Michelle Goldberg has a must- read on why a post- Roe world would be even worse than the conditions that existed before Roe. Here are a few of her top line arguments (our emphasis):
While doctors were prosecuted for abortions before Roe, patients rarely were. Today, in states that have legislated fetal personhood, women are already arrested on suspicion of harming or endangering their fetuses, including by using drugs, attempting suicide or, in a case in Utah, delaying a cesarean section. There’s no reason to believe that, in states where abortion is considered homicide, prosecutors will be less punitive when investigating it.Overturning or weakening Roe also shifts the Overton window:
Further, the abortion bans in the new wave are harsher than most of those that existed before Roe. At that time, most states prohibited abortion in most circumstances, but according to historian Leslie Reagan, the author of the book “When Abortion Was a Crime,” there was little legal conception of fetal personhood.
Republican politicians in other states are clearly interested in locking women up; last month Texas legislators held a hearing on a bill that would allow women who have abortions to be charged with homicide and potentially subject to the death penalty. In a post-Roe future, the political fight, at least in red states, could shift from whether women can have abortions to whether they can be imprisoned for them.Should there be any more talk of a Republican "fever" breaking upon the election of a Democratic president in 2020, the troglodyte extremism exhibited by these State and local (largely white male) Republicans demonstrates this isn't a bug of that rotted out party -- it's a feature.
As we watch Donald Trump remake this country in ways that once seemed unimaginable, it’s tempting to reach for historical analogies to grapple with what’s happening. It’s why, as people struggle to understand how his abuses of power might be constrained, there’s been renewed interest in Watergate. Yet, as in the comparison between Richard Nixon and Trump, the past can prove inadequate to understanding the depredations of the present. Rather than moving backward, we’re charting awful new frontiers.These are not people with whom you can have a civil dialogue, much less reason with. They are yahoos who will use their power to impose their dangerous, antediluvian views on everyone else. At every level in American politics, as we keep saying, they need to be voted out of office once and for all. The vast majority of Americans disagree with these absolutist crackpots and have ever since Roe; they need to act on that at the polls from now on.
