The Blade Runner

Days of future past brought into the present applies with the gutting of Roe and the intent of the far right SC to push ever onward to limit the rights of women in all things related to abortion including invasion of privacy, access to contraception and the enforcement of legal actions brought against anyone involved or thought to be involved in possibly aiding a woman to get an abortion. With this in mind, the notion of The BladeRunner becoming all too real rings true.

To whit ...

The Bladerunner (also published as The Blade Runner) is a 1974 science fiction novel by Alan E. Nourse, about underground medical services and smuggling.

And this ...

“We won’t go back”—it’s an inadequate rallying cry, only prompted by events that belie its message. But it is true in at least one sense. The future that we now inhabit will not resemble the past before Roe, when women sought out illegal abortions and not infrequently found death. The principal danger now lies elsewhere, and arguably reaches further. We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth. Those who argue that this decision won’t actually change things much—an instinct you’ll find on both sides of the political divide—are blind to the ways in which state-level anti-abortion crusades have already turned pregnancy into punishment, and the ways in which the situation is poised to become much worse.

In the states where abortion has been or will soon be banned, any pregnancy loss past an early cutoff can now potentially be investigated as a crime. Search histories, browsing histories, text messages, location data, payment data, information from period-tracking apps—prosecutors can examine all of it if they believe that the loss of a pregnancy may have been deliberate. Even if prosecutors fail to prove that an abortion took place, those who are investigated will be punished by the process, liable for whatever might be found.

The Thought Police goes prime time.

Addendum ... CNN senior legal analyst Laura Coates agreed, saying that the Supreme Court's ruling will spark "legal chaos."

"You're going to have interstate battles about how you're going to enforce these laws," she said, adding that there have been examples from history where "wrongly decided decision" have been overturned.

"...I can't help but wonder, how do you intend for these laws to be enforced?" Coates continued. "Is there no doctor-patient confidentiality provision any longer? ... Are you going to be able to have access to medical records or interrogate people in the office of the receptionist or the doctor about someone's menstruation? The womb is actually the site of the so-called crime, so whatever law would be enforced would have to be intrusive and invasive in trying to figure out what has happened there."