1). “You're Not Overreacting: Republicans want to ban out-of-state travel, you're not nearly 'hysterical' enough”, Sep 1, 2023, Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day (9.01.23), at < https://jessica.substack.com/
2). “The GOP ramps up attacks on out-of-state abortion travel”, Aug 31, 2023, Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day (8.31.23), at < https://jessica.substack.com/
3). “An American Nightmare: Young, pregnant & living in Texas: Her fetus had no chance of survival. Texas didn't care”, Jun 12, 2023, Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day (6.12.23), at < https://jessica.substack.com/
4). “Historic Texas County Bans Abortions and Abortion Trafficking: The Goliad County Commissioners Court unanimously passed an ordinance that outlaws abortion in its county from the time of conception”, Aug 31, 2023, Kim Roberts, The Texan, at < https://thetexan.news/issues/
5). “Abortion providers on two years of Texas ban: ‘We’re living in a devastating reality’: Senate Bill 8 wiped out almost all abortion care in the second-most populous state in the US, and served as a harbinger of what was to come over the rest of the country”, Aug 31, 2023, Mary Tuma. The Guardian, at < https://www.theguardian.com/
6). “We the Targeted: How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics: John Whitehead's Commentary”, August 29, 2023, John & Nisha S, The Rutherford Institute, at <https://www.rutherford.org/
Introduction by dmorista: Since the intensification of the historic fascist attack on Reproductive Health Care Rights in the U.S. (precipitated most immediately by the Dobbs Ruling by the 6 right-wing Extremist Justices on the Discredited Partisan Hack dominated U.S. Supreme Court); this aggressive right-wing agenda item has become the most notorious and hated of the U.S. ruling class' various attempts to defeat working people and force them down into lives of desperation and servility. It clearly showed the real agenda of the right-wing to the sleeping day-to-day majority of the population who are not engaged with the never ending political circus and deeper events.
The ever vigilant Jessica Valenti posted two articles about the increasing moves to criminalize abortion and to control women's travel inside the U.S. by right-wing officials in the Fascist Red State Neo Confederacy that is alive and well in the center and south of the U.S. Valenti notes in article 1). “You're Not Overreacting: ….” that:
“ …. this week, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall argued in a court filing that groups helping people leave the state for abortion are participating in a 'criminal conspiracy.' Under Marshall’s interpretation of the law, even telling someone about a clinic where they could get care would be a crime: (Emphasis added)
(His Twisted reasoning is that)
'One cannot seriously doubt that the State can prevent a mobster from asking a hitman to kill a rival because the agreement occurred through spoken word. So too here for conspiracies to obtain an elective abortion.'
“Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Marshall likens having an abortion to a mob hit, once again it’s clear that the strategy is to terrorize communities. Put simply: conservatives want to criminalize people helping each other. ….
“But Republicans aren’t just coming after those who ‘aid and abet’ abortions—they’re laying the groundwork to ban travel for women themselves. While Marshall says in his filing this week, for example, that Alabama doesn’t 'forbid' a woman to leave the state to get an abortion—he argues that the state is allowed to 'restrict' travel when they have 'strong, legitimate interests including preserving unborn life.' (Emphasis added)
“Incredibly, Marshall makes this argument by citing a case involving a Florida sex offender who was required to notify state law enforcement when he changed residences. Because the court found that the burden on his right to travel wasn’t unreasonable given the state’s 'strong interest in preventing future sexual offenses,' Marshall suggests that similar restrictions on women’s travel for abortion care aren’t illegal.” (Emphases added)
Article 2 “The GOP ramps up attacks ….”, was an earlier iteration of the basic questions in Article 1, and discussed some other issues. In Article 3 “An American Nightmare: ….” Valenti tells the story of a couple from the Austin Texas area who found out that their much anticipated and beloved baby, at that point still a developing fetus, was fatally flawed and was not developing a head (anacephaly). The woman, Terry, was from a reactionary Forced-Birth Evangelical background and: “Terry’s father once told her that if he knew someone who had an abortion, 'he’d be more than willing to exercise his second amendment rights.' ”
Article 4, “Historic Texas County Bans Abortions ….” is specifically about the Goliad County Commissioners Court passing a county law that makes any abortion, from the moment of conception, a crime. It has a group photo of the various County Commissioners and county court employees. That photo should be compared to early photos of officials from Nazi Germany to compare the variations of Fascism we see between 1930s Germany and 2020s America.
Article 5, “Abortion providers on two years of Texas ban: ….” looks at several people who were involved in providing Reproductive Health Care in Texas before the State's Vigilante law and the Partisan Hack Supreme Court Decision that overturned Roe. Some of them have moved to provide those services in Blue State areas or Washington D.C.; that remains a refuge for Reproductive Health Care. A couple of them remained in Texas or Oklahoma to try to provide the best Reproductive Health Care that they still can, under the Police State conditions that prevail there.
Article 6, “We the Targeted: ….” is written by noted critic of police state development John Whitehead, with his wife, Nisha Whitehead, as a co-author. Whitehead has a sort of center-right political outlook but has long been an incisive and tireless critic of the growth of police state tactics and norms in the U.S. He does mention a couple of times that there is close cooperation between the corporations and the police in using a variety of new technologies for social control and surveillance of political dissidents.
The important information that comes from the article is that a wide variety of new technologies are becoming available and we can expect them to be used against us. Those of us on the left are fully aware that the police cooperate closely with right-wing paramilitaries and we can expect the main targets of such police repression to be aimed at us.
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You're Not Overreacting
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that you’re overreacting about abortion rights. Given the latest evidence that conservatives want to stop women from leaving their states for abortion care, I’d say we’re not nearly ‘hysterical’ enough.
This week, Goliad County in Texas passed an ordinance making it illegal to take someone out-of-state for an abortion: Driving a friend or family member from or through the county so they can end a pregnancy elsewhere would make you guilty of “trafficking.” It’s part of a broader trend of anti-abortion ordinances across Texas seeking to limit people’s ability to leave the state.
While not criminally enforceable, these ordinances—like so many other anti-abortion laws in Texas—allow citizens to sue each other. The point is to instill fear; you don’t have to ban travel outright if you make people too afraid to lend a friend gas money or a car to get out of town.
Also this week, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall argued in a court filing that groups helping people leave the state for abortion are participating in a “criminal conspiracy.” Under Marshall’s interpretation of the law, even telling someone about a clinic where they could get care would be a crime:
“One cannot seriously doubt that the State can prevent a mobster from asking a hitman to kill a rival because the agreement occurred through spoken word. So too here for conspiracies to obtain an elective abortion.”
Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Marshall likens having an abortion to a mob hit, once again it’s clear that the strategy is to terrorize communities. Put simply: conservatives want to criminalize people helping each other.
After all, the Alabama lawsuit and Texas ordinance come just months after Idaho passed an ‘abortion trafficking’ law that makes it illegal to bring a minor out-of-state for an abortion. Under this law, an aunt or grandmother who helps a teenager get an abortion could go to prison for years.
But Republicans aren’t just coming after those who ‘aid and abet’ abortions—they’re laying the groundwork to ban travel for women themselves. While Marshall says in his filing this week, for example, that Alabama doesn’t “forbid” a woman to leave the state to get an abortion—he argues that the state is allowed to “restrict” travel when they have “strong, legitimate interests including preserving unborn life.”
