“Emboldened by a newly conservative US Supreme Court,” the Intercept (4/16/21) reported, “many states…[are] crafting extreme measures designed to wind up in court.”
The Guttmacher Institute warned at the beginning of March that “states will be the main abortion battleground in 2021,” as legislators had already passed eight restrictions and bans. Two and a half months later, the number of restrictions signed into law has risen to 69 (including 9 bans), across 14 states, with a total of 549 restrictions introduced in 47 states.
Oklahoma, for instance, passed a near-total ban on abortion in April, under which doctors who fail to check for a fetal heartbeat before performing an abortion would be charged with murder. In March, the Texas Senate passed a bill (signed into law today) to ban abortions at six weeks—when most people don’t know they are pregnant—and give literally anyone the right to sue a doctor they believe has violated the ban or any individual who “aids or abets” an abortion. As the Intercept (4/16/21) reported, it’s a strategy designed to stop abortion providers from suing to block the law from taking effect, since they can’t just sue the state as the enforcer of the law. Several states are moving to restrict medication abortion and impose further burdensome restrictions on abortion providers (Guttmacher, 4/30/21).
This campaign should surprise no one: With the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett in October, the right immediately recognized an opening to push their agenda as far as possible, in the hope that a 6–3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court would soon make previously unthinkable laws a reality. And indeed, the court has just announced it will review a Mississippi law that directly challenges Roe v. Wade.
But you’d be forgiven if you didn’t have a clue this was all brewing—that is, if you rely on some of the nation’s biggest news outlets for your information.
From the beginning of the year through May 16, when the number of restrictions introduced had reached 549, national TV networks had barely mentioned the state-level campaign.
Sen. Josh Hawley (FoxNews.com, 10/30/20) praised Amy Coney Barrett as a nominee who “understood Roe was an act of judicial imperialism and that it was wrongly decided.”
NBC News, where the word “abortion” was only uttered on three segments, didn’t mention the bills a single time in the first four and a half months of the year. ABC mentioned them twice: once in an interview with Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson (3/19/21), who signed into law a bill that bans abortion in all cases except when the life of the pregnant woman is at risk, and once in a feature (3/16/21) about Black perspectives on abortion, which vaguely noted that “challenges to Roe v. Wade are mounting.” CBS ran the most of the broadcast networks with six mentions, five of which were from the same anchor: Anne-Marie Green of CBS Morning News.
Cable news did no better than broadcast: CNN mentioned the state bills only four times and MSNBC five times.
The New York Times mentioned the current state campaigns in the news section of its print edition only a single time—four words in an article about Texas pushing voting rights restrictions (5/9/21)—during the entire time period studied, relegating discussion of the unprecedented attack on reproductive rights to the opinion page. Even when looking more broadly at stories focused on reproductive health policy in general, the paper published more foreign desk stories (11) than domestic news articles (4) through May 16 of this year.
The only attacks on reproductive rights in the world that the paper saw fit to put on its front page came from Venezuela (2/21/21, 4/14/21) and China (5/11/21), not Texas or Oklahoma.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (4/2/21) wrote that “it’s extremely easy to imagine the end of Roe leading to a little more state regulation over all”—ignoring the many states that already have laws in place that would ban or severely restrict abortion as soon as Roe is overturned.
Conservative Times columnist Ross Douthat (4/2/21) managed to write a nearly 2,000-word column about anti-choice strategy without mentioning the current drive by states to ban abortion, instead arguing that “abortion foes actually have good reason to feel unsettled and uncertain rather than triumphant”—despite the fact that they’ve installed a 6–3 majority on the Supreme Court:
It’s extremely easy to imagine the end of Roe leading to a little more state regulation over all (mostly limitations in the second trimester, along the lines of many European countries), but then for the few states that go further to find themselves boycotted and besieged, leaving the goal of ending abortion nationwide as far away as ever.
It’s a disingenuous argument. Ten states already have trigger laws that will ban abortion the moment Roe is overturned. Twenty-two states already have laws on the books that would restrict access further than they already do—and it’s important to remember that in some states, even with Roe on the books, abortion is nearly impossible for most people to access. With the slew of state-level laws coming down the pipe this year, the picture is sure to look even bleaker.
The anti-choice assault goes hand-in-hand with the right’s state-level campaigns against voting rights and transgender rights (the latter of which has also gotten far too little media attention—FAIR.org, 3/12/21).
Republican-dominated states have long pushed restrictive abortion laws that they knew would be immediately halted by the courts; largely ignoring such stunts was not always unreasonable. But these bills are no longer just stunts, and media should have been listening to the alarm bells advocates like Guttmacher have been ringing for months now, recognizing that threats to reproductive rights aren’t only front-page news when they happen in far away lands ruled by official enemies.
