Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP
A protester holds a sign high at the White House, at the end of a pro-choice march from the Supreme Court, June 26, 2022.
With its ruling last month in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court has collapsed Americans’ right to privacy in matters related to abortion and sexual health. As a result, the various state governments that have banned (or will soon ban) abortion will now be fully enabled by the federal government to spend taxpayer money on unregulated digital surveillance, violent vigilantism, and criminal prosecutions against anyone who is declared to be abetting, let alone directly having, an abortion.
Some, like University of Texas law professor Charles Silver, are warning of a disaster comparable to the failed War on Drugs. “The negative consequences of the War on Drugs greatly exceeded the positive ones,” wrote Silver on June 27. “It cost more than $1 trillion, undermined our freedoms, militarized our police forces, institutionalized racism, fostered corruption, stimulated the formation of gangs, facilitated the spread of disease, ruined the lives of millions, and was responsible for the deaths of millions more.”
It also, of course, failed to alleviate American drug distribution and use.
For now, the “War on Abortion” will be led, and paid for, by state governments. Some states, most infamously Texas, had already begun pumping in money to set up authoritarian anti-abortion programs before the Dobbs decision. Most prominently, the state established the so-called Alternatives to Abortion program in 2006. Through the program, the Texas state government currently sends $100 million in taxpayer dollars to Christian anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers,” which use deceptive tactics to talk pregnant people out of having an abortion. Until 2017, neither lawmakers nor the general public were able to access even basic information as to what these crisis pregnancy centers did with taxpayer money. Moreover, specific data about pregnancies, abortions, and the general well-being of patients as it relates to these centers remains elusive. What is known is that the budget for the Alternatives to Abortion program in Texas grows every year, as a percentage of the overall budget. As a University of Texas law student named Audrey Gow pointed out in 2020, while COVID decimated the Texas state budget for social spending, the Alternatives to Abortion program was left untouched.
Texas has also spent millions of dollars in recent years on abortion-related legal fees.
It’s too soon to put an exact number on how much the share of the Texas state budget related to abortion will balloon going forward, but it is safe to assume that plans for invasive surveillance, out-of-state abortion pill restrictions, and perpetual prosecution (all of which will disproportionately harm Black and Latino people) will not come cheap.
To get a sense of what Texas and other states might spend on anti-abortion enforcement, it is useful to examine what they already spend on policing and surveillance. Texas already is spending nearly $3 billion on “border security,” and sending millions of dollars to private companies for surveillance tools and capabilities. Other abortion-ban trigger states, like Arkansas, provided budget increases this year for state, county, and municipal law enforcement. A study showed that in 2019 the 50 states and their local governments spent upward of $255 billion on police, corrections, and courts. And 2019 was before the recent “fund the police” craze, and the severe escalation of the War on Abortion.
For now, the “War on Abortion” will be led, and paid for, by state governments.
With states unable to print money, trade-offs would have to ensue. Money spent for the War on Abortion will have to, at some level, come out of other parts of the budget. This means either less money spent on other parts of criminal justice—white-collar crime units, perhaps, or improved conditions in correctional facilities—or other forms of social spending. In addition, forcing pregnant people, particularly low-income ones, to carry children to term could increase safety-net spending, whether they keep the child or send it into the foster care system. Being denied an abortion can also trigger significant physical and mental-health issues that require care. So just as an elaborate abortion surveillance state is funded, potentially taking away from welfare spending, more welfare need could arise.
SEEKING TO SKIRT NOW-OBSOLETE FEDERAL LAW and, perhaps more relevantly in a post-Roe world, save money in their ever-increasing budgets, state governments had been concocting frightening and draconian methods of criminalizing abortion. One such example is the Texas Heartbeat Act, enacted last year, which will likely provide something of a model for all anti-abortion states going forward.
The Texas Heartbeat Act enables all Texas citizens to participate in what some have called a vigilante bounty system. Anyone in Texas is allowed to report—with or without direct involvement of police—and sue anyone in Texas believed to be involved in performing an abortion. This spans from the pregnant person themselves all the way down to a hypothetical Lyft driver who drove said person to a clinic. Should the defendant be found guilty, they will be required to pay the vigilante plaintiff $10,000 and their legal fees.
In this system, much of the traditional legal process is outsourced to private citizens. That’s terrifying from the standpoint of public safety and the ability for angry citizens to engage in blackmail schemes, but it also keeps the state out of the funding of the abortion police state.
“New permutations of [the Texas Heartbeat Act] are coming,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her (technical) concurrence in the Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson decision, which allowed the law to stand. “In the months since this Court failed to enjoin the law, legislators in several States have discussed or introduced legislation that replicates its scheme to target locally disfavored rights.”
That the GOP is now embracing vigilantism in concrete policy should not be surprising, considering that Kyle Rittenhouse has become a heroic poster boy in far-right circles. But whatever cost-cutting might result from the Texas Heartbeat Act (forgetting for a second, if possible, the miserable societal implications) and those like it, the trade-offs promise to still be overwhelming.
A December 2021 review of the Heartbeat Act by the UC Berkeley Business Review suggested that, on top of the annual $14.5 billion loss caused by abortion restrictions in Texas due to loss of business activity and inability to recruit workers, the state now faces severe strains on its medical and foster systems that will harshly affect the livelihoods of millions, particularly those who are low-income and nonwhite. The Alternatives to Abortion program has been presented as a government-sponsored counterweight to potential losses, but it is a drop in the water and is more a propaganda tool than genuine welfare policy.
Some big- and medium-sized cities in anti-abortion states will be looking to spend money of their own to do whatever is possible to protect abortion rights. In the case of Cincinnati, Ohio, Mayor Aftab Pureval has stated that the hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to the city’s police department will be directed away from abortion restriction enforcement. Pureval is also exploring a program that would reimburse Cincinnati residents who get abortions out of the state, potentially linking up with the pro-choice city of Chicago. Similarly, the city council in Tucson, Arizona, voted to forbid its police department from arresting anyone involved in an abortion.
Unfortunately, though, these cities and others will not be able to protect their residents from criminal prosecution, should such a practice be permitted by state law, nor from digital surveillance. These cities also cannot explicitly expand abortion access. They are undertaking a desperate defensive effort in the face of an aggressive and relentless attack on the rights of American citizens. And this punitive approach happens to also be a waste of money.
