I think a lot of people have no idea what enforcement of abortion laws is going to look like between modern surveillance technology and the War on Drugs mindset. It’s the ideal American form of reactionary governance from time immemorial: a state that is incredibly intrusive in day-to-day life while providing few benefits.

Scott Lemieux, writing for Lawyers, Guns, and Money

This is a key point that seems to be largely unspoken in the wider media complex. Take a state like Texas and then remove Roe. Laws are already in place to ban all abortions. But I think everyone stops here and talks about how bad that would be for people with no resources to, say, fly to Massachusetts for an abortion.

The folks in charge of Texas, of course, have already thought of this. Their vigilante-based law already provides rewards for turning in your neighbor or co-worker who sneaks off to get an abortion. But why stop there? Medical abortion is safe and available. So Texas (and the other red states) will need to monitor the mail, internet searches, connections to specific websites where one might do a consult online; all of it. Same goes for crossing the border and getting the pills in Mexico; it’s all but guaranteed they’re going to clamp down harder on mifepristone than meth. I’d expect that, before too long, women traveling for any reason will begin to face enhanced questioning and scrutiny if they’re going someplace suspicious. Did you get a permission for travel form signed by your husband, Ma’am? Could we see some proof of your meeting registration in Boston? Why are you trying to drive out of Texas? We’re going to need to draw a little blood…

As if that’s not enough, then we get to the “just like an abortion” issue. That’s how these folks now in charge of our legal system define many contraceptives. Turns out that IUDs, Plan B, the regular old pill, and many other common forms of contraception are, in fact, considered abortifacients by the far right who now control the Supreme Court and govern red states across the land. If we’re lucky, married couples will still be able to access condoms in the red states of the near future, though probably not for long the way we’re currently going.

Lastly, can we file the “lets get together and maintain some “popularist” level of regulated access to abortion legislatively” nonsense in the “Tip and Ronnie working into the evenings to hammer out sensible compromises” Drawer of Centrist Fantasies? You could pass such a bill by a collective 535-0 tomorrow and within about six hours it would be struck down by a Trump judge and promptly 5-4’d by the Supreme Court; they might not even bother to hear it. There will be no plausible way (short of amending the Constitution, and I don’t consider that approach plausible) to pass any legislation guaranteeing a right to abortion in this country that will survive judicial “review.” These people don’t give a fuck and will contort their legislative “reasoning” into whatever non-Euclidean shape that is required to back-solve for “strike this down.” Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying attention and should not be paid attention to.