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Pro-life activists rallying outside of the Supreme Court  Sarah Silbiger/Getty

Ever since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Republican Party has gotten a crash course in what it feels like to be the dog that caught the car. To the surprise of no one who’s spent the past few decades warning what might happen if the abortion rights protections offered by the 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade perished at the hands of a conservative court, the Dobbs ruling rather swiftly unleashed dystopia across the land and brought a voter backlash with it—so severe that GOP elites, when last we checked in, were contemplating a “rebranding” of the pro-life movement.

That task will become all the more impossible given the persecution this month of a pregnant woman in Texas, which tells you all you need to know about the Republican vision of a post-Roe America.

In late November, Kate Cox learned that her unborn child had a dire genetic disorder called trisomy 18 that typically leads to a stillbirth or, in rare instances, a very short and unhappy life. Making matters worse, Cox had previously delivered two children by C-section, which created potentially life-threatening consequences for her delivery. And so, understandably, she wished to end her pregnancy.

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But Cox lives in Texas, where it is illegal to perform an abortion except in some “narrow exceptions”—to save the life of a pregnant patient or prevent a “substantial impairment of major bodily function.” Her doctor, playing by the new rules of the road and having determined that Cox qualified for such an exception, obtained a ruling from a judge that would have permitted her to have an abortion. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton then went to elaborate lengths to thwart her. Beyond merely getting the Texas Supreme Court to intervene, he sent threatening letters to area hospitals warning of the legal consequences of treating Cox. He also made sure to invoke Texas’s infamous abortion bounty law and sic the Lone Star State’s anti-abortion vigilantes on her and anyone else who might help her obtain the procedure. Cox ended up having to flee the state just to get the care she needed.

It’s worth underscoring some basic facts. Cox was no libertine, seeking to use abortion as a form of birth control in the popular caricature of abortion-seekers that the right likes to promulgate. She has two children and very much wanted a third. Doctors were able to offer her doomed child mercy and keep alive the possibility of her adding to her family at some point in the future. Paxton, however, took the position that the only just outcome would be for her to run the risk of leaving her children without a mother and her spouse without a wife, all for the sake of a warped ideology that’s already failed on its own terms.

The pro-life rebranding is thus proceeding exactly as I predicted it would, with the most extreme elements of the anti-abortion movement driving policy forward and grabbing headlines for the fringe ideas they’re birthing and the militancy by which they carry them to term. 

Texas Senator Ted Cruz is running scared from this story. Meanwhile, among the Republican presidential candidates, who have the most at stake when it comes to putting lipstick on the party’s anti-abortion pig, mealy mouths are the order of the day. As NBC News reported, none of the candidates “were willing to outright say they disagreed with Texas’ decision to deny Kate Cox an abortion, but they also weren’t jumping to defend the Republican politicians in the state.” There never were such sterling examples of courage and conviction. Nikki Haley, who has strained herself trying to locate a middle position on this issue, offered this nonsense: “We have to humanize the situation and deal with it with compassion.”  

What Haley doesn’t grasp is that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Humanity and compassion are qualities that were ever present in the pre-Dobbs status quo. How do we know this? We know this because prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling, whenever people like Kate Cox needed humanity and compassion, they got it from their doctors. Humanity and compassion just ran seamlessly in the background, and these women never ended up in the news, fleeing their states, fearing for their lives, or watching their state’s attorney general try to destroy their family. Humanity and compassion didn’t just vanish by accident—the anti-abortion movement is hunting it to extinction.

I don’t personally believe that Republicans have any deeper thoughts to their extreme hostility to reproductive rights beyond a simple but deeply held belief that women are chattel. But you can judge for yourself. Their talk of humane exceptions to abortion bans is bunkum. Their talk of leaving abortion restrictions to the states: hogwash. Their talk of compromise is a lie. They even lie to themselves about how unpopular their position is. Left to their own devices, they will identify people like Kate Cox—a loving mother who played by the rules—and subject them to stupefying cruelty. And there will always be a next Kate Cox; there already are some next Kate Coxes in the news. The rebranding is well underway.

—Jason Linkins, deputy editor

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