Incredibly, Marshall makes this argument by citing a case involving a Florida sex offender who was required to notify state law enforcement when he changed residences. Because the court found that the burden on his right to travel wasn’t unreasonable given the state’s “strong interest in preventing future sexual offenses,” Marshall suggests that similar restrictions on women’s travel for abortion care aren’t illegal.
I’m going to repeat that: the Attorney General of Alabama isn’t just claiming that it’s illegal to help someone leave the state to get an abortion—which would be bad enough—but that it’s legal to impose restrictions on individual women’s travel, as well.
How many more ways do they need to tell us what they’re planning? It’s not as if they’re hiding it! Republicans aren’t going to ban travel all at once with a single law; they’re going to chip away at that right bit by bit, right in front of us.
The good and bad news is that the enforcement of these laws and ordinances require community buy-in—they rely on friends and families ratting each other out and turning each other in.
In many places, the terrorization is working. Yesterday, The Guardian spoke to abortion providers in Texas who report that patients need to be convinced that the clinic is allowed to help them get out-of-state care. These women, they say, often show up without their partners or family members for fear that they could be charged with abetting their legal, out-of-state abortion.
The young woman I spoke to in Texas, forced to leave the state for an abortion after finding out her fetus was developing without a head, relayed the same sense of fear and isolation. She and her boyfriend, Eric, told no one about their plans. “It felt as if we were robbing a bank, that’s how bad it felt,” he said.
What that means, though, is that the way we fight back is by being brave enough to help each other. We can’t be too afraid to share the number of a clinic, or to drive a friend out-of-state. They can’t sue all of us, and they can’t arrest everyone.
Of course I know it’s not as simple as that—there’s more danger for some than others, and we know that the most marginalized among us are those who are targeted by law enforcement and zealous prosecutors. But it’s a thought that does give me some hope: they need people to turn on each other, while our strategy relies on community strength.
Still, while we work on building those community bonds and helping the organizations that do the same—like local abortion funds—it’s vital that we don’t allow anyone to accuse us of fear-mongering or dramatics. Because conservatives coming after our right to travel is not a future danger or something that might happen—it’s an attack that’s already well underway, right in front of our eyes.
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Abortion, Every Day (8.31.23)
The GOP ramps up attacks on out-of-state abortion travel
In the States
Republicans want to make it illegal for women to leave the state for abortion care—and I’m tired of people claiming that saying so is hyperbole. Let’s just look at what’s happened this week in abortion travel issues. Since July, I’ve been telling you about the case against Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who is being sued by the ACLU, abortion providers and the Yellowhammer Fund. The suit is a response to a radio interview Marshall gave where he said volunteers who helped a Louisiana woman travel out-of-state for an abortion would face “conspiracy” and “accessory” charges in Alabama. The groups are seeking a ruling that makes clear that the state can’t prosecute anyone who provides referrals or other help to people getting out-of-state abortions.
Marshall is fighting back against the suit by arguing very plainly that helping anyone to travel out-of-state for an abortion is a “criminal conspiracy” not protected by free speech. From Marshall’s motion to dismiss:
“[I]t is well settled that speech used to conduct a crime receives no constitutional protection; the same is true for the right to associate…Likewise, the right to travel, to the extent that it is even implicated, does not grant Plaintiffs the right to carry out a criminal conspiracy simply because they propose to do so by purchasing bus passes or driving cars.”
And while Marshall claims that “there’s nothing about that law that restricts any individual from driving across state lines and seeking an abortion in another place,” he’s arguing that anyone who helps someone to do so is a criminal! What constitutes aiding and abetting travel? Lending someone your car? Giving them gas money? Changing their flat tire? It’s absurdity and it’s terrifying.
I’m not done talking about criminalizing travel yet: A county in Texas has passed an anti-abortion ordinance that makes it illegal to drive anyone from or through the county in order to get a legal abortion in another state. To do so would be “abortion trafficking.” Like so many Texas abortion laws, citizens could take civil action against anyone found in violation of the ordinance.
If you’re a regular reader, you know that this is part of a broader anti-choice tactic meant to create legal challenges that conservative lawyers like Jonathan Mitchell—architect of Texas’ bounty hunter law—hope to bring all the way up to the Supreme Court. (Grace wrote about this strategy & its connection to the Comstock Act yesterday.)
The point is: they are already coming after out-of-state travel. And like everything else they do, it won’t be a singular law banning women from leaving the state—it will be this slow chipping away process that’s already in effect.
More from Texas and their attacks on democracy: As I wrote earlier this week, a new law goes into effect in the state tomorrow allowing for the removal of district attorneys who decline to prosecute abortion cases. Today, Rolling Stone spoke to one of the prosecutors in the state likely to be targeted by the new law. Mark Gonzalez, the district attorney for Nueces County, is one of five Texas DAs who signed onto a letter promising not to use their office to “prosecute personal healthcare decisions.”
Gonzalez told Rolling Stone that it’s the most marginalized people in Texas impacted by the state’s abortion ban:
“I promise you: If there’s somebody that has a lot of means and their daughter gets pregnant, or they’re a victim of rape, or incest, they’re gonna take them to New Mexico. The only people that are going to be left with no real options are those who are of a lower economic status, and those of color.”
A conservative group has petitioned to remove Gonzalez as DA for “incompetency,” and a trial to determine whether he’ll keep his job begins in September. This is just another part of the war on democracy: removing elected officials who don’t go along with conservatives’ extremist agenda.
Grace told you yesterday about new ballot measures in Missouri seeking to add rape and incest exceptions to the state’s abortion ban, and to legalize abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Just to expand a bit: All of the six initiative petitions were filed by Republican strategist Jamie Corley. If Corley’s name sounds familiar, that’s because she’s been writing op-eds quite a lot this year in opposition to abortion bans—including this one at POLITICO warning Republicans that going after medication abortion is a “political dead-end.”
Corley told the Missouri Independent, “The current abortion law makes Missouri look draconian, punitive and unsafe for families,” and told the Associated Press that she wanted a ballot measure that is “actually passable.”
While it seems as if Corley is acting in good faith with these measures, they aren’t exactly fantastic: the proposed ‘exception’ for rape, for example, would only apply if a victim has reported the assault to a crisis hotline. (We also know that exceptions aren’t real—they really only serve as a way for Republicans to make themselves look better without actually meaningfully changing abortion access.) And you know how I feel about 12-week ‘compromises’.
Still, it will be interesting to see how this plays out—and if Missouri Republicans throw up the same kind of insane hurdles they have for the broader pro-choice amendment seeking to restore abortion rights in the state.
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More on the war on ballot measures: Conservative media is on the attack in Ohio, where voters will decide on a pro-choice ballot measure this November. Anti-abortion activists and publications continue to claim that the amendment would allow children to have abortions and gender-affirming surgery. They’re taking any little quote they can and running with it—like at the National Review, which ran a whole-ass article based on a singular quote for a pro-choice activist about how they want to “work” on a policy for minors with unsafe parents. (Which is…reasonable??) And in the wake of the lawsuit against Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose—who wrote an inflammatory and inaccurate ballot summary—the Washington Examiner claims that the issue is simply a fight over the term “unborn child.”
