on family separation
May. 29th, 2019 09:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quigonejinncw us politics
I read this today, and it basically made me cry at the office. I know that the cruelty is the point, and the fuckers in the Administration have said as much OUT FUCKING LOUD, but it fucking boggles me how these ostensibly pro-life people can be like this. How cruel do you have to be to intentionally attempt to separate a mother and her newborn baby? How cruel do you have to be to keep her from seeing the woman who will take care of her days old baby?
A newborn baby is one of the most helpless things you'll ever see. They have weird squashy faces, helpless little uncoordinated limbs, and they're fucking terrible at everything -- they're terrible at breathing, they're terrible at eating, they're terrible at pooping. They can't lift their heads. They can't support their own weight. Their heads are weirdly soft. In fact, they can't even cry that effectively, and spend most of their waking time, which amounts to like, four hours a day or so, being upset that they're outside the womb. For a long fucking time, really, the only thing a newborn will look at for any amount is a human face -- sit down and pretend you're holding a baby in your arms, as if you were breastfeeding it and folded around it the way that mothers tend to hold their newborn babies, and you'll find that you're probably, without thinking about it, holding the pretend-baby roughly 12 inches away from your face.
Non-coincidentally, that's about as far as a newborn baby can see with any degree of clarity.
That 12 inches is a newborn baby's whole visual world. That's all they're really set up to see, all they're really set up to care about, even more than food, even more than warmth -- they'll struggle to eat, and they'll wriggle out of warm blankets, but come into their visual field, and they lock onto you like a heatseeking missile. One of the strongest directives for a newborn is to look for, to learn, to bond with the face of someone who will love them and protect them and hold them and stay with them.
And now this fucking American government is trying to take these tiny, helpless creatures away from their mothers, and putting them into the hands of strangers who may lie in order to adopt the kids without any right to do so, and I have to think about the babies because thinking about the mothers makes me almost hysterical.
...
After getting upset in the office, I shut off my emotions like I'm trained to do, worked until the normal time, went home, got my kid dinner, got my kid a bath, got my kid into bed, dealt with the usual ration of shit from the kid in connection with all of this, then sat down at the computer and spent a shitload of money at BPAL before realizing that the only reason I spent the money was because I was still really fucking upset about, like, everything, including the fact that Louisiana is about to pass a fetal heartbeat bill, too -- so I went and donated a roughly equivalent shitload to a legal nonprofit that helps migrants being held in the detention center closest to me. Shamefully, it's only about sixty miles away, and has a well-earned reputation for brutality.
Fuck every single one of these heinous fuckers.
Also, it would've been a lot cheaper for me tonight if I'd realized how upset I was. But uh, I guess I've got some big containers of perfume coming?
I read this today, and it basically made me cry at the office. I know that the cruelty is the point, and the fuckers in the Administration have said as much OUT FUCKING LOUD, but it fucking boggles me how these ostensibly pro-life people can be like this. How cruel do you have to be to intentionally attempt to separate a mother and her newborn baby? How cruel do you have to be to keep her from seeing the woman who will take care of her days old baby?
A newborn baby is one of the most helpless things you'll ever see. They have weird squashy faces, helpless little uncoordinated limbs, and they're fucking terrible at everything -- they're terrible at breathing, they're terrible at eating, they're terrible at pooping. They can't lift their heads. They can't support their own weight. Their heads are weirdly soft. In fact, they can't even cry that effectively, and spend most of their waking time, which amounts to like, four hours a day or so, being upset that they're outside the womb. For a long fucking time, really, the only thing a newborn will look at for any amount is a human face -- sit down and pretend you're holding a baby in your arms, as if you were breastfeeding it and folded around it the way that mothers tend to hold their newborn babies, and you'll find that you're probably, without thinking about it, holding the pretend-baby roughly 12 inches away from your face.
Non-coincidentally, that's about as far as a newborn baby can see with any degree of clarity.
That 12 inches is a newborn baby's whole visual world. That's all they're really set up to see, all they're really set up to care about, even more than food, even more than warmth -- they'll struggle to eat, and they'll wriggle out of warm blankets, but come into their visual field, and they lock onto you like a heatseeking missile. One of the strongest directives for a newborn is to look for, to learn, to bond with the face of someone who will love them and protect them and hold them and stay with them.
And now this fucking American government is trying to take these tiny, helpless creatures away from their mothers, and putting them into the hands of strangers who may lie in order to adopt the kids without any right to do so, and I have to think about the babies because thinking about the mothers makes me almost hysterical.
...
After getting upset in the office, I shut off my emotions like I'm trained to do, worked until the normal time, went home, got my kid dinner, got my kid a bath, got my kid into bed, dealt with the usual ration of shit from the kid in connection with all of this, then sat down at the computer and spent a shitload of money at BPAL before realizing that the only reason I spent the money was because I was still really fucking upset about, like, everything, including the fact that Louisiana is about to pass a fetal heartbeat bill, too -- so I went and donated a roughly equivalent shitload to a legal nonprofit that helps migrants being held in the detention center closest to me. Shamefully, it's only about sixty miles away, and has a well-earned reputation for brutality.
Fuck every single one of these heinous fuckers.
Also, it would've been a lot cheaper for me tonight if I'd realized how upset I was. But uh, I guess I've got some big containers of perfume coming?
(no subject)
Date: 2019-05-30 05:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-06-03 12:06 pm (UTC)