A nation where there is no refuge to seek

Adam Serwer has a good discussion of the dystopias made possible by Dobbs, including the revolting Catch-22 bans on abortion impose on doctors:

So this was not just about Cox. Texas’s abortion laws have exceptions for the health of the mother, but Cox’s plight has made clear that they are unenforceable, and the governments of states with strict abortion bans would rather risk destroying a family than allow a mother to end a pregnancy, including one in which the fetus cannot survive. The purpose of the exemptions is to provide political cover for abortion bans so that they seem less strict, not for women who need them to be able to use them. Had Cox stayed, she might have shared the fate of Deborah Dorbert in Florida, forced to give birth to a child who could not live and to watch them die on the same day. As in Texas, the exception in Florida existed only on paper.

Caregivers who wish to invoke the exception to provide care live in fear of prosecution, and sometimes allow women to develop life-threatening conditions, as they did in Amanda Eid’s case. Eid developed sepsis and nearly died before doctors acted, despite the fact that her fetus had a fatal abnormality. As Valenti points out, now that Eid has joined with other Texas mothers in suing the state, its lawyers are insisting that the doctors are at fault for not acting sooner, even though it is the state that puts caregivers in the position of choosing between a person’s life and their own career, freedom, and livelihood.

The sick and cynical strategy that opponents of reproductive freedom will use is definitely going to be to blame doctors for failing to perform medically necessary abortions, while refusing to at any point withdraw the threat of prosecution. I don’t think this will be effective, politically, but it underscores how worthless the nominal exceptions to these bans are. And the next pundit who compares these laws to European regulations that make it marginally more difficult for women to obtain abortions in the second trimester (while making the procedure much more broadly accessible in general) should be put on a raft in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Women of sufficient means can still flee the states that wish to fully control their reproductive rights, something that the next Republican administration will try very hard to stop:

Once you understand how dangerous pregnancy is, how many things can go wrong, and how hard it is for everything to go perfectly right, these incidents in which state commissars see mothers and their families as little more than props in their own ideological holy war become even more perverse. The decades-long Republican control of Texas means that politicians decide how and when women carry pregnancies to term and whether they are likely to survive the process.

Cox was able to seek refuge elsewhere. But the Republican Party and the anti-abortion movement envision a nation where there is no refuge to seek. Anti-abortion leaders attacked Cox for engaging in “eugenics” and “discrimination,” as though mothers who do not wish to risk their own lives and fertility simply do not love their children as much as the self-righteous strangers urging the state to seize control of their bodies do. Republican lawmakers like the Cancun-enjoying Senator Ted Cruz and his senior colleague John Cornyn exercised slightly more message discipline, refusing to comment on her specific case.

Their circumspection is merely strategic, however. As my colleague Elaine Godfrey writes, Republicans hope that a second Trump administration will bring a nationwide ban on abortion. Trump is directly responsible for the Supreme Court appointments that led to Roe being overturned, after all. It is natural for the anti-abortion movement to vest their hopes in him a second time, whatever deception he might employ to appear moderate on the issue.

The anti-abortion movement believes that they can persuade Trump to issue an order reviving the Comstock Act, which “could be applied to prevent the transport of all supplies related to medical and surgical abortions, making it illegal to ship necessary tools and medications to hospitals and clinics, with no exceptions for other medical uses, such as miscarriage care,” as Godfrey reports. Under such circumstances, she writes, “conditions that are easily treatable with modern medicine could, without access to these supplies, become life-threatening.”

Just remember that the pundits who tell you that Republicans would never do such a thing are probably the ones who told you that they would never overrule Roe in the first place. Never be Susan Collins.