"In March, anticipating the very decision that Alito drafted, a Missouri lawmaker introduced an amendment that copies Texas’s bounty-hunter law to allow private citizens to sue people who help abortion patients leave the state. In recent years, thousands of Missourians have already been crossing the border to Illinois for abortions, many more than have been able to be seen by the state’s last remaining clinic. The provision didn’t succeed this time around, but its author, state Representative Mary Elizabeth Coleman, wasn’t wrong when she responded to claims the provision was unconstitutional by telling the Washington Post, 'That’s what they said about the Texas law, and every bill passed to protect the unborn for the last 49 years.' It’s only unconstitutional until you get the right court. [snip]
It’s an open question how abortion travel could be restricted, given the porousness of state borders, but Missouri provided a hint when its state health director testified in the fall of 2019 that he’d compiled a spreadsheet of Planned Parenthood patients’ last menstrual periods, purportedly to track whether they had complications. Such detailed tracking of pregnancies has been used in countries like China and Poland to track if women are defying restrictions on whether and when they can be pregnant or not." -- Irin Carmon, in New York Magazine, on the lengths some Republican theocrats are prepared to go to control the uteri of women, even as women cross a state line to get safe and legal abortions. "Privacy"? "Personal freedom"? Don't you know those apply only to straight, White, Republican males? You know, the Republican Taliban.
BONUS: In his draft decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Alito cited a curious, but revealing, source of inspiration.
