.
So wait, so Boot Hill is actually below sea level?
Is that what you're saying?
Or you're saying like it's south?
South is what we mean.
We don't have a sea here so it's hard to It's hard to get an accurate reading on sea level.
I know it's hard to understand a state that doesn't touch a coast, that doesn't touch an ocean.
It doesn't sound very chill at all.
Could you maybe work on the verbiage there?
Boothill sounds a bit like, it sounds like you're appropriating Italian culture.
And I don't really appreciate that.
We don't really appreciate that.
So if we can maybe figure something else out there.
I mean, we'll let it go for now, but for the future.
Yeah, I'll try to, I'll try to think about something that would be more appropriate.
Perhaps like a, just like a, like if Missouri was facing, if Missouri was facing New York, you know, if it's just like a person standing there and it has a beer belly that's just like hanging down over its belt.
Sorry, that's also appropriating Italian culture.
I think it might be German culture.
Here, we'll let you keep calling it Boothill as long as you put a statue of Columbus there.
Okay, fair.
I would imagine that it already is.
So it might already be covered.
Anyway, Cape Girardeau is the home of a fairly large university, Southeast Missouri State.
So you would have to think that this guy would be You know, it's not like, it's not a small town really.
I would guess it's in like the top ten largest cities in Missouri.
So, and it has a ton of college kids, so this guy's like...
Talking about all the rapes and the nuances of college drinking culture, like, I just feel for these college kids that graduated from 1970 to 2000, however long he's been in term.
Yeah, like, he probably thinks, like, rape kits are something you use to rape somebody, so he just hasn't touched them in decades, in his entire 30 years.
He sees a caboodle.
This might be lost on YouTube.
He sees a makeup-carrying caboodle.
And that's what he thinks a rape kit is.
Sorry.
He's like, uh, I don't own a cat.
Why would I need kits or caboodles?
There's actually a kid who's graduating right now who actually wants to thank him, because if it wasn't for him, he wouldn't have been alive to, you know, to graduate.
To perform consensual rape.
Yeah.
Yeah, so that's something some guy said in Missouri.
Let's go over the various contours, just briefly, of these abortion laws because they're popping up everywhere.
Alabama, as the listener has probably heard already, has the strictest abortion law in history, not just among these states that we're talking about.
It's got It bans abortion at any stage of the pregnancy So this isn't even like a fake heartbeat six week eight week thing.
This is just life begins at conception One and done what you know, and I feel like this is the You know, maybe this is a bad thing to say.
Maybe it won't come across as well as I want it to, but this is the only way to have this belief.
To have this insane belief that a fetus is a human being that deserves all the protections, whether it's 6 weeks or 20 weeks or whatever.
How are you going to be okay with an exemption for rape or incest?
How are you going to be okay with abortion at five weeks?
How are you going to, like, this is, you know, I know slippery slope is technically a logical fallacy, but it's, this is what we're dealing with here.
It's, this is the natural See, I disagree with you.
I think there is room for nuance, and that's where, you know, our democratic brothers and sisters come in.
human life.
And I mean, as far as I'm concerned, Alabama is taking a courageous stand here and just letting it all hang out.
See, I disagree with you.
I think there is room for nuance.
And that's where, you know, our democratic brothers and sisters come in.
It's like, you know, everybody likes chocolate chip cookies, but not everybody likes chocolate chip cookie dough.
You know, it's like by your logic, you can't like, you can like cookies and you have to also enjoy the dough.
Okay.
This is a fetus being baked joke.
Yeah no I get it.
I'm wondering like don't you add something to the dough before you cook it though?
Like you add butter or something?
Wheat?
Yeah, so, um, so the dough is just like, uh, the egg, and then the weed is the sperm.
So I don't believe, like, I don't believe that cookie dough is actually an embryo.
Like, it's not an embryo until you add the weed in there.
Oh, okay, okay, yeah.
Well, we're forgetting that cookie dough can kill you.
Uh, not vegan cookie dough, suckers.
Yeah, so, uh, Alabama also describes a fetus as, quote, a human life for homicide purposes.
Fuck.
That's the language.
A human life for homicide purposes.
Um, which is, yeah, just a great way to, uh, talk about life.
Like, uh, you only care about it insofar as it can be murdered.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think that's one of the things that's frustrating about having these conversations because I think the things that have popped up on my feed or the, you know, like, I probably about six years ago, I saw my Facebook as like a bonsai tree that I pruned for my enjoyment.
