If stores and other LGBTQ+ allies hide their support the hateful fundamentalist Christian white supremacist maga brownshirt gang thugs win. That encourages them to do more acts of this domestic terrorism. And they are proud of their tactics. And they won’t stop, they can not be appeased. Hugs
Just in via press release:
Recent pushback against businesses such as Anheuser-Busch and Target, blatantly organized by extremist groups, serves as a wake up call for all businesses that support the LGBTQ+ community.
We’ve seen this extremist playbook of attacks before. Their goal is clear: to prevent LGBTQ+ inclusion and representation, silence our allies and make our community invisible.
These attacks fuel hate against LGBTQ+ people, just as we’ve seen this year with more than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills that restrict basic freedoms and aim to erase LGBTQ+ people.
Extremist attacks and harassment of businesses for standing in solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community and values of diversity, equity and inclusion have challenged Target, and businesses more broadly, to lead – to demonstrate they mean what they say when investing in and standing with LGBTQ+ people, creatives, and organizations.
Businesses must continue to lead and respond with unwavering support for LGBTQ+ employees, shareholders, customers, allies – and the broader community. When values of diversity, equity and inclusion are tested, business must defend them unequivocally.
Doubling down on your values is not only the right thing to do, it’s good for business. Research shows that if a brand publicly supports and demonstrates a commitment to expanding and protecting LGBTQ+ rights, Americans are 2x more likely to buy or use the brand.
Americans ages 18-34 are 5.5x more likely to want to work at a company if it publicly supports and demonstrates a commitment to expanding and protecting LGBTQ+ rights.
It isn’t just LGBTQ+ consumers and communities: 70% of non-LGBTQ+ people believe companies should publicly support and include the LGBTQ+ community through practices like hiring, advertising and sponsorships (Accelerating Acceptance, 2023).
At this moment, it’s critical that Target champions equity and inclusion as it has for over a decade. Target consistently tops the list for brands that show genuine, authentic support of the LGBTQ+ community through outreach and policies.
Target received recognition for outstanding commitment to DEI from the Executive Leadership Council in 2022. It’s time to prove the recognition was earned.
When it comes to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion, there is no such thing as neutrality.
We’re calling on Target to release a public statement in the next 24 hours reaffirming their commitment to the LGBTQ+ community, put Pride merchandise back on the sales floor and online in full, ensure safety of team members who are on the front lines.
Target, and all businesses, can leverage the support of LGBTQ+ organizations to navigate this hate, so that together, we can let extremists know unequivocally that, just as with every other failed anti-LGBTQ+ campaign of the past, fear will not win.
The above is cosigned by GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the National LGBTQ Task Force, the National Black Justice Coalition, and other groups mentioned below.
Recent attacks on businesses supporting LGBTQ+ equality are a wake-up call for them to be ready to respond with strength. Extremist groups will not bully businesses, and Target must serve as an example by standing up, not stepping back, on equality. https://t.co/Ci3zhqnlpy
If you're a corporate marketing officer concerned over what's happening with Target, let me make something abundantly clear: you will never appease anti-LGBTQ extremists. They don't want *some* concessions. They want all of them. But there's a colder truth at play here.
This is how it started in Hitler’s Germany. Nazi propaganda campaigns claimed that Jews were “predators” who were “coming for your children.” Then came the attacks and violence. Flash forward to America in 2023. Christofascists claim that trans people, drag queens and pretty much anyone who isn’t a far-right fascist is a “groomer” who’s “coming for your children.” They won’t stop until there’s blood in the streets.
Beyond that, it only makes things much worse. As soon as any waffling happens, the fascists smell blood in the water. It only amps them up. To them it’s a sign of weakness and a signal to pounce en masse. More people need to understand the psychology of fascism, it’s well documented and there are many resources online. Knowledge is power.
