Thread by @meredithshiner

Two years ago, in a hospital bed and irreversible labor, I had a lot of time to think about what was happening to me, how I was swiftly approaching an outcome we didn't desire. And I thought about Republicans attacking Ralph Northam over this interview: cnn.com/2019/01/31/pol…

I thought about how what Ralph Northam described was exactly what I was experiencing, how the mainstream media had taken the GOP bait and made this into a "controversy" when what the actual medical doctor was describing was palliative care within the bounds of medical ethics.

In my sadness, confusion and anger on that day two years, I also felt *presence* because I knew everything would be fleeting, a burst of energy in our lives that never would be recaptured. So I focused on our family, but I also promised myself something.

I promised myself that the first Republican politician who said anything about the totally-made-up-by-them condition of "born-alive abortion" would evoke my response and prompt me to share our story. It took only 9 days from my delivery to this tweet.

https://twitter.com/meredithshiner/status/1163994678657724418

My sustained awareness campaign over the past 2 years often has felt futile, but at its core it's so urgent: Republicans have weaponized and politicized medical science to discredit doctors and nurses. The alarm I was sounding has turned into a full-out tornado siren during COVID

We are edging towards a place of no return when it comes to the GOP's total degradation of the credibility & authority of medicine. More than 99% of abortion happens before a fetus is viable, so the GOP keeps proposing "solutions" to "problems" that don't exist for a culture war.

I've emailed top Democrats I know—powerful people—and told them point-blank that I believe Republicans are much more committed to imprisoning my doctors and nurses than Democrats are to keeping them from being imprisoned. The two parties aren't even fighting on the same plane.

Until there's a reckoning—a *real* reckoning—with how Republicans manipulate the media, both through outlets they control and also through propagating lies in one side of the MSM's "both sides" model, the basic foundations of our society, including medicine, are in peril.

I'd like to say I feel more optimistic now than then, but I don't. I do recognize my own power. In the 2 years since I wrote @GOPLeader, I've carried a pregnancy to term and spent 11 beautiful months with our second son. He's still not mustered a reply. thedailybeast.com/for-house-repu…

So today is a day to remember what we've lost, to honor what we've gained, and to honestly question wtf we're all doing here, letting powerful people get away with eroding faith in the science and medicine that could protect us all because they're craven and misogynistic.