By Dave Andrusko
Jex Blackmore, the chapter director of the Satanic Temple Detroit
A tip of the hat to Life News for reporting this morning that a Cole County Circuit judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a New York-based group called the Satanic Temple that challenged Missouri’s 72-hour waiting period/informed consent laws on abortion.
When we last reported on the lawsuit, NRL News Today explained that the plaintiffs were the Satanic Temple and a woman identified as “Mary Doe” who subsequently had an abortion. In suing Gov. Jay Nixon and Attorney General Chris Koster, they maintained that the law violated their religious beliefs.
“The suit says the counseling and waiting period the law requires are not medically necessary for any woman or anyone who believes in the Satanic Tenets to make an informed decision on an abortion,” according to the St. Louis Post Dispatch’s Valerie Schremp Hahn.
Hahn went on to quote from the lawsuit:
The law is “in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because the State of Missouri is using its power to regulate abortion to promote some, but not all, religious beliefs that Human Tissue is, from conception, a separate and unique human being whose destruction is morally wrong.”
The law causes Doe and “pregnant members of The Satanic Temple to endure delay, doubt, guilt and shame when they exercise their religious beliefs to abort Human Tissue in accordance with the Satanic Tenets.”
According to Life News, the Satanic Temple plans to re-file its case in state court and has also filed a suit in federal court.
Our last story did not focus on the lawsuit but rather the blog kept by Jex Blackmore, the chapter director of the Satanic Temple Detroit and a national spokesperson for the organization, once she had became pregnant.
Anna Merlan quotes from an email Blackmore sent to Jezebel, a hotbed of kooky abortion advocacy, in late November:
“As you know over the past year The Satanic Temple has been invested finding creative ways to challenge oppressive reproductive rights legislation,” she wrote. “As someone who has been deeply involved in the planning and implementation of these projects, it’s surreal to suddenly be on the other side of the mirror—last week I discovered that I’m pregnant.”
What to do? Naturally–what else?–abort. But why waste, in a manner of speaking, this opportunity to turn her own chemically-induced abortion experience into a manual for other women? After all, there was such a “dearth of accounts written by women planning their own abortions.”
So, Merlan tells us, on November 14, Blackmore launched her blog, “Crisis Pregnancy Michigan.” She blogged the two weeks until she had her “medical abortion” on November 26.
Which, of course, was Thanksgiving Day.
That Blackmore, what a clever gal.
So why did she write about “the nuances of this experience”? To “help to demystify the termination process and provide support and encouragement to others.”
According to Merlan’s account, Blackmore focused on what are, to her, the unnecessary hoops she had to jump through before she could off her unborn kid. And, if we believe an admiring Merlan, Blackmore did it so well:
The entries are granularly detailed, elegantly written, and, as she intended, serve as a helpful guide for what other people could expect.
So the day of the abortion, lots of details about warm blankets and heating pads and pain killers and soft cats and anti-nausea medication and, of course, the Misoprostol.
Here’s her description of the final steps:
At three thirty I placed two pills against the left side of my cheek, and two pills against the right cheek, took one deep breath, and pressed play on John Carpenter’s They Live. The pills dissolved slowly into a paste of wet sawdust in my mouth. I lay there with swollen cheeks for forty minutes until I could wash away the remaining pill-goo from my gums.
Why They Live? The film is described in Wikipedia as “a 1988 American satirical science fiction action horror film written and directed by John Carpenter. The film stars Roddy Piper, Keith David and Meg Foster. It follows a nameless drifter (called ‘John Nada’ in the credits), who discovers the ruling class are in fact aliens concealing their appearance and manipulating people to spend money, breed, and accept the status quo with subliminal messages in mass media.”
Ah, yes, none of the alien-imposed status quo for the chapter director of the Satanic Temple Detroit.
The end of this bizarre account is drenched in unacknowledged irony. Darn if that chemical-abortion-leading-to-a-“miscarriage” doesn’t hurt like heck.
Blackmore can’t sleep. “Low, deep pains on my left side kept me awake. I’m still taking painkillers. I woke up frustrated that this is still happening.”
She writes that
My body aches. I have no energy. I’m sick of this.
She asks rhetorically, “Is it manageable?”
Of course, but I don’t want to “manage” my life. I want to live it.
The baby whose life she took would have liked to live hers as well.