September 25, 2024
Politics can be a theatre of the absurd and pointless, often in service of soundbites for campaign ads or fundraising opportunities. What’s happening in New Jersey could take this to a new level of nonsense. According to a news report from The New Jersey Monitor, “A New Jersey lawmaker wants the state to warn residents about restrictive abortion laws elsewhere in the country.
Sen. John Burzichelli (D-Gloucester) on Monday announced legislation requiring the state to maintain a reproductive health travel registry to warn pregnant New Jerseyans who are considering trips out of state.
The bill would identify states as blue, yellow, or red, depending on how restrictive their abortion laws are.
“People should be able to protect their health and safety by making informed decisions before traveling to states that restrict access to reproductive medical care,” Burzichelli said. “They don’t want to be in a place where they are denied vital treatment in a time of need.”
Now, SFLAction has been long critical of abortion tourism – states that turn themselves into hotspots for out-of-state travelers to come and kill their preborn child – but this new proposal is ridiculous.
To put it into perspective, the U.S. Department of State will sometimes issue warnings for American travelers visiting dangerous countries. For example, they might war against traveling to Ukraine because of war, Haiti because of civil unrest, El Salvador for out-of-control crime or gang violence, or other developing nations because of disease or unstable infrastructure.
Yet, an American state now wants to take the same approach with its fellow American states. Why? Because they won’t embrace the radical extremism of other Democrat-run states that allow for abortion without restrictions, or just because they won’t allow abortions to occur inside their borders after conception, a heartbeat, or varying other timeframes.
The most recent example on the issue of abortion was from Canada in 2023 when they issued a similar warning to Canadian travelers. The report in Politico states, “The internal emails reveal Canada was aware it was an ‘outlier’ among ‘most-like-minded’ countries because its official U.S. travel advice was lacking ‘some languages on 2SLGBTQI+ issues.’”
Of course, there’s another way to see it; the residents of pro-life states and “red states” might get a reprieve from the awful tourists from New Jersey and elsewhere.
So maybe this isn’t so bad after all. In fact, maybe the pro-life states should write their own laws warning pregnant mothers about travel to states where they might be coerced into aborting their child.