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Lubbock County, Texas, joins a group of other rural Texas counties that have voted to ban women from using their roads to seek abortions.
This comes after six cities and counties in Texas have passed abortion-related bans, out of nine that have considered them. However, this ordinance makes Lubbock the biggest jurisdiction yet to pass restrictions on abortion-related transportation.
During Monday’s meeting, the Lubbock County Commissioners Court passed an ordinance banning abortion, abortion-inducing drugs and travel for abortion in the unincorporated areas of Lubbock County, declaring Lubbock County a “Sanctuary County for the Unborn.”
The ordinance is part of a continued strategy by conservative activists to further restrict abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade as the ordinances are meant to bolster Texas’ existing abortion ban, which allows private citizens to sue anyone who provides or “aids or abets” an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy.
The ordinance, which was introduced to the court last Wednesday, was passed by a vote of 3-0 with commissioners Terence Kovar, Jason Corley and Jordan Rackler, all Republicans, voting to pass the legislation while County Judge Curtis Parrish, Republican, and Commissioner Gilbert Flores, Democrat, abstained from the vote.
Unfortunately, the legal precedent that protected a woman’s right to get an abortion was overturned by the SCOTUS and now we’ve got a complete mish-mash of state and local laws being created to test the boundaries of what they can do.
It’s almost like using precedents instead of just writing the fucking laws unambiguously is an inherently broken concept.
I would say the 14th Amendment is pretty unambiguous on abortion, just as the Commerce Clause is 100% unambiguous on the unconstitutionality of these travel laws. The problem is that it’s not specific, which is the opening used by this adversarial SCOTUS.
Even if you had 100 pages listing specifics for a Constitutional Amendment, you’d STILL miss obvious ones. The protection from Cruel and Unusual punishment, for example. It should be more unambiguous by including a list of 100 things the authors considered cruel, 100 things the authors considered unusual, and then a stipulation that they meant “if any of those 200 items is true”. And even then, those Constitutional authors didn’t write “Keelhauling” in the list, so that must be fine!
But summarizing… You can’t have a large over-arcing right that stands the test of time and dishonest lawmakers without it being general and requiring some interpretation. If only we could solve for dishonest SCOTUS justices.
Ultimately, the only check or balance that actually works is the people. No system of laws will protect you from a broken culture. If millions of Americans didn’t support this kind of behaviour then the politicians writing these laws would never have won their elections, but since they do, they’ll find whatever justification they need to to impose their ideology.
Sure, but I’m replying to the person whose opinion is that laws aren’t worded correctly. They’re worded fine. There’s just bad actors involved.
Without bad actors, you don’t need to worry about wording laws more specifically. With bad actors, it doesn’t matter if you have a “Abortions cannot be banned” amendment.
I actually don’t think Dobbs affected this that much. Texas was trying to circumvent Roe before Dobbs, anyway, not using criminal prosecution but by allowing people to be sued in civil court for abortion.
Sure, and they found lots of subtle ways to make abortions inconvenient and in some cases unavailable. But now that they can make them outright illegal, they’re passing laws to criminalize everyone and everything involved.
The ordinance in this Texas case doesn’t make anything criminal, it uses the same civil liability workaround that Texas was using at the state level before Dobbs.