Mocktails and Despair
2025 Starts On A Sour Note
We are less than ten days into the new year and a little more than ten days out from the new Trump Administration. In my last post, I said I had no interest in analyzing the year we’d just experienced or making predictions for this next one. I stand by that.
I mean, the only real prediction one can make with Trump is that he will sow chaos partly because he’s a child with bright shiny object syndrome who has no real convictions about anything and partly because he gets bored when things aren’t chaotic. The people around him, however, have real agendas, and whether they signed on because they worship the wizard or scrambled aboard for political expediency, they will push hard for policies designed to take us backwards.
We don’t really have to make predictions anyhow, we just have look to what’s happened in red states over the last few weeks to get a taste of 2025.
Tastes Like Ken Paxton’s After Shave *
At the end of last year, Texas’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against a doctor in New York for “unlawfully providing abortion-inducing drugs to Texas residents in direct violation of state law.” The lawsuit seeks civil penalties of “no less than $100,000 for each violation of the law” against Dr. Margaret Carpenter who is the founder of the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine (ACT) and a provider with Aid Access.
The specifics of the case almost don’t matter because it’s mostly a test balloon pitting state against state. After the Dobbs decision quashed national protection for abortion, red state legislators went to work passing laws that threatened to take away medical licenses and throw doctors in jail if they did anything that vaguely looked like an abortion. At the same time, lawmakers in blue states set up shield laws designed to protect their doctors from being sued or prosecuted by states where abortion was illegal. Eight states—including New York—have passed shield laws.
It should surprise no one that Texas AG Ken Paxton is the first to go after an out-of-state doctor and challenge these shield laws. (If the Secret Society of Douchey GOP Governors allowed mere Attorneys General to join, Paxton would be the first.) New York’s Attorney General Leticia James says the Empire State will not be bullied: “… New York is proud to be a safe haven for abortion access. We will always protect our providers from unjust attempts to punish them for doing their job and we will never cower in the face of intimidation or threats.”
It remains to be seen how the case will play out or how the courts will decide. Some experts say that the shield laws give Carpenter standing to counter sue, others think these laws won’t hold much weight. But this lawsuit could do damage even if it fails. Doctors are fleeing red states because they don’t want to go to jail. Lawsuits like this might scare some out of providing abortion services in other states as well. Moreover, this lawsuit serves as a reminder that abortion opponents want mifepristone off the shelves and out of the mail (cue Comstock).
And while I said the specifics of the case shouldn’t matter, they are a kind of creepy harbinger of how the abortion debate may play out on a more personal level. This case came to Paxton through the boyfriend. He didn’t know his 20-year-old partner was pregnant until she was in the ER with symptoms of a miscarriage. According to the lawsuit, the man suspected “that the biological mother had in fact done something to contribute to the miscarriage or abortion of the unborn child” and went home to search her stuff only to find mife/miso prescribed by Carpenter.
His girlfriend had an abortion that she wanted without telling him and instead of talking to her or suggesting couples counseling (clearly there are issues), he found some channel or another to take his gripes to the state’s douchey Attorney General. You can’t know the specifics of anyone’s relationship, but I’m confident that I wouldn’t want to have a baby with this guy.
* To be fair, I’ve never met Ken Paxton and don’t know what after shave he wears, but I’m convinced he’s one of those guys who wears so much too much that one can, in fact, taste it.
Tastes Like Dirty Diapers and Garbage Bins
In the lawsuit against the New York doctor Paxton writes, “In Texas, we treasure the health and lives of mothers and babies….” That’s an iffy statement at best given that Texas does worse than national averages on pretty much all measures of maternal health including maternal mortality, infant mortality, percentage of births that are pre-term, and teen birth rate. In addition, the proportion of women 19 to 64 who are uninsured in Texas is more than double the national average.
Ken’s heartfelt concern rings even more false when we add the growing number of cases of abandoned newborns in Texas.