Featured image: Reproductive rights rally at the Supreme Court (CC photo: Adam Fagen).
For the corpress, abortion is just another “culture war” issue to be “She said/he said” to death.
They’re deaf to the alarm bells because they don’t see anything to be alarmed about.
“The only attacks on reproductive rights” Typical leftist speak. Who is attacking a woman’s right to reproduce? Nobody. They are attacking a woman’s right to murder her unborn child. Only the left believe that the exact same thing has no value (abortion) or infinite value if somebody shoots the woman and kills the baby that she wanted to have. Payment to a doc. in one instance. Murder sentence in the other. Same length of gestation, different outcomes. Now that’s some science!!! Probably the same science that believes a person who declares they are a woman is a woman or that a man just had a baby. Science at work!!!!!
Tim,
Reproductive rights includes the right to not reproduce.
Only the Right believes non-science that you can make an ectopic pregnancy viable by reimplantation(you can’t), and that a fertilized egg is a “baby” if it is in a woman, but it isn’t if it is in an IVF test tube.
Very few of the people who support legal abortion believe that a fetus has “no value”. That is, huge surprise from you, a strawman argument.
What Pro-Choice people believe is that that the woman experiencing the pregnancy should have the right to determine its outcome, because they know the situation surrounding the pregnancy.
What the Right believes, on the other hand, is that something that has 3 possible outcomes: a baby(48%), several babies(2%), or no baby (50%); IS a single human, ensouled and complete.
No science involved in that kind of sleight of hand.
What blows my mind is right-wingers like you, you constantly rail against “intrusion by government”, but think that in one of the most complex situations, the decision to bring a new human into the world, the government should TOTALLY be involved up to its elbows.
What a craptacular definition. Why don’t you just define up as down and down as up? We on the right believe that a fertilized egg is a baby (tube or not). Don’t try to change what we believe.
It is a human inside a human. Not a clump of cells inside a human. What do you think that clump of cells will become? A tree? It is a human from conception. Just as a baby looks similar yet different from an adult, a fertilized egg is a human, just in a different form. Common sense escapes you?
You don’t think we should have murder laws? When you abort a baby, you are murdering another human. That is where the government steps in – MURDER.
What that woman does to PREVENT pregnancy is her business.
You’re not much on science and common sense. The only one involved up to their elbows are the abortion doctors (and those like you who support them) who remove recognizable body parts of one human from another human.
Tim,
100% pure undiluted bullshit. 100% of the abortion restrictions put in place 100% of the time by Republicans, 100% EXEMPT any IVF facilities from the onerous burdens they put on Women’s health centers that provide abortion.
Do you need me to provide the ridiculous quotes from the lawmakers as to why they exempt these clinics? Because they line up 100% with what I just posted.
It must be tough being so wrong on the most basic of facts in an issue.
And, no, it isn’t a human. It is a clump of cells that in many circumstances will NEVER become a human, in some instances will become a single human, and in some other instances may become several humans.
Sorry if you can’t handle the facts of that.
You right wingers want science to bend around your religion, and it doesn’t in this case.
Also, your “common sense” and this is “murder”…..in some states there are very specific rules about cutting down trees, but yet none about disposing of acorns.
Based on your definition, the rules about acorns are wrong….because they are just trees, right?
The fact that you can’t tell the difference between an acorn and a tree is on you, not me.
Welcome to Gilead.
https://www.facebook.com/ira.dember/posts/10220810896675821
A clump of cells with the *potential* to be a human. A clump of cells that right-wingers treat as far more important than the actual human woman who is carrying said clump of cells. Religious right-wingers don’t give two flying fucks about the women who carry these clumps of cells with the potential to be people, if they did they’d spend vastly more time, money, and energy on the sorts of social supports and contraceptives that would prevent said clump of cells from coming into existence in the first place, and especially more money on the sorts of childcare programs that would help support the clump of cells after it grows into a baby that is born and needs food and water and clothing and housing and parents who have a stable income to provide it with all of these things. It is hilariously and tragically ironic that right-wingers simultaneously fight for the clump of cells, and yet fight equally as hard to try and deny and educate women away from using the contraceptives that would prevent the clump of cells in the first place, thus removing the need for any moral dilemma whatsoever. But when you base your policies on religion, don’t ever expect anything to make sense I guess. Geez.
Thank you so much for focusing on this….which some of us HAVE noticed.
Your work on this issue is crucial!
It affects half the population, at least!!!!!!!!!!