So like, if, you know, if somebody's not bringing me joy, like, I want to open this up and just see, My liberal bubble really is what I want.
Totally.
So I don't want to see anything that, well six years ago I didn't want to see anything that frustrates me.
So anyway, at this point I'm just, like, basically seeing angry people and witty retorts that have been, like, screenshotted from Tumblr, which I also like.
But I think what we're not getting at is, like, we can talk about it being, like, my choice, this is my body, but when we're not addressing that this is, like, a faith issue That somebody believes that that is a body that should have a choice that just can't speak for itself is one of the tough things.
Like, I don't know how to argue with somebody's belief, but it's not like they're even, even if we play on their terms, it's not like they're consistent in that because they don't seem to have any of the magic that belief that things are an embryo at conception for like in vitro fertilization clinics yeah yeah so many frozen babies technically
In vitro freezers.
That was a Bush thing.
I mean, that was a big Bush deal back during his term.
He thought those were babies.
He thought those embryos were babies.
And like, I don't remember the specific bills, but yeah, he passed legislation to protect those embryos from ever being discarded, even though they would never, even the ones that would never go on to be implanted.
Here's what you do.
Here's how you get by this faith issue is you simply tell them that it's a brown child.
You simply tell them that it's going to be an anchor baby and then they'll let you abort that post haste.
Yep.
What's wild is Being anti-abortion is a fairly new concept in, like, the American diaspora.
It only became relevant around the Reagan era.
It was something he kind of ran on.
Before that, most people were pro-choice because it was a constitutional thing, you know?
Well, a lot of people did think that Roe vs. Wade went too far.
Joe Biden, that is part of its history.
Yeah, but the American majority was still okay with it.
I think so, yeah.
So it really became more marketable during the Reagan era.
That's when things like the pro-life movement really got its legs and it was just to appeal to evangelists.
And so it's crazy that something that's that modern in American history that it's like held on to like it's some sort of great American tradition and some sort of wholesome wholesome you know hold on to the dream type thing where it's like you're getting in the way of this this uh this um lump of cells uh uh pursuing life and liberty no yeah exactly that whole thing
Trying to make it.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, if you're actually interested in arguing with somebody in your life that might be, you know, persuadable, I think the best argument is the bodily... There's an argument that... There's an argument around bodily autonomy that also includes the idea that a fetus is a person with rights.
And that argument is that even if a fetus has a right to live or whatever, that fetus, that quote person, does not have the right to use somebody else's body to live.
Like, if your survival depends on literally, like, siphoning pieces of my body off, then that violates my bodily autonomy.
And if you want to argue that a fetus is a person or whatever, that's fine.
They don't get to come to your house and state legislature Barry Vargas can't, you know, hold you at gunpoint while somebody, like, I don't know, sucks your blood, you know?
Like, I feel like that's an argument you could make that might be compelling to some logically-minded pedant about this issue.
I think I just solved it actually.
I think we can all go home because I think I actually just figured out how we can appease everyone.
I think what we do is we go ahead and have an abortion but just like hold on to it and I don't think that anybody in the pro-life movement is interested in like fact-checking or science so what we say is like Hey, we've got like this thing that's just like ready for in vitro.
Yeah.
So if you just want to like throw it in, pop it in the microwave.
Yeah.
For all of you willing to like take these kiddos, uh, get it popping.
Cause like we've got, we've got it here ready for you.
And then we just throw them in a freezer next to, you know, like, you know, partition it off, but next to the other, like viable cells, viable eggs.
And then we just wait for people to come pick them up.
I think you could probably just tell people that you're going to plant it and grow more babies.
You're going to grow more feti.
No, I really like this whole farm-the-table type approach you're taking to in vitro fertilization.
It's like, it would be like a co-op, you know?
You sign up and if you pay your dues, you can go pick up a new embryo and get it implanted.
Yeah, I like that.
And I think if we just start throwing it around, we could label them heirloom.
Yep, yep.
Exactly.
Yeah, 100% organic.
They are from the fetus region of America.
Yeah, so Georgia has another one of these heartbeat bills.
Is Georgia the one that says you can't even travel out of state to get it?
I believe Georgia is the one.
Yes.
The one exception that I will say about the Missouri bill is that They did us a kindness.
