This is an opinion cartoon.

Alabama’s draconian abortion ban is harsh enough on women and reproductive healthcare professionals in this state. Attorney General Steve Marshall now threatens to take his abortion punishment tour across state lines. Like the Alabama Supreme Court’s ‘frozen embryos are children’ ruling sent IVF shockwaves around the country, our leaders are never satisfied just to create hardship on its own people. Nope. They like to spread the chaos.

Related: Abortion: AG Steve Marshall has a ‘very particular set of skills’ to punish women – al.com

The Alabama Reflector reportsthe U.S. Department of Justice last week sided with reproductive health providers seeking to stop AG Marshall from prosecuting those who help Alabama women obtain abortions across state lines.

Related: DOJ challenges Alabama threats to prosecute those helping women get abortions out of state – al.com

More from the AF story: In a brief filed on Aug. 19, the DOJ argued that it’s in the country’s best interest to preserve “the proper functioning of the federal system and ensure that one state does not improperly intrude into the affairs of other states.”

“The filing states that Alabama’s threats to use criminal conspiracy laws against those who help women leave the state for abortion services violate a “bedrock principle of American constitutional law: states cannot punish their residents for traveling to another state to engage in conduct that is lawful in that state.”

Josh Moon of the Alabama Political Reporter writes:

The fact is, in Alabama, we know for certain that the results of the upcoming presidential election, and the also-important races for the House and Senate, will decide one of two pathways for women within our state borders: Either Alabama women will be subjected to the most draconian, regressive, invasive restrictions imaginable, or they will enjoy some level of freedom ensured by federal law.

Oh, I am aware that the framing of that choice will send the conservatives into a conniption, but the truth hurts. And make no mistake about it, that option is the truth.

When you have consciously decided to force 12-year-old rape victims to carry a resulting pregnancy to term, you don’t get to cry foul when your laws are referred to as draconian, barbaric or 1960s-regressive.

Alabama’s conservative lawmakers have imposed one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country in the wake of Roe v. Wade falling, and those same lawmakers have flatly refused to alter that law to grant exceptions in the cases of rape or incest.

Alabama’s attorney general has stated repeatedly that he wished to pursue criminal charges against women who sought abortion medication, and he threatened nonprofit organizations that sought to help women travel to other states for abortions.

And just to make sure we’re a little dose of extra awful, we went ahead and declared IVF to be murder too. Because, why wouldn’t we take the dreams of women who so badly want to become moms that they’ve dished out tens of thousands of dollars and undergone dozens of invasive procedures and step on those dreams just because … we’re too dumb to work ourselves out of the box we constructed from whole cloth.

Read all of Moon’s column here.

Check out more cartoons and stuff by JD Crowe

JD Crowe is the cartoonist for Alabama Media Group and AL.com. He won the RFK Human Rights Award for Editorial Cartoons in 2020. In 2018, he was awarded the Rex Babin Memorial Award for local and state cartoons by the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Follow JD on Facebook, Twitter @Crowejam and Instagram @JDCrowepix. Give him a holler @[email protected].

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