Vigilante Justice, Back Alley Abortions, and Segregation Forever
There was no proclamation yesterday saying Roe v Wade is overturned. But that’s what happened.
Instead, a few unexplained procedural maneuvers from the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit allowed Senate Bill 8, ushered through the Republican-dominated Texas legislature and signed into law by Republican governor Greg Abbott, to take effect.
The law bans abortion once embryonic cardiac activity is detected, which is around six weeks following the last menstrual period, and offers no exceptions for rape or incest. Many women don’t even realize they are pregnant at that point. It gets around previous attempts at enactment of so-called heartbeat laws, which have been blocked by the courts.
The Texas version is intentionally designed to shield government officials from enforcement, and thus make legal challenges more difficult to secure. Instead, private citizens are incentivized via a cash rewards system to bring civil suit against an abortion provider or anyone who “aids or abets” the procedure.
https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1433288565136396288?s=20
In other words, vigilantism is encouraged. The Uber driver who takes a woman to a clinic, the nurse handling paperwork, and anybody with the “intent” to facilitate terminating a pregnancy can end up in court. Trust me on this one, it’s no paper tiger. Bible belt reactionaries have already started advertising their willingness to help in filing suits.
This was always going to be the year where anti-abortion forces thought they had a chance at getting their way. Actions by former President Trump to pack the courts with judges pre-screened by the Federalist Society for their political correctness, meant legal challenges would move further and faster than in past years.
Most observers thought the final blows to precedents established in the wake of Roe.v. Wade would come via a ruling on a case involving Mississippi in a blockbuster, end-of-term court decision. Instead there was a non-decision with the same result for Texas women as a decision overruling Roe.
It is, as court watcher Leah Litman described at the Washington Post, “a curious and intellectually cowardly way to resolve an issue that conservatives have often described as involving important legal and moral principles.”
From Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent:
“The Court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand. Last night, the Court silently acquiesced in a State’s enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents. Today, the Court belatedly explains that it declined to grant relief because of procedural complexities of the State’s own invention.”
More abortion restrictions (90!) have been enacted across the U.S. this year than in any previous year, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute. Expect another two dozen or so states to enact similar laws going forward.
Don’t think the assault on women's healthcare will stop with this Supreme Court non-ruling.
Via NPR:
Joe Pojman, executive director of the anti-abortion group Texas Alliance for Life, said the Supreme Court's apparent readiness to take a new look at abortion rights gives opponents such as himself some hope that Texas and other states will see an outcome that gives them the latitude for such restrictions.
Although he expects the so-called Texas Heartbeat Act to face a series of court challenges, he wants to see such bills go even further, he said, "even up to the moment of conception — fertilization."
“The moment of conception” means birth control, in case you had any doubt.
https://twitter.com/JYSexton/status/1433063857988243459?s=20
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The “pro-life” movement wasn’t really about saving babies, for the most part. Even after Roe v. Wade, anti-abortion sentiment was mostly limited to conservative Catholics.
The fact is, we as a society really don’t care that much about carrying pregnancies to term. The U.S. leads the developed world in maternal and infant mortality. The U.S. ranks around 50th in the world for maternal safety. Nationally, for Black women, the maternal death rate is nearly four times that of white women, and 10 to 17 times worse in some states.
The fetishization of the fetus as a political strategy has its origins in a 1971 ruling by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in the case of Green v. Connally. Ultimately, this case meant that the religious academies set up to perpetuate segregation were not eligible for tax-exempt status.
Despite the attempts at rewriting history by the likes of Jerry Falwell, evangelical and fundamentalist churches were not motivated by 1973’s Roe v Wade.
From Randall Balmer’s The Real Origins of the Religious Right:
Although a few evangelical voices, including Christianity Today magazine, mildly criticized the ruling, the overwhelming response was silence, even approval. Baptists, in particular, applauded the decision as an appropriate articulation of the division between church and state, between personal morality and state regulation of individual behavior. “Religious liberty, human equality and justice are advanced by the Supreme Court abortion decision,” wrote W. Barry Garrett of Baptist Press...
...In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
As the religious right has morphed into the fellowship of the Dear Leader, their positions have become more extreme and now overlap with a variety of ideologies that can’t be described as “pro-life.” Anti-abortion violence has also been climbing in recent years, as has white supremacist and misogynist violence.
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Is there a silver lining in all this bad news?
Some pundits (mostly men, for what that’s worth) seem to think the abolition of abortion rights will backfire on the GOP.
As one former GOP campaign consultant put it on Twitter (condensed for readability):
TX Republicans just put abortion rights on the ballot for every state and federal race in the country for 2022. GOP campaign managers and consultants are cringing. They loved to fundraise off the hope of overturning Roe, but secretly never actually wanted it to happen.
This will cost them seats all over the country. Pro-choice Republican women, and there are plenty, already uneasy after the insurrection and covid policies, will cross over in 2022. It won’t be a huge number, but it won’t take that many to flip close races Roe gave Repubs the ability to declare themselves pro-life with no political cost.
As long as it remained a constitutional right, it was not a political issue in the minds of voters. Now it is. For the people whose job it is to win elections, this is the last thing they wanted.
As much as I’d like to believe this will be the case, I’ll be waiting to see how the women’s movement responds.
https://twitter.com/tizzywoman/status/1433428637970092041?s=20
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