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      Anger, fear and desperation: people reflect on two years since fall of Roe

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      After Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022, Daphne did not want to leave anything to chance.Abortion is currently legal until 18 weeks in Utah, where the 38-year-old lives – but the state has a 2020 trigger law banning almost all abortion care that is currently under appeal.Daphne knew she didn’t want children so she decided to undergo surgical sterilization in October 2022, to have “peace of mind that [she] physically cannot become pregnant”.“My husband could have gotten a vasectomy for less money and an easier recovery time. However, that doesn’t change the outcome if I were to be assaulted. Living in Utah, I could not and would not risk having to seek an abortion, likely having to leave the state to do so, after an already traumatic event,” Daphne said.The procedure, which was not fully covered by her health insurance, left her around $1,000 out of pocket.“I’m lucky I was able to take these measures, and most cannot,” she added.Almost two years after the supreme court decided there is no constitutional right to abortion in the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, patients have increasingly been forced to travel out of their state in order to access abortion care, while others have carried unwanted pregnancies to term. A study earlier published in January estimated there have been nearly 65,000 pregnancies from rape in states with abortion bans.Interstate travel for abortion care in the US doubled between 2020 and 2023, from one in 10 to almost one in five people leaving their state to access treatment, data from the Guttmacher Institute shows.In states where it is possible, many go to neighboring states. Hanz, a 30-year-old who works as a clinical social worker in an abortion clinic in Illinois, but lives in Missouri, found out they were pregnant in late July 2022, they recalled: “As soon as I saw the two lines on the test, I knew I had more rights standing in Illinois than I would when I got home that night. Abortion rights had already got so much worse in recent years – and then Roe was overturned.” (Missouri passed a trigger law in 2019 that banned abortions except in medical emergencies.)Hanz wanted a child, but felt it wasn’t the right time. “I was really weighing what I wanted and what felt like the right decision. It was very hard for me to terminate the pregnancy, but I had a difficult time growing up and didn’t feel I could bring a child into the world and not be able to give them the quality of life I wanted to,” they said.After spending a month carefully weighing their options, they crossed into Illinois to terminate the pregnancy at the beginning of September at nine weeks.“Making the decision was much harder than having the actual abortion,” Hanz said, adding that fears remain about crossing the border to receive care.“I’ve talked to people who thought they may be arrested when they returned to their home state – you’re not breaking the law by crossing the state,” Hanz said.For others, the introduction of abortion restrictions has meant they are not having children they may have had. Over the last few years, Brie, 41, had been considering having another child – but after Dobbs, she felt she could not undergo the risk of a pregnancy at her age in the state of Texas.“My husband and I had dreamt of a third child. Now, I know it’s definitely not going to happen,” Brie said, adding that she felt she could not risk a pregnancy in Texas, which has a near-total abortion ban.Her medical history adds to her fears: she had a complicated first pregnancy, including experiencing pre-eclampsia, and needed an emergency C-section.“It was scary and dangerous,” she said. “With my history, there’s no way I’d trust having this pregnancy in Texas or the south. I’d have to move.”The loss of the constitutional right to abortion has taken the choice out of her hands, she feels. “Our seven-year-old son is asking for a younger sibling,” Brie said. “I know I’m in a privileged position – we have two wonderful, healthy kids – but I don’t appreciate the state making my family planning decisions.”Abortion is an issue that divides her family. “The last two years have been a very volatile time, even having these discussions within my extended family,” she said. The issue is at odds with other values prized in Texas, she believes: “People here are very concerned with freedom. But there’s this huge conflict here between concern with personal freedom, and the approach to women and fertility. The only acceptable carveout is women that are pregnant.”Every month, she feels anxious about the chance of pregnancy. “It’s constantly on my mind and has been since Dobbs: am I going to be thrown under the bus by my state this month?“You play scenarios out, what if, where would I go, who would I tell. It’s a big wall of separation between who could you trust. I think that’s the goal: to isolate and put women in a position of insecurity.”For some, the fall of Roe was a call to action. Paul, in his mid-50s and living in North Carolina, knew little about abortion rights when he heard the news two years ago.“Up until then, it was not something I cared about – it was obvious that women should have the right to choose,” he said. He had thought abortion was a “settled issue”.When he heard the news, he remembers that he and his wife “stared at each other in silence, and thought, what the hell happens next? It doesn’t affect us personally, but it does affect millions of women. I went in completely blind.”Compelled by a need to take action, by November 2022, Paul had begun volunteering with a group that offered logistical assistance to people requiring abortions, often picking up patients who had travelled from states with more restrictive laws and driving them to clinics.“I’ve driven young teens with their parents who are absolutely petrified; women in their 20s who accept it’s something they have to do, and others to whom it’s no big deal. Everyone has a different set of circumstances – you don’t have to explain your reason to me,” he said.After North Carolina reduced the limit from 20 to 12 weeks in May 2023, the number of patients traveling to the state dwindled until the service disbanded. Now, Paul volunteers most weeks as a clinic escort.“More Saturdays than not, I can be found wearing a rainbow-striped vest, shielding women behind umbrellas as I walk them into the clinic. I have been called a murderer, a baby killer … And I’ll happily do it again next weekend as well,” he said. “A lot of men don’t want to acknowledge that men have a role to play in fixing this – it’s not up to just women.”For Jane*, a woman from Texas in her 60s, the writing was on the wall before Dobbs as she watched restrictions chip away at abortion rights year after year. ​Between 1973 and May 2022, 1,380 abortion restrictions were enacted in states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, with more than 630 of these enacted since 2011.Jane became involved in direct action in 2018, driving people in need of abortion to appointments: “I became involved because I realised pro-choice is just that – it doesn’t address access. It’s a limited way at looking at reproductive justice. Seeing the impact of restrictions on abortion, I felt that to do nothing is to be complicit.”After Texas passed a bill outlawing abortion following the detection of cardiac activity – usually around six weeks – in 2021, Jane was galvanized to take further action. Toward the end of that year, she reached out to Las Libres, a Mexican network that mails pills for self-managed medical abortion.“The inhumanity of restrictions just raised my temperature and made me increasingly angry and willing to stick my neck out and do something to help,” she said. “Dobbs was the logical next step after increasing regulations permitted under Roe. [Access] was very effectively overturned before Dobbs.”Jane has been packaging and posting pills to states with abortion bans for the last two years.“It is empowering and effective to fight back,” Jane said. “Perhaps I am in denial about my own risk, but I have had a good life, I enjoy relative financial stability in my retirement, and who better than me to be in a position to fight back? Small actions matter, and allow me to maintain hope.”
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      How Many Abortion Seekers Are Traveling to California

