Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day Substack:
Conservatives have spent a lot of time, energy and money on the lie that abortion bans won’t send women to prison. It’s a crucial strategy: Voters already overwhelmingly oppose abortion bans, and the last thing Republicans need is for already-worked-up Americans to start thinking about the women they love behind bars.
Despite how obvious the deception is—women were being arrested before Roe was even overturned, and when you make something a crime, people tend to be criminalized—anti-abortion lawmakers and activists continually insist that they will never, ever prosecute women.
Thanks to a slip-up by the Alabama’s Attorney General’s office, however, we now know exactly how Republicans plan to get around those false promises.
For years, politicians and major anti-abortion groups have dismissed feminist warnings about women being prosecuted as ‘myths’ and misinformation. And since Roe was overturned, those same people have pointed to abortion bans themselves as ‘proof’—noting how many contain clauses stating that women are not to be arrested.
Indeed, that language does exist. In Alabama, for example, the Human Life Protection Act explicitly says, “this bill would provide that a woman who receives an abortion will not be held criminally culpable or civilly liable for receiving the abortion.” And when Roe was overturned, Alabama’s Attorney General Steve Marshall went on television to assure voters that the law “is not a criminal offense against the mother.”
But conservatives wouldn’t be conservatives if they weren’t thinking about new and innovative ways to punish women, and Alabama Republicans were never going to let a little thing like the law they wrote stand in the way of putting women in jail.
In the worst wink-wink-nudge-nudge statement I’ve seen in a long time, the Alabama AG’s office told a conservative reporter that just because the abortion ban won’t let them arrest women, it doesn’t mean that the state can’t use other laws to put women behind bars: A spokesperson for Marshall told 1819 News this weekend that even though the Human Life Protection Act exempts women from being prosecuted, it “does not provide an across-the-board exemption from all criminal laws, including the chemical-endangerment law—which the Alabama Supreme Court has affirmed and reaffirmed protects unborn children.”
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And while they don’t want voters to realize just how cruel they are—hence the continued insistence that women will never be jailed for abortion—Republicans’ appetite for abuse will always win out.
The anti-abortion extremist claim that women won’t be imprisoned due to a state’s laws on banning abortion is a whole load of bullpucky, as there have been several instances in the wake of the Dobbs ruling (and even before then) that women have been arrested for obtaining an abortion.