Abortion’s Unceasing Legal Wars
Terry H. Schwadron
March 14, 2023
Even as we await more court rulings to restrict medical abortions nationally, private lawsuits in Texas are show how the legal twists and turns are taking on a disproportionate sense of vengeance, medical urgency apart from abortion and a kind of madness about it all.
By coincidence, there have been private lawsuits in the news lately.
In one, five women who say they were denied abortions even when their conditions showed “substantial” risk of medical harm by doctors in the state who feared state prosecution for second-guessing their judgments.
The five women had discovered that their fetuses had no chance of survival, but doctors resisted until they showed signs of hemorrhage or life-threatening infection from carrying fetuses without full skulls or that threatened a twin’s survival. They seek to challenge the Texas laws barring abortions and threatening punishment for helping to obtain one.
In the second, three women are being sued for wrongful death for allegedly helping a friend obtain medical abortion pills — legally. The first-of-its-kind complaint was filed by Marcus Silva who says the three helped his ex-wife obtain abortion pills in violation of Texas law that prohibits aid to helping a women to obtain an abortion herself.
Silva is asking a million dollars in damages and for an injunction to prevent the women from providing abortion pills in Texas, and filed a charge of conspiracy against the women, alleging that they told his ex-wife to not tell him about their actions.
According to the Texas Tribune, the wife filed for divorce in May 2022, before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, became pregnant in July, and received medical abortion pills in July after talking with her friends. The couple, who have two other children, completed divorce proceedings last month.
The Tribune reported that the state of abortion law in Texas in July 2022 was uncertain, as the state’s trigger law to punish anyone performing an abortion did not take effect until August. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says as soon as Roe was overturned, a law from the 1850s kicked in making it illegal for anyone to perform an abortion or “furnish the means” for one. But he is turning enforcement over to private citizens.
It is all more than a little over the edge of reason.
Medical Abortion Decision Looms
In the meantime, a single federal district court judge in Texas is deciding whether medical abortion should be halted or barred nationwide in a case that could be decided any day now.
An anti-abortion group has challenged the use of one of the two medical abortion pills available through the mails or at participating drug store chains based on testing protocols used by the Federal Drug Administration 20 years ago.
Having left the abortion issue to the states, the anti-abortion crusade can’t stop — this week pressuring drug store chains not to distribute medical abortion pills even in states where usage is totally legal. Thus, California’s counter-threat to Walgreen’s to drop the chain as a state supplier if the chain continues to buckle to attorneys general from red states.
The continuing legal actions, the continuing parade of additionally restrictive state legislation nationally, the sense of state-encouraged vigilantism all are contributing to rising ill-will arguments abounding as we head into an election season.
Actress Jane Fonda intemperately spat out on a televised panel that abortion feelings are running so strong that advocates might consider “murdering” opponents to get their way as a word picture to capture the depth of ill will. Instead, of course, it prompted anti-abortion warriors to claim that they had been targeted by death threats.
We’re way past the moral arguments here about one woman or one couple facing a highly critical personal decision about continuing a pregnancy. We have found ourselves instead deep inside state control over individual decision-making, inside personal medical considerations.
Adding irony, the anti-abortion campaigns are driven by exactly those anti-abortion forces who have argued the other side of keeping the state away from individual in cases involving public health measures, covid, vaccines and mask-wearing.
However difficult the abortion issue is for individuals or for the state, it couldn’t be the intent to have women to have to prove medical suffering before they can get care or for an individual denied having personal conversations with friends before making an important decision.
It couldn’t even have been the intention of the five Supreme Court justices to spend the rest of their lifetime terms still trying to define a line between humanitarian concerns based on moral code and the insanity of extreme enforcement.
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