Every warning of post-Roe America is coming true, and there’s worse ahead

There are currently nine states where a rape victim under the age of 18 is forced to carry a fetus to term. Four states where that’s true even if there is a threat to the girl’s or woman’s health. This is the reality of America since the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs v. Women’s Health Organization ruling on June 24, 2022. Within days of the Dobbs ruling, a 10-year-old rape victim was forced to flee Ohio to find treatment. The child was almost six and half weeks pregnant, just past the cutoff for Ohio’s “fetal heartbeat” ban.

As grim as all of this has been, still is, and will be in the future, Republicans want to make things worse. That doesn’t mean just a national abortion ban that spreads these horrors to every state. It means forcing women to surrender their autonomy and be crushed by a patriarchy that demands control over every aspect of their bodies.

On Wednesday, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are “children,” showing yet another aspect of how radical conservatives are forcing their way into the most intimate decisions of women and families. And that’s just the beginning.