Mike Hilgers Wants Your Confidential Medical Records
During the Nebraska 2023 legislative session, the Republicans passed a ten week abortion ban and a ban on trans medical care for minors. Planned Parenthood has filed a challenge to these laws in the Nebraska state courts but I’m not optimistic about the outcome. Most of the judiciary has been appointed by Republican governors.
Now the Republicans have the problem of enforcing these bans. The GOP right wing Christian base will be expecting a vigorous and aggressive effort to enforce these new laws. Unfortunately, Nebraska already has an experience on how just how these laws will be enforced.
Before the current ten week ban was passed, Nebraska had a twenty week abortion ban. The state has already enforced this law in a controversial prosecution.
Earlier this month, a Nebraska teenager who used abortion pills to end her pregnancy was sentenced to 90 days in jail after she pleaded guilty earlier this year to illegally concealing human remains.
Both the teenager and her mother were charged last year after the police seized their private Facebook messages, which showed them discussing their plans to end the pregnancy and destroy the evidence. The mother also pleaded guilty in July to violating Nebraska’s former twenty week abortion ban.
Greer Donley, an associate professor of law at the University Pittsburgh School of Law, said in an interview that the case was a “harbinger of things to come.” So- called Nebraska Right to Life, an anti-choice group, praised prosecutors for enforcing Nebraska’s abortion laws.
So what have here is that Nebraska has sent a 17 year old girl to jail for having an abortion. Her mother was also incarcerated for helping her. The GOP used to tell us they had no intention of going after women. They lied.
There are many examples in other states where women were imprisoned for having abortions. And there are going to be more prosecutions as the Republicans continue to pass reactionary abortion bans in the red states. Miscarriages will also be investigated by law enforcement. The Republicans are only getting started.
Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers has escalated the GOP war against freedom and medical privacy. Now Hilgers wants your confidential medical records if you are a woman obtaining an abortion or your child is seeking trans care. Hilgers and 18 other GOP Attorney Generals want the power to seize the private medical records from people who are making the most intimate decisions in their lives.
What this means is that Hilgers won’t settle for banning freedom only in Nebraska — he wants to enforce Nebraska’s laws in cases in which people obtain banned medical care in other states. In a chilling move, Hilgers wants to extend Nebraska’s bans beyond state lines.
It will take really, really big government for the GOP to enforce these draconian bans. “Will the policing and punishment of women be an important issue in 2024? It sure seemed important to the outcome in 2022 — and that was while the new surveillance regime was still mostly hypothetical. Now it’s becoming real.” David Frum.
It’s pretty evident that the GOP will be doubling down on abortion and trans care bans. This what their base is demanding. The GOP always does what the base desire. Every time.
GOP on abortion then: Leave it up to the states. GOP now: We’re coming for your medical records! If you seek out of state medical care, we will send you to prison!
It used to be that Republicans wanted smaller government. That’s no longer the case as they want to interfere in every aspect of our lives. The only people who get the benefit of the GOP’s so-called “small government” are the wealthy, corporations and the owners of war weapons.
This may sound ominous but it’s obvious that the GOP wants your confidential medical records. Folks, pay attention for whom and what you vote for. Our freedoms are being undermined.
Freedom and liberty are on the ballot in 2024. Choose wisely!