Roe v Wade

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      ‘A generational struggle’: abortion rights pioneer offers insights to the post-Roe US

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      The battle to bring back the federal right to abortion in the US hinges on much more than just the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and winning will require proponents to be as organized and steadfast as their opponents, at least as one of the reproductive freedom movement’s most veteran voices sees it.Invoking scenes that played out all across the country after the supreme court’s Dobbs decision eliminated nationwide abortion rights, Merle Hoffman recently said: “It looks like thousands of people marching in the streets all over the country … [But] you can’t just do one action.“The pressure has to go, and go, and go.”Hoffman, 77, positioned herself at the forefront of the American reproductive freedom movement decades ago, when she helped open one of the US’s first abortion centers in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens in New York City two years before the supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision established the national right to the procedure.Hoffman recently spoke to the Guardian about how Democratic control of the White House and one of the congressional chambers has offered little resistance to Republican command of the judiciary, which allowed the supreme court’s conservative majority to overturn Roe.She believes that gaining back the ground lost since Dobbs was handed down in the summer of 2022 requires more than just voting for pro-abortion candidates.“That’s one aspect, yes,” Hoffman said.But, given that the federal levers of power are divided among the two political parties, and the procedural blocks that one branch of government can leverage on another, “don’t assume – please don’t assume – that as soon as these people get into office, they’re going to put Roe v Wade right back,” Hoffman said.“They can’t.”Hoffman highlighted how little federal-level Democrats had done to protect abortion access with Joe Biden in the White House and a slim majority in the Senate since Roe v Wade was overturned.Biden has been unwilling to pursue an expansion of the nine-seat supreme court to add liberals to the bench and better balance its 6-3 conservative majority. Meanwhile, with control of the House and Senate split by thin margins, Congress has not been able to enact national protections for reproductive rights through legislation, creating a confusing checkerboard where abortion is nearly completely banned in 14 states.Hoffman had a hand in founding Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights shortly before Roe fell, with the aim of galvanizing popular opposition to abortion restrictions.She said the thousands who participated in mass street protests in cities across the US – including Washington DC, New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago – then and since have had the correct approach. And she complimented the energy younger advocates brought in organizing those events and similar, unrelated ones when unrest over Roe’s fall was at its highest.But Hoffman said such demonstrations have all but vanished in terms of size and intensity as other major events, including the Israel-Gaza war that erupted in October, have taken up the progressive left’s attention.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHoffman acknowledged that some believe street protests and walkouts in schools and workplaces have a limited effect within the current structure of power in the US. But she said she steadfastly believed enough actions like that, sustained over an adequate amount of time, would convince those in power to side with the majority of Americans who favor abortion rights over opposing special interests.She said reproductive rights supporters could also do more to advocate for the movement by contributing time or money to efforts aimed at improving healthcare for women who do want to have children.Meanwhile, Hoffman said, women who have had abortions but have chosen to remain silent because of the social stigma could help break that stigma by speaking up about their experiences and decisions.She likened it to LGBTQ+ people “coming out” about their sexualities, and how supportive that can be to members of their communities who feel shame and guilt in silence.“There’s an abortion closet,” Hoffman said. “The first thing you can do is come out.”Hoffman said it was perhaps most important to realize that truly taking back what was lost to Dobbs would take decades. That’s how long it took opponents of reproductive rights – as well as like-minded judges and lawmakers – to plot the seeds for the historic decision to end the right to abortion in the US.“This is a generational struggle,” said Hoffman, echoing the central point in her recent book Choices: A Post-Roe Abortion Rights Manifesto. “This is going to pass from me to the next generation to the next generation.“The opposition is extremely, extremely … relentless. They’re persistent, they’re creative – and they won’t stop until there is no abortion in this country.” More

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      Democrats won Virginia on abortion. Can it also win them the White House?

