The Red Mass Went Up My Ass

NOTE FROM THE FLYTRAP FOUNDERS: If you’re a paid subscriber and you’re having trouble viewing today’s piece, check your spam filter! We’ve heard from a number of folks who are seeing our emails go to the junkbox, so be sure to add us to your safe-senders list. If you’re still unable to view our content after checking that out, please holler at us at info@theflytrapmedia.com and we’ll get you sorted out.

The John Carroll Society is an organization for Catholic “professionals” in Washington, D.C., including doctors and judges who wear suits underneath their long white medical coats or flowing black robes, meting out a person's fate with the authority of the God they worship at Sunday Mass. As self-described laypeople in service to the Archbishop of Washington, I imagine their interpretation of faith unduly influences their day jobs.

Emboldened or terrified by the fall of Roe v. Wade, doctors and judges make ever more restrictive rulings about whether a pregnant patient, often a mother with living, breathing, clamoring children at home, is septic enough to provide the legal standard of care: a life-saving abortion. Providing anyone an abortion as a legitimate form of health care is—I’ve learned in nearly a decade as an abortion journalist—an oxymoron to a megalomaniac.

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was a member of the society before he also became the answer to its prayers, the closest thing to a SCOTUS swing vote on abortion. Every first Sunday in October, the John Carroll Society convenes an annual "Red Mass" to pray for the Supreme Court justices before the start of the judicial session the following day.

The Red Mass reduces the rest of us—you, me, and anyone who isn’t a conservative Catholic doctor or judge praying, delaying, and ruling away routine medical interventions—to a Hail Mary. I mean the idiom, not the prayer. I am sure we are not on their list of petitions to God the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit. The only way to find out would be to stream the Red Mass on YouTube.

I have never been inside the Red Mass, but the Red Mass has been inside me.

While reporting on the first Trump administration’s anti-abortion agenda and holding myself together with whiskey and dry shampoo, I underwent my first colonoscopy to assess my longstanding gastrointestinal distress. The symptoms had only gotten worse with each successive Supreme Court nominee that brought us closer to the majority needed to overturn Roe. Losing Roe was an outcome I predicted to family, friends, and some readers who seemed to think, or outright said, I was overreacting.

If you’ve ever lived with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), IBS-D for diarrhea in my case, you know that unpredictable, explosive bowel movements are exhausting, physically and mentally. Which foods would run through me? Would I be near a bathroom in an advanced post-industrial yet highly individualistic country which, according to one estimate, has eight public toilets for every 100,000 of us plebs who live here? I would consider what small-dollar value mints or chips to buy my entry into a coffee shop bathroom while doubling over as subtly as possible, leaning into the direction of each cramp like you’re supposed to do with a car spinning out in the rain.

As a white woman, I could sometimes get away without a purchase. As a woman, a once and forever “good girl” and a “nice Catholic girl,” no less, I was conditioned to follow the unspoken rules of late-stage capitalism, which didn’t post the bathroom door code for the masses, anyway. Would I be able to get the 4-digit number from the barista in time?

Those were the questions I asked myself on my “bad poop days” in 2015, when I started seeing a doctor who I will refer to as Dr. Name Redacted. He came highly recommended by my primary care doctor, and the internet stood behind his reputation as the 5-star Uber driver you would want if your internal road conditions were backed up or, in my case, mudslides threatened to wipe out the roads.

Dr. Name Redacted, I would later learn once our doctor-patient relationship turned like my stomach, is a top leader of the John Carroll Society. The Red Mass went up my ass.

Bad poop days began to outnumber the good after the first election of Donald Trump in 2016 and his sparsely attended inauguration as president in 2017. That orange motherfucker’s cabinet and undersecretaries from hell issued regulation after regulation with the force of law against abortion and, through the same legalese, trans rights.

