A few posts ago I ridiculed the notion that America would ever start another Civil War. I stand by that belief, but the upcoming Supreme Court decision overturning Roe Vs Wade is going to show the deepest divisions between states in this country since that conflict, with Anti choice and Pro choice states becoming the new Confederate and Union states. The upcoming legal battles about the different laws in those states is going to be ugly: if a woman travels out of state to get an abortion, can her home state still prosecute her when she returns? Some are already saying that they will try. And what about the fact that the majority of abortions are now administered by the pill mifepristone? How much power will states have to prevent women from getting such pills, which can be taken safely at home? How will the Anti choice states stop the inevitable illegal market for those pills in their states? Are they going to try and search for mifepristone in every car that drives into their state? That would be almost impossible to do.
The Republican Party knows full well how difficult these questions are, so that's why many of them are avoiding answering them. Instead, they are trying to focus their outrage onto the leaking of the ruling rather than the ruling itself, as if anyone will care whether the ruling was leaked or not five years from now. One example of how muddled the current Republican message is came from a talking points memo released by the National Republican Senatorial Committee that said "Republicans do not want to throw doctors and women in jail. Mothers should be held harmless under the law." But many Anti choice states have passed laws that will press for criminal charges against both doctors performing abortions and women getting one. You would think that a party that has been trying to get this ruling for decades would know how to respond to it, but like the dog that caught the car, they aren't sure what to do.
Abortion is, as always, an extremely difficult topic to discuss, and reasonable people can disagree (the biggest fight my parents ever had was about a family member getting an abortion) it is, after all, a question of life and death. But with Anti choice states poised to pass laws that ban all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, and saying that personhood begins at the moment that the sperm hits the egg, I think it's fair to say that the Republican party is about to engage in an overreach on this issue that the majority of Americans do not agree with. Time will tell whether they will pay a political price for it or not. I sure hope they will.
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