In the year after the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled the constitutional right to abortion in June 2022, more than 200 pregnant women faced criminal charges for conduct associated with their pregnancy, pregnancy loss or birth, according to a new report.
The report was produced by Pregnancy Justice, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of pregnant people, including the right to abortion. Researchers in multiple states documented 210 cases of women being charged for pregnancy-related conduct in 12 states from June 24, 2022, to June 23, 2023, the first year after the U.S. Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, throwing the issue to the states.
The majority of charges alleged substance use during pregnancy; in two-thirds of cases, it was the only allegation made against the defendant. Six states — Alabama, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas — accounted for the majority of cases documented by researchers.
While I’m not sure the idea is practical, I would be curious to see it play out.
What starts as a few cases of women disappearing would become a pattern. Allegations of abduction would be leveled as pretense to seek, arrest and prosecute all that help them leave. Meanwhile, by the power of the Internet, it would be quickly found out where these women fled to. An underground counter-stalking network would emerge, seeking to steal back the women. Eventually, another civil war might break out, this time over women’s right to control their own fate.
History might not repeat, but it may well rhyme.
Just a couple things…
Of course a modern underground rail road would function different than the one 300 years ago.
Legal adults don’t need to notify anyone that they are moving. Ya is a shitty thing to do but a simple letter or phone call after is fine for loved ones. Pro birthers have no idea how to actually stop abortions that doesn’t involve progressive actions like comprehensive sex education, cheap and free contraception, paternity leave, raising the standards of living, etc… Because their goals are to subject women and to ensure that there’s always a poor, unhealthy, uneducated, and subservient population. Outside of having check points in and out of the state and knowing every women’s current pregnancy status it’s impossible.
Multiple normal states have already passed laws that protect women from any persecution for laws restricting their bodily freedoms. Mine included. And Ya they can try to take the women back but theres no way to tell why a woman left. It’s way easier to move a willing person over someone who is surrounded by a supportive community. I’d imagine this organization would help LGBTQ+ people escape as well.
Everyone is under surveillance all the time these days. There would have to be some very secure way for women to contact any organization trying to help without raising any flags that could be used to tip off the police. This would be a real challenge.
Remember that you need to use it for normal browsing as well, if you only use it for “shady” stuff correlation attacks are easier.
You also need to read up on cookies and fingerprinting.
Yes, OpSec is more or less important depending on your threat model.
they would have to make real phone calls! *gasp.
International phone calls are under surveillance and the data collected includes domestic calls. Agencies have been abusing this to monitor domestic calls since at least the 2000s.
Article from 2013: https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/surveillance-timeline
More recent: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/05/fbi-misused-foreign-surveillance-law-280k-times-to-snoop-on-people-in-the-us/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/04/us-senate-and-biden-administration-shamefully-renew-and-expand-fisa-section-702-0?language=en
Certainly, but I suspect there will be parallels. I consider it important to understand the past and apply that knowledge to the present to predict the future.
Of course not. But you know as well as I do how important personal rights (particularly women’s) are to the party of Law and Order. If women started fleeing, they’d find some line of arguing why this couldn’t possibly be them exercising their human rights.
My worry is that the other states (or rather the unhinged citizens thereof that create such legislation that would warrant saving women from them) may escalate this ideological conflict. We’ve seen the hateful incitement of violence happen already. It’s not legal to storm Congress either.
If I don’t respect your laws, believe that they’re “wrong” anyways and disobeying them is right and just, and think that I can get away with it, what’s to stop me?
Obviously evil librul indoctrination! The same people believing that the female body “has a way of shutting that down” and that a woman’s proper place is in the kitchen probably don’t respect the woman’s actual motives, if they consider it an evil plot. As you rightly pointed out:
If they don’t believe on a woman’s right to self-determination, none of the good and legal reasons women might want to determine their own lives will matter to them.
And that is exactly what the opposition would need to be: a stronghold, united in the purpose of being a safe haven for all the oppressed.
All these parallels to slavery aren’t an accident. Like the Railroad mentioned in the premise, I worry that an effort to liberate women from the stranglehold of a society trying to subjugate them, yet depending on them, would spark a similar counter-effort to recapture them. In the hypothetical that such a modern Railroad would be created, this Railroad and all its supporters would similarly need to be prepared for a violent response. I wish freedom could triumph peacefully, but history suggests poor precedents for that.
That’s not an attempt to dissuade, mind you. I’m all for it. Liberate the enslaved and oppressed from their oppressors and have a plan to defend them.