Published in The New York Times, Manager of Communications Devin McMahon writes in this Letter To The Editor (LTE) that the effort to criminalize abortion will disproportionately devastate working-class women, who lack the financial resources of wealthy individuals to bypass abortion bans or pay the cash bail required to avoid pretrial incarceration. As a result, America’s dysfunctional pretrial justice system will become a punitive weapon of the anti-choice movement, forcing low-income women into dangerous detentions and coercive plea deals.
Read the LTE below and on The New York Times‘s website.
To the Editor:
Re “Support Builds for Prosecuting Women Who Get Abortions” (news article, June 26):
The push to prosecute women for obtaining abortions is chilling. This isn’t just an attack on reproductive freedom — it is also an escalation of the continuing war against working-class Americans under the guise of moral values.
Wealthy women will never see the inside of a cell. They can travel to states where abortion is legally protected, and on the off chance they are arrested, they have the financial means to secure immediate release. These criminal penalties will overwhelmingly target and punish everyday people living paycheck to paycheck by trapping them in America’s dysfunctional cash bail system.
Cash bail turns financial insecurity into a crime. When a judge puts a price tag on freedom, those with money walk back through the front door.
For a woman without deep pockets, it means being locked in dangerous jail conditions for weeks or months — denied medical care, ripped from her family and stripped of her livelihood — while awaiting trial. Under that weight, innocent people routinely plead guilty simply because freedom can’t wait.
We cannot allow our broken justice system to be the new front line of the anti-choice movement.
Image: Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press
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In These Times: No One Should Be in Jail Because They’re Poor