Other clinics are moving as well, like this one profiled in the New Yorker. There was no more need to soft-soap their position on things like rape, and the Supreme Court was down for anything - there was no need to worry about them anymore.”īack in Texas, one high-profile physician is relocating his clinics to New Mexico, near an airport, and to southern Illinois in a bid to provide care as accessible as possible to the fast developing “abortion deserts” in much of the middle and southeast of the country. She continued: “But they read Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a sign that Roe would go anyway. “Previously, Republican legislators had a sense that pushing too hard on unpopular things like abolishing rape or incest exceptions could make it harder to reverse Roe,” Ziegler told Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern. Law professor Mary Ziegler offers this analysis on why these exceptions - once common in anti-abortion laws - have fallen out of favor with conservative lawmakers. That law, like several trigger laws passed in other states in recent years, contains no exceptions for rape or incest. The Texas Tribune reports that anti-abortion groups are planning to use this law in at least two suits against groups raising money to fund abortions.Ī third Texas law - a so-called trigger law passed in 2021 - which criminalizes abortion from the moment of fertilization, is slated to go into effect on Sunday.
It bans abortion after a fetal heartbeat can be found, about six weeks into a pregnancy. One archaic 1925 law technically went into effect when the court’s decision came down last month, but prosecutors have not yet used it.Ī second law, which has been called a “bounty” or “vigilante” law, allows private citizens to sue anyone who assists with an abortion for damages of at least $10,000. Take Texas, where there are three anti-abortion laws. That includes not just control of Congress, which has been the focus of national Democrats like President Biden, but also statewide ballot initiatives, the partisan makeup of state supreme courts, the outcome of governors’ races, and more, down to city governments.Įven within jurisdictions, the picture is muddled. This comprehensive roundup from Bolts gives a sense of how many ways the fight over reproductive rights can go in the 2022 midterms alone. Some resolutions will come at the ballot box. OK? It opened a Pandora's Box of other legal problems that are going to take years to resolve.” In rescinding the 49-year-old constitutional right to abortion care, the court “suddenly dumped the abortion question back into the realm of criminal law.”Īs Jeff Crossman, a candidate for attorney general in Ohio, put it: “The Dobbs decision did not settle anything. There are instead thousands of municipal, county, state and federal legal systems that often overlap and contradict one another.įew moments in recent memory have highlighted this better than the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. There is no such thing as the criminal justice system in the U.S. Want this delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters here.
This is The Marshall Project’s new Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue from reporter Jamiles Lartey.
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