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It almost seems sometimes like we are living in some dystopian science fiction world where women are more like breeding stock than human. Last week came the announcement that the anti-abortion group has a new weapon in their forced birth artillery. Poland announced that they can now detect whether a woman has taken any miscarriage drugs (Mifepristone and mifeprostol) if said woman has had a miscarriage.

The website Jezebel reported on this recently. The mind boggles at what this means for women. While some people may think that living in a “blue“ state may shield them from such consequences, remember that only a few votes often separates an abortion friendly state from an abortion repressive state.

News of these drug tests could mean even more people criminalized by the healthcare system, especially without the protections of Roe v. Wade. Hospitals in the U.S. routinely test pregnant women for drugs without their consent, sometimes taking away their newborns and other children as a result. With tests for mifepristone and misoprostol, cops wouldn’t even need to, say, subpoena Meta for someone’s Facebook messages before arresting them for an alleged abortion.

When abortion is banned, every miscarriage and stillbirth becomes a potential crime scene, and Poland is taking its already dystopian anti-abortion surveillance state to the next level. Poland created a national pregnancy registry in June 2022 and recently had police search the sewers for a fetus to try and prove a woman lied about having a miscarriage. In that case, the police collected her underwear, scissors she used to cut the umbilical cord, and blood from her floor for the investigation. They even wanted to funnel the contents of her home’s septic tank, but cleaners refused. Police claimed the woman lost her pregnancy “as a result of criminal actions” and prosecutors opened proceedings against her, only to drop them months later.

It is not too much of a leap to envision a society that will be tracking women’s periods and as noted above monitoring sewer pipes for evidence of an aborted pregnancy. As we let our imagination fill out the scenario we can imagine women being arrested and jailed and charged with murder. We can also easily imagine anyone who aided in procuring the above mentioned drugs would be charged as an accessory to murder.

Pregnancy is not a simple process. Things go wrong and ending a pregnancy to save the life of the mother is not rare. As we have already seen in many states women have died or nearly died and forced to endure horrible pain and mental stress due to inflexible laws that have little to do with reality. MAGA Republicans want to nationalize such laws.

In an interesting backlash against these policies, Politico reporter Lauren Leader reports    that pregnancies are down:

Polling conducted in August by my organization, All In Together, in partnership with polling firm Echelon Insights found that 34 percent of women aged 18-39 said they or someone they know personally has “decided not to get pregnant due to concerns about managing pregnancy-related medical emergencies.” Put another way, poor or unavailable maternal health care post-Dobbs is leading people to alter some of their most important life choices.

For young people, the maternal health care crisis is deeply personal. More than a third of young people and 22 percent of young women told us they have personally dealt with or know someone who has “faced constraints when trying to manage a pregnancy-related emergency.” And 23 percent of 18- to 39-year-old women say they have themselves or know someone else who has been unable to obtain an abortion in their state — a number almost three times higher than respondents in other age groups.

Perhaps most surprisingly however, these results are similar regardless of whether the respondents are living in states with abortion bans or states without restrictions on abortion access. The consistency between red and blue states suggests that the statistics on maternal mortality and the stories and struggles of women navigating the new normal on abortion access have penetrated the psyche of young people everywhere. The Dobbs decision, it seems, has fundamentally altered how people feel about having families and the calculus for getting pregnant.

In the wake of Dobbs, stories of women enduring horrific medical trauma in states where abortion is illegal have been widely reported. For instance, Carmen Broesder, an Idaho mom, documented her 19-day long harrowing miscarriage on TikTok – including her three trips to the emergency room. While only six weeks pregnant, she was denied access to a D&C (dilation and curettage) surgery because of Idaho’s abortion ban.

Remember though that the anti-abortion faction is also looking to outlaw birth control. Such a ban would create a de facto forcing of women into a forced breeding situation with little recourse. 

MAGAs are realizing that their stances on abortion and birth control are real vote killers. Seriously, what woman would vote for a politician whose policies include putting women into forced breeding situation? At a time like this MAGAs will turn to what they always do in situations like this – they will lie about their positions.

Be very aware that as MAGA politicians change their tune to sound more conciliatory toward abortion and birth control, that once they get into office, they will return to the anti-abortion/ anti- birth control policies they truly espouse.