Arizona's 1864 abortion ban: GOP longs to force women into the past

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:

Amanda Marcotte
@AmandaMarcotte
·
Follow
Republicans reviving an abortion ban from 1864 is no anomaly. Take a look across the 2022 landscape and you'll see signs everywhere that the GOP wants to take women back to the 19th century.

salon.com
Arizona's 1864 abortion ban: GOP longs to force women into the past
GOP's Victorian cosplay: Candidates oppose divorce, call women the "weaker sex" and aren't sure they should vote
10:34 AM · Sep 26, 2022

https://www.salon.com/2022/09/26/back-to-petticoats-arizonas-1864-abortion-ban-shows-longs-to-force-women-into-the-past/

For some time, Arizona has been near the front of the pack of Republican-controlled states itching to ban abortion. Gov. Doug Ducey didn't wait for the June overturn of Roe v. Wade or even for the leak of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health ruling in May. Merely anticipating such a decision was enough for the Republican governor to sign a 15-week abortion ban in March. But even that didn't go far enough for the state's Republican attorney general, Mark Brnovich, or Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson, a Ducey appointee.

On Friday, Johnson upheld Brnovich's request to reinstate a draconian abortion ban that dates back to 1864. That was 48 years before Arizona became a state (and women got the right to vote there) and 56 years before women's suffrage was nationalized in the 19th Amendment. Under this law, which was enacted in the Arizona Territory shortly after the Union had reconquered it from the Confederacy (to truncate the history a little), doctors or anyone else convicted of helping a woman abort a pregnancy could face up to five years in prison.

"Yesterday's ruling in Arizona is dangerous and will set Arizona women back more than a century," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement on Saturday. Which is more or less the goal, honestly.

Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at Boston College who specializes in 19th-century American history, posted an article over the weekend putting Arizona's ban in context by noting what other statutes were passed by the territorial legislature at the same time. Along with banning abortion, the legislature set the age of sexual consent at 10 years old and also passed a law stating that "No black or mulatto, or Indian, Mongolian, or Asiatic, shall be permitted to [testify in court] against any white person" and invalidating any marriages between a white person and a Black person.

*snip*