leguin:

We now have all the exposure of life pre-Roe but none of the paternalistic protections: Women are now seen as fully autonomous moral agents, which means that they will be legally on the hook for endangering the babies they carry, but they will also be punishable as autonomous adults. Women thus remain children for purposes of pregnancy and giving birth, but have become adults for purposes of criminal liability.

It’s easy to lull yourself into the false belief that a reversion to life pre-Roe would simply mean that the reproductive freedom movement needs to redouble efforts to fund and transport persons needing abortions to more hospitable states. That would be awful, we think, but maybe not that catastrophically bad. But as Goldberg warned in 2019, “the past can prove inadequate to understanding the depredations of the present.” We are not in fact moving “backward” to life before Roe. We are more likely moving sideways into a fundamentalist religious regime in which life pre-Roe will come to look like a vastly less terrifying option than a world in which women are subject to revanchist religious claims—claims with no support whatsoever in the Constitution—about the lives they may carry, the unknown crimes they may commit, and the choices they are no longer permitted to make.