They did us a solid here and said that, so even though the doctor's performing the abortions, if they did it after eight weeks or did it, you know, like for not, or in a medical emergency, they can get five to 15 years, but the women themselves or the people that are pregnant will not be prosecuted, which is a big, big help.
What happens if that woman performs the abortion herself?
What happens if she intentionally miscarries?
Ooh, that's a good question.
The language is very vague in these bills.
I think it's Georgia that I'm thinking of specifically where these bills, like you said, carve out an exemption for the woman or the carrier of the embryo.
And says that only the person who performs the abortion would be, you know, criminally liable.
Well, what if the woman or the person is performing the abortion on themselves?
And certain district attorneys around the Atlanta area, certain prosecutors around the Atlanta area have pledged not to prosecute women.
For seeking out abortions, which is, you know, all well and good.
You know, assuming they actually follow through on that word.
But yes, the language is vague in some of these bills that could hold the mother liable.
Yeah.
Ohio, also very terrible here, they have language in their bill that would force a person who has an ectopic pregnancy, now this is a pregnancy where the embryo has embedded in the lining of a fallopian tube instead of a uterus, and they're life-threatening.
They can kill that person and Often people don't know that they have an ectopic pregnancy until it becomes life-threatening and this bill allows what they're calling surgery once the ectopic pregnancy has become life-threatening but that surgery is just to remove the embryo and plant it in the uterus.
That's your only option if you have an ectopic pregnancy.
You can't take the normal route of, you know, taking a little abortifacient or whatever to flush it out of your system.
You have to get a fucking surgery, a medical procedure done that implants the embryo in your uterine lining, which...
Is not possible.
It's not scientifically possible to do this.
It's state-mandated surgery for religious reasons and religious reasons only.
It's basically torture.
I mean, it's basically torture.
It's Nazi shit.
It only does not work.
It's never worked.
It can't work.
It's not possible to work.
But it's also very painful.
And it's torture.
It's unconstitutional torture.
We have a woman representative here in KC that spoke today at the rally, Judy Morgan, and she told us a story because they've been hearing testimony all leaning up to the votes on these bills and people have just been coming and, you know, like, exposing the most traumatic parts of their lives in hope of getting some sentimentality from these legislators.
But she told a story today about a woman that came in and testified and said that she was experiencing a lot of pain.
She knew that she was pregnant.
She thought she wanted an abortion and she showed up that she was Basically tricked into showing up at one of those pregnancy crisis centers and they basically told her to carry it, didn't give her like a medical examination whatsoever, encouraged her to abstain from sex, and then she continued to be in just like excruciating pain and showed up finally at a hospital and she had an ectopic pregnancy.
And so not only are these like You know, if we're redirecting patients to these crisis prevention centers, or, excuse me, pregnancy... Crisis pregnancy centers?
Yeah.
If we're redirecting them to these centers, they're not providing adequate health care whatsoever.
They're not even doctors, right?
No!
Fuck no.
Yeah.
It would violate your Hippocratic Oath to work at one of these fucking places.
Correct.
Um, somebody very close to me had an ectopic pregnancy.
They experienced the pain that you're talking about.
Uh, they, they assumed they were pregnant.
It were experiencing pain, went to the doctor two or three times, the actual doctor who told them, no, you're fine.
didn't believe this woman uh when she told him she was in extreme pain said no you're fine until finally she had to get rushed to the hospital found out that it was in fact something very wrong going on and uh had had surgery and she was devastated you know she was gonna uh she was gonna keep this child and um
The thought of forcing any woman but especially this person uh to undergo a what is essentially a religious metaphorical cosmetic surgery against their will uh
On top of all the pain that they were already experiencing for an unviable pregnancy and then forcing them to carry that unviable pregnancy until it amounted to another medical emergency or until they miscarried, quote, naturally, um, is, uh, it's, it's just, um, evil.
It's pure evil.
And you shouldn't have to have somebody in your life who's gone through this to know that it's evil.
It should just be obvious.
It should just be obvious that it's Nazi shit.
Your government forcing unscientific medical experiments on you.
Because of their total ignorance, and it's beyond ignorance, it's negligence, it's malicious negligence of human biology.
I wonder if the anti-vaxxers have anything to say about this state-mandated unscientific surgery.
I wonder how they feel about this.
I mean, what's the ultimate vaccine besides a good old-fashioned abortion cocktail?
