For the future of US abortion rights under a second Trump presidency, look to Arizona

Sometimes, in 2024 America, you have to pinch yourself to make sure you’re not in a long-running dystopian nightmare. Then again, maybe we all are. And no amount of pinching will help.

Two scenes from this week stand out.

One, thoroughly bizarre, was on the floor of the Arizona senate, where – led by a Republican state senator, Anthony Kern - a fundamentalist Christian prayer group “spoke in tongues” as they knelt together over the state seal, praying for a civil war-era abortion ban to become law again. Kern and the group got their wish; a day later, the Arizona supreme court ruled to allow the law to go into effect.

Kern, naturally, is one of those under investigation for falsely claiming to be an Arizona elector as Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. He also got an Arizona bill passed allowing the Ten Commandments to be posted and read out loud in the state’s public school classrooms. If you had any lofty notions about the separation of church and state, consider them laid to rest.

The other memorable scene was on the Larry Kudlow Show on the Fox Business channel, as three middle-aged white guys kicked around the aforementioned ruling by the Arizona supreme court. That 4-2 decision reinvigorates a 160-year-old law that says virtually all abortions are felonies. On the broadcast, radio host Mark Simone was blithe.

“Buying a bus ticket to go somewhere to get it is not the worst thing in the world,” Simone – someone who will never be in that situation and apparently lacks the empathy to imagine it – opined.

The bus-ticket solution might not even be an option. If Donald Trump is elected again, a national abortion ban is far from unlikely.

Just a day before the Arizona ruling, the former US president came out with