Peter Thiel’s fake-Appalachian towel boy supports menstrual surveillance regimes
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JD Vance continues to be candid about the level of domination the American anti-abortion lobby aspires to:
It’s not enough for many anti-abortion stalwarts to ban the procedure in their state. They want to ban legal drugs designed to induce abortion. They want to surveil and block women traveling to other states to obtain an abortion. One of the most threatening dimensions of these programs is that they threaten to make doctors and other medical professionals — who might give counsel on or simply know about a woman’s plans to obtain an abortion — responsible for reporting her actions. If you visit your OB-GYN and discuss traveling to another state to get an abortion, does your OB have to report you to the local sheriff? It applies to third parties who might assist a woman either in traveling to get an abortion or getting FDA-approved medications to induce an abortion at home. The cases we’ve already seen range the gamut from sheriff’s departments wanting to pull medical and travel records for evidence of pregnancies that ended for unexplained reasons, gaps in menstruation, trips out of state that coincided with a pregnancy not brought to term.
JD Vance is a major menstrual surveillance hawk. When the Biden administration pushed for updated HIPAA regulations to prevent sheriff’s departments and other law enforcement agencies from pulling women’s medical records for their menstrual surveillance programs (which they termed “compassionate laws protecting unborn children and their mothers”), Vance was one of only 28 members of Congress (and only 8 senators) to sign a letter protesting the new regs, which, per the letter, “interfere with valid state laws protecting life.” (You can see the letter here. It’s a doozy.)
Think about those numbers. Out of all the crazies in the House Republican caucus and among the 49 Republican senators, they couldn’t even get 30 people to sign this thing. But the Trump campaign itself, not surprisingly, has done its best to avoid the issue. I mean, how could they not? Even the name is toxic.
But yesterday in an interview on Newsmax of all places, a host asked Trump spokesman Jason Miller whether Donald Trump supported or wouldn’t aim to prevent states from enforcing their own menstrual surveillance regimes. It was one of those Fox-like interviews in which the host seems to go out of his way to signal what the right answer is. You wouldn’t do this, right?
“But he wouldn’t support monitoring pregnancies, even if a state decided to do that?” the host asked.
Miller responded that “he’s [i.e., Trump’s] made it very clear that he’s not going to go and weigh in and push various states on how they want to go and set up their particular rules and restrictions. That’s going to be up to the states.”
This should also be a reminder that Alito’s repeated assertions in Dobbs that the right to choose to have an abortion can be neatly separated from the entire well-established framework of personal autonomy rights is nonsensical on every level. And Dobbs did not return the country to the pre-Roe status quo; given the different surveillance capacities of the state and the greater fanaticism of the anti-abortion mob, it will be much worse.