Meanwhile, as Ohioans gear up to cast a vote on abortion rights in November, abortion funds in the state are struggling to stay afloat. The Abortion Fund of Ohio reports that they’re helping a record number of patients: they’ve worked with more than 2,200 patients this year so far, more than double the number of people they funded in 2021. The group is seeing patients from as far away as Texas and Florida, who travel to Ohio because the state’s ban has been blocked—which means care is still available up until 22 weeks. Because of a waiting period in the state, though, it means that those traveling from out-of-state have increased lodging costs and logistical hurdles.
And while the fund has a bigger revenue than in past years, interim executive director Maggie Scotece says, “A huge chunk of that money goes right out the door, back to patients.” Also, Scotece says, “as finances for the average Ohioan get tighter, it is harder for our community to show up in that way for us.” To support the Abortion Fund of Ohio, click here.
Pennsylvania abortion advocates and providers are seeing similar problems as patients from around the country come to the state for care. Signe Espinoza, executive director of Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates, says, “Throughout this fiscal year, there’s an estimated 74% increase in abortion patient volume.”
A woman in Tennessee gave birth in a jail cell after being denied care, CBS News reports. The Montgomery County Sheriff's Office said that the woman and her baby are in stable condition, but didn’t explain why she wasn't brought to the hospital earlier. This is what a ‘pro-life’ state looks like. Just as a reminder: Tennessee Republicans fought for months over including an exception for the life of the pregnant person. (When they finally added something in, it was watered down to nothing, thanks to the lobbying efforts of Tennessee Right to Life.)
Virginia Democrats are leaning hard on abortion rights—and for good reason. J. Miles Coleman of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics told The Center Square that since Dobbs, Democrats have been performing incredibly well:
“Every time there’s been a special legislative election for a Senate seat or a House seat—or a referendum like we saw in Ohio—the Democratic and pro-abortion rights side has almost always run ahead of what Biden received in 2020.”
Indiana abortion provider Dr. Caitlin Bernard has decided not to appeal the decision by the state medical board to reprimand her for a supposed privacy violation. As you probably remember, Bernard was the target of a year-long harassment campaign by Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita after she spoke out (without violating privacy rules) about a 10 year-old rape victim who was forced to leave her home state of Ohio for abortion care.
This was punishment, plain and simple—and a warning to any other doctors who might shine a light on the consequences of abortion bans. I’m glad this nightmare is over for Dr. Bernard, and I think we all owe her a debt of gratitude.
Quick hits:
A new poll in Wisconsin shows that 88% of voters in the state support some form of legal abortion;
An Idaho woman wrote an op-ed about how tired she is being a second class citizen (I think we all can relate);
A column on the upcoming Pennsylvania Supreme Court election and why the anti-abortion movement should admit their “attempt to limit abortions through the law is a failure”;
And finally, a Florida man has been arrested for shooting and killing his girlfriend, allegedly because she refused to get an abortion. Something notable: The state is charging the man with double homicide. (More on this soon.)
In the Nation
While American women were sobbing and devastated over the leak that Roe would be overturned, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was flying on a private jet. Yes, seriously. The Washington Post reports that Thomas disclosed three 2022 trips on billionaire Harlan Crow’s jet—including one he claims was to protect his safety after the leak of the Dobbs decision. Honestly, fuck that guy.
Five anti-abortion activists who pushed their way into a DC clinic waiting room in 2020—blocking its doors with furniture, ropes and chains—were found guilty this week of violating the FACE Act. The leader of the group, Lauren Handy, was also found in possession of five fetuses (!!!) though she hasn’t been brought up on charges for that.
A lawyer for the five activists filed an emergency motion yesterday to get them released while they await sentencing, arguing that Handy is “a prominent national nonprofit leader” and that their crime wasn’t violent. What’s also notable is that Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America released a statement in support of Handy and the 4 others, claiming that the group did a “vital public service” and should be “recognized for their heroism.”
This is important (and scary): SBA Pro-Life America is arguably the country’s most powerful anti-abortion group, and they’re explicitly lauding domestic terrorists. Their statement also comes at a time when violence against abortion clinics and providers is on the rise across the country.
Quick hits:
News21 on how hospital mergers with Catholic institutions endanger reproductive rights;
States Newsroom on the ballot measure attacks we’re seeing across multiple states;
And the deputy executive director of the Fairness Project writes at The Hill about the danger to direct democracy.
2024
Finally a few pundits are pointing out that Nikki Haley is not at all ‘moderate’ on abortion, despite attempts to frame herself as such. Paul Waldman at The Washington Post points out something I’ve been hammering on since the debate: that Haley “is on record supporting a national ban, even if she acknowledges it wouldn’t pass.” And over at New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore (who quotes Abortion, Every Day), calls Haley an “opportunist.” He also reports that the polls showing the former South Carolina governor doing well in early states actually come from the Trump and DeSantis campaigns—who are likely trying to damage each other.
Quick 2024 hits:
NPR on how a new generation of Republicans wants the party to reach out to younger voters (good luck with that!);
In Newsweek, the president of the conservative group FreedomWorks writes that abortion “is a losing battle for Republicans”;
And The New York Times has more on Tudor Dixon’s interview with Donald Trump that Grace reported yesterday—including Trump’s belief that candidates need to focus on ‘exceptions’ in order to avoid pissing voters off about abortion.
Abortion Rights Trade-Offs
I’ve written a lot about how vital it is that we don’t base our policies on bad-faith attacks from the anti-abortion movement. Most recently, this has been an issue with ballot measure initiatives and the notion of ‘viability’—pro-choice groups are including restrictions after ‘viability’ in the language of their measures as a way to pre-empt attacks from conservatives who claim the amendments would allow abortion ‘up until birth’. My position has always been that they’re going to make that claim anyway (and they have), so we should fight for the policies we actually believe in.
Now we’re seeing something similar play out in Michigan over parental consent. Yesterday, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer spoke in support of the Reproductive Health Act, which would repeal some of the anti-abortion TRAP laws still on the books. (Voters recently enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution and so Democrats are doing a lot of legislative clean-up.) As I’ve reported, the legislation would get rid of Michigan’s 24-hour waiting period, would end the prohibition on using Medicaid funding for abortion, and would remove onerous and unnecessary regulations on clinics. What’s notably missing from the legislation is the repeal of Michigan’s parental consent law.
From Loren Khogali, executive director of the ACLU of Michigan:
“We know that this an area that is just more complex, that often requires more education, more explanation. We continue to advocate around parental notification, and we will continue to do so even if a bill is introduced that does not include it. We know that we have to improve access to abortion and reproductive health care for young people in Michigan.”
It’s disappointing news; young people are some of the most marginalized among us, and deserve to be protected. But I imagine that the move isn’t so much about abortion rights in Michigan itself, where voters made clear how they felt—but instead is about the upcoming ballot measure vote in Ohio (and initiatives in other states).
Anti-abortion activists have spent millions of dollars to claim that Ohio’s pro-choice ballot measure would allow minors to have abortions and gender-affirming surgery without parental consent. If Michigan repealed their parental consent law after passing a pro-choice ballot measure, it would give conservatives the ammunition they need to say that an amendment in Ohio would lead to the same. So I understand the strategy, I really do. But here’s the thing: Just as was the case with ‘viability’, anti-abortion activists don’t care about the truth and are out in force today claiming that Michigan Democrats are trying to eradicate parental consent.
