Texas starts from scratch on abortion
A Nebraska girl’s Facebook correspondence with her mother about abortion medication is turned over to prosecutors in Nebraska. A Mississippi woman’s internet search history looking for an abortion pill is used as evidence to charge her with killing her infant child.
An Indiana woman’s email from an online abortion pill marketplace helped convict and send her to prison.
Fifty years ago, women were using coat hangers to terminate pregnancies or seeking abortions in the back alley. Today, the back alley is online.
In the post-Roe v. Wade landscape, what will stop over-zealous prosecutors in states such as Texas where providing an abortion is now illegal from playing the role of Big Brother, combing browser histories, location data, even information from period-tracking apps in order to criminalize a doctor?
Is this the dystopian vision Gov. Greg Abbott had when he signed the abortion ban into law?
When the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion last June in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, it opened up a Pandora’s Box of sinister possibilities for anti-abortion restrictions. For states such as Texas, which had spent much of the 49 years since abortion rights became the law of the land chipping away at women’s bodily autonomy, Dobbs was the culmination of its efforts.
In the seven months since that decision, Texas and 12 other states have enforced near-total bans on abortion with limited exceptions, with several others prohibiting abortion after specific points in pregnancy. Anti-abortion extremists are seeking to push the battle lines of this culture war even further, going after birth control pills and formulating fetal personhood laws.
It’s as if making abortion restrictions as Draconian as possible will make us forget that for half a century women had control over their own destinies.
We’re already seeing the Texas abortion ban’s chilling effect on the medical profession and reproductive health care.
The law, which makes performing an abortion a felony punishable by up to life in prison, is forcing obstetrician-gynecology residency programs to send young doctors out of the state to learn about pregnancy termination. Doctors who fear lawsuits are postponing abortion care until a patient’s life is in imminent danger. In one instance, a Houston woman was forced to walk around for weeks in debilitating pain with fetal remains inside her because her doctor refused to perform a miscarriage surgery. In a state where ectopic pregnancies are already a major cause of pregnancy-related deaths, restricting doctors from treating their patients will have devastating consequences and could result in increased rates of maternal mortality.
A state where district attorneys who pledged to defy his ban are now being targeted by lawmakers for removal from office. Where would-be parents are postponing pregnancies out of fear that they will experience serious health complications that no doctor is willing to treat. Where abortion pill websites are earnestly being compared to child pornography.
More than half of Texas’ 23 abortion clinics have closed in the last seven months, according to the nonpartisan Guttmacher Institute. Requests for mailorder abortion pills have doubled, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The most recent data released by the state Health and Human Services Commission found that abortions in Texas plummeted by 99 percent in the months after the Dobbs decision.
But don’t worry, we’re told. Women’s health care will be well guarded by the governor and leaders of the state Senate and House, none of whom, by virtue of their gender, have ever had to contend with the consequences of being pregnant and bearing a child. Are we really supposed to accept that Texas doesn’t need an exception for rape and incest victims because Abbott has assured the public he will “eliminate rape”? Are we supposed to accept that a Plan B pill — which is most effective in the 72 hours after unprotected sex — is a perfectly suitable alternative to abortion rights? We think not.
If you want to see what lawmakers really think about women’s health care, follow the money. Since 2011, the Legislature has slashed family planning funding to qualified providers — although federal funding has thankfully made up for some of those losses — and forced the closure of dozens of clinics, and instead sent funds to organizations such as the anti-abortion Heidi Group, which was later forced to repay nearly $1.6 million for failing to provide the family planning services it was required to. Evidently, lawmakers haven’t learned from that mistake. In the House’s recent budget proposal, anti-abortion groups such as Alternatives to Abortion would receive a funding boost of $22 million despite a glaring lack of transparency on how the organization spends its money.
There are, thankfully, some lawmakers who are not seeking to further burden pregnant women or criminalize doctors who simply want clarity that they can do their jobs without risking a prison sentence. State Sen. Carol Alvarado, D-Houston, has authored two bills, one that would create several exceptions to the abortion ban in cases of a lethal fetal anomaly or to preserve a pregnant patient’s physical or mental health; another would allow women to get an abortion if the pregnancy is the result of sexual assault. Alvarado told the editorial board she believes the bills can attract the support of her Republican colleagues.
“I think there are some on the other side of the aisle that feel that this bill that they passed goes too far,” Alvarado said.
We hope she is right. Despite some notable rejections of abortion restrictions in Republican-led states such as Kansas and South Carolina, we are under no illusion that Texas’ ban will be overturned anytime soon. The courts have spoken and the goalposts have shifted for anti-abortion advocates towards enacting a federal abortion ban that would make the procedure illegal even in states that have codified a woman’s right to choose.
What we can do is remind lawmakers who gleefully voted to ban abortion that there are consequences for rolling back nearly 50 years of progress? That many women will never forget having freedom over their bodies stripped away. That all of us who believe, as Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in his majority opinion deciding Roe v. Wade, that the Constitution affords women an expansive right to privacy, won’t stop fighting to get it back.
Women who remember the freedom they had for 50 years won’t stop fighting to get it back.