The unconstitutional plan to stop women from traveling out of state for an abortion, explained
The unconstitutional plan to stop women from traveling out of state for an abortion, explained
The age of travel bans is now upon us.
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Let's say they get this through the courts and are able to do it. How will they do it? Checkpoints at the border with mandatory pregnancy tests for all women? If you're getting an abortion for a non-medically necessary issue, you're probably not pregnant enough to be showing yet.
I think this is a civil prosecution like Texas' abortion ban. So say you and a friend of yours live in Texas. Your friend was raped and just found out that she's 7 weeks pregnant. You help her get to a blue state for an abortion.
At some point, your friend tells her mother who happens to tell me. I sue you and your friend to collect thousands of dollars.
Now even if I'm unsuccessful, you still need to deal with the time, money, and stress that a civil trial brings. And if you're found to be in violation of that law, you could be out thousands of dollars. This is all intended to make people reluctant to help pregnant women. It's a cruel law designed to scare people into being crueler to others.
Remember when you needed to have standing to sue someone? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Only if you're trying to overturn one of these laws, see Whole Women's Health v Jackson. Which despite what's claimed doesn't protect SB8 style laws from judicial review, but rather protects them from such review before they go into effect and someone actually sues under them.
Any abortion travel ban is either going to immediately collapse under the commerce clause (leaving the state to have an abortion is necessarily an act of interstate commerce and federal government is the one with power over interstate commerce) or use Texas SB8-style civil enforcement, which means no one can challenge it until someone actually sues using it - at which point I'd get some activist group to make a fucking showing of taking women across state lines for abortions to bait a lawsuit under the travel ban so as to be able to challenge it.
It only takes one or two unsuccessful suits for this to not even be taken up by the courts in the future though, right? And I don't know how you can prove someone had an abortion out of state.
And it only takes the vague threat to have a chilling effect on women getting medical access they are otherwise entitled to, unfortunately.
Laws like this are designed to be deterrents. You don't need to catch very many offenders with checkpoints as long as you can create enough fear about the consequences of breaking the law to keep people from traveling to get an abortion.
Exactly, these are terror tactics, not things that they ever thought would work in practice.
I can't imagine anything good coming out of asking that many women if they're pregnant when they're not. That's the kind of mistake you make once, not make it a full time job!
You really don't want to ask an overweight woman that question. You might lose a few teeth.
Is there a boomer humor community yet?
I taught boomer humour would be more something along the line of "I wouldn't want to be in the car when they'll ask my wife if she's pregnant only to realize she's just got a few baby's worth of extra weight"
You know, deprecating humour about one's own wife