This is the goal of the fundamentalist right wing maga Christians racists bigots. It is not about protecting kids. It is about returning to a 1950s social public morality and enforced gender roles. It is about rolling back all social advances gained since the civil rights era. It is entirely about wiping minority rights away and pushing the LGBTQ+ back into the closet while making them afraid to come out openly into society. It is about returning to a time of white straight Christian superiority and automatic assumed authority, with subservient women to do their bidding. So now that this very vocal aggressive arrogant violent minority that feels laws and polite society norms don’t apply to them feels as they have the right to make the entire population follow their religiously driven views from a book written 2,500 years ago. Hugs
“Matt [Walsh] made this point, he articulated it directly, but this has been the point that has been building for months now, which is we need to make that symbol toxic, the pride flag symbol, we need to make that toxic.
“We need to have companies think twice about it. Everyone was talking about the Dylan Mulvaney incident as being harmful to the Bud Light brand. That’s true.
“But more importantly, it was harmful to the Dylan Mulvaney brand. Now, other companies are going to think twice before sponsoring Dylan Mulvaney because they don’t want to lose $6 billion in market cap in two days. That’s what we got to do.
“And then once we make these things culturally toxic or as we’re making these symbols culturally toxic, we’ve got to bring in the cavalry, we’ve got to come back in with more political force to ban some of this stuff and to say no.” – Daily Wire host Michael Knowles.
Knowles appeared here last week when he declared that millennials should not have the right to vote.
Last month Knowles appeared here when he declared that the bible instructs us to burn books. Knowles, who has called for televising executions, previously declared that banning drag shows and burning books is “very American.”
Earlier this year Knowles declared from the CPAC stage that “transgenderism must be eradicated.”
Knowles performed in a gay sex scene for a college film.
I just found an old short film that Michael Knowles acted in.
The current headliner of conservative homophobia and transphobia played a gay twink. So much for restoring "traditional masculinity" 💀 pic.twitter.com/sC8fcoQ3HC
That’s exactly where this is going. Does anyone think that a company that caves to homophobic and transphobic terrorists won’t do the same when it’s antisemites calling in bomb threats?
Can’t stop thinking about the highway construction blinky sign in Florida with KILL ALL GAYS flashing away. I’m looking forward to my death because I’m so fucking tired of having to live with people like that on this earth.
It’s amazing how people fail to realize how quickly a tolerant society can become an oppressive one when you have a disciplined and determined far-right movement that will stop at nothing to win.
Pride parades need to change. They need to be more political and less celebratory. We are in the middle of a right wing assault on our very existence. We need to make pride more like the silence=death activity in the ’80s and ’90s.
It’s not enough that they’re trying to ban drag and trans healthcare – now they’re going after corporations that support LGBT people to try and bully them into turning their backs on us. Today, it’s Bud Light hiring a trans spokesperson and Target selling Pride gear. Tomorrow, it’s any company that says or does anything to support us or offers benefits for same-sex spouses of employees.
Something tells me that sooner rather than later, all those people who complain about Pride becoming too corporate are going to miss the days before corporations stopped having floats at Pride for fear of terrorism and boycotts.
…and how many of those who complain about corporations, etc .. actually work for corporations?
A lot of the corporate donations / flags / pride months came *because* the corportate suite realized how many lgbtq’s etc they employed when those employees became vocal — started lgbt work groups, awareness campaigns, etc … it comes from within, and from without, too ..
Note: Foreign-born describes adults born outside the U.S., where neither parent is a U.S. citizen, and includes legally-admitted immigrants, refugees, temporary residents and undocumented immigrants; Data: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Chart: Axios Visuals
The share of foreign-born workers in the U.S. labor force reached a record high last year, per new data from the Labor Department.
Why it matters: With more Americans aging out of the workforce than entering into it — and at a time of labor shortages —immigrants are playing an increasingly crucial role in the labor market.
State of play: The share of foreign-born people in the workforce has been steadily rising for decades, but dipped during the pandemic — making last year’s uptick look a bit more striking than it is, said Abraham Mosisa, a senior economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Still, this is a trend that isn’t going anywhere. The U.S. labor force participation rate of native born men has been consistently decreasing, he pointed out. And the rate for women has stagnated.
The number of foreign-born workers in the U.S. increased to 29.8 million in 2022, from 27.9 million the previous year — a jump of about 6%.