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      After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and some states banned abortions altogether, many Americans began crossing state lines to get one.The New York TimesAfter the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and some states, mainly in the South, banned abortions altogether, many Americans began crossing state lines to get one.In 2023, the first full year after Roe was reversed, the number of patients traveling out of state for an abortion or to get abortion pills was double the figure from 2019, according to new data from the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. The institute said that nearly one-fifth of all recorded abortions involved interstate travel. The New York Times recently captured that trend in a fascinating set of maps.“We’re having people travel hundreds or thousands of miles for a procedure that typically takes less than 10 minutes and can be done in a doctor’s office setting,” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder of Whole Woman’s Health, which runs clinics in Maryland, Minnesota, New Mexico and Virginia. “Nobody does that for any other medical procedure.”California has positioned itself as a safe haven for abortion seekers.In the past two years, state legislators in Sacramento have passed several laws fortifying access to abortion. The state Constitution was amended to guarantee the right to abortion and contraception. California, along with Oregon and Washington, officially declared that abortion patients and providers would be protected from the legal reach of other states.Just last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill temporarily allowing Arizona abortion providers to travel to California to provide abortions to their Arizona patients. The move was in response to a possible reinstatement of a 160-year-old near-total ban on abortions in Arizona, through what Newsom called “oppressive and dangerous attacks on women.” (The Arizona Legislature ultimately blocked the ban from going back into effect.)“California stands ready to protect reproductive freedom,” the governor said at the time.The data from Guttmacher shows that 179,610 abortions were performed in California in 2023, which is 19 percent more than in 2019. About 4 percent of the 2023 abortions — or 7,184 — were for patients who don’t live in California.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Democrats move to repeal 1873 law they say could pave way for national abortion ban

