Anti-abortion laws are never about preserving life (Getty)
It’s been a long time since Texas was anything other than a hostile environment for reproductive choice. But the state-wide law put in place yesterday — which effectively overturns Roe v. Wade — means than Texan women are now living under one of the most tyrannical and invasive abortion laws in the world.
Previous legislation in America has attempted to outlaw the procedure after a certain gestational point, or imposed wholly unnecessary barriers and regulations, such as requiring that women wait 48 hours before they can have abortion. But the Republican-backed Senate Bill 8 takes a wholly different approach: it pays private citizens up to $10,000 to spy on, snitch on and sue anyone who has “aided or abetted” a woman in having an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy (which, to be clear, is just two weeks after a woman misses her period). There is no exception for women pregnant from rape or incest.
In true dystopian fashion, “aided or abetted” is defined broadly enough to cover any health care provider who performs or assists in performing an abortion, anyone who goes with a woman to an abortion appointment and anyone who gives a woman money to pay for her procedure. Even a taxi driver who takes a woman to a reproductive health clinic could now be sued — and potentially bankrupted.
It didn’t have to be this way. Abortion providers in Texas challenged SB8 in July, and called on the Supreme Court to prevent it from going into effect while it is litigated in the lower courts. This is pretty standard when a law clearly violates Roe v. Wade. But this time, the Supreme Court did something shocking and unprecedented: they let the Texas law stand. And so for the first time since Roe v. Wade broadly legalised abortion for American women in 1973, abortion is effectively illegal in an American state (roughly 85% of women who seek an abortion in Texas are at least six weeks into pregnancy).
What’s so galling about this law, though, is how unprecedented and invasive it is. It harkens back to some of the worst eras of authoritarianism and paranoia in modern history, when citizens were encouraged by their governments to spy and snitch on their family members, friends and neighbours. It’s the kind of state-sponsored civilian surveillance we associate with the Stasi, China’s cultural revolution and Soviet Russia.
More acutely, it harkens back to dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania. Ceauşescu banned both abortion and contraception, and engaged a broad network of secret police called the Securitate who, like Texas’s lawmakers, also relied on civilian informants to snitch on women who ended pregnancies or sought to prevent them.
Doctors went to jail. Women were forced into humiliating and invasive gynaecological examinations every three months, just to make sure they were obeying the law. If these examiners found evidence of a pregnancy, it was noted down — and if she didn’t give birth in the expected period, she could be prosecuted. By the 1980s, Romania’s orphanages were overflowing with malnourished, neglected and abused children. But Texas’s conservative lawmakers appear to view it as an aspiration.
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