The number of native-born workers went from 133.2 million to 134.5 million — up barely 1%.
One key factor is that a bigger share of the immigrant population is of working age (18-64), at 77%, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI). That compares with about 59% of the native-born population.
Meanwhile: The relative size of the immigrant population has stayed flat over the past two decades — comprising 13.6% of the total U.S. population in 2021, according to the most recently available data from MPI — just below where it was before the pandemic.
Zoom in:Foreign-born workers tend to take different jobs than the native-born (see the chart below), and they typically earn less money.
In 2022, median weekly earnings for foreign-born full-time workers was $945, or 87% of their native-born counterparts.
Data: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Chart: Rahul Mukherjee/Axios
Worth noting:Immigration opponents might see the record number of foreign-born workers and argue that foreign born workers are somehow stealing jobs from Americans — but that’s not what’s happening.
Although was a big increase in net immigration in 2022 — essentially catching up from the COVID slump — there were plenty of jobs to go around.
At times last year there were actually two jobs available for every job-seeker. And this year, the unemployment rate has continued to hover around a record low.
Zoom out: As wealthier nations contend with shrinking workforces, many are crafting new immigration policies to find more workers — and combat inflation, as the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.
Policies that encourage immigration “will determine the extent and persistence of labor supply challenges,” as a note from Moody’s Investors Service pointed out a few weeks ago.
Immigration law in the U.S., meanwhile, remains a contentious and fairly intractable political issue.
What they’re saying: “If you want a growing workforce, without immigration, that isn’t going to happen,” said Phillip Connor, a senior demographer at FWD.US, an immigration advocacy group.
The republicans don’t care about the economy, they want political power. To get it, they need to crash the economy or wipe out every thing Biden got done while getting concessions on the border and fewer regulations / more leases for drilling. This is a power play for 2024 elections. It has nothing to do with the debt limit other than causing hurt to the public that they can blame on Biden. They are already just making up things like how Biden is working for China. And stupid people believe their bullshit. Hugs
Republicans have often bristled at accusations that they are resorting to hostage tactics by refusing to raise the federal debt ceiling without securing spending cuts.
But on Tuesday, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz leaned into the charge as he explained to reporters that he and his fellow hardline conservatives would likely reject any sort of compromise deal that watered down the party-line bill Republicans passed through the house.
“I think my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, and they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage,” Gaetz told Semafor.
“I think my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, and they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage,” Matt Gaetz told @josephzeballoshttps://t.co/v96X36BMiB
Republicans have been trying to “starve the beast” for years. I don’t get how they think that helps the country but it might make the wealthy wealthier for the short term. Beyond that, the infrastructure will crumble and all supportive services will fail. And THEY WILL CELEBRATE THE COMING DYSTOPIA. This is what terrorism is about and why they are holding the country hostage – to ultimately destroy the government.
I honestly think this will backfire on the GQP. If McCarthy brings it to the House floor and can’t get enough of his “majority” to vote for it, any fault will have to be his.
Every government shutdown or other hostage-holding the USA that they’ve done in the past has backfired on them, every time.
The problem is that every time, Fox News then works incessantly afterwards on erasing their viewers fruit-fly-sized memory cells, and two years later they’re right back to spouting the same total bullshit that Tucker/Sean/Laura/Jesse/Maria spoonfeed them.
I figure he’s been set up as the fall guy by the ‘freedom’ wing. They’ll push for unreasonable things, negotiations will fail or result in a bill they’ll torpedo. Then they’ll use the “one vote to remove the speaker” option they set up at the start of all this and send him back. Then we’ll have more weeks of chaos as they all (including McCarthy) grift the cult even more. Most of them are in areas where they have safe seats, so it won’t matter either way – whoever has the R next to their name gets the vote.
So ultimately they don’t care about the harm this may cause. Working from that point of view, the rest of this follows.
And yet the very smart people are still both sidesing this and covering it like a back and forth sporting event.