Conservative media outlets like Hot Air and Life News are running headlines (I won’t link to them) that say Whitmer wants to do away with parental consent, and the president of Right to Life Michigan released a statement suggesting the same. They get around the truth by pointing out that repealing parental consent has “been included in prior versions of the Reproductive Health Act.”
As I’ve said many times over, I’m not an activist doing work on the ground in these states—so I can’t pretend to know the best route here. And I’m sure that if the repeal of parental consent was actually included in Michigan’s Reproductive Health Act they conservative coverage around the same thing happening in Ohio would be massive. But it’s also hard to see pro-choice groups making moves based on anti-abortion attacks that are going to happen no matter what. Would love to know what you all think.
The Care Crisis
The Guardian spoke to Texas doctors about what their work and lives have looked like since abortion was banned in the state—as you can imagine, it’s pretty stark. Dr. Jessica Rubino describes having to turn away a patient who was experiencing kidney failure, and having to tell people she couldn’t help them unless they were about to die. “The law forced me to be a bad doctor,” she said.
Kathy Kleinfeld in Houston says she and her colleagues have become “dystopian travel agents” helping patients leave the state, and that they still have to explain to them that it’s not illegal for them to do so. “SB 8 was meant to be a fear tactic that paralyzed care and instilled anxiety in patients, and even after Dobbs, we are still seeing its impact,” she said.
Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi, who told The Guardian, “I really don’t have words to describe the deep, deep pain I feel,” said that the post-Roe response from the Biden administration “has been a limp handshake.”
“We want to see tangible, bold action to restore or at least prevent the further erosion of reproductive rights. We need unwavering support—not a leader who can barely say the word ‘abortion’.”
But the quote that chilled me to the bone was from Andrea Gallegos, who manages Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services, who says she feels like they’re “waving our hands on top of a burning building, trying to warn everyone else that this is what it’s going to look like for the rest of the country soon.”
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An American Nightmare: Young, pregnant & living in Texas
Content Warning: Descriptions of severe fetal abnormalities
Some names have been changed to protect the identities of those interviewed.
There was a point during their 11-hour car ride home when Terry’s boyfriend debated whether or not to bring her to an emergency room. Terry was pale and lightheaded, and had terrible blue-ish bags under her eyes. “She was looking really, really bad,” Eric, 22, tells me. “At a certain point she just faded.”
But the couple were only halfway home, and Eric didn’t want to stop at a hospital at 3am in one of the reddest parts of Texas. Not when they were coming from a New Mexico abortion clinic. “He was worried that they would call somebody and report us,” Terry, 21, says. And so he drove on.
Terry and Eric’s nightmare began just a few days earlier at a 15-week ultrasound appointment. It had been a normal day, Terry says. She and Eric had gone out for breakfast in Round Rock, where the young couple lives, and planned to see a movie when the appointment was over. They thought they’d be learning the gender of the baby that day, and had picked out names in anticipation: Ren for a boy, Summer for a girl.
But at the appointment, Terry noticed that her OBGYN was getting quieter and quieter the longer that she looked at the ultrasound. The doctor left the room, and came back with a phone number, address, and instructions to make an appointment with a specialist immediately.
It was at that point, Terry says, that she began to go numb.
Just a few hours later, the couple were sitting in front of a maternal fetal specialist in Austin delivering unthinkable news: Terry’s fetus had not developed at all above the neck—there was no head. It was a one-in-a-million abnormality, the specialist told them. And while the fetus obviously had no chance of survival, there was still heartbeat present.
In Texas—which enacted a near-total abortion ban in 2021, and a total ban shortly after Roe v. Wade was overturned—that was a problem.
Texas’ abortion law doesn’t have an exception for fetal abnormalities, not even lethal ones. The state requires women to carry pregnancies even when the fetus has no chance of survival, a cruelty that Republican legislators don’t like to talk about.
Eric was baffled, he says, as the reality of the law sunk in. “Like at that point there has to be some sort of reasoning to allow these special cases,” he said. “It’s so cutthroat, and that’s what really makes me mad.”
The couple had to process more than just the horrific news about the fetal abnormality: Terry, herself, was also very ill. And waiting for her pregnancy to end on its own carried a serious risk. She hadn’t been feeling well for a few weeks—she had trouble keeping food down, and was often too tired to get out of bed. Terry figured it was just a difficult pregnancy. But lab work revealed issues with her kidneys and liver, and found that she was severely malnourished and had elevated blood pressure.
As sick as she was, Terry wasn’t at an ‘imminent’ risk of death—not yet, anyway—and Texas law requires the danger to a woman’s life be a “medical emergency” in order to qualify for an abortion.
Because the deliberately vague language of the law isn’t medical terminology, doctors in the state have been left to struggle with just how close to death a patient needs to be in order for them to legally provide care. As a result, multiple Texas women have come close to dying after being denied abortions. (Fifteen of those patients are suing the state right now.)
And while Texas Governor Greg Abbott has claimed he wants to “clarify” the ban to “make sure that the lives of both the mother and the baby can be protected,” the state is actually suing the federal government in opposition to a rule that requires hospitals to give women life-saving emergency abortions.
For Terry, the concern was that if doctors waited for her fetus’ heartbeat to stop, or until she was ‘sick enough’ to legally warrant an abortion, her health’s already-rapid decline could become irreversible.
And so she had two choices: Leave the state for an abortion, or wait and take her chances. “I kind of shut down,” Terry says.
Terry’s specialist was unequivocal: He recommended that she terminate the pregnancy. “There’s only one thing that we can do to assure that you walk out of this healthy,” she says he told her.
It’s advice many Texas doctors wouldn’t dare give—no matter how dire the circumstances. After all, state law prohibits “aiding and abetting” an abortion, and allows civil action against anyone who does. (NPR reports that the law has doctors “talking code” to patients in order to avoid speaking directly about abortion.)
Terry’s OBGYN, however, who is anti-abortion, gave different advice. She recommended that Terry carry the pregnancy until she went into labor—whether she was able to carry the pregnancy to term or gave premature birth. The doctor claimed it would be emotionally better for Terry to have a moment with her baby.
“As much as I wish I had the chance to hold my baby,” Terry said, “I don’t think anyone would want to see something that has no head.” What made Terry feel even worse was that her OBGYN pushed her to remain pregnant even as she explained the serious risks to her health.
“It felt like ‘does my life matter in this, or is this just about bringing a baby into the world for a moment’? It felt like my life didn’t matter, like I could just die and it would all be for nothing.”
Dr. Chloe Zera, a maternal fetal medicine physician and associate professor at Harvard Medical School, tells me, “It is very much the standard of care to offer termination, but like any other patient care situation, the best response is compassion.”
Dr. Zera says ideal treatment for patients like Terry is full spectrum pregnancy care—providing patients all the information they want in order to make a decision.
“For some people it’s very cut and dried, ‘I want an abortion,’” she says. For others, it might mean carrying the pregnancy and offering palliative care for the fetus. In her hospital, most patients with severe fetal abnormalities would have pediatric sub-specialists, nurses and social workers involved in their case. “We try to wrap around people with care,” she says.
