When Dobbs was decided, historian Heather Cox Richardson “suggested to a group of people that it was only a question of time until we saw laws designed to make it impossible for women to travel across state lines. They told me there was no way such a thing could happen in the US.”
Yesterday she noted “Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall claimed in a court filing on Monday that Alabama can prosecute people who help women travel out of the state to obtain an abortion as part of a ‘criminal conspiracy.’”
And Caroline Kitchener reported in the Washington Post that at least 51 jurisdictions in Texas have passed ordinances to make it illegal to transport anyone on roads within city or county limits to get an abortion. Their hope is to target interstates and the roads around airports to block off routes out of Texas. The laws also allow any private citizen to sue any person or organization they think is violating the ordinance.
Richardson notes: Such barriers are precisely the same as those for people trying to leave authoritarian countries. Someone who is prohibited from leaving a jurisdiction is not a citizen but a subject. Authoritarian countries also urge people to turn on each other, reporting them to the state for punishment.
This poem by Seamus Heaney was in The Writer’s Almanac yesterday. It’s called “Digging.”
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Gotta run! Shooting down for a quick trip to catch the Gnats tangling with the pesky Marlins. Pizza on the way in Baltimore (with clams!) at Joe Squared. Already drooling. See you later.
The Wellington Files 