Last week, the Idaho state legislature made headlines and
history when it passed a measure making it a felony to assist young people in
crossing state lines for abortion care. Other states have tried and—so
far—failed to restrict residents from traveling out of state for abortions, but
Idaho may have hit upon a formula for success by targeting young people. The
law’s justification rests on a central contradiction at the heart of
conservative politics: a Satanic Panic–esque, conspiracy-derived frenzy over
the need to protect children, coupled with insidious efforts to use the rule of
law to do the exact opposite. Few anti-abortion bills embody this tension more
fully than Idaho’s, which exploits both the historical disenfranchisement of
young people and the language of conspiracy in a baroque, factually suspect
effort to stop “abortion trafficking.”
The threat of
“abortion trafficking,” like any number of myths propagated by the anti-abortion
movement, is not rooted in reality but rather has been spun up out of a sense
of creeping moral panic, combined with an insincere demonstration of “helping” children—by doing anything but.
Trafficking is a useful valence for what this law will actually criminalize:
the very ordinary impulse to help someone you care about navigate a common
procedure under uncommon circumstances. “Every single person potentially could
end up with a friend, a loved one, who might need abortion care, and that includes people who don’t believe in abortion,” says Sara Ainsworth of If/When/How, a reproductive justice law group that operates a legal helpline for people navigating abortion care amid restrictions. “This idea that everybody around a pregnant person is potentially
committing a crime just by helping them is a very disturbing and unprecedented
trend in U.S. law, and this bill is a perfect exemplar of that.”
With its
loophole of restricting travel by targeting young people, the law sets a
precedent for other states to follow—much like Texas’s notorious Senate Bill 8.
That measure, which encouraged ordinary people to inform on each other for
facilitating abortion care, became a model for similar policies across the
country. But the Idaho law also builds on a long history of limiting young
people’s autonomy, particularly when it comes to health care, and not just
among Republicans. Even before Roe
was overturned, many states enforced parental consent laws, some with support
from Democrats, that required young people to obtain parental consent before
having an abortion. Those who could not involve their parents in the decision
were forced to go before a judge for approval.
In this way,
young people have always been “easy targets” for this misuse of the law, says
Ainsworth, a dynamic that’s also evident in state-level restrictions on
gender-affirming care, which often resemble abortion laws in their mechanisms
and replicability. The rationale and underlying message are also the same: that
these laws ostensibly protect young people from their own decisions. “The ease
with which young people’s rights have been restricted in so many contexts, I
think, makes it likely that people are going to continue to push for these
kinds of restrictions that specifically affect young people,” says Ainsworth.
You can draw
a straight line from pre-Roe parental
consent laws to Idaho’s grim innovation, but it also reveals another pattern in
the ongoing conservative moral panic over sexuality: a conflation of sexual
freedom and coercion that betrays a profound misunderstanding of both. Just as the SESTA/FOSTA laws conflated consensual sex work with trafficking, the Idaho law’s use
of the term “trafficking” shows a deep disconnect with the reality of sex
trafficking, which more often facilitates the need for abortion care, as
opposed to being caused by reproductive freedom.
“There’s no evidence that restricting
young people from abortion care helps stop human trafficking of young people,”
says Ainsworth. “There’s no correlation between the two.” Meanwhile, she noted,
anti-abortion bills rarely consider the needs of survivors in any meaningful
way. In fact, since the reversal of Roe,
it’s become the norm for anti-abortion bills no longer to include exceptions
for victims of sexual assault. “I’m sorry, but you can’t fool us,” Ainsworth says.
“You can’t fool those of us who’ve been in the movement against sexual and domestic
violence for decades that you care at all about survivors and what they need or
don’t need.”
Idaho has
long been a laboratory for policies that provoke constitutionally rooted legal
challenges, and this one is no different. The same week Governor Brad Little signed
the trafficking bill, Planned Parenthood filed suit against the state’s
attorney general’s opinion that providers in Idaho cannot refer patients out of
state for abortion care, and it’s likely the trafficking bill will be the focus
of similar lawsuits. But moral panics can destroy lives even if they don’t
dictate policy, and so can the misinformation they propagate.
Even if
Idaho’s law is challenged, says Ainsworth, the confusion such measures trigger
causes its own kind of damage. “Even when laws are not enforceable, and they
get enjoined, unfortunately, people are still so confused—and rightly so—about
what’s legal and what’s not now that a lot of people don’t access care when
they perfectly well can legally,” she says. “On our helpline we get a ton of
calls from people all over the country, and a lot of times people call and
believe that something that they need is not legal, when in fact it is.”
The confusion
is the point. In his 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard
Hofstadter
wrote of politics as “an arena for angry minds” marked by “heated exaggeration,
suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Hofstadter applied this diagnosis
to “extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater
movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and
passions of a small minority.”
The resonance
with today’s political arena is almost too much to bear. What is “a small
minority” if not the current makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court or the number of
Americans who want to see abortion banned entirely? What is a “conspiratorial
fantasy” if not the idea that sexual freedom and shadowy crime must be one and
the same? At the heart of this dynamic is fear: a fear that maybe young people
do know what’s best for them, a fear of challenging gender norms, a fear of
losing control, a fear of admitting that traditional power structures were
always built on shaky ground.
Here is the truth about abortion: It is common,
and if you are a compassionate or caring person, offering support will be
instinctual when someone you love comes to you with the news that they need
one. Outlawing this kindness won’t help anyone. But it will sow chaos and
isolate vulnerable young people. And for the party of Pizzagate, with its
long-standing commitment to saving children from problems that aren’t real in
the name of fueling moral panics whose consequences are, that’s exactly the
point. Because when the truth is no longer available, the lies are the only
weapons left.