Republicans Want to Ban Abortion Nationwide

So much for "states' rights."

Photo by Aiden Frazier on Unsplash

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Mere months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ended the era of legal abortion for American women, and tossed the question of abortion rights back to the states, Republican politicians are introducing a national abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The bill is being introduced by Sen. Lindsey Graham.

This is the same Lindsey Graham who said this back in May:

Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, “abortion should be an issue left to the states” was the dominant conservative line. While many anti-abortion groups were honest about their ambitions — to outlaw abortion nationally, under all circumstances, and to potentially also expand their reach into contraception — more mainline Republicans insisted that the issue wasn’t about misogyny, but SCOTUS overreach, Constitutional malfeasance, and states’ rights.

We knew they were lying. But it sure didn’t take them long to publicly advertise their unrepentant hypocrisy.

Now that the national protections of Roe are gone, Republicans are not content to leave abortion rights to the states. Conservative states, including Graham’s home state of South Carolina, has acted quickly to broadly criminalize abortion. In liberal states, abortion has remained legal. This is precisely the compromise so many Republicans said they wanted; it is an outcome that they said would turn down the national temperature and make abortion a less contentious political issue.

Instead, they’ve decided that they want to decide for all of us; that regardless of what the majority thinks — and a majority of Americans support abortion rights and want the government to butt out — all American women should be beholden to the views of a minority of reactionary misogynists.

Overturning Roe didn’t make abortion a less contentious issue in the US. It’s made it far, far more contentious — mostly because Republicans insist on fanning the flames of conflict instead of leaving blue states (and women) alone.

Republicans have latched onto a 15-week national ban for a reason: They can brand it as a “late-term” abortion ban and, they hope, recapture some of the support they’ve lost since their rush to criminalize abortion put so many women’s lives at risk. But 15 weeks of pregnancy is not “late term;” a normal pregnancy is 40 weeks long, which puts 15 weeks barely into the second trimester. And while I haven’t seen the text of this latest bill, a previous, more liberal version of it that would have outlawed abortion after 20 weeks did not include an exception for serious fetal anomaly — many of which can only be detected later in pregnancy, after 15 weeks.

Women, then, who go in for their 20-week scan and receive the heartbreaking news that their fetus has a serious issue incompatible with life would be forced, under this Republican bill, to carry to term. As it stands, this is already the case for women in many conservative states, which have systematically stripped out fetal anomaly and women’s health exceptions from their abortion criminalization laws. But women in conservative states at least have the option to travel (that is, if they can afford the trip and the time off of work, and if they are physically healthy enough to do so). A national 15-week ban would foreclose that possibility.

I realize the men making these laws know nothing of women’s bodies. But the reality is that a doctor can’t identify a serious fetal anomaly early in pregnancy — six-week abortion bans, for example, don’t have fetal anomaly exceptions either, but that early, there isn’t even a fetus to diagnose an anomaly in. Conservative politicians try to use so-called “late term” abortions as a wedge issue because it sounds squicky and bad, but they ignore the reason so many women have abortions later in pregnancy, and they keep moving up the definition of “late.”

This is fundamentally a question of who decides: Lindsey Graham, or you and your doctor? Republicans got what they said they wanted: The abortion question returned to the states.

But that was never the real goal. And let’s be clear: A 15-week ban isn’t the real goal, either. It is what they believe to be one achievable step forward the actual goal, which is the total criminalization of abortion nationwide, no exceptions, and from there less female independence, more power exclusively in male hands, and generations of women and girls treated as nothing more than bodies meant for breeding.

xx Jill

This is an (extra!) weekly free edition of this newsletter. If you want even more, or if you want to support feminist writing, reporting, and analysis, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. This newsletter is 100% supported by readers like you, and I am so so so appreciative of all of you who subscribe, read, and share.