The ability to get that kind of full spectrum care, though, depends on the kind of insurance you have, access to physicians, and—as in Terry’s case—what state you live in.
And so instead of being wrapped in love, and provided with a slew of experts to help her through a nightmare that few will face, Terry—just 21 years-old—had to come to terms with conflicting advice from two doctors and a backdrop of fear and isolation.
In the end, the decision was clear. Terry and Eric made calls to multiple out-of-state clinics and—amazingly, given the long waitlist at most providers—they found a place in New Mexico that could see her the following week.
For both, any feelings of confusion or helplessness soon gave way to anger. “I should not have to sit there all night staring at the wall and thinking about how the baby I wanted was still in me, with a failing heart and no head,” Terry tells me. “I’ve never been that angry before in my life.”
Instead of being able to take a moment to grieve their loss, the couple spent the next few days sorting out the logistics of the abortion. Because Terry was in her second trimester, the procedure would be expensive—between the abortion, travel and lodging, they would have to come up with about $2,000.
They made too much money to qualify for help from an abortion fund, but not enough money that the cost wouldn’t seriously hurt them. Terry only had $300 in her savings account.
The couple couldn’t go to their friends or family for financial help, either—they’re religious, and staunchly anti-abortion. Terry’s father once told her that if he knew someone who had an abortion, “he’d be more than willing to exercise his second amendment rights.”
When I asked if she thought her father might react differently given the circumstances, Terry was adamant: “I would get a lecture on how it's my motherly duty to bring my child into the world.”
And so they paid for the procedure out-of-pocket, using the entirety of Eric’s most recent paycheck, and told friends and family that they were going to New Mexico to go hiking. “I felt like a criminal,” Terry says. “We lied to everyone we knew to get out.”
The clinic appointment was early in the morning, so they found a nearby Motel 6 to sleep at the night before. The couple didn’t have enough money to cover a second night, though, so Eric would have to drive them the 11 hours back home after the procedure.
When they arrived at the clinic a few minutes before it opened, Terry and Eric were struck by the nondescript area. “If you weren’t looking for it, you would miss it,” Terry said. But the minute it hit 8am, two guards stationed themselves outside of the doors.
Later, Eric told Terry that while he sat in the waiting room during her procedure, different people would come up to the clinic doors and try to get in. They would claim they were there to support a patient, but it seemed as if they might really be protesters. Each one was turned away, but still, it was nerve-wracking. What if someone was able to get in?
Inside the procedure room, the mood was different. “The nurse held my hand, petted my hair and talked to me,” Terry said. “She kept me calm and wiped my tears.”
After the procedure, Terry had to stay in recovery longer than expected: there had been a bleed behind her placenta that wasn’t visible on the ultrasound, and so doctors kept her at the clinic for a few extra hours to ensure she was safe before leaving. By the time Terry was discharged, the couple realized they’d have to drive through the night to get home.
“He did his best to make sure that I was comfortable,” Terry says. But it’s not so easy to drive for hours after such an emotionally and physically taxing experience. Still—despite how scared Eric was of how poorly Terry looked in the car—they both say they made the right decision to drive all the way home without stopping at an emergency room in a conservative town. “We wanted to get as close to Austin as possible,” she says.
When I pointed out that no one did anything illegal—people are allowed to travel out of the state for care—Terry responded with a sentiment that anyone who follows abortion news knows is true: What the law says and what the law does are two different things.
“We’ve heard things about people getting reported and a whole investigation happening,” she said. Besides, Terry told me, she knows other states are considering the death penalty for abortion. What happens if Texas considers a law like that, and her name is on a list somewhere? She didn’t want to risk it.
That’s also why, a few weeks after the abortion, the couple still hasn’t told anyone. It’s not only fear of their friends’ judgment—but the knowledge that someone could turn them both in. After all, the state’s so-called ‘bounty hunter’ law allows private citizens to sue anyone they suspect of being involved in an abortion (that’s doctors, nurses, even people who drove to the out-of-state clinic) for at least $10,000.
The isolation, though, is painful; their community is a big part of their lives. “I go to church almost every Sunday, I’m friends with the pastor,” Terry told me. Now when she walks out into the world she feels as if she’s wearing a huge sign that announces she’s a criminal.
“It felt as if we were robbing a bank,” Eric tells me. “That’s how bad it felt, and it shouldn’t have to feel like that.”
Dr. Zera says that when it comes to pregnancy, there should be no government involvement. “The constellation of things that can go wrong in a pregnancy is so vast that you can never write legislation that captures the complexities of it,” she says. “It takes a real lack of humility to think that you could write a good law that could encompass all of that.”
Today, Terry and Eric are trying to get back to their normal lives. They still haven’t told any friends or family, which makes going about their day to day routines strange. They have to pretend as if everything is fine.
Eric says he tries to let himself feel all the grief and anger, but when he goes to work he has to push it all down. Terry, on the other hand, told me she just feels defeated.
“I wish I could move past it. I’ve never felt defeated before in my life. I failed math tests, I’ve lost sports games, but I've never felt defeated. Not like this.”
It all just feels pointless, she says. The suffering, the guilt, the pain and the loneliness. She should have been able to have an abortion close to home, she says, so that she could heal and be in the comfort of her own bed instead of driving for hours, afraid.
And that’s what Terry wants people to understand about her experience and the Texas law: the pain that it caused her. The pain it still causes. “I want to force people to see what they’re doing,” she says.
“I want Greg Abbott or anyone who voted for this law to look me in the eye and tell me that I deserved what happened. That I deserve to be punished by the law for what I’ve gone through. I want them to look me in the eye.”
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Historic Texas County Bans Abortions and Abortion Trafficking
Editor's Note
The section on the enforcement of Texas' laws against abortion has been clarified to state that all of them are currently in effect.
Historic Goliad County in South Texas has outlawed abortion within its unincorporated areas. On August 28, the Goliad County Commissioners Court voted unanimously to approve an ordinance prohibiting abortion, abortion-inducing drugs, and abortion trafficking in the county.
Goliad County is the second Texas county to pass such an ordinance. In July, Mitchell County in West Texas took a similar action.
Rep. Geanie Morrison (R-Victoria), who represents Goliad County in the Texas House, reacted favorably to hearing the news. "I am proud of Goliad County for protecting LIFE,” Morrison reportedly said, according to a Facebook post by Mark Lee Dickson, who leads the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn initiative.
Similar to the Heartbeat Act — Senate Bill 8 passed during the 87th Texas Legislative Session — the Goliad County ordinance creates a cause of action enforced by private individuals instead of the government. Rather than protecting unborn children from the time of a detectable heartbeat, it protects them from the time of conception.
Dickson was instrumental in passing the ordinance. He explained that the trafficking section of the ordinance prohibits the transportation for an abortion of any individual beginning, ending, or passing through Goliad County.
“This means that people who live within Goliad County will not be allowed to drive people out of Goliad County who are seeking to obtain an elective abortion in another state – as such actions would be considered abortion trafficking,” he said in a press statement.
