Abortion Thoughts by Meghan Waters, an unrolled thread

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1540467539368607745.html

Meghan Waters

Link to tweet

The unroll...
Som (sic) abortion thoughts: I teach sex ed and when I explain the menstrual cycle, I emphasize that if you are expecting your period, it’s one day late, and you take a pregnancy test, if it comes back positive, you are considered 4 weeks + 1 day into your pregnancy.

Students look confused. How could you be 4 weeks pregnant? What if you only had sex two weeks ago? Well, a pregnancy is calculated from the first day of your last menstrual cycle.
I repeat that 4 or 5 times. It bears repeating. Eventually it dawns on them: people who are one week late are 5 weeks pregnant. By the time you notice your period is late, get an appointment with a doctor, figure out your next steps,

You might easily be at 6, 7 or 8 weeks along. Especially if you got jerked around by a fake clinic. If you mistake implantation bleeding for a period, you would miss your next period and take a test. One week late, your pregnancy is at 9 weeks.

If you mistake implantation bleeding for a light period and only figure it out when you miss your next period, the window to get a medical abortion is rapidly closing. If you live in certain states, you will have to make arrangements to travel to get one.

One mistake will irrevocably change the trajectory of your life if you cannot make arrangements to get out of your state.

For sex ed, I get a lot of questions about abortion. One that often come up is « till when is an abortion legal in Canada? »

I explain that an abortion is legal at any point in the pregnancy due to then fact that personhood is granted only once you are born.
Some students look shocked by this. I explain: you will be hard pressed to find a doctor in Canada able and willing to perform an elective abortion after some 21-23ish weeks on a viable pregnancy.

That said, if you are pregnant and present to the hospital hemorrhaging from your vagina, that is a medical matter. No doctor in Canada will have to get on the phone to talk to a judge in order to save your life.

That is an unfortunate call that some doctors have had to make in the middle of the night to desperately try to reach a judge as a woman lay bleeding to death. When you put it that way, they understand.

Only a willfully ignorant person would refuse to understand. And those people are the ones calling the shots in so many states. Those are the people calling the shots in the Conservative Party of Canada. They must be stopped.

This thread is gaining traction (leave it to me to have that happen with a typo in the first word). I want to recommend to all sexual health facilitators to read the Vagina Bible by fellow Winnipegger @DrJenGunter and consider a donation to

https://womenshealthclinic.org/get-involved/support/donate/#donate-form
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❤️ pants