Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll looks into her crystal ball and sees FREELOADER FIESTA, LOOTAPALOOZA. She writes:

Supposedly, thanks mostly to Sinema and Manchin, the multi-gazillion dollar Build Back Bigoted Bill is dead in the water. Unfortunately, it has been my experience that you can’t stop a boondoggle. Especially one where you can call anyone who opposes it a rayciss. Without a stake through its heart, and possibly a cross and a lot of garlic, these corpses always rise again. So let’s look at just one tiny example of the pointless, outrageous giveaway the Democrats had planned to empty the Treasury for eons to come.

Weeks ago, Ann Coulter delved into the wretched thousands-page bill and ferreted out just a few gems. Though my fact-obsessed editor found her reportage less than accurate (picky, picky, picky…), it was all I had to go on, save reading it myself which was out of the question.

The Build Back Bigoted $2 trillion dollar grift-a-palooza has such gems in it as an authorization for grants totaling “not less than” $75 million to “study” maternal health for pregnant and postpartum minority individuals. What, pray tell, has PREVENTED anyone from studying that up to this point? How hard could it be? I don’t even believe that it has never been done. It requires $75 MILLION to make a spreadsheet?

And, as if that hunka hunka burnin’ waste were not enough, they throw in an additional $50 million to study maternal mortality among minorities. And who better to oversee this pretend problem to see if it can be made worse than Kamala Harris, the pretend black woman who is the pretend Vice President? It would seem to a non-doctor person such as myself, that there is a LOT of overlap in “maternal mortality and maternal health” studies, nu? But, by all means, throw another $50 million at it.

The first thing to notice is that all the emphasis is on MATERNAL health — not a word about producing a healthy BABY. Catch that? If 40 percent of black babies are deliberately killed in utero, I guess it’s clear how much the baby’s health means.

So how much of a problem IS there in the “minority” community of pregnant women up and dying? A quick click on the CDC Maternal Health article on the Internet tells us that there are 6 million pregnancies in the U.S. a year, with 700 maternal deaths. Something that occurs 7 times out of 60,000 does not seem like any kind of crisis, though each death is certainly sad. No information was given about cause of death, other than that they died either pregnant or a couple of weeks postpartum. The stats were not broken down by race. And, just like with COVID stats (at least under Trump), we don’t know how sick people were BEFORE they either got the Wuhan Flu or before they became pregnant. So it’s entirely possible many died WHILE pregnant, not because of it. In which case, there’s nothing to “study.”

Just a couple of weeks ago, a pregnant woman in Lori Lightfoot’s Chicago was slain taking the baby shower gifts out of her vehicle outside her home. She was shot 5 times and killed, along with her baby. I wonder if Kamala will be “studying” that incident for just 1 or 2 million of that insane sum. And another fine gentleman from Detroit, started his girlfriend on fire while she was pregnant with twins. Call me crazy, but that’s gotta impact minority maternal health in a pretty negative way! He’s already out on minimal bail.

Here’s how any woman of any race – though this “study” affirmatively doesn’t care about one icky pale race — greatly increases her chances of her pregnancy producing a healthy baby. And, simultaneously, not dying herself:

Try to get to a reasonable weight before becoming pregnant. Don’t smoke; don’t do drugs. Drink very little alcohol, preferably none at all. Eat a healthy diet of protein, fruits, vegetables, fibrous carbs, and good fats, and try to soft-pedal salt. Take prenatal vitamins. Walk, or do other gentle exercise at least several times a week. Don’t live with someone who beats you up or sets you on fire. If at all possible, live with a husband who, with any luck at all, is not only YOUR husband, but the father of your baby. Eat a lot of ice cream and pasta. (Okay, I just made that last one up based on my own experience. But it was very effective, just sayin’.)

So here’s what I would do to “study” maternal deaths. First, get a breakdown of those 700 deaths by race – should be one phone call, right? Then, take those couple of hundred names and request death certificates to determine actual CAUSE of death. Did it have anything at all to do with being black or even with being pregnant? If it involved drugs, domestic violence, gross overweight, high blood pressure causing toxemia or eclampsia, well, there’s your answer. The whole project might take me a couple of weeks if that information was not forthcoming. Two weeks of work, hey, let’s even give it two months, and a quick $125 million in the bank! Well done, government!

As the commenters say: There! Fixed It For You. Seriously, I would volunteer to STUDY this problem (note again: not FIX, just “study” it), for less than HALF of that sum. Because I love to give back.

No, really, as someone who has BEEN pregnant and has delivered a very healthy baby, that really is all there is to it, barring some kind of unfortunate complications. So that’s the last piece – get regular prenatal care, so complications can be headed off at the pass or at least discovered in time. We were very poor and uninsured at the time we had our baby, but we decided to prioritize the best prenatal care that money could buy. We chose that over, say, tattoos, hair extensions, drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, $300 athletic shoes, or eating in restaurants.

In the end, complications DID arise and my doctors very quickly decided on a C-section for the health and safety of both me and my baby. And that, boys and girls, is why my abs are not of the six-pack variety, but more like the liter bottle. But, oh well. What is that compared to a beautiful baby with a perfectly round head since he decided to skip that last cramped part of his journey? Smart kid from Day One! And now, rich, too, since he will inherit that $62.5 million I am planning on getting for my bargain basement wages for this “study”.

Multiply that unconscionable waste times a couple thousand pages of boondoggles, and you begin to get the picture. Not a single item – no matter how attractively named – is anything but a scam to shovel a mountain of money to black people to keep the Democrats in power. Every single Republican who voted for any part of it should be primaried and defeated.