It’s time for lawmakers to end the drama and come to terms and increase the debt limit. There has been little economic fallout from the political back and forth so far. But that is set to change quickly. https://t.co/ZA1mGWtWfb
It isn’t only our heritage at stake in this discussion. It’s our history. We’ve already spent that money, Doofus, with the approval of congress. Now you want to turn us into a deadbeat nation.
This “game” has been played all too often. In the past the GOP has paid the price, and I’d like to think they know this. So I have to wonder, are they really this stupid (evidence points to this), or do they have something new planned?
Do No Harm, a nonprofit that launched last year to oppose diversity initiatives in medicine, has evolved into a significant leader in statehouses seeking to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youths, producing model legislation that an Associated Press analysis found has been used in at least three states, including Florida.
The nonprofit, not widely known outside conservative medical and political circles, describes itself on its website as a collection of doctors and others uniting to “protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology.”
Founder Dr. Stanley Goldfarb is a kidney specialist and a professor emeritus and former associate dean at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school. Goldfarb retired in 2021 and incorporated Do No Harm in January 2022.
Do No Harm initially focused on race in medical education and hiring. “The same radical movement behind ‘Critical Race Theory’ in the classroom and ‘Defund the Police’ is coming after healthcare, but hardly anyone knows it,” it warns on its website.
Goldfarb declined to be interviewed by The Associated Press but said in an email that “Do No Harm works to protect children from extreme gender ideology through original research, coalition-building, testimonials from parents and patients who’ve lived through deeply troubling experiences, and advocacy for the rigorous, apolitical study of gender dysphoria.”
The organization’s executive director, Kristina Rasmussen, previously was chief of staff to former Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, and served as president of the Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, according to her LinkedIn profile. Perhaps coincidentally, Rauner donated $250,000 to DeSantis’ former political committee.
An AP analysis of statehouse bills to restrict gender-affirming care for youths found passages identical or nearly identical to Do No Harm’s model legislation in Montana, Arkansas and Iowa.
The organization had lobbyists registered in 2022 in at least three states — Kansas, Missouri and Tennessee — and in Florida in 2023. People associated with the group have appeared as witnesses in statehouses, including Chloe Cole, 18, listed on its website as a “patient advocate” who has spoken to lawmakers about her gender-transition reversal.
In states including Florida, Idaho, New Hampshire, Tennessee and Ohio, Cole described her transition beginning at age 13, surgery to remove her breasts at 15, and stopping her transition a year later saying it was a mistake. Republican supporters of bills restricting or banning gender-affirming care often cite Cole’s story.
Cole told the Kansas news outlet The Reflector this year that Do No Harm was reimbursing her travel expenses as she testified before state lawmakers. She and her lawyer did not respond to requests for comment from the AP.
Do No Harm originally organized as a charitable organization whose tax-exempt status would be endangered by substantial lobbying.
On March 9 this year, after the group had already made significant inroads in legislatures with its model bill, lobbyists and hearing witnesses, it incorporated Do No Harm Action as a separate nonprofit with a tax status that allows for more lobbying, according to records obtained from the Virginia Office of Charitable and Regulatory Programs.
Goldfarb did not respond directly to questions about Do No Harm’s lobbying, nor did another representative for the organization.
In the application for nonprofit status obtained from the Virginia agency, Do No Harm projected revenues of $910,000 in 2022, more than $1.1 million in 2023 and over $1.5 million in 2024.
The organization is so new that federal tax forms that typically reveal nonprofits’ spending details have been either not received or not processed.
It won a $250,000 award last year called the Gregor Peterson Prize. Its previous recipients include the Center for American Liberty, led by Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer who advised former President Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign and who is representing Cole in her lawsuit against Kaiser Permanente over gender-transition treatments she now says she regrets. The prize was announced in December at a summit held by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a prominent provider of conservative model legislation.
Duke Health’s antiracist “pledge” is nothing more than a political assertion forcefully made on behalf of its employees, who were in no position to push back.
When did health institutions start acting politically under the guise of medical science?https://t.co/3aalgjq47S
We hope the inquiry into DEI spending at Virginia’s public colleges and universities will begin to dislodge this divisive ideology from medical education.
