Shut The F*ck Up, Ted Cruz

Ted Cruz doesn’t think pregnancy is “life-threatening”

Ted Cruz doesn’t think that pregnancy is “life-threatening.” Tell that to the 700 women a year who die in the U.S. as a result of pregnancy or delivery complications.

I don’t want to think or talk about Ted Cruz, but I have Twitter, and so I stumbled upon some nonsense he formed into a sentence today — not because I follow Ted Cruz, but because I follow a lot of brilliant women who are pissed off about what a comic book villain he is. Here’s what he tweeted today:

“Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness, and the abortion pill does not cure or prevent any disease,” the man so stupid he once liked a porn video from his official U.S. Senator Twitter account then tried to say a staffer did it, wrote. “Make no mistake, Mifeprex is a dangerous pill. That’s why 20 of my Republican colleagues and I are urging @US_FDA to classify it as such.” Pretty interesting thing for a senator whose home state (Texas) has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world to say.

Mifeprex (also known as RU-486) is used in a regimen with another prescription medicine called misoprostol, to end an early pregnancy. Early pregnancy is defined as a pregnancy of 10 weeks or less, from the first day of a missed period. What mifeprex does is block a hormone needed for a pregnancy to continue. The pill causes the mass of cells that never developed into a human life to pass from the uterus two to 24 hours after taking it.

Because the world is a dumpster fire and unusually complicated for women, women are required to see a doctor in person to get mifeprex prescribed – it cannot be prescribed via telemedicine. In July, a federal judge suspended the FDA requirement that the drug be prescribed in person, as the COVID-19 outbreak rendered that requirement unconstitutional — as in-person appointments were seen as causing a significant threat to public health. The American Civil Liberties union brought a lawsuit against the FDA, arguing in-person requirements infringed “on a woman’s constitutional rights to an abortion” and violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang in Maryland decided that the “in-person requirements” for patients seeking RU-486 to end their pregnancies imposed a “substantial obstacle” on those women.

“Particularly in light of the limited timeframe during which a medication abortion or any abortion must occur, such infringement on the right to an abortion would constitute irreparable harm,” the judge wrote in his 80-page decision, as reported by PBS News Hour.

The lawsuit noted that mifepristone is one of the more than 20,000 FDA-regulated drugs that patients have to receive in person — but the only one patients can then “self-administer, unsupervised, at a location of their choosing.” Why? Because clearly the FDA recognizes that the drug is safe for most people to administer themselves. So if it’s safe to administer unsupervised, why an in-person appointment to get it? If you guessed the Republican pro-life lobby — Ding! Ding! Ding! You are correct!

Now Ted “I love porn but hate women” Cruz and his friends are asking the FDA to classify the abortion pill as dangerous. “Pregnancy is not a disease and abortion is not health care,” Cruz wrote in an op-ed on the conservative National Review. “The abortion pill is not medicine. No child deserves to be killed by a drug, and pregnant women deserve better.”

Yes, women do deserve better. We deserve to make decisions about our futures and our bodies without conservative men weighing in on the matter. We also deserve to not be emotionally assaulted and triggered every time one of these jerks opens their mouths. After I read Ted Cruz’s tweet, you know where I was mentally transported? To the emergency room 15 years ago, where I was told that if I didn’t allow the doctors to administer methotrexate immediately and stop the growth of my rapidly dividing fetal cells, I could suffer internal bleeding and die.

Women do hard things. We do them all the time. And you know what makes it harder? Having a constant loop of ignorant men’s hot takes bouncing around our brains. Men who are unable to get pregnant and therefore will never know the gravity it carries: SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP.

Women get pregnant and they’re told they should’ve been on better birth control. Or they should’ve been sure the man was wearing a condom. Or they should’ve never “opened their legs” to begin with. All of the responsibility of the choices that come with having a sexual experience are placed on our shoulders — until we get pregnant. Then magically — we should have no say at all.

Which one is it? Is it totally our responsibility and meant to be handled alone, by us, or do we all of a sudden have to listen to a bunch of Republican assholes making the choices for us?

We don’t have to make excuses for why we choose to have abortions, we don’t have to listen to men who don’t believe in them, and we don’t have to justify our decisions about the matter. We just need to keep fighting hard as hell to keep them legal because if these conservative dinosaurs have their way — more unwanted babies will arrive and more women will die. And small measures like this is the way men chip away at our freedom overall. So in summary…

Shut the fuck up, Ted Cruz.