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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   29279 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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If there were any HIPAA violations involved, well... I wouldn't count on an investigation from the federal government.

ProPublica's website has the below addendum, it is not included on RawStory.

https://www.propublica.org/article/georgia-abortion-ban-amber-thurman-death

How We Reported the Story

ProPublica reporter Kavitha Surana reviewed death records and medical examiner and coroner reports to identify cases that may be related to abortion access. She first reached out to Amber Thurman’s family and friends a year ago. The family shared her personal documents and signed a release for ProPublica to access her medical information. The maternal mortality review committee reviewed Thurman’s case at the end of July 2024.

Interesting to me is the article's inclusion of Will Brewer, lobbyist from Tennessee. Yes, a totally different state than the death.

The state’s main anti-abortion lobbyist, Will Brewer, vigorously opposed the change. Some pregnancy complications “work themselves out,” he told a panel of lawmakers. Doctors should be required to “pause and wait this out and see how it goes.”

The above quote is the only time Brewer is mentioned in this particular article, and I got the feeling that ProPublica butchered whatever Brewer actually said. So here is what is the full quote, (with emphasis mine) courtesy of...Kavitha Surana via Oklahoma Voice:

https://oklahomavoice.com/2023/11/27/some-republicans-willing-to-compromise-on-abortion-ban-exceptions-activists-ensured-they-didnt/

When Tennessee Republicans introduced a bill to give doctors more protection to offer terminations when a pregnant patient faced a condition that could become life-threatening, Will Brewer, the lead lobbyist for Tennessee Right to Life, testified against it, arguing the patient’s condition needed to deteriorate before a doctor could intervene.

“There are issues with pregnancy that could be considered an emergency — or at least could possibly be considered an anomaly or medically futile — that work themselves out,” Brewer, who has no medical training, testified on the House floor. “I’m not talking about an eleventh hour, you know, a patient comes into the ER bleeding out, and what do we do? I’m talking about (a situation when) there is a condition here that some doctors would say constitutes an emergency worthy of a termination and other doctors would say, ‘Let’s pause and wait this out and see how it goes.’ I wouldn’t want the former to terminate when the latter says there’s room to see how it goes before this is urgent enough.”

So Brewer explicitly says that he wants to allow an exception in Thurman's exact situation! And Kavitha, the ProPublica reporter, knew he wanted an exception for this exact situation because she quoted him saying exactly so in an article she herself wrote less than a year ago! All on top of the guy being from a totally different state! Why include this detail in the article?

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