Cross-referencing with people who show credit card purchases in abortion-friendly states is the follow-up. It’s not like there’s some nationwide database of credit card purchases that you can compare the list of pregnancy tests purchasers to. Let’s say 10,000 tests are purchased each month in the state that has passed this law requiring pharmacies to keep a log of home pregnancy tests sold. Once you have the names of the people who purchased the test, you then have to find out which banks they have credit cards with and subpoena the records from those individual banks. Assuming you get the subpoenas and the banks comply, you then have to see how many have charges in abortion friendly states. You have however many thousands are left - now you have to figure out which charges actually put them in the abortion-friendly state and which were online orders that were just billed in that state. And what you still don’t have at the end of this is any idea of which of those home pregnancy tests came up positive.
I’m not saying people will be able to get around such a law easily - I’m saying I don’t think it ever gets passed to begin with.
Don’t underestimate legal theater. Even if unenforceable, a significant number of folks will be happy that the law exists and the occasion odd person is punished under it.
IANAD, but AFAICT the “reasoning” of the ignorant legislators who tried to mandate ectopic pregnancy “reimplementation” is something like this: Embryos can naturally implant in the uterus via IVF, even if they weren’t made in the uterus. Therefore it should be easy to remove an embryo that’s (ectopically) growing in a fallopian tube and let it implant in the uterus instead. Like transplanting a bean seedling from one part of the garden to another."
Sorry for the horrific simile, but I’m trying to give an idea of how monstrously ill-informed and brutally unworkable the proposed mandated “procedure” would be. The attempted Johnny-Jenny “penis transfer procedure” would not be good for Johnny and it would not be at all good for the penis, and it definitely would not make Jenny turn into a boy.
Similarly, removing a long-past-fertilization embryo from a fallopian tube destroys its implantation and makes it unable to continue growing. And even if it could continue growing, the uterine lining would be incapable of allowing it to implant. It would be impossible no matter whose uterus you were trying to “transplant” the embryo into.
It cannot be stressed enough that an embryo/fetus, especially pre-viability, is part of a pregnant person’s body. That body is not a mere planter in which a seedling can be moved around and allowed to re-root at will. It takes months and months for a fetus to have even the remotest possibility of being able to survive on its own if removed from its originally implanted site.
There’s no room in the fallopian tube for an ectopically implanted fetus to develop for months and months. And as explained, it can’t be removed early on and “re-implanted” somewhere else. So an ectopic pregnancy simply cannot survive, no matter what the wishful thinking of idiotic and deeply ignorant “pro-life” legislators might suggest.
Adding to the fun… a miscarriage may well be medically termed an abortion, and a nonviable pregnancy labelled a “missed abortion”. That’s what the diagnosis said for my first miscarriage (where I had started spotting, but nothing more had happened). Some stupid (or malicious) prosecutor might get hold of such medical records, and try to prosecute a woman for terminating a pregnancy. In theory a judge would throw that out, but if the judge didn’t, and they managed to get an equally stupid jury, a woman could go to prison - for a blighted ovum.
It’s not clear from the Newsweek article, but this ordinance allows private citizens to sue persons (not including the women seeking an abortion) aiding the travel.
"No, officer, I’m not driving my new friend, here, over to that abortion clinic by the 62 offramp. I’m driving my new friend to that shredded frankfurter restaurant a mile past the abortion clinic by the 62 offramp. You know how pregnant women get those inexplicable cravings for things like pickles-on-ice-cream? Well, she called me, of all people, and asked me to drive her to that shredded frankfurter restaurant because she just inexplicably craves their kosher-all-beef-with-cheeze-and-habaneros. Me, I just thought it was such a crazy craving that I wanted to see if she’d actually eat it – Hell, I’m even gonna buy it for her.
No, officer, I just like ketchup – and besides I don’t like mine shredded.
Look, casino gambling is illegal in many states, yet their citizens routinely go to Las Vegas. Are we saying that those states could charge their residents for leaving their state to commit “out of state gambling”? Effing ridiculous.
Doesn’t Federal Law make some things a crime to travel to a foreign county to do something legal there that is illegal in the US? And can that set a precedence for state sovereignty over its residents?
The US constitution has the “Full Faith and Credit” clause which says all states have to respect the laws and judgements of other states. I’m not sure how that would play out in court but I think it would be a big roadblock to making it criminal to go to another state and do something that is legal there.
And the implications for interstate commerce would get very weird very fast if states could “ban” things.
One thing that states differ on is age of consent, and that age will affect laws against statutory rape. How would it play out if a couple is dating in a state where AoC is 16 and one person is 15 and the other is 18. The couple abstains from sexual activity while in their own state, but they have sex when they travel to a state where AoC is 15. Would their home state with AoC 16 be able to prosecute the 18-year-old for statutory rape for having sex with the 15-year-old while in the AoC 15 state?
I suppose this would be similar for marriage. If the same couple got married in a state with AoC of 15, would the state with AoC 16 recognize the marriage?
The difference is that it’s very simple to tell whether I am a US citizen or not. It’s less simple to tell whether I am a state resident. There’s no way to renounce residency in a state. One can be a state resident for some purposes and not for others. At what point would my residency change if I went to stay with a relative in another state until I found housing? Suppose I was staying in a hotel till I found housing? Suppose things didn’t work out and I returned to the original state without ever finding housing? How long before I don’t have to worry about returning to Texas after having had an abortion in NY? Two days? Two months? Am I forever a resident of Texas just because I lived there for a while?
I thought state residency rules were pretty well established. They differ state-to-state but the rules are clear in each state about what you need to do to establish residency in that state (so you can vote in that state’s elections and so on). You need not renounce residency from a previous state…just setup shop in a new one.
It can get a little more weird for taxes (e.g. you live in Indiana but work in Illinois…who gets your payroll taxes?).
There are exceptions like marriage. Remember that some states did not recognize same-sex marriage from other states and there have been cases of child rape convictions when a couple gets legally married in one state but move to another state where the girl is too young to get married. How that applies to going out of state for an abortion I’m not sure. I don’t think anyone really knows but I guarantee the State would bring it up as precedence in a trial.
And even that issue is being pressed. How is it that California thinks it can tax my income 10 years after I move? At what point does a state lose jurisdiction over me as a former resident? I could totally see Texas claiming jurisdiction over a fetus even if the mom moves while the fetus is still in utero.
And let me throw this scary thought out there … what happens if the baby is conceived on vacation in Texas? Can Texas prosecute you if you get an abortion when you go home to your state of residence?
Each state’s rules for when you become a resident for a particular purpose are clear but when you become a resident and must change your license is likely to be different from when you file a resident tax return vs a non-resident return and when you are eligible for state resident tuition rates at the public university. And with State A making it a crime for residents to go to State B to have an abortion what’s important is not when you become a resident of state B (which might be a year later for in-state tuition or immediately for changing your driver’s license) but when you are no longer a resident of State A.
The difference there is that something happened in the state where the marriage wasn’t recognized - nobody was convicted of rape for sexual activity in the state where the marriage was legal.