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      Democrats introduced legislation on Thursday to repeal a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bans mailing abortion-related materials, amid growing worries that anti-abortion activists will use the law to implement a federal abortion ban.The bill to repeal the Comstock Act was introduced by the Minnesota Democratic senator Tina Smith, whose office provided a draft copy of the legislation to the Guardian. The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto also back the bill, according to the Washington Post, which first reported the news of Smith’s plans. Companion legislation was also set to be introduced in the House.“We have to see that these anti-choice extremists are intending to misapply the Comstock Act,” Smith said in an interview. “And so our job is to draw attention to that, and to do everything that we can to stop them.”Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act is named after the anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock and, in its original iteration, broadly banned people from using the mail to send anything “obscene, lewd or lascivious”, including “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion”. In the 151 years since its enactment, legal rulings and congressional action narrowed the scope of the Comstock Act. For years, legal experts regarded it as a dead letter, especially when Roe v Wade established the constitutional right to an abortion.But after the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022, some anti-abortion activists started arguing that the Comstock Act’s prohibition against mailing abortion-related materials remained good law. Project 2025, a playbook written by the influential thinktank the Heritage Foundation, recommends that a future conservative presidential administration use the Comstock Act to block the mailing of abortion pills. Other activists have gone even further, arguing that the Comstock Act can outlaw the mailing of all abortion-related materials.Because abortion clinics rely on the mail for the drugs and tools they need to do their work, such an interpretation of the Comstock Act would be a de facto ban on all abortion.The Biden administration has issued guidance arguing that someone only violates the Comstock Act if the sender intends for abortion-related materials “to be used unlawfully”. However, although Joe Biden has focused his re-election campaign on reproductive rights, he has steered clear of addressing the potential return of the Comstock Act.Smith said that it “seems impossible” that her repeal bill will garner the 60 votes necessary to advance legislation in the Senate. Republicans recently stymied Democratic efforts to establish federal rights to contraception and in vitro fertilization.But Smith views her bill as a chance to raise awareness of the nationwide consequences of a Comstock Act revival, particularly among voters living in states where abortion rights are currently protected.“You talk to somebody in Minnesota or Nevada or Pennsylvania, places where people feel secure that they have control over their own decisions and their own potential to decide for themselves about abortion – and then come to find out that Donald Trump has a plan to take away that control that you have, even without a vote or an act of Congress,” Smith said. “It makes it much more real, what the difference is and what the contrast is, what the choices are for you even in those states where state law protects you. That could all change.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a New York Times April op-ed where she first aired her plans to repeal the Comstock Act, Smith suggested that she planned to introduce the legislation once the supreme court ruled on a case involving access to mifepristone, one of the two drugs typically used in US medication abortions and a top target of anti-abortion activists. In a unanimous opinion earlier this month, the supreme court ruled on technical grounds to let access to mifepristone remain unchanged for now. Although rightwing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito brought up the Comstock Act during oral arguments in the case, neither the majority opinion nor a concurrence by Thomas ultimately mentioned the anti-obscenity law.“The court, in its decision, left the door wide open for future challenges based on Comstock,” Smith said, adding: “There was nothing in the court’s decision that gave me any sense of security.” More

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      It’s Unanimous: In the Senate, Neither Party Consents to the Other’s Ideas

