"Nobody wants to drive through the streets because it is too dangerous," says Dr. Andrew Weeks, an obstetrician and expert on maternal deaths who published a chilling editorial about the risks of war for pregnant women in the journal The BMJ. "There are no taxis. There's no money. So you start walking or being carried to the nearest health facility, which is in ruins. Of course you're going to die. You haven't got a chance."
And it's not just a lack of medical care, he says. Direct attacks on pregnant women are another concern. In his editorial, Weeks described women being shot while giving birth in Nigeria and a fetus being shot through a pregnant woman's belly by a sniper in Syria.
Without any official tracking of the number of pregnant women who die from reasons related to war, these women often become "forgotten victims," says Weeks.
"Every avenue you look at for women during war times, their health is compromised," says Weeks, a professor at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. "The voices of women in war situations are often neglected. These are the lost voices we're trying to highlight."
The US has a rule against federal money being paid towards medical service providers who perform abortions, because it is unethical.
The US does not have a rule against dropping a fuel bomb on a small town in Afghanistan, killing thousands of people (including pregnant women and their attendant fetuses). Or laying siege to the island of Cuba for 80 years and ratcheting up the miscarriage and infant mortality rates with sanctions. Or ratcheting up the cost of life-saving medications via the for-profit domestic pharmaceutical system, in order to generate profit at the expense of infant and unborn lives. Or sending aid to the IDF to assassinate pregnant women with bullet wounds through their stomachs.
In effect, the US is fine with federal taxpayer money going towards all of these different and horrible ways to end the life of an unborn child. Just so long as it isn't done medically, and with the consent of the woman. Because we don't consider this unethical.
Okay, but saying we are doing one dumb thing but justifying it by saying 'well we already are doing these other dumb/horrible things guess the whole system is broken' is simply giving up on the whole concept of organized government.
There is no government anywhere in the world, now or any time in history, that has done everything perfectly. But individual improvements to human rights and protections get us closer than just throwing ones hands up when it isn't perfect out of the gate.
We still fight stupid ideas like basically everything JD Vance has ever said because those ideas move us in the wrong direction. Defeating his idiocy doesn't make everything else perfect but it sure as hell keeps it from getting worse, and hopefully makes it easier to make more positive changes in the future.
I got your point later on and you are right just saying time and place was weird. The whole context and a better summary would be better dropped on a disagreeing comment