Trump likes to brag that he did away with Roe v Wade, but he did a lot more than that.  He has criminalized medical care under the guise of abortion in a way that has never been done before.

In English common law, abortions were legal until fetal movement was detected, usually 4-5 months.  The moral debate over abortion came more recently.

50+ years ago, the Roe debate was over a word you never see anymore: elective abortion. Elective abortion meant terminating an otherwise healthy pregnancy early on by choice (though “healthy” might be defined differently in different places).  In 1973, 10+ years after birth control pills were introduced, the argument against elective abortion treated the issue as if it were mostly single women seeking them. The anti-abortion people argued that single women shouldn’t have abortions because single women shouldn’t be having sex. It didn’t sound any better then.

Roe v Wade was meant to prevent “back-alley (unsafe) elective abortions.” That and women injuring themselves to create a medical situation that a doctor had to treat—if the woman didn’t go into septic shock and die.

There had never been any debate at all that women should be treated for fibroids, post-partum bleeding, miscarriages, or ectopic pregnancies. There was no debate at all that a dead or dying fetus could and should be removed without moral implications (though “dying” might be debated).

That is what is different today.  The GOP redefined abortion far beyond the elective abortion at issue in Roe v Wade, and no one has challenged this. Prosecutions are ongoing.

• They have gone beyond the most fervent pro-life position to force women to carry unviable fetuses, often at unnecessary risk to the mother.  
• Before Roe, there were no laws penalizing doctors for treating a woman in medical distress, even if the treatment ended a pregnancy.  Now women are “bleeding out in the parking lot” because doctors are afraid of criminal liability and prison for treating them.
• After birth, a new mother is given Oxytocin to help the uterus contract and stop bleeding. If there is still too much bleeding, she gets additional treatment. This could be misoprostol, which is also used for bleeding ulcers and can be used to induce labor.  Except the GOP wants to ban misoprostol because it can also be used for abortion by inducing “labor” early in the pregnancy. 
• “At least 210 women faced criminal charges related to pregnancy, abortion, pregnancy loss, or birth in the year [June 2022-June 2023] after the Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion”[1] (emphasis mine)

Women’s healthcare has always had elements of hostility and indifference. Women’s issues and women’s bodies were treated as less important than men’s. All official medical testing was done on men (even for women’s issues) until quite recently. When they started testing women, they found some surprises. For example, symptoms of heart attacks are different in men and women, but until very recently only men’s symptoms were known because only men were tested.^[2] 

In the 1960s, my mother had an ectopic pregnancy, an egg implanted in a fallopian tube instead of the uterus. Even today, that’s an unviable pregnancy, but today it would be illegal to treat in some places. In the 1960s, the doctors treated my mother, but rather than remove one fallopian tube, they did a hysterectomy (removed her whole reproductive system) without asking her (or even my father). She was devastated, but to the doctors it was no big deal. She wasn’t even 30.

So Trump is the latest purveyor in a long line of cruelties to women. But he takes it to another level because he is using this to disenfranchise women.  Any woman who has a critical need for certain kinds of health care will either die or be prosecuted, and he doesn’t care which. Either way, she can’t vote.

This is more than the repeal of Roe. This is forced denial of medical care on a level we have never seen in this country. Even Kamala Harris understates it.  It is killing people in the name of pro-life and ripping families apart in the name of pro-family. We have good Samaritan laws because people naturally want to help; we never have had laws that prohibit people, especially doctors, from providing lifesaving care until now.

Why aren’t we screaming about this?

Picture: In the movie Dirty Dancing, made in the 80s but set in the 60s, Penny’s need for an abortion is the plot device that pushes the two leads together.  The abortion she receives causes her medical distress, which brings her to this scene where she is treated by a doctor. A witness says the person who did the abortion had a dirty table and a rusty knife. At the time it was a reminder that because of Roe v Wade 10+ years earlier, no one had to go through that anymore. Today, the doctor in this picture might have to wonder if he could be prosecuted for treating Penny.

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[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/pregnant-women-prosecuted-supreme-court-abortion-1235111112/

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/10/health/women-heart-attack-research/index.html