Abortion Bans Are Empowering Abusive Men

And prominent "pro-life" activists are representing them.

Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash

Abortions bans are designed and written to allow for all kinds of horrors: Women losing their organs, women bleeding out without help, women losing their lives. But they’re also written to empower abusive men. After all, the very foundation of an abortion ban is an assumption that a woman’s body does not belong to her. Abusive men agree.

And so it’s perhaps not a huge surprise that several men have indeed taken advantage of these laws in an effort to control their ex partners. And it’s also not particularly surprising — although it is appalling — that they’ve found support and legal representation from some of the most powerful people in the US anti-abortion movement.

One man in Texas sued his wife’s friends for allegedly helping her to get abortion pills (she was trying to leave him, saying that, duh, he was abusive); Jonathan Mitchell, an anti-abortion lawyer who wrote the Texas abortion bounty law and also represents president Donald Trump, represented him. Another Texas man murdered his girlfriend after she traveled to Colorado for an abortion. And now, a third Texas man found out his ex girlfriend was planning to travel out of state to end her pregnancy, and he also hired Jonathan Mitchell to help stop her. Mitchell has splashed her name all over public court filings, and even though she has not actually broken the law (traveling out of state for an abortion is perfectly legal), he’s seeking to depose her and any of her “accomplices” in what can only be described as a blatant campaign of harassment and abuse, on behalf of an nauseatingly controlling man.