Screenshot from news article, posted to Twitter, and then to Reddit, reading ""Pro-life" woman seeks abortion and gets denied. Privileged people are used to authorities being reasonable and accommodating. They vote against rights for others thinking they'll be able to negotiate an exception for themselves. Then they get shocked when this fails. Farmer told the newspaper she's always identified as "pretty pro-life" —but she found herself seeking abortion care, anyway, even calling her state senator's office to seek help. She didn't find it. The office of her state senator, a Republican named Bill White, told her the state ban that was literally jeopardizing her life was actually "designed to protect the woman's life." Farmer recalled telling White's aide, "It's not protecting me... There's no chance for a baby; she's not going to make it. It's putting my life in danger." She continued, "I'm 41, it's not something I can recover from quickly. I could lose my uterus, there's a lot of things that could happen. We just want to move on, we just want to grieve." White's office promised it would talk to the state's Attorney General Eric Schmitt on her behalf and then connected Farmer with an anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center in the state. Farmer never heard from White's staff again."
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[–] 12 points 2 years ago

Reading.

We need everyone to read more books. A wide variety of stories on a wide variety of topics by a wide variety of authors, all with different backgrounds and ideas. We must read stories that let us temporarily step into the mind and experiences of other people, who aren't us, to train our brains the ability to understand the plights of others. Books of human stories, as opposed to movies, doom-scrolling TikTok, etc., seems uniquely suited for this kind of training of empathy, because the stories are executed inside our own brains.

I'm willing to bet that these why-are-the-leopards-suddenly-eating-my-face? the-only-moral-abortion-is-my-abortion type people have read distinctly less, or at least far less varied, stories than us who look at them and wonder how it is possible to be so unable to put themselves in the shoes of anyone but themselves.

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