Judges, Sex and Women

Red state lawmakers, judges, prosecutors and clerics are invading your uterus

Many Americans were shocked to hear about the state-sponsored persecution of a woman in Texas named Kate Cox, pregnant with a fetus diagnosed with a fatal chromosome defect. After her obstetrician recommended an abortion procedure to protect Cox’ life, health and future fertility, the Texas Supreme Court intervened to stop her from receiving vital medical care.

But this was not some unexpected side effect of a ‘pro-life’ policy. This is exactly what was intended to happen.

The recently-enacted Texas abortion ban does not include an exception for fetal anomalies, by design. Such total abortion bans are in effect in 14 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Similar draconian bills are being drawn up in most right-wing states, to be rushed into law as fast as possible.

Texas’ choice not to include a fetal anomaly exception in its abortion ban was in keeping with what many in the anti-abortion movement believe. In response to Kate Cox’s case, Texas Right to Life said: “Every child is uniquely precious and should continue to be protected in law no matter how long or short the baby’s life may be.”

No matter what happens to the pregnant woman. It is, they acclaim, ‘God’s will’ — and whether you personally believe in that god or feel competent to decipher what that ‘will’ may be, is irrelevant in a budding theocracy like ours.

In a saner world, those decisions would be left to the people who are actually living through the tragedy. But the US, in 2023, is not sane or just or merciful. We are under siege by cynical fanatics.

Republicans are fighting each other to pass ever tougher and more cruel laws to strait-jacket women and render them powerless. Can’t you imagine these holier-than-thou hypocrites high-fiving each other in their leather-chaired hearing rooms every time they come up with an even more devious means of domination?

An Oklahoma bill to take effect this summer, for instance, would make it a felony to perform an abortion, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. That bill contains no exceptions for rape or incest, no matter how young the victim.

But it’s even worse than you might imagine. Tennessee, Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina lead the nation in arresting and criminally punishing women for allegedly posing a danger to their fetuses, according to a report released by advocacy group Pregnancy Justice.

Nationwide, nearly 1,400 people were arrested or subject to disparate bail, sentencing and probation for conduct related to their pregnancies between 2005, and the Supreme Court decision in June 2022 dismantling abortion rights, the report found. The vast majority were poor white women, although poor black women were disproportionately represented.

A key driver in criminalizing pregnancy is the expansion of so-called fetal rights or “personhood” laws. Many criminal cases documented related to substance use, including marijuana or cocaine … although in some, the substance was legal: nicotine, alcohol or prescribed drugs. It doesn’t take much of a leap to visualize being forbidden by law to engage in many ordinary activities, like biking or hiking — who knows what these ignorant, self-righeous scolds might arbitrarily dream up?

In Ohio, a young woman named Brittany Watts is facing felony charges for “abuse of a corpse” after miscarrying 22 weeks into her pregnancy in September — and her case is now heading to trial. Watts, 33, is specifically accused of miscarrying her pregnancy while using the restroom, and then flushing the fetal remains down her toilet. The remains were uncovered by local law enforcement on Sept. 22, per the Warren Police Department.

Watts faces this felony charge even as a forensic pathologist testified last month that her fetus was not born alive and died before passing through the birth canal; further, he said the fetus ​​was “nonviable because [Watts] had premature ruptured membranes—her water had broken early—and the fetus was too young to be delivered.” Watts’ defense attorney, Tracy Timko, told local media last month that her client “learned days before” her miscarriage that this outcome “was inevitable and that the fetus could not survive outside the womb due to gestational age.”

The assistant prosecutor has previously responded to Timko and the forensic pathologist by arguing that “the issue isn’t how the child died, when the child died, it’s the fact that the baby was put into a toilet, large enough to clog up a toilet, left in that toilet and she went on [with] her day.” There is a lot to unpack here, foremost that fetal remains from a miscarriage are not a “child” or “baby,” and this language is both inaccurate and dangerous. Nonetheless, Warren Municipal Court Judge Terry Ivanchak decided to move the case forward, shrugging off the matter of “the exact legal status of this fetus/corpse/body/birthing tissue/whatever it is,” as he so dismissively put it.

The law in most states does not dictate what a woman is supposed to do under these traumatic circumstances — if she were even able to think much about that while bleeding profusely. It certainly appears that some zealous legislators, judges and prosecutors are actively seeking ways to punish pregnant women … and targeting already marginalized people who lack the resources to fight back.

Miscarriage is common. Among women who know they are pregnant, miscarriage occurs in about 10-20 percent of pregnancies. Rates are even higher for those who don’t yet realize they are pregnant. Despite the reality that so many share this experience we are often reluctant to talk about it, and most people remain hazy about the specifics.

