This is the worst assault on free speech in America

And because it targets poor women in the South almost no one cares.

Photo by Robin Marty.

We’re often told that the biggest threats speech faces in our society is either opinionated college students or “DEI,” which happen to be two of the right-wing’s favorite targets. Conservatives constantly scream about their speech being oppressed, even as they ban books and specific words. Still, we’re told that the first amendment is so important that it even justifies discriminating against LGBTQ people.

Meanwhile, America is in the midst of the worst free speech crisis in our history, a Kafkaesque plot in which government officials have enacted bans on speech that literally could kill people or maim people. And surely already have.

Yet somehow this free speech crisis never hits headlines and rarely even gets mentioned by anyone with any real platform or power.

To be fair, this free speech crisis is just a part of a far greater crisis, one that should dominate the November elections. That’s the assault on reproductive freedom that has spread across the South and into the Great Plains since the Republican majority installed by Donald Trump on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

The horrors of abortion bans have become undeniably real. They’re literally an everyday thing, as Jessica Valenti makes clear with her indispensable newsletter “Abortion, Every Day.”`

These horrors and what we can do to end them should dominate our discourse. Yet it’s still crucial that we talk about the assault on free speech endured by the poor people of the South in the form of restrictions on what health care providers can say to pregnant people. Because these restrictions are designed to multiply the horrors and create a culture of terror for anyone who can get pregnant and anyone who wants to help people who can get pregnant.

Ridiculous laws about the sorts of things medical professionals could say to patients about and about abortion have existed in America for decades. But in the Dobbs era, they have become a essential tool of fundamentalist tyranny.

Alabama’s Attorney General has threatened to prosecute providers who offer any guidance about avoiding the state’s abortion ban. And Texas’ law makes a sport of persecuting anyone who might help anyone end a pregnancy.

And most of us who think we’re safe in Blue States cannot even imagine the sort of nightmare this purposeful assault of individual freedom makes real.

On this week’s “How are you feeling about democracy?” podcast (which you can listen to above), I spoke to Robin Marty – the executive director at the West Alabama Women’s Center and author of “The New Handbook for Post-Roe America” and she explained what this assault on free speech means to Alabamians who seek medical care:

“...they are coming in and finding out that not only has abortion become completely illegal and inaccessible, we're not allowed to speak about it. We can't tell them where they can go to get an abortion. We cannot tell them that it's okay for them to take pills, and according to the state, they will not be prosecuted for it, according to our law. We don't know if we believe that anymore based on the Supreme Court ruling that came through our state that said that personhood matters more than anything else.

 But according to our abortion bill, a person can manage their own abortion and not be arrested. They could technically come to us afterward and make sure everything was okay. And we're not gonna tell anybody that they tried to have an abortion. We wouldn't even know unless they said it to us. But we can't tell them that. We can't tell them that at this moment the closest abortion clinic for them would be in Tallahassee, Florida, and we can't tell them that's only until now, May 1st, and then that's not going to be an option for them anymore. So this has gotten worse and worse. But also our legislature has done absolutely nothing to try to bring in more contraception for people to be able to prevent pregnancies or do anything in order to expand health care so that people can actually be able to take care of themselves if they do become pregnant.”

This is the definition of a free speech crisis. Speech is being denied for explicitly political purposes and that speech contains timely information that patients need to make decisions that affect their entire lives or could even possibly save their lives.

They may be able to access this information elsewhere, but under the state’s “Sanctity of Unborn Life Amendment” – which you probably heard about when Alabama’s Supreme Court banned IVF – they could still be prosecuted, as Marty told me. 

Nobody knows. And the information you access on the internet is no substitute for a medical provider giving you expert advice tailored to your specific condition.

Indiana’s Supreme Court recently ruled that denying abortion is actually a First Amendment Issue as it clearly requires patients to follow others’ religious beliefs based on a state “religious freedom” law signed by Mike Pence mostly to justify discrimination against LGBTQ Indianians. But the actual – not fictional or sensationalized – government suppression of speech Republicans have built into Alabama's abortion ban to trap pregnant people in white fundamentalist religious beliefs is a massive free speech issue.

But you’re never going to hear about it because it isn’t a convenient talking point for rich white dudes.

Please give whatever you can to keep the West Alabama Women’s Center open.