Sean Murphy/AP Photo
Abortion rights advocates gather outside the Oklahoma Capitol, April 5, 2022, in Oklahoma City, to protest several anti-abortion bills being considered by the GOP-led legislature.
Last Tuesday, the Oklahoma legislature passed an anti-abortion bill that criminalizes health care providers for performing abortions at any time during a woman’s pregnancy and provides only a narrow exception to save the mother’s life. It is the latest bill to be initially modeled after Texas’s controversial and contested “heartbeat bill” that not only prohibits abortion, but incentivizes citizens to sue people who aid or abet the practice.
After the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Texas bill to stand, state lawmakers were emboldened to create their own copycats. There are at least 35 bills modeled after the “vigilante loophole,” according to The Washington Post.
Granted, these are not all abortion bills, and they’re not all done by the GOP (though a majority are). But the Texas law triggered other real-world effects. Few Texas women have been granted an abortion since the bill was passed. In consequence, so many women traveled north, making up 60 percent of cases in Oklahoma over a five-month period according to The Texas Tribune, that it prompted that state’s Republican lawmakers to pass their own ban.
Or maybe Republicans didn’t require any urgency. Whether due to a desire to ratchet up wedge issues before an election, or the confidence that comes with a Supreme Court securely in conservative hands, GOP bills that limit bodily autonomy and subjugate vulnerable populations on increasingly radical grounds—with or without “vigilante” provisions—are passing through Republican-led state chambers with little pause or pushback, and there is no end in sight.
The Oklahoma bill’s final iteration does not include a so-called “vigilante provision.” Instead, lawmakers wrote a separate bill for that, Senate Bill 1503, or their very own “Oklahoma Heartbeat Act.” Like the Texas bill, it allows up to $10,000 in potential damages through a civil suit against a doctor who performs, or someone who aids or abets, an abortion.
These provisions are built around the idea that it’s not the state enforcing a restriction before 24 weeks of pregnancy, which has been decidedly unconstitutional since Roe v. Wade. Instead, it lays the burden on the shoulders of citizens, in an attempt to shield the state from legal challenges.
These laws are about control over women and their bodies, rooted in misogyny and the patriarchy.
As Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, wrote for the Prospect last year when the Supreme Court let the Texas law stand, “Under the Court’s decision, a state can create civil liability for any constitutionally protected behavior, and so long as no state official plays any role in enforcing it, the law will remain on the books until someone violates it, is sued, and then challenges the law in court.”
This approach is just vague enough to take advantage of our “deeply polarized” society, as Chemerinsky described it to me. It creates enough confusion to let such statutes stand for however long there’s a conservative Court majority.
As many feminists have argued, these laws are about control over women and their bodies, rooted in misogyny and the patriarchy. That intent is perhaps most starkly demonstrated by the Oklahoma abortion bills, seen as the toughest in the nation, with ten-year felony sentences for doctors performing the procedures.
Dozens of states have prepared their own abortion bans in advance of a looming Supreme Court decision on one such ban in Mississippi that’s expected to overturn Roe, or at minimum to restrict freedom of choice to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy. While many Democrat-led states have shored up their abortion rights, the inevitable influx of patients seeking care from the states that have simultaneously prepared bills to outright ban the practice would increase the wait times for women traveling across state lines for the procedure.
The net effect of such Court rulings and these red-state laws is to subjugate a group of people and encourage them to live in fear. It’s an adaptable strategy—just look east from Texas to Florida, where the so-called “don’t say gay” bill has drawn criticism from many corners.
That bill prohibits education about sexual orientation and gender identities until the third grade. After that, it must be “age-appropriate,” with no precise definition of what that means.
The GOP has couched these bills in “anti-pedophile” rhetoric, asserting that because children are vulnerable, these extra steps must be taken to protect them. Children who are going to be gay will be gay no matter where they get taught, but with these bills, they, and multiple groups of people, will be humiliated. Many teachers will not be able to be themselves—some have been fired for being LGBTQ educators in Florida and Texas (where there isn’t even legislation yet)—and children’s minds will be shrouded in ignorance and hand-me-down hatred.
Similar bills are circulating. In Louisiana, pending bills would bar educators from discussing their sexuality with students up to the 12th grade. Alabama lawmakers tacked similar provisions onto an anti-transgender piece of legislation, another tool in the strategy gaining traction among red states.
These bills spur hatred and sow seeds of division in an already dangerously divided nation. They are a successor to Jim Crow laws that reinforced swaths of white people in believing that Black people were not worthy of humane treatment, much less a vote. The current campaign for them is not just political strategy; it’s also a coordinated attempt to maintain the power of subjugation.
