Abortion Bans Are Empowering Abusive Men--and Prominent 'Pro-Life' Activists Are Representing Them (trigger warning)

Abortion Bans Are Empowering Abusive Men—and Prominent ‘Pro-Life’ Activists Are Representing Them (trigger warning)
5/8/2024 by Jill Filipovic
Murder is a leading cause of death for pregnant women. The anti-abortion movement wants to hand more power to abusive men anyway.



Anti-abortion activists (including a monk from the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal) are confronted by abortion rights protesters in front of a Planned Parenthood clinic on June 3, 2023, in New York City. (Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images)

This story originally appeared on Jill.substack.com, a newsletter from journalist, lawyer and author Jill Filipovic.

The way abortions bans are designed and written allow for all kinds of horrors: women losing their organs, women bleeding out without help, women losing their lives. But they’re also written to empower abusive men. After all, the very foundation of an abortion ban is an assumption that a woman’s body does not belong to her. Abusive men agree.And so it’s perhaps not a huge surprise that several men have indeed taken advantage of these laws in an effort to control their ex partners. And it’s also not particularly surprising—although it is appalling—that they’ve found support and legal representation from some of the most powerful people in the U.S. anti-abortion movement.

One man in Texas sued his wife’s friends for allegedly helping her to get abortion pills (she was trying to leave him, saying that, duh, he was abusive); Jonathan Mitchell, an anti-abortion lawyer who wrote the Texas abortion bounty law and also represents president Donald Trump, represented him. Another Texas man murdered his girlfriend after she traveled to Colorado for an abortion. And now, a third Texas man found out his ex-girlfriend was planning to travel out of state to end her pregnancy, and he also hired Jonathan Mitchell to help stop her. Mitchell has splashed her name all over public court filings, and even though she has not actually broken the law—since traveling out of state for an abortion is perfectly legal—he’s seeking to depose her and any of her “accomplices” in what can only be described as a blatant campaign of harassment and abuse, on behalf of an nauseatingly controlling man.



. . . .

In the United States, it is legal to cross state lines for medical care, including abortion. But the anti-abortion movement wants this long-standing legal allowance to end. The Texas woman who planned to leave the state for an abortion no more broke the law than a person who lives in New Jersey but goes to the doctor in New York. Abortion opponents, though, want to make abortion a special category—and by extension, want to make pregnant women a subcategory of citizen who are, unlike everyone else, disallowed from seeking healthcare in places where it is perfectly legal.

. . . .



The ideology that underlies this abuse is both insidious and common—and it underlies the anti-abortion movement more broadly. The idea seems to be that, by impregnating a woman, a man has laid claim to her body, and has ownership over it. Should she remove the pregnancy, she hasn’t just made a choice that involves her and a fetus or embryo, but she has violated his rights—his right to have her body used for the end he desires. This is the logic of the anti-abortion movement, of every rapist everywhere, of every abusive man. And so it’s no wonder that the anti-abortion movement is going to legal bat for these abusers, as they also write abortion laws without rape exceptions and use the law not to protect children, but to punish women.

*********It’s not about protecting life. It’s just about abusive misogyny. And these cases could not make that truth more clear.*********

https://msmagazine.com/2024/05/15/meet-the-anti-feminist-womens-group-leveraging-their-independence-to-convince-americans-to-vote-republican/