Fight Back, Blue America! – The New Republic

“Probably the most creative, although legally risky thing that states could do is say that every state says that the location of care for telehealth is where the patient is,” Cohen said. That would mean that a California nurse practitioner who coordinates a pill abortion for a patient in Alabama is acting legally in the eyes of her home state (though still illegally in the eyes of Alabama). “That’s where the legal risk comes in, because they would then be subject to prosecution in Alabama, but they would be safe in their own state,” Cohen said. The downside is that a provider wanted in Texas might not safely be able to leave their blue state for fear of prosecution. This raises the potential scenario of abortion providers from blue states never being able to travel in any red state, if red states band together to vow to arrest such providers.

Business and labor have roles to play in safeguarding abortion rights as well. After the fall of Roe, many nationally known firms announced abortion travel benefits for employees in states where abortion is illegal. Dick’s Sporting Goods announced that it would reimburse employees for up to $4,000 for travel to the nearest place they could obtain a legal abortion. Some, like the law firm Sidley Austin, were offering these benefits even before Dobbs. These programs aren’t just for good press—there’s an important business calculus behind them. In the short term, lack of reproductive rights will become a major obstacle to recruiting and retaining talent, a source of expensive job turnover, and a drain on morale. And over the long run, employers may find the end of legal abortion in Sun Belt states has a negative effect on the overall business climate.

Corporate America is engaged in what Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo calls “a war for talent”—a struggle to attract qualified employees to ensure a competitive edge. Criminalizing abortion, along with other red-state social policies, such as marginalizing LGBTQ youth in school and attacking academic standards in the name of fighting imaginary “critical race theory” in the classroom, are only going to reduce the supply of talent that keeps the Sun Belt economy humming. People with options are less willing to live as second-class citizens or raise their daughters as second-class citizens. The Dobbs decision is also putting even nonpregnant women’s health in jeopardy. We have seen health insurers and pharmacies crack down on vital medications for conditions like rheumatoid arthritis on the grounds that they could be used to induce an abortion or simply because they might cause harm to a fetus. There are real questions about whether in vitro fertilization will be legal in some states, especially if they adopt additional laws declaring an embryo to have all the legal rights of a person. All state bans contain exceptions for the life of the pregnant person, but it’s not clear how close to death a woman has to be to merit an emergency abortion. Which means that abortion bans pose a threat to any woman with a high-risk pregnancy. There have already been cases of women having to travel to obtain lifesaving care because their doctors didn’t think they were close enough to death to qualify for a termination. Imagine that scenario repeating itself in states where helping a woman travel for an abortion is now a felony.