I was all set to publish a normal daily report today when I came across two bits of news: Idaho Republicans are back in federal court fighting for the right to deny women life-saving abortions, and South Carolina lawmakers have reintroduced legislation to make abortion punishable by the death penalty. Considering this comes at the same time that politicians are disbanding or tampering with maternal mortality committees in order to cover up the fact that their bans kill women, it seemed like the right moment to take a step back and acknowledge how absolutely fucking crazy this is.
They’re killing us, and we’re meant to behave as if it’s business as usual.
Anti-abortion politicians and activists have demonstrated again and again that they believe women’s lives are expendable—worthless, really, if not for our reproductive ability. Yet we’re expected to sit here and react to that violence as if it’s simply politics. As if it’s perfectly fine that our suffering and deaths are being debated in statehouses and courtrooms as if we’re not human beings, but thought exercises and legal arguments.
That’s the hardest thing about doing this work. As difficult as it is to comb through the onslaught of awful abortion rights news every day, the real horror is the normalization.
Because truly, how is it possible that there isn’t one single headline or news article about the South Carolina bill that could punish abortion patients with the death penalty? Is that how little our lives rate?
It’s not as if reporters didn’t know the legislation was coming; Republicans have introduced this bill before. In fact, last year two dozen lawmakers co-sponsored the ‘Equal Protection Act’—a bill that doesn’t only classify abortion as a homicide, but defines personhood as beginning at fertilization.
That means conservatives who believe emergency contraception and IUDs stop the implantation of a fertilized egg could argue that these common forms of birth control are actually abortions. In other words, birth control could be punishable by the death penalty. Still, not a peep from mainstream media outlets. As if such legislation should just be expected.
Similarly, the legal fight over emergency abortions only warranted three headlines today, from CNN, the Associated Press and Newsweek. We’re talking about a case that could determine whether states can legally deny women life-saving abortions in hospital emergency rooms. That’s a front-page story—an issue that deserves coverage in every publication across the country. Instead, we got a few obligatory paragraphs in a handful of outlets.
For those who need a reminder, this case revolves around the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA)—a federal law that requires hospitals to provide life-saving emergency care, including abortions. In 2022, the Biden administration sued Idaho, arguing that the state’s abortion ban prevents doctors from following EMTALA.
By the time the suit reached the Supreme Court, we heard about doctors having to airlift women out of Idaho for emergency care, and a medical system so broken that OBGYNs were advising pregnant patients to get extra life insurance. Still, Idaho Republicans defended the law and pooh-poohed concerns about patients’ lives. At one point American women were put in the surreal position of watching the nation’s highest court debate just how many organs are acceptable for them to lose before the state should be required to provide an abortion.
In the end, the Supreme Court didn’t issue a ruling on the merits but kicked the case back to a lower court. That’s where it is now, with the Ninth Circuit—where we’ll have to listen to lawyers debate our lives like bullet points all over again.
And while I can’t think of anything more important than reminding us all that this is not normal, my worry is that with every passing day that statement becomes less true.
After all, over the last few months I’ve outlined how conservatives are working toward doing away with ‘exceptions’ for women’s lives, how anti-abortion groups are strategically shirking blame for women’s deaths, and how Republicans are enacting policies to obscure those deaths altogether. Their strategy is 90% inundation; repeating lies again and again until those of us telling the truth start to seem like the outliers.
It reminds me of an interview I read once with an anti-abortion activist who helps draft extreme bills for state legislators, much like the one in South Carolina. A reporter asked him why he kept reintroducing extreme bills—why use all of that time and energy working on legislation so radical he knew they would never make it to a vote? This activist answered easily: Every time his bills are reintroduced, he said, voters in the state get that much more used to seeing them and get less outraged over time.
Reintroduced again and again, the language and extremism of his bills stayed the same. But because voters heard about them over and over, something once shocking eventually turned into background noise.
That’s exactly what the anti-abortion movement is doing across the country. The more maternal mortality committees they disband, the less surprised we become. The more absurd and misogynist comments they make, the quicker we roll our eyes and move on.
What are we left with? Republicans able to argue—publicly and on paper!—for the right to deny women life-saving abortions without fear of massive backlash. Legislators willing to sign their name to bills that would punish abortion patients with the death penalty, hopeful that maybe this time the public will be inured enough to look the other way.
I’ve written before about the anti-abortion movement shattering the Overton Window—my fear now is that we no longer even have a fucking window.
That’s not to say it’s too late; I know it’s not. Their extremism is so grotesque, so wildly out of step with what Americans actually believe, that it wouldn’t take long to reignite outrage and focus. But it requires all of us to be relentless and unapologetic.
We need to say it constantly and consistently, online and off: This is as bad as it seems. They are as unhinged and cruel as they seem. And no amount of calling themselves ‘pro-life’—or trying to normalize this horror—will ever hide the truth. They’re killing us, and we won’t let America forget it.
Why say that life saving abortions are being denied. It is life saving medical care period. that is being denied.
Repeating extreme messages until they turn into background noise appears to be a tactic frequently used far and wide by all sorts of right-wingers. I believe Steve Bannon called it “flooding the zone with shit,” and oh boy did that zone turn into a Superfund site or what. The man may be the walking human equivalent of a car crash between a garbage truck and a hearse, but he does seem to have quite the talent for propagating propaganda!
Ugh.