A former healthcare clinic administrator in Texas today announced that she had quit her job, joined a far-right anti-healthcare group, and dedicated herself to harassing other women to prevent them from receiving surgery and other forms of “icky” healthcare, after seeing a video of an appendectomy that she didn’t like.

I just thought I can’t do this anymore, and it was just like a flash that hit me and I thought that’s it,” said Jonhson. . . .

Johnson said she was told to bring in more women who wanted [icky procedures], something the Episcopalian church goer recently became convicted about.

“I feel so pure in heart (since leaving). I don’t have this guilt, I don’t have this burden on me anymore that’s how I know this conversion was a spiritual conversion.”

Johnson reports that she is likewise convicted about gall bladder removals, most forms of cancer surgery, and liposuction, although she does not criticize the decisions several of her friends have made to have such procedures, because “that’s different”. She is semi-convicted about breast implants, believing they are the work of the Whore of Babylon but also something you could understand that a woman needs sometimes. She justifies these distinctions with random Bible quotes and references to her own idiosyncratic feelings, which she cannot coherently articulate but is happy to impose on others by law.

This otherwise trivial story about one small-town individual’s weird religious hangups was trumpeted by the religious right as a stunning victory over the right of other people to make healthcare choices they don’t like, claiming other people’s healthcare was now “in meltdown mode” and “total disarray”. Every healthcare clinic in the country, including the one that has now hired a new director, went about its business as usual.