An in-depth article in the Washington Post on December 28th noted that last year there were 18 infants left in parking lots, bushes, and dumpsters across the state which is nearly double what it was ten years ago. While there isn’t definitive data yet, it’s easy to believe that restrictive abortion laws that seek to punish everyone involved combined with a new law ordering public hospitals to track money spent on undocumented immigrants is behind the upward trend. Pregnant women in Texas don’t have a lot of places to turn for help.
This is not a new problem in Texas. More than twenty-five years ago, it became the first state to pass a Safe Haven Law. These laws allow parents to relinquish a newborn at designated place—think firehouses and hospitals—within the first 60 days without questions or the risk of prosecution. Recently, the state leaned into this idea by passing legislation allowing communities to install climate-controlled baby drawers in the external walls of firehouses.
The state isn’t putting any money behind this, however. Communities must raise the funds for baby boxes—about $20,000—on their own. Moreover, legislators have continually refused to fund public education campaigns about the Safe Haven Law despite having a $32.7 billion dollar surplus and giving $165 million to crisis pregnancy centers to lie to women about abortions and encourage adoption. Advocates note that having a law designed to prevent people from leaving a baby in unsafe places by promising they won’t be punished for leaving a baby in a safe place is only helpful if people know about the law.
That’s very true. At the same time other maternal health experts question whether Safe Haven laws are the right answer. Leaving a baby at a hospital or firehouse is obviously better than leaving a baby in the parking lot of a Whataburger in San Antonio (which happened a few days before Christmas), but it doesn’t really solve the problem. Pregnant women need prenatal care, and birthing women need medical attention. We need to help them before they have a baby, and it’s possible that these laws do the opposite by encouraging secrecy instead.
WaPo’s piece tells a number of stories including that of the only woman being charged for abandoning her baby. The 18-year-old from rural Guatemala says she was raped by a relative and didn’t realize she was pregnant until she was seven months along. She didn’t know what to do and had heard that clinics would report you to immigration. She says she does not remember much about the birth, which took place in a parking lot and was caught on security cameras. Summarizing this story and the others, the article concludes, “No matter the circumstances, desperation is a common thread.”
Remind me again, Ken, about how much Texas treasures women and children.
Tastes Like Burnt Flesh and Hypocrisy
South Carolina clearly values the lives of women as well. So much so that one legislator is willing (or eager) to sentence women to death for the crime of abortion.
A bill that was pre-filed by Republican Representative Rob Harris wants to make sure the states treats blastocysts as people for the purpose of law and order. His South Carolina Prenatal Equal Protection Act would change the criminal code’s definition of “person” to include “an unborn child at any stage of development.” If that change were to pass, all abortion would become homicide.
South Carolina law allows for the death penalty for murder under certain circumstance including when the victim was under 11 years old. It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment that sperm and egg come together, but a fertilized egg is definitely younger than 11. Ahead of the state’s September execution of Freddie Owens (its first in over 13 years), South Carolina’s Corrections Director assured the public that the state had a supply of lethal injection drugs, that its electric chair had been tested, and that the firing squad was armed and ready.
But it’s unlikely that the firing squad is coming for pregnant women. Harris tried to pass this bill in 2023, and its hypocrisy got national attention. According to HuffPo, “Several Republicans who co-sponsored that bill quietly removed their names after public outcry.” Harris defended the 2023 bill in the press saying, “My bill does not single out women. It prohibits everyone from committing murder. It provides the same due process that everyone enjoys under our current laws.”
Anyone else think Rob stands outside the meetings of the Secret Society of Douchey GOP Governors and dreams of the day when the big guys notice him? (I’m now picturing Abbott, DeSantis, and Youngkin leaving a power lunch and mistaking him for the valet.)
