US Politics

Here’s how Americans can fight back to protect abortion rightsRebecca SolnitA Democratic majority in both houses of Congress could make abortion a right by law, and it’s worth remembering Mexico, Ireland and Argentina are among the countries that recently did so How do you strip away cherished rights? The best strategy is incrementally and undramatically, a death of a thousand cuts. That’s how Republicans were hacking at voting rights until recently, when the rest of us woke up and began to pay attention to the cumulative impact of voter ID laws, the shuttering of polling places, restrictions on voting by mail, and all the rest. Reproductive rights have been under attack for more than 30 years – by rightwing terrorism against abortion providers all through the 1990s and as recently as 2015 in Colorado Springs, but also by a sort of attrition, narrowing down access by shutting clinics, limiting how many weeks pregnant you can be, and other such measures. Overturning Roe v Wade upends all this stealth and incrementalism. Judging by the reaction, it may be exactly the kind of overstep that leads to a backlash. After all, the great majority of Americans support the right to choose.There are many kinds of actions to take in response to this likely overturning of a fundamental right to bodily self-determination and privacy. (And it’s bitterly amusing that a court that wants to set policies reaching into the uteruses of people across the country apparently feels violated by having its own internal workings exposed with this leaked draft opinion.) Direct support for the poor and unfree people who will be the most affected is already under way – and by unfree I mean those who are under the domination of a hostile partner, family, church or community. People have organized to offer travel to clinics for those far from them, access to abortion pills, and other forms of support. But by backlash I mean and am hoping for the kind of backlash Trump’s election and subsequent outrages provoked, the 2018 election that swept the Squad and many other progressives into office and took back the House of Representatives. A Democratic majority in both houses could make abortion a right by law, and it’s worth remembering that Mexico, Ireland and Argentina are among the countries that recently did so.What is striking this time around in the US both about the rightwing agenda and the response is that it is broad enough to build powerful coalitions. The human rights activism of the 1990s was siloed: though the same voters and politicians might support LGBTQ rights and reproductive rights and racial justice, largely separate campaigns were built around each of them, and the common denominators were seldom articulated.This time around – well, as I wrote when the news broke: “First they came for the reproductive rights (Roe v Wade, 1973) and it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a uterus in its ovulatory years, because then they want to come for the marriage rights of same-sex couples (Obergefell v Hodges, 2015), and then the rights of consenting adults of the same gender to have sex with each other (Lawrence v Texas, 2003), and then for the right to birth control (Griswold v Connecticut, 1965). It doesn’t really matter if they’re coming for you, because they’re coming for us.”“Us” these days means pretty much everyone who’s not a straight white Christian man with rightwing politics. They’re building a broad constituency of opposition, and it is up to us to make that their fatal mistake.It’s all connected. If Texas wasn’t suppressing voting rights so effectively, rightwing politicians might not be running the state. If non-Republican turnout can overcome the restrictions, Texas itself – now leading the attacks on abortion rights and trans rights – could elect Beto O’Rourke governor in November and turn Texas Democratic. O’Rourke tweeted today: “If they want states to decide, then we must elect a governor who will protect a woman’s right to abortion.”The right knows that it represents a minority and a shrinking minority as Americans as a whole become more progressive and as the country becomes increasingly non-white. They have made a desperate gamble – to rule via minority power, for the benefit of the few, which is why voter suppression is so crucial a part of their agenda. It cannot be a winning strategy in the long run. But in the short run it can perpetrate immense damage to too many lives and to the climate itself. The revelations should strengthen our resolve to resist by remembering our power and strengthening our alliances, winning elections, and keeping eyes on the prize.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
