It was a bill so bad it wasn’t written to ever be enacted. Instead, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson signed Senate Bill 6 with the hopes that it would be overturned and begin a legal battle that could theoretically lead to overturning Roe v. Wade and making abortion illegal in the United States.
You’d think Republicans might be a bit sheepish about protecting the lives of embryos since they’ve shown such apathy toward protecting the lives of actual living people. But 530,000 Americans have died of COVID, and still Republicans are largely indifferent toward masking and other restrictions. On Wednesday, Texas ended its mask mandate despite only having vaccinated 8.5 percent of the state.
But Republicans can’t get abortion off the brain, and now they have a Supreme Court that could make all their most Handmaid’s Tale dreams come true.
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Most of Donald Trump’s “accomplishments” were easily reversed by Joe Biden in the first few days of his administration. After all, executive orders can be overturned with just the stroke of a pen. But what can’t be undone is the terrifying reality that Trump has fundamentally altered the makeup of the Supreme Court, and no amount of executive orders can erase that. During his unbelievably crappy presidency Trump was able to appoint three Supreme Court justices, meaning that a full third of the court was installed by Trump.
Even before installing a third of the Supreme Court, in 2016, Trump promised he would nominate justices who would overturn Roe. "That will happen automatically, in my opinion,” Trump crowed, “because I am putting pro-life justices on the Court." Three justices later, it seems that Trump may get his wish.
Arkansas’ Hutchinson was happy to oblige Trump’s anti-abortion fever dream with Senate Bill 6. “SB6 is in contradiction of binding precedents of the U.S. Supreme Court, but it is the intent of the legislation to set the stage for the Supreme Court overturning current case law,” Hutchinson’s statement explained. That is, this law was made never to be enacted. He even added, “I would have preferred the legislation to include the exceptions for rape and incest, which has been my consistent view, and such exceptions would increase the chances for a review by the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Hutchinson was saying the quiet part out loud—that this wasn’t about preventing women in Arkansas from getting abortions. It was about preventing women in all states from getting abortions by kicking the argument up to the Supreme Court. And it makes sense. It’s not like it’s exactly easy to get an abortion in Arkansas now. As of 2017, 97 percent of all counties in Arkansas had no abortion providers. But this law isn’t about Arkansas. It’s about anti-choice activists newly emboldened by Trump’s court.
SB6 is one of the most restrictive anti-choice piece of legislation ever and it was signed into law on Tuesday. It has no exceptions for rape or for incest. It’s a law that criminalizes abortion, marking it as a felony punishable by a fine up to $100,000 or jail time. And it’s not the only one of these kind of laws. Texas has one too. On Twitter, Texas State Rep. Bryan Slaton announced, “Today, I filed HB 3326 to Abolish Abortion in Texas.” Under HB 3326 abortion would be criminalized, and women receiving or doctors preforming could be charged with homicide, which is (in Texas) punishable by death, the Texas Tribune reported.
Abortion is about abortion, but it’s also never just about abortion. It’s also about controlling what women can and can’t do with their own bodies. Trump’s Republican Party seems more interested in enacting misogyny than saving lives. Of course I would argue that a clump of cells is not a “life.”
A year ago, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Tucker Carlson, “No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”
The idea here was that dying for the Dow might not be such a large ask. While its been a year since Patrick said that, in the interim, 530,000 Americans have died of COVID. Republicans were hesitant to enact restrictions; Patrick himself was saying he wasn’t a “mandate guy.” Now, while those bodies aren’t even cold, Republicans have figured out yet another new way to try to overturn Roe. Republicans like to call themselves the party of life, but with more than a half a million dead, can they really call themselves that?
