Gov. Katie Hobbs, who’s serving Arizona only until Jesus returns in glory to root through all those boxes of unscanned Kari Lake votes, is extending a lifeline to the state’s women after Republicans turned the clock back even further than usual.
While Republicans work on new state slogans—“What Happens in Arizona Stays in Arizona, Unless You Can Afford a Bus Ticket to Mexico” is the current favorite—Hobbs is actually doing something to help state residents who’ve been blindsided by the Arizona Supreme Court’s decision to subject women to the harsh dictates of the state’s long-dormant 1864 abortion ban.
Hobbs is hoping to reassure state residents as chaos ensues in the wake of the court’s decision on Tuesday reviving a law that bans nearly all abortions. And while the current situation is both frightening and grim, Hobbs is doing what she can to allow her constituents to remain citizens in good standing of the 21st century.
Hobbs, a Democrat, on Friday afternoon, issued a written statement that says an executive order on abortion that she signed on June 23, 2023, provides “protections for anyone involved in seeking abortion care,” including “any person helping a woman obtain an abortion,” even under the 1864 near-total abortion ban that was upheld by the Arizona Supreme Court this week.
Hobbs’ statement was in response to an April 11 Republic story about concerns from some providers about facing prosecution for helping pregnant people obtain an abortion outside of Arizona.
Arizona’s extreme abortion ban has vague enough language that it could be interpreted as meaning providers and even regular civilians are at risk of prosecution for helping someone go out of state to obtain an abortion.
“As Arizonans continue to grapple with this new reality, I want to be very clear: my executive order provides protections for anyone involved in seeking abortion care,” wrote the governor. “That includes women and their loved ones, doctors and other healthcare providers, and any person helping a woman obtain an abortion.”
Well, at least the gestation gestapo won’t be dragging women and girls back to Arizona by their hair to make them explain why they refused to carry their fetus to term. That’s likely more than Kari Lake—who was for forcing rape victims to give birth before she was against it—would have accomplished.
Still, there’s a lot of chaos to clean up. A lot. And it’s real—as in not fake—chaos. The kind that only a massive Roevember blue wave can hope to quell.
In the few days since Republican brains wound back a full two decades to 1864, fear, confusion, and chaos have reigned, and not just in Arizona.
It starts with the impact on individual clinics.
A Saturday Washington Post story included several quotes from Arizonans and workers at the Camelback Family Planning clinic who are positively gobsmacked by the court’s decision—which, according to The Post, could take effect before the end of April—and the impact it will have on them.
Many of the clinic’s employees—one of whom reassured a patient that, for the time being, “we’re just going to keep on keeping on”—fear what will happen in the short term as Arizonans fight to reclaim their rights.
At Camelback, doctors acknowledge that creative workarounds probably won’t succeed this time if the 1864 law is not successfully appealed or blocked by the legislature, as some lawmakers have pledged. The state’s newly elected attorney general, a Democrat, says she won’t prosecute abortion providers under the ban. She has informed several that they probably have 60 days before the ban kicks in, while the proposed ballot measure, should it pass, wouldn’t take effect until Nov. 25.
During that window, Goodrick isn’t sure the attorney general will be able to protect clinics from prosecution by conservative county attorneys.
“I don’t know that her reassurances are good enough,” she said. “If it’s illegal to do abortions, we’re not going to do abortions.” The election, she added, “is the future of everything.”
Health care providers also wonder how the zombie law’s vague “life of the mother” exception will be interpreted. According to AZPM, an Arizona affiliate of PBS and NPR, that provision in the law is hardly reassuring to women whose lives will now be further threatened in the wake of the decision.
Now with the ban, providers, like Dr. Atsuko Koyama, will need to determine what exactly will be considered life-threatening.
“That’s not a real medical thing,” Koyama said. ”There’s no definition of what close enough to death means to a legislator…Right? These are medical decisions that should be between a physician and the patient.”
Koyama has seen firsthand how abortions can save a life. She recalled seeing one patient who was diagnosed with postpartum cardiomyopathy, meaning her heart could fail in the last month of pregnancy and anytime in the months immediately after.
“If she has another child, she could potentially die and she doesn’t want to die. Of course, she doesn’t want to die. She wants to watch her child, you know, grow up and graduate from high school and get married. So yeah, she’d like to stick around to see all that and having access to abortion allows her to do that, right? It allows her to be there for her own child.”
But while the law won’t go into effect immediately, the impact on Arizonans’ mental health is already coming into focus. As NBC News noted in yet another story on the confusion the law’s reemergence has wrought, patients who are currently preparing for abortions are facing an extra layer of anxiety on top of the uncertainty that usually accompanies these decisions.
“That chaos and confusion that we’re seeing is what I’m having to explain to patients,” Dr. Jill Gibson, chief medical director of Planned Parenthood Arizona, told NBC News. “Patients are coming and they are already asking, because they’ve seen the news, if their appointment would be upheld today.”
The Arizona court ruling is also having an impact on neighboring states, which will likely be forced to handle the overflow of patients from Arizona—assuming those patients can afford to travel outside the state and take the time off they’ll need to have the procedure done.
Angela Florez, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Arizona, told reporters on Tuesday that the organization’s clinics in the state would continue providing abortion services “for a very short period of time.” Then it will work with neighboring states, including California, to help people cross state lines if needed to obtain an abortion, she said.
“There really is no way to sugarcoat it. Today is a dark day for Arizona,” Florez said.
The Los Angeles County public health department said in a statement that it is committed to working with health providers, advocates and businesses to welcome people seeking abortions who cannot obtain them in their home state.
On the plus side, the new/old law is exposing previously hidden fault lines in the GOP, particularly with respect to women voters. And while the Arizona court has unleashed plenty of chaos at the state’s abortion clinics, it’s also created plenty of internal turmoil for Republican women, auguring potential trouble for Republicans in November’s elections.
Across the country, fractures are emerging among conservative and centrist Republican women, as they confront an unrelenting drumbeat of new abortion bans and court rulings. For years, the party’s message was simple and broad: Republicans oppose abortion. Its politicians rarely dove into the specifics of what the position meant for reproductive health issues like miscarriage, medical emergencies and fertility treatments.
Now, those complicated realities are everywhere. In Alabama, the State Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos could be considered children, raising concerns over future access to in vitro fertilization procedures. In Florida, women are preparing for a new six-week abortion ban to soon go into effect.
Nowhere is the conversation more intense this week than in Arizona, a key battleground state in the 2024 election. On Tuesday, the State Supreme Court ruled 4 to 2 in favor of reinstating an 1864 law banning all abortion from the moment of conception, except to save the life of the mother. It made no exceptions for rape or incest.
Of course, the bottom line is you simply can’t trust Republicans on this issue. A conservative woman voting a straight GOP ticket may find herself not just on the wrong side of history, but on the wrong side of the mausoleum wall as well. And that’s not a good place to be. After all, when you die, you can’t take your fortune—or your MAGA hat—with you. It’s just a dark, bottomless abyss, like the yawning, heartless chest of your typical Republican politician.
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link.