You just, well what you do is you give them a little bit of the abortion and that prevents the actual abortion from happening.
You take the first pill of the, I can't think of the actual name for the drug now, but you know that for a medical abortion it's a two pill series.
So you take the first pill and it actually makes you very strong.
You come out with like Hulk kids.
It inoculates the baby to the abortion.
Yeah.
Um, so last thing on this Ohio bill, um, so there are no exceptions for rape and incest, um, and the reason that that's, uh, unique in the news at least is because there was an 11 year old who was raped and impregnated, uh, who is, who was at the time of this bill, Past their six-week mark in terms of the progress on the pregnancy.
This bill doesn't go into effect until, you know, six months down the road, if ever.
It's already being challenged.
But yeah, they would not be eligible for an abortion under this bill despite the fact that they are a fucking child.
And somebody had a really good tweet about this.
Somebody did a really good tweet because you know the...
The popular outcry of, hey, this is awful, this is terrible, how can we force an 11-year-old girl to carry a pregnancy to term when she was raped or whatever, is really just kind of short-sighted.
You're not looking at the big picture, according to this tweet from Matt Walsh, who we've covered on the show before.
It's in the Patreon episode.
He's the Easter worshipers guy.
Totally worth it too.
If a 12 year old is raped by her father and the father takes her to get an abortion, the evidence of the crime will be destroyed and he will go on molesting his victim for years.
If, however, the child is born, his crime will be discovered and she will be rescued from the abuse.
Totally worth it, too.
Totally worth all the trauma that that would cause.
Oh, my God.
Just like a stunningly bad take.
I think this is the worst tweet that's ever been tweeted.
Yeah, for sure.
It's up there.
I mean, I think it just shows the lengths that the GOP and conservatives are willing to go to continue not believing women about anything.
Yeah, totally.
Well, listen, I understand you're in an abusive situation at home, but we would recommend that your husband continue assaulting you right up until the moment the police get there, so they can see the assault happen, and then your abuser will be arrested.
Because otherwise, how could they possibly know?
And look, why don't you just go ahead and bring another life into the world, into this family?
Yeah.
Like, I'm picturing, uh, in the maternity ward, like, the dad is, like, watching his daughter, uh, give birth, and his- his eyes are, like, darting to the left and to the right while there's, like, a- a detective waiting, eyes on- eyes on the vagina, waiting to see, uh, what comes out of- like, this is so fucking stupid.
This is s- Yeah.
It- it- it's insane, it's just, like, How do you think DNA works?
Well you know DNA doesn't actually populate until about you know the the 13th week.
That's when you can actually it's like yeah if that's how you really feel then um let abortions happen and when those abortions happen treat treat like The DNA, like, evidence.
Which is what they do.
Have a detective there.
It's what they do.
I mean, you can get DNA from an abortion, like, it's already, uh, that's the science behind it.
That's what I'm saying, yeah.
If that's how you feel, then you should actually, like, make it more important that it happens.
Yeah, it's just amazing that in order to defend this boneheaded... Boneheaded's too good of a word for it, but in order to defend this truly monstrous take, or this monstrous ideology, you have to give out this take that encourages a child to, like, Stay with their abuser until the baby is born?
Like, what is the fucking idea behind this?
It's incredible.
And it's, um... Somebody responded.
Matt Walsh was on one on Twitter.
He was not backing down.
The ratio was like 10 to 1.
He retweeted some response that was like, hey dude, I'm pro-life, but this tweet isn't helping.
Or not making exceptions for age or rape or incest is not helping.
And I would say, yeah, of course it's not helping your cause because your cause is awful in general.
This is the logical extension of your fucking cause and you're just too much of a coward to own it.
That's like the only, this is like the only silver lining that I can see from this, you know, spurt of extremely bad bills is that it really just forces everybody to confront how awful this line of thinking is.
I would rather, I would rather just it not happen, of course.
But, um, you know, the natural, like, the logical conclusion to this ideology are these bills.
And the logical conclusion to these bills is that they're, the ideology is fucking disgusting.
Yeah.
Another really interesting take on Twitter is from somebody named Andy Stout.
And this goes, I'm completely pro-choice.
Okay, so so far that's fine.
But I don't perceive the abortion issue to be about a woman's body.
Okay.
Interesting.
Andy goes on to say it's about the rights of the quote tenant versus the rights of the quote landlord.
