This sounds so project 2025-y, doesn’t it? For the party of alleged “small government,” the Republican Party is all up in our business.
Via The Guardian:
In early September, a woman, nine months pregnant, walked into the emergency obstetrics unit of a Colorado hospital. Though the labor and delivery staff caring for her expected her to have a smooth delivery, her case presented complications almost immediately.
The woman, who was born in central Asia, checked into the hospital with a smartwatch on her wrist, said two hospital workers who cared for her during her labor, and whom the Guardian is not identifying to avoid exposing their hospital or patients to retaliation.
The device was not an ordinary smartwatch made by Apple or Samsung, but a special type that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had mandated the woman wear at all times, allowing the agency to track her. The device was beeping when she entered the hospital, indicating she needed to charge it, and she worried that if the battery died, ICE agents would think she was trying to disappear, the hospital workers recalled. She told them that, just days earlier, she had been put on a deportation flight to Mexico, but the pilot refused to let her fly because she was so close to giving birth.
The woman’s fear only grew from there, according to the hospital workers. Her delivery wasn’t progressing the way the care team hoped, and she needed a C-section, a procedure that requires doctors to use a cauterizing tool to minimize bleeding. To prevent possible burning and electrocution, patients are instructed to take off all jewelry or metals before the surgery. The mandatory watch had no way to be easily removed, nor was information about whether it would be safe to wear during the procedure readily available. Hospital staff didn’t know how to contact ICE to ask what to do. When hospital staff told the woman they might have to cut the smartwatch off, she panicked, the workers said.
Staff eventually did remove the device, and ICE agents did not show up at the hospital during the delivery. The nurses said they do not know what happened to the woman after she left the hospital with her baby.
To most of us, this isn’t surprising, but it is alarming. We knew this sort of thing would happen if Trump regained power because, to the Republican Party, women are just vessels to give birth. Nothing more. And now, they’re using pregnancies for deportations. Again, it’s unnerving.
