Secession without declaration

I walked past the TV in the living room just now, and the chryron on the screen read, “Election deniers in charge of elections in 17 states.”  It came to me that we’ve entered a period when the political polarization of the country has become physical, because a huge section of our nation is uninhabitable by increasing numbers of citizens.

It's in the headlines, and it’s not just about voting rights and the problem of election deniers and the millions of our fellow citizens who continue to think that their substitute god, Donald Trump, didn’t lose the election of 2020 because it was “rigged” somehow.  Here’s a headline for you, from The Guardian: “‘It’s demoralizing’: Idaho abortion ban takes toll on medical providers.”  The story is about “an exodus of OB-GYNs and other medical providers” from Idaho because of the conservative state’s strict abortion ban.  One obstetrician, Dr. Stacy Seyb, whose specialty is high-risk pregnancies, has seen a steep increase in the number of patients he sees because doctors like him have already left the state.  Multiple hospitals in Idaho have closed their maternity wards.  Doctors don’t want to deal with the kinds of patients Seyb sees every day because they might face criminal penalties for giving care that they gave as a matter of course only 11 months ago.  Seyb has seen so many colleagues leave the state, he mourns the loss of their friendship. “It feels like a step backward in improving the health of women and children in the state,” Seyb told The Guardian. He believes that soon in Idaho, “we’ll see a collapse in women’s healthcare.”

Here’s another headline for you, this one from ABC News: “Doctors face tough decision to leave states with abortion bans.”  In the article, a doctor from North Carolina is moving to California because North Carolina’s 12 week abortion ban makes it impossible for her to care for patients who show signs of fetal abnormalities that often don’t occur or can’t be detected until 20 weeks or more of pregnancy.  “It's really put me in a position of moral distress on more than one occasion,” the doctor told ABC.

It isn’t just North Carolina and Idaho.  ABC News interviewed doctors in Texas, Ohio, and Florida who said they were leaving their states because of “the impact abortion bans have had on their ability to practice medicine and provide the best care possible for patients.”  And it isn’t just doctors.  Citizens of states with abortion bans of one kind or another are moving to states with no abortion bans, especially young women.  Students applying for colleges are taking into consideration whether the college they want to attend is in a state that will make it illegal for them to have an abortion if that becomes necessary for them.  The same is true for college graduates looking for jobs.

States with restrictions on voting, many of them race-based, are causing people to think about leaving their states, and in many cases, hometowns they’ve lived in since birth.  They feel as if their states have seceded from them personally, if not from the United States as a whole.  We’re in the early months and days after the Dobbs decision, but if I were to guess, the next census is going to show a reversal of a decades long trend of population growth in the so-called Sun Belt, which includes states with abortion bans and restricted voting like Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.  Northern states with strict laws against abortion like North and South Dakota, Wyoming, and Nebraska – states with populations that are already low and really can’t afford to lose citizens – may see a brain-drain associated with their restrictive laws.

In states that had abortion referendums on the ballot in 2022 -- California, Michigan, Vermont, Kentucky, and Montana – voters upheld maintaining access to abortion.  A measure to amend the constitution in Ohio to allow a right to abortion will be on the ballot next year, as will a constitutional amendment in Maryland.  The way Republicans have reacted to the spate of recent wins by abortion rights supporters in state referendums is to attempt put restrictions on ballot measures or to ban them altogether.  If that starts to happen in red states, it is likely we’ll see more population shifts away from those states, because not only do people not like their rights taken away, such as the right to vote and the right to have an abortion, they absolutely don’t like having their right to put measures to the vote of the populace of a state taken away. 

And of course abortion will be on the ballot in every state in the Union in 2024 when it comes to voting for president, for Congress, and other positions of power and authority within their states. It is possible that there will be a significant defection from Republican candidates across the board, especially by independent and moderate voters.

Red states are seceding from the Union in every way without outright declarations of secession, but more importantly, citizens are seceding from states they no longer feel comfortable living in.  It’s not a Civil War, but it’s the next thing to it, it’s going to change this country for decades to come, and not in ways that will favor the political party that is pushing authoritarian laws on citizens unwilling to live under them.