The people pushing this madness are right about one thing: systemic racism is real. They’re proving it by bringing racial segregation back into the higher education system. pic.twitter.com/MWQd2lqsKs
.@FLSurgeonGen’s guidance against socially and medically transitioning children is a well-thought-out and evidence-based approach.https://t.co/8xn8vg3qgk
The Florida state legislature and @GovRonDeSantis passed two commonsense bills that will help restore fairness and sound teaching in higher education, including in medical schools. pic.twitter.com/IPDsATjvXV
When it became obvious that the targetted religious war on just the LGBTQ+ community was starting to lose public support, they simply changed to hating the non-defined “WOKE” giving them a faceless generic enemy to rake in tax free money and run political campaigns, and giving them an even larger base of fellow Americans to focus their hate upon, and rally their “Christian Warriors” around.
Freedom Caucus — they hate freedom Moms For Liberty — they hate liberty Alliance Defending Freedom — they’re anti-freedom Do No Harm — they’re doing great harm
ALL of Iowa’s recent book banning, gay shaming, bathroom bills are simply out of state copy/paste laws. Oh and libs of tik tok and Q anon bitches got to write a couple bills too. Non are home grown
It ALWAYS starts out with the Trojan Horse of protecting the young children, before quickly expanding to including all teens/minors, and then the banishing of LGBTQ adults from sight…”for the sake of the children,” and not for the bigoted adults hiding behind them.
bans the “instruction, guidance, activities, or programming regarding sexual orientation or gender identity to students enrolled in prekindergarten through 12th grade
Question 1. Are you married? Question 2. How do you explain that to an 18 year old without alluding to the fact that you’re a man and the person to which you are married is not?
Question 3. Why is that an exception to your rule?
This is about absolute power and control. Abortion bans/contraception bans Book bans Attacks on LGBTQ+
Can you tell the difference between Republicans/Conservatives and Muslims/ISIS and Sharia Law? pic.twitter.com/9MgNgF0AR2
— Fight4Justice Fight4Equality! AbortionIsARIGHT! (@fight4women) May 17, 2023
All 3 members of the Republican freshman class of 2020 who lectured us the loudest about family values and marriage didn’t have their marriages survive a second term. pic.twitter.com/Zel6uyB6Ut
I’ve been dubious of the word “fascism” being thrown around. But it’s the right word. After reading How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley, I am convinced that DeSantis is in fact a fascist.
“What normalization does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary. It makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been.”
Defaulting would also slash the dollar (and our trade balance), jack up interest rates (putting the brakes on housing and infrastructure construction), and reduce our status as the largest free economy.
Aside from the usual times he makes himself look and sound stupid in public, he has a magical way of doing that to himself in pics, too. Our Commander in Chief of all our armed forces actually saluted a Russian military official as if that was what needed to be done to show his abject subservience. Even the Russian would have settled for a handshake. He, along with all the other “felonies” attached to him, did so much to trash America’s prestige and standing in the world.
I originally posted this from The Washington Post but I understand many couldn’t read it. I will add the original post here because Frank had a great comment on it. But I want everyone to realize the heartbreak of this family, the expenses they were forced to incur, and the risk to the woman’s life who had a child already who could have lost his mother, all due to some republicans on the right demanding to make the medical decisions for this woman and her family. They were forced to give birth to a child who couldn’t live risking the woman’s life, give that child a name, and then under law bury that child with all the emotions / exspeces that goes along with all of that. I cried reading this the first time, and I cried hard reading it the second time. I wonder if the radical fundmentlist religous right that forces this cry at all when they read it? Out of respect I wont color any of it as all of it is serious and important Hugs.
Frances Stead Sellers,Thomas Simonetti and Maggie Penman, (c) 2023, The Washington Post
·9 min read
Nobody expected Baby Milo to live for long.
He arrived in the world with no kidneys, underdeveloped lungs and a life expectancy of between 20 minutes and a couple of hours.
He lived for 99 minutes.
Milo Evan Dorbert drew his first and last breath on the evening of March 3. The unusual complications in his mother’s pregnancy tested the interpretation of Florida’s new abortion law.
