Maryland Fights Back on Abortion

At Slate is a good update on the state-level aftermath of Dobbs, as far as pro-choice states go, with the main focus being on Maryland.

As with practically anything these days, the news is mixed: Blue states are working to ensure "access" to abortions, including for non-residents. I've explained the good and bad of this before in "Free Abortions vs. Abortion Freedom:"

Image by Emma Guliani, via Pexels, license.

[Access] is a word the left does not use in the same way normal people use the word.

Many (if not most) people would regard access to contraceptives in a political context as being free to purchase and use them. But at least since before the ObamaCare debates, the word access has been code for "obtain at someone else's expense," much in the same way Southern planters had "access" to manual labor in antebellum times.

This kind of "access" was wrong then and it is wrong now, even if the form has changed from chattel slavery to forms of government theft and redistribution that everyone is way too comfortable with.

So, to get the bad news out of the way, blue states are, to varying degrees, finding new ways to make people pay for other people's abortions, such as by funding medical training or even providing financial aid outright to women seeking abortions.

The state should protect a woman's right to an abortion. It has no business picking anyone's pockets to pay for anyone's abortion.

The good news is that these states are working to fully legalize abortion and to shield providers from the laws of other states that have wrongly criminalized abortion:

Democratic Gov. Wes Moore recently signed a new law that prohibits Maryland entities from assisting in abortion-related investigations and court proceedings that originate in other states, shielding abortion providers and out-of-state patients from other states' restrictions. Another new law helps protect patients by barring electronic medical records about their reproductive health care from being shared across state lines without consent.

...

And next year, Maryland residents will vote on an amendment that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution, making it much harder for any future Legislature to take them away. A poll from the Baltimore Sun and the University of Baltimore found last year that 71 percent of likely Maryland voters would support such an amendment. [link omitted, bold added]

The shielding measure is one I hope other states adopt given that some states have atempted to extend their tyranny across their borders by such means as criminalizing helping pregnant minors (!) travel to obtain abortions elsewhere.

-- CAV