You ain’t seen nothin’ yet
The prospects of a post-Roe America have women spooked already (Wired):
WITHIN MINUTES OF the leaking of the draft opinion from the US Supreme Court calling for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Elizabeth Constance, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Heartland Center for Reproductive Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska, was inundated with messages on social media from concerned patients. What does this mean for the embryos I have frozen, they asked her. What does it mean for the egg retrieval I have planned? “Our patients are really afraid,” says Constance.
Should Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case which ruled that the right to abortion in the US is protected by the Constitution, be rolled back, the repercussions will be swift, and they will be devastating. And the realities of a post-Roe world will likely not stop at abortion bans. Many more frontiers of reproductive health are in peril, legal experts and bioethicists warn.
In part, because Republicans are swinging for the fences. Aaron Blake has more:
Several states have recently passed trigger bans that make no exceptions in the cases of rape or incest. (And several GOP senators recently punted on whether they support them, citing the lack of a final word from the Supreme Court on Roe.)
A number of high-profile Republican candidates have explicitly come out against these exceptions — a position at odds with about 8 in 10 Americans and with where the GOP has stood in recent decades. A few candidates even oppose life-of-the-mother exceptions.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) was pressed this weekend on his state not making exceptions for incest, and he suggested the issue could be revisited.
“When you look at the number of those that actually involve incest, it’s less than 1 percent,” Reeves told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “And if we need to have that conversation in the future about potential exceptions in the trigger law, we can certainly do that.”
Another proposal (and another area where Republicans previously treaded lightly) is to criminalize abortion — that is, to attach significant criminal penalties to deter people from violating a state’s ban.
Trigger laws in Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Tennessee and Utah would make providing an abortion a felony. Idaho’s law would carry sentences of up to two to five years for providers.
You’ve lost your touch, South Carolina
Louisiana is going for full nullification.
How many doubling-downs are Republicans preparing? Republican state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman is doubling down on Texas’ ban (Mother Jones):
Coleman’s proposed legislation would not only allow citizens to sue anyone who performs an abortion for a Missouri resident, but anyone who helps or even attempts to help a Missouri resident seek an abortion in or out of state. In other words, Missouri’s law would come for people outside of Missouri.
While this could be considered a step forward in the development of citizen-enforced rights-abridging laws, historically, it looks like a giant step backward. The most notorious corollary are the Fugitive Slave laws, which required the recapture and return of enslaved people who made it to free states—and put anti-slavery Northerners at risk of arrest, fueling resentments that led to the Civil War.
“When you look at the Texas law, it has all of the features and ingredients of the Fugitive Slave laws,” says Michele Goodwin, an expert in constitutional law and reproductive rights at the University of California-Irvine School of Law. “To understand the pernicious underbelly of the Texas law means situating it alongside other successful laws that sought to shackle individuals and keep them from gaining their fundamental human rights.” Rep. Coleman’s innovation, like the Fugitive Slave laws’, is to expand this regime nationwide.
The South’s insistence on expanding slavery into new states led to the Civl War, didn’t it?
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