While Texas’ bounty system is currently facing a challenge, it was conceived to help the state avoid the obvious legal path that struck down tough abortion laws elsewhere. Florida, the state that never saw a bad idea it didn’t love, is currently trying to emulate it, and other red states are expected to follow suit. Texans, while split on the state’s new level of abortion access, generally seem to hate the fact that non-Texans can try to cash in with the bounty system, but the law is the law and aggressive new gerrymandering efforts are hoping to keep it that way.
Meanwhile, pro-choice activists have been pushing cities and states to expand abortion access. Virginia, for example, now allows state health care to cover abortions, while Connecticut cracked down on deceptive anti-abortion advertising, and Portland established an abortion access fund. So it’s not all bad, but abortion is being pitched as the next great culture war in the same way that ominous drumming in movies foreshadows a horde of ravenous orcs.
If It’s “Just” A Culture War, That Might Make It Even Worse
Public opinion on abortion hasn’t changed much since Roe v. Wade supposedly split the nation atwain—support for legality in all or most cases has always hovered around 60%, while only about 20% of Americans support total bans—but attempts to portray it as an existential crisis have become a hell of a lot more common.
“Is it, though?”
Some of that is because America’s religious left has lost its influence, while right-wing Protestants have found an ally by begrudgingly accepting that conservative Catholics aren’t secretly plotting the country’s downfall. But while there used to be pro-choice Republicans and pro-life Democrats who appealed to voters equally driven by class concerns, those are a vanishing breed. The former are practically unicorns, if unicorns were called crypto-communists by Glenn Beck.
Why the change? Well, there’s a history lesson there too. As the attempts to besiege school board meetings for the authoritarian thought crimes of acknowledging slavery and disease may have taught you, Republicans are leaning hard into waging a cultural forever war in lieu of having, like, ideas. America never really finished fighting its culture civil war, but the battleground shifted and became more existential, and American conservatism has always done better with fearmongering warnings about a certain way of life being extinguished than it has suggesting tax policy.
And so attempts to effectively ban abortion join attacks on LGBT rights and the elimination of concealed carry restrictions, because an armed society is a society politely telling pregnant women and gay kids to go screw themselves in the name of freedom.
So brace yourselves for many, many more laws like there are in Texas, where history offers us so many red flags that we could give a bull a heart attack. It’s going to be obnoxious and stupid and hurtful. Hopefully it’s also a death rattle before pissed off activists send all these awful ideas back into the hateful oblivion from which they spewed.
Mark is on Twitter and wrote a book.
Top image: Jno.skinner/Wiki Commons