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Silicon Valley’s Abortion Schemes & Buffett’s Clinton Hire

The Buffetts
Photo: Michael S. Williamson/Getty Images
Theodore Schleifer
July 12, 2022

On Monday evening, a San Francisco OB-GYN named Meg Autry went on Rachel Maddow’s primetime program to float an imaginative, radical, and characteristically Silicon Valley solution to the Supreme Court stripping away abortion access across the South. What if, like Peter Thiel’s plans for a seasteading institute in international waters, donors built an abortion clinic that floated permanently in the federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where women could travel for reproductive healthcare if unable to escape red states by land? The novel project, which Autry has been pitching to philanthropists, has an estimated $20 million initial price tag—for the retrofitted boat, for the staff, and naturally, for maritime lawyers to defend it in court.

It’s easy to caricature Autry’s proposal as a Google-esque moonshot, the sort of pie-in-the-sky thinking that scratches an itch for otherwise powerless philanthropists at a time when they are desperate for ideas to secure abortions in a post-Roe world. There are large parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas where it may be easier to reach an offshore medical facility than traveling hundreds of miles by car. “California has some big donors that are very interested,” Autry told me. “We’re prepared for these big donors, and we’re answering these calls right now.”