More Than A Magazine, A Movement
In May 2024, following Idaho’s lead, Tennessee became the second state in the country to criminalize the ‘abortion trafficking’ of minors, making it a class A misdemeanor.
Late last month, Nashville Democratic Rep. Aftyn Behn and abortion rights attorney and activist Rachel Welty brought a lawsuit in federal district court challenging the trafficking law on constitutional grounds and asking to have it permanently enjoined.
The Supreme Court’s dismissal of the EMTALA case drew the fierce ire of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Warning of the “storm clouds [that] loom ahead,” Jackson condemned the Court’s failure to resolve the case on the merits, in accordance with the long-settled principle that “state laws that conflict with federal laws, are ‘without effect.’”
In an alternate dissent, the Court’s hardcore conservative justices—Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch—paid homage to the unborn child.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a request from the Biden administration to send a dispute over emergency abortions in Texas back to the lower courts. The Court dealt with a set of similar cases out of Idaho in June without reaching a conclusive decision on the federal law in question, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA).
“Recently, the world has heard the story of Amber Thurman, a young woman who died because of Georgia’s extreme abortion ban,” said Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates. “Today’s punt by the Supreme Court will lead to more cases like Amber’s. … The Court is telling women in states with bans that need abortion care to save their life: ‘We don’t care.'”
The state of Texas does not believe its arsenal of antiabortion laws has done enough to strip pregnant people of control over their bodies.
Represented by antiabortion warrior Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas is suing the Biden administration in a challenge to the Title IX claim that abortion-related discrimination is prohibited sex discrimination. Two professors from the University of Texas-Austin—John Hatfield, a professor of finance, and Daniel Bonevac, a philosophy professor—subsequently joined the suit as named plaintiffs.
At its core, this case is about the surveillance and control of the sexual and reproductive lives of students, and the chillingly privileged view that professors are somehow entitled to this measure of control over students’ lives based upon their own views about abortion.
Amarillo residents will vote on an abortion travel ban—which would ban the use of the city’s roads and highways to seek an abortion out of state—in the November election.
In February, Texas attorney Mason Herring pleaded guilty to slipping abortion-inducing pills into his wife Catherine Herring’s drink without her knowledge or consent. She subsequently gave birth to a baby 10 weeks premature with significant developmental delays.
Catherine Herring’s brother, Thomas Pressly, a Republican state senator from Louisiana, drafted a bill in collaboration with Louisiana Right to Life which creates the new crime of “coerced abortion by means of fraud.” Although the bill was initially framed narrowly in terms of holding men such as Herring accountable for heinous behavior, Pressly makes clear that “throughout the process, I have been trying to determine what other steps I can take to control the rampant illegal distribution of abortion-inducing drugs that ended up hurting my sister.”
In the wake of Dobbs, while most abortion-restrictive states have maintained an exception to preserve the health of the pregnant woman, a handful of ban states—including Idaho—no longer permit abortions needed to protect a pregnant person’s health. The Biden administration says this is in direct conflict with the federal statute EMTALA.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar encapsulated what Justice Sotomayor referred to as the “big daylight” between the two laws: “In Idaho, doctors have to shut their eyes to everything except death—whereas, under EMTALA, you’re supposed to be thinking about things like: Is she about to lose her fertility? Is her uterus going to become incredibly scarred because of the bleeding? Is she about to undergo the possibility of kidney failure?”
The Arizona Supreme Court resurrected its zombie pre-statehood criminal abortion ban earlier this month, which is slated to go into effect as early as June.
The decision, which took many by surprise, has sent Republican lawmakers and antiabortion activists in the state into a strategic tailspin as they seek to prevent the widespread outrage over the decision from transforming Arizona into a state that priorotizes reproductive freedom during the November elections.
The Arizona Supreme Court revived an 1864 pre-statehood ban on abortion (although the law will not go into effect immediately).
To quote the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the way of thinking embedded in these zombie laws from the 19th century reflects “ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution, ideas that have long since been discredited.” The Arizona Supreme Court does not expressly traffic in these deeply gendered stereotypes that are contemporaneous with the abortion ban it has resurrected from the dead—but they are silently lurking in the margins of the opinion.
As Attorney General Mayes put it, the decision is “unconscionable and an affront to freedom… and will go down as a stain on our state.”
A general consensus seems to have emerged after last week’s oral arguments in the case against the abortion pill that the Supreme Court is likely to rule that the anti-abortion physicians and their umbrella group, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, lack sufficient legal grounds to challenge the FDA’s loosening of restrictions on mifepristone.
While dismissal based on a lack of standing would be a welcome result, it is not a guarantee given the Court’s anti-abortion supermajority. But even if this occurs, the apparent zest manifested by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas towards the Comstock Act from 1873 brings a lurking danger fully out into the open.
