The anti-abortion Stasi

If you look at social media, you’re likely to see a Republican complaining about women who place a high priority on not wanting the state to force them to carry pregnancies to term, to investigate their miscarriages, to have them bleed profusely in a hospital parking lot, etc. as if it’s a dirty trick rather than a rational reaction to Republican politicians who want to control their lives:

Good for them, an extremely valid reason to be a single issue voter https://t.co/JXt64p9Kt7— (@vanillatary) October 21, 2024

Republicans are really longing for the MARK UTERUS days, but the problem is that it only worked until Roe was actually overruled. You broke it, you bought it.

Relatedly, Adam Serwer has a great piece about how abusive men use anti-abortion statutes to attack their partners:

Last year, in Texas, a deteriorating marriage became the testing ground for a novel legal strategy favored by some of the country’s most prominent right-wing lawyers and politicians.

Marcus and Brittni Silva’s divorce had just been finalized when Marcus filed a lawsuit against two of Brittni’s friends. According to his complaint, Brittni had discovered that she was pregnant with their baby in July 2022, and ended the pregnancy by taking abortion medication. Marcus alleges that her friends Jackie Noyola and Amy Carpenter “assisted Brittni Silva in murdering Ms. Silva’s unborn child.” He is suing for wrongful death and asking for at least $1 million in damages from each defendant.

Noyola and Carpenter tell their own version of what happened in a countersuit they filed. Marcus drank often, they allege, and when he did, he was prone to verbally abusing Brittni. He got so drunk at one of her work events that he had to be escorted off the premises—but not before he called her a “slut,” a “whore,” and an “unfit mother” in front of her co-workers. Brittni had stayed in the marriage for the sake of their two daughters, but Marcus’s outburst convinced her that there was no saving it. In the spring of 2022, she filed for divorce.

That summer, soon after Roe v. Wade was overturned but before Texas’s abortion “trigger ban” went into effect, Brittni got a positive result on a pregnancy test. Certain that she did not want to have another child with Marcus, Brittni texted Noyola and Carpenter to talk about her options. Noyola and Carpenter allege that Marcus disapproved of the friendship; he would sometimes hide Brittni’s car keys to try to prevent her from seeing her friends.

Brittni kept her pregnancy test a secret from Marcus, but according to Noyola and Carpenter’s suit, he learned about it when he riffled through her purse and discovered a Post-it note with the number for an abortion hotline and, on her phone, her texts with her friends. Marcus took photographs of the texts. The next day, he looked through her purse again and found a pill that can be taken to induce abortion.

Later, Marcus confronted her, Brittni told her friends. She wrote in a text message that he had demanded that she give him her “mind body and soul” and act “like his wife who loves him.” If she didn’t agree to give him primary custody of their daughters, Brittni wrote, he would “make sure I go to jail.” Brittni was surprised by Marcus’s reaction, her friends’ suit alleges; he’d never been opposed to abortion. Now he was accusing her of killing a baby and threatening to go to the police. (Noyola and Carpenter have denied all the claims in Marcus’s lawsuit, and he has denied all the claims in their countersuit.)

In fact, Marcus had already filed a police report. Soon, he obtained legal representation. Jonathan Mitchell, a conservative activist and attorney and the former solicitor general of Texas, became his lawyer in the case. Mitchell is often cited as the brains behind Texas’s 2021 “bounty law,” which provides a reward of at least $10,000 to plaintiffs who successfully sue someone who “aids or abets” abortion. The Silva case follows a similar logic: Marcus is, in effect, seeking a reward for reporting his ex-wife’s friends to the state.

Mitchell declined to comment for this article. But his work on the Silva case and the bounty law, among other matters, reflects a tactic that conservatives have recently embraced in a range of social battles, including those over abortion, LGBTQ issues, and school curricula. Across the nation, Republican-controlled state legislatures and conservative activists have passed bills and embraced legal strategies that encourage Americans to monitor one another’s behavior and report their friends, family members, and neighbors to the authorities. Call it the Snitch State.

Why the party of Jonathan Mitchell is repelling young women is almost as deeply mysterious as how Donald Trump became the unquestioned god-emperor of the Republican Party.