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Trump still won’t shut up. He’s doing Democrats running for office a huge favorRobert ReichTrump is framing the midterms as a referendum on his continuing influence over the Republican party – even as polls show most voters want him to go away The beginning of May before midterm elections marks the start of primary season and six months of fall campaigning. The conventional view this year is that Democrats will be clobbered in November. Why? Because midterms are usually referendums on a president’s performance, and Biden’s approval ratings are in the cellar.But the conventional view could be wrong because it doesn’t account for the Democrat’s secret sauce, which gives them a fighting chance of keeping one or both chambers: Trump.According to recent polls, Trump’s popularity continues to sink. He is liked by only 38% of Americans and disliked by 46%. (12% are neutral.) And this isn’t your normal “sort of like, sort of dislike” polling. Feelings are intense, as they’ve always been about Trump. Among voters 45 to 64 years old – a group Trump won in 2020, 50% to 49%, according to exit polls – just 39% now view him favorably and 57%, unfavorably. Among voters 65 and older (52% of whom voted for him in 2020 to Biden’s 47) only 44% now see him favorably and more than half (54%) unfavorably. Perhaps most importantly, independents hold him in even lower regard. Just 26% view him favorably; 68% unfavorably.‘JP, right?’ Donald Trump appears to forget name of candidate he endorsedRead moreRepublican lawmakers had hoped – and assumed – Trump would have faded from the scene by now, allowing them to engage in full-throttled attacks on Democrats in the lead-up to the midterms. No such luck. In fact, Trump’s visibility is growing daily.The media is framing this month’s big Republican primaries as all about Trump – which is exactly as Trump wants them framed. But this framing is disastrous for Republicans. The Republican Ohio primary, for example, became a giant proxy battle over who was the Trumpiest candidate. The candidates outdid each other trying to imitate him – railing against undocumented immigrants, coastal elites, “socialism”, and “wokeness”, all the while regurgitating the Big Lie that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election.Whether Trump’s endorsements pay off in wins for his chosen primary candidates is beside the point. By making these races all about him, Trump and the media are casting the midterms as a whole as a referendum on Trump’s continuing power and influence. This is exactly what the Democrats need.June’s televised hearings of the House January 6 committee will likely show in detail how Trump and his White House orchestrated the attack on the US Capitol, and rekindle memories of Trump’s threat to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless Ukrainian president Zelensky came up with dirt on Biden. But the real significance of the hearings won’t show up in Trump’s approval ratings. It will be in the heightened reminders of Trump’s reign in Washington, as well as Trump’s closeness to Putin. The result is an almost certain shift in marginal voters’ preferences toward the Democrats in November.The leaked decision by the supreme court to uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks and reverse Roe v Wade – courtesy of Trump’s three Court nominees – will green-light other Republican states to enact similar or even tighter bans, and spur Republicans in Congress to push for national legislation to bar abortions across the country. Republicans believe this will ignite their base, but it’s more likely to ignite a firestorm among the vast majority of Americans who believe abortion should be legal. Score more Democratic votes.There is also the possibility of criminal trials over Trump’s business and electoral frauds – such as his brazen attempt to change the Georgia vote tally – whose significance will be less about whether Trump is found guilty than additional reminders, in the months before the midterms, of Trump’s brazen lawlessness.Meanwhile, Trump will treat America to more rallies, interviews and barnstorming to convince voters the 2020 election was stolen from him, along with incessant demands that Republican candidates reiterate his Big Lie. More help to Democrats.Somewhere along the line, and also before the midterms, Elon Musk is likely to allow Trump back on Twitter. The move will be bad for America – fueling more racism, xenophobia and division. But it will serve as another memento of how dangerously incendiary Trump and Trumpism continue to be.Accompanying all of this will be the ongoing antics of Trump’s whacky surrogates – Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Steve Bannon, Madison Cawthorn, Trump Junior, et al – who mimic Trump’s bravado, bigotry, divisiveness, and disdain for the law. All are walking billboards for Trumpism’s heinous impact on American life. All will push wavering voters toward Democrats in November.I’m not suggesting Democrats seeking election or re-election center their campaigns around Trump. To the contrary, Democrats need to show voters their continuing commitment to improving voters’ lives. Between now and November, Democrats should enact laws to help Americans afford childcare, cut the costs of prescription drugs, and stop oil companies from price gouging, for example.But Democrats can also count on Americans’ reawakened awareness of the hatefulness and chaos Trump and his Republican enablers have unleashed. And it’s this combination – Democrats scoring some additional victories for average Americans, and Trump and others doing everything possible to recollect his viciousness – that could well reverse conventional wisdom about midterms, and keep Democrats in control.
Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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Is escalation in Ukraine part of the US strategy? Adam ToozeCongress’s extraordinary new Lend-Lease plan commits billions of dollars to the war effort, echoing a second world war strategy In the spring of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Washington DC seems haunted by the ghosts of history. The US Congress has passed the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022 to expedite aid to Ukraine – just as Franklin D Roosevelt did, under the Lend-Lease Act, to the British empire, China and Greece in March 1941.The sums of money being contemplated in Washington are enormous – a total of $47bn, the equivalent of one third of Ukraine’s prewar GDP. If it is approved by Congress, on top of other western aid, it will mean that we are financing nothing less than a total war.Lend-Lease was a wartime intervention. The vast majority of the goods delivered were armaments. Monty’s army in the north African desert fought with Lend-Lease Sherman tanks. After 1942, the great Soviet counter-offensives were carried by Lend-Lease trucks.What made this so extraordinary is that at the moment the Lend-Lease programme was launched in March 1941, the US was not in the war. Lend-Lease was the decisive moment in which the US, while not a combatant, abandoned neutrality. It forced jurists to come up with a new term to describe a stance of “non-belligerence”. In broader terms it marked the emergence of the United States as the hegemon that, for better and for worse, it remains today.However, history is complex – scratch the surface and the ambiguities multiply. What does invoking Lend-Lease really imply for the direction of US policy?Presumably, the narrative is sustained by the promise that a good war fought against an evil regime will be won through the generous sponsorship of the United States. But to complete that narrative arc you have to keep winding the clock forward from Lend-Lease in March to the Atlantic charter in August 1941 and, by December, to Pearl Harbor and the US entry into the war. Providing aid to both China and the British empire, Lend-Lease was a crucial step in turning what was originally a separate Japanese war on China and a German war in Europe into a world war. If the US Congress is now launching a new Lend-Lease programme, the question of whether escalation is part of the plan must come into consideration.Both friends and critics of FDR have always insisted that provoking a war with Nazi Germany was the hidden agenda of Lend-Lease. Most historians today would argue that the president’s intentions were more uncertain. Even after Pearl Harbor it was not obvious that Roosevelt could find a majority to declare war on Germany. As Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman show in their book Hitler’s American Gamble, an extraordinary reconstruction of the fateful week following Pearl Harbor, the immediate reaction to the Japanese attack was to suspend Lend-Lease shipments; London and Moscow were horrified. It was not FDR but Hitler who saved the alliance by declaring war on the United States on the afternoon of 11 December.Then, as now, it was our antagonists who were left with the choice of whether to escalate from economic to military confrontation. Then, as now, the motives of those antagonists are obscure.After the announcement of central bank sanctions on 28 February, Putin rattled his nuclear sabre. If Biden signs a giant Lend-Lease-style aid package into law, who can tell how the Russian president will react? Further questions arise: will Ukraine be given weapons only to expel Putin’s army? Or will we equip Kyiv to strike at Russia itself?In 1941, the main Anglo-American vision was to mount an unprecedented strategic bombing campaign to lay waste to Germany’s cities and “dehouse” its population. With conventional bombs that was a real slog. But part of the quid pro quo for the Anglo-American partnership was the Tizard mission, through which British know-how, including atomic bomb development, was transferred to the US. Behind the sugar-coated narrative of a good war won by the arsenal of democracy lurks the unleashing of an apocalyptic world war.This was the nightmare that haunted Roosevelt’s opponents in America in 1941. They bemoaned the US being dragged into a second terrible conflict and the militarisation of the world order. And this was not a marginal point of view. Whereas the 2022 version of the Lend-Lease Act passed the Senate unanimously, in 1941 a third of the Senate voted against it.Roosevelt knew that the American public was not ready for war. And he hoped that the Lend-Lease Act would allow him to avoid calling for it. This was the sentiment that Churchill played into when he appealed to the US in February 1941 not to enter the war, but to give Britain and its empire the tools “and we will finish the job”. But the very generosity and scale of Lend-Lease, and the commitment that implied, brought into stark relief the fact that the US was paying for others to fight the battle on its behalf.That is precisely its position today. The US and its allies are for very good reasons choosing to back one side in a fight in which they will not directly engage. We do so like FDR, with one eye to the heroic resistance of those holding out against attack and with another eye to the geopolitical balance. If Russia has chosen to smash itself on the rock of Ukraine, if Ukraine is willing to fight, so be it.If that is the plan and Putin allows us to stick to it, it certainly has logic on its side. It is a calculation so cold-blooded that it is little wonder that we want to dress it up in half-remembered histories of the second world war, in which the happy ending is assumed without the necessary sacrifices ever being spelled out.
