"Evangelical MAGA lawyer Michael Farris (who helped lead the effort to overturn Roe v. Wade) has acknowledged in a videotaped interview from 2022 that reversing Roe was just an interim step. In fact, he and his colleagues plan to also amend the U.S. Constitution to ban abortion in all 50 states 'from conception until natural death' once they amass enough power.
“This is a fight for freedom, the fundamental freedom to make decisions about one’s own body & not have their government tell them what they’re supposed to do,” the VP said.
These, the gruesome reality of pregnancy loss, are not words we often hear during Supreme Court oral arguments, buttoned-up proceedings where the justices prefer theory and abstraction to blood and organs."
"On Wednesday, the right-wing justices really preferred the safe world of legal abstraction, where they could pretend that Idaho’s abortion ban — which only has an exception to save the woman’s life — won’t inevitably leave women to gruesome suffering."
Of course they are never going to admit the human cost of their decision to impose on the whole nation the view of the minority of religionists whom they represent.
"One woman miscarried in the lobby restroom of a #Texas emergency room as front desk staff refused to admit her... [another horror story]... And in #NorthCarolina, a woman gave birth in a car after an emergency room couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby died.
"Yesterday illustrated what the overturning of Roe v. Wade has wrought. The Republicans who were celebrating that overturning two years ago are now facing an extraordinary backlash, and they are well aware that Arizona is a key state in the 2024 presidential election."
""Former president Trump has boasted repeatedly that he was responsible for nominating the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe, supported a national abortion ban, and even called for women who get an abortion to be punished.
But today he swung around again, telling reporters that he would not sign a national abortion ban if it came to his desk."
As Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby report, Arizona Republicans, who have spent recent years praising the 1864 anti-abortion law to highest heaven, are now running from their previous statements in support of the law, after their state Supreme Court rehabilitated the 1864 law. As with the IVF debacle in Alabama, they're pretending they never said what they previous said.
Before Arizona was even a state (by almost fifty years!).
Before women could vote.
And at a time when bloodletting, blistering and injection of poisonous minerals were common medical treatments!
How horribly symbolic.
Because all across America, basic GOP policy is to send women back in time—to an era where they were, at best, second class citizens. With little freedom. Few rights."
"Despite some Republicans’ criticism of the ruling, it is nevertheless the product of a concerted effort by their party to make it nearly impossible to obtain an abortion in the state—both by overturning Roe v. Wade at the national level and by appointing state Supreme Court justices to an expanded court who would be willing to enforce an abortion ban that predates women’s suffrage by more than 50 years."
"Consider election-denying, Trump-adoring, gubernatorial-losing extremist Kari Lake who is now running for outgoing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s seat. Two years ago she called abortion 'the ultimate sin' and the 1864 law 'a great law.' Tuesday she was cravenly backtracking: 'I speak to more Arizonans than anyone and it is abundantly clear that the pre-statehood law is out of step with Arizonans.'”
Want to see what governance is like anytime Republicans are in control? Look at Arizona, William Kristol says: it's the very model of Republican governance:
"Republican extremism and authoritarianism comes with a side dish of Republican chaos and disarray."
'Doctors across the country have already been quitting since the fall of Roe v. Wade due to their state's restrictive abortion laws and the potential liability they may face in performing them at any stage.'
"Yesterday, former president Trump released a video celebrating state control over abortion; today, a judicial decision in Arizona illuminated just what such state control means. With the federal recognition of the constitutional right to abortion gone since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, old laws left on state books once again are becoming the law of the land."
"So, this is a law that is coming back into force in Arizona that dates back to a time before women could vote, that dates back to a time before slavery was ended, when Black women in large swaths of the country were still considered chattel. This dates back to an era where we had widespread regulation not just of abortion, but of anything that was considered vice or, you know, immoral."
"If it can happen in Arizona, it can happen at the federal level if the Comstock Act comes back into force. And we saw recently in arguments before the Supreme Court that at least two justices on the Supreme Court seemed very eager to bring the Comstock Act back into effect and roll this entire country back to the Victorian era."
"Today in Atlanta a reporter asked Trump whether he would sign a national abortion ban if Congress sent one to him as President. He said he would not. A clear 'no.' He got asked again, and again said no. It should go without saying that there’s zero reason to believe him. If Congress passed such a law he would almost certainly sign it. But that’s not what’s interesting here."
"He very conspicuously did not say this in his abortion mini-speech on Monday. It’s not like he didn’t know that was an option. He and his campaign very strategically did not say this. Now he has. It is a very clear sign of just how much Trump and his campaign feel like they’re on the run and on the ropes on this issue, partly because the Monday announcement was generally ineffective and even more after the bombshell news yesterday out of Arizona."