I released today's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down to gen pop just because the situation pissed me off. We hear all the time how America is sliding into fascism and its alleged watchdogs in the press are either oblivious or required by the terms of their contracts to pretend to be. But the end of Roe v Wade had sped things up perceptibly (at least to non-prestige-media types) .
By now you've probably heard about the poor 10-year-old who got raped and had to leave Ohio to get an abortion because Ohio's crackpot post-Roe law suggests that removing child-rape-fetuses more than six weeks after the rape would put the doctor in prison. All the worst people on the right (and in America, pretty much), from the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal to wingnut tradcaths, were glib and dismissive; where are the court and medical documents? Are we supposed to just take the word of the doctor who says she treated her? Ho ho ho, fake news etc.
When the news was confirmed, none of these guys was apologetic, and many raced to attack liberals for being right but in a bad way because abortion is bad and anything that makes it look good is bad. Matt Vespa at TownHall:
We later learned that an illegal alien was the girl’s rapist—a Guatemalan national with an ICE detainer. The judge rejected the motion to remand the defendant without bail at the arraignment. And how do liberals react to this horrific story? By pouncing on conservatives for doubting it. That’s a weird flex. They’re cheering that this girl got raped and impregnated by an illegal alien. First, it exposes for the 1,000th time that Biden’s border control agenda remains a pile of garbage. This attack wouldn’t have happened if liberals understood the basic concepts of law and order...
You may see now why I don't industriously collect dumb takes from rightbloggers like Vespa the way I used to: It got depressing to see how they never get less dumb but do manage to get even more repulsive.
Speaking of repulsive, the wingnut AG in Indiana, to which state the poor kid fled for care, is threatening to prosecute the doctor she fled to.
There are several good pieces on this mess -- Judd Legum's roundup at Popular Information, for example, and Amanda Marcotte's at Salon -- so I'll only add this: Conservatives are aware that the game is all up as far as Consent of the Governed is concerned; even their usual lie diffusers can't effectively spin how people feel about the Dobbs decision. So they're just rushing to get as far with it as they can before somebody does something about it, in hopes that gerrymandering and voter suppression will gain them enough power to put in a national ban. Laws like Ohio's are ambiguous, to the extent they are, not because they're rushed, but because they're designed to terrorize health care providers so badly that even if they've got a raped child under their care they'll think twice about giving her an abortion.
And it's the providers they have to scare now, because the strategy now is of course we don't want to hurt the precious mommies! At this stage they seek to remove any such opportunity to avail this disappearing right as still exists. But they'll go further. Today a Democratic Senator rose to push a bill supporting the right to cross state lines to get an abortion, and Republicans blocked it. When they've got the girls penned in their states, it will (one hopes) be slightly clearer to even the sleepwalkers, and when they're locking individual women down because they present a breeder flight risk, it'll be clearer still. But for many of us, it's obvious right this very minute and demands immediate action.
UPDATE. By the way --
National Right to Life official: 10-year-old should have had baby
...Jim Bopp, an Indiana lawyer who authored the model legislation in advance of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, told POLITICO on Thursday that his law only provides exceptions when the pregnant person’s life is in danger.
“She would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child,” Bopp said in a phone interview on Thursday.
Wake. The. Hell. Up.
UPDATE 2. Here's WSJ's bullshit follow-up:
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