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      Days before Josh Cole won his toss-up race, the Democratic candidate for Virginia’s house of delegates predicted that his party would perform well on election day, largely because the issue of abortion had motivated many voters to turn out at the polls.“There are people who are absolutely passionate about reproductive freedom and making sure that an abortion ban doesn’t come to Virginia,” Cole said.Four days later, Cole was proven right, defeating the Republican candidate Lee Peters to represent house district 65 in Richmond, the capital of Virginia. Cole’s victory reflected Virginia Democrats’ broader success on election day, as the party flipped control of the house of delegates and maintained their majority in the state senate.Democrats’ wins in Virginia may now offer some helpful lessons for the party heading into a crucial presidential election. A year and a half after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, abortion continues to weigh heavily on voters’ minds, helping to lift Democrats’ prospects at the polls. Even as Biden remains unpopular and voters express pessimism about the state of the economy, Republicans have struggled to translate that dissatisfaction into electoral success.House district 65 in particular represents a fascinating example of how Republicans failed to win the support of swing voters who helped elect Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia governor, two years earlier. The district, which was newly redrawn following the 2020 census, lies roughly halfway between Washington and Richmond and encompasses the small city of Fredericksburg, as well as parts of Stafford and Spotsylvania counties.The battleground district supported Biden by 11.7 points in 2020, according to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. Just one year later, the district went for Youngkin by 2.8 points. Both parties had targeted the seat, with Youngkin himself appearing alongside Peters at a get out the vote rally in Fredericksburg the day before polls closed.Republicans had hoped Peters’ biography as a sheriff’s captain and a former marine would help him defeat Cole, a local pastor and former delegate who narrowly lost his re-election race in 2021. But Cole ultimately won the seat by 6 points.“This was in no way a predetermined result. It’s not a solid blue district at all. It was a winnable one [for Republicans],” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. “And probably among the house of delegates districts, it best represents what went wrong for the Republicans when it should have been a better year for them in the legislative races.”Democrats credit their success in the district and elsewhere to one issue: abortion. Democrats consistently reminded voters of Virginia’s status as the last remaining state in the US south without severe restrictions on the procedure, warning that Republicans would enact an abortion ban if they took full control of the legislature.Those warnings appeared to resonate with Virginians; according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted in October, 60% of voters in the state said abortion was a “very important” factor in their election decisions. More than half of Virginia voters, 51%, said they trusted Democrats more when it came to handling abortion policies, while 34% said the same of Republicans.In this year’s race, Cole kept relentless attention on the issue, citing his support for abortion rights in nearly all of his ads and mailers while attacking Peters over his “anti-choice extremism”.“It was very interesting because it seemed as if people were showing up on one issue,” Cole said after election day. “Of course, we did talk about kitchen-table issues when we’re on the doors and different things like that, but our message was simple. We need to trust women and we need to protect a woman’s right to choose and we need to make sure that the government doesn’t interfere with that.”Virginia Republicans were clearly aware that their stance on abortion could become a liability in the legislative races, particularly after the party’s disappointing performance in the 2022 midterms. To address voters’ potential concerns over abortion, Youngkin chose to deploy a new and untested messaging tactic. He proposed a “reasonable 15-week limit” on the procedure, rejecting the label of an abortion “ban” and instead accusing Democrats of being out of step with voters on the issue.