Texas Heralds America's Own 'Cultural Revolution'

Neighbor spying on neighbor.  Indoctrinated children betraying their own parents.  A cadre of the ideologically unhinged and would-be bounty hunters searching for women, doctors, nurses, social workers and even drivers who they suspect of violating their version of religious law.

Yes, Texas has codified its own version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  Bravo! 

The shocking nature of this new move by the anti-abortion zealots is a sign of the extremes to which these people will go to implement their self-righteous crusade.  The fact that five of the supreme court justices refused to immediately reject this radical vigilante-encouraging law is extremely sobering.

There is something about deputized citizens, bounties and vigilante justice that is supremely distasteful.  It is antithetical to a sense of fair play and due process.  It conjures up images of Nazi Germany, the KGB and many other totalitarian regimes where neighbors are encouraged and even paid to turn in their neighbors for perceived infractions or disloyalty.

The religious right may have gone a step too far with this attempt to circumvent our judicial system.  The incredulity, outrage and anger that it has engendered could cause a wave of reaction in independents and middle America and find expression at the polls.

I am not sure what these extremists ultimately hope to accomplish.  The availability of pharmaceutical abortions and the willingness of people to help women find and fund alternative places for ending pregnancies will probably reduce the impact dramatically.  Moreover, there has been a continuous decline in the rate of abortions in the USA since a peak was reached in the 1981.

Here is an extract from the Wikipedia article on abortion in the USA:

In 1973, the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision legalized abortion in all 50 states. Thoughout the 1970s, the abortion rate rose almost 80%, peaking at 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age according to the Guttmacher Institute and at 25 abortions per 1,000 women of childbearing age according to the CDC.

From 1981 through 2017, the abortion rate fell approximately in half. It did not fall every single year, but it has not risen two years in a row since 1979 and 1980. The abortion rate fell below the 1973 rate in 2012 and continued to fall through 2017. 

Abortion foes would be so much wiser to encourage these downward trends of abortions by promoting sex education and birth control, especially the newer IUDs that provide highly reliable birth control without the risk of non-compliance that pills, condoms or other means entail.

That presumes that the goal of abortion opponents is truly to reduce abortions and not simply to wage a culture war that projects their own insecurities about a changing and uncertain world.  If they really want to save lives, I would recommend they put their energy towards reversing climate change.  The number of future victims of that onrushing calamity, all of whom will be cognitive, self-aware human beings, will dwarf the number of aborted fetuses.