When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, it did more than just ramp up the assault on the right to abortion. It also opened a corresponding attack on the right to travel.
That attack is a direct result of giving states the power to ban abortion. An abortion ban in Ohio, for example, doesn’t really end abortion. It just pushes it underground or, for those who have the resources, out of state. This is basically what happened to a 10-year-old rape victim, which was recently taken out of state? to have an abortion after being impregnated as a result of the attack.
It is important to note that the Supreme Court has recognized the right to travel between states on multiple occasions in cases dating back to the 1800s.
In Crandall v. State of Nevada, decided in the late 1860s, the court invalidated a Nevada law that imposed a one-dollar tax “on any person who leaves the state on a railroad, stagecoach, or other vehicle used in the business.” is involved or employed.” for the carriage of hired passengers.” Americans, Judge Samuel Miller wrote in the opinion of the majorityhave a right of movement which is “in its nature independent of the will of any State over whose land it must go in exercising it.”
The court affirmed this right a second time in Williams v. Fears in 1900. “No doubt”, Chief Justice Melville Fuller wrote“The right of locomotion, the right to move from one place to another according to one’s inclination, is a characteristic of personal liberty, and the right, ordinarily, of free passage from and through the territory of a State is a right guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment and by other provisions of the Constitution.”
More recently, in Saenz v. Roe in 1999, a majority of the court recognized that, like Judge William Brennan put it in 1969, “the nature of our Federal Union and our constitutional concepts of personal liberty unite to demand that all citizens be free to travel the length and breadth of our country, unimpeded by statutes, rules, or regulations that would unreasonably favor this movement.” burden or restrict.” The right to travel, Judge John Paul Stevens wrote in his majority opinion, quoting Judge Potter Stewart, “is a virtually unconditional personal right, guaranteed by the Constitution to all of us.”
There is nothing in the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that would explicitly threaten the right to travel between states. In his agreement In fact, with the majority ruling, Judge Brett Kavanaugh says that in his opinion, a state “shall not prohibit a resident of that state from traveling to another state to undergo an abortion.”
But that’s exactly where some Republican-led states want to pass the law.
Missouri legislators have introduced a “bounty” bill similar to the one now in use in Texas, allowing private individuals to sue anyone who helps a resident get an out-of-state abortion. Another account would apply Missouri’s laws to abortions taking place in other states.
Speaking of Texas, a group of state house lawmakers calling themselves the Texas Freedom Caucus to hope “impose additional civil and criminal penalties on law firms that pay for abortions or abortion trips,” regardless of where the abortion takes place.
According to The Washington PostAn anti-abortion organization led by Republican state lawmakers has examined “model legislation that would prevent people from crossing state lines for abortions.”
“Just because you jump a state line doesn’t mean your home state doesn’t have jurisdiction,” Peter Breen, vice president of the Thomas More Society told The Post. “It’s not a free abortion card when you drive across the state line.”
And in Washington, Congressional Republicans have rejected an attempt to affirm the right to travel. “Does the child in the womb have the right to travel in the future?” asked Senator James Lankford of Oklahomawho objected to a Democratic bill that would ban restrictions on women traveling to a state to have a legal abortion.
There are few, if any, modern precedents for laws restricting Americans’ right to travel between states. So far as there is any history here, it lies in the legal conflicts over both fugitive slaves and free blacks in the decades before the Civil War.
“As the North began emancipating those slaves who brought slaveholders to free jurisdictions, slave states sought to strengthen a power structure of slaves thought to have been attacked by the North,” writes historian Edlie L. Wong in “Neither fugitive nor free: Atlantic slavery, freedom suits and the legal culture of travel.” Slave states, she writes, increasingly implemented punitive restrictions “banning free blacks from traveling to slave jurisdictions.”
On the other hand, slave owners tried to use the legal system to restrict the movement of enslaved Americans from the south. If the governments of the northern states did not recognize the existence of slave ownership, federal courts would.
The federal government was also reluctant to provide the free Northern Blacks with the documents they needed to secure their freedom outside of the states in which they lived. The result was a world in which black Americans had no freedom of movement. This was true even after the Civil War when, in the wake of Reconstruction, the Southern states “liberated,” imposing restrictions on the right of black Americans to use public transit and other modes of transportation.
As Wong points out, the landmark 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson—which confirmed Jim Crow segregation—was “fighted over equal access to the technologies of intrastate rail travel.” In his famous lone dissent, Judge John Marshall Harlan reminded the court that “personal liberty,” as it is well said, “consists in the power of locomotion, changing station, or moving one’s person to wherever the own tendency. ; without imprisonment or coercion.’”
There is no direct parallel between the travel rights of women, girls and others who can give birth under anti-abortion laws and the travel rights of black Americans under various forms of legalized unfreedom. But there is an echo of a question pertaining to both situations: what happens to citizens’ rights when their bodies become property under the law?
And make no mistake, when a state claims the right to restrict your travel because of your body—when it claims one of the most fundamental aspects of your personal freedom to take control of your reproductive health—that state has little more than another form of property.