So I love this because it starts out fine and then just takes a massive dive, just a straight line down.
And halfway down is, I don't care about women's bodies.
And then the bottom is that, no, we should sympathize with people carrying an embryo or a fetus because they're like landlords.
I think actually Andy just made a mistake because I am in line with the idea that I think he just got it switched backwards because in a sense a fetus is kind of like a leech or a parasite, which is how I view landlords.
Yeah, when I look at the landlord-tenant relationship, I definitely think of the tenant as the leech.
That's exactly what I come away with with that analogy.
You guys are reading this all wrong.
He's actually very... he's all about like...
People taking advantage of things like welfare and social security and handouts and tax breaks.
When you have a kid, you have a tenant who's paying you by way of tax breaks and food stamps and leeway like that.
That's all this person wants is more people taking advantage of the resources we have in America for our poor.
I wish the state treated me as well as they treated landlords in my state because, honestly, I would just be serving evictions on those fetuses.
Yeah, you'd be like, oh, this place is inhabitable.
Like, you could purposely, like, destroy your own body to make it uninhabitable.
I'm a goddamn slumlord.
Yeah.
Well, it's like, it's like anything.
It's like after the first one, you kind of, you know, after you get the first one in your belt, it becomes easier.
Oh yeah, we got mold.
You're gonna get, you're definitely getting asthma from, from this.
There's a lot of loud noises on the ceiling every night for some reason.
Alarms.
Yeah.
No, I love this take because yeah, it's like, no, I don't care about women, but I do care about landlords.
It's like, it's like, this is a take I've really seen, but it's, it's like a boss, like shouting at living wage advocates that no one is entitled to my labor.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But the labor in this case is actual labor.
I'm still trying to think of ways that I can, you know, compare my body to a dilapidated building.
How often do you vacuum in there?
Is that a euphemism for abortion?
Um yeah well I don't know it's yeah it'd be ironic because you want the place spic and span for a tenant but uh sometimes the tenant gets caught in the crossfire you know.
So I was I was really interested to see what libertarians had to say about this completely invasive uh infringement on the rights to a person's bodily autonomy.
So I figured, oh, of course, all your popular libertarian pages on Facebook are just going to be, you know, posting memes against this bill.
You know, Liberty Memes is going to be going to be having a field day or Being Libertarian is going to be having a field day.
And I only found two fucking posts about this on those major meme pages.
The first one is a screenshot of a tweet from Bernie Sanders who says, uh, abortion is a constitutional right.
And the caption from Being Libertarian is, quote, abortion is a constitutional right.
Now Gibbs me your guns.
So they're trying to own Bernie by hypocrisy, by saying, oh, all those bills that he passes to grab everybody's guns makes him a hypocrite.
He doesn't actually care about the Constitution or whatever.
Never mind the fact that Bernie is one of the better, what do you call it, rated senators from the NRA, or at least he was at one point.
He did have a high rating with the NRA.
His home state is actually pretty lax on guns.
That doesn't matter in here.
Like, these are the only posts you can find from libertarian pages are trying to call out hypocrisy for liberals supporting abortion instead of just outright supporting abortion on themselves because, like we've talked about on this show, they're fucking cowards.
Just absolute cowards who know that most of those Facebook likes are just from Republicans who think they're smarter than Donald Trump and smoke weed.
Yeah.
Well, you do know about the programs that exist in places like Georgia and Alabama where when you have a kid you actually are given a gun.
So that's what this is.
He wants people to get abortions so they have less guns.
This whole comment section on both of them, there was like one comment that was like, you can't be a libertarian and be against abortion, which I think is true.
I mean, insofar as libertarians have an ideology, as far as the libertarian party has a platform, abortion rights are included in that platform.
So this one commenter, this one commentator was just, you know, describing that basic fact.
and there were a hundred replies saying no there were a hundred replies saying you're a fucking idiot if you think uh libertarians want abortion rights how could you be this this violates the non-aggression principle uh by killing a fetus it said like just just like massive morons In respect to their massively moronic ideology.
Like, they're not even smart enough to get their dumbass beliefs right.
See, what the Dems have to do in order to appeal to Libertarians is we have to impose a uterus tax.
Where at your 18th birthday you pay a certain amount for every moment you spent in the uterus in your taxes.
And then once the uterus is being taxed they won't have anything to do with it.
Okay.
