According to The Washington Post, an anti-abortion organization led by Republican state lawmakers has been exploring “model legislation that would restrict people from crossing state lines for abortions.”
“Just because you jump across a state line doesn’t mean your home state doesn’t have jurisdiction,” Peter Breen, vice president of the Thomas More Society, told The Post. “It’s not a free abortion card when you drive across the state line.”
And in Washington, congressional Republicans have rejected an effort to affirm the right to travel. “Does the child in the womb have the right to travel in their future?” asked Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, objecting to a Democratic bill that would bar restrictions on women traveling to a state to get a legal abortion.
There are few, if any, modern precedents for laws that limit the right of Americans to travel between states. To the extent that there is a history here, it lies in the legal conflicts over both fugitive slaves and free Blacks in the decades before the Civil War.
“As the North began emancipating those slaves whom slaveholders brought into free jurisdictions, slave states strove to strengthen a slaveholding power structure thought to be under northern attack,” the historian Edlie L. Wong writes in “Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel.” Slave states, she writes, enacted increasingly punitive restrictions “that prohibited free blacks from traveling into slave jurisdictions.”
On the other side, slaveholders sought to use the legal system to restrict the movement of enslaved Americans out of the South. If the northern state governments would not recognize the existence of slave property, then federal courts would.
This content was originally published here.
