Republicans are making a huge mistake on abortion pills.
They are choosing intrusion.
Forty years ago I would buy Coors beer in California and bring it across the border into Oregon. Oregon prohibited whatever pasteurizing process Coors used, so Coors was illegal in Oregon back then. Coors became a prized commodity, served to guests as a special treat.
I presume that most motivated women, and certainly women with money to spend, will get abortion pills if they want them, regardless of the law. Some people will get them easily at a local pharmacy. Others will get them brought in from out of state. If that is blocked, women will get them via underground methods, the way people buy illegal drugs now, dangerously and furtively. For some people the hassles and illegality will be too much, or they will be caught in the legal snares, and they won't get them in time.
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| New York Times |
Counterfeits will enter the market. In the cases where there are medical complications women will be slower to get medical help. Abortion pill bans will make a bad situation worse. Over half of all abortions are done very early and by pill. Normal protocol is to take two drugs, first one day and then the next. The first is mifepristone, which ends the pregnancy. It works by blocking the hormone progesterone, so the uterine lining breaks down and the fertilized egg detaches, ending the pregnancy. A second pill, misoprostol, taken within 48 hours, causes the uterus to cramp, which empties the uterus. Either pill taken alone almost always works, but best results are when both are taken. It is 99% effective in ending the pregnancy without additional medical intervention. The woman experiences it as "a heavy period."
The two-pill regimen may be covered by a health plan. In 16 of the states it is covered by Medicaid; in the others it is not. Planned Parenthood reports that the average cost of the pills at their clinics is $580. People who acquire them underground will pay the up-charges associated with legal risks.
Walgreens announced that it will stop dispensing the drugs in about 20 states where current laws appear to ban early abortions, plus four states where abortions are legal but where a Republican Attorney General has threatened Walgreens anyway. In response, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced that California would end its contract with Walgreens to provide drugs to California's prisons. America is moving into a new phase on abortions, and now abortion pills, one characterized by different laws in different jurisdictions. Pills legal in one state will be illegal in another. In New Mexico, which is generally friendly to abortion, some counties are imposing local bans, so the subject of state pre-emption of county bans is being debated in its legislature.
All of this puts a focus on location, not health, safety, or the moral bases for abortion bans. Actions that are a felony in El Paso are perfectly legal across the border in New Mexico. Felony behavior in Boise is perfectly legal across the border in Oregon. I felt no guilt bringing Coors beer into Oregon.
This issue won't go away. Republican lawmakers are stuck with the inertia of having been anti-abortion back before the Dobbs decision. Republicans said abortion was murder because a fertilized egg was a precious un-born child with an immortal soul. Most Republicans never really believed that. If they had, there would have been mass uprisings by armed citizens at the "Auschwitz" of a woman's health center. GOP lawmakers are stuck with an extreme ideology at odds with their own real feelings, and significantly at odds with majority opinion.
Americans have complicated feelings about abortion, but early abortions have widespread acceptance by a majority of voters. Banning early abortion pills makes later abortions more common. Americans are accustomed to taking pills, including on matters of reproduction. Fights over abortion pills are a huge negative for Republicans. It puts the issue directly in the faces of voters.
Aggressive prosecutors are subpoenaing internet searches for abortion pills as a way to investigate and prosecute women. Republicans are making something intensely personal into something complicated, intrusive, arbitrary and fraught with legal risk. Women who consider themselves law-abiding will need to sneak and they won't like doing so. This all comes across as overreach, but Republicans are stuck doing it.
After all, they said abortion is murder.
9 comments:
Immortal soul? Maybe...absolutely no evidence, but hey, let's oppress half of the population just in case.
The Roe decision, rightly, didn't impose a fantastical religious belief on society, and at the same time compromised on another issue, infanticide. Mainly, however, it freed women from risking death in order to terminate a pregnancy, though the stigma has persisted, recognizing a right that followed the others associated with the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which I wonder would pass today.
Regardless of its wisdom it was never accepted by religious fanatics who set themselves on overturning it from day one. They found accomplices in a dying Republican party, and so here we are, with zombies on the Supreme Court who have eviscerated the establishment clause.
Immortal soul?...the ignorance of such nonsense is only exceeded by it's arrogance.
It shows that Republicans are desperate to control women's bodies, women's lives and mass fertility (not enough babies, especially white babies, being born). They also are desperate to keep this wedge issue alive (same goes for immigration).
Not exactly consistent with the party of Freedom and Less Government in our lives. But, of course, women don't count when it comes to being free in a patriarchy. True freedom is for men only.
And even if the woman or girls becomes pregnant by force, the response is, "Too bad, so sad, you must remain pregnant and have the baby. Deal with it."
Remember when calling it “Obamacare” was supposed to make the Affordable Care Act sound scary? One of the many bogus reasons Republicans gave for opposing it was that it “puts the government between you and your doctor,” as if their government interference in OB/GYN didn’t.
Republicans have staked out the same fanatical territory related to gun violence, opposing the universal background checks that 88% of Americans support. Apparently, they make up the difference by appealing to white nationalist fears of our changing demographics, promoting such crackpot conspiracy theories as The Great Replacement Theory.
None of this is new, of course. I remember when the conventional wisdom was that the best way to keep a woman was “barefoot and pregnant.” Everything old is new again.
You can think of politics as the attempt to harness the emotional/irrational impulses we all have to the rational/practical project of putting together large enough coalitions to be politically effective. Abortion is definitely out there on the emotional/irrational end of the spectrum. People have strong feelings.
I have always been a strong advocate for abortion rights, basically on libertarian grounds; it’s my body, I can do what I want with it. But sometime in the mid-1970, a former girlfriend I had remained friends with asked me to drive her to and from an abortion. When I picked her up to drive her home, I was totally surprised at the dark and heavy emotional tone in the car.
I had always been of the opinion that “the embryo is just a few cells, so who cares?” But that wasn’t what it felt like we had just done; it felt like we had done something really serious. The experience didn’t change my opinion about whether abortion should be legal, but it gave me a new insight into where the opposition to abortion rights comes from.
Issues like this put political parties into a tough situation; it takes extreme levels of political skill to navigate them.
As the gop shows us repeatedly, it doesn't care about a child.
This debate is about White males having trouble competing against females in the workplace, politics, education and elsewhere.
So if the gop can sideline women for a few years/decades to raise a child, (White) men will be able to resume their "god-given right" to dominate.
Can anyone point out exactly where in the U.S. Constitution it states that the microscopic fertilized egg (0.1 millimeter at 3 weeks, per quick internet search) has ANY "rights," especially "rights" that supercede the rights of a live, fully-born American woman or girl?
If I am correct, the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawed all involuntary servitude, aka slavery.
Women and girls are not even being compensated for the involuntary use of their bodies, bodily harm (damages), pain and suffering, emotional distress and lost opportunities. Taxpayers will need to pay reparations to these women and girls for involuntary reproductive slavery.
The states in the former Confederacy are the states with the strictest anti-abortion laws. Not a coincidence.
Of course other red, regressive, MAGA states have jumped on the bandwagon as well.
Can anyone point out exactly where in the U.S. Constitution it states that the microscopic fertilized egg (0.1 millimeter at 3 weeks, per quick internet search) has ANY "rights," especially "rights" that supercede the rights of a live, fully-born American woman or girl?
In the Dobbs decision, the Supreme Court decided that The Constitution doesn’t say anything about abortion, so it left that matter to the states. They overturned Roe, which found a right to abortion hiding somewhere within “penumbras emanating“ from The Constitution.
There’s a difference between supporting access to abortion (which I do), and believing that The Constitution has something to say about that (which I doubt).
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