Three paths in a post-Roe America
"Ignore your rights, and they’ll go away,” the bumper sticker goes.
I think about that a lot these days.
THen about what kind of world that we elders are creating for our descendants, like 3 early-teen girls in front of author Adam Lee at a deli.
Though AL doesn't have much to say that others have not already said, he nevertheless has some thoughts.
Start with the obvious: Women are going to die. It’s only a matter of time before we have an American Savita Halappanavar, who was murdered by anti-choice ideology when her doctors refused to treat her septic miscarriage as long as there was a fetal heartbeat. There will be many such cases.
We already have a lot of women who were only given abortions after they were judged very sick, so it may be a matter of time before the doctors slip up.
Everyone who said in 2016 that Donald Trump’s presidency wouldn’t be that bad, that the extreme rhetoric was for show and he’d become a moderate populist once in office, that Democrats were engaged in needless hysteria—those people need to make a heartfelt apology and then withdraw from political punditry for a long period of self-reflection.
He then considers three possible scenarios.
First, an optimistic one, what he calls the “dog that caught the car” scenario, of not being sure what to do next. Car-chasing dogs acts according to instincts that gave their wild ancestors their meals, but cars aren't very edible, and dogs don't usually have a lot of practice in eating caught food.
The Republican Party gets a reputation for anti-abortion nastiness, and it turns off suburban women who might otherwise like its promised tax cuts. Democrats hold Congress, abolish the filibuster, and pack the Supreme Court with progressive justices. Religion continues to decline, with right-wing Xianity becoming permanently discredited as a political force.
Second, a pessimistic path, much like what Nicolae Ceausescu's regime implemented in Romania.
ed-state legislatures, drunk on power and eager to see how far they can go, will create a regime of mandatory regular pregnancy testing for all women. Secret police will infiltrate hospitals, and women who suffer miscarriages will be shackled to their beds for trial. They’ll set up checkpoints and make it illegal for pregnant people to leave the state in case they get an abortion elsewhere, as if Utah forbade its own citizens from traveling to Nevada to gamble or drink.
Seems like a recipe for a constitutional crisis, when blue states refuse to extradite women from red states who get abortions in their states.
Third, the "War on Drugs" scenario.
In this scenario, abortion is outlawed, but widely available through drugs and underground clinics. The law will be enforced selectively against poor women and people of color, in showy raids trumpeted by “law and order” politicians. Meanwhile, middle-class white women will be able to terminate a pregnancy without much trouble, and rich people with private jets and concierge doctors won’t have any trouble at all. It’s the brand of hypocrisy that America excels at.
Commenter Atea noted that a good part of our current problems was from the neglect of previous Democrats, like the Obama Administration's breaking promises to codify RvW and to eliminate George Bush II's Office of Faith-Based Initiative.
Pam:
It's funny, but I haven't heard any conservatives complaining about activist judges making laws from the bench lately.
I wonder why that is.