Adam Tooze is a professor of history at Columbia University
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How soon could US states outlaw abortions if Roe v Wade is overturned?If the draft supreme court decision is not substantially altered it would result in 26 states banning the procedure An unprecedented leak of a draft supreme court decision shows a majority of justices support ending federal protections for abortions in arguably the most controversial court case in generations.‘It will be chaos’: 26 states in US will ban abortion if supreme court ruling standsRead moreWhile the draft could still change, if it is not substantially altered it would result in 26 states immediately or as soon as practicable banning abortion, a sea change in the American legal and political landscape.Why would half of the US outlaw abortion?If the draft decision remains substantially unchanged, it would return the issue of abortion to the states, 26 states stand poised to ban or greatly restrict it. Until the court issues a final decision, the right to abortion is protected under federal law.That right was established in the landmark 1973 case Roe v Wade. Roe found pregnant people have a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy up to the point a fetus can survive outside the womb, roughly considered 24 weeks gestation, and a legal principle called “viability”.graphicThe court’s finding in Roe invalidated dozens of state abortion bans, and made it illegal for states to outlaw abortion before viability. The case that was the subject of the leak on Monday, called Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, considered a Mississippi law that banned abortion at 15 weeks. Even though this is not a total ban, it strikes at the heart of the holding that established a federal right to abortion.Do Americans support abortion?A recent poll found 70% of Americans think abortion is a choice that should be left to a woman and her doctor, and polling over time has shown support for legal abortion has changed little since Roe v Wade was decided. Only a small minority think abortion should be completely illegal.If most Americans support the right to abortion, can Congress intervene?The federal right to abortion hangs on a supreme court decision because, in the nearly 50 years since Roe v Wade was decided, congressional leaders failed to protect the right in statute.While there are Democrat-led efforts to protect abortion, they are stalled in the Senate. That’s because any new statute would need 60 votes to pass, and the 100-member Senate is evenly split. Democrats broadly support abortion rights, while Republicans almost universally oppose efforts to protect abortion rights.Some Democrats have proposed ending the 60-vote rule, called the filibuster, to move legislation on abortion and other key items on Joe Biden agenda’s forward. The president has endorsed such a change.However, two key Democratic senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, oppose such a change. It is unclear how the leaked opinion may change their position. Sinema has said she supports abortion rights, while Manchin has issued conflicting messages.Biden has called on Americans to elect more members of Congress who support reproductive rights in the upcoming midterm elections in November.How soon would abortion become illegal?If the issue of abortion were to return to the states, 26 would immediately or as soon as practicable ban abortion.States would do so through a mix of abortion bans that were invalidated by Roe v Wade but remained on the books, abortion bans “triggered” if Roe is overturned, and laws that limit the gestational age at which a person can terminate a pregnancy. All will probably be the subject of court challenges.For example, an abortion ban enacted in 1931 could go back into effect in Michigan. There, the Republican-led legislature supports the ban, but the state’s Democratic governor is challenging it in state court.In Arkansas, the state legislature has enacted a “trigger” ban. There, the state attorney general would need to certify the central holding of Roe was indeed struck down. The attorney general, a Republican, would likely seek to do so quickly.Trigger bans vary from state to state. While Arkansas requires an attorney general certification, Wyoming requires the governor to certify Roe has been overturned before the law goes into effect five days later.Other bans, once blocked by the courts because of Roe, could also go into effect. Enforcement of a six-week abortion ban in Iowa could go into effect. Because that is just two weeks after a pregnant person might miss a period, and before most people know they are pregnant, it is effectively a near-total ban.In all cases, laws will probably be challenged by reproductive rights groups, and it will take time for cases to move through state and perhaps federal courts. Some experts have estimated it could take between six months to two years for most cases to be settled.What is certain is in that time, Republican-led states would probably seek to push the envelope in terms of criminalizing abortion, and seek to enforce the bans they already have on the books.How will people terminate pregnancies in states where it is banned?Making abortion illegal will not stop abortions. People who live in states where abortion is outlawed but want to terminate a pregnancy may seek to travel to states where it remains legal, or obtain medication to end a pregnancy.Medication abortion can safely end pregnancies up to 10 weeks gestation using a two-pill protocol. However, in states where abortion is illegal, those pills would need to be obtained illicitly, perhaps through through the mail.Patients who want to go to clinics, or whose pregnancy is too far along to