New from Crooked Media: Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams

Stacey Abrams (0:09)

Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media. I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

Last week, three red states sued three blue states in the US Supreme Court. Louisiana, Alabama, and Arkansas want the court to strike down the Abortion Shield Laws in California, Massachusetts, and New York. Now, these are the laws that protect doctors who prescribe abortion pills by telehealth to patients in states that have banned abortion. On that same day, the same three attorneys general filed a second lawsuit in federal court in Louisiana against 30 individual people and organizations. We're talking doctors, pharmacists, a nonprofit in Massachusetts. Their complaint calls Shield Laws, quote, one of the most serious interstate aggressions in our nation's history. But I want you to notice who the bad guy is in that accusation. You see, they don't blame the deadly ban on health care that forces a woman to carry a pregnancy against her will and likely sometimes against her doctor's better judgment. It's a doctor in Boston who answers her plea when she asked for help, who's the culprit. The legal scholar, Mary Ziegler, says that this is the first time a state or a group of states has sued other states to challenge shield laws, because the draconian abortion bans are not working as quickly as they'd hoped, and women continue, unfortunately, to risk their lives to find options.

Medication abortion now accounts for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in this country, and telehealth makes up about 30 percent. By late last year, out-of-state providers were mailing roughly 1,000 packages of abortion medication a month into Louisiana alone. One Massachusetts group, The MAP, reportedly fills more than 6,000 orders a month, and 95 percent of them go to states with severe restrictions. So the people who wrote these bans have a problem. Women in their states keep making their own medical decisions. So, rather than accept a woman's right to choose, these politicians masquerading as bounty hunters have decided to reach across state lines and drag the rest of the country into enforcing horrific laws that have a body count.

The argument to strip women of their bodily autonomy rests on the full faith and credit clause, the part of the Constitution that says states have to respect each other's public acts and court judgments. Look, I went to law school. I know how this clause works. It's why a divorce in Mississippi holds up in Ohio. However, it has never meant that one state has to enforce another state's criminal laws on its own soil. The Supreme Court said so in 1892 in Huntington v. Attrill, which is why a law in Kentucky that, I'm being serious here, that forbids a woman from marrying the same man more than three times, is not enforceable at a Vegas wedding chapel in Nevada.

Nevertheless, Louisiana is asking the court to throw out 130 years of that principle so that Louisiana's criminal code can follow a doctor into New York.

This attack didn't start last Wednesday. Louisiana has already indicted a New York doctor and issued a warrant for another California doctor. Texas won a $100,000 civil judgment against that same New York doctor, and a county clerk in New York has refused twice to enforce it. The governors of New York and California have refused to extradite, and when these efforts stalled, the attorneys general went to the one place left where they think they can win, a compromised Supreme Court where Justice Samuel Alito has already called shield laws, quote, a scheme to undermine Dobbs.

Authoritarians always have multiple paths to their goals, and we must understand that the concentrated assault on abortion rights is part of this larger overthrow of American democracy, not separate from it, not distinct, the same. Because democracy is about power, and authoritarians want all of it. So when they lose fights at the federal level, they will always, always, always try to take it state by state. And we've seen this fight before. In the 1840s and 1850s, northern states passed what they called personal liberty laws to protect free black people and people who had escaped slavery from being seized and taken back south. Southern states called those laws an assault on their sovereignty. In 1842, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, the US. Supreme Court struck down Pennsylvania's law because even then, conservatives on the US. Supreme Court didn't believe in the humanity of all who lived within America's domain.

They were the protectors of a whitewashed idea of citizenship, and pesky issues like state sovereignty weren't going to stand in their way. In 1850, Congress then passed the Fugitive Slave Act and made northern officials complicit in the capture of black people with the audacity to move freely about the country. When South Carolina left the Union, its Declaration of Secession named the North's refusal to enforce those laws as one of their key reasons. Now, I recently got chastised by conservatives for calling out the South's history of soft or competitive authoritarianism, the practice of using democratic institutions like legislatures or the courts to strip freedoms and call it law. The current actors learned from more than two centuries of slavery and Jim Crow to use states as their weapon of choice. What the South learned during the time of enslavement, three attorneys general are now applying to reproductive health. One set of states decides it owns a category of people's bodies and then demands that the rest of the country help enforce that ownership. And the courts have been the tool every single time. This egregious set of lawsuits represent more than a legal dispute. Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lukan Wei, who've studied regimes around the world, have warned that America is sliding towards what they call competitive authoritarianism and I would argue we've already made it. Elections still happen, courts still sit, newspapers still publish, but the people in power use the machinery of the state to tilt every field in their direction so the contest is never fair. You don't need to control an election if you can make sure the other side can't win. And you don't need a national abortion ban if you can get the US. Supreme Court to export Louisiana's law and tell Kansas it has to follow. Now, look at what's happening alongside this lawsuit because it's not an isolated move. This administration has been running a campaign it calls quote pro-family and I'm using air quotes quite sarcastically. The putative heir to this repressive regime, JD. Vance, said on the National Mall quote, I want more babies in the United States. And since then, in April, the administration rewrote Title 10, the 1970 program that gives birth control to more than 2.8 million low income people. Its new priorities are infertility services, cycle tracking, and what officials call avoiding unnecessary medicalization. In a birth control program, that translates into meaningless birth control. In May, HHS launched Moms.gov, a federal website that steers pregnant women towards crisis pregnancy centers, which are often anti-abortion operations dressed up as legitimate clinics. In July, it canceled teen pregnancy prevention grants and rewrote the rules so programs emphasize abstinence, and in the government's words, affirms marriage and parenthood as meaningful. Then last year's tax and spending law cut planned parenthood out of Medicaid, while simultaneously slashing Medicaid, the program that pays for about four in 10 births in this country.