This is not a feel-good story, folks. But I'm stating the obvious.

The picture of the OB-GYN doctor standing in her garage with her packed belongings made me quite sad. And for pregnant mothers having only the support of a midwife in a region of small towns totaling 50k people - while adequate care is hours of driving away - is unfathomable.

Further in the article, there's this interesting line:

But the women of Sandpoint are clear about one thing they want others to know: this can happen anywhere in the post-Roe United States. Nowhere is as safe as you might believe and the battle won’t stop at state borders.

This point appears to be inaccurate considering there are a number of States that proceeded to enshrine abortion rights in their own constitutions (or otherwise protect abortion access by law). Some have even expanded abortion care. The Center for Reproductive Rights makes this clear:

https://reproductiverights.org/maps/abortion-laws-by-state

I'm gathering that is why the aforementioned doctor is moving to Oregon. (See how Oregon is depicted in the above map...) I would imagine other OB-GYN doctors are doing the same.

It's been fun watching the MAGAs crash and burn in recent years and Trump getting arrested every few weeks. But the damage that the Christofascists have done to women - and other marginalised communities - is grave indeed.

Women should just all pack up and leave. Let all the men have the place.

A land just full of nothing but their crazy ass laws and nothing but men with their chest puffed out walking around. Fucking each other.

I recall a thread over on Reddit, where someone in one of the dad subs was asking for advice on what to do. His wife, an OB/GYN, had gotten a job offer in Massachusetts. They were living in one of the Southern states, and her taking the job meant uprooting their young family away from nearby relatives and friends.

The response in the sub was almost unanimous telling him to move. Wife could get sued to oblivion and go to jail, etc. That would be far worse than living a few hours away from family.

I recall they did move.

This was predicted. No doctor is taking a chance to be arrested or sued, let alone losing their license to practice medicine in the state.

It doesn't just affect OBs or gynecologists. A general practitioner or an emergency room doctor could prescribe a medication and if that patient happens to be pregnant (and did not know it at the time she received the medication) and has a miscarriage due to the medication, that doctor could go to jail and be sued by every family member of the patient. It's common sense that they would move to states where abortion is legal and where they can provide the standard of care they were trained to provide, without fear of being arrested or enormous legal fees.

Texas removing tenure is going to have this effect too—chasing your experts away might seem like a republican utopia but I promise the people will follow the experts eventually.

It’s incredibly shitty that this situation was allowed to get this bad.

That said: Idaho has been and continues to be overwhelmingly Republican, by close to a 2:1 ratio. This is a policy - and thus implicitly, an outcome - that the majority voted for. This is deep into /c/LeopardsAteMyFace territory.

This is by design, they want to lower the standard of living for the average American, so that we get more and more grateful for table scraps. We have created this culture where when someone complains that they don't have enough to eat, we blame the complainer instead of wondering why one of the richest Nations on the planet, can't spare $20 for a coffee and donut from time to time.

The hard red states don’t want people living there that aren’t puritanical fundamentalist bootlickers. They want people who disagree to leave.

People SHOULD leave, let these cesspools rot. I’ll even contribute to a fund that builds a wall around those states. They should also forfeit all federal funding because it’s too “socialist”.

Honestly it is awful, but if you're female you need to get the hell out of these deep red states that think they have any right to regulate women's bodies.

They need to reap what they've sown.

It pains me that people are suffering, but on the other hand: good.

People will have to suffer to prove to them that they're voting against their own interests. They need to know someone who is harmed to change their vote. They must feel the brutality of what a christo-fascist state delivers to prevent one from being instituted nationwide.

I hope this nonsense is repealed as soon as possible and the suffering ends but the suffering is necessary for change to occur.

Haha fucken Idaho of course.

So many medical personnel moved during the aggressive COVID policies. Oregon and Washington had to take COVID infected Idaho patients, causing severe shortages on our side, all because of the inept Idaho government.

Idaho also became the only state in the country to stop tracking maternal mortality rates

What the fuck

This is the best summary I could come up with:

It’s a scene out of an American dream: a stretch of city beach buzzes with young families playing and laughing under the hot afternoon summer sun, moms chasing after children, splashing in the shallow ripples of Lake Pend Oreille.

Lauren Sanders relaxes among the beachgoers in a sea-green bikini that reveals her pregnant belly, keeping an eye under her sun hat on her young daughter, Gwen, who’s angling to get back in the water.

But if anything goes wrong – a last-minute emergency, a scare, an unpredicted turn - and she needs hospital maternity care, she’ll be put into an ambulance and driven over the two-lane highway to a larger city half an hour away.

The OB-GYN ward shut down this spring and doctors have been fleeing the state in a steady stream, seeking shelter in places where their work doesn’t put them at risk of criminal charges or big lawsuits.

The raft of extreme abortion laws left doctors like Huntsberger unsure if they could continue to practice any kind of family medicine in Idaho, where untrained political figures now have greater say over medical decisions than physicians.

Along with its ramping up of abortion restrictions this year, the legislature enacted a law banned gender-affirming care for minors and the governor signed a strict “bathroom bill” mandating that restrooms and changing rooms be segregated by the gender a person is assigned at birth.

The original article contains 2,285 words, the summary contains 233 words. Saved 90%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

This is what the Christofascists want. They don't care, they can travel for their abortions. They can bribe, etc.