Yeah, we'll try that.
The only libertarians I know in the world don't know anybody different from them.
And so it makes sense to me that they think that like everybody else just experiences, well, and let me also just say that they're all white men.
They're all men, yeah, exactly.
They're all white men, yeah.
They're all white cis men, none of them have uteruses.
Correct.
And they move through the world with very few hurdles in their way.
And I just get the sense that they don't realize that nobody else experiences the world in the same way as them.
So I understand they're like, you know what, just let us all go loose, see how it goes.
Because they haven't really had too many obstacles to jump over.
The irony of that is one of the major obstacles they have to jump over is pregnant mistresses.
A comment here.
Heath Murphy in this comment section from Being Libertarian says, "Abortion is such an awful word.
I think women should be able to opt for early delivery.
If the baby lives... it was God's will.
If not... just not in the plans." I mean, I think that is what we do.
Early delivery.
Just upgrade to Next Day Air.
This is like... Yeah, I tried to early deliver it with a pair of forceps and it didn't work out.
Sorry.
Sorry, God.
I love this libertarian appeal to God.
I kind of like this one, though, because maybe if we let this happen for a good, you know, Two, three months, they realize how much God hates babies.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
I mean, I am for the de-emotionalizing, like taking the feelings out of the way.
I don't think that we use scientific words as much as we should during this, but I think this is exactly what we do and they just aren't living.
Yeah, because they're not alive.
Granted, we sucked them through a metal straw.
Abortion is such an awful word.
It's funny how when you think about it, the word abortion is not referring to the fetus or the embryo.
Abortion refers to the pregnancy.
You're aborting the pregnancy.
You're pulling out of the pregnancy.
That's what abortion refers to.
You're aborting the mission of gestating this fetus.
That's what the abortion refers to.
Abortion isn't a word for murder.
Abortion isn't a word for chopping something up.
Abortion just refers to canceling the pregnancy.
And it's just been so tarnished by the discourse in this country.
I think if we just explain to people that, they'll come to our side.
Maybe ejection?
Yeah.
Something without so many hard Rs.
Yeah, put like your little fetus in like a paratrooper outfit and just talk.
Oh, we're just ejecting them into heaven.
I got it.
You know when a plane lands in the water and those blow-up slides come out?
Yeah.
Looks fun.
I think maybe I could just attach one of those and then the fetus just slides down it.
Yeah, we had to make an emergency landing into the ER.
Everybody was evacuated.
We're all good.
Yeah, we strap one of those little like oxygen masks on it first.
I do mine first and then the little blastoma gets it next, you know, and if it dies, it dies.
I am also for like changing the verbiage, you know, it's like, um, oh yeah, like, uh, did you hear like, um, She's pregnant, but then she had the fetus moated.
Yeah, she had the baby owned.
The baby got really... Are you here for a moating?
She went to the hospital, and then that doctor totally dragged that fucking kid.
You don't want us to be served.
Do you think any of this is hurting our cause?
I don't think we have any persuadable minds listening.
Hopefully everybody's listening is at least pro-choice, even if they don't like abortion.
Hopefully we have laid out arguments that will encourage the support of actual abortion, but also I don't really care.
I also like using the word focus, like if you just focus the pregnancy.
Like in skateboarding, when you get really mad, you break your board, you call it focusing.
Just focus the pregnancy.
Yeah, and there's like those blooper reels where the abortion doctor keeps trying to focus the fetus and it doesn't work and then goes to ride away on the intact fetus and it finally snaps in half.
Yeah, got another one.
Or it's the picture of the fetus holding the IUD.
Oh god damn, I know.
Is that a real picture?
That's not a real picture, right?
I don't think it's how it works.
No, me neither.
It could have been put in after.
I think so.
I think someone handed that baby an IED.
Are you talking about that picture of the baby that's still in the womb and there's like big claw machine clamps going up to grab its leg and the baby is like pulling on the string that is connected to its mother's heart balloon and it's like, no mommy why?
I think that one's photoshopped.
I don't think it's real.
That one's a cartoon.
No, this is the one where the newborn is holding an IUD in its hand and really chuckling to itself.
Yeah, I've seen that meme.
It's like a God meme, right?
It's like, I cast you out, demon, and he throws the IUD.
You're close.
I can tell you're not from the Midwest.
The quote is... No weapon formed against me shall be... There you go.
