Look — it’s Halley’s comet!

Texas Republicans have recently used threatened state coercion to chase a woman out of the state to avoid being forced to carry a non-viable fetus to term at serious risk to his health and fertility. Surely the Texas Republican facing the most potentially competitive state election has something to say about this:

Reporter: Are you supportive of the court decision that prevented Kate Cox from getting an abortion after she learned her fetus was not viable?

Ted Cruz: Just call my press office

Reporter: I have for 2 days with no answer

Cruz: Thank you pic.twitter.com/mzQngiITsx— DNC War Room (@DNCWarRoom) December 15, 2023

And his flight to Cancun was about to take off.

Admittedly, how much can you expect from notably greasy politicians? But you can bet that the columnist brought into the New York Times because of his reactionary cultural views would be willing to take this issue head on:

Of course, if they disapproved of how Paxton and the Texas Supreme Court interpreted the sham exceptions, it would be a layup to say so. The inference to be made here is obvious — the law is working exactly the way it was intended to work, with women having to risk their lives for even obviously medically necessary abortions, and doctors, patients, and anyone associated with the procedure at threat of prosecution no matter what. But they don’t want to explicitly defend this because the vast majority of people will correctly view it as monstrous.

I feel duty-bound to acknowledge that filling in the vacuum is a Genuinely Good Maureen Dowd Column:

Still, Ireland was shaken to its core in 2012 by the death of Savita Halappanavar, a beautiful, sparkling 31-year-old Indian immigrant, a dentist married to an Indian engineer. Savita was expecting her first child. She wore a new dress for the baby shower and prayed for the future. But that night she got sick. She went to a Galway hospital, where she was crushed to learn that her fetal membranes were bulging and her 17-week-old fetus would not survive.

Knowing her life was at stake, she begged the medical staff to remove the fetus. As Kitty Holland wrote in “Savita: The Tragedy That Shook a Nation,” a midwife explained to her, “It’s a Catholic thing. We don’t do it here.” Ireland had a long history of punishing women, sending them to religious asylums if they were pregnant out of wedlock or deemed “fallen.” Savita developed septic shock and died four days after her baby girl, whom she named Prasa, was stillborn.

That tragedy jolted the turbulent debate in Ireland about the right of women to control their bodies. Savita’s story was vividly evoked by women and men when I covered the 2018 referendum to revoke the Vatican-approved Eighth Amendment of the Irish Constitution, which made abortions illegal, even in cases of rape or incest. That draconian amendment had women selling their cars and going to loan sharks to get the money to fly to England for procedures. It stamped women with a Scarlet Letter and psychological trauma because they felt their country had turned its back on them.

 remember, as I reported on the vote, having a flash of gratitude that I lived in America and not Ireland. I thought to myself that I would hate living in such a benighted country shaped by religious fanatics.

But now I am. Religious fanatics on the Supreme Court have yanked America back to back alleys. American women are punished, branded with Scarlet Letters, forced to flee to get procedures.

And we have our own fraught case of a 31-year-old begging for a termination: Kate Cox, a married Texas mother of two who was thrilled to be pregnant until she was told that her fetus had a deadly chromosomal abnormality. Continuing the pregnancy could also keep Cox from getting pregnant again.

“I kept asking more questions, including how much time we might have with her if I continued the pregnancy,” Cox wrote in The Dallas Morning News. “The answer was maybe an hour — or at most, a week. Our baby would be in hospice care from the moment she is born if she were to be born alive.”

[…]

It is outrageous that such an important right in America was stripped away by a handful of cloistered, robed zealots, driven by religious doctrine, with no accountability.

But the Savonarola wing of the Supreme Court — all Catholics except Neil Gorsuch, who was raised Catholic and went to the same suburban Washington Catholic prep school as Brett Kavanaugh — could go to even more extreme lengths. The court announced Wednesday that it will consider curtailing the availability of a pill used to terminate first-trimester pregnancies. Soon, it’ll be mandating the rhythm method.

An explosive new Times article by Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak revealed that Justice Samuel Alito was even more underhanded than we knew as he plotted to engineer “a titanic shift in the law” by vitiating Roe. Conservative judges who assured the Senate that Roe was settled law in their confirmation hearings could barely wait until Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died to throw it in the constitutional rights rubbish bin.

It’s astounding how many politics-talking people discussed overruling Roe as if it would be some typical culture-war rube-running, like Dr. Seuss books nobody has looked at since the Truman administration or CRITICAL RACE QUEER THEORY, that would vanish when Fox News discovered a new toy. 1 in 4 American women has had an abortion! People won’t forget that this right has been abrogated! And given the much stronger zeal today’s anti-abortion fanatics have for enforcement, stories like this will be a constant drumbeat in American politics.