A headline in the New York Times March 7, the day before International Women’s Day, seemed designed to convey that there was no need to be alarmed about the decimation of abortion rights of 6 million women and girls of childbearing age in Texas: “Most Women Denied Abortions by Texas Law Got Them Another Way.” It describes how many women were forced to travel to neighboring states; nearly half of them went to Oklahoma.
Anyone thinking that helping women travel to another state is any answer to anything other than a complete dead end should look at the state of abortion rights in Oklahoma.
In Oklahoma, there are “trigger laws” on the books that go into effect to curtail abortion access as soon as the Supreme Court guts or overturns the constitutional right to an abortion.
The Republican fascist-controlled Oklahoma Senate in early March 2022 approved a Texas-style abortion ban that allows private lawsuits against those who perform abortions.
Another bill would prohibit abortions after 30 days from a woman’s last period, before most women or girls would know they are pregnant. These two bills are expected to pass the full legislature and be signed into law by the governor in short order.
Another proposed bill says that “providers should not be allowed to terminate a woman’s pregnancy ‘based on a claim’ that she intends to kill herself if she cannot get an abortion. That bill also classifies abortion as homicide.” (See New York Times article, “States Aren’t Waiting for the Supreme Court to Tighten Abortion Laws,” March 8, 2022) [Emphasis added.]
Already last October, Oklahoma convicted a Native American woman, Brittney Poolaw of manslaughter after she suffered a miscarriage when she was just 19 years old and about 17 weeks pregnant. A medical examiner cited her alleged drug use as one of several “conditions contributing” to the miscarriage along with congenital abnormality and placental abruption (rupture).
Brittney spent one-and-one-half years in jail awaiting a one-day trial. She was convicted by the jury in three hours and sentenced to four years in prison!
In order to find, investigate and criminally punish women who have abortions or even considered one but then had a miscarriage, Oklahoma currently has another bill in the works that would require anyone seeking an abortion in the state to first call a designated hotline to receive “counseling” from anti-abortion agents. According to Salon.com, there is an important new twist here that looks to be the tip of a national iceberg: The Oklahoma bill also provides for the Oklahoma State Department of Health to assign each abortion-seeker who calls the hotline a "unique identifying number." Abortion providers would be required to obtain and record that number, which would also be registered in a Department of Homeland Security database. Lawyers warn about the danger of the collaboration between the state and the anti-abortion forces in collecting information on women who might seek an abortion: "The potential for privacy violations is profound and the consequences, if not addressed, could be dire—especially if abortion is criminalized and police investigations and state prosecutions become, as expected, common once again.”
This is just one of many such laws now being enacted all over (see accompanying article “Rewards for Rapists’ Families, Jail Sentences for Doctors, Potential Death Sentences for Women: As Possible End to Legal Abortion Looms, States Prepare Extreme And Perverse Punishment”). The headline, framing and tone of this March 7 New York Times article actually disarms people from understanding the gravity of the attack now under way; it distorts what is truly a dystopian reality now clawing its way into being, soon very possibly to be given major backing by the Supreme Court. Whatever the intent, this dovetails with the approach of the Democratic Party, the Times Editorial Board, and the so-called leaders of the so-called pro-choice movement: to soft-pedal the threat and steer opposition into the dead-end channels of voting.
