Another Woman Arrested for Allegedly Self-Managing Abortion

Plus: TX Republicans move to criminalize online abortion info, credit card purchases of medication abortion

March 03, 2023

Here’s another edition of Hard to Believe It’s Only Tuesday, a weekly roundup of the top headlines, tweets (for now!), toks, takes, and more in abortion news. You can always email me ([email protected]) or DM me on instagram with action items, takes, and news clips.

The big takeaway: Abortion criminalization — including what I am starting to call the Big Brother Abortion Monitoring Apparatus — is ramping up on a number of fronts, as experts predicted.

In South Carolina, a Black woman was arrested earlier this week and charged with allegedly ending her own pregnancy back in October 2021. South Carolina is one of just two states (the other is Nevada) where self-managed abortion is expressly criminalized — meaning that people who end their own pregnancies (and not only those who support/assist them) can be prosecuted for doing so. Reportedly, the county coroner reported the woman to police, and medical providers seem to have shared the woman’s private health care information with law enforcement. It’s essential to note that self-managed abortion needn’t be explicitly criminalized for people to be targeted by police and prosecutors for pregnancy loss. This kind of thing can happen anywhere, any time — and does — and Black, Indigenous, and women and people of color are more likely to be targeted.

In Texas, anti-abortion Republican lawmakers who love small government and personal freedoms and supporting businesses have proposed new laws that would track and criminalize private internet browsing and online purchasing behavior related to abortion, and hold internet service providers and credit card companies (among others) liable for facilitating the transmission of abortion information or the purchase of abortion medication.

“But all of this sounds absolutely batshit, unconstitutional, and unenforceable?” you say. Of course it does! But it also sounds like a big, expensive, terrifying hassle for people who might fall afoul of such laws, which is the point: terrorizing people (and businesses) into pre-compliance with non-laws.

🦅 🇺🇸 Don’t worry, though — our most important freedoms are still intact, because you can still buy all the guns you want with your credit card and no one will ever know! 🦅 🇺🇸

The Top Headlines

The Takes

  • Physicians for Reproductive Health’s Kelsey Rhodes on why boycotts of abortion-hostile states don’t work: “Boycotts against hostile states don’t work. They just erase the incredible, grass-roots level work being done by organizers across the country. They’re merely publicity stunts that don’t recognize the full impact. And that impact is way less powerful than what you could do if you gave your time, money, and thought to the organizers on the ground.”

  • We Testify’s Renee Bracey Sherman talks to The Meteor about the “Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine” (the anti-abortion group behind the Texas FDA/mife lawsuit) and what Hippocrates actually said about abortion: “They want to hold on to someone like Hippocrates, because they believe in ancient Greek and Roman medicine, and because they revere ancient white society. And they want to say that the original physician—for whatever that’s worth—said, “No abortions!” But that’s simply not true. [Meanwhile], they want to throw out Black and brown communities that have been teaching abortion for thousands of years.”

  • Repro legal scholars David S. Cohen, Greer Donley, and Rachel Rebouche are in Slate laying out the legal means by which a forthcoming Texas District Court judge (a ruling is expected any day now) might not be able to ban mifepristone, actually: “First, as an amicus brief from FDA law scholars (including one of the authors of this piece) makes clear, Congress crafted procedures by statute for the FDA to use to withdraw approval of a drug. Judge Kacsmaryk cannot force the FDA to adopt another process to do the same—doing so would violate federal law. At best, he should only be able to order the agency to start the congressionally mandated process, which involves public hearings and new agency deliberations. This could take months or years, with no guarantee of the result. Second, even if Judge Kacsmaryk forgoes this process and rules that the FDA’s approval was unlawful and that mifepristone is now deemed a drug without approval, he cannot force the FDA to enforce the decision.”

The Tweets/Toks/Grams

  • Health care providers don’t need to know if a person took abortion pills in order to treat complications from miscarriage. Take it from Dr. Jenn Conti.

  • A word from the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund’s Laurie Bertram Roberts:

The Fuck Are We Supposed to Do About It?

That’s all for this week. I’m sure I’ve missed something you’d like to see featured in this roundup, for I am but one woman with a computer and an abortion-news-induced drinking problem. Holler at me — [email protected], or DM me on Instagram, and I’ll try to add follow-ups as I’m able.