For two decades, Republican legislators have passed increasingly restrictive abortion regulations. The strategy is working, and has slowly chipped away at abortion rights. Lawsuits in response to these regulations have produced a confusing morass of legal precedent that further weakens abortion rights.
Now, Republican legislators are simply ignoring the law. Several states have passed or are considering abortion laws that are patently unconstitutional. That’s exactly the point. Legislators hope to bait choice activists into a choice showdown that winds its way to the Supreme Court. If Donald Trump gets another nominee or two, it could mark the end of Roe v. Wade.
An Unprecedented Increase in Abortion Restrictions
According to the Guttmacher Institute, 19 states enacted 63 new abortion regulations in 2017. This marks the largest increase in abortion regulations since 2013, and for an obvious reason: Donald Trump is president, and hopes to get at least one more Supreme Court nominee. Ginsburg is 85 and Breyer is 75. Though both seem to be in good health, their age offers plenty of reason to worry about whether they’ll remain on the Court through the end of the Trump administration.
Choice advocacy organizations have done exactly what they should in response to the new regulatory climate: they’ve filed lawsuits asserting the unconstitutional nature of the new generation of abortion bans. The problem is that this strategy is exactly what Republicans want. Any of these suits could eventually be appealed to the Supreme Court. The appeals process is long, offering time for the Court to shift right.
Iowa’s Six-Week Abortion Ban: The Ultimate Roe Test?
One of the most disconcerting new abortion regulations is Iowa’s six-week abortion ban. The legislation was passed by the state Senate and will now go to the House It prohibits Iowa abortion clinics from performing abortions once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. This is usually around 6 weeks’ gestation, which is so early that many women may not even realize they’re pregnant.
Under the law, women who have been raped must report the rape within 45 days to access an abortion.
Pro-choice advocates have argued that the law is unconstitutional, but with an uncertain court, that’s not clear. A new justice or two could change all of that.
For the law to remain intact, Iowa has to prove that the law does not constitute an “undue burden” to women seeking abortions. That’s becoming an easier hurdle in a legal climate that has endorsed numerous abortion restrictions.
Chipping Away at Abortion Rights With Other Attacks
Abortion doesn’t have to be banned outright to effectively become illegal. That’s the approach Republicans have taken with regulations that require abortion clinics to be equipped like hospitals, or that require numerous trips to a clinic before a woman can have an abortion. For the women most in need of abortions—poor women, women without transportation, women in abusive relationships—these regulations make abortion virtually inaccessible. Some give up. Others delay their abortions until they have to seek a more expensive second trimester abortion.
Republicans know this. Though they’ve cloaked other regulations in language about women’s “safety,” abortion remains a safe medical procedure. These regulations are really about making abortion more difficult, more dangerous, more expensive, and more stigmatized. If legislators can enact technically Constitutional regulations that make abortion impossible, they don’t have to ban the procedure.
What It’s All Really About: Punishing Women for Having Sex
It’s all happening in the midst of a maternal mortality crisis that’s the worst in the industrialized world. Republican lawmakers seem uninterested in doing anything about the real threat to women’s health—low quality prenatal care, no postpartum support, and increasingly risky childbirth. They’d rather force women into pregnancy and watch them die. After all, in the Republican mind, a fetus isn’t really a child. It’s a punishment for having sex. So it doesn’t matter if the woman suffers and dies or the baby grows up in poverty. No punishment is too harsh for being female and having sex.