Yup, boarder towns in red states are going to start stopping women as they travel through their towns to make sure they aren’t pregnant.
Yup, boarder towns in red states are going to start stopping women as they travel through their towns to make sure they aren’t pregnant.
Unfortunately, there are already reports of police stopping women in cars on the highway to check if the women are pregnant and off to another state. The notion that a locality or state has the right to violate your privacy in order to veto your travel if it’s for purposes they don’t like seems impossible to square with the 4th Amendment or the Commerce Clause, but I guess that’s not stopping these people
How could a police officer legally determine if a woman in a car is going to get an abortion or is just travelling out of state? Women may not be showing when they get an abortion and from a vantage point outside of a car you can’t really tell if a woman is pregnant anyway. Plus they could just be pregnant and driving somewhere out of state. It seems like unreasonable search to stop every woman at the boarder and question them about where they are going. And on top of that why would a woman confess to going to get an abortion when stopped? Unless they had panflets and a confirmation printed out in plain view in the car it would be impossible to prove intent once a police officer pulls someone over. If they enforce this law I think there will be a lot of lawsuits about unreasonable and illegal stops by the police, and I think the women suing will win.
All good points. Unfortunately, this probably means they’ll stick to doing the unreasonable and illegal stops on people they think won’t be able to afford to bring lawsuits.
Also, questions of ‘is this actually legal?’ have a fine way of becoming moot when the it’s cops doing the lawbreaking and who polices the police, right? Especially in states with long history of good-old-boys justice networks
You’re correct, going to see a lot more old Civics and Malibus stopped for this, won’t often see a new Lexus or Acura being pulled over for a womb check.
Interesting point, in America the poor and minorities are always treated different. I think any lawyer who wanted to put together a big lawsuit could probably work probono for some but that’d be no guarantee.
You fail to understand what these laws are actually ment to do. These laws are to give the illusion of righteousness, but all they want to do is control women. They see women as objects and not human. A woman traveling alone, not on their watch. They give two shits about the baby they just want a brood sow to keep pumping out poor laborers and to be shackled to a man for ever.
I though about it some more and the lawmakers probably don’t even care about actually arresting people. The threat could be enough to deter some people. And on top of that if they make someone late to or miss an appointment, in the lawmakers mind they just “saved a life”. (I personally believe that life occurs at fetal viability and that abortions should be allowed before that point, and after that point should the mother’s health come into jeopardy.)
They shoot them and check the autopsy. Merica.
I have not heard of this but I imagine they just look for woman drivers by the border, pull them over for something fake, then ask them if they are trying to get an abortion, and if they said yes then the cop can collect the bounty.
It’s the “something fake” that is illegal and is the crux of the issue with the law. It’s almost unenforceable legally. If they pull over every woman and question them that would be blatantly discriminatory based on gender. If they pull over every person it would be a huge waste of time and resources. There is no way to determine if a woman is pregnant when she is seated in a moving car, and unless the doctors office she is going to is in sight of the boarder there is no way to legally determine where she is going.