I have a new column this week on OnlySky about the effect of abortion bans. They don’t decrease abortion – they increase it.
It’s been three years since the Dobbs decision that allowed red states to pass abortion. It was always obvious that wealthy, privileged people wouldn’t be affected by this – they can just travel to where abortion is legal. But you might have guessed that poorer and working-class people, who can’t afford the time or the expense, would be unable to access abortion care.
However, that expectation would be wrong. The data shows clearly that America’s overall abortion rate has gone up, not down. Blue-state shield laws, which allow providers to mail abortion medication to red states, have made these bans far less effective than their authors would like. This is a victory for personal liberty and reproductive rights, and a resounding defeat for the religious right lawmakers who spent decades trying to reach this point.
Of course, this is hardly good news. The flip side is that, while abortion hasn’t gone down, maternal mortality has gone up. This is exactly what we should have expected from laws that make doctors afraid to treat women in the throes of a pregnancy-related medical emergency. That’s not an accident, but their entire purpose.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
What this shows is that the religious right has tried their utmost to deprive women of autonomy—and they’ve failed.
Let’s not forget, they’ve spent a staggering amount of time and energy getting to this point. After their leadership made a political decision that fighting desegregation was a lost cause, the religious right reorganized around banning abortion. That’s been their all-consuming obsession for decades.
They’ve lobbied, marched and picketed. They’ve preached countless anti-choice sermons calling down hellfire on America. They’ve poured billions of dollars into getting anti-choice politicians elected. They’ve tried to frighten and shame women, squeeze clinics out of business with onerous regulations, and chase doctors out of practice through harassment, intimidation and outright violence.
This was supposed to be the moment of their triumph. The overturning of Roe was the culmination of their dreams. They thought it would be the start of a new era of glorious theocracy, where their particular version of religious dogma would reign over the land.
Besides all the anti-woman, anti-health posturing behind abortion bans (I could go on for days about this and I’m sure other posters will make those points), there’s another thing a pregnant woman has to worry about besides risking her life if she develops any one of many pregnancy complications:
Republicans are also busy cutting the safety net that would encourage women in a risky (e.g. young/underemployed/student/disability) position to continue a pregnancy. Being able to count on food and housing assistance–at least for the short-term–would be factors allowing women to keep their pregnancies. Instead, they’re at the mercy of charities. Most of the Christian charities pat themselves on the back for providing a blanket or maybe some diapers and that’s it.
“squeeze clinics out of business with onerous regulations”
The very idea of healthcare of any kind being a “business” one could be squeezed out of is an incongruous USAian perversion to civilised eyes.
Plenty of people not only expected this outcome, but explicitly warned against these laws for this reason. They include red state obstetricians and gynaecologists who left red states because they knew they would not longer be able to practice medicine in line with best practice in those states.
One thing that the Religious Right keep doing is assuming that most people are mindless sheep. And if only they could just oust a small number of demon-controlled evildoers, set their rules, flex their own authority, and everyone else will just fall into place.
This often gives the appearance of working within communities where they already have a dedicated supermajority. Not because their assumptions are correct, but because they have sufficiently overwhelming force to make their assumptions largely irrelevant. It doesn’t work so well otherwise. Most people aren’t sheep, their enemies are far more numerous than they imagine, and even on the rare occasions when they succeed in a takeover others won’t fall entirely into place, but instead resist and bypass where they can. And that’s if getting what they demand would realistically result in what they really want to happen, which it occasionally doesn’t.
the obvious next thing is to drop the pretense of caring about state’s rights and push through a national ban. just need to declare the most tepid democrats to be enemies of the state and finish the coup, then they finish the job.