Tastes Like Tamiflu
It’s flu season in Louisiana. Okay fine, it’s flu season everywhere, but it’s especially bad in Louisiana. The CDC measures and categorizes flu risk by tracking the percentage of doctor’s visits each week that were for influenza-like illness. In the week before Christmas, Louisiana was one of only two states that had “very high” levels whereas 13 state/cities were at high risk, 11 at moderate, 10 at low, and 19 at minimal.
Why was there so much flu in Louisiana, you ask? Well, it might have something to do with a new mandate preventing health department employees from promoting or even educating about seasonal vaccines like the flu shot, COVID-19 booster, and mpox vaccines. According to NPR, an assistant secretary told employees in November that they were no longer allowed to send out press releases, hold vaccine events, or encourage vaccines in social media posts.
Staff seems to be following the dictate. NPR notes that the department’s webpage still lists 2023 events. A more recent social media post warning of flu season suggested that people wash their hands, cover their mouth when they cough or sneeze, and avoid touching their face but did not even mention vaccines.
In a statement to NPR, the Louisiana Department of Health said it had been "reevaluating both the state's public health priorities as well as our messaging around vaccine promotion, especially for COVID-19 and influenza.” The statement goes on to say the move is a shift "away from one-size-fits-all paternalistic guidance" to a stance in which "immunization for any vaccine, along with practices like mask wearing and social distancing, are an individual's personal choice.” (Yes, the state that that bans almost all abortion and threatens providers with 10 years in prison clearly wants to avoid being paternalistic.)
We all know that the Louisiana Department of Health was never tying people down and jabbing them against their will. People had personal choice, but they also had accurate information and access to potentially lifesaving preventative care. In 2023, 652 people in Louisiana died from the flu. Anyone want to bet on whether that number goes up this year?
This anti-vaccine move is both alarming and not at all surprising. Republican Governor Jeff Landry was Louisiana’s Attorney General during the pandemic. He was critical of the state’s approach to COVID-19 and filed laws suits against both state and federal vaccine mandates. The state’s current Surgeon General, a family doctor, claims his practice was inundated by people suffering side effects from the COVID-19 vaccine. The Deputy Surgeon General, an ophthalmologist, said in a meeting, "You could probably fill Tiger Stadium with moms who have kids that were normal one day, got a vaccine and were then autistic after."
That’s not how it f**king works. Do we need to start a Secret Society of Douchey GOP Surgeons General too?
Tastes Like Ignorance
Finally, I bring you to the University of Iowa where administrators have a plan to close its Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies department. The move was announced as part of a press release explaining the creation of a new School of Social and Cultural Analysis which would teach these topics as well as course focused on American Studies, African American Studies, Jewish Studies, Latina/o/x Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies.
The Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences said in the release that this new department would create “more sustainable structures and room for innovative new curricula.” An associate dean also quoted in the release implied that the current system of many small departments was inefficient. This may be true. I am not in higher education administration, and I don’t think I’ve ever been to Iowa (though I have taught in a few Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies departments). It is possible that the decision was purely practical.
But this is academia where all things are political, and this is 2025 when colleges are under assault for being “too woke.” Throwing all the “others” (aka women, African Americans, gays, and Jews) into one academic pot is not a great look. In fact, this decision comes after Iowa's Board of Regents approved 10 recommendations to scale back diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
It’s easy to see how this restructuring might lead to the devaluing of these areas of studies, fewer classes being offered, and students learning less about these important topics. Which is, of course, the goal. An educated populace votes for the other team.
Tastes Like Ruined Cocktail Hour
I might have ended this with a joke about the cocktails we’re all going to need to get us through this year (and the three that come after it) because this bulls**t is only going to get worse post inauguration, but the current U.S. Surgeon General—who actually does believe in science—had to ruin that for all of us.
In what is likely his last major act in office, Dr. Vivek Murthy released a new advisory on the link between alcohol consumption and certain cancers and suggested that new warnings to that effect be placed on bottles of booze.
Ugh, 2025 is starting off tasting like mocktails and despair. Happy New Year?