Reply to Can states actually outlaw traveling out of state for an abortion?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am reading about bills being introduced to make it illegal for a woman to leave the state in order to get an abortion.

So if one of these actually passes, how could it realistically be enforced?

Would pregnant women from the state outlawing travel be refused permission to travel to a state which allows abortions?'

Or, would pregnant women need to certify their pregnancy status with a doctor before leaving, and again upon return?

What about international travel?

[/quote]

The bills floating around that I’m aware of would not actually “prevent” anyone from traveling to get an abortion. They are more targeted at the providers of out of state abortion.  So if it’s illegal in, say Kentucky, but legal in Illinois, Kentucky would purport to have jurisdiction over Illinois providers for performing abortion on a Kentucky resident.  It’s not like they are going to have checkpoints at every state crossing giving pea stick tests. [/quote]

There is absolutely no way in hell that Kentucky should be able to have jurisdiction over Illinois.[/quote]

One, I think that these laws are patently unconstitutional, even under this SCOTUS.

But even if this statute survives judicial review for a few weeks, what exactly is Kentucky's recourse here?  They are going to have their state troopers march into Illinois to try to arrest and drag away an out-of-state OB-GYN? Illinois is going to love having its sovereignty mocked so much that it extradites? The enforcement difficulties further underscore how ludicrous this whole thing is (though I suppose the nightmare scenario is that the Illinois OB unwittingly decides to vacation in KY and... ...)[/quote]

A Kentucky judge will issue an arrest warrant based on a funding of probable cause  (a grand jury indictment will also work). It will then fall upon the Illinois resident to fight extradition and prosecution. This is designed by the Republican Attorneys General to create a constitutional crisis. Koch, Lowes, Comcast (NBC), Walmart, GM and Johnson & Johnson sponsor these extremists.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/07/14/republican-ag-group-holds-private-retreat-for-corporate-donors-at-swanky-palm-beach-resort-.html[/quote]

What good is an arrest warrant floating around KY? Absent cooperation from IL law enforcement and/or courts, it is not self-executing. Thus my question re: enforcement (and this isn’t even getting to question of the many blue states who have passed or otherwise indicated non-extradition policies here)…[/quote]

I think this misses the point. There are conservative judges who will happily issue an arrest warrant for a women's healthcare provider if given the pretext. Let's not pretend that there aren't people on the right monitoring and posting the personal information and/or locations of abortion providers and their family members (and many more who are willing to do so), and law enforcement who believe providers should be in jail or dead. So then providers -- often women -- cannot travel to any red state that has issued a warrant for their arrest, for their own safety.

Give it a couple of years, and I don't think we're all that far from a scenario where through a concerted effort of anti-abortionist activists, law enforcement and the courts, a women's health clinic doctor from say, NY or Illinois takes a family vacation to Mexico and during her two-hour layover in Houston, gets arrested, with the whole thing videotaped by Fox (who would have been alerted beforehand to be on-site), to massive applause on the right. So essentially treating fellow U.S. citizens like international criminals who are surveilled and arrested as soon as they step into a location where they can be. [/quote]

I'm playing devil's advocate a little on this thread, just for my own sanity.

What if this dr. were white, and attractive, and married, and is traveling with her 3 cute kids on said family vacation? And Savannah Guthrie does a heart-wrenching interview with the family on the Today Show, and one of the kids is sad and confused that mommy, who helps women for her job, is in jail?

Or I'll do you one better, what if the dr. is an attractive white man with 3 cute kids a pretty wife?

I'm not saying these things can't happen, but it does create a PR challenge for the republicans. Not an insurmountable one. But we are getting a long way from when Kellyanne Conway could coach the republican men to talk about their feelings when they saw their pregnant wives getting an ultrasound. That for years, was the winning anti-abortion talking point that got us past a lot of the missteps on anti-abortion rhetoric, like the politician who said some women "rape easy" or the other politician who said rape "shuts that whole thing down" and can't result in pregnancy. Kellyanne swept in and solved a lot of those problems. But arresting nice white parents....that could be tougher?[/quote]

I don't like it either, but I'm super pessimistic even in the scenarios outlined above. And I don't think we're "getting a long way" from the GOP talking points or phrases that you mention, I think things that are even worse are being said out loud and seen as acceptable and even applauded. All the fact-checking or calls for decency in the world don't seem to matter because in that world (I grew up in a very red and Christian area and 100% bought into it for most of my childhood & teen years), an unborn fetus is seen as the purest of pure and the best of humanity's potential (the underlying default assumption by  ALWAYS that the fetus is healthy, white and just unwanted by some careless whore).

I will give you that in the case of providers who are white, attractive and UMC, it could be a bit of a PR challenge for the GOP, but I think that Fox and conservative radio and talk show will happily jump to the othering and how sinful and the epitome of evil that such a person is, wolf in sheep's clothing, how their children are brainwashed, etc. The conservative media machine to denigrate, vilify and threaten opponents, and to question health providers who disagree with them, is well-established and eager for targets.

I think it will take multiple, high-profile deaths of conventionally attractive, young white women with established families, who wanted their babies, dying in horrible, drawn-out ways due to care paralysis because of anti-abortion laws, in order to get movement on this. Possibly not even then, because the impulse on the right is to NEVER say, "we were wrong, we need to make some allowances/compromises", it's "this is not happening/should not happen/that's not what I meant" and then make no changes. Like the anti-abortion organization leader who tried to tell legislators that the 10-year-old's abortion was not actually an abortion, combined with the right's well-established bent toward conspiracy theories divorced from reality (this woman didn't die, her "family" is all crisis actors, look at this grainy photograph taken six months later, it's totally the "dead" person -- i.e., the same thing that has happened to Sandy Hook families).

I mean, how many hundreds of adults and children have died in mass shootings without any meaningful bipartisan action to prevent more shootings? If that level of death is acceptable ("acceptable" meaning that one side is unwilling to do anything to change it), how many pregnant women have to die in order to get anti-abortion laws loosened?

This is probably not helping your sanity, it's not helping mine either, but I think it's where we are. [/quote]

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