The National Pregnancy Registration List is on It's Way
Over the years since I've been blogging here, I've predicted numerous times the inevitable result of an abortion prohibition will be the required recording by public authorities of all pregnant women. This will be necessary so when a pregnancy ends before a birth an investigation can be initiated and the woman prosecuted for abortion when police deem the crime was committed. Law enforcement, not the woman, will determine if a claim of miscarriage is valid. My prediction was scoffed at the abortion prohibition readers. We only need look at Poland today. It has abortion prohibition and is advocating a national registry of pregnant women accessible to vigilante groups.
Many both inside abortion prohibition and outside do not understand the goal of abortion prohibition. It is not "saving babies." It is about punishing women for having sex. Registering pregnancies and putting women under control of government goes a long way toward the anti-women crusade.
It can also be seen in the effort to overturn Roe. When each state decides if abortions are available we know abortions will be available in some states. Most women will travel to the states where they can obtain abortions. There will still be a lot of abortions.
Let's say hypothetically 60% of pregnant women who want abortions in an abortion prohibited state go to other states and get abortions. And, assume 40% who wanted abortions give birth. How will abortion prohibitionists judge the success of their law?
They will call it a great success. Even though most women who wanted abortions got them, all of these women were harassed. The biggest success was with the 40% who were forced to give birth even though they did not want to. It was also a success because the other 60% were forced to pay for travel and time off of work. An abortion prohibition was successful when all these sinful women who had sex when they should not have were harassed.
While a national pregnancy registration is coming, another aspect is less certain. It is funding for the extra law enforcement necessary to track many thousands of pregnancies. Just as law enforcement was not large enough or skilled enough to make alcohol prohibition work, I doubt enough money will be made available to make abortion prohibition work.
The link to your article brings one to a NY Times pay-wall.
ReplyDeleteElsewhere, I found articles which support your claim of a national registry of pregnancies. The ostensible reason of the registry is to allow any doctor in the country to access it if and only if he is a prescribing physician, in order to avoid drugs which could harm the mother or child.
However, the registry could be used to track criminal acts such as abortion. Just like domestic or child abuse, doctors are required to report to police or other proper legal authorities, their suspiscions of crimes.
This is not happening in Poland.
Matt-- "This is not happening in Poland."
DeleteThere is a link in the NY Times article that went into more detail about Poland. You are correct a law tracking and monitoring pregnant women is not technically in place at this time. Instead, the first steps to implement a monitoring system is being put into place. The plan is a digital public record of pregnant women accessible to the public. If the government itself does not spy on pregnant women vigilantes of the anti-abortion cult would do the dirty work. This is the Mississippi method.
It is not a public database. No State in the US does this.
DeleteLies reduce a man's credibility.
Matt--"It is not a public database. No State in the US does this."
ReplyDeleteI did not say either of these. The data base and monitoring of women are a goal of many in the abortion prohibition. You yourself endorsed this in your previous post. You are part of the cult of abortion prohibition that has no ability to perceive its anti-women cruelty.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling ! ! !
ReplyDeleteJon, you sound as though you think your anti life faction is going to loose. I see your bold assertions as a lot of bluster and fear tactics to build up your ranks.
Such an interesting comment. Of course we are afraid that the anti-choice crowd is going to win, but there is an interesting anomaly here. I am pro-choice, but this is not a wedge issue to me. In fact, the topic of abortion has little to no weight whatsoever in how I vote.
DeleteThe issue at stake here is the fact that the Supreme Court has already taken up a case that has been challenged countless times with really nothing changing. This goes beyond being completely out-of-character for the Supreme Court. It's judicial activism. The Supreme Court should have never taken the Mississippi case because the law in this case is absolutely as clear as any law could ever be.
The Texas case is different, as the concept of vigilante law enforcement is a perversion of justice in a completely different manner, and my opposition to that law has nothing to do with my stance on abortion.
The Mississippi case? The way I see it, the pro-choice crowd has already lost. The only reason the Supreme Court would even ponder taking the case is if the justices feel that they should enact judicial activism on a law that has been settled for over 40 years, This has a far further negative impact on our democracy than simply the rights of women.
It's about the four pillars of democracy and how the Trump GOP has ripped them all down. We no longer have confidence in the press, in the ballot box, in our schools, or in the courts.
One might say we no longer live in a democracy.
Roe v Wade was never a decision over legislation and, like many other times the Court has reversed previous Court decisions, the reasons usually have to do with the activism and poor judgment of the prior Court.
DeleteRoe was based on several flaws. First, the plaintiff had lost standing. Jane Roe had given birth when the Court heard the case. Most importantly, there is no right to abortion in the US Constitution. The Court invented the right much like a magician makes doves and rabbits appear.
Technically, the court doesn't grant a guaranteed right to a lot of things, but there are those pesky 9th and 14th Amendments, and the job of the courts is to interpret them. Typically, a court agrees to hear a case based on a previous decision if a certain aspect of the case is different or if understanding of the elements that comprised the case originally had changed. Neither of these existed going in which means that the court has decided to hear a case based on its opinion that the law should be different. It's not based on any sort of legal precedent, as the job of the previous courts was to establish that. It's not based on any difference in the law, as there was no difference between the Mississippi law and those that preceded it. It's not based on any change in understanding as, if anything, the case for allowing abortion has become more convincing in the last 40 year primarily due to its broader acceptance on an international scale.
DeleteI also think that the plaintiff in Roe had legal standing. Any woman in a jurisdiction that has regulations on abortion has a legal standing to sue, but the most obvious reason why this is the case is because requiring a woman to wrap up a judicial proceeding in the short time that a pregnancy lasts is pretty secure guarantee that the law will never be challenged.
There is no logical reason for the Supreme Court to take the case other than the court's opinion that the law ought to be changed, and that's called judicial activism.
Helper-- See it as you wish. Like in every political group there are factions, which factions dominate is not completely predictable. We have seen that w/in the abortion prohibition group is a subgroup, which we now know includes Matt, which advocates or approves of government monitoring pregnant women. As we have seen recently in Texas, the most extreme wing of abortion prohibition politics won. It could be the vigilante groups will not prevail ultimately in court, but they have prevailed up to now. So, it is incorrect to say my alarms are groundless.
ReplyDeleteFor some abortion prohibition states, abortion might be just against the law. Women will travel to other states to get abortions. Probably national organizations will shun these states for their conventions, some corporations move out. In time approval of abortion would prevail. That is the model from the gay rights experience. That is roughly what happened to alcohol prohibition which, like gay and abortion prohibition, was religion based.