Or more to the point, even if you don’t get an abortion. If you didn’t get the abortion, then you might win the lawsuit, but even winning a lawsuit is expensive when you’re not allowed to recoup legal fees. Or, of course, you might lose even if you didn’t, in fact, get an abortion: The standard of proof in a civil case isn’t very high.
Just being in the general vicinity of Texas is a legal risk for anyone.
Whereas I wish we’d never fought the civil war, and let the south succede. I’m I sure economics would have killed slavery, and the Union states would be a lot better off today if we didn’t have to negotiate with the Confederacy over everything.
Maybe eventually, but I wonder how long that would have taken. And how difficult it would have been for a Confederate nation explicitly premised on the concept of Black chattel slavery to be able to relinquish it.
Heard on the news this morning that the city of Portland, OR has decided not to do business with Texas anymore. Not sure how that’ll work in reality.
If it hasn’t already happened with the multiple historical attempts to hinder women’s rights, this isn’t likely to do it.
So, Texas and Florida will be states were Covid has reproductive rights while women don’t… /s
This whole idea of states refusing to do business with each other is 1) childish and 2) goes against the whole concept of United states.
? How you figure? AFAICT, what the United States requires its constituent states to do is to abide by Article IV of the Constitution, including the Full Faith and Credit Clause, and related law. Nothing in there about states having to engage in commercial transactions.
Inter-state spending boycotts on ethical grounds don’t “go against” the basic concept of the United States as a nation, any more than refusing to shop at your brother’s store because you don’t like how he treats his workers “goes against” the fact that you’re part of the same family. Family members can refuse to support one another’s toxic behavior financially, and so can states.
To answer the question on the thread title, no, i don’t think Texas will be cancelled enough to matter.
Exactly. No state is prohibiting its citizens from engaging in commerce with the citizens of another states. What has happened in response to this and other offenses like the “bathroom bill” is that some state and municipal governments, as a matter of policy, have decided that their citizens’ tax dollars should not be spent in such a way to benefit those offending states. Mostly this has involved limitations on state taxpayer-funded travel to conferences. It’s hardly an assault on federalism.
I hope just having stories like this in the news leads to bigger and better things. I wish I had some business with Texas that I could cancel.
Texas is too big to cancel.
I’ll boycott anything Texas that I can. For what that’s worth. It lookslike Texas’ new law might help California’s Governor in his recall, we’ll see. Most Americans do not support these measures, and if this rallies voters and the GOP is hurt in the midterms, maybe Republicans will rethink things.
If this has no effect, or god forbid bolsters Republicans, then look out. That would surprise me, but politics lately has been through the looking glass.
Frankly a significant problem for proponents of abortion rights is that the passion behind pro-lifers has massively outweighed the passion of the pro-choicers ever since Roe. There’s a big population of people, more than there are pro-lifers, who don’t want to see legal abortion ended. But how many of them have pro-choice as a cause celebre? How many will govern their entire political identity around abortion access? That number is far smaller than on the other side, for many pro lifers it’s their entire political/religious identity, and they make up probably 30% of the GOP base.
That’s something that has long baffled me. If, twenty years ago, you had asked me, “Which side is likelier to retain greater passion and fervor for its cause by the year 2021; the pro-lifers or the pro-choicers?” I would have definitely said pro-choicers for sure. I would have been surprised that there was even any meaningful pro-life movement left remaining by 2021. Yet the opposite is what’s happened.
Liberals were able to successfully flip public opinion about same-sex marriage over the last twenty years, and get Obergefell’d along the way. So it’s not like they’re incapable of flipping a nation. Yet they’ve achieved no such success with abortion.
It’s because “They’re killing babies!” is scarier than “George and Tom are married!”
I think it’s harder to build support for something that’s already a fait accompli, the “soft” pro-choicers never need to think much about abortion because for most adults today, and anyone younger than an adult, abortion has been legal and easily accessible for as far back as can be easily remembered. You have to be 67 to have even been an adult (barely) back before Roe was decided, and realistically for most people a few years older than that to have a good conception of reproductive law. Most of the country is younger than this.
I think in many ways Roe bypassed the country having a serious discussion about abortion. It went from being almost universally seen as immoral, to being legally accepted in all fifty states. Gay marriage underwent a much more gradual process, first gay people became more normalized in our culture, and then very gradually a few states started to experiment with civil unions, a couple states started solemnizing marriages etc. Meanwhile a lot of people had to see overtime the injustices of not allowing gay marriage front and center.
Most people have never had to contend with that for abortion.
Even a lot of pro-life people frankly have never had to seriously think about abortion, since it’s been broadly legal, they have not had to do so. Ireland recently legalized abortion, and Mexico actually had a Supreme Court ruling just today decriminalizing abortion nationwide.
