September 04, 2023 12:52 PM UTC

Pueblo Abortion-Ban Johnny Appleseed's Latest Creepy Plot

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• by: Colorado Pols

Readers will recall a brief but heated dispute in Pueblo last November over a proposed municipal ordinance to ban abortion within city limits, the work product of an itinerant Texas-based anti-abortion pitchman named Mark Lee Dickson.

Dickson, a self-professed “36-year-old virgin” who proudly admits to having been present at the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was sent packing by Pueblo, and to our knowledge Dickson hasn’t tried again in Colorado though his anti-abortion initiatives have passed in a number of Texas and New Mexico towns.

As the Washington Post reported Friday, Dickson is back with a new variation of the same strategy–this time pushing municipal ordinances to allow citizens to sue if a town’s roads and even airports are used to transport a patient headed out of state for abortion care:

A director of Right to Life of East Texas, Dickson joined forces with former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell in 2019, when abortion was still legal in Texas until 22 weeks of pregnancy. Together, the men set out to ban abortion city by city, focusing on conservative strongholds. The Texas ordinances relied on the novel enforcement mechanism that empowers private citizens to sue, creating the model for the statewide “heartbeat ban” that took effect exactly two years ago, on Sept. 1, 2021.

Since Roe fell, triggering a new ban that outlawed almost all abortions in Texas, Dickson and Mitchell have changed their strategy. Along with passing ordinances in conservative border towns in Democrat-led states, where abortion providers may look to open new clinics, the team has zeroed in on those helping women leave Texas for abortions — a practice they call “abortion trafficking.”

By Dickson’s definition, “abortion trafficking” is the act of helping any pregnant woman cross state lines to end her pregnancy, lending her a ride, funding, or another form of support. While the term “trafficking” typically refers to people who are forced, tricked or coerced, Dickson’s definition applies to all people seeking abortions — because, he argues, “the unborn child is always taken against their will.”

So for starters, these municipal ordinances almost certainly violate constitutional rights to interstate travel. You can’t just declare that Americans are prohibited from traveling across state lines to get health care any more than you can stop them from doing so to gamble or buy marijuana. Congress would need to pass a law like the Mann Act to specifically prohibit such travel and that law would need to survive its own court challenge. The problem, like Texas’ “heartbeat ban” abortion law, is the slippery enforcement mechanism of private lawsuits that makes challenging the law’s clear constitutional problems more difficult. Since the passage of the original Texas abortion ban relying on private lawsuits to enforce, there hasn’t been a single case filed as of this writing.

“The purpose of these laws is not to meaningfully enforce them,” said Neesha Davé, executive director of the Lilith Fund, an abortion fund based in Texas. “It’s the fear that’s the point. It’s the confusion that’s the point.” [Pols emphasis]

Dickson doesn’t seem to care that the laws he’s championing don’t actually work in practice, and are therefore pretty much entirely for scaring people. And Dickson’s aspiration to frighten people out of helping Texans get abortion care goes way beyond driving the roads:

The true purpose of these civil suit-based “bans” seems entirely to stoke a climate of fear, not to actually be enforced. No one to date has been “sued into oblivion,” and Texas does not have the right to end abortion “in every state in America.” In Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis signed an executive order last year forbidding state agencies from cooperating with any out-of-state investigations or lawsuits arising from these suehappy new laws. And even in the conservative rural areas of Texas where Dickson is currently operating, there is significant resistance to Dickson’s proposal just like there was in Pueblo last November.

A self-professed thirtysomething virgin has made ending the body autonomy of others his life’s obsession.

It’s a sad post-Roe reality, but it’s okay to laugh at the laughable parts.