The Anti-Abortion Movement's War on Free Speech and Democracy

The GOP's post-Roe efforts to block ballot initiatives and shut down information about abortion make clear that they don't want a liberal democracy, they want power.

Photo by Reed Naliboff on Unsplash

Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the era of legal abortion in America, a standard Republican line was that abortion was a question that shouldn’t have been decided by the courts, but rather should be left to the people — to the states, to voters (feminists, of course, countered that legal abortion does leave the question to the people — it leaves it to the people deciding for themselves whether or not to have an abortion). Now that the question of abortions legality has been tossed back to the states, though, Republicans have changed their tune. They don’t want input from the people at all; they want to outlaw abortion entirely, with no exceptions, regardless of the consequences or what the American public wants.

And it’s not just abortion procedures they want to ban. They’re trying to ban or penalize sharing information about abortion — speech, in other words, generally protected by the First Amendment.

At the same time, Republican-dominated legislatures are making it difficult or impossible to put abortion rights on the ballot.

Much has been written about the anti-democratic shift of the Republican right over the past several years, from scaling back voting rights and targeting voter disenfranchisement laws at Black voters, to sowing doubt about free and fair American elections, to changing the rules to keep their opponents out of power, to attacks on racial, sexual, and religious minorities. The battles over reproductive rights has long been a microcosm of these anti-democratic impulses; abortion has perhaps been the issue on which Republicans are most unapologetic about tossing all alleged concerns about fairness, truth, and even Constitutional governance aside. That is now reaching a fever pitch, as Republicans try to shut down talking about abortion, and try to prevent voters from casting their ballots on abortion.

In Texas, public opinion polling suggests that a majority of voters support abortion rights. A Democrat in the Texas legislature has put forward a bill that would allow Texas voters to vote on whether to add the following to the Texas constitution: “The legislature shall not pass a law that abridges an individual’s access to abortion care if the individual’s decision to access abortion care is made in consultation with a licensed physician.”

Pretty straightforward, right? Too bad the Republicans of the Texas legislature will never let the bill go to a vote. They don’t want the public to have a voice when it comes to abortion rights, because they know they’ll lose — as they’ve lost every single time the public has voted on abortion rights this year, from Kentucky to Kansas to California to Michigan to Vermont.

In Ohio, something even sneakier is happening. Republicans there are trying to make it harder to amend their state’s constitution — because, many Ohio politics-watchers believe, they’re worried that a ballot initiative could enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. As it stands, Ohio’s Republican-dominated legislature has also banned abortion, and reproductive rights advocates worry that they could make the ban even more expansive, and potentially come for some highly-effective methods of contraception next. A majority of Ohioans say that they would support an amendment to the state constitution protecting abortion rights. And so Ohio Republicans are now trying to require a supermajority in order to amend the constitution.

Republicans have made clear they have zero interest in enacting the will of voters when it comes to abortion rights. But they also want to squelch even conversation and information about abortion. A few days ago, I wrote about right-wing efforts to cover up the stories from doctors about what happens when abortion is banned. But Republicans and anti-abortion groups are also trying to criminalize sharing information about how and where to have a safe abortion. From Michelle Goldberg’s important column in the New York Times this week:

Proposed legislation in South Carolina would have made it unlawful to provide information about abortions. In September, the University of Idaho issued guidance that it might be illegal for employees to “promote” birth control or abortion. In Texas, two abortion funds (groups that help people pay and travel for abortions) this year received deposition demand letters from people tied to anti-abortion lawmakers for information on anyone who has “aided and abetted” the procedure.

And in Oklahoma, some library workers were warned about helping patrons find information about abortion, or even uttering the word. In an email, the employees were told they could face a $10,000 fine, jail time or even lose their jobs if they didn’t comply. (The library system later updated its guidance.)

…

The death of Roe has given at least some abortion foes second thoughts about their proclaimed love of free speech. The National Right to Life Committee has also proposed a model law that would define “aiding or abetting” an abortion to include speech that “encourages or facilitates efforts to obtain an illegal abortion.” But conservative lawmakers don’t even need a new law: Most states already have criminal laws on aiding or abetting, and prosecutors could apply them to people who provide information about abortion.

This could be at issue in Mississippi, where the attorney general’s office recently sent a subpoena (a possible prelude to criminal charges) to Mayday Health, a health education nonprofit that put up billboards directing women to a website with information about medication abortion.

This is particularly ironic given that the anti-abortion movement has argued that it is a protected act for, say, a pharmacist to refuse fill a prescription for the morning-after pill for a rape victim. They have argued that anti-abortion “crisis pregnancy centers” lying to women and pretending to be medical facilities when they’re not is protected speech. But sharing accurate information about abortion? For that, the anti-abortion movement wants to prosecute you.

These attempts to regulate speech about abortion aren’t new, they’ve just recently been targeted at women and organizations overseas. Under Republican administrations, US development dollars are pulled from any family planning group that advocates for abortion rights, refers for safe abortions, performs abortions with non-US dollars, or informs women where and how to get abortions if they need them — including in countries where abortion is legal.

When that law, which abortion rights groups call the Global Gag Rule, has been challenged in court, abortions opponents have argued that it’s ok for the US government to stifle abortion-related speech because the First Amendment doesn’t apply outside of the United States.

But their efforts now are within the United States. And they’re not just tearing down abortion rights; they’re tearing up the First Amendment.

xx Jill