Fifty cities in Texas have outlawed abortion within their city limits. These “sanctuary cities for the unborn” began in 2019, when Waskom was the first city in Texas to adopt an ordinance outlawing abortion.
Texas has several state laws in place that outlaw abortion. Some laws criminalizing abortion and carrying a potential prison sentence were in place before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade and are still on the books. They became effective again following the court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson. Those laws include exceptions for procedures meant to save the life of the mother.
Additionally, the Human Life Protection Act passed by the Texas Legislature in 2021 makes elective abortions a felony, carries a civil penalty, and revokes the license of medical personnel involved in performing elective abortions.
The Heartbeat Act and Human Life Protection Act, along with pre-Roe abortion bans, were enjoined from enforcement. Travis County District Judge Jessica Mangrum issued a temporary injunction on August 4 in which she wrote, “This injunction is necessary to preserve Plaintiffs’ legal right to obtain or provide abortion care in Texas in connection with emergent medical conditions under the medical exception and the Texas Constitution.”
However, when the Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) filed an interlocutory appeal of the injunction with the Texas Supreme Court, the injunction was stayed and the laws remain in place and enforceable.
“The OAG will continue to enforce the laws duly enacted by the Texas Legislature and uphold the values of the people of Texas by doing everything in its power to protect mothers and babies,” it wrote in a press statement.
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Abortion providers on two years of Texas ban: ‘We’re living in a devastating reality’
Nearly a year before the US supreme court eviscerated Roe v Wade, the court allowed an unprecedented abortion ban to take effect in Texas, serving as a harbinger of what was to sweep over the rest of the country.
The most restrictive abortion law at the time, with no exception for rape, incest, or lethal fetal abnormality, Senate Bill 8 barred care after six weeks of pregnancy, and carried a private enforcement provision that empowered anyone to sue a provider or someone who “aids or abets” the procedure.
The move successfully wiped out almost all abortion care in the second-most populous state in the US. When Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization hit, the state doubled down, criminally banning all care and solidifying itself as the largest state in the US to outlaw abortion.
In the two years since, Texas abortion providers – some of the first in the US to experience a nearly post-Roe world – reflect on the devastating and lasting effect of the severe law, the trauma they felt denying patients care, and the struggle they faced when deciding whether or not to flee the state or stay put.
Dr Jessica Rubino: ‘The law forced me to be a bad doctor’
When Senate Bill 8 took effect, Dr Rubino felt like she was on a “sinking ship”. The abortion provider and family medicine specialist was forced to turn away dozens of patients at Austin Women’s Health Center – including one who was experiencing kidney failure. At the same time, patients below the six-week mark were rushing to choose abortion care before it was too late, leaving thoughtful decision-making behind.
“I had to tell people there’s nothing I can legally do for you, unless you’re on death’s doorstep,” said Rubino. “The law forced me to be a bad doctor.”
“It was heartbreaking and soul-crushing,” she continued. “I was watching a healthcare disaster play out in real time, knowing that this law not only affects our state but is causing a ripple effect in every other state. With SB 8 – and even years before the law – we saw the writing on the wall with Roe and tried to warn everyone, but I’m not sure who was listening.”
Rubino also recalled a conversation she had six months prior to SB 8 with colleagues across the state who appeared united, vowing to continue providing care despite the law’s consequences. People are going to die, she told them, we should take the “personal hit”. However, that wave of defiance never materialized. Rubino lacked critical mass.
She soon fell into an “extreme” depression; it was difficult to get out of bed each day and she eventually sought mental health therapy and antidepressants. Her brain felt “broken”, she said. After Dobbs, she stopped performing abortion for nearly a year, exacerbating her gloom.
“Having to deny patients the healthcare you are trained – and able – to give them is something you never get over. It’s not only medically unethical, it’s morally wrong,” said Rubino. “It was traumatizing, and it still haunts me.”
SB 8, she said, was the tipping point for abortion providers in Texas like her who have been forced to navigate onerous laws over the years that compromise the care they give, including a mandatory sonogram and 24-hour waiting period that incorporates relaying erroneous medical information, bans on insurance coverage for care, restrictions on minors’ access to abortion, and more.
In May, under the advice of attorneys and those closest to her, Rubino and her family left Texas with no plans to return. She worked at a clinic in Bristol, Virginia, where she largely served patients in banned southern states, before moving to DC in late August to help expand abortion services at a reproductive health clinic there.
Rubino still struggles with the decision to flee Texas, while also acknowledging the legal inability to continue her calling.
“There is a sense of guilt, of letting down the community I serve. Sometimes I feel like I gave up on these people,” she said.
She also worries that a national abortion ban could once again pull her away from the community she now treats. She considers one day working in the UK or New Zealand.
Rubino feels deeply anxious about the fate of the patients she has left behind and mentioned a recurring patient, a victim of domestic violence, whose partner blocked her access to birth control.
“She’s going to call and I’m not going to be there,” said Rubino. “She’s not in a safe situation and we know staying pregnant can lead to more abuse, and even death by an abusive partner. The safest thing for her would be to get an abortion but now she’s not going to have that choice.”
Dr Ghazaleh Moayedi: ‘Inhumane and illogical’
Testifying before Congress three separate times to oppose abortion bans and uplift the right to access, Dr Ghazaleh Moayedi has made her mark as an outspoken and passionate reproductive justice advocate for Texans.
But the road wasn’t always clear for the doctor: unsure of what to do after graduating college, Moayedi’s friend recommended she take a nanny job. Her boss was Amy Hagstrom-Miller, the head of a network of abortion clinics and then major figure in Texas reproductive rights who would go on to lead several legal challenges against the state, including a 2016 US supreme court victory. Moayedi began working in Miller’s clinic, where she saw her interests collide.
As a “brown, Muslim” n Iranian American woman who grew up in Texas, Moayedi quickly realized the majority of state abortion doctors – largely white men – did not reflect the diversity of the patients they treated, and vowed to fix that.
“I could feel a palpable racial and cultural divide,” she said. “None of the doctors looked like the people we take care of. I wanted to be a provider that helped represent the communities we serve. I decided to go to medical school with that goal as a driving force.”
Moayedi has worked in Texas abortion care since 2014, weathering the roller coaster of state abortion laws, including a 2020 order to ban abortion under the pretense of the Covid emergency, which, at the time, upended her plans to start her own practice.
After SB 8, she transitioned her care to Oklahoma. When Oklahoma’s abortion law took effect, she switched gears, providing ultrasounds in Texas to those traveling to and from out-of-state abortion care. Moayedi then became uncertain if she could safely venture to states where abortion was still legal, as the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, encouraged local prosecutors to go after providers shortly after Roe fell. She and abortion funds sued the state for legal protection, and paused their services in the meantime.
After securing a court victory, Moayedi has worked to build an abortion and miscarriage telemedicine practice, still in the process of getting off the ground. She is now licensed in 20 states – but only half allow abortion telemed. She also travels to Kansas, a safe haven state, to provide care.
“I’ve had to really pivot quite a bit. It’s been absolutely wild,” she said. “My practice doesn’t look anything like I thought it would. For now, my goal is to stay in Texas but we’ll see what happens.”
Moayedi says the law’s “inhumane and illogical” impact is especially pronounced when she is treating a patient in another state only to discover they’re from not just the same city as her, but the same neighborhood.