What's funny, though, is this is the first time a woman's ever going to win a case against a contraceptive.
That's so true.
Okay, we need to wrap this episode up.
It's gone long.
We had a couple more topics to cover tonight, but we ran long, so those topics will be in the bonus episode for Patreon supporters later on this week.
We are going to be talking about a wonderful college essay that went viral on the internet.
Some dude was like, hey, I got an F from my feminist professor.
Read my essay and tell me it's not an A+.
And then literally everybody told him that it was a dog shit essay because it is.
It's very fucking funny.
It's so bad.
We're going to be going through that on the Patreon as well as the uproar over Mr. Ratburn marrying another man.
On the PBS show Arthur, which you know I'm so inundated with like the far right on this show and just the absolute like death cult that these people are that I figured oh a little cartoon like rat getting married having a gay marriage on the show won't like I don't know, spur these people like Ilhan Omar will, but nope, I was completely wrong.
I thought that they were like, you know, they needed harder stuff at this point to get their Jones up, but no, no, totally incorrect.
We will be covering that on Patreon this week.
For Patreon supporters you can, if you're not a Patreon supporter, you can go to patreon.com slash MinionDeathCult.
Subscribe to the show there.
You'll be supporting the show and you will get access to every single bonus episode we've done.
We've been doing them weekly now.
They're Often a bit shorter, but they're usually a half hour to an hour.
There are about 40 full-length bonus episodes in our history.
And by joining the Patreon, you will be entered into a chance to win that commemorative North Korea Summit coin when Trump met Kim Jong-un.
And you'll be supporting the show and also you'll be supporting the National Abortion Network because we're going to be donating all the proceeds from this month's Patreon to the National Network of Abortion Funds.
And I'm probably going to be matching that donation myself on top of it.
And what you can do is you can just join Get the extra content and then after your card gets charged for one month, you can just unsubscribe or whatever.
But it's a good way to get bonus content for supporting a good cause.
Or you could just go straight to the source.
If you're in Alabama or if you want to donate to Alabama-specific abortion rights funds, you can go to yellowhammerfund.org.
That's yellow, like the color.
Hammer, like the tool.
Fund, as in money, dot org.
Or you can go to National Network of Abortion Funds, which is a, like the title says, a national network and you can pick out an abortion center in your area or you can just donate to the General Fund, which is what we will be doing on this show, and that's at abortionfunds.org.
And these links will be in the show notes.
You click on the info for this episode and you'll have a link to go to these places.
If you're in Alabama and you want to help organize on the ground, you can go to facebook.com slash Hometown Action.
That is a grassroots direct action organization that are helping people in need with reproductive care And that's really your your only option, you know, sure you you vote you vote a couple times a year or whatever Get it get a Democrat in there if you can I guess but this is what's gonna help people send your money to the right people or help them yourselves and
Find an abortion clinic in your area and volunteer to be an escort if you have the time to do so because patients at these clinics are being accosted by an ever more confident right wing.
So that's something you can do directly.
Is there anything in Missouri that people can check out if people are interested in helping people in Missouri or people who are interested in sending money that way?
Yeah, I would say check out our Lone Abortion Clinic.
It's a Planned Parenthood out of St.
Louis.
There's also a group here in Kansas City that's focused on infant maternal health, particularly for black mothers, called Uzazi Village.
U-Z-A-Z-I?
Correct, yeah.
I'm so happy you tried to spell that and I didn't blow it by trying to spell that, because I would have.
Zazie Village.
Thanks so much for listening.
Go to patreon.com slash MinionDeathCult.
Follow us on social media.
Minion Death Cult on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Tell somebody about the show.
Sorry this show was a little more serious this week, but it's obviously serious times in which we live.
And thank you so much for listening.
Thank you, Bryn, for joining us.
We really appreciate your perspective on this issue.
Thanks for having me.
Alright, bye everybody!
See ya.
I tilt my head I'm trying to get an anger 'Cause the evening I've always longed for
It could still happen How do I must end The perfect day Six glasses of water Seven found cars
If you leave it alone It might just happen Anyway...
It's not up to you Oh, it never really was Oh, it never really was It's not up to you Well, it never really was It's not up to you
It never really was If you wake up and the day feels upbroken
Just lean into the crowd And it will tremble ever so nicely Notice how it sparkles down the air
I can decide what I give But it's not up to me What I get given Unthinkable so much
