The cruelty visited on women by the U.S. Supreme Court majority’s imposition of their religious views about abortion in the United States is beginning to take concrete shape.

Just today, for example:

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The New York Times reports on Nebraska’s prosecution of a woman and a mother after the teenager obtained pills to terminate a pregnancy at home.

Still, the case raises questions about how abortion-related prosecutions will unfold in a constantly shifting legal landscape, in which enforcement of new bans is already dividing the authorities. It has inflamed debate over abortion restrictions in a post-Roe era, fueling fears that women, and those who help them, will be prosecuted for abortions, and that their private communications will be used against them

Arkansas law currently doesn’t allow the prosecution of women who have abortions. Yet. Wait for it.

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And here’s a prediction in that the crazy quilt of varying state regulations will have an impact on the workplace.

“Countless women will now make different decisions about careers, education, relationships, and whether to try to become pregnant than they would have when Roe served as a backstop,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in his dissent. “Other women will carry pregnancies to term, with all the costs and risk of harm that involves, when they would previously have chosen to obtain an abortion.”

And he’s right. In an opinion piece that ran days after the official decision, New York Times opinion columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom argued that this ruling would make half of the nation’s population reliant “on the kindness of strangers to do something as basic as work.”

“With Dobbs, women cannot assume that we can safely work in Idaho the same way that we can in Oregon or Washington,” she wrote. “I cannot negotiate wages or time off with an employer with the same risk profile as those who cannot become pregnant.

“An employer who offers lower pay in a state with abortion care indirectly benefits from women’s inability to take our labor on the open market across the nation,” McMillan Cottom continued. “Thanks to a rogue court, women’s lives are now more determined by the accidents of our birth than they were a week ago.”
Prior to this ruling, people with the ability to become pregnant were far from equal in the workplace — as evidenced by the wage gap. Now, they must also consider whether they will have access to vital and often lifesaving healthcare.

Arkansas is already a low-pay, poor-health state and now it is tied with a few others as the most unfriendly to women’s medical rights with a near-total abortion ban. Move to Arkansas?

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Maybe it would be better to move to one of the states where attorneys general are fighting to protect adequate medical care for women with problem pregnancies, protection notably lacking in the Arkansas law. The Arkansas Advocate reports on a legal effort by 20 states (not Arkansas, of course) challenging Texas’ assertion that it need not comply with the federal law that protects doctors who perform an abortion as a stabilizing treatment for a woman with severe medical problems. In Arkansas, abortion is allowed ONLY to prevent death.

“For decades, the federal government and courts throughout the country have interpreted EMTALA to require treatment for emergency conditions relating to pregnancy that do not involve active labor and have concluded that stabilizing treatment may include emergency abortion care when necessary to treat an emergency condition,” the attorneys general wrote in the 28-page brief.

The attorneys general also wrote that “emergency abortion care is necessary to avoid serious harmful outcomes (including death) in numerous situations such as when a patient presents with an ectopic pregnancy, severe preeclampsia, complications from abortion including self-induced abortion, and other medical conditions for which immediate medical attention is needed.”

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, and the District of Columbia all signed onto the brief, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

PS: Here’s another related article from the Arkansas Advocate on the failure so far of a single so-called pregnancy resource center to apply for $1 million in money provided by the legislature to support the work of these agencies, which discourage abortion and claim to provide needed goods and services for women with unintended pregnancies beyond discouragement (including misinformation at times about) of abortion. The rub appears to be that the organizations have been told they can’t spend the money on religious programs. They aren’t prevented from having religious programs, they just can’t get the state to pay for it. A deal-breaker for many, it seems.

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Don’t be confused when the religionists tell you the anti-abortion movement isn’t about their particular view of religion but about women’s health.

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