The coat hanger abortion is back. It’s back. It’s back!
That’s what the headlines on sites such as The Daily Beast, Mother Jones, Vox, and Cosmopolitan have proclaimed over the last couple of weeks.
Scarier still, they say, the poor woman who resorted to take such a horrendous action has been charged with attempted murder.
How can this be…in the year 2015? This isn’t supposed to be happening. Women have rights, they have choice! A right to choose! The choice to be right! We’re going back to the 1950s when abortions were carried out in back alleys (as opposed to front alleys), and filthy pavements ran red with the blood of thousands of women burdened with clumping cells! Those dark days are returning because racist white Rethuglican men–ugh!–have been forcing Planned Parenthood clinics to shut down across the nation, and when you’ve got wingnuts voicing their hateful rhetoric, it’s no wonder that psychos like Robert Dear walk into PP clinics, massacring people with combat assault rifles, scaring even more women and making them want to look for illegal means to exercise their vagina’s rights…
Hold on a sec. Attempted murder? You can’t kill clumps of cells. They’re not alive. There must be some loo-pole in the state law where this happened that counts those clumps as human and the amateur self-aborter gets punished for terminating those clumps and that’s why she’s been charged with attempted murder.
No, actually. The pregnant woman was charged with attempted murder because she was 24 weeks along when she tried to perform the abortion herself, and her baby–yes, her BABY–survived. This is what happened, per reports.
Back in September, 31-year-old Anna Yocca of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, filled her bathtub with several inches of water, went in, and attempted to terminate her six-month pregnancy using a coat hanger. She became “alarmed and concerned for her safety” over the amount of blood she saw in the tub, so her boyfriend took her to the St. Thomas Rutherford ER in Murfreesboro. She was then transferred about 32 miles to St. Thomas Midtown in Nashville, where medical staff saved Yocca’s baby boy, who weighed 1.5 pounds at birth.
Yeah, bummer. The cellular clump made it through. No word on how Anna’s boyfriend feels about that.
However, Murfreesboro Detective Tommy Roberts explained in his incident report that “although Saint Thomas Midtown was able to save ‘Baby Yocca,’ [the doctors] indicated to me that his quality of life will be forever harmed.”
According to the Murfreesboro Post’s initial report, the baby “will need a medically-experienced foster parent, remain on oxygen and take medication daily because of problems with his eyes, lungs and heart stemming from damage caused by the coat hanger. Medical staff also said other physical problems will arise when the child grows older.”
Roberts wrote that the mother made “disturbing statements” about the baby and about wanting to end the pregnancy. On December 9th, Anna Yocca was arrested and charged with attempted first-degree murder after an indictment by a Rutherford County grand jury. She was booked in the Rutherford County Jail and held on a $200,000 bond.
Last Tuesday the 22nd, Yocca faced an arraignment before a Circuit Court judge. With about a dozen pro-abortion protesters in the courtroom, the judge asked Yocca if she understood the charges against her. “Uhh, vaguely,” she replied. She pleaded not guilty and was assigned a public defender. Her next hearing is on January 5th.
The protesters–who belonged to a group called Stop Patriarchy–left the court afterward, squawking and chanting to free Anna Yocca, mispronouncing her last name (“yoh-ka” instead of “yah-ka” as she’d just pronounced it moments before) as they walked out the door with their fists raised in the air. They then took their little spectacle outside the courthouse, where they held up signs and screeched some more. “Fetuses are not babies…women are not incubators…abortion is not murder!” they cried.
Sounds reasonable, except that here the fetus was born and is now a biological non-fetal baby, the woman was trying to end her role as an incubator, and she’s being charged for attempting to murder that baby.
No matter. Per the Murfreesboro Post again:
“When a woman attempts a coat-hanger abortion, it’s the patriarchal system that’s guilty of murder against her,” said Adreinne Luendo, a member of the group from New York Center.
The group referenced comments from Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, stating attacks on abortion are “a way of enslaving women to the dictates of an oppressive male supremacist, patriarchal system; and that is what the cruel fanatics who are determined to deny women the right to abortion are really all about.”
Yes, they traveled from New York to Tennessee to protest the charges against a person who took six months to finally get around to trying to abort her BABY.
BABY BABY BABY.
It’s a baby. A baby that will suffer for the rest of his life because his mom allegedly attempted to kill him.
Of course, it’s the mom who deserves the sympathy. Damn the patriarchialists, forcing women to become mothers, turning them into slaves. One of their signs said as much.
The aforementioned lefty blogs weren’t much better.
For instance, Vox complained that an abortion costs between $500 and $1,000, and Tennessee doesn’t allow Obamacare to cover it, as if it’s terrible that taxpayers aren’t on the hook for paying for abortions, and instead, the responsibility lands on the ones who acted irresponsible in the first place.
How bad does a woman want an abortion? Is she willing to forego a few nonessentials to save up the money for it? If not, don’t freak out when she decides in her third trimester to do the abortion herself.
Besides, we were assured that Obamacare didn’t cover abortions. So Obamacare does cover abortions in some states? Gee, that’s a surprise not at all.
Vox also Voxpothesized that restrictive laws like Tennessee’s, which may or may not–may not–have had anything to do with Ms. Yocca’s attempted self-induced abortion, would mean that even women who have miscarriages could be interrogated by authorities, arrested, and charged with murder, just like what happens in El Salvador or some such. It’s more than “just a theoretical possibility,” people. We’re on our way to becoming a third-world country. Vox knows. They isn’t no dum-dumz.