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      Democrats sought to quickly reinstate a ban on gun bump stocks after a Supreme Court ruling. It was the latest Senate floor fight to end in a predictable stalemate.In the Senate, the term “U.C.” stands for “unanimous consent” — usually verbal shorthand for an agreement by all senators to quickly take up and pass a bill. But with the November elections just months away, it might as well stand for: “You see? Our political opponents are dead wrong on this issue.”With the focus of the political universe turning to the upcoming fight for control of Congress and the White House, lawmakers are spending most of their time not on real legislative work but in trying to corner their rivals on hot-button issues.On the Senate floor in recent days, those efforts have often taken the form of unanimous consent requests that are designed to fail, thus spotlighting one party or another’s refusal to agree to a policy proposal.Such procedural skirmishes provide a shortcut to Senate showdowns on wedge issues or subjects on which one party believes it has the upper hand. That was the case on Tuesday, when Democrats attempted to quickly bring up and pass a bill that would outlaw gun bump stocks after the Supreme Court last week struck down a ban on the devices.Like similar recent maneuvers, Democrats knew the U.C. attempt would fail because of a Republican objection, but they tried anyway in a bid to give themselves a talking point against the G.O.P.“What today’s bill does is return things to the status quo set by Donald Trump, saying bump stocks are dangerous and should be prohibited,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said on Tuesday. “Senate Republicans by and large supported Donald Trump’s ban on bump stocks back then, so they should support this bill today.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden’s Health Secretary Goes West With a Focus on Reproductive Rights

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      Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services, said on Friday that he would begin a national tour next week to promote the Biden administration’s efforts to preserve and expand access to abortion.The tour, which Mr. Becerra will begin on Tuesday in Washington, will take him to states across the West, including Arizona, California, Nevada and New Mexico. Mr. Becerra plans to attend round-table discussions with health care providers, family-planning groups and families who have been affected by restrictive state abortion laws.In an interview, Mr. Becerra said he would be traveling with good news after the Supreme Court this week unanimously rejected a bid to sharply curtail access to mifepristone, a widely available abortion pill. But, he added, his message would be no less urgent.“A lot of women are still confused — can they get an abortion?” he said, describing the tour as way to ensure that people have clear and accurate information. “How long are they able to do so? Who can provide it? We want women to know that women still have a lot of rights.”Mr. Becerra’s tour is not on behalf of President Biden’s re-election campaign. But he will be talking about reproductive rights in states with key races on the ballot in November.Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the issue has become central to elections, and Democrats are betting abortion rights will help them drive voters to the polls. In Southwestern swing states with large Latino populations, like Arizona and Nevada, they are looking to motivate Latina voters in particular.Former President Donald J. Trump has said abortion access should be left to the states, and several Republican candidates in swing-state races have aligned himself with him, avoiding mention of a national ban and laying bare the party’s rift over the issue.The White House has given Mr. Becerra the task of helping to protect access to reproductive care since Democrats and reproductive rights advocates first pressured Mr. Biden to act in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. In 2022, his agency pledged to work with the Justice Department to ensure access to abortion pills. He has been meeting with patients and providers across the country since then, including stops at Planned Parenthood clinics in St. Louis and Minneapolis.In the interview on Friday, Mr. Becerra said that many women across the country were still being turned away from emergency rooms, had been forced to go to court to plead for care or had needed to travel hundreds of miles for treatment. Antiabortion activists are still seeking to curb access to contraception and fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization.“So many people are confused or afraid right now, and it is tough to make good decisions when you are confused or afraid,” he said. More

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      One Week That Revealed the Struggles of the Anti-Abortion Movement

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      The movement looks for a path forward: “Is the goal the absolute abolition of abortion in our nation?”The Southern Baptist Convention voted to condemn in vitro fertilization at its annual meeting in Indianapolis this week, over the objections of some members.Conservative lawyers pushing to sharply restrict medication abortion lost a major case at the Supreme Court, after pursuing a strategy that many of their allies thought was an overreach.Former president Donald J. Trump told Republicans in a closed-door meeting to stop talking about abortion bans limiting the procedure at certain numbers of weeks. In one chaotic week, the anti-abortion movement showed how major players are pulling in various directions and struggling to find a clear path forward two years after their victory of overturning Roe v. Wade.The divisions start at the most fundamental level of whether to even keep pushing to end abortion or to move on to other areas of reproductive health, like fertility treatments. A movement that once marched nearly in lock step finds itself mired in infighting and unable to settle on a basic agenda.In some cases, hard-liners are seizing the reins, rejecting the incremental strategy that made their movement successful in overturning Roe. Other abortion opponents are backing away, sensing the political volatility of the moment.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Baptists and the G.O.P. Took Different Paths on I.V.F.