“Most people believe that abortion at the moment of birth is wrong, far beyond any reasonable limit. Not Virginia Democrats,” the narrator said in one Republican ad. “They fought to make late-term abortions the rule, not the exception.”Republicans also attempted to downplay the significance of abortion in the legislative races, insisting Virginia voters were more focused on other issues. Peters himself made this argument at a September debate, saying, “Everybody is not concerned or worried about women’s rights, even though there are many, many women who are. Some people worry about public safety. Some people worry about their schools.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut in the end, Virginia Republicans’ efforts to redefine and minimize the abortion debate were unsuccessful. Democrats maintained a majority of 21-19 in the Virginia senate while flipping control of the house of delegates with a majority of 51-49.“They tested some new messages around this issue – with the intention of getting to the same result, which was an abortion ban. And voters just outright rejected them,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “Republicans are still scratching their head on how to talk about an issue that voters don’t want.”Even fellow Republicans have acknowledged that abortion has become a persistent problem for the party’s electoral prospects. Bill Bolling, a Republican and the former lieutenant governor of Virginia, attributed the party’s losses to three factors: abortion, Donald Trump and a lack of a clear policy vision.“It really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to quickly analyze why Republicans did not perform better at the polls,” Bolling wrote last month. “Democrats successfully argued that Republicans wanted to ‘ban abortion’ in Virginia. While this argument was certainly not truthful, it was effective, especially with suburban women who have grown increasingly Democratic in their voting patterns in recent years.”In Cole’s view, his message to voters spread beyond abortion access to encompass other rights, allowing his campaign to embrace a central theme of safeguarding fundamental freedoms.“This election was about protecting rights, whether it’s the right to education, women’s rights, the right to live safely in the streets, or whatever have you. This race was about rights,” Cole said. “[Voters] understood that we definitely have to have people fighting for us on every level, who are looking out for us and our rights.”That theme was similarly present in the messaging of other Democratic candidates in Virginia, Williams said. She suggested that their success could offer a framework for candidates running next year, when Democrats will be fighting to hold the White House and the Senate and flip control of the House of Representatives.“The way that that [message] shows up in an individual community or state may look different. One community may gravitate much more towards having good safe schools and a planet to live on,” Williams said. “But that arc is still true – that fundamental freedoms matter and voters want to see their freedoms protected and not rolled back.”For Republicans, the results in Virginia present the latest in a series of warning signs about how the party is suffering because of its stance on abortion. Youngkin’s failure to take control of the legislature may signal that Republicans must find a way to shift the conversation away from abortion, although that strategy risks angering their rightwing base.“It seems to me that Republicans have just constantly squandered whatever advantage that they have by focusing on divisive social issues where the voters are not aligning with their position,” Rozell said. “So they need to find a way out of that trap that they’ve made for themselves. Otherwise, they’re going to keep losing winnable districts.” More

