Indiana, South Carolina Abortion Bans Take Effect, Further Decimating Access

Plus: Political reporters are letting anti-abortion candidates off the hook again and again on this one essential question

August 27, 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. This post is probably too long for email, so click on the links up there ^ above the headline to open in your browser or the Substack app. You don’t want to miss this week’s Good Night and Good Dunk!

PROGRAMMING NOTE: Here’s a short, five-question, multiple-choice-answer survey for HTBIOT readers about content and frequency! I’d love for y’all to let me know how you feel about these roundups and how I can make them better and more useful for you. Literally this will take like 90 seconds, max.

The big takeaway: South Carolina’s six-week abortion ban and Indiana’s abortion ban both went into effect this week, significantly harming abortion access in the South and the Midwest. I cannot stress this enough: now is the time to become a regular/sustaining donor not to NARAL or NOW or national Planned Parenthood, but to abortion funds and support organizations based in abortion-ban states, where the post-Dobbs donation zeitgeist has faded significantly. One of the single best things you can do to support abortion access today, if you are a regular donor to those huge national orgs, is move your money to a local, grassroots fund or clinic in a ban state. Find a fund here, or support the Repro Workers Aid Fund.

And: thanks to the first GOP debate, this week we had lots of coverage looking at “where the GOP candidates stand” on abortion. Notably absent from approximately 100 percent of this coverage is an answer to the question: How would these candidates enforce their preferred abortion ban, whatever it is? Criminal or civil liability? Punishment for providers, supporters, or pregnant people, or all three? It’s the single most important question to ask these clowns, and either no reporters are even posing it, or they’re not printing the answers they are getting. We especially deserve answers about Comstock enforcement — and we’re not getting them. It’s journalistic malpractice and it really the fuck chaps my ass.

The Top Headlines

The Takes

  • Reckon’s Becca Andrews interviews repro legal scholar Mary Ziegler, who had this to say about Fifth Circuit Justice James Ho’s creepy “we can’t ban abortion because pregnant women are too pretty” screed in the mife case out of Texas last week: “You don’t want to read too much into it, because he is known for these sort of bomb-throwing solo things. That’s his hallmark. But he also, just like Justice Thomas, has a track record of shifting the Overton Window, because what ends up happening is that people will read Judge Ho’s opinion and think, ‘Wow, that’s pretty extreme.’ Then whatever the rest of the court has done, which can also be pretty extreme, comes across as much more normal and moderate by comparison.”

  • Here’s Rewire’s Jessica Mason Pieklo on why there’s no such thing as a “moderate” abortion ban.

  • Here’s Slate’s Christina Cauterucci on the (growing, this stuff isn’t particularly new) tin-foil-hatifaction of anti-abortion politics.

The Tweets/Toks/Grams

The Fuck Are We Supposed to Do About It?

Goodnight and good dunk — Here’s an interesting connection between the insurrection conspirators and abortion politics/legal wrangling from health policy expert Sara Manns:

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.