I was in the process of informally excommunicating myself from the Catholic Church by writing about abortion and marrying a nice Jewish boy, whose religious values alternately accept and affirm abortion. But I couldn’t let go of my Catholic superstitions, embroidered with the morbid self-absorption in each stitch of gold thread through the red-for-Red Mass vestments “representing the tongues of fire symbolizing the presence of the Holy Spirit,” in the John Carroll Society’s words.

❝ Dr. Name Redacted came highly recommended by my primary care doctor, and the internet stood behind his reputation as the 5-star Uber driver you would want if your internal road conditions were backed up or, in my case, mudslides threatened to wipe out the roads.

Shitting my way through abortion end times had to be punishment for begging my high school Advanced Placement U.S. Government and Politics teacher to let me argue against Roe. My case, my choice. “But it’s a baby!” I shouted with the authority of a high school senior who always stopped at third base with her boyfriend, lest the angel Gabriel try to recreate the Immaculate Conception on Saturday nights. Besides, the pixelated, Botoxed white face of the actress Patricia Heaton on the family computer assured me I could be a “Feminist for Life” amid my growing cognitive dissonance on Sunday mornings.

The Supreme Court would anthropomorphize my teenage hubris into “sincerely held religious beliefs” for corporations a decade later in the 2014 case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.

We can perpetuate our childhood obsessions, or their mirror images in adulthood. Of course I would come to write about what I’d feared the most, a mosquito drawn to the sweetest blood with the fastest hands. With each smack from the federal agencies, I dismantled abortion stigma for everyone except myself. I spurned a highly effective IUD—a false “abortifacient” to an anti-abortion fucko. I needed the monthly assurance of my period, which isn’t a regular indicator for everyone. Black women meanwhile had been coerced into IUDs and other long-acting reversible contraceptives for decades.

The car was spinning out and I was leaning in, at the expense of my colon. Roe wasn’t good enough, I learned from Black women who ran reproductive justice organizations. Roe left out trans people denied gender-affirming hysterectomies that left them vulnerable to dissociative pregnancies. Roe left out young people who had to beg for the rights to their own bodies through judicial bypasses. Roe left out mothers who couldn’t find childcare; couldn’t fill it up, regular; couldn’t take off three days from work to travel to and account for potential waiting periods in another state.

Roe was still in place when military service members, the Indian Health Service’s patients, and Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries couldn’t use their various forms of government-sponsored health care due to a congressional rider called the Hyde Amendment.

The pink-mottled oil on canvas ghost of Henry Hyde looked down at me during “religious freedom” hearings in the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, pre-insurrection, while his first victim, Rosie Jimenez, denied Medicaid coverage for a legal abortion after Roe, should still be alive and a grandmother today.

But Roe was what we had. We were going to lose Roe.

My singularity of focus wasn’t transferable, my foolish hope being that we could stop what I could not. I told the otherwise loving concern trolls in my life I could give less of a shit about abortion if they gave more of a shit. I lived in a constant state of agitation that my kind of laypeople weren’t shitting bricks, which sounded preferable—fully formed stools—to what was coming out of me.

I felt like a meme or a conspiracy theorist insisting there was a right-wing deep state government takeover unfolding before our very eyes—and did you hear me? Losing Roe would be the least of our problems when fetal personhood entered the Constitution. Are you shitting yourself yet?

Dr. Name Redacted ordered various blood tests, all of which came back “normal” during my years as his patient. By 2017, he recommended I undergo a colonoscopy to rule out structural issues—the literal and metaphoric kinds that tend to run in high-strung Italian American families that yell to communicate without saying what they really mean. Given my “family history,” Dr. Name Redacted said. I swallowed the phrase with the laxative solution in preparation for the procedure.

