As we reported yesterday, a Maricopa County Superior Court judge has ruled that the Sheriff’s Office can not force female inmates to “prepay” the costs of bing transported to a clinic to obtain an abortion.

This case is yet one more example of the “let’s take the law into our own hands” practice of so-called pro-life activists.  Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, who completely defied earlier court decisions prohibiting him from denying female inmates access to abortion services decided on his own to institute his own “abortion lawaway plan” for incarcerated women under his supervision by imposing costs and restrictions not required of other inmates in need of health care, nor legally required, for that matter.

The Arizona Republic reports today that:

Judge Robert Oberbillig said he felt “compelled” to add the ruling to an existing injunction against the Sheriff’s Office forbidding it from demanding court orders before taking inmates to abortion clinics.
Sheriff Joe Arpaio appealed that 2005 injunction all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case.
Then his office told another inmate that she would have to pay $300 to $600 in advance to cover the office’s cost of transport and security before being taken to the clinic. If she wanted a waiver for the fee, she could get a court order. The woman was able to obtain funds for the transport.

Let me repeat: The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, yet this “officer of the law” decided to create his own laws and put in place other obstacles to women seeking to exercise a fundamental human right.  As this woman was incarcerated, there is no question as to the fact that this was a forced pregnancy and birth.

Yet astoundingly…or maybe not these days….in response to the recent ACLU suit seeking to stop the pre-payment requirements, Deputy Chief Sheriff Jack MacIntyre told The Republic:

the court should have waited for a new case with a plaintiff who still needed an abortion, “someone whose actual constitutional rights have been affected. This really is judicial activism taken a few steps too far,” he said.

Judicial activism taken too far???

Is this guy kidding?

It is a signal characteristic of the far right that they create and implement their own laws and policies and constraints on individual rights as they see fit–pharmacists who refuse to dispense contraceptives, clinic obstruction that goes well beyond free speech, misinformation spread like wildfire on dry tinder–and yet cry “judicial activism” when things don’t go their way.

And while the right claims to be very very concerned about later term abortions, the very conditions they seek to create have the effect of delaying abortions to later stages of pregnancy.

ACLU lawyer Brigitte Amiri told the court that the three women
who have been plaintiffs over the history of the case had their
abortions delayed seven weeks, four weeks and six weeks, respectively,
which she claimed placed their health in danger and delayed their
constitutional rights.

No kidding.

Representatives for the
Sheriff’s Office stated they would likely appeal the ruling.

Your tax dollars at work, once again.