Due to a Republican senate majority, Amy Coney Barett’s Supreme Court nomination is virtually guaranteed to be confirmed which many conservatives both in my feed and in the public space cheer as a win for having a majority-conservative court, with potential to reverse Roe v. Wade. “Cooler heads” say that seems unlikely but the quiet part is said out loud now, so let’s consider this scenario. I’ll acknowledge that abortion and pregnancy choices are very personal decisions, and emotionally fraught for many people (and that I personally have a stake), but this is a practical question: what are the consequences for people who get illegal abortions?
Some states take the tack of targeting the providers- while they can’t forbid abortions currently, they can make restrictions such as physician credentials, physical space requirements on hallways, and affiliation with hospitals etc. Trigger laws, such as that by my home state of Idaho would punish the provider, and not the seeker. However, this is the internet age. If someone gets Mifepristone off the internet, would the state pursue the vendor or the purchaser?
Idaho also provides an example case for where they did punish a woman who got an illegal abortion after the first trimester. Jennie Linn McCormack (tw: pregnancy loss description) of Pocatello, ID faced an unplanned pregnancy in 2010. Like 59% of women who have an abortion, she is already a parent. Eastern Idaho does not have a clinic; your nearest options are either Twin Falls, ID or Salt Lake City, UT which are both >100 miles away. Idaho has a 24 hour waiting period after an ultrasound, so you’d have to plan and budget both time and money for gas or hotel, in addition to childcare if you already have children. Jennie’s best access was obtaining mifepristone off of the internet. Mifepristone (or RU-184) is prescribed for early abortions in the first trimester; it induces a miscarriage. Jennie was much farther along than she thought, though, and wasn’t sure what to do with the remains. She confided in a friend, who contacted the police. Jennie was arrested under 1973’s Idaho Code 18-606, which
makes it a felony for a woman to have an abortion in a manner not sanctioned by the state and carries a possible prison sentence of up to five years.
This went to court for a few years, and in 2015 the Ninth Circuit overturned 18-606.
I do find it interesting that anti-abortion groups stress that they do not want to arrest women. But, if they consider abortion murder, wouldn’t that make people who have abortions murderers in their minds? And if so, should we (as I said earlier, personal stake, but also 24% of American women will have an abortion by age 45 so there’s a lot of us) therefore face the same legal consequences as murder/manslaughter? In my case, my abortion was in South Carolina, so looking at punishments for murder it varies from 30 years in prison to the death penalty. Every time I see someone on my feed compare abortions to murder, I always want to ask them: do you think I should serve jail time? That would be the next logical question to ask, but it’s hard to get to that step when there’s so much emotional energy over whether the unborn are alive. (and that’s not pausing to consider the lives of people already born- could go on a whole tangent here, but I’ve also seen people compare the number of COVID-19 deaths to abortions claiming the latter is the real epidemic, which is a bad comparison because one is infectious and spreads through actions whereas the other… does not).
If the goal is to reduce the number of abortions, the answer is increased access to contraceptives and childcare. Make it easier for people who don’t want to become parents to not be parents, and for people who can’t afford another child to actually be able to have the children they want. Restricting access will only increase the number of illegal abortions performed by people who aren’t trained professionals, and as seen in the pre-Roe era, people will die. The quippy response is, “If you don’t like abortions, don’t have one” but I’ll go further and say if you don’t want abortions to happen, find ways to make the other choices more accessible (adoption is not a panacea for this either but that is a tangent on its own for another day).