This week, Steve Marshall, Alabama’s Republican attorney general, said he sees a path to prosecuting women for having abortions in his state. This was a bit of a faux pas: a moment of letting slip the mask that the anti-abortion movement always tries to keep on.
Alabama’s abortion ban, which has only limited exemptions for women’s lives, makes providing an abortion a felony, punishable by up to 99 years in prison. But like nearly all of the abortion bans that have sprung into effect since the US supreme court’s ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health overturned Roe v Wade last June, the law has no mechanism to prosecute women who receive abortions. But that doesn’t mean that patients are safe from criminal charges, according to the state’s top prosecutor.
