Dem
47
GOP
53
There were also a trio of news stories yesterday on the abortion front. First up, out of that bastion of freedom that is Texas, AG Ken Paxton is trying very hard to punish Dr. Margaret Carpenter, a New York-based OB/GYN who allegedly provided abortifacient pills to a woman in Texas. It is true that this is a violation of Texas state law, which establishes penalties for out-of-state doctors in this situation. It is also true that Paxton went to law school (the University of Virginia, to be exact), and surely learned that Texas state law stops at the Texas border. It is further true that Paxton cares nothing about the law, and is only interested in showboating, either in search of glory, or in hopes of running for higher office.
So, under these circumstances, Paxton filed suit in Texas state court, and he got a judgment against Carpenter for $113,000. Then, he sent the order to New York, requesting that authorities there enforce the order. That's a problem, not only because New York is generally uninterested in taking marching orders from some other state, but also because state law has specifically been amended to forbid state officials from complying with laws like the one in Texas. So yesterday, acting Ulster county clerk Taylor Bruck told Paxton to shove his court order where the Lone Star don't shine. The AG will try to get this matter before the U.S. Supreme Court, but it's fair to wonder if they will grant cert. And even if they do, we would guess the justices, even the conservative ones, will be very leery to declare that states are allowed to pass laws governing the behavior of people in other states. Not only is that clearly unconstitutional, but Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito can figure out what a state like California might do with that power, even if Ken Paxton can't.
The other pair of stories are both out of Georgia. The Peach State has some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the nation. And, it would seem, the Republican-controlled legislature wants to make things even worse. So, they are considering a near-total abortion ban, very much along the lines of the ones in other Deep South states. Should the measure become law, an abortion would become illegal as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detectable. That would work out to a cutoff of about 6 weeks, which is before most women know they are pregnant. The only exception to the law would be if the life of the mother was in danger. While that might sound reasonable in theory, in practice it creates a lot of danger for mothers, and no small number of injuries and deaths, because medical professionals are leery of intervening until doing so is absolutely, 100%, no-question-about-it justified. By then, it's often too late.
The other Georgia story speaks to the... culture, for lack of a better word, that has already trickled down to at least some of the folks responsible for enforcing the state's current, still pretty restrictive, abortion laws. A 24-year-old woman, whose name is publicly known but does not need to be repeated here, suffered a spontaneous miscarriage. It was so spontaneous, in fact, and so traumatic that she passed out, bleeding, outside her residence. Before she passed out, fearing prosecution, she tried to dispose of the fetus. This did not work; she was arrested by Georgia state police and charged with "concealing the death of another person" and "abandonment of a dead body."
That was last week. Since then, the coroner's office in Tift County has conducted a full autopsy on the miscarried 19-week-old fetus. The finding was that there was no trauma, no evidence that the woman tried to abort the pregnancy, and that the fetus was dead while still in her body and never took a breath. And so, Georgia law enforcement has responded by... keeping the woman in jail. They are still deciding whether or not to drop the charges.
We recognize that our headline ("War on Women") is pretty loaded. We are very familiar with the arguments and the rhetoric of the anti-choice movement, as we have been paying close attention to those folks for decades. Consistently, the great majority of anti-choice activists have said: (1) abortion is a states' rights issue, and (2) of course the procedure should be available in cases of rape, incest, or the mother's health is in danger. Neither of those two precepts is being followed in the cases covered by the above news stories. Meanwhile, we have never once heard an anti-choice advocate say that if a woman suffers a miscarriage, and there is even the slightest chance it might not be a "real" miscarriage, she should be imprisoned and made to suffer during a period of intense physical and emotional trauma. And yet, that is exactly what is happening in the third story.
Maybe the rhetoric of the anti-choice movement wasn't truthful. Maybe the people in positions of power, like Ken Paxton, don't actually care what the movement wants and are taking matters into their own hands, in service of their own goals. We do not feel particularly qualified to judge what is going on. What we do know is that if the United States chucks 10,000 bombs in the direction of Yemen, it is making war on Yemen, no matter what the U.S. government's stated (or actual) goals might be. Similarly, you have abortion policies that are turning women physicians into criminals, that are leading women in Georgia and elsewhere to be maimed or killed, and that are putting the 25% of women who suffer a miscarriage at real risk of being imprisoned. Regardless of what the stated (or actual) intent is, that is a war on women. (Z)