In the game of up-the-ante that Republican-controlled states are playing in their zeal to eradicate abortion rights, Oklahoma took the lead this week. Its new law doesn’t bother with heartbeat standards or clever enforcement mechanisms but just says it outright: Any doctor who performs any abortion at any time (other than to save a woman’s life) could face 10 years in prison. This is the oppression that awaits women throughout red-state America should the U.S. Supreme Court dismantle Roe v. Wade.
That landmark 1973 case established the right of women to determine for themselves whether to carry pregnancies to term. As with most rights, this one isn’t absolute. The balance struck by the court allows a woman to end a pregnancy until the fetus could viably live outside the womb — generally, about 24 weeks. After that, states can prohibit the procedure. But the anti-abortion movement has never accepted that compromise, fighting for decades to deny women’s rights to control their own bodies at virtually any point during pregnancy.
Texas’ radical new anti-abortion law circumvents Roe by leaving it to bounty-hunting strangers to enforce the state’s draconian limits via profitable lawsuits. That way, the state itself can’t be said to be enforcing it in contravention of Supreme Court rulings. Astoundingly, the Supreme Court has, so far, let this cynical maneuver stand.
Other states have passed or are considering bills that would outlaw abortion as of the medically irrelevant onset of a fetal heartbeat — which can be as early as six weeks, when the fetus is the size of a pea and some women don’t even yet know they’re pregnant.
Oklahoma’s bill, which Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt has vowed to sign, doesn’t bother with such complex strategies. It states outright that any doctor who performs an abortion at any point is guilty of a felony punishable by a decade in prison and $100,000 in fines. There is an exception in cases where abortion is necessary to save the mother’s life, but no exception in cases of rape or incest. The law doesn’t even attempt any workarounds to Roe but just blatantly violates it. As such, court challenges will almost inevitably prevent it from going into effect until the Supreme Court rules on this or other pending cases — which is undoubtedly the whole point of the exercise.
Polls have shown for many years that a large majority of Americans support abortion access with reasonable limits. The movement in red-state legislatures to end that access isn’t based on any shift in that public opinion, but on the fact that today’s Supreme Court sits far to the right of the country, providing an opportunity for the nation’s minority to impose its ideology on the majority. Make no mistake: Where other red states are trying to work the ball up the field toward that goal, this is a Hail Mary by Oklahoma.
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