The Pill vs THE PILL

 

"I think the question that voters are going to be asking when 75 percent of people are with us on this, is who should make this decision… Should it be a woman and her doctor or a politician? Should it be Ted Cruz making this decision or a woman and her family? Where are women’s equal rights?"

Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, May 7th

“If the leaked opinion became the final opinion, legislative bodies — not only at the state level but at the federal level — certainly could legislate in that area… And if this were the final decision, that was the point that it should be resolved one way or another in the legislative process. So yeah, it’s possible.”

Republican Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, May 6th, on the possibility of a national, federal abortion ban.

Before the Supreme Court leak, polls tell us that only 20% of Americans expected Roe vs Wade to be overturned. Apathy reigned. Assuming that leaked Alito draft majority Supreme Court ruling comes to pass, twenty-six states are about to expand existing restrictions or impose restrictions on a woman’s right to control her body when it comes to accepting or rejecting a pregnancy. Of those, 13 have trigger “repeal abortion rights” laws, which take effect right after the Court rules. Many of the same states that have passed voting restrictions are assailing LGBTQ rights. Conservative states would have one social order, the rest of the country another. Military personnel and those transferred from blue to red states by their employers would be forced into legal and cultural realities beyond their choice or control.

Some religions define a human life as beginning on conception, others when the fetus has sentience, others still when the baby draws a first breath. The states that are imposing controls, almost uniformly based on personal religious beliefs, are effectively preventing a termination of pregnancy either totally or at time when a majority of women would not know that they were pregnant. Most of those anti-abortion states also support and implement the death penalty as well as the right to bear and use lethal arms, including military grade assault weapons, that are almost exclusively intended to kill people. The belief that these legislators support the “right to life” is thus hardly sustainable justification.

Even as there isn’t a single state where most adults would reverse Roe vs Wade, legislatures with men in the majority are determining what choices a woman might have over her pregnant body. While globally Roman Catholic prelates pray for a reversal of Roe, many countries in Latin America are liberalizing abortion laws. But within the overall religious community here in the US, it’s clear that support for the reversal is really coming from only one fierce segment of voters, the GOP base: “National polls show that most Americans support abortion access. A Public Religion Research Institute survey from March found that a majority of religious groups believe it should be legal in most cases — with the exception of white evangelical Protestants, 69% of whom said the procedure should be outlawed in most or all cases.” Associated Press, May 8th.

It is interesting to note that while these malevolent male-controlled statutes prevent termination of pregnancy, some even for rape or incest, there also isn’t a single anti-abortion state budgeting the needed funding for the care and support of the resulting unwanted children. The burden would fall heaviest on those at the bottom of the economic ladder with the least ability to travel and board in a state that permits abortions, those most likely to bear unwanted children and be unable to care for them. And no, there vastly insufficient existing resources to care for those children. Where is the responsibility for the men who impregnate and, along with their sexual partners, mutually decided to abort? How will that fare in the courts?

Some states, like Missouri, seek to impose criminal sanctions on those in other states who offer abortions to Missouri residents, a rather dramatic distortion and unconstitutional application of extraterritorial state jurisdiction. But legal niceties and individual rights, except for minority evangelical Christian views, have been shoved by the wayside is this battle for moral and religious control of the United States by a clear minority. In his twisted logic rejecting a 49-year-old Supreme Court precedent, Justice Samuel Alito’s 98-page draft – which moves abortion laws back to the states – reaches back to British scholars and jurists from the 13th and 17th centuries, also relying significantly on US cases from as early as 1883.

Indeed, even birth control was denied to women in many states until the Supreme Court legitimized unfettered access to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut [1965]) for married couples (later expanded to unmarried couples). During the pandemic, many pro-Trump voters in red states protested that their individual rights to control their own bodies effectively gave them the right to reject vaccinations, lockdowns and mask mandates, even though those decisions were significantly responsible for the COVID mortality rate that has now claimed the lives of over a million Americans. See any hypocrisy here?

But today, there is another “pill” that is ratcheting the abortion controversy even higher: the “abortion” pill. Writing for the May 5th Los Angeles Times, Jennifer Haberkorn, summarizes: “The future of abortion in the U.S. is moving to the mailbox… Medication abortion, in which a woman takes two drugs to terminate an early pregnancy at home, became the most commonly used method in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly after the Food and Drug Administration stopped requiring the prescription be dispensed at healthcare facilities and allowed it to be delivered directly to users. Many online pharmacies around the world ship them without a prescription at all.

“As the Supreme Court prepares to give states the power to ban abortion, medication abortion could be a game changer — the last option for women in conservative states who are unable to travel elsewhere to end their pregnancies… ‘We see medication abortion as being a potentially transformative and disruptive technology in the face of these unjust laws that are being passed,’ said Elisa Wells, co-founder and co-director of Plan C, a website that provides information on finding and using the medication. ‘It is a bit of a safety net, potentially.’… Medication can be shipped discreetly, in some cases evading detection from those who hope to ban its use. It is so hard to track… statistics on so-called self-managed medication abortions — those conducted without a prescription or a doctor’s guidance — [which] are not well researched.” For those taking the pill, there is the added advice that such pills be taken within 10 weeks of conception.

As right-wing states race to contain this pill-driven potential, a difficult intrusion into the US Mails, anti-abortion activists are demanding immediate action. Would a right-wing president end that use of the mails if he or she could? “But just as abortion rights supporters look to shore up access to medication abortion, antiabortion groups are focusing on enacting additional state restrictions on pills, making medication the next battleground in the decades-long cultural standoff…

“‘It’s one of our biggest priorities and it’s certainly something that a lot of states are thinking about much more than they were three years ago,’ said Katie Glenn, government affairs counsel at Americans United for Life, a law firm that opposes abortion and advises states on legislation. ‘We saw a huge uptick in the pill use during COVID.’… But in states that plan to limit or ban abortion — more than two dozen in the South and portions of the Mountain West have already done so or plan to — medication abortion is likely to be one of the few remaining options.

“PlanCPills.org runs through the practical options for residents of every state, though in some cases, shipping drugs or taking them may violate local laws… For instance, a patient in Texas — where abortion is banned after embryonic cardiac activity is detected, or about six weeks of pregnancy — could drive across the border into New Mexico and conduct a telehealth appointment with a doctor there. The pills could be shipped to a friend or a temporary mailbox in New Mexico and then forwarded to the patient in Texas. Or a patient could stay in Texas and buy the drugs directly from an online pharmacy at a cost of $200 to $500.” LA Times.

For Democrats, once facing a highly likely loss of majorities in both houses of Congress, this issue gives them hope for a change in that prospect. Listening to likely GOP presidential candidates, including Donald Trump at his recent rallies, you don’t hear much discussion about their right-wing “victory” in overturning Roe vs Wade, which they realize goes against the majority view in America. Instead, they rail at a secondary and vastly lesser issue: the criminality of a leaks of an anticipatory Supreme Court ruling. For younger generations, most impacted but increasingly withdrawing from politics in frustration (see my May 4th Is Politics a Solution or Disease - Ask the Rising Generation blog), with this rise of right-wing minority control represented by a Trump populist GOP, would a reversal of Roe be enough re-engage their political concerns? We will know in a few months.

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you think the American anocracy was polarized before this decision, you ain’t seen nuffin’ yet!