be self-managed with medication, would need to travel potentially hundreds of miles to states where abortion is legal. That may be an impossible hurdle for women whose finances are strained or who cannot find childcare.People who live in states where abortion remains legal would also be impacted, because they would face longer wait times for appointments as patients flood into clinics from out-of-state. This could create a secondary wave of travel.Even more broadly, outlawing abortion would substantially undermine care for basic obstetric procedures, such as miscarriage and ectopic pregnancies, in a country which already has among the highest maternal mortality rates in the developed world.Nearly half (44%) of all future obstetricians and gynecologists are trained in states that would outlaw abortion, making it impossible to train all new doctors in the skills needed to manage induced or spontaneous abortion. Even more doctors may be frightened to provide evidence-based care to women who face life-threatening complications, if their condition is not imminently emergent – but may become so.How are liberal states responding?Some Democrat-led states, such as Oregon, are working to protect abortion by providing funds for people who travel to their states to obtain abortions. Others, such as California, are working to build capacity for the thousands of woman who could suddenly find the nearest abortion clinic there.But in all cases, these efforts will be incomplete. Not all people will be able to travel or obtain medication abortions, and may forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.TopicsRoe v WadeAbortionUS politicsHealthexplainersReuse this content More

US politics liveRoe v WadeBiden ‘not prepared’ to support ending Senate filibuster to pass abortion rights law – live
Full story: US shaken to its core by supreme court draft
Chief justice orders inquiry into leak of draft ruling
’It will be chaos’: 26 states will ban abortion if ruling stands
Abortion to become key fight in US midterm elections
LIVE Updated 25m agoKari Paul (now), Richard Luscombe and Alexandra Topping (earlier)Tue 3 May 2022 17.28 EDTFirst published on Tue 3 May 2022 06.14 EDT0Show key events onlyLive feedShow key events onlyFrom More

President Joe Biden on Tuesday blasted the ‘radical’ draft opinion suggesting the supreme court may be be poised to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade case that legalised abortion nationwide, saying it would threaten ‘a whole range of rights’ if it holds. Speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One, Biden said he hoped the draft would not be finalised by justices, contending it reflects a ‘fundamental shift in American jurisprudence’ that threatens other rights such as privacy and marriage

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The Guardian view on overturning Roe v Wade: a human rights catastropheEditorialAccess to safe abortion is vanishing fast. The US supreme court appears poised to deal it the worst blow yet If the supreme court overturns Roe v Wade, as a leaked draft opinion indicates, it will be a crushing blow to the fundamental right of women in the United States to control their own bodies. It is the grim culmination of a crusade by zealots, against the will of the majority, to risk the health, happiness and lives of women. An accelerating erosion of rights and services has already slashed access to abortions, and many feared that Donald Trump’s judicial legacy would be the curtailment or reversal of the 1973 ruling, which effectively legalised abortion nationally. But this text, obtained by Politico and written by Justice Samuel Alito, looks worse than expected. Excoriating Roe v Wade as “egregiously wrong from the start”, it abandons the issue to states – nearly half of which have, or will soon have, laws banning abortion.Such a decision will force women to give birth in a country with high maternal mortality rates and no national paid maternity leave; it will risk lives as they access illegal abortions; it will threaten to criminalise vulnerable women and those who help them (and even those who have miscarriages); it will push yet more children into poverty. Experts warn that states are likely to pass further restrictions targeting those who travel to obtain abortions, or order medication to manage their abortions at home. These days there are new ways for women to obtain abortions, but also new ways to track them, and those supporting them. Overturning the five-decades-old decision could also help to pave the way for a nationwide abortion ban.Moreover, it throws into doubt other established rights, such as gay marriage, which are similarly rooted in the right to privacy. Though it states that it does not do so – arguing that abortion is a unique issue because it involves the right to life or potential life – that is little reassurance. After all, two of the justices backing this decision were confirmed after describing Roe v Wade as “settled law”.This catastrophic decision, assuming it proceeds, both highlights and solidifies the gulf between different Americas. First, the geographical division between states that ban abortion – home to the majority of women – and those that do not. Second, the socioeconomic and racial divide between those whose wealth and connections will allow them to access abortion, and the rest. Finally, it captures the gulf between American public opinion and the institutions that have been captured by the right because the electoral college, the Senate and supreme court are all skewed in favour of Republicans. A poll in January found that only 30% of voters wanted to see Roe v Wade overturned; 69% were opposed.The move is also strikingly out of step with the rest of the world. With a few