The Week in Patriarchy: Texas Doctors Fight for Right to Lie to Pregnant Women

By Jessica Valenti, Guardian UK

05 March 17

A new bill would let doctors lie to prevent abortions and – look, over here! – Ivanka Trump is trying to distract us from Trump’s misogyny with feminism

hese days it’s hard to keep too many things in your head at once – there’s a new scandal unfolding every day, from Mike Pence’s emails (emails!) to yet another person in the Trump administration admitting to meeting with Russians. (At this point, maybe it would just be easier if the White House let us know who didn’t have a meeting with a Russian ambassador.)

But please don’t get too overwhelmed with The Americans-like intrigue of all this – too many other things need your attention. This week, for example, Texas legislators advanced a bill that would make it legal for doctors to lie to women about the health of their pregnancy in order to prevent them from getting abortions. So if your fetus was sick, or had a disability or chromosomal abnormality, your doctor could literally not tell you – and that would be legal. It’s astounding, yet somehow in this mess of bad news every day, it’s also largely unremarked upon.

So I know it’s hard – but keep your eyes open.

Glass half full

Local activism is just incredible. Concerned about the slow response time of first responders and the impact of gun violence, Ujimaa Medics in Chicago trains community members to give first aid to gunshot victims. Martine Caverl told the Chicago Reader: “We would like to see a situation in which … people feel like they have a system in place that meets their need for safety, for living a fulfilled life, and for access to care that’s preventative and emergency-based.”

What I’m RTing

Who I’m reading

Anne Helen Petersen on Ivanka Trump and the “aesthetics of denial”; Mother Jones’ interview with the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom on her new book about the for-profit college industry; and, in lighter fare, The Awl has us trying to identify a media outlet by one tweet.

What I’m writing

Ivanka Trump has long been presented as a salve for her father’s overt misogyny, but using feminism to cover for Trump’s bigotry is just beyond the pale.

How outraged I am

On a scale of one to ten, I am at a seven over the “future of media” being all-male. It’s just so predictable at this point.

How I’m making it through this week

For whatever reason, this video of turkeys being very … strange gave me the best laugh I’ve had in a long time. If you’re looking for a more substantive distraction, my book Sex Object is out in paperback this week. (Because who doesn’t love a little shameless self-promotion?)