The Handmaiden's Tale, Alabama Edition

In the can you top this world of Talibaptist abortion restrictions in the United States, Alabama has started giving legal counsel to the embryo, but not the girl:

Ever since Sandra Day O’Connor resigned from the Supreme Court in 2006, anti-abortion activists have been playing a game of chicken with the justices. On one side are the activists, who want to push anti-abortion laws as far as they can without getting slapped down by the court. On the other side is Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wants to let states make abortions harder and harder to obtain without actually outlawing them. For more than 20 years, Kennedy has approved literally every anti-abortion law he’s encountered, leading some liberals to fear he’d finally abandoned Roe v. Wade altogether.

Soon, however, Kennedy may finally be forced to balk. On Tuesday, the ACLU sued to halt an extreme new Alabama law targeting minors who are seeking abortions. The measure is very clearly designed to degrade and humiliate teenage girls, far beyond what any state has previously attempted (and what the Supreme Court has allowed). Alabama already requires a minor to secure parental consent before obtaining an abortion, but if she cannot—if, for instance, it was her parent who raped and impregnated her—she can ask a judge to bypass this requirement. The new law takes that judicial bypass and turns it on its head, permitting the judge to appoint a lawyer to represent the minor’s fetus and advocate for its best interests. The judge may bring the district attorney into court to question the minor. And, worst of all, the district attorney can call witnesses to testify against the minor—and in favor of her fetus.

All of this is quite heinous. But it gets much worse. If the judge rules in favor of the minor, the district attorney is now permitted by law to appeal the ruling and make his case all over again to a higher court. By letting the district attorney call an endless number of witnesses then appeal an unfavorable ruling, the law creates a loophole that could let the state delay a minor’s abortion to the point that she couldn’t even legally receive one. (In Alabama, that’s 20 weeks, unless there is a threat to the mother’s health.) If Alabama gets away with this law, in other words, it’ll have effectively nullified young women’s constitutional right to an abortion.

I would also note that parental notification laws, in more than a few of the cases, means that the girl has to ask permission from her rapist.

This is undiluted evil, and should no more be compromised with than we would with Osama bin Laden,