“Here we both are, hundreds of miles away from our home and support system, just to receive healthcare,” she said. “Moments like those just hit you in the gut.”
As a complex family planning specialist, Moayedi constantly worries for patients with “potentially catastrophic” high-risk pregnancies, especially as the Texas law offers only vague medical emergency exceptions, leading patients to near-death experiences. She receives calls from colleagues wondering if pregnant patients with complications, like C-section scar ectopic pregnancies, can receive care in Texas. She often refers them out of state to be safe.
“I really don’t have words to describe the deep, deep pain I feel,” said Moayedi. “These laws are insulting, disgusting, cruel, and absolutely pointless.”
The provider and advocate expresses disappointment with the federal administration, who she feels has failed to meaningfully protect abortion providers and patients since SB 8 took effect.
“The Biden administration’s response has been a limp handshake,” she said. “We want to see tangible, bold action to restore or at least prevent the further erosion of reproductive rights. We need unwavering support – not a leader who can barely say the word ‘abortion’.”
Kathy Kleinfeld: ‘SB 8 was meant to be a fear tactic that paralyzed care’
Kathy Kleinfeld will never forget the desperation that swept over Houston Women’s Reproductive Services after SB 8 took effect. Anxious patients begged her and her staff to perform abortion care past the six-week mark, even offering money under the table and other favors.
“They were crying and pleading with us, saying ‘I’ll do whatever you want,’” said Kleinfeld. “It was so heartbreaking, there was nothing we could do.”
Patients – as well as clinic staff – held their breath during each ultrasound, hoping the pregnancy would fall under the state-mandated time frame. For those past the mark, Kleinfeld and colleagues became “dystopian travel agents” connecting patients with out-of-state care.
After 30 years of providing abortion in Houston, Kleinfeld had never experienced anything so chaotic and devastating. Then Dobbs hit.
“It felt like everything we experienced with SB 8 was magnified – it was like SB 8 on steroids,” said Kleinfeld. “The intensity, the confusion, the chaos all became so overwhelming.”
While she was forced to halt abortion care, Kleinfeld did not want to leave her patients behind. One month after the fall of Roe, she regrouped, considerably downsizing her 5,000 sq-ft clinic and cutting her staff by more than half. She now provides pre- and post- abortion ultrasounds for those traveling out of state, as well as abortion clinic referrals. Her clinic is only one of two former independent abortion providers in Texas – and just a handful across the US – that have not closed or moved away.
“We did not want to completely abandon pregnant people in Houston,” said Kleinfeld. “We felt it was still really important to adapt and provide this necessary service. It feels absolutely awful to not be able to offer abortion care, but at the same time, we feel grateful to be able to still help patients in whatever way we can.”
Her clinic received around 1,200 visits this year, with most traveling to and from New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas.
The fear unleashed by SB 8 two years ago still lingers today: Patients are scared to disclose that they want or have had an abortion; they are fearful to bring a partner or family member with them to a procedure out-of-state or even to the ultrasound at Kleinfeld’s clinic, worrying that a loved one may be in legal trouble for “aiding or abetting” care.
“We still have to explain to patients all the time that it is not illegal to help someone obtain a legal abortion,” said Kleinfeld. “SB 8 was meant to be a fear tactic that paralyzed care and instilled anxiety in patients, and even after Dobbs, we are still seeing its impact.”
Dr Alan Braid and Andrea Gallegos: ‘Waving our hands hands on top of a burning building’
As a medical resident in 1972, Dr Alan Braid will never forget treating a 15-year-old girl in a San Antonio emergency room who was suffering from sepsis – a life-threatening blood infection – after a botched and illegal abortion, her vaginal cavity packed with rags. Braid and doctors did everything they could but the infection was so severe, she died a few days later from massive organ failure. That year, he saw another two teenagers die from illegal abortions.
It was then that Braid realized that abortion care was vital and medically necessary, an inextricable component of overall healthcare. One year later, Roe would help solidify and protect Braid’s mission.
For the next 45 years, he provided ob-gyn and abortion care in Texas. When Senate Bill 8 hit, it felt like 1972 all over again, he said.
“To repeat history and expect a different outcome is insanity. Women will be injured and women will die – again – without access to healthcare,” said Braid.
With a passion for reproductive rights, Andrea Gallegos joined her father’s practice as manager of Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services a few years ago. She describes the impact of SB 8 as “devastating” to patients, many of whom were saddled with multiple barriers to care. Even when staff would offer to pay for travel or the procedure itself, patients – still bound by the inability to find child care or time off work – couldn’t make the journey out of state.
Braid felt like he had to fight back. In an act of overt defiance, the provider performed an abortion on a patient beyond the six-week limit. He was not only acting out of medical duty but hoped to invoke a legal challenge that would eventually halt SB 8.
“I don’t think any of us really thought SB 8 would last – it’s so blatantly unconstitutional and just crazy, we figured the courts – even a court as conservative as the fifth circuit – would recognize the law needs to be stopped,” said Gallegos.
While Braid’s intentional act of resistance attracted an outpouring of nationwide support, the lawsuits against him ultimately failed to halt SB 8, leaving the provider feeling largely defeated.
He and his team continued to navigate the draconian law, routinely sending patients to their Tulsa, Oklahoma, clinic, where the caseload tripled within the first couple of months, placing a strain on the out-of-state provider.
When Oklahoma’s governor signed into law an abortion ban – modeled after Texas’s SB 8 – in April 2022, Braid was forced to shutter the critical pipeline for Texans.
“It felt like we were waving our hands on top of a burning building, trying to warn everyone else that this is what it’s going to look like for the rest of the country soon,” said Gallegos. “While we see the lack of access, the forced travel, the domino effect on surrounding clinics now everyday post-Dobbs, in Texas we were experiencing it first.”
Following Roe’s demise, Braid was forced to close the doors to his San Antonio clinic and stopped practicing abortion care in Texas after nearly five decades. In May, he officially moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he has set up a clinic in the safe haven state.
Gallegos relocated to Carbondale, Illinois, in July, a spot nestled between abortion-hostile states, to oversee a new clinic there.
Leaving Texas – and friends and family behind – is deeply “bittersweet” for the father-daughter duo: there is a sense of “abandonment” but also a recognition that the move was necessary.
“It’s not easy to completely start over but I know this is where I’m supposed to be,” said Gallegos.
For the abortion providers, it’s also a painful reminder of the growing inequity of reproductive healthcare across the US.
“It hits me hard knowing geography has played such a significant role in privilege to access to what I consider basic healthcare,” said Gallegos. “Geography should not determine if you can have a safe or dangerous pregnancy. We are living in a devastating reality.”
Braid, now in his late 70s, describes working in New Mexico as “refreshing”, as he can “just be a doctor” and not “have to call attorneys” for guidance every step of the way, as he did in Texas.
However, he has left his home state – and the place where he learned to be a physician so many years ago – with a tinge of regret, wishing he not only provided one abortion in violation of SB 8, but several more, convinced that the act of rebellion would have eventually led to a successful court battle that brought down the law. His daughter seeks to allay his remorse.
“I remind my dad that the law was so unprecedented, so hard to predict and navigate, none of us knew what would happen,” said Gallegos. “In the end, the whole point of SB 8 was to elicit fear in abortion providers and sadly, that’s exactly what it did.”