One thing about the pro-life movement, is it’s created a lot of “throwaway” laws like the heartbeat bills, that were frankly written primarily as political theater, that will actually be truly monstrous in execution. Most of them contain improper provisions for the health of the mother, and we’re going to see tragedies. If we had never had Roe, then what would’ve happened is over time these tragedies would’ve played out in a more public setting, as public awareness grew they were avoidable. You’d have seen states gradually start to implement abortion legislation, maybe some states wouldn’t go for full legalization, but they’d have regimes where medical access is more fleshed out, things of that nature.
Instead, Roe mostly quashed for a long time most abortion laws. In the last 10 years the court has been letting more laws creep in, and because no one has had to really contend with the reality of these laws, a lot of very extremist laws have gotten written that if they go into effect will kill women. This happened in Ireland, and one of the final cases in which a woman died to infection because doctors would not end her pregnancy, lead to a major change in Irish culture and a change in their law.
It is likely that over time we’ll see something like that happen as abortion rights get shut down in large swathes of red America, but how long it will take to produce any sort of political movement is hard to say.
I read an article by a Texas doctor just yesterday talking about pregnancies where the amniotic sac gets ruptured before 23 weeks. He mentioned he had a patient (with a desired pregnancy) whose amniotic sac ruptured at 19 weeks. He had to give her the grim prognosis–they could carry the pregnancy to around 23 weeks and then deliver, putting the ultra-preemie into NICU. It would be highly likely the child would have lifelong disabilities and medical issues due to the nature of the pregnancy. Meanwhile, the entire time she continued the pregnancy with the sac ruptured, she would be continually exposed to serious risk of fatal infections. In some cases, by the time signs of those infections manifest in fever and etc, even if they terminated the pregnancy then it might be too late. But of course it’s the woman’s choice. She thought about it for 12 hours, and decided to end her pregnancy. He said that under SB8 he is unsure if he would be able to do something like that going forward, and that as an OBGYN who specializes in difficult pregnancies in a hospital setting, he sees a case just like that a few times every single month, and he’s just one doctor in one hospital in Texas.
That’s a good point (the Roe bypassing things part.) It would be like as if Obergefell had happened in, say, 1985, back when most Americans still opposed gay marriage, and pro-SSM people just kept stubbornly saying, “It’s the law, it’s the law, Supreme Court said so!” anytime someone objected to gay marriage. That would have allowed anti-SSM sentiment to foment and get stronger. It was treating something as a settled issue when it wasn’t settled yet.
It’s also why there is no real push among conservatives to overturn Obergefell today, unlike Roe.
Anyhow, I won’t sidetrack the thread with SSM any further. On the topic of Texas, I don’t think the boycott movements will amount to anything meaningful. It’ll be one of those boycott things people will hype up but will be distracted just a month or two later already and forget about.
I agree that there won’t be a huge boycott, but not for the reasons you guys claim. It’s currently not safe to run your business from Texas, so there will be a lot of people staying away while this law is in effect. However, there is just very little likelihood that this law won’t be challenged and beaten at the Court level.
I’m not remotely so sure about Roe standing, but the way they are going about it here is not going to pass muster. The precedent of being able to pass a law that circumvents Constitutional protections would cause too much damage to the Republicans. It’s not just all their gun rights stuff that would be undone.
(That said, this desperation move does make me suspect they don’t think they can defeat Roe.)
I do agree that stopping the import of liberals is the point. However, this may be too little too late. They already were quite close, and they’ve just fired up the hell out of their opposition. They’ve fallen for their own trap of assuming that immigrants are the issue.
So, no, Texas won’t be cancelled, but I would not assume that means it is smooth sailing for these guys. There is a three prong approach here at least to deal with this.
I suspect the real reason for this lunacy is that Abbot’s trying to establish his “Trumpier than Trump” brand. Hence also why DeSantis is suggesting similar legislation. And I very much hope it is this competition that is their undoing. Trump didn’t have a fellow whack-a-doodle to compete with, to siphon off his votes.
I think there is a significant faction of pro-lifers who think that they are just 1 more justice away from getting Roe overturned, and/but that the current majority won’t cut it. Roberts is pretty much guaranteed to uphold Roe and they can’t count on there not being at least one more defector, so they don’t want to take on Roe yet. They need Breyer to kick the bucket or retire, and be replaced by a conservative, before they feel confident enough to take their shot. Only a 7-2 majority would make them feel good enough to try.
As such, they are resentful against other pro-lifers who jump the gun by trying to overturn Roe when it’s still premature to do so, and hence risk getting Roe upheld instead of struck down.