More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Anti-abortion and right-wing prosecutors and law enforcement agencies are warping child neglect, abuse and endangerment statutes to criminalize behavior during and after pregnancy.
Dobbs “will further accelerate an existing crisis, putting anyone who is pregnant or has the capacity to become pregnant at even greater risk of arrest, prosecution, and conviction,” according to a new report from Pregnancy Justice.
Kenneth Chesebro and Sidney Powell—both former lawyers for Trump—were indicted by a Fulton County grand jury in mid-August, alongside 17 others, including Trump himself. All 19 co-defendants are charged under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act.
On Thursday, Oct. 19, Powell pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts—five counts of conspiracy to commit intentional interference with performance of election duties, and one count of conspiracy to commit theft—making her the second defendant to flip on Trump and cooperate with prosecutors. Powell was supposed to go to trial on Monday with co-defendant Chesebro. With Powell’s plea deal, Chesebro will go to trial solo next week.
“The basic thrust is, is that while all of those defendants did slightly different things and engaged in slightly different discrete acts of criminal activity, they all were engaged in one unlawful purpose, which was to overturn the 2020 election,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a professor at the Georgia State University College of Law, on a recent episode of On the Issues with Michele Goodwin.
This fall, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in U.S. v. Rahimi, a case about a Texas law that prevents individuals subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms. In a country where an abuser’s access to a firearm makes it five times more likely that he will kill his victim, where gun ownership continues to increase and where domestic violence and mass shootings are fundamentally entwined, a ruling overturning the Texas law (and making similar laws impermissible) would be disastrous.
“I believe America stands for the proposition that you can walk down the street and not get shot,” Kris Brown, president of Brady United Against Gun Violence, told Ms. “And I’ll never stop fighting for that.”
Last month, Celeste Burgess was sentenced to 90 days in prison because she took abortion pills when she was 17 years old. The story of Celeste and her mother—who helped her get the pills and will be sentenced in September—went national.
This case was seen as a harbinger of intimate privacy violations to come. But this case also exemplifies a disturbing phenomenon in the genesis of abortion prosecutions: friends and community members reporting on each other.
