Episode Details

Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, where I spend my Saturdays going through the receipts on what the men running this country did to women all week.

This week, an argument to take the vote away from American women went mainstream. Texas moved its maternal death report to four weeks after the midterms. Louisiana spent Wednesday in federal court trying to end mail order abortion pills in all fifty states. And Indiana argued in front of its own Supreme Court that its religious freedom law was never meant for Jews.

Let’s get into it.

Coming for the 19th Amendment Because of…Empathy

The Federalist published a piece this month arguing that women who feel sorry for Lindsay Clancy are the best argument for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment. That’s the one that gave women the vote in 1920, after seventy two years of asking.

Lindsay Clancy killed her three children in Duxbury, Massachusetts in January of 2023, during a postpartum psychosis, after months of going to doctors and telling them exactly what she was frightened of. Her trial ended in a mistrial this month. A lot of women responded with something like sympathy, and the American right decided the women were the problem.

Ann Coulter wrote, “I guess the Lindsay Clancy trial has put an end to that whole thing about a woman being president.”

Meghan McCain posted, “Feel like a woman becoming president has now gotten much further away from happening since the Lindsay Clancy trial.”

The Washington Examiner ran a piece saying feminism should be on trial alongside her. Jessica Valenti has been tracking this all week at Abortion, Every Day, and where it went from there is men filming themselves swearing off ever voting for a woman, people demanding that anyone who sympathizes with Clancy be committed, and thousands of comments underneath all of it that just say repeal the 19th. There is now a petition on Change.org.

The Federalist’s actual argument is that suffragists won the vote by claiming women had the same capacity for judgment as men, and that Clancy’s defenders have now disproved it. Over in The Spectator, Geoffrey Cain writes that women spent generations fighting to be treated as full moral agents, “not as creatures governed by emotion or reproductive biology.” One hung jury in Massachusetts and we’re back to creatures.

Clancy told her providers what was happening to her, over and over, and got sent home with a stack of prescriptions. Not one of these people wrote a column about that.

Speaking of things women aren’t supposed to see.

Texas Hiding Maternal Death Stats Until After the Midterms

Texas was supposed to publish its maternal mortality report on September first. It’s coming out December first instead, which is four weeks after the midterms.

This is the first report covering a full year of pregnancy deaths since Texas banned abortion. The last one the state managed to release found that roughly eight in ten pregnancy related deaths in Texas were preventable, and that was data from before the ban.

The health department says the acting commissioner asked the committee to strengthen the report by better describing its work around preventability. Which is a curious thing to need three extra months for, given that deciding what was preventable is the committee’s entire job, and given that nobody in Texas government has prevented anything.

Texas ran this identical play in 2022, pushing the same report past that November’s election.

The report already has a hole in it, because the committee voted to skip deaths from 2022 and 2023 entirely. Those are the first two years under the ban, which makes them the only two years anybody is asking about.

And Texas seated Ingrid Skop on that committee, an anti-abortion activist who has spent years arguing publicly that maternal death numbers are inflated. So the report is three months late, it skips the years that matter,