Deborah Dorbert discovered she was pregnant in August. Her early appointments suggested the baby was thriving, and she looked forward to welcoming a fourth member to the family. It didn’t occur to her that fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a half-century constitutional right to abortion would affect them.
A routine ultrasound halfway through her pregnancy changed all that.
Deborah and her husband, Lee, learned in late November that their baby had Potter syndrome, a rare and lethal condition that plunged them into an unsettled legal landscape.
The state’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of gestation has an exception for fatal fetal abnormalities. But as long as their baby’s heart kept beating, the Dorberts say, doctors would not honor their request to terminate the pregnancy. The doctors would not say how they reached their decision, but the new law carries severe penalties, including prison time, for medical practitioners who run afoul of it. The hospital system declined to discuss the case.
Instead, the Dorberts would have to wait for labor to be induced at 37 weeks.
For the next three months, the Dorberts did their best to prepare for their second son’s short life. They consulted with palliative care experts and decided against trying to prolong his life with high-tech interventions.
“The most important thing for us was to let him know he was loved,” Deborah said.
The day before Milo was born, the Dorberts sat down with their son Kaiden to explain that the baby’s body had stopped working and that he would not come home. Instead, some day, they told Kaiden, they would all meet as angels. The 4-year-old burst into tears, telling them that he did not want to be an angel.
Without functioning kidneys, a fetus with Potter syndrome cannot produce the amniotic fluid that allows the lungs to expand and that cushions the growing body. The babies who survive until birth typically have contracted limbs, club feet and flattened features from being compressed against the uterus wall.
But after Deborah’s 12-hour labor, Milo turned out to be 4 pounds and 12 ounces of perfection, with tiny, flawlessly formed hands and feet and a head of brown hair.
– – –
“When he came out you could hear him gasping for air. He was really trying to breathe. … He didn’t cry when he was born and he didn’t open his eyes at all. But I mean, he struggled.” – Deborah Dorbert
– – –
“I thought I had my miracle,” said Peter Rogell, the baby’s grandfather, who attended the delivery. He allowed himself a moment of hope until the obstetrician cut the umbilical cord that for 37 weeks had performed the functions Milo’s underdeveloped lungs and missing kidneys would now take over.
– – –
“When they pulled the baby out I thought my miracle happened. ‘Cause he looked perfect to me.” – Peter Rogell
– – –
Milo remained blue, swaddled in a blanket hand-knit by his great grandmother.
He never cried or tried to nurse or even opened his eyes, investing every ounce of energy in intermittent gasps for air.
“That was the beginning of the end,” Rogell said, recalling the persistent gulps that he thought at first were hiccups but turned out to be his grandson’s labored efforts to inhale.
Lee read a book to his dying son – “I’ll Love You Forever,” a family favorite that the Dorberts had given Kaiden for Valentine’s Day – and sang Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds.”
For 99 minutes that lasted a lifetime, they cuddled and comforted their newborn.
– – –
“The baby just went to my chest, and we just cuddled with him. … My parents held him for a little bit. And we kinda just gave him all the loving until he passed.” – Deborah Dorbert
– – –
At 11:13 p.m., a doctor declared Milo dead.
The nurses took some photos, clipped a few pieces of Milo’s dark brown hair and made imprints of his hands and feet on the inside cover of Kaiden’s book before taking the infant down to the morgue. Milo’s organs were either missing or too damaged to be donated; his body was so small that even his heart valve could not be used to save another baby.
Milo would be cremated, with some of his ashes embedded in a pendant for Kaiden and two spherical glass ornaments.
Deborah feared that mementos would serve as reminders of her pain.
But gradually, she realized she might want something to hold onto, or as a teaching tool for Kaiden.
“Down the road he might have questions,” she said, imagining how she might pull out an object to help explain “what I went through, how the laws dictated this.”
Two weeks later, about 40 of the Dorberts’ friends and family members gathered at Lakeland Funeral Home and Memorial Gardens for a service.
A three-inch-tall silver urn – delivered by Amazon the previous day after other child-sized urns turned out to be too big – sat on a memorial table with two vases of flowers, carefully picked out at a nearby Publix supermarket, and a photo of Milo, wrapped in the hand-knit blanket and held by his parents in the hospital bed.
