Thinking Citizen Blog — Abortion Landscape — A Balkanized Legal System

Thinking Citizen Blog — Thursday is Health, Health Care, and Global Health Policy Day

Today’s Topic: Abortion Landscape — A Balkanized Legal System

States where abortion is banned with no exceptions for rape or incest include: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, South Dakota. States where abortion is legal with no gestational limit include Alaska. Colorado, District of Colombia, New Mexico, New Jersey, Oregon, and Vermont. States where the legal outlook for abortion is quite uncertain include: Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Today a few more notes. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.

ABORTION BANS DEPEND ON LOCAL PROSECUTORS

1. “Deep rifts have emerged among the hundreds of elected district attorneys who will be charged with enforcing the expanding restrictions on abortion, creating a Balkanized new legal system within states that are banning the procedure.”

2. “Dozens of Democratic prosecutors who represent liberal pockets in conservative states already have vowed to resist bans by refusing to bring charges against abortion providers.”

3. “But in many rural areas and outlying suburbs, conservative prosecutors have said they will enforce their state bans.”

A STATEMENT BY 80 ELECTED PROSECUTORS SAYING THEY WILL NOT ENFORCE ANY BANS

1. “In a joint statement released after the Supreme Court’s decision last week, they said that enforcing abortion bans on what had for decades been a legal medical procedure would degrade public trust, especially for sexual assault victims, and drain resources from prosecuting what they called serious crimes.”

2. “Criminalizing and prosecuting individuals who seek or provide abortion care makes a mockery of justice, Prosecutors should not be part of that.” (joint statement)

3. But: “In some states with abortion restrictions, Republican attorneys general could intercede to bring abortion cases even if local prosecutors refuse. In Texas, where district attorneys in five of the state’s most populous counties have said they will not “criminalize personal health care decisions,” a Republican legislator has proposed a law that could empower conservative rural prosecutors to charge urban residents for violating Texas’ abortion laws.”

THE CASE OF ILLINOIS AS AN ISLAND OF ABORTION ACCESS PLUS SOME NATIONAL STATISTICS

1. “Four of Illinois’s neighbors immediately banned abortion after the court’s decision on Friday, and two others — Ohio and Tennessee — now restrict the procedure to six weeks into a pregnancy.”

2. “A ban in Michigan is temporarily blocked by a court there there, and lawmakers in Indiana and Iowa are expected to consider abortion bans in the coming months.”

3. Medication abortions: “ Providers are also expecting increased interest in medication abortion, which does not require a clinic visit. Out-of-state patients can cross the border into Illinois and meet with a provider virtually, and then have pills mailed to a post office box or a friend at any address within the state.”

NB: “Without Roe, more than half of American women of childbearing age could live in a state where abortion is banned or the procedure is restricted. In 2020, the latest year of available national data, almost as many abortions occurred in the states poised to restrict the procedure as in those where it is likely to remain legal.” The total number of abortions performed in the US in 2020 was 930.000.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/29/us/abortion-enforcement-prosecutors.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/29/us/illnois-abortion-roe-wade.html

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/abortion-laws-roe-v-wade.html

LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY

PDF with headlines — Google Drive

ATTACHMENTS BELOW:

#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).

#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, 11/17/20

YOUR TURN

Please share the most interesting thing you learned in the last week related to health, health care or health care policy — the ethics, economics, politics, history…. Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to health are or health care policy that the rest of us may have missed. Or just some random health-related fact that blew you away.

This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your mind something really important you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than you otherwise would about something that matters.