By TheCriticalMind | 18 January 2025
Daily Kos
Texas is trying to slam the door on all abortion avenues. Women have one way around the anti-choice crusade. They can order abortion-inducing medications online from doctors in states that still honor a woman’s right to control her reproductive destiny. According to the Texas Tribune, every month 2,800 Texan women use this workaround.
The state’s AG, Ken Paxton, is trying to shut down this breach in the misogynists’ dam. He is suing a New York doctor for shipping abortion pills to a Texas resident. The Texas Tribune reports:
In December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a first-of-its-kind civil lawsuit against a New York doctor for allegedly prescribing abortion pills to a Texas resident, setting up a conflict between Texas’ abortion ban and New York’s shield laws. Legislators are filing bills for the upcoming session that would give the state more tools to try to root out this practice. And they do all of this knowing the incoming Trump administration has their back.
Because their extreme ban on the procedure isn’t terrible enough, Texas Republicans are now working to prohibit the people of their state from being able to access abortion pills. https://t.co/ixhHyfvWua
— Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (@DLCC) January 19, 2025
This suit will end up in the US Supreme Court. I cannot say what they will decide. But I know which way I would bet. Regardless, women with resources will still be able to exercise their choice. The poor, who can least afford additional children, will bear the brunt of any restrictions.
Note: I say “additional children” because 61% of women who seek abortions are already mothers. And the majority of them cannot afford another child. Women living at or below the federal poverty line (FPL) are 5 times more likely to get abortions than women at 2+ times the FPL. However, picking on the powerless is exciting for sadists.
While that case makes its way up the judicial ladder, Texas’s anti-choice activists are not sitting on their hands. The Washington Post reports (paywall should be down):
As antiabortion advocates launch legal efforts to stop abortion pills from reaching women in states with bans, they are increasingly turning to one group with uniquely intimate and specific information to help them find cases: male sex partners of women who decided to end their pregnancies.
Antiabortion advocates are increasingly turning to one group with uniquely intimate and specific information to help them find cases: male sex partners of women who decided to end their pregnancies. https://t.co/NNj2Okoavk
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) January 17, 2025
When I read this, I got a whiff of life in East Germany under the Stasi, the communist state’s invasive and brutal secret police. Those unchecked guardians of law enforcement and official morality gathered intelligence and took action based on ‘evidence’ offered by relatives, including the children, of the person under suspicion. (I recommend the German Netflix series Kleo for a diverting and somewhat surrealistic look at the organization around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall).
Other close parallels to the evangelical states pining for theocracy are the fundamentalist Islamic nations. The Iron Age thinkers in Yemen and Texas have much in common.
However, putting the comparative analyses aside, let’s think how this will play out. WPo reports:
This partner-focused approach will shift to a more public phase next month when Texas’s largest antiabortion organization launches an advertising campaign on Facebook and X to reach the husbands, boyfriends and sex partners of women who have had abortions in the state — with the goal of recruiting them to file lawsuits against those who assisted the women in ending their pregnancies.
What´s to stop a guy, who has a beef with his partner, from using an abortion they both agreed to as a blackmail tool? How about someone who got dumped falsely reporting an abortion to the authorities simply for its nuisance value? All he has to say is “I believe my ex might have got an abortion” to dodge false reporting charges. Relationships end badly. Women already suffer from domestic violence. Now they have to worry about this?
Needless to say, there are Texan men — and sadly some women — who think this is a smashing idea. John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life says:
“The strategy right now is to tell dads that if you’re the father of a child victim of an abortion, you have legal rights, there may be a way to hold these people accountable.”
According to the study, 26,313 rape-related pregnancies have occurred in Texas during the 16 months after their abortion ban.
This was always part of the end game. You can say it wasn’t – fine, then reverse it. But they won’t. Because it was. https://t.co/BrcMgfZM24
— feminist next door (@emrazz) March 23, 2024
He claims his group has found several men who could act as plaintiffs in upcoming cases. Of course they have. It seems there is no shortage of men who think they should have a say in what women do with their bodies. I say to them, if you got one woman pregnant you can do it again with a woman who wants to have your child. Move on.
It seems this novel legal approach (another way of saying bending the law to use it as it wasn´t intended) was dreamed up by a notorious antiabortion attorney, Jonathan Mitchell. His thinking hinges on Texas’s wrongful death statute, He argues helping someone obtain an abortion qualifies as murder under the state’s homicide law and Texas’s abortion ban, which outlaws nearly all abortions.
This seems at odds with the state’s antiabortion laws which do not allow women seeking abortions to be punished. Of course women who want abortions should not be charged with anything, much less penalized. However, the inconsistency in outcomes between the patient and her doctor points to the cynicism of antiabortionists. They know that charging women with murder for getting an abortion would make their anti-abortion position untenable. So they pursue the expedient path.
WaPo detailed the background of Ken Paxton’s case:
The unnamed woman in Paxton’s lawsuit who sought the abortion chose not to tell the father about her pregnancy, according to the complaint. After she took abortion pills — and experienced heavy bleeding — the female partner asked the man to take her to the hospital, where he was told by a health-care provider that she had been nine weeks pregnant, the lawsuit claims.
“The biological father of the unborn child, upon learning this information, concluded that the biological mother of the unborn child had … done something to contribute to the miscarriage or abortion of the unborn child,” Paxton writes.
The man later found abortion pills at the residence, according to the complaint.
It is hard for me to get my head around any of this. I’m a father. If I discovered my wife had gotten an abortion without telling me, I would accept it — regardless of my feelings on the matter. For damn sure I wouldn’t call the cops on her. I am not about to tell any woman — that would include my daughters — what they should do with their bodies. It’s not my choice. How hard is that to understand?
How Texas’ abortion ban has impacted health care in the state
State of Texas: Woman’s death highlights divide over abortion ban in Senate race
With lawsuits and legislation, Texas Republicans take aim at abortion pills
‘All about dismantling the autonomy of women’: Project 2025 warns that Dobbs is ‘just the beginning’
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