Wanted: Abortion Spies
Big Payouts Out West
I can picture the ominous billboards popping up along the highways and byways of the Lone Star State, screaming out the warning words, “Hear something, see something, say something” next to the photo of a bouncing, bubbling, giggling, new born baby boy and the words in smaller case, “Vote Republican.”
The billboards aren’t about terrorists, at least not the kind that set off bombs, but these terrorists are no less frightening and just as potentially dangerous. They could turn the local McDonald’s into a nest of spies, there could be informers at the neighborhood Starbucks, undercover agents may be lurking past the lettuce aisle in the Shop N Save.
It would be all in the name of an ever darker, more draconian measure to outlaw abortions in Texas after about six weeks of pregnancy, or after a doctor detects a fetal heartbeat, and often before a woman even knows she is pregnant. Current federal law permits abortions up to the point when a fetus can sustain life outside the womb, generally at 23 or 24 weeks.
Another new Texas law that could be a template for national legislation, not only permits but rewards private citizens who sue abortion clinics, doctors and anyone helping a woman get an abortion. Those who turn in errant clinics, doctors or women will get a $10,000 reward, otherwise known as a bounty, for each abortion avoided.
The Texas law goes so far as to prohibit officials from enforcing the new abortion law and only allows members of the public to sue anyone who helps a woman get an abortion. How would someone know that a woman is planning an abortion, possibly by overhearing talk about it at the hair salon or while standing in line at the Dunkin Donuts, maybe a high school student overhears talk between two classmates. Someone who donates to Planned Parenthood could potentially be hauled into court, a friend who drives a friend to an abortion appointment could be liable or even helping someone to understand an abortion medication could end up before a judge.
Maybe the lure of $10,000 rewards will lead people to stalk a suspected woman or to stake out a doctor’s office in hopes of identifying women seeking abortions. The law encourages everyone to take on the mantle of big brother in the struggle to further limit women’s reproductive rights.
Deputizing citizens to enforce laws is not new in Texas and other wild west states. They used to call them posses. Recently, 32 Texas Sheriffs began deputizing citizens to help fight illegal immigration. In Texas an officer serving a search warrant can call as many citizens as needed to aid in the execution of a warrant.
The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office in Arizona has a new “citizens posse” law that allows residents to be deputized to help law enforcement keep the peace. The Sun City West community in Arizona uses volunteers to patrol the area, working closely with sheriff’s deputies.
The anti-abortionists are quickly gaining ground as this year more abortion restrictions have been signed than in any other year, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion statistics and supports abortion rights.
Mississippi has one of the most restrictive anti-abortion measures where abortion is illegal even in the case of incest or rape. Mississippi, like many of the new and more oppressive anti-abortion laws, claims the new laws were enacted “to promote women’s health and preserve the dignity and sanctity of life.”
Anti-abortion laws, however, have the opposite effect, according to Michele Goodwin, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the founding director of the U.C.I. Law Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy and its Reproductive Justice Initiative. Goodwin wrote in a column in today’s New York Times that a woman is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by legally induced abortion. She also wrote that African American women are more than three times as likely to die because of pregnancy and labor complications as white women.
The new Texas law sets a sinister low in the ongoing right wing, largely white evangelical battle to curb women’s reproductive rights. As the right becomes even more violent, a return to the anti-abortion violence from 1977 to 1988 is altogether possible if not likely. During those years, the National Library of Medicine reported 110 cases of arson, firebombing, or bombing. The epidemic peaked in 1984, when there were 29 attacks. Nearly all sites were clinics that provided abortions and violence targeted facilities in 28 states and the District of Columbia.
There’s also no reason to believe that laws requiring forced sterilizations could not once again surface, as a surefire way to eliminate abortions while also controlling population growths among certain groups, such as people of color, immigrants or even the disabled and the mentally ill.
There were numerous examples of legalized, federally-funded sterilization programs in the 20th century. The practice, promoted as part of the eugenics movement, was so rampant in California in the early part of the last century, that even Adolf Hitler referred to it as a model for Nazi Germany to eliminate the Jews.
Western states permitted mandatory sterilizations, partly as a way to limit Asian, Mexican and native American populations. In southern states, sterilization was used to control African American populations. Sterilizations through unnecessary hysterectomies, known as “Mississippi appendectomies,” were performed at teaching hospitals in the South on women of color as practice for medical students.
North Carolina set up “Eugenics Boards” in the early 20th century to review requests from public and private agencies to sterilize poor, unwed, and/or mentally disabled women, children and men.