From the toilet, I considered my “family history.” Northeast Italian American Catholics at the turn of the century, the low-rise, dial-up aughts, were far from Bible-reading evangelicals and contemporary trending tradcaths Tik Toking their adult conversion stories without a child’s unpleasant memories (at best) or trauma (at worst). The then 40-something boomer mothers and aunts performed penance and womanhood, or maybe they are the same thing. These women set the pot of Sunday sauce, a ragù—no, not that Ragu—with pork sausages and a braciole, on the stove before Mass, lighting the gas as soon as they returned home. Their lacquered nails gripped the wooden spoons they used to ever so often stir the pot.

My mom believed, really believed, more than most. Hail Mary on repeat had gotten her through breast cancer and ulcerative colitis, the latter diagnosis of concern to Dr. Name Redacted. Otherwise, in Goomba Jesus’ world, you could take your little birth control pills. Just don’t show your father. You could probably have your little abortion, if you never talked about it. Just don’t show up pregnant at the backyard barbeque where your uncle will say he’s pro-choice, “except for abortion,” in the misogyny-to-insurrection pipeline building between the ears of boys and men for whom Rush Limbaugh led to Joe Rogan led to Nick Fuentes. Many of the women supported it, because white women launder white supremacy.

I arrived for my colonoscopy in early 2018 with Dr. Name Redacted at an area Catholic hospital that counts toward the country’s one in seven or one in four acute-care beds, depending on the estimate. Either a nurse or a technician handed me what they described as a mandatory pregnancy test. I did not want to take the mandatory pregnancy test. I was just learning how two pink lines can and will be used against you in a court of law, and on an operating room table, and at a pharmacy counter. At Catholic and secular hospitals alike, a pregnancy test or the question of pregnancy is the standard barrier to care for anyone in possession of a uterus.

The pregnancy test was the first rub. The anesthesia was the second. I remember Dr. Name Redacted’s medical team poking my veins, to no avail, and he was annoyed. Like most doctors, he probably hadn’t placed an IV in a patient’s arm since his internship. That is the work of a nurse, and it is often gendered work—bitch work.

The third rub was the billing.

I called my employee-sponsored insurance provider from another hospital where I set up camp while my mother-in-law hovered between life and death. She was recently moved out of the intensive care unit when I excused myself to the waiting room to deal with what must have been a mistake for my recent colonoscopy: a $1,200 bill—$1,000 for the physician’s payment and $200 for the hospital co-pay.

❝ You could probably have your little abortion, if you never talked about it. Just don’t show up pregnant at the backyard barbeque where your uncle will say he’s pro-choice, “except for abortion,” in the misogyny-to-insurrection pipeline building between the ears of boys and men for whom Rush Limbaugh led to Joe Rogan led to Nick Fuentes.

To the best of my recollection, I sought the blessing of the insurance company prior to the procedure. I knew there would be no absolution, no number of prayers I could say to wash away the sins of capitalism when you owe money in this fractured not-even-a-system. Because Dr. Name Redacted coded the procedure as “medical,” rather than “preventative,” the insurance company representative told me I was responsible for the entire bill. I was confused. “Given my family history.” Wasn’t that the definition of preventative?

Dr. Name Redacted presumably was not happy to hear from me, however many times I reached out. When he returned one of my calls, he blamed insurers. He didn’t have much good to say about them, he told me—even though they bankrolled his physician’s payments for other patients who weren’t me. My insurance company, like others, was running a “little bit of a scam,” he said. An official insurance company letter instructed Dr. Name Redacted to change the procedure code based on its review of my case file. He countered with a five-sentence letter attesting to the necessity of the procedure, given my family history.

Recoding the procedure would amount to insurance fraud, he said.

Christ, what an asshole, I thought.

Dr. Name Redacted promised to consult with the “billing team” about the code, but I never learned the outcome. Presumably, it was not in my favor because the insurance company’s decision stood. I owed Dr. Name Redacted $1,000 for his fee, plus another $200 for the hospital stay—a matter of hours for an outpatient scope of my colon.

