Listen to the advocates. They’re seeing this clearly.
A 26-year-old woman was arrested and jailed in South Texas last week over a self-induced abortion just months after the state banned most abortions and weeks before the U.S. Supreme Court could roll back 50 years of federal abortion protections.
The timing of the now-dropped murder charge amid such seismic policy shifts could be pure coincidence. But on Monday, legal scholars and abortion rights advocates said the implications of Lizelle Herrera’s ordeal could not be more timely.
“Ms. Herrera’s case is a terrific example of exactly what we expect to happen,” said Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a group that has defended women in abortion-related criminal cases. “You can’t continue to say over and over again that abortion is murder and not expect that police and prosecutors are going to not treat it as murder.”
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But abortion researchers warn that as Texas and other states further restrict abortion access, more and more pregnant women will be driven to seek out the procedure themselves, leading to potential criminal investigations. In the past, abortion-related criminal cases have disproportionately affected women of color and poor women.
“When you don’t have anybody else to punish, do you just punish no one and let the abortion happen? Or do you punish the woman?” asked Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University who has studied the anti-abortion movement. “I don’t know what the state’s going to do with that, but that’s going to be the scenario sometimes. And I think this is sort of a harbinger of that debate to come.”
See here for the background. The anti-abortion zealots that forced SB8 on us insist that they don’t want women who seek abortions to be punished, but there’s no reason to trust them. There are Republican candidates who would very much like to punish women for getting an abortion. There’s no reason to believe that won’t become the mainstream Republican position, because the Republican mainstream has gotten more and more extreme over time. Allowing rape and incest exceptions for abortion used to be Republican mainstream, and now it’s not. This goes in one direction, and we can see that from here. Listen to what the advocates are saying. They’ve been right all along.