And When There is No State to Go To?

 

Simone: If you had to travel to another state to get an abortion, it’s not the worst thing in the world. Hopefully this is very rare occurrence in your life… Buying a bus ticket to go somewhere to get it is not the worst thing in the world. pic.twitter.com/EmaCoft18T

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 9, 2024

This is the glib, dismissive way that abortion bans are spoken about by people who have simply never had to think about reproductive health care in a personal, urgent way. 

A bus ticket? Well, across how many states? How long would that journey take? How soon/when/for how much time will one be able to get off work for? Will one also have to pay for lodgings, depending on the distance? Does one's state have a law that limits travel (this is proposed in several states) Will one need someone else's assistance in obtaining travel? Will the patient and/or the accomplice face felony charges for trying to get abortion services? 

Will these circumstances open up one's private, personal business to other people's investigation and judgment? (Depending upon one's community, it can be hard to schedule a sudden trip without some people speculating why one left.) 

And why would someone compare it to "the worst thing in the world?" Isn't it bad enough that it's pretty damn bad, possibly very expensive, not merely an inconvenience, but a life-altering event? 

For people who have never considered this choice for themselves, what if you had to help your daughter, your sister, your best friend? What if you knew their life was in peril, their health was not good, they had been raped, or some other event made their pregnancy an undue burden but that the circumstances of their obtaining care was nonetheless going to be legally hazardous--could they trust you to help them? 

For a ride? For a loan? For emotional support in being with them? What if that made you an accessory to a crime? What if your own kid needed to travel across country to get an abortion--and there was no way to raise the money needed at all? 

Take a walk through it. Imagine the determination of whether your sister's hemorrhaging miscarriage was left to lawyers and judges--not doctors, and life and death was a matter of moments? Wouldn't the distance, and the time involved, be an onerous factor? Read the actual stories of women who have already been injured by abortion bans. 

And realize very well that this Pandora's box, this parade of horribles, could simply be avoided by never having such bans at all. Think about that, and never vote for Republicans. They can't be trusted with our health. This minefield for childbearing age people was unleashed by the foolhardy Dobbs decision, and the decision is courtesy of Trump's extremist SCOTUS picks. 

We can't go back to the back-alley surgery and the homebrew concoctions of our grandmothers' or great-grandmothers' time. 

CODA: This conversation today is brought to us by the AZ court's decision to uphold an 1864 abortion ban . Arizona was not a state when that ban was passed. Women could not vote. The hand-washing techniques of Ignaz Semmelweis were not yet widely accepted. Sedation in childbirth was yet novel. It was a different time--and we should not be going back to it in any respect.