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      The vote at the Southern Baptist Convention raising alarms about in vitro fertilization began with two conservatives at a seminary in Kentucky.About a month after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos were to be considered children under the law, Andrew T. Walker, an ethicist at a Southern Baptist seminary in Kentucky, called a friend with an idea: to spread Alabama’s argument beyond Alabama.The Alabama ruling, which had threatened access to in vitro fertilization and other reproductive services in the state, caught many Americans, including conservatives, off guard. The idea that fertility treatments could be morally and legally questionable rattled many anti-abortion voters who had used such procedures to expand their families. And it further frayed the increasingly tense alliance between the anti-abortion movement and the Republican Party, which saw political peril in going after I.V.F. Four months later, Dr. Walker succeeded. On Wednesday, the Southern Baptist Convention, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, voted to condemn the use of reproductive technologies like I.V.F. that end in the destruction of “frozen embryonic human beings.” The resolution passed by what appeared to be the overwhelming majority of Baptists that gathered in Indianapolis for their annual meeting. The moment was especially striking given that after the Alabama ruling earlier this year, Republican leaders quickly tried to signal to their base that they supported I.V.F., an extraordinarily popular procedure widely used by Christians and non-Christians alike.But the vote showed the power of wide-reaching theological and moral arguments about human life and reproduction, and that anti-abortion Christians in the denomination’s more than 45,000 churches, many of whose congregants have relied on I.V.F., may be open to more sweeping moves against the procedure.Dr. Walker, 39, first publicly opposed in vitro fertilization five years ago, co-writing an article titled “Breaking Evangelicalism’s Silence on IVF” for the website of the evangelical organization the Gospel Coalition, which ran a companion essay by a high-profile theologian defending the procedure.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Is Mifepristone and How Is It Used?

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      Mifepristone is one of two drugs used in a medication abortion. It is combined with a second drug, misoprostol, to end a pregnancy.Mifepristone blocks a hormone called progesterone that is necessary for a pregnancy to continue. Misoprostol brings on uterine contractions, causing the body to expel the pregnancy as in a miscarriage.In U.S. studies, the combination of these pills causes a complete abortion in more than 99 percent of patients, and is as safe as an abortion procedure administered by a doctor in a clinic. A variety of research has found that medication abortion has low rates of adverse events, and a study published in The Lancet in 2022 found that patients are generally satisfied with it.Growing evidence from outside the United States suggests that abortion pills are safe even among women who do not have a doctor to advise them.While the only F.D.A.-approved method in the United States is to use both pills, misoprostol can also end a pregnancy when used alone, and its availability was not affected by the ruling on mifepristone. Misoprostol — which is around 80 percent effective on its own, although it sometimes has to be taken more than once — is also prescribed to treat ulcers, and is available over the counter in many countries, including Mexico.The Food and Drug Administration has approved medication abortion for up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, while World Health Organization guidelines say it can be used up to 12 weeks at home and after 12 weeks in a medical office. The vast majority of abortions occur before 12 weeks.More than half of people who get legal abortions in the United States — and three-quarters in Europe — use medication abortion. During the Covid-19 pandemic, it became more common because patients wanted to avoid going to clinics in person, and a change in federal regulation made it easier for them to get prescriptions via telemedicine and to fill them in a pharmacy.Since nearly two dozen states banned or restricted abortion following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, some women in those states have turned to mail-order abortion pills instead. Clinicians in several states have mailed pills into states with bans, protected by so-called shield laws. And foreign nonprofit groups and entrepreneurs have shipped some women pills from overseas.The court’s decision does not influence the availability of the overseas pills, which operate outside the bounds of the legal U.S. health care system. More