Right-wingers want gun stores open and abortion clinics closed during the novel coronavirus disaster. As my colleague Aysha Qamar reported earlier this week, the forced birthers in charge of numerous state governments see the crisis as an opportunity to undermine women’s reproductive rights, a crusade they’ve been on since 15 minutes after Roe v. Wade was decided nearly half a century ago. They know enacting policies that shutter abortion clinics even temporarily guarantees that one or more of them will never open again. Closing clinics in the face of a national emergency adds a twisted patriotism to the moral high ground the forced birthers like to claim they stand on. These opportunists say the federal guidelines calling for canceling all “non-essential surgeries and procedures” until further notice excludes abortions from being performed.
Postponing nonessential procedures makes sense if we’re talking facelifts, cataract removals, cochlear implants, or gastric bypass surgery. Delaying a few weeks or few months does not prevent the patient from getting those operations after the guidelines are lifted. An abortion delayed on the other hand—especially in states with strict gestational age limits on the procedure—means no abortion at all. Which is, of course, exactly what forced birthers want.
This coronavirus-fueled power play would be bad enough, but abortion foes simultaneously dare to claim that their harassing protests outside clinics are essential. At Rewire, Jessica Mason Pieklo reports on a conference call with activists conducted by Pro-Life Action League Executive Director Eric Scheidler. Because Donald Trump has done what Scheidler called good work (and others call intolerable curtailment of women’s fundamental rights), he urged supporters on the call to show the man in the White House respect by continuing to protest, but doing so in small groups, following social distancing guidelines.
Peter Breen, vice president and senior counsel for the anti-choice litigation firm Thomas More Society, reiterated that approach, telling protesters not to cough on each other. That’s no joke.
“Going deeper into some of these [stay-at-home] orders, we are of the opinion, based on the necessary services or essential services that are being defined in these orders, that we also qualify,” Breen said, “If you are providing information about local pregnancy centers trying to connect pregnant women going into an abortion facility or any patient going to an abortion facility with more life-affirming alternatives, you are connecting them to reproductive health services. Or you are connecting them to health care generally.”
Fountains of disinformation about abortion and its after-effects, in several states, including Texas, these so-called ”pregnancy centers” receive often generous government funding to tell women their lies.
Texas is one of the states ordering a ban on abortions and to classify them nonessential for the duration of the coronavirus disaster. The idea behind this is obviously to ensure hospitals have enough equipment, protective gear, and skilled staff to handle exploding COVID-19 cases. How bogus it is to exclude abortions from the essential category is exemplified by the fact that medication abortions—abortions by pill—are also forbidden during the crisis, even though these require nothing that would evenly remotely impinge on taking care of people afflicted by the virus.
Texas and four other states have been sued over these temporary bans. Like two dozen states over the past decade, the Lone Star State has imposed ever-stricter rules regarding abortion and abortion clinics, measures that its most outspoken advocates freely admit are directed at shutting them down entirely.
In 2013, a Texas law showed how this works. It required doctors performing abortions to have hospital admitting privileges and clinics to be hospital grade. That forced the closure of more than half the state’s 41 abortion clinics before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the law four years later in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. Despite the ruling, just 23 abortion clinics now operate in Texas.
Or they did, until a panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 this week that temporarily banning abortion was okay. That case had received an amicus brief from 13 anti-abortion state attorneys general, led by Louisiana A.G. Jeffrey Landry.
“It’s a matter of gubernatorial authority in a public health crisis to conserve resources,” one the signers, Indiana A.G. Curtis Hill Jr., told The Washington Post. “Gubernatorial authority provides the temporary relief from certain constitutional liberties. It’s not comfortable and I don’t like it but courts must recognize the right to take these actions. [...] The pandemic is an excuse to do something that they’ve tried to do for years,” said Rupali Sharma of the Lawyering Project, part of the legal team suing Texas.
In Ohio, a federal district judge ordered the state’s temporary ban lifted for two weeks. In Alabama, a judge ordered a stay until arguments can be heard from both sides. Lawsuits are pending in Iowa and Oklahoma. The governor of Mississippi and attorney general of Kentucky want to impose their own bans.
The 5th Circuit Court is known for its conservatism, and one of the more liberal appeals courts might come to the opposite conclusion in this case. Such differences can only be resolved by the Supreme Court. These days, that is a dicey prospect.
Abortions are essential. Without legal access to the procedure, women’s sexuality and bodily integrity are hostage to ideologues whose attitudes and actions have long failed to live up to their “pro-life” sloganeering.