Much hangs on the upcoming Supreme Court decisions on the dilation-and-extraction ban and the no-doubt-to-be-challenged South Dakota abortion ban. Everybody is watching to see which way the court breaks with its two new stealth-anti-choice Justices now seated. Just the fact that they granted cert in Carhart is ominous, given the law’s obvious extremism and the fact that it has now been held unconstitutional in five federal courts and three federal appellate courts. The South Dakota law is, of course, a deliberate attempt to provoke the court into overturning Roe entirely, by giving them a test case that violates virtually every remaining vestige of that decision. The results in these two cases will probably paint the full picture of abortion jurisprudence under the current Court.

The suspense is killing us - in some cases literally. “Back-alley” abortions have been reported even throughout the period of legal abortion, and in almost every case they are prompted by fears that a legal abortion would be unobtainable or bring repercussions from the violation of the patient’s confidentiality. With the possibility that abortion will be even more severely restricted than it now is, and on a nationwide basis, women are beginning to imagine what a post-autonomy world would look like.

One sign: the realistic consideration of the need for an “abortion underground” again. Women on the Waves offers detailed advice (with plenty of safety warnings) on how to self-administer a medical abortion with misoprostol (one of the ingredients of RU-486) up to the 9th week of pregnancy. Molly, of Molly Saves the Day, attempts to fill the need for a new “Jane“-style abortion network by providing detailed instructions for D&Cs by non-professional caregivers. (CAUTION: These instructions are not vetted by professional review, and in some places lack considerable detail. For instance, it instructs operators to “don’t be afraid to scrape [the uterus] fairly hard”, but nowhere at all does it mention the possibility of perforation - still less how to recognize it or what to do about it.)

I appreciate these women’s concerns, and the service they are providing to other women. However, I would much prefer to see hands-on training by professionals of non-professionals in a one-to-one setting before people blithely set out doing this on their own. At some point, experienced non-professionals could then start mentoring others, as the Jane network did, but the thought of somebody reading sketchy instructions off a Web site and then setting up as an abortion provider is exactly the reason we need abortion to remain legal! But women know this, of course. They prefer to get healthcare openly, without denial of services or deliberate misinformation, with respect for their autonomy, and from trained professionals backed by a non-punitive healthcare system. They prefer their healthcare professionals to care for women’s freedom and women’s bodily security. They prefer abortion to remain legal. The fact that they are willing to seek other avenues to preserving their freedom - and are doing so already - merely underscores how far the assault on women’s independence has already undermined their sense of security - not to mention the actual availability of healthcare services.

Just how bad things are going to get - they are surely going to get worse, whatever happens - remains to be seen. We will know much of what we need to know in weeks or a few months. But the fact that women are now planning to find the least unsafe method to preserve control of their bodies and their lives is testimony to the climate of fear the right wing has created, aside from actual practical inroads it has made on sexual freedom. This fear is one of the tools they use to control women - it’s part of the reason they seek to ban procedures that are safer than the alternatives, why they oppose realistic contraception education and access, and why, increasingly, they seek restrictions on abortion that make no exception even for direct threats to a woman’s health. The more dangerous pregnancy and abortion are, the more women are punished for their sexual activity (and, it is claimed, the less likely they are to choose to be sexually active, though the empirical facts demonstrate that this is not the case).

“Fear Up” is the name for one of the torture strategies used at Abu Ghraib - a method of breaking the enemy by threatening the most grievous bodily harms (accompanied with some physical abuse, lasting injury, and the occasional death). It appears to be the strategy adopted by the anti-sex right toward women’s autonomy, and it appears to be working.

Hat tip: Amanda at Pandagon.