By the Time She Makes Albuquerque . . .

 . . . she'll be a criminal in Texas.

Kate Cox is a woman in Texas who has sought a legal abortion there to preserve her uterine viability (I'm hoping I am saying that right) and so she doesn't have to bear a baby that will either be stillborn or die shortly after birth, given the baby's rare genetic condition.  Carrying the baby to term might render her infertile, and she wants more children in addition to the two she and her husband have.

That was good enough for a Texas court, but not good enough for Texas attorney general and all-around scumbag Ken Paxton, who threatened to prosecute her if she went ahead with the abortion, without regard to what the lower court said, and the state Supreme Court has also shown disregard for what what the lower court said, overturning that ruling last night and having the final say.  The joke's on them - Mrs. Cox has fled the state and gone for an abortion in a state where it's legal, though that means she can still be prosecuted as a legal resident of Texas under state law.  Now, I'm not certain about this, but I believe her husband and likely be charged as an accessory to a crime.

Given Mrs. Cox's condition, the most likely state she went to for the procedure is New Mexico, the only state that borders Texas in which abortion is still legal, but she could have easily gone to Kansas (which codified abortion as a right in its state constitution) or California.  Note that she has not made public her destination.  That of course, is to be expected, since states with strict abortion bans can be expected to deal with runaway patients most severely.  Abortion rights activists are going to have to start an underground highway to ferry patients to clinics in states where the procedure is legal.  But not an underground railroad - you know how Americans these days think passenger rail is a waste of time.

All right, I am showing my gallows humor there, but this is indeed serious.  Women are not only being told how to manage or care for their own bodies, they're being restricted, like slaves in the antebellum era, from going anywhere they please - when they are are pregnant and in need of medical care at that.  If state governments can place travel restrictions on pregnant women who decide on an abortion for health reasons, what's to stop the U.S. government under Trump 47 from doing the same - or, for that matter, what's to stop Trump as President from restricting travel outside the United States . . . because to allow anyone to leave and possibly not come back would only prove that he had not made America great again and he can't have that?  

Trump won't just build border walls to keep people out - he'll build them to keep people in.  Don't be surprised if, some time, in some future with another Trump administration, you reach the Canadian border on the 49th parallel on your way to freedom and confront something like this.

Remember the Berlin Wall?  Remember what happened to East Berliners who tried to scale it to escape the German "Democratic" Republic's "worker's paradise?"