Efforts in red states to pass increasingly restrictive limits on abortions have ramped up in the past few years as the composition of the Supreme Court has made it more likely that those laws will be upheld. But a new law in Texas that’s set to go into effect on Sept. 1 is especially worrisome.
Not only has Texas banned virtually all abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, a point at which many women do not even know they’re pregnant; it has also provided for enforcement of that ban by private citizens. If you suspect that a Texan is seeking to obtain an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy, not only will you be able to sue the provider to try to stop it, but if you succeed, you’ll also be entitled to compensation. (And what’s known as the litigation privilege would likely protect you from a defamation claim even if you’re wrong.) The law, known as S.B. 8, effectively enlists the citizenry to act as an anti-abortion Stasi.
All of that would be […]
This is what already happens in several countries in Latin America with strict anti-abortion laws. In Nicaragua, for example, where I lived for several years, women who suffer miscarriages are often arrested and thrown in jail on the basis of “tips” by neighbors until they can convince someone in charge it wasn’t intentional. When they go back to their communities, they commonly find their homes/shops have been ransacked and any children they had from previous relationships taken away to parts unknown to live with others. This law is almost exclusively used in situations involving poor women, not the elite, and more often than not the woman is an individual who is making strides in her community to remove herself from poverty.
This anti-abortion law is clearly designed to control women, specifically poor women, and also plays to the resentment others (both women and men) feel when a woman forgets her “place.” This can’t happen in the America? Seeing the hostility often directed at women who forget their place in the U.S. (those, for example, who participate in areas men feel should belong exclusively to them), the distance between Nicaragua and the United States seems rather small. Laws that encourage neighbors to spy upon each other are also a tool to re-direct the attention of the populace from any scrutiny that might fall on the activities of the elite.
Reminds me of a woman in Kansas a few years back. Hospital exam showed her baby was dead, due to natural causes. The state law forced her to carry that dead baby for 9 months. I can’t begin to imagine the emotional and physical damage she suffered.