The Frightening New Wave of Anti-abortion Bills

Like school boards and public libraries, women’s bodies are now, more than ever, Republican battlegrounds.

JIM WATSON / AFP via Getty Images

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It’s not every day you get to watch a doctor explain to a room full of Republican men that much of what they think about abortion is wrong: demented, strange, and, most importantly, profoundly unscientific. But a viral video of diagnostic radiologist and Kentucky State Senator Karen Berg provided many of us with the moment we have long wanted to see. Berg was commenting on Kentucky’s S.B. 321, a bill that would create a 15-week abortion ban in the state. There already are 15-week abortion bans in Mississippi and Louisiana, though neither has taken effect, and Texas has a super-restrictive law, S.B. 8, that limits abortion to the first six weeks of pregnancy, or two weeks after one missed period. Some of these bills are “heartbeat bills,” and some are even more restrictive. Heartbeat bills typically define a heartbeat as the moment a fetus has any cardiac activity, though cardiac activity does not mean a fetus has a heart. They are in part the influence of a far-right homophobic birther named Janet Porter, who, according to The Guardian, has suggested that “gay marriage caused Noah’s floods.”

Like so many ideas now floating around the GOP ecosystem, these bills originated on the far-right fringe. But as Trumpism has driven Republicans closer to that fringe, support for concepts like these bills and “permitless carry” have become conservative litmus tests. And like school boards and public libraries, women’s bodies are now, more than ever, Republican battlegrounds.

I asked Dr. Berg about H.B. 3, another Kentucky bill that imposes extensive restrictions on abortions and has passed the House. “What we are seeing in Kentucky and all over the country is willful ignorance by GOP legislators—mostly men—about medical reality in order to undermine choice,” she told me. “It is deeply frustrating to sit in committee as the only woman and the only health-care professional and watch as these men so cavalierly pass legislation that continues to chip away at Roe. Now they are upping the ante with the horrific H.B. 3, which will be heard in committee this week and will, in effect, end legal abortion in Kentucky by making it impossible for people to access essential, time-sensitive care. These politicians hide behind emotionally charged rhetoric in order to ignore facts, science, and the real-world implications of banning choice. Kentucky has some of the highest childhood poverty and abuse rates in the country. We have real problems to fix, and they are making it worse.”

But what’s happening in Kentucky is nothing compared to what’s happening in Missouri—and what’s happening in Missouri wouldn’t be happening if the Supreme Court hadn’t protected Texas’s S.B. 8. A new Missouri amendment takes a page out of the Texas law, which deputizes private citizens to sue anyone suspected of aiding an abortion. As Elie Mystal writes in The Nation, “The proposed [Missouri] amendment could almost have been ripped right from Section 7 of the Fugitive Slave Act: ‘it shall be unlawful for any person to perform or induce, or to attempt to perform or induce, an abortion on a resident or citizen of Missouri, or to aid or abet, or attempt to aid or abet, an abortion performed or induced on a resident or citizen of Missouri, regardless of where the abortion is or will be performed.’” The goal is to bar women from leaving the state to get an abortion, but if the amendment is allowed to stand, it will have even larger implications, granting the state far too much power.

And there’s another massive restriction written into some of these anti-choice bills: no exceptions for rape and incest. Meanwhile, bills cooking in Tennessee and Idaho effectively allow—encourage—the family of the rapist to sue anyone who provides or aids in providing an abortion. The woman, in other words, is responsible for being raped, and liable for not keeping the pregnancy. It’s a baldly misogynistic view, and it’s catching on. Regarding the Idaho bill, Republican State Representative Steven Harris said that if the rapist had 10 siblings, they could each sue for $20,000. This is too dystopian even for Margaret Atwood.

California, on the other hand, wants to provide a haven for women in a country that is quickly becoming an abortion desert. Today the California Future of Abortion Council announced support for 13 bills that “address current barriers to accessing abortion care in California.” Can California fill the gap and provide the medical care that women in Missouri, Idaho, Texas, and Kentucky need? Will these women be able to drive hundreds of miles and spend hundreds of dollars on gas? Will private citizens be able to sue them for getting abortions elsewhere? Will these women face financial or criminal repercussions for just trying to get health care?

As I was writing this on Tuesday night, Oklahoma’s state House passed a bill even more restrictive than Texas’s. H.B. 4327 states, “A physician may not knowingly perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman, unless such abortion is performed to save the life of the mother.” If the bill makes it through the state Senate, Oklahoma will be the first state to completely disregard Roe v. Wade in a near-total outlawing of abortion. A pretty grim milestone that seems not to have gotten the public’s attention … yet.

Republican statehouses are racing to pass more and more restrictive anti-choice legislation because they saw what the Supreme Court did for Texas, and they know that the Court, with its three Trumpy justices, will seemingly sign off on anything ideologically conservative no matter how it perverts the Constitution or undermines stare decisis. Even with the addition of the accomplished Ketanji Brown Jackson, if she is confirmed, the Court will still have a 6–3 conservative majority. There is nothing we can do to save Roe now. As someone whose mother fought for reproductive rights, it breaks my heart that my daughter will have to fight for them, too.

Molly Jong-Fast is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.