It’s chaos out there.
Roe V. Wade was a planned outcome, but it still leaves many people in a lot of distress and potential tragic uncertainty. Numerous patients have reported sobbing and screaming in despair when their appointments were cancelled by clinics. TikTok is circulating recipes for deadly herbal abortions. A group of hospitals, pharmacies and clinics in Missouri, a state where a so-called trigger law immediately banned abortion upon Roe’s demise, briefly stopped providing emergency contraception. In vitro fertilization doctors in certain states fear that they could be prosecuted if they discard unused embryos.
Every state with an abortion prohibition provides an exemption to save a mother’s life, but they’re not generally well-defined, so doctors and their attorneys have to decide on their own which interventions they can legally justify. What happens if a pregnancy is terminated? mightKill a woman What if doctors believe it’s going to become life-threatening, but not immediately? How sick must a patient be before medical professionals can take action? Lisa Larson-Bunnell is a Missouri hospital health care regulatory attorney who wants to know if doctors can prescribe methotrexate. This drug is used to treat certain cancers and rheumatoidarthritis. It is also an abortion inhibitor. “The answers for these questions are going to be somewhat case specific,” she said.
These laws are a sign of contempt for their vagueness. The people who wrote them either don’t know enough about how reproduction interacts with other health conditions to think through what they’re prohibiting, or they don’t care. In the coming weeks and months, a lot of Americans who don’t think anti-abortion laws apply to them are likely to be shocked at how their health care is curtailed, often at the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
“The far-reaching implications of this Supreme Court decision and its impact on women’s health and people’s health in a broad range of ways is just beginning to be understood,” said Senator Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat who was once vice president at Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota.
The legal turmoil unleashed by the Supreme Court’s decision will fundamentally change the relationship between the states. As The Washington Post reported, a conservative legal group called The Thomas More Society is drafting model legislation based on Texas’ abortion bounty bill. It would allow residents of states where abortion is illegal to sue those who help them get abortions elsewhere. The National Right to Life Committee proposes a model state law to make it easier for abortion providers to avoid state bans. It also targets those who publish information on where to get an abort.
The N.R.L.C.-proposed law would make it a felony to transport a minor out of the state for an abortion without consenting to a parent. It’s not clear whether, say, a teenager’s mother could be charged for taking her daughter across state lines for an abortion without telling the girl’s father. This could be a very serious issue in custody and divorce battles.
Traveling in the red states could be dangerous for anyone who is caught in one of these cases. Already, Planned Parenthood of Montana has stopped providing medication abortions to people from states with abortion bans, citing “the potential for both civil and criminal action.”
I think that Democrats in Congress should force Republicans to vote on every element of the right-wing regime they are trying to impose upon us. Republicans were adept at putting Democrats on defense while defending abortion rights. Take for example the 2003 Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which banned the use of late-term abortions. There were good reasons for Democrats to oppose that law — it forced women facing health risks, or carrying fetuses with severe abnormalities, to undergo more dangerous procedures. Republicans were able, thanks to the graphic descriptions of the abortions in question, to paint prochoice Democrats as extremists.
There are some Democratic staffers who would like to do something similar. One Democratic aide recently told me she wishes the Senate would try to codify the right to an abortion in cases of rape, incest and threats to a mother’s health, exemptions that are overwhelmingly popular with the public, but controversial among Republicans. If Republicans attempt to block it, such a measure could divide Republicans and highlight their fanaticism.
The aide said that pro-choice advocacy organizations generally oppose such a strategy, seeing it as a retreat. And Smith was skeptical, in part because she doesn’t think Republicans would let such bills even get to the debate stage. “I see no evidence that we have 10 Republicans who would be willing to provide those protections to women,” she said.
So Congress is unlikely to prevent the next catastrophe unless Democrats win enough Senate seat to end the filibuster. Plan A is to win in November by Democrats. As far as my knowledge goes, there is no plan A.
Source: NY Times