Anti-Abortion Groups Plan to Sue Women for Abortions

With Trump in office, conservative groups are going on the offensive against abortion providers, abortion rights activists, and women who end their pregnancies.

Photo by Reed Naliboff on Unsplash

If you thought women bleeding out in hospital parking lots, losing their uteruses, being forced to carry doomed pregnancies to term, and dying of treatable pregnancy complications was more enough of an anti-abortion dystopia, just wait until you see what the anti-abortion movement has planned with Trump in office. Despite abortion criminalization being vastly unpopular — abortion rights have secured majority support nearly everywhere those rights have been on the ballot — the anti-abortion movement is charging forward. They don’t care about public opinion or majority support or even the basic democratic functioning of the nation. They care about forcing women to carry and birth children against our will. They care about punishing women who end pregnancies and those who help them.

For all of Trump’s claims to moderation on abortion, many of the people he’s nominating for top cabinet positions are staunch and often aggressive abortion opponents. There seems to be little doubt that they will use their positions to go after abortion rights supporters and those who help women end pregnancies, a list that includes doctors and abortion rights groups, but also moms and friends and aunties and boyfriends. And it’s not pro-choice Chicken Littles saying that the full force of the law is about to bear down on abortion-seekers — it’s the leaders of the anti-abortion movement, who fully expect their To Do list to get checked off by President Donald Trump and Attorney General Matt Gaetz.

“If I was a midwife or a rando left activist packing pills in a basement in New York State … I would be really f---ing worried right now,” Kristan Hawkins, the president Students for Life, told the Washington Post’s Caroline Kitchener.

That’s because an anti-abortion attorney general could use centuries-old laws to criminally prosecute people who mail not just abortion pills, but any items used for an abortion, making if effectively impossible to provide legal abortions anywhere in the US. This would be a shocking and infuriating decision, but Matt Gaetz is not exactly someone who shies away from the shocking and infuriating, and neither is Donald Trump. And the anti-abortion movement absolutely expects Gaetz, or any other conservative who winds up in the AG seat, to make good on the movement’s support for Trump despite his rhetorical backsliding on their number-one issue. Many of these people are fools, but they know how the game works: Abortion bans are currently unpopular, and so you just can’t talk about them in an election year. Now that the election is over and their guy has won, it’s time to do what they always intended.

In Texas, anti-abortion groups are trawling around for men who are upset their partner had an abortion, and helping those men to sue anyone involved — a doctor, a friend who helped to provide abortion pills, an organization that facilitated access to them. This is the predictable outcome of the Texas law against “aiding and abetting” abortion. And it’s also predictable that anti-abortion groups have waited until they had the political upper hand to bring these kinds of vastly unpopular and authoritarian actions. They know they can’t get the public’s consent, and so they force themselves on us.

It’s hard to overstate how dark things might get. Many voters seemed to truly believe Trump when he said he would leave abortion to the states. In fact, Trump’s plan seems to be to leave abortion to others in his administration — and unlike Trump, who truly does not care about abortion rights one way or the other, many other people on his team very much do want to criminalize the procedure and punish those involved in it (that list of “anyone involved” will inevitably also include women having abortions).

Women in conservative states are the most at risk. But abortion opponents have no intention of leaving abortion rights to the states — not with Republicans controlling the whole of the federal government and Trump appointing a nasty band of ideologues, imbeciles, and accused sexual assailants to his cabinet. The most vicious and extreme opponents of women’s most basic freedoms have more power than ever. They absolutely plan to wield it.

xx Jill