Column: Crackdown on abortion reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Act

[u/shallah]

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/04/02/column-abortion-providers-texas-enforcement-chapman/

[u/Obversa]

Article transcript:

In the decades before the U.S. Civil War, Americans were deeply divided over slavery. When enslaved people fled north to escape from bondage, Southern owners demanded help in recapturing their property. Often, they didn't get it, which led to a federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 requiring the return of runaways, with criminal penalties for anyone providing aid to them.

Today, the nation exhibits a similar divide around a basic issue: the right of women to control their bodies through access to abortion. Again, states that stoutly deny human freedom — often former slave states, by the way — are at odds with states that uphold it. It's by no means clear who will prevail in the end.

After the Supreme Court's 2022 decision discarding the constitutional right to abortion, Louisiana was among the first states to ban nearly all abortions. Some residents get around the law by traveling to other states where the procedure remains legal. Some turn to out-of-state providers for pills to end their pregnancies. (Nationally, medication abortions now account for 63% of terminations.)

Yet in January 2025, Dr. Margaret Carpenter of New Paltz, New York, was indicted in West Baton Rouge for mailing abortion pills to a pregnant teenager. When the governor of Louisiana demanded that the doctor be arrested and transported to face charges, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul replied, "I will not be signing an extradition order that came from the governor of Louisiana, not now, not ever."

The parallels to the slavery fight are hard to miss. Anti-slavery tracts were banned from the U.S. mail in slave states, and bounties were offered for the capture of fugitives. Northern states acted to frustrate the catchers of enslaved people by guaranteeing jury trials for the runaways, and barring police cooperation in catching them.

Hochul's state is one of eight that have "shield laws" barring cooperation with civil or criminal efforts to punish abortion providers who provide abortion pills by mail to patients in other states. Yet states that want to restrict this freedom have other methods of doing so.

In February 2025, a federal judge ordered the same New York physician to stop sending abortion pills to patients in Texas and imposed a $100,000 fine. New York, however, is unlikely to help the judge enforce his decree. Prohibitionist states are bound to take these fights to the Supreme Court — the same one that repealed the right to abortion at the federal level, claiming it was an issue of "states' rights".

We are now presented with the specter of physicians being targeted by red-state prosecutors hell-bent on forcing their anti-abortion agenda on the whole country. Carpenter may not have to worry about being extradited by Hochul, but she has other worries. The demand from Louisiana means she would put herself at risk by traveling to any of the states that lack a shield law. She is effectively under house arrest, the house being New York state.

She's not the only person in peril for helping women with unwanted pregnancies. Idaho and Tennessee have passed laws making it illegal to help a minor travel out of state to get an abortion without their parents' knowledge and consent. Idaho's attorney general said medical providers may not even refer a patient to an out-of-state clinic. A handful of Texas counties have passed laws making it illegal to use their roads — their roads! — to transport someone to another state to end a pregnancy.

Texas Republicans, who firmly believe that overboard is the only way to go, have come up with another way to shackle those seeking abortions. A bill before the legislature would let private citizens sue organizations for mailing abortion pills to Texans — and make it a crime for anyone to help pay for someone's out-of-state abortion.

Blue states now serve as a haven to those who want abortions. Numerous organizations help cover the medical and travel expenses of patients who need a procedure that is illegal back home. In 2023, more than 37,000 women and girls traveled to Illinois for abortions.

The goal of all these efforts is to bolt every door through which such women and girls could find a way to end their pregnancies. The abortion-rights opponents resent the idea that citizens of other states could extend a hand to those unfortunate souls — much as champions of slavery demanded that Northern states silence abolitionists and return fugitives.

In all these efforts, the health, autonomy and freedom of women and girls count for nothing. Kaitlyn Kash was forced to travel from Austin, Texas to Kansas to end a pregnancy after learning that her fetus had severe abnormalities. Surveying the deliberations of her elected representatives last week, she said sadly: "I honestly didn't think Texas law could get much crueler."

But it can, and Texas is not alone.

[u/dixiehellcat]

DUH. I said this over a year ago.

(eta, not duh to you OP, duh to the writer of that piece. Better late than never, I guess. sigh.)

[u/lotusflower_3]

Kaitlyn voted for dumpie. I have trouble feeling for any magat.

[u/spiked_macaroon]

Jane Crow Laws

[u/Individual_Jaguar804]

Exactly.

[u/Onsllaughtt → u/Individual_Jaguar804]

You Americans deserve this lmao.