Morning Briefing: Anti-Abortion Movement's Post-Roe Playbook Goes Beyond Abortion
If the U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, GOP lawmakers prepared to seek a federal ban on abortion, and the anti-abortion movement's playbook targets various types of reproductive healthcare.
Morning Briefing: GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has “signaled that the GOP could pursue a federal ban on abortion if the right-wing Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade and Republicans regain control of Congress in the fast-approaching midterm elections.”
Many leaders in the anti-abortion movement are reportedly “redoubling state efforts, where they’ve already had success, with an eye toward more restrictive measures.”
The anti-abortion movement has embraced the idea of fetal personhood, and now GOP controlled states “are not just shutting down clinics. They are attempting to create a panopticon that surveils and punishes every individual involved in the termination of a pregnancy.”
The anti-abortion movement’s goals include more than abortion, and “with SCOTUS poised to curtail abortion access, activists will be further emboldened to chip away at birth control.”
While Republican state lawmakers once supported anti-abortion legislation that included various types of exceptions, during the past several years GOP state lawmakers have “now adopted the language once promoted by the most extreme anti-abortion activists in the country.”
The criminalization of abortion in other countries provides a window into a possible future in Post-Roe America, even as “overzealous prosecutors in the U.S. have already jailed women over suspected abortions. If abortion is outlawed, every indication is that more women, and certainly more doctors, will wind up behind bars.”
Must Reads
Augustine Sedgewick writes that “Patriot Front members dress up in the uniform of white fatherhood because they fear that their claim on that role is in doubt. This fear has been passed down from fathers to sons across centuries of American history, along with the conviction that “strong families” of the type that Patriot Front celebrates—white and patriarchal—prove their strength through violence. The result is a war so old that its battledress now looks like casual wear, a war that can never end because its combatants believe it to be their lifeblood.” [The American Scholar]
Stacy Lee Kong and Doan Truong write that “racialized, Indigenous, queer, disabled and poor people rarely have access to wellness spaces as customers, much less the opportunity to become practitioners themselves, even though many wellness trends are derived from their traditional practices, then repackaged as “ancient secrets” or “mystical knowledge.” It all creates the perfect opportunity for white supremacy to flourish—and for the wellness industry to do serious harm.” [The Monitor]
Greg Fish writes that “while the final opinion due in the summer may have been significantly watered down, focused on surgically eviscerating Roe, and limiting the scope of the decision to avoid public backlash, this full-throated assault on even the notion of a right to bodily autonomy or medical privacy is now out in the open. The band-aid has been ripped off, giving the Court’s far-right majority the green light to start overturning the entire legal framework for the personal rights of anyone they see as less of a human than them. If the justices were afraid of the public’s fury, well, the public is already furious, so they might as well just go for it.” [Rantt Media]
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