Deborah and Lee sat rock still and silent in the front row as Milo’s aunts and uncles and several cousins walked in and took their seats. Her usually free-flowing hair was pulled back from her face and held in a bun.
The service, which mixed Christian gospels and the Lord’s Prayer with “Three Little Birds,” lasted about 45 minutes – half as long as Milo’s life.
The pastor from a local Lutheran church had a message for the congregation. “Not everything happens for a reason,” she said, echoing Deborah’s own rejection that the manner of Milo’s birth and death carried some special spiritual significance.
– – –
“Milo. Milo. For such a little love, he leaves a giant hole in our soul and in our hearts. And nobody – nothing else – can completely fill that hole.” – The Rev. Pamela Smith
– – –
Deborah occasionally stifled sobs or turned to quiet Kaiden, until she could contain her feelings no longer, and Lee reached over to embrace her slender shaking frame.
Rogell lingered at the funeral home after others left, staring at the urn that contained his 16th grandchild’s ashes and trying to reconcile his own misgivings about elective abortion with the months of suffering he watched his daughter and her family endure.
Now, he was haunted by the sound of Milo gasping for air and the sight of his body struggling to ward off a death that had been inevitable for three long months.
“To me it’s just pure torture,” Rogell said. “The law has created torture.”
In many ways, the routines of daily life returned swiftly after Milo died.
Deborah shuttles Kaiden back and forth to preschool. The Dorberts take occasional outings to the aquarium or hike the trails near their house. They visit family.
Deborah held her brother’s baby girl, born a few days after Milo – the products of pregnancies that had followed parallel paths until Thanksgiving.
“I’m happy for my brother. He has a precious baby girl that brings so much happiness to his family, and that makes me happy,” she said. “Is it hard to see her because my son’s not here? Absolutely.”
Deborah says she is wrestling with anxiety and depression. She hasn’t returned to her part-time job filling Instacart orders. And she still hasn’t figured out how to respond to Kaiden, when he asks whether he can see his baby brother.
“We tell him he’s something he feels, like the wind. Or we point up to the stars and say he’s an angel with the stars,” she said. “We’re still kind of navigating that question, for him to understand.”
Kaiden brought a card home from preschool for Mother’s Day. It showed a family of four purple stick figures with bulging torsos – Mommy, Daddy, Kaiden and Baby Milo.
Deborah said her grief is complicated by ongoing anger that her decision to terminate her pregnancy early was thwarted by politicians she has never met and who are not experts about obstetrics.
The mail brings reminders of the Dorberts’ new financial burdens, invoices for all the things they wish had never happened: $12,320 so far in medical costs – not including induction and delivery, $7,000 for Milo’s cremation and funeral, and $500 for the keepsakes in memory of their son.
The bills keep coming. Deborah estimates that Lee’s health insurance will pick up about half of the medical costs, some of which will be offset by a GoFundMe appeal that one of her sisters set up.
The Dorberts have no idea how their grief will evolve, or if they will ever come to terms with losing control over the most painful decision of their lives.
“It’s really becoming our reality now,” Deborah said. “We don’t know what six months is going to look like. We don’t know what a year looks like. We’re just kind of taking it one day at a time. Because that’s all we really can handle, is just taking it one day at a time.”
– – –
“If people want to really know how I’m doing, I’m not doing okay.” – Deborah Dorbert
– – –
In the midst of that uncertainty, Deborah has endeavored to find some purpose in Milo’s short life, sharing the story of her pregnancy as broadly as she can, even as she has watched Florida legislators move to restrict state laws around abortion even further.
It surprises family members to see Deborah take such a public stance.
“I always thought of her as my shy child,” Rogell said.
But Deborah wants other people to know what happened, how politicians intervened in decisions about medical care with a law that made doctors fearful of terminating even hopeless pregnancies.
“If it helps another family or a mom, then good came of it because we’re all here to help one another,” Deborah said. “It’s not something easy to go through alone. You need all the support you can get.”