The New York Times cited the progtastic Raw Story as a source when Raw Story was cribbing information it took from the Murfreesboro Post. I guess Raw Story’s headline “Tennessee woman nearly dies trying coat hanger abortion — and then gets jailed for attempted murder” was more attention-grabbing than the local news source’s headline was. Also note that Raw Story made the story about the woman almost dying–not her baby.
One of the arguments the mad, mad pro-ab typists and yappers are trying to make about this case is that Tennessee recently created more restrictions that ended up shutting down a number of abortion clinics in the state, so this case is only the beginning of what’s to come, they warn. The law in that state now requires abortionists to be licensed physicians, and none of them can perform an abortion after viability, which is usually around the 24th week of pregnancy. None of the state’s clinics will perform an abortion upward from the 16th week. Two appointments are required for an abortion in Tennessee–the first for the physician to examine the mother of the unborn child and advise her of her options, followed by a 48-hour waiting period after which she can get the abortion if she wants.
How come this is a problem? Progressives demand a waiting period on guns. Why shouldn’t there be a waiting period on abortions? At least the constitution is exact about gun rights. Not so much in regard to abortion. But several columnists I read seem to think this case could make its way up the federal chain of justice.
Anna Yocca was an employee at an Amazon fulfillment center in Lebanon, TN, which is almost the exact same distance from Murfreesboro as Nashville is, about a half-hour to forty-five minute drive. There are at least two abortion clinics in Nashville. If she could make it to work every day, she could have gotten to the abortion clinic instead of stabbing her teeny unborn kid in the face and chest with a hanger stuck up her lovehole. So the argument that an available abortion clinic was out of reach holds no weight in this case.
Here’s the thing about the Tennessee law: the voters of that state made it happen. Hey, look. It’s democracy.
Another impression the pro-aborts try to create with stories like this is that WOMEN WILL DIE due to all the illegal abortion procedures that will happen now because of restrictive abortion laws. Yet the Center for Disease Control reported that between 1995 and 2008, an alarming total of two abortion-related deaths of pregnant women took place that the government agency attributed to illegal abortions. One death was in 2001 and the other in 2004. From 2005 to 2008, as abortion laws became more restrictive…zero deaths. There is no hard evidence that new laws that keep abortions from being convenient will lead to women bleeding to death from between their legs in dark corridors. Anna Yocca is but one person. Compare that one to the hundreds of thousands of “safe, legal, and rare” abortions that take place each year.
These pro-ab geniuses also try to argue that because only half of the babies that are born at 24 weeks survive regardless of the circumstances that led to their premature births, women like Anna Yocca shouldn’t be charged with a crime. Some abortionist told the writer of the Cosmopolitan column on Yocca that although we don’t know if the stabbing brought on the injuries to the baby’s body, she knows that eye, heart, and lung defects are common in preemies at that age. The problem with that argument is that it was reported the injuries and complications were brought on by the woman’s use of the hanger. But the abortionist wouldn’t take the cops at their word. She needed to hear it straight from the doctors’ mouths.
The conclusions these columnists draw from the case and the excuses they make to defend this woman, while admitting that they don’t know what her circumstances were, are extreme. I’d go as far as to call them vulgar in their disregard for what is and isn’t known.
The manipulation to insert their agenda is obscene. They come up with these nightmare implications because of this one woman’s personal decision. Take as an example the title and byline of the Cosmo writer’s column: “The Coat-Hanger Abortion Is Back, and This Time, Women Can Be Jailed for It; Bleeding to death or facing prison is a choice no woman should ever be forced to make.”
The baby lived. That means it was a living human being. Had she succeeded in killing it, that would have been murder. Any eight-year-old knows what life is, just as they probably understand on some level what murder is. These grown-ass adults are still in denial over the meaning of such simple words.
The byline positing the idea that bleeding to death or facing prison were the only choices Anna Yocca had is gut-busting, no pun intended. (Or maybe it was.) How about choosing life? Or how about choosing quickly to get a legal abortion instead of waiting a whole six months before choosing to take action on your own?
The Cosmo columnist was wrong anyway when she wrote that Tennessee only has seven abortion clinics–the state has at least eleven according to the source she cited–so she’s obviously not all that bright.
It’s hard to take people serious when they insist that mainstream journalism doesn’t have a leftist agenda–not when the Washington Post used Yocca as an opportunity to bring up that godforsaken Texas Policy Evaluation Project study where they determined that a sample size of 32 is equivalent to a real population of 240,000, which I debunked to the fiery pits of the netherworld a month ago. That makes WaPo no better than The Daily Beast or the Guardian’s resident über-feminist Jessica Valenti, who both cited the TxPEP study within their articles about Anna Yocca.
The Washington Post also corrected their December 14th article on Yocca after I had first read it. It originally claimed that Tennessee banned abortions after the twelfth week of pregnancy, not after the point of viability of around 24 weeks as I mentioned earlier.
Layers and layers of editors and fact-checkers.
And CBS had to bring up Robert Dear in its article about Yocca. That’s because…well…anything negative about abortion will always lead back to the right-wing. They are solely responsible for all the unpleasantries concerning abortion. Everyone knows that. If everyone doesn’t know that, the mainstream media will learn ’em right proper. They’ll see to it that people know and believe their truthiness.
There’s one last thing to mention. The clump. The fetus. The baby.
It has a name.
His name is Leo. Leo Kluge.
May Leo live a long, healthy, and happy existence, never to be haunted by the knowledge that his own mother tried to prevent him from ever taking a breath or witnessing the light of day.
Good luck, kiddo. It’s a cruel world out here. But you already know that. Hell, it was a cruel world in there, too.
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Correction: I mistakenly referred to Memphis when I meant to write Nashville.
