With support for abortion rights at an all-time high one year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, Republicans are now the dogs that caught the (clown) car — and instead of letting go of the bumper, they piled right in. But until the political media starts asking the right questions about anti-abortion policy, the bursting Beetle carrying the 2024 GOP presidential field will continue to drive in cheerful circles around the charred remains of Donald Trump’s still-sizzling circus tent, honking and hooting about 12- or 15- or six-week gestational limits and “leaving the issue to the states.”
The question is not when Republicans would prefer to ban abortion, but how. How do they plan to enforce their preferred abortion ban, whatever it may be? And what are the consequences for violating that ban, and for whom?
Americans deserve to know what will happen if we resist attempts to force us to remain pregnant against our will.
These are glaringly obvious follow-up questions that reporters should ask every single time a politician stakes out a position on abortion. The answers will tell us far more about how anti-abortion politicians think — and how they might govern — than theoretical finagling over gestational bans or deflections about the political prospects of federal abortion restrictions. And yet national coverage of Republican politicians’ views on abortion is almost exclusively concerned with everything except the obvious: that outlawing abortion means surveilling, prosecuting, and punishing people who have, support, or provide abortions.
So far, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley appears to be the only aspiring Republican presidential candidate who’s gone on the record recently concerning her preferred method for abortion ban enforcement, and she’s set the bar horrifyingly low. At a CNN town hall event in Iowa, Haley suggested abortion bans should “start” from the premise that people who have abortions shouldn’t be executed. Real humanitarian stuff. But proposals to prosecute abortion as homicide and sometimes as a capital crime have been introduced in at least five states.
And abortion needn’t even be technically outlawed for police and prosecutors to target and criminalize people for pregnancy loss. A recent report from the reproductive justice legal group If/When/How found that from 2000 to 2020 — before Roe was overturned — 26 states had cases where Americans were “criminally investigated or arrested for allegedly ending their own pregnancy or helping someone else do so.” (Full disclosure: I used to work on the group’s communications team.)
Americans deserve to know what will happen if we resist attempts to force us to remain pregnant against our will. Will we face civil litigation and the ridiculous prospect of paying damages to anyone who believes we’ve helped someone else end a pregnancy, as in Texas? Will we face criminal prosecution for self-managed abortion or pregnancy loss, as in South Carolina and Nevada? We should hear what charges politicians believe we should face if we refuse to comply with abortion bans or experience miscarriage. We ought to know what kind of time they believe we should serve, or the fines they believe we should pay. Because the people driving anti-abortion policy are not at all shy about their ultimate goal: criminalizing abortion, including people who have abortions.
Republicans should be forced to spell out their views on the matter, especially in light of the fact that America’s racist, classist and sexist abortion bans are not now and have never been about saving unborn children, ensuring healthy pregnancies, empowering families, or advancing the health and safety of our children. If that were the case, our nationwide social safety net would look far different. (For a start, it would…exist.) Instead, abortion bans have always been about using pregnancy, forced birth and coerced adoption as a means of controlling compliance with white, heteropatriarchal gender norms and punishment for perceived promiscuity.
Anti-abortion politicians recognize the question of enforcing abortion bans is the real third rail of abortion politics.
Anti-abortion politicians recognize the question of enforcing abortion bans is the real third rail of abortion politics. It’s why they are happy to waffle over so-called abortion “exceptions” and fixate on restrictions to abortion insurance coverage and funding. It’s also why they’re keen to present gestational limits as “compromises,” in the hope that the public will be fooled into thinking that second-trimester abortion bans are in keeping with Western European norms. (They aren’t.)
These frameworks allow for the construction of “good” and “bad” or even “less bad” abortions — such as earlier versus later abortions, abortions performed because of rape or incest, or to save the life of a pregnant person. Setting up this sliding scale of stigma is a great way to soft-sell the necessary demonization of people who will inevitably end pregnancies, regardless of what the law says, to a public that tends to recoil at the prospect of punishing people who have or provide abortions.
The fact that Republicans continue to deliberately hold back on talking about abortion on the campaign trail should be the loudest possible signal that they need to be pushed much, much harder on the issue. Americans deserve to hear what they would do about those of us who won’t submit to compulsory pregnancy. It’s time to put some spike strips around that clown car until we get some answers.