Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call
Roe v. Wade Protest
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is arrested during a sit-in outside of the Supreme Court to protest the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on July 19, 2022.
The shape of the post-Roe United States is swimming into view, and most of the worst predictions of pro-choice activists are coming true. Not only have tens of millions of women lost the right to choose whether or not to be pregnant, and not only are pregnant pre-teen rape victims being forced to travel to different states to get abortions, much medical care for people of all kinds is also under grave threat. The increasing pile of stories of care being denied, thanks in large part to lawyerly hesitation, are grisly and wholly predictable.
It’s increasingly clear that the anti-abortion right had no idea what they were about to inflict on the American people. But if the last few weeks are any judge, contact with reality will not cause them to moderate their views. On the contrary, they are already retreating into denial or even more deranged zealotry.
The political background here is wide public misunderstanding. As Alex Pareene once wrote, “the few who ardently oppose abortion have been able to skillfully exploit a certain squeamishness most Americans feel about the procedure that leads them to tell pollsters that abortion should only be legal ‘in certain circumstances.’” In particular, the anti-abortion movement's hysterical rhetoric and policies around late-term abortions, and associated policies, created an impression that a significant portion of abortions come from women who are days from giving birth and abruptly decide they’d rather not, basically throwing a live infant in the garbage.
This is, of course, not remotely the case. The vast majority of abortions happen very early in the pregnancy, and the vast majority that happen later are because the fetus has irreparable medical problems or the health of the mother is threatened.
But now, with abortion banned with almost no exceptions in several states and de facto banned in many more, conservatives have crashed headlong into their own numerous—and this time very real—moral quandaries.
The most prominent story of late has been that of the 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio who had to flee to Indiana to end her pregnancy. The conservative reaction was instructive. When the story was originally published, conservatives from National Review to Fox News scoffed. Jesse Watters suggested it was probably a “hoax” and Tucker Carlson stated flatly it was “not true.” (They were helped along by Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post, who rarely misses a chance to beclown himself while trying to discredit the left.)
When it turned out that the child rape pregnancy really had happened, conservatives pivoted to attack. Watters—following the lead of his former boss Bill O’Reilly, who repeatedly accused Dr. George Tiller of being a “baby killer” until a right-wing terrorist assassinated him—claimed that the doctor who performed the abortion had failed to report both the rape and the abortion as required by state law, and had the Indiana attorney general on to announce that he was going to open a criminal investigation. (It later turned out that the doctor actually had done everything required by law. She is considering legal action.) The other attack was to emphasize the immigration status of the rapist, which has nothing to do with the ability of the child victim to obtain an abortion.
All this fits exactly with long habits of the conservative movement. For many years it has learned that it can always indulge its worst, most depraved instincts (like nominating Donald Trump for president), and almost never have to pay a price for them. The conservative bias of American institutions and the fecklessness and cowardice of their liberal opponents has reliably bailed them out. When faced with some disaster of their own creation, conservatives virtually always double down, deflect blame, attack their critics, and most of all claim victimhood for being criticized.
The womb of every person capable of pregnancy is a potential crime scene, and any food, drink, drug, sport, or hobby that might cause a miscarriage is a potential homicide weapon.
So it would be wrong to expect that conservatives will do anything to rectify the broader medical disaster that is taking shape across the country. While child rape pregnancies are not that uncommon in terms of raw numbers, as Lindsey Tanner reports for the Associated Press, the end of Roe is wreaking much broader havoc with all kinds of other medical care. In Ohio, at least two women reported that doctors would not treat them for ectopic pregnancies. In Texas, a woman suffering a miscarriage had to sit and wait, bleeding profusely, until she was judged close enough to death to get care. In Virginia, a woman with lupus was denied her methotrexate medication because it can also be used for abortions.
And as Sam Karlin reports at The Advocate, a Louisiana woman whose water recently broke at 16 weeks pregnant was denied an abortion-style extraction of the nonviable fetus, and instead had to suffer through an excruciating labor, after which she hemorrhaged a liter of blood.
This is simply the kind of thing that happens when one treats abortion as murder. The womb of every person capable of pregnancy is a potential crime scene, and any food, drink, drug, sport, or hobby that might cause a miscarriage is a potential homicide weapon. Women and girls become de facto second-class citizens.
Now, some of these problems are happening because these abortion bans are so vaguely written and lawyers are afraid to violate them. But from Texas to Louisiana, conservatives are fighting against any effort to clarify them. Instead, the groundwork is being laid to legally prevent women from traveling to liberal states to get abortions. A goal of a national ban has already been announced, consequences be damned. If history is any guide, the certain grotesque consequences from such a policy will be carefully downplayed and ignored in the right-wing media, and the victims subjected to harassment if not violence.
If that future is to be avoided, the fanatical anti-abortion minority that has seized control of the Republican Party and the Supreme Court must be defeated.