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How the Government Weaponizes Surveillance to Silence Its Critics | By John & Nisha Whitehead
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — President Harry S. Truman
Ever since Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his groundbreaking “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, the Deep State has been hard at work turning King’s dream into a living nightmare.
The end result of the government’s efforts over the past 60 years is a country where nothing ever really changes, and everyone lives in fear.
Race wars are still being stoked by both the Right and the Left; the military-industrial complex is still waging profit-driven wars at taxpayer expense; the oligarchy is still calling the shots in the seats of government power; and the government is still weaponizing surveillance in order to muzzle anti-government sentiment, harass activists, and terrorize Americans into compliance.
This last point is particularly disturbing.
Starting in the 1950s, the government relied on COINTELPRO, its domestic intelligence program, to neutralize domestic political dissidents. Those targeted by the FBI under COINTELPRO for its intimidation, surveillance and smear campaigns included: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X, the Black Panther Party, John Lennon, Billie Holiday, Emma Goldman, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Felix Frankfurter, and hundreds more.
In more recent decades, the powers-that-be have expanded their reach to target anyone who opposes the police state, regardless of their political leanings.
Advances in technology have enabled the government to deploy a veritable arsenal of surveillance weapons in order to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” perceived threats to the government’s power.
Surveillance cameras mounted on utility poles, traffic lights, businesses, and homes. License plate readers. Ring doorbells. GPS devices. Dash cameras. Drones. Store security cameras. Geofencing and geotracking. FitBits. Alexa. Internet-connected devices. Geofencing dragnets. Fusion centers. Smart devices. Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition. Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.
What these add up to is a world in which, on any given day, the average person is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
Consider just a small sampling of the ways in which the government is weaponizing its 360 degree surveillance technologies to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong.
Flagging you as a danger based on your feelings. Customs and Border Protection is reportedly using an artificial intelligence surveillance program that can detect “sentiment and emotion” in social media posts in order to identify travelers who may be “a threat to public safety, national security, or lawful trade and travel.”
Flagging you as a danger based on your phone and movements. Cell phones have become de facto snitches, offering up a steady stream of digital location data on users’ movements and travels. For instance, the FBI was able to use geofence data to identify more than 5,000 mobile devices (and their owners) in a 4-acre area around the Capitol on January 6. This latest surveillance tactic could land you in jail for being in the “wrong place and time.” Police are also using cell-site simulators to carry out mass surveillance of protests without the need for a warrant. Moreover, federal agents can now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on your monitor. Malicious hacking software can also be used to remotely activate cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the personal business of a target.
Flagging you as a danger based on your DNA. DNA technology in the hands of government officials completes our transition to a Surveillance State. If you have the misfortune to leave your DNA traces anywhere a crime has been committed, you’ve already got a file somewhere in some state or federal database—albeit it may be a file without a name. By accessing your DNA, the government will soon know everything else about you that they don’t already know: your family chart, your ancestry, what you look like, your health history, your inclination to follow orders or chart your own course, etc. After all, a DNA print reveals everything about “who we are, where we come from, and who we will be.” It can also be used to predict the physical appearance of potential suspects. It’s only a matter of time before the police state’s pursuit of criminals expands into genetic profiling and a preemptive hunt for criminals of the future.
Flagging you as a danger based on your face. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to identify and track someone’s movements in real-time. One particularly controversial software program created by Clearview AI has been used by police, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security to collect photos on social media sites for inclusion in a massive facial recognition database. Similarly, biometric software, which relies on one’s unique identifiers (fingerprints, irises, voice prints), is becoming the standard for navigating security lines, as well as bypassing digital locks and gaining access to phones, computers, office buildings, etc. In fact, greater numbers of travelers are opting into programs that rely on their biometrics in order to avoid long waits at airport security. Scientists are also developing lasers that can identify and surveil individuals based on their heartbeats, scent and microbiome.
Flagging you as a danger based on your behavior. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. One smart “anti-riot” surveillance system purports to predict mass riots and unauthorized public events by using artificial intelligence to analyze social media, news sources, surveillance video feeds and public transportation data.
Flagging you as a danger based on your spending and consumer activities. With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time. Consumer surveillance, by which your activities and data in the physical and online realms are tracked and shared with advertisers, has become a $300 billion industry that routinely harvests your data for profit. Corporations such as Target have not only been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers, particularly their purchasing patterns, for years, but the retailer has also funded major surveillance in cities across the country and developed behavioral surveillance algorithms that can determine whether someone’s mannerisms might fit the profile of a thief.
Flagging you as a danger based on your public activities. Private corporations in conjunction with police agencies throughout the country have created a web of surveillance that encompasses all major cities in order to monitor large groups of people seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies. They are also engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of “large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally predicated individuals.” Defense contractors have been at the forefront of this lucrative market. Fusion centers, $330 million-a-year, information-sharing hubs for federal, state and law enforcement agencies, monitor and report such “suspicious” behavior as people buying pallets of bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a pilot’s license as “suspicious activity.”
Flagging you as a danger based on your social media activities. Every move you make, especially on social media, is monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line. As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. This obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin, writing for NBC News, observed, “We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads… the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.”
Flagging you as a danger based on your social network. Not content to merely spy on individuals through their online activity, government agencies are now using surveillance technology to track one’s social network, the people you might connect with by phone, text message, email or through social message, in order to ferret out possible criminals. An FBI document obtained by Rolling Stone speaks to the ease with which agents are able to access address book data from Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage services from the accounts of targeted individuals and individuals not under investigation who might have a targeted individual within their network. What this creates is a “guilt by association” society in which we are all as guilty as the most culpable person in our address book.
Flagging you as a danger based on your car. License plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, affixed to overpasses, cop cars and throughout business sectors and residential neighborhoods, it allows police to track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives. Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture out suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.
Flagging you as a danger based on your political views. The Church Committee, the Senate task force charged with investigating COINTELPRO abuses in 1975, concluded that the government had carried out “secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power.” The report continued: “Groups and individuals have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles… Intelligence agencies have served the political and personal objectives of presidents and other high officials.” Nothing has changed since then.
Flagging you as a danger based on your correspondence. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”
Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from these mass spying programs as long as we’ve done nothing wrong.
Don’t believe it.
As Matthew Feeney warns in the New York Times, “In the past, Communists, civil rights leaders, feminists, Quakers, folk singers, war protesters and others have been on the receiving end of law enforcement surveillance. No one knows who the next target will be.”
The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.
Moreover, there is a repressive, suppressive effect to surveillance that not only acts as a potentially small deterrent on crime but serves to monitor and chill lawful First Amendment activity, and that is the whole point.
Weaponized surveillance is re-engineering a society structured around the aesthetic of fear.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the police state wants us silent, servile and compliant.
They definitely do not want us to engage in First Amendment activities that challenge the government’s power, reveal the government’s corruption, expose the government’s lies, and encourage the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
And they certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, let alone attempting to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully, whether it’s protesting police brutality and racism, challenging COVID-19 mandates, questioning election outcomes, or listening to alternate viewpoints—even conspiratorial ones—in order to form our own opinions about the true nature of government.
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