069 The Erickson Report for January 26 to February 8, Page Two: The anniversary of Roe v. Wade

January 22 marked the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade - and the first such anniversary without it.

Years of fanaticism, years of lies about abortion and about the people who get them, and particularly years of lies by Supreme Court nominees swearing that Roe is "settled law" even though they knew damn well SCOTUS has the power to overturn such "settled law," and perhaps most egregiously equal years of failure by Democrats to call those nominees out on those lies and evasions, together have brought us to the point where for the first time in US history a protected, recognized right has been stripped away.

And the fanatics, busily chanting "Onward Christian Soldiers," have no intention of stopping.

So let's mark the day by noting some recent headlines on the topic.

For example, Alabama has a near-total abortion ban which targets abortion providers but exempts the people who get abortions from being prosecuted. That creates a loophole for folks who want an abortion to do a self-administered, chemically-induced one.

Well, State Attorney General Steve Marshall doesn't like the idea that people actually have an option. So two weeks ago his office issued a statement that people who use an abortifacient could be charged with a crime under a chemical endangerment law.

Originally passed to protect children from exposure to chemicals and fumes from home meth labs, this law has been expanded in practice to apply to pregnant people who took any drugs while pregnant or exposed their fetuses to drugs. Now they want the term "drugs," until now referring to illegal drugs, to refer to legal ones that the Alabama official fanatics don't like.

Meanwhile, there's a method of doing an abortion called "dilation and extraction," or D&X, which involves dilating the pregnant person's cervix and drawing the fetus out through the birth canal. In 1995 the fanatics at the National Right to Life Committee dubbed it "partial-birth" abortion, a medically-meaningless and deliberately misleading term used by the fanatics ever since.

In floor debate in the Minnesota legislature on January 11, State Senator Bill Lieske showed the level of actual understanding of the issue so common among his ilk, which is why this is important.

He said "We have born alive individuals and we must protect the born alive. In this case, a partial-birth abortion. The child is in part born alive."

In other words, Lieske thinks the aborted fetus is "partly alive!" He didn't specify which part that was. This would surely deserve a Clown Award for utter stupidity if this level of ignorance wasn't so serious and so common among the men making these laws.

What has even greater potential impact is that some states are even looking to prosecute people simply for providing information on openly-available, entirely legal options for people who want to obtain an abortion but live in a state where such rights are being destroyed. Even just telling someone "You could go to such-and-such a state and get it done legally there" would be a crime, aiding and abetting a crime, and free speech be damned.

This is no joke and no exaggeration. The South Carolina legislature is considering legislation to do exactly that*, based on draft legislation from those fanatics at the National Right to Life Committee. Meanwhile, Mississippi is investigating a group called Mayday Health over a billboard advertising a website providing some of that sort of legal information.

And this doesn't even touch on the intensified campaigns to restrict or even ban birth control. Because as we told you many times, overturning Roe was not the goal - it was just a step in the process of achieving the fanatics' vision of the Republic of Gilead.

And the efforts are not limited to the state level, because despite their decades-long screeching that regulations on abortions should be "returned to the states," now they have that they have it they are looking for federal legislation to ban abortion after 15 weeks and to block states that try to preserve access to reproductive care from doing so. "Return it to the states" was just another lie.

Now, not all the news is bad, of course. I mentioned before suits in Indiana, Kentucky, and three other states arguing that abortion restrictions in those states are a violation of the plaintiffs' religious freedom, taking the fanatics' recent practice of making every attempt to combat bigotry into a First Amendment violation and turning it to a good end.

A new example is a challenge to Missouri's ban, one filed on January 19 by a group of 11 religious leaders of varying faiths. As part of their argument, they note that during debate on the bill, several lawmakers, including the bill's primary sponsor, specifically invoked their religious beliefs while drafting the bill, marking it a clear violation of church-state separation and the Missouri state constitution.

The fact is, we face a moment when every aspect of reproductive health care from birth control to post-natal care is under attack and the fanatics seem ascendant, a moment that arose in part because despite the signs, for too many among us, including those most directly affected, the loss of those rights didn't seem "real" until the Dobbs decision actually came down. Fortunately, the resistance lives and continues and hopefully will grow.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2023%3A27-28&version=KJV
As for our opponents, the fanatics who proclaim their "freedom" but deny it to others, who proclaim "love" for the fetus but deny it to the mother, who claim to pursue "justice" but deny it to your victims, Matthew 23:27-28 has the words for you, you who are the embodiment of the truism that for the right wing and its acolytes, the right to life begins at conception and ends at birth.

Enjoy your time while you have it - because in the long run, we will not let you win.

*At the link, scroll down to Section 44-41-860. But don't stop there. It gets worse.