When I was growing up in Louisiana and our bigoted, money-hungry government officials tried their best to make sure citizens remained poorly educated, sick, and suspicious of our neighbors enough to vote against their own best interests, adults would always look to our neighbor to the east, Mississippi, and say “At least we are not as bad off as them.”
And as the Supreme Court has recently struck down Louisiana’s draconian abortion measures, Mississippi has emerged with an even more horrible proposal: a bill that would find anyone performing an abortion guilty of murder, as well as a pointless iteration of the “born-alive” bullshit Republicans like Ben Sasse bandy about when they need to get their religious voter base all riled up, and a measure that would make even mentioning abortion a felony.
Under the bill, “distribution any instrument or article, or any drug or medicine, for causing unlawful abortion; or who writes or prints, or causes to be written or printed, a card, circular, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind, or gives information orally, stating when, where, how, of whom, or by what means such article or medicine can be purchased or obtained, or who manufactures any such article or medicine,” would be a felony punishable by one to ten years in prison and no less than a $25,000 fine.
Obviously, this is not the first time Mississippi or a whole host of other red states have introduced laws with similar language. Last year, a federal appeals court declared Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks unconstitutional and this is obviously part of a greater effort on behalf of lawmakers who apparently do not have enough to do with the pandemic and all to try and get their 15-week ban while whittling away at protections provided by Roe v. Wade. Like many of the other states whose lawmakers seem preoccupied with fetuses yet do not give two shits about the welfare of children, nearly 30 percent of the kids in Mississippi live in poverty, the highest rates in the nation, followed closely, of course, by Louisiana.