exceptions – notably Poland – the trend has been overwhelmingly towards the liberalisation of abortion laws, including in countries such as Chile and Ireland. The UN special rapporteur on the right to health, Dr Tlaleng Mofokeng, has warned that overturning abortion rights would set a dangerous precedent, as well as violate international human rights treaties, including the convention against torture.But this decision, of course, can only be fixed at home. Democrats demand the codification of Roe v Wade, knowing that it would require overturning the filibuster, a Senate procedural rule. Calls for supreme court reform will gain ground, with the introduction of term limits a more straightforward move than expanding the court. Beyond the immediate crisis is the greater challenge of fixing a political system now tilted decisively towards Republicans through the systematic pursuit of power, from gerrymandering to voter suppression to control of elections themselves. The right’s victory is the fruit of an orchestrated campaign over decades; the fightback will demand equal ferocity and commitment. This blow could yet help to create some of the momentum required. November’s midterms will be the first test.TopicsRoe v WadeOpinionAbortionUS supreme courtHealthUS politicsWomeneditorialsReuse this content More

‘It will be chaos’: 26 states in US will ban abortion if supreme court ruling standsRegulation would be returned to states where lawmakers in south and midwest have enacted bans in anticipation of court’s decision More than half of US states will outlaw abortion immediately or as soon as practicable, if a leaked draft decision from five supreme court justices remains substantially unchanged.US states could ban people from traveling for abortions, experts warnRead moreThe result would send hundreds of thousands of people in 26 states hostile to abortion elsewhere to terminate a pregnancy – either by traveling hundreds of miles to an abortion clinic or seeking to self-manage abortion through medication from grassroots or illicit groups.Many would also be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.“Abortion is an essential part of reproductive healthcare, and this is going to affect people, even people who think, ‘I will never have an abortion,’” said Dr Nisha Verma, a Darney-Landy fellow with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.On Monday, a draft supreme court decision in arguably the most contentious case in generations was leaked. The case considered whether Mississippi could ban abortion at 15 weeks gestation.The ban is highly significant because it strikes at the heart of US constitutional protections for abortion. The landmark 1973 decision Roe v Wade established the right for pregnant people to terminate a pregnancy up to the point a fetus can survive outside the womb, roughly considered 24 weeks gestation, and a legal principle called “viability”.Two maps, one showing the distance under current law of each US county to the nearest abortion provider. The second map shows the increased distances if Roe is overruled and clinics close.The decision invalidated dozens of state bans, and until the court issues a final decision, prevents states from outlawing abortion before viability. A final decision is expected from the court in late June.The leaked decision in the Mississippi case, called Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, shows five conservative justices are willing to reverse constitutional protections for abortion on the grounds Roe v Wade was wrongly decided.If the decision is not substantially changed by the time a final opinion is issued, abortion regulation would be returned to the states where lawmakers across the south and midwest of the US have enacted bans in anticipation of the court’s decision.“There’s six months to two years before the dust settles,” said Elizabeth Nash, interim associate director of state issues in the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights research organization. “It will be chaos.”In that time, “there will be a lot of fluctuation as states are trying to implement their bans”, some of which are designed to go into effect immediately after a court decision is issued.Such state bans would probably close abortion clinics for nearly half of US women of reproductive age (41%) and increase the average driving distance to an abortion provider from 35 miles to 279, according to predictions from Professor Caitlin Knowles Mayers, an economist at Middlebury College in Vermont who has studied how the reversal of Roe would affect accessibility of abortion. This would probably reduce the rate of abortions by 20% in states that ban the procedure and increase births by 4% (birth estimates are less certain).“As was the case in the pre-Roe era, many women seeking abortions will find a way to get to the states where abortion is legal,” said Myers. “Current empirical evidence suggests that about three-quarters of women in the states that go dark will manage to make such a trip, reaching providers in soon-to-be “border” states like Florida, Illinois, New Mexico and Virginia.” Myer also works as a consultant to the Center for Reproductive Rights and Planned Parenthood Federation of America, one of the nation’s largest networks of abortion providers.Roughly 860,000 induced abortions are performed each year in the US. However, a disproportionate share of the people who seek abortions are low-income or people of color who already have children, making it more difficult to obtain an abortion.“Current evidence on the causal effects of travel distances indicates that about one-quarter of women seeking abortions will not be able to travel to obtain them and that most of these women end up giving birth as a result,” said Myers. More