Which is one of the main reasons anti-choice activists find the issue so easy to demagogue. Many people assume that every abortion is a choice involving a healthy woman and fetus. It should be our right to choose regardless, but this false impression muddies the waters, masks how very complex any pregnancy is or can potentially become, and thereby endangers the health of every pregnant woman by making life-saving care unavailable.

The laws are so vaguely written that, in deciding whether or not to provide abortion care to preserve the life or health of a pregnant patient, physicians now face the risk of a jury or the state disagreeing with their judgment about the gravity of the health risk the pregnant person was experiencing, and as a result, face prison time, monetary fines, and loss of professional license.

You don’t have to look far to find these wrenching stories, but they are not widely reported and a growing national health crisis is mostly hidden in the shadows.

At her 20-week ultrasound appointment, Kylie Beaton said her physician discovered the fetus had a rare, severe anomaly — called alobar holoprosencephaly — in which the fetus's brain does not develop into two hemispheres as it normally would, and the major structures of the brain remain fused in the middle.

“The inside just appears very empty, “ said Dr. Carrie Rouse, an OB-GYN and maternal fetal medicine specialist at Indiana University Health. “Babies with this condition never reach developmental milestones, meaning they won't have any intentional interactions like smiling, and often can't see, have severe seizures and hormonal and organ abnormalities. Very few outliers are able to survive up to a year and the level of intervention needed for babies with this condition to survive is extremely high; they often need mechanical ventilation or a life support machine, multiple medications and repeated lab draws,”

A specialist told Beaton he could not do anything to end the pregnancy unless she developed a severe health issue or if the fetus dies in the womb.

This anomaly occurs in about 1 in 250 fetuses, but in just 1 in 16,000 live births, according to the Cleveland Clinic. And of course that is just one of many dire abnormalities than can occur, even with young parents who are both in excellent health. Non-viable fetuses often die in utero, but if the woman’s body does not expel them promptly are prone to cause a life-threatenin infection.

The standard medical procedure to remove the tissue is now illegal in several states, until the woman shows signs of advanced infection or sepsis, and some have already died from being denied treatment too long.

Travis County DA José Garza told Texas Monthly he believes HB 1280 “will not only fail to promote or protect public safety but will also lead to more harm.”

Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, an obstetrician and gynecologist based in Dallas, said the medical community needs to come together to define when abortion interventions are appropriate. If a patient’s amniotic sac ruptures fewer than 22 weeks after conception, she said—or a cervix is dilated and a patient is bleeding—an immediate abortion should be offered because waiting is likely to result in death.

But moments after making her pronouncement, Moayedi admitted her recommendation is unlikely to be adopted. “I’m also not certain how much it will matter,” she added. “Scientific evidence, medical opinion, and the health and safety of our communities are not what is being taken into consideration when making abortion bans. These rules are not designed to keep pregnant people safe, [they’re] to exert control over women’s bodily autonomy.”

Blake Rocap, a lawyer who works with abortion advocacy organizations, said he believes the vagueness surrounding exceptions—combined with the fact that doctors and health-care officials are being asked to make legal decisions—is a way of deterring abortion. The law’s language, Rocap says, allows anti-abortion advocates to describe exceptions in a palatable way even as it perpetuates enough ambiguity to dissuade hospital lawyers from advising doctors to take medical risks that could result in prosecution. “Anybody getting conservative legal advice from their hospital system or their in-group counsel, those lawyers aren’t well versed in this stuff, and they’ll say, ‘Yeah, I don’t know, the safest course of action is just don’t do it,’ ” Rocap said. “And that’s the advice that people are going to get, right? So it’s intentionally vague in that respect.”

A Florida woman, unable to get an abortion in her state, carried to term a baby who had no kidneys. Deborah Dorbert’s son died in her arms a few breaths after he was born, just as her doctors had predicted he would.

She said her pregnancy was proceeding normally until November, when, at 24 weeks, an ultrasound showed that the fetus did not have kidneys and that she had hardly any amniotic fluid. Not only was the baby sure to die, her doctors told her, but the pregnancy put her at especially high risk of preeclampsia, a potentially deadly complication. What followed was an agonizing 13 weeks of carrying a baby she knew would die and worrying about her own health.

Her doctors told her it was too late to terminate the pregnancy in Florida, which bans nearly all abortions after 15 weeks. The only options were to go out of state to get an abortion or to carry the baby to full term, and Dorbert and her husband didn’t have the money to travel.

And of course now, to tighten the screws even further, right-wing states have begun drafting laws to restrict interstate travel of their own citizens for the purpose of reproductive health care.

