Texas abortion ban takes a page out of Cuba’s communist playbook. Is this what Florida wants? | Editorial

Vigilantes video recording detractors, standing outside buildings with flashlights to identify the people they will go after. People outing strangers and acquaintances alike for violating rules created by ideologues in control of government.

Turning private citizens into watchdogs willing to tell on each other for financial rewards often works better than government itself doing the dirty work. It’s Texas’ new approach to banning abortion, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to block this atrocity has emboldened other states to consider their own bans. Of course, Florida, where former state House Speaker Jose Oliva of Miami once referred to pregnant women as “host bodies,” is among them.

The Texas law is to be enforced by citizens, who can sue for at least $10,000 people they say helped a woman get an abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy. This includes her family members, friends and neighbors, counselors, pastors, healthcare providers — even the Uber driver who drops a woman at a Planned Parenthood office.

The tactic of turning neighbors into informants should remind many in Miami-Dade of Communist Cuba’s famed neighborhood spy network. On the island 90 miles away, informing to the regime of your neighbors’ activities is the country’s most successful form of repression, introduced by Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban Revolution.

The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution network in Cuba, known as “el comité,” was an ingenious move by Castro to keep tabs on everyone. Its real purpose remains to reveal and then suppress all forms of opposition to the Communist dictatorship.

The tactics of Texas lawmakers and the Cuban regime aren’t exactly the same, of course. In Cuba, people are denied due process, and the government uses local vigilantes to identify, arrest and torture dissidents.

Here’s what makes it possible: On every block in Cuba, in every building, in every neighborhood, there are loyal comité members ready to turn in those who they perceive are betraying the revolution. The CDRs remain an integral part of Cuba’s police state machine.

Why does Cristina down the street receive so many calls from Miami? A comité member will find out and pass the information to the government.

Ricardo from the next block is acting suspiciously. Is it because he’s involved in the latest anti-government street rallies? Headquarters should know.

In Texas, private citizens have the power to pursue civil complaints in court, and the defendants have the right to be heard before a judge and hire a lawyer. But that’s the best that can be said about it in relation to Cuba.

The Texas law already has empowered anti-abortion activists to act like Cuban informants. The group Texas Right to Life created a website where people can submit anonymous tips against those allegedly obtaining or facilitating abortions, though the website was taken down after its hosting platform said it violated the company’s policies.

The administrator of four Texas clinics told the Los Angeles Times that abortion opponents routinely record patients and make note of staff members’ name tags and license plates. Those employees are “terrified of being sued,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, of Whole Woman’s Health. At other facilities, anti-abortion protesters shine flashing lights on parking lots as patients enter and leave.

That’s the point of this law: to expose, terrify, shame and intimidate healthcare providers and others. Paying $10,000 in damages would be enough to shut down small clinics that operate on shoestring budgets or to scare people away from giving a woman a ride to get a procedure she has the constitutional right to obtain.

Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson told WFLA in Tampa last week that lawmakers are “already working on” a so-called “heartbeat bill” that bans abortions after about six weeks after conception and when most women don’t know they’re pregnant. It’s unclear whether Florida lawmakers would also allow private citizens to rat on and sue abortion providers and others. It would be a rich irony, however, if that became law in this state, where Republican candidates stormed into elected office last year by accusing Democratic rivals of being “socialists” and “communists” for, say, supporting quality healthcare for all.

It’s also unclear whether lawmakers would adopt the Texas law’s most cruel provision: forcing victims of rape or incest to carry a resulting pregnancy to term.

We wouldn’t put it past our lawmakers to do so, not after they proved the damage they can inflict in their two-month-long legislative session this year: a crack down on mail voting, a vaguely worded “anti-riot” law and a ban on cruise lines and other businesses requiring customers’ proof of COVID-19 vaccination.

For years, Florida has tried to chip away at the federal precedent that grants the right to an abortion up to viability, or about 24 weeks into a pregnancy. But, for the most part, lawmakers have been unsuccessful. The Florida Supreme Court also ruled in favor of abortion rights in 1989.

But the Texas ban offers anti-abortion lawmakers a work-around to these legal precedents by putting private citizens in charge of enforcing the law instead of government authorities. Conservative activists have hailed it as a new strategy. The makeup of the Florida Supreme Court has also changed since 1989, especially after Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed three conservative justices after he took office in 2019.

We can’t deny abortion opponents have been clever in pursuing ways to skirt what should’ve been a foregone conclusion that women are entitled to reproductive rights. They are very close to finally overturning those rights, especially if the U.S. Supreme Court upholds a Mississippi law banning abortions after 15 weeks this fall.

Ultimately their “cleverness,” would not end abortions. It would just end safe abortions.

This story was originally published September 8, 2021 at 2:41 PM.