Pro-life activists around the country — and particularly in the states that have enacted abortion restrictions or outright bans following the disastrous Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade — are running headfirst into the realization that you can’t stop people from getting necessary health care.

This is what pro-choicers had consistently warned about in the run-up to this June’s Dobbs decision, and more generally have flatly stated throughout the history of the national abortion access fight. Fortunately, the grim invocations of clothes hanger abortions have largely not come to pass, with domestic and international operations focused on supplying safe and effective abortion pills to those in need.

Now, the anti-health care crowd, who won’t be satisfied until every pregnancy is carried to term, with the health and free will of the mother be damned, wants to go to extraordinary lengths to block the avenues for these life-saving drugs to reach patients.

According to reporting in the Washington Post, the conservative activists who often find themselves complaining about Big Tech censorship and government intervention in free speech are now pushing Texas state lawmakers to force internet service providers to block sites that offer abortion medication within the bounds of the state.

The move will likely not survive legal scrutiny, but does illustrate the extent to which other values can be compromised in service of an obsessive focus on preventing abortions from taking place, and the eagerness to use state power to that end. Texas-based groups are also going as far as testing wastewater to find women to bring prosecutions against, frustrated that their judicial victory hasn’t already resulted in mass surveillance and targeting of people seeking abortions, and horrified that their position has turned out to be widely unpopular.

This should only steel the resolve of pro-choice advocates and legislators to nip this campaign in the bud by getting more referendums to enshrine abortion rights into state constitutions, as they’ve successfully done in several states already and, ultimately, establish the right in federal law once and for all.

— Tribune News Service