Texas’ new abortion law puts nation in bad company internationally

With the passage of Texas’ regressive new abortion law and the looming possibility of the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in the near future, it’s worth looking at the countries that extremist Republicans are modeling in their movement toward outright restriction of abortion.

The list of nations that ban abortion altogether (see insert) is peppered with repressive and authoritarian countries. They’re places like:

■ Iraq, where systematic oppression of women is iron-handed even by Middle East standards, including a penal code that allows men to physically punish women in households. Despite an alarming increase in domestic violence against women due to the pandemic, and unprecedented protests by women for greater protections under the law, Iraqi leaders have yet to embrace a longstanding reform to the penal code.

■ El Salvador, where violations of the nation’s ban on abortion carry prison sentences of up to 40 years.

■ Laos, whose single-party communist power structure has a lengthy history of jailing and torturing political and religious dissidents.

■ Angola, where human rights abuses by an increasingly oppressive regime included security forces firing live ammunition at a crowd protesting the government’s response to COVID-19 this year, killing at least 10 unarmed individuals.

Are these nations that the U.S. should aspire to become? Of course not, and hopefully the U.S. Justice Department will keep us from moving in their direction with the lawsuit it filed Thursday aiming to block the implementation of the Texas legislation and have it declared unlawful.

But the enaction of the ban demonstrates clearly that the extremist GOP traffics in the same ideological sphere as the most repressive and dictatorial governments in the world. The Founders of our nation would shudder to see the direction the GOP is steering toward.

Texas’ law was a withering attack on women’s reproductive rights in that state, and a sign of things to come in any areas controlled by Republicans. The Supreme Court’s disgraceful decision to allow the law to go into effect underscored the threat.

The legislation prohibits nearly all abortions after six weeks of conception, a time when most women don’t even know they’re pregnant. It also creates a vigilante enforcement structure, allowing private citizens to file lawsuits against anyone who provides abortions or even assists a woman in obtaining one. Complete with a provision that allows the litigants to receive at least $10,000 for successful suits, the law effectively turns Texans into bounty hunters.

And despite false claims by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to the contrary, the regressive law even bans abortions after six weeks in cases of rape or incest.

The march backward on reproductive rights and women’s equality isn’t limited to Texas. As reported by Reuters, 19 states have enacted 97 restrictions on abortion since January, including 12 that have passed so-called “trigger laws” that will automatically result in full bans if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

However, since the GOP clearly believes that Americans’ right to bodily autonomy is subject to gender-based conditions when it comes to reproduction, why stop with women? By the same standards of the Texas law, a state could pass a statute requiring men to get vasectomies and allow women to sue men without vasectomies for up to $10,000 per suit. Why not? Requiring all men to have vasectomies would end the need for abortion too! What’s good for the goose is, quite literally in this example, good for the gander.

Imagine how the white males of the GOP would howl if a forced vasectomy law was put in place to end abortions. See, that’s where we’re at with the GOP and the Texas law: Your gender alone determines your rights. There is no limit to additional abuses if we accept that proposition.

Ironically, abortions in America have been falling for a long while now because of easier access to reproductive health services. Meanwhile, studies of countries that harshly restrict women’s reproductive rights show that these strict policies do not reduce the number of abortions that take place, but rather result in women turning to unqualified providers or home methods to terminate pregnancies. According to one frequently cited report, botched abortions cause as many as 11% of all maternal deaths in countries with harsh restrictions. In the United States, there are approximately 3.7 million births per year — calculate the horrific math of losing 11% of those mothers.

Fortunately, abortion rights in Nevada aren’t under attack at the moment, but instead are safely protected under our state constitution. But that could change if GOP leaders gain control of the levers of power.

It’s critical for voters here and across the country to remember all of this when choosing political candidates in 2022 and beyond. One party is waging an all-out attempt to turn back the clock to an era of patriarchy and disempowerment of women. Voters must send that party a message that we won’t allow the U.S. to go backward.