It's Ok, Governor Landry Can Check My Cervix for Cancer
SCOTUS opens legal gates for women on Medicaid to be denied cancer screenings and referrals
Since they gave the presidential election to George Dubya Bush on December 12, 2000, I’ve not wavered once in my belief that the Supreme Court of the United States is an abomination to the concept of justice.
Lifetime appointments… big time lawyers don’t get dementia??
Nine justices for 340 million people… in a country with the highest civilian incarceration rate in the world??
Then there’s Ginni Thomas, cults, open bribes and white supremacy, but I’ll let you explore that fuckery on your own.
Start here with this PBS Frontline documentary about Justice Thomas and his wife, Ginni. I love Frontline, have since I was a kid—watch it soon, all of this public information access is being defunded, databased, and removed.
Over the last 25 years of my activist and community life, I’ve watched SCOTUS strip away nearly every fucking right and service I, and millions of others helped campaign for and worked to strengthen, and expand; for citizens, residents, migrants, and visitors alike, just as generations of our ancestors did before us.
While some of us have devoted our lives to making this country a better place for everyone, politicians and the courts have attacked the people of the United States on: voting rights, gerrymandering, petitions for a public vote, bodily autonomy, abortion access, housing access, medical access, marriage equality, public land, private land, public comment, transparent budgets, roads that cave in, forests that burn, chemical spills, law enforcement brutality, executive branch illegality… these are just the things important to me; the list, as we are all painfully aware is exhaustive.
My favorite happened one year ago today. SCOTUS made it legal to punish poor people for being homeless on the street, after 15 years of HUD not funding emergency shelters or programs, and shelters closing all over the country for lack of funds.
New shelter builds (most are a lot of fluff) are a decade behind the growing number of homeless populations. Of which, Gen X and Millennials make up the fastest growing homeless population nationally. The cost of housing and crushing student loan and medical debt has done many of us in, in addition to decades of shrinking middle-class job opportunities. Myself included.
For 12 years in Atlanta I worked with, fundraised and advocated for more low-income and homeless services. As the federal and local governments began to strip away funding and practical programs under Obama’s second term, we were assured that the gaps would be filled with expanded funding.
That was a huge lie. Funding cuts to shelter and service providers happened almost immediately (and across states, within 3 years of the Continuum of Care being a national standard for state-HUD-HHS relations.)
I’ve been chronically homeless since 2021, bouncing between jobs, friends and acquaintances. Given my professional and advocacy background, I’ve been able to check out shelter conditions in all of the cities I’ve stayed in the last 4 years, across the southeast and into the northeast coast.
No guaranteed shelter bed is free.
It’s $400+ a month to have a guaranteed shelter bed in major cities, and the few suburban areas that still have a single shelter left. Showers, lockers and food are not usually a service offered at shelters.
Shelters are overcrowded.
People are in crisis every way imaginable, and they have no breathing room on the streets or in the shelters. This makes every “small” issue a mountain problem.
Many shelters are more dangerous than ever before.
Exacerbated by overcrowding and overnight staffing cuts. Shelters have to pay for most staffing, and all security, costs separate from government funding. Right now shelters don’t have adequate funds for toothpaste and tampons, let alone properly trained staff and security.
Homeless people in the United States are valued the least, and targeted the most; shelters don’t provide an escape from this environment.
If you don’t have a substance abuse or domestic violence situation attached to your homeless status, and you’re an adult without dependents, there’s no housing programs to help. Doesn’t matter how poor you are. Even sickness requires prolonged or repeated hospitalization before organizations will consider a waitlist situation.
It is impossible living in the US in poverty, and I’ve never seen homelessness this difficult to escape from, and stay out of.
So, the government has decided to make things worse for me and millions of others…
SCOTUS has decided that patients on Medicaid have no right to Planned Parenthood as a medical provider, allowing several states to impose existing laws barring them from Medicaid patients. The ruling is legally quite cruel, because they measured the validity of choosing Planned Parenthood against the validity of choosing a nursing home on Medicare.
The Justices know that the majority of Planned Parenthood patients are women with reproductive-age medical needs, and that the majority of patients on Medicare are FUCKING NOT.
This whole case legally compares my right to get a cervical cancer screening or mammogram referral, to a Boomer picking out which nursing home he wants to sexually harass until he dies.
These are not remotely the same things.
My medical rights have nothing to do with my housing needs. Yes, my health is negatively impacted by my lack of safe and stable housing (the actual difference between housed vs homeless; for example, it’s why DV victims living with the abuser/s are considered at-risk of homelessness, the home is not safe, which is required for stability.) My housing choices are a separate issue from my right to medical care, and to choose which provider I’m treated by.
So, this ruling is cruel and wrong. It’s fucking wrong for many reasons, and the cruelty always being the point, leaves me with no choice…
If Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry insists on preventing me from continuing care at the New Orleans Planned Parenthood, then I’ll just have to make him my gynecologist until I can find another one.
The wait time for a new GYN patient is about 8 months in south Louisiana. I figure the best way to keep Governor Landry up to date, is by sending him photos of my cervix and asking if everything looks good.
He’s the one that got Gulf Coast Planned Parenthood tangled in federal lawsuits to begin with, him and his evil troll friends in Texas.
This is his doing, so, he’s ultimately now responsible for my uterus healthcare until I can find a licensed professional, willing to accept Medicaid (lolz.)
As soon as Planned Parenthood informs me I am no longer a patient because of this motherfucking cocksucking bullshit, I will begin my cervix photo project.
I have enough surgery photos of my cervix to get Governor Landry up to speed on my extensive gynecological medical and surgical history.
Although, I might have to find someone in New Orleans with a medical camera. Governor Landry needs recent photos of my cervix to ensure, I, a woman still capable of creating future labor, don’t have any intraepithelial activity preventing me from fulfilling my Christo-Fascist duty.
If anyone knows someone, let’s make it happen.
Am I kidding?
Fuck no.
These people are killing us. They’re killing children and old people and anyone in their way. And if they want to kill me, then they’re gonna look at the damage they’ve done to my body. They should see and hear every complaint I have about this cold, soulless system we all fucking hate.
Fuck the Supreme Court.
Fuck Jeff Landry.
Fuck Donald Trump.
Maybe I’ll send my cervix to all of them. Art is my right, and no human can take that away from me. Creativity is a gift to all humans, a divine right.
Therefore, I have a God-given right to send my medical cervix photos to anyone who prevents me from continuing care at Gulf Coast Planned Parenthood.
Besides, they’re all the wrong kind of perverts, anyway. Maybe one of them will be into it, buy me a surgery or two.
Because I knew this case was coming down the pipeline, I got my overdue cervical cancer screening at Planned Parenthood two weeks ago. My results just came in with great news, negative for abnormal changes. I’ll be sure to include this so Jeff knows the terminology.
I found a spot in one of my breasts about a year ago, and I had that checked as well, likely just a cyst. They gave me a super quick mammogram referral, one I have to wait a few weeks on, because I have to raise money to get back to New Orleans for that, and another art market, to raise funds to get back to the east coast. This is the cost of healthcare for the homeless that no one factors in. Let alone my sanity, or my heart, which hurts.
I write all of this to demonstrate how impossible this system makes everything for those of us already on the bottom. And that if my pap screening had come back positive for abnormal changes, how terrified I would be right now.
But, I got lucky.
A little more time, to make more art.