This is how Donald Trump would ban abortion nationally without an abortion ban
Please listen to the activists who have been right about this the whole time.
The last thing you want to do for the next six months is listen to anything Donald Trump says about abortion.
All of it will be lies. All of it is meant to confuse. All of it is meant to fool just enough voters to put him and his fundamentalist base back in power so they can ban abortion. And they don’t need any new laws to do it.
Trump, more than anyone, knows that overturning Roe v. Wade and fathering every abortion ban in America is wildly unpopular. He also knows that as president he will do what every Republican president since Ronald Reagan has done: anything he possibly can to eliminate access to abortion in America and abroad.
This week on “How are you feeling about democracy?,” which you can listen to above, I spoke to Jessica Valenti, the badass behind “Abortion, Every Day” whose latest book is “Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win.”
She explained that with Roe gone and 5-6 Republican votes on this Supreme Court, a national abortion ban is effectively already in place. All the right needs is someone to put the right fundamentalists in place to make it happen. And Donald Trump is obviously that someone.
Jessica made the case succinctly in a thread she posted in early April but I wanted to follow up a bit to discuss what a ban without an official ban would actually look and feel like:
Jessica Valenti: That thread came about because I was so frustrated. I started noticing this Republican messaging coming up in comments on my TikTok videos. And I saw it in tweets. I saw Republicans saying "The president doesn't make abortion policy. There's not going to be a national ban. We're never going to even if we wanted one, we're never going to have the votes."
But guess what? You don't need a national formal ban to make abortion laws abortion banned nationally. As soon as Trump gets into office, and this is not stuff I'm predicting, this is stuff that they've been very clear about and written down on paper, as soon as he gets into office, they would replace the head of the FDA, which means that they can repeal approval for Mifepristone. Abortion medication is how 63 percent of people and their pregnancies at this point, right? So right off the bat you have that 63 percent gone. Then they would replace the head of the DoJ and they would decide that the Comstock Act, which is this 18th century obscenity law, that applies to abortion and birth control and that it's no longer legal to Not just ship abortion medication, but anything having to do with abortion, like clinic supplies.
And so right off the bat, that is a national ban. It may not be formalized, they may not have a name for it, but if no one can get an abortion, that's a ban.
Jason Sattler: It wouldn't be like one day, like the lights turned off. It would be like, we're going to start prosecuting certain clinics in certain areas, sending a chilling effect across the country.
Jessica Valenti: Yeah, they're already doing this in anti-choice states or states with restrictions where, they target individual clinics, and it won't be like, "We're gonna shut you down or arrest you." It'll be, “We are going to give you 200 fines for $10,000, and you're not gonna be able to pay those fines, and so you're gonna have to shut you down.” Or they are going to legally threaten abortion funds, which are the local groups that make it possible for people to leave the state or help them get money. And you're talking about largely, a volunteer effort. And all of a sudden, if they have the state AG coming after them saying, "I'm going to prosecute you for aiding and abetting," or "I'm going to prosecute you using the RICO Act," which is something that they've talked about.
That will have absolutely a silencing effect. And that's the point.
I think they very much don't want to have that big splashy newspaper story where they have an abortion provider arrested. They want it to be that people are so afraid that they are just not giving the care at all.
Catch up on all the episodes of “How are you feeling about democracy?” here.
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