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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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The New York Times reports:

Vice President Kamala Harris will give remarks in Atlanta on Friday focused on the stories of two Georgia mothers whose deaths she has argued show the consequences of the strict abortion bans passed by Republicans after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

The speech is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to push reproductive rights to the center of the presidential election, according to a person with knowledge of the event who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.

The deaths, reported this week by ProPublica, occurred in the months after Georgia passed a law banning abortion at six weeks. Amber Thurman died of sepsis resulting from an incomplete medication abortion after waiting 20 hours in a suburban Atlanta hospital for medical care. A second woman, Candi Miller, died after declining to seek medical care for complications from abortion medication.

Tactically, this is the sorta thing that's obvious logical: Harris is trailing Trump in Georgia in recent polls, it's a major state for many of her success paths to the Presidency, and abortion is one of strongest spaces Harris has. There's basically zero chance of the ProPublica article leaving the "There may be alternative explanations for that delay other than legal concerns. But I trust that the reporter on this asked those questions, and so far no one has offered any" zone before the election is over, if it ever happens, and even if final report drops and embarrasses ProPublica, there's minimal chance anyone going to a Harris rally will ever hear about it.

But I remember when a federal candidate repeating rumors under the aegis that they weren't disproved yet was a bad thing. Scroll up in that twitter thread, and you'll find that a ProPublica writer brought it up as a counterexample in response to a conservative comparing fearmongering over ectopic pregnancies to the "eating cats" thing.

...

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the sorta people who were found it atrocious when Trump squirmed to mock a disabled man but couldn't care about Biden calling an innocent guy a white supremacist are going to find their gumption here. I'll post one if I can find it.

The New York Times reports...

Huh. I admit I did not expect the article I was fisking to turn out to be at the start of a chain of information laundering for Kamala's campaign, but I guess I should have.

It's amazing to me how transparently false the narrative is, that these deaths are directly downstream of Dobbs. There seems to be more evidence that these deaths are directly downstream of the news media's scaremongering; I'd bet that both women honestly believed abortion laws in Georgia to be far more restrictive than is actually the case.