It’s been almost three years since the conservatives on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wadeand in that time, everything that pro-choice advocates warned would happen has indeed happened.
Pregnancies are more dangerous. Infant mortality is up. And even though the ostensible holding in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was that abortion should be left up to the states, anti-choice activists and conservative politicians keep pushing for nationwide bans and undermining the will of voters.
In pushing for bans, anti-choicers have often tried to minimize their impact by saying that people who have abortions are victims of the abortion-industrial complex or whatever, so they shouldn’t be prosecuted. Anti-abortion activists know most people don’t support bringing criminal charges against patients, so they pretended like that would never happen—fig leaf to make bans more palatable.
Now, spurred on by so-called abortion abolitionists, conservative legislators in at least 8 states are pushing bills that would allow for criminal charges against abortion patients. These efforts were inevitable. If hard-liners truly believe what they say—that abortion is murder—then there’s no moral justification for exempting patients from prosecution.
This has led to some hilarious whining from leading anti-abortion groups who are now being targeted by their more hardline brethren. It turns out they don’t like being told that they are ungodly, murderous demons for not wanting to imprison people who get abortions.
Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, complained that she fears being shot by abortion abolitionists and that she now knows the price of a bomb dog. This complaint might land better if anti-abortion activists didn’t have a long and horrifying history of shooting providers and bombing clinics.
Guess it isn’t so fun to be on the receiving end of those attacks.
Anti-choicers have also tried to package bans as safety measures to protect pregnant people from the dangers of abortion—even though abortion, particularly medication abortion, is extremely safe.
You know what actually is dangerous? Pregnancy. You know what’s even more dangerous? Being pregnant in a state with an abortion ban.
It’s not just that people are dying because doctors, fearful of being criminally charged, are refusing to perform abortions—though that is certainly happening. Even before Dobbsresearch showed that states with the most abortion restrictions had higher maternal mortalitysince those states tend to have fewer parental care resources and often refuse expanded Medicaid eligibility, which provides longer post-birth coverage.
But surely babies are much safer now, right? Nope.
Infant mortality is up in states with abortion bans. While some people have the means to travel to other states for abortions, those who can’t—typically poorer people and people of color—already experience higher rates of infant complications and mortality.
Also, when people are forced to carry to term fetuses with congenital anomalies, those babies often die shortly after birth. But in places like Texas, legislators don’t seem terribly bothered by the gruesome specter of babies born with lethal abnormalities, doomed to short lives of terrible suffering.
The notion that Dobbs was just about returning abortion regulations to the states was also always a lie. If someone truly believes that abortion is murder, they’re not going to be OK with that murder just because it happens across state lines.
Hence the push for nationwide abortion bans and fetal personhood.
Hence attempts to the Ban traveling out of state for abortions and prosecuting abortion funds that help cover those costs.
And hence lawmakers trying to roll back abortion rights even after people voted to enshrine them in their state constitutions.
Pregnant people are not safer. Actual, factual babies are not safer. But at least we won’t know how much less safe they are?
Most of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees who worked on tracking and improving maternal and infant outcomes were just placed on leaveas was everyone who worked on the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System.
And not only did the Trump administration stop tracking maternal and infant mortality. Texas’ maternal mortality committee stopped reviewing pregnancy-related deaths after Dobbsand Georgia removed all members of its maternal mortality committee after ProPublica reported on two pregnancy-related deaths that were preventable.
Every justification for the demise of Roe was a falsehood designed to obscure the real impact of abortion bans. Now, the whole country bears the burden of those lies.
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