My perceived lack of informed consent in a U.S. medical decision making matrix that relies on a cost-benefit analysis led me to write to hospital leadership. Plus, I really, really didn’t want to pay the $1,200. A woman in charge passed along my case to the hospital’s patient advocate. My case was still under review when, presumably, the same “billing team” sent the balance to collections. I lost my shit. The patient advocate never contacted me—the patient—and ruled against me.

The Red Mass went up my ass, and into my wallet. To put an end to this aspect of the stress poop cycle, I put Dr. Name Redacted on the lowest of the interest-free payment plans the hospital offered patients like they were part of the Presentation of the Gifts, and tried to move on from the altar of capitalism.

The cycle of shitting three to four times a day unfortunately didn’t resolve. My primary care doctor recommended a new gastroenterologist, an integrative practitioner whose practice promised to heal my gut through the transformative power of food. Six to eight daily cups of greens and cruciferous vegetables, as you can imagine, threatened to rip my asshole a new asshole.

Somehow, I found my way to my current gastroenterologist. She fixed, if not healed, my IBS-D in late 2019 with a simple question: “Have you ever tried a daily Imodium?” A daily Imodium slowed me and my colon down and together, we formed solid stool once a day. In 2022, my traumatic preeclamptic birth somehow reset my gut, which the doctor said can happen with the great postpartum shift. Through losing Roe to Trump’s second coming, I continue to be mostly regular, with no gastrointestinal medical interventions and a hell of a lot of therapy.

There is going to be a “minimum national standard” for abortion—a national abortion ban. I have to care for myself, so I can care for others instead of yelling to communicate this time.

My current doctor also taught me a few key lessons about my body, my self, and the medical industrial complex. First, she insisted a pre-procedure pregnancy test or question for the uterus crowd was necessary because anesthesiologists need to calibrate their meds for patients. I still think this begs the question: Who is the patient? The American Society of Anesthesiologists is on my side, at least in theory, or in public relations. According to a 2021 statement, “The patient has the right to decide to have pregnancy screening prior to receiving an anesthetic. Coercing a patient into having a pregnancy test against their wishes violates patient autonomy. Informed consent for pre-procedure pregnancy testing should be obtained to respect a patient’s self-determination (autonomy) of decision making.”

Then my doctor explained a loophole specific to gastric distress in the Affordable Care Act—under which Democrats capitulated codifying Roe despite their majorities in 2010 and supermajorities in the prior election cycle. A “preventative” colonoscopy is covered in full for patients starting at age 45 today, and 50 at the time of my appointment, a threshold I still do not meet. Under the loophole, closed in 2020, if Dr. Name Redacted found my family history inflaming my hypothetical 50-year-old colon or polyps growing inside of it, he would have to recode the preventative “screening” to “therapeutic” or medical, which wouldn’t be covered by insurance regardless of age.

He also, I believe, could have informed my consent.

Dr. Name Redacted wasn’t wrong when he shitted on the grift. What he failed to recognize was his part in it. I don’t know what compelled me to Google him, years later. Dr. Name Redacted’s picture with Brett Kavanaugh twisted the five feet of colon he’d explored with his camera-capped plastic tube. The sense of violation was what surprised me, clenched me with renewed grief over what we’d lost.

Red Mass, my ass.

With that orange motherfucker’s resurrection for a second term, I find myself angry with Dr. Name Redacted’s “do no harm” profession. Angrier still at Democrats’ complacency and the mainstream media’s business-as-usual approach to the political that could not be any more personal. Women—Black women in particular—are dying from miscarriages, whether a doctor fails to act out of cowardice or malice. People are being robbed of living the kind of lives they dream and deserve, with or without children.

These thoughts run through me whenever I think about Dr. Name Redacted. He’s not worth my money. The John Carroll Society is not worth my time. But I have written in service of rending the red vestments, the black robes, and the white coats. I have written in service of you. The Red Mass that came for my ass is coming for yours, too.

This piece was edited by Tina Vásquez and copy edited by Katelyn Burns.