In 2022, Republicans blocked a Senate bill, Freedom to Travel for Health Care Act of 2022, which had been introduced by Democrats to guarantee freedom to interstate travel for abortion. In April 2023, Idaho became the first state to explicitly restrict interstate travel for abortion by passing legislation that made it a criminal offense to help a pregnant woman obtain an abortion.

As the Washington Post reports, two Texas counties and two Texas cities have passed local ordinances making it illegal to transport someone through one of these counties or cities for the purpose of obtaining an out-of-state abortion.

Notably, this list of anti-abortion localities includes Mitchell County, Texas, a sparse community of about 9,000 people. This matters because Interstate 20, the route that many people traveling from Dallas to New Mexico to receive an abortion will take, passes through Mitchell County. Several other counties with major highways or airports are also considering similar laws.

These ordinances and proposed ordinances largely track model legislation, which anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson shared on Twitter, that is itself modeled after SB 8 — the statewide anti-abortion law that allows private bounty hunters to sue abortion providers and collect bounties of $10,000 or more.

Also coming from Texas — where the Republican legislature, governor, DA and assistant DA are all busy making names for themselves as MAGA misogynist zealots, and peabrains can spout illiterate idiocy like ‘preborn lives’ and not have people laugh in their faces — is the latest assault on women’s access to health care.

It wasn’t enough to to block abortion. The state removed Planned Parenthood clinics from state-funded health programs and turned down federal dollars rather than allow PP to receive them, so funding was cut off for cancer screenings, contraception, HIV prevention and sex education, family planning and primary care, leaving thousands of low-income people no access to what for many was the only health care of any kind available to them.

There is in this country a large and well-funded movement to impose theocratic rule in America, and a handful of deeply twisted, domineering and misogynist men are abolishing women’s rights — and and succeeding at placing their bodies under state control.

Among the most evil and devious among them is Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a puritanical activist federal judge in Amarillo, Texas. A Cotton-Mather-inspired tyrant, Kacsmaryk has been on a crusade to control Americans’ private lives for decades.

Before being appointed by Trump to the federal bench in 2019, he was deputy counsel for the First Liberty Institute, a far-right ‘religious liberty’ law firm based in Plano, TX. Its attorneys have argued several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, including one in which the Court found a school district discriminated against a football coach who prayed on the sidelines after a game.

Under Kacsmaryk’s direction, First Liberty was involved in several legal fights over reproductive health care, including trying to block the “contraception mandate” which required health insurers to pay for birth control. First Liberty settled the suit in 2017 after the Trump administration amended the requirement to exempt those with “conscience-based objections” to providing contraception.

Kacsmaryk himself has been outspoken in his fanatical opposition not only to abortion and contraception but also to LGBTQ rights. Additionally, he is involved in efforts to end no-fault divorce, to make it more difficult for women to escape abusive partners.

Since Kacsmaryk joined the bench, the Texas attorney general [Ken Paxton, another deranged persecutor of women and children] and private litigants have brought their most contentious suits to Amarillo, largely with the desired outcome. He reinstated the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy on behalf of Texas. He struck down efforts from the Biden administration to protect LGBTQ workers and trans youth. And he ruled that a longstanding federal program that gives teens confidential contraception violated state law.

Access to the most commonly used method of abortion in the U.S. plunged into uncertainty this year, following a court ruling by Kacsmaryk over the legality of the abortion medication mifepristone, that has been widely available for more than 20 years.

Mifepristone was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2000, and a large body of research has shown the medication to be safe and effective. It is used for medication abortion in the United States, along with misoprostol, which is also used to treat other medical conditions.

There is essentially no precedent for a lone judge overruling the medical decisions of the Food and Drug Administration, but Kacsmaryk’s method is to always push the envelope — to see how far he can game the system to impose his rigid ideological agenda.

The Supreme Court announced in December that it will decide this term whether to limit access to mifepristone, returning the polarizing issue of reproductive rights to the high court for the first time since the conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade last year.

The Biden administration and the manufacturer have asked the justices to overturn the ruling which would make it more difficult to obtain the medication, which is used in more than half of all abortions in the United States.

I don’t need to tell you how wetting-their-pants thrilled Alito and Thomas are for this opportunity to further hijack your body and being, and ramp up the pain and terror in the War on Women ... and the rest of the Seditious Six will go along.

You know. You get it. It is now your job to explain to everyone you know who doesn’t, just exactly how bad this is, and how much worse it’s going to get.

Your life, and that of other girls and women you love, may well depend on it.

2024 is going to be a year of major changes and challenges. May we all rise up to meet them.