Editorials of The Times

While Donald Trump once said he was “very pro-choice,” since the start of his presidential campaign his stance on abortion has been consistent: It should be banned, no matter the consequences to women. At times, he has even veered to the right of the mainstream anti-abortion movement, as when he said during a primary season town hall event that women who seek abortions should face “some form of punishment.” Most anti-abortion politicians profess to want to protect women, even when they pass laws that harm them.

Now legislators in one state want Trump’s cruel vision to become reality. Ohio lawmakers have proposed legislation to ban all abortions, period, with no exceptions for victims of rape or incest or to save a woman’s life.

Carrying to term a pregnancy against one’s will is punishment enough — in fact, it can amount to torture, according to the U.N. Human Rights Council. But the Ohio bill would not only cut off access to the procedure, it would also open the door to criminal charges against both abortion providers and women seeking the procedure. One of the Republican co-sponsors of the legislation, Rep. Ron Hood, said it would be up to prosecutors to decide whether to charge a woman or a doctor, and what those charges would be. But they could be severe. Under the bill, an “unborn human” would be considered a person under state criminal homicide statutes. Thus, a prosecutor could decide to charge a woman who ended a pregnancy with murder. In Ohio, murder is punishable by life in prison or the death penalty.

How’s that for pro-life?

If this all sounds legally unsound, that’s because it is. The Ohio bill is “blatantly unconstitutional,” said Brigitte Amiri, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, which has challenged anti-abortion laws in the state. “This isn’t a hard one.”

That’s because the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision made abortion legal up to the point of fetal viability, which has shifted over time due to medical advancements in treating premature babies, but now occurs at about 24 weeks of pregnancy. Any ban on abortion before that time — say, at 15 weeks, as would be the case under a law that was passed and legally blocked in Mississippi last week — is generally considered unconstitutional.

This rash of radically unconstitutional bills is appearing by design. The anti-abortion movement has been trying to pass pre-viability abortion bans, like the Ohio bill, hoping that efforts to overturn them would lead to a challenge of Roe v. Wade that would end with the 45-year-old decision’s reversal in the Supreme Court.

Reproductive rights advocates say the various pieces of legislation are in keeping with the anti-abortion crowd’s newfound optimism under Trump, who has said he wants Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe. Trump may get the chance to appoint a judge who will cast the deciding vote.

As Trump himself acknowledged during his 2016 town hall, banning abortions does not stop women from getting them — it just makes it harder for them to do so safely. If abortion were banned, “You go back to a position like they had where they would perhaps go to illegal places,” Trump said, inarticulately but correctly noting that some women would be driven to back-alley providers.

That’s one reason abortion rights supporters are so concerned about the Ohio bill. Another is that, even if the bill doesn’t become law, it could pave the way for other, somewhat less extreme measures to pass, seeming reasonable by comparison. For instance, in 2016, John Kasich, the state’s Republican governor, vetoed a bill that would have banned abortion when a fetal heartbeat can be detected, which could have effectively outlawed the procedure as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. But the same day he signed a bill banning abortion at 20 weeks.

Bills like the Ohio total abortion ban seem outrageous, because they are. But if there’s any lesson to learn from them, it’s that the Republican anti-abortion strategy doesn’t stop with one extreme bill. If it’s up to them, they won’t stop until it’s impossible for many or all women in America to make their own choices about whether to access a safe, popular and common form of health care.

The Chicago Police Department has a history of corruption, brutality and torture dating back decades. But the pressure for reform has ratcheted up since 2015, when a police video withheld by the city for more than a year showed an officer executing a black teenager named Laquan McDonald on the street — contradicting the official story that the young man had been killed while menacing officers with a knife. The officer was finally charged with murder — but only after a judge ordered the video released.

A Justice Department investigation has since found that the police routinely used excessive force against black and Latino citizens. The effort to remake this deeply troubled agency entered a new phase last week when a coalition of community groups — one representing families of people killed by police officers — was granted a formal role in a process that could soon produce a sweeping, court-enforceable police reform agreement. By including community groups, the city and the Illinois attorney general — which have primary responsibility for forging the agreement — might overcome deeply held public skepticism about the department’s ability to change.

The Justice Department uncovered a number of cases, like the McDonald shooting, where the department accepted police versions of events that were later undercut by video. The investigation found that the city often failed to investigate cases.

If there was ever a police department that warranted federal supervision through a court-enforceable consent decree, this was it. Mayor Rahm Emanuel initially embraced that idea, but equivocated after the Trump administration made clear that it had no appetite for such agreements. Three parties — two coalitions of community groups and the state attorney general, Lisa Madigan — sued the city, urging it to accept court oversight. As Madigan pointed out, Chicago had never had real police reform because it had never been mandated by an enforceable order.

The city had little choice but to embrace the lawsuit. The two parties are working out details about the use of force, training, supervision, accountability and other areas.

Community groups were included in the process through a memorandum of agreement filed in federal court last week. The agreement lets the community coalition submit ideas as the decree is being drafted, contest the final proposal in court if it finds it wanting and ask the court to enforce the decree if necessary.

Like a consent decree, the memorandum is intended to outlast elected officials who will be gone from office long before reforms have been completed and to protect the decree from incoming officials who might oppose it.

Words on court documents are, of course, just the beginning. But if the agreement works as envisioned, minority communities in Chicago who have borne the brunt of police abuses for decades will play a significant hand in shaping a new model of police accountability that benefits everyone.