Race to the bottom
By 
When Roe is overruled in June, the result is going to be opponents of reproductive freedom continually trying to top themselves:
In addition to making medically necessary care inaccessible, thereby putting women’s lives in danger, HB 2810 would also enable law enforcement to target people seeking abortions directly: Under the bill’s terms, a pregnant person who tries to order abortion pills online would have committed a felony.In the past, even the most conservative legislatures have been loath to outright punish the person getting the abortion, focusing instead on providers as perpetrators. But without Roe, Ziegler expects that we’ll see them drop the façade. Ziegler points out that in recent years, lawmakers in Missouri were working off a literal playbook of anti-abortion legislation passed around in sympathetic states. While there have always been fringe opinions,fear of alienating more moderate voters largely bound the movement to “strategic discipline,” Ziegler says. With an increasingly friendlySupreme Court, though, the true ambitions of abortion opponents are coming into view.Now, Ziegler says, there are “a lot of people within the anti-abortion movement saying, ‘Why do we need to play by the rules anymore? Let’s just put out whatever we want — the Supreme Court is going to let us do it.’”
Previously, abortion opponents have suggested that post-Roe,“red states can have conservative policies, blue states can have progressive policies, and everyone will just leave each other alone,” Ziegler says. But the reality will likely be far messier.If they want to fully ban abortion, legislators in conservative states will have to confront the fact that more permissive environments may exist right next door and across the country. They will have to grapple with the right to travel, to use the internet, to receive packages. It’s hard to see how policy-makers can close those loopholes without penalizing the patients directly.
Even in that context, the ectopic-pregnancy callout still looks like an overreach, and probably for that reason, Seitz has struggled to find support, even within his own party. But it could also be strategic.“I can very easily imagine Missouri legislators looking at this and being like, You know, this ectopic-pregnancy thing is kind of bad PR … but the rest of it sounds great. Let’s treat moving abortion pills in and out of Missouri as felony drug trafficking,” Ziegler says. Cutting out the bill’s most sensational line could help lawmakers position themselves as reasonable — at the same time as they start scheming up a framework that endangers and punishes patients.
Just a few years ago, wild legislative bids like these were more or less guaranteed to fail. These two still could.Either way, Missouri’s tactics signal a shitstorm ahead in which a lack of federal jurisdiction creates a complex web of conflict and broad questions of privacy. After all, Missouri isn’t the only state confronting the limits of its abortion laws. For now, Ziegler notes, it’s simply “ahead of the curve.”
The Hot Pundit Idea that overruling Roe would be no big deal produced a large volume of stupid arguments, but one of the dumbest was the idea that Republican elites didn’t want Roe overruled because it would demobilize anti-abortion forces. But this never made the slightest sense — making abortion a live issue in many states and at the federal level will of course ensure that mobilization levels remain high. And far from stable equilibria being established, Republicans will constantly be one-upping themselves to ban abortion in as many jurisdictions as possible while making it as inaccessible as possible in jurisdictions they control.