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      An ‘abortion abolitionist’ became an Oklahoma senator. The fringe is celebrating its big victory

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      When Dusty Deevers won his race to become an Oklahoma state senator on Tuesday night, he wasted no time in making sure his new constituents knew what he stood for.“Here in Oklahoma, it’s time to abolish abortion, abolish pornography, abolish the state income tax and give power and equal representation back to the people!” the Republican posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.Deevers’ use of the term “abolish abortion” is no mere rhetorical flourish. On his campaign website, Deevers has identified himself as an “abortion abolitionist” – an adherent of a hardline, fringe segment of the anti-abortion movement that, in Oklahoma and elsewhere, is growing in the wake of the fall of Roe v Wade.Opposition to abortion is rooted in the belief that fetuses are people, worthy of rights and protections. But the mainstream “pro-life” movement posits that abortion patients should not be punished, since they are seen as the bamboozled victims of nefarious doctors and the “abortion industry”. Typically, abortion bans target abortion providers, not patients.Abortion “abolitionists,” on the other hand, hold what they believe to be a more ideologically consistent stance: if a fetus is a person, then abortion is tantamount to murder. And patients should be punished accordingly.Roe’s overturning has made a broader range of anti-abortion ideas look acceptable, as well as cast a spotlight on the contradictions and limits in current anti-abortion law, said Mary Ziegler, a University of California, Davis School of Law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. In turn, that’s emboldened the abolitionists.“It’s not an easy question about how you can be consistent and exempt women from punishment,” Ziegler said. The abolitionists, she says, are essentially saying: “‘We’re the pragmatists, because if a lot of abortions are self-managed, or involve medical practitioners from out of state or even out of the US altogether, how do you propose meaningfully enforcing [bans] if you’re not going to punish women or other pregnant folks?“They’ve also been hated because people who are not opposed to abortion didn’t know that they existed,” Ziegler added. “And people who are opposed to abortion are not happy that people discovered that they existed.”Over the last several years, “abortion abolitionists” and their ideology have quietly amassed popularity in churches, state legislatures and online. Several abolitionist organizations filed an amicus brief in the decision that overturned Roe. Abolitionists Rising – which features a video of Deevers on its website – has almost 200,000 subscribers on YouTube, with at least one video with more than half a million views. (Deevers did not immediately reply to an interview request.) The YouTube account of Apologia Studios, which is run by prominent abortion “abolitionist” and pastor Jeff Durbin, has more than 500,000 subscribers.In 2023, legislators in at least nine states introduced bills that would advance the abortion abolition cause, such as by erasing provisions in laws that explicitly protect pregnant people from being prosecuted for having abortions. At least two of those bills explicitly cite the 14th amendment, which was originally passed to ensure that formerly enslaved people had equal rights, to extend rights and protections to fetuses.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe anti-abortion movement has a long history of drawing comparisons between their cause and that of pre-civil war abolitionists trying to end US slavery, as well as civil rights crusaders. For decades, they have tried to use the 14th amendment to establish fetuses’ right to personhood, a push that is seeing renewed interest post-Roe.However, anti-abortion “abolitionists” often draw a line between their work and that of the mainstream pro-life movement. Not only do they frequently disdain the pro-life label, but while the pro-life movement has increasingly sought to portray its mission as secular, anti-abortion “abolitionists” are staunchly and openly Christian.“I think that the abolitionist movement is a litmus test for how much the anti-abortion movement needs to win or wants to win in democratic politics versus other means,” Ziegler said. “If you need to win with voters, abolitionists are not going to get anywhere, ever.”There is little support for severe punishments for people who get illegal abortions. Although 47% of US adults believe that women who have illegal abortions should face some form of penalty, just 14% think they should serve jail time, according to a 2022 poll by the Pew Research Center. “Abolitionists” don’t necessarily believe that people should face the death penalty for abortions. “I do believe that the unjustified taking of human life, if provable, ultimately, justly, ought to be capital punishment,” Durbin told the New York Times last year. “However, I don’t trust our system today to deal that out.”None of the “abolitionist”-style bills ultimately advanced very far in state legislatures this year. Still, they can be something of a PR nightmare for Republicans and the mainstream pro-life movement. After a host of news articles about South Carolina’s Prenatal Equal Protection Act, which would allow people who have abortions to face the death penalty, 10 Republican state legislators asked to remove their names as sponsors of the bill.That bill died in committee.While these bills technically focus on abortion seekers, in reality they would probably also be used to penalize people of color or poor people who have unintended pregnancy losses, according to Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director of If/When/How, a legal advocacy group for reproductive justice.“We know who the targets of these laws would be, because they’re the people who are already criminalized for pregnancy outcomes. So we would see an escalation of that status quo,” Diaz-Tello said. “Things that for people of wealth and privilege would be considered a tragedy end up being charged as a crime against people of color, in particular Black women, and people who are in poverty.”Deevers won his seat in the Oklahoma state legislature after its former occupant resigned for another job. On his campaign website, Deevers says that he supports Oklahoma’s version of the Prenatal Equal Protection Act, which was introduced in 2023. That bill eliminates language that would block Oklahoma prosecutors from targeting pregnant people for “causing the death of the unborn child”. Its sponsor, whose 2020 election was supported by the abolitionist group Free the States, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.“This bill would abolish abortion by making preborn children equal under law and closing the loopholes which allow for self-managed abortion,” Deevers’ campaign website reads, adding, “I am 100% against abortion and for its abolition.” More

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      US supreme court agrees to consider abortion pill access

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      The US supreme court on Wednesday agreed to hear oral arguments in a case that could determine the future of a pill used in most abortions in the US, in the first major abortion rights case to land at the country’s highest court since the justices overturned Roe v Wade and abolished the national right to the procedure in 2022.A decision in the case will probably arrive in summer 2024, just months before the presidential election. The outcome of the case could affect not just access to the pill, which has been repeatedly deemed safe and effective, but the Federal Drug Administration’s authority to regulate all manner of medications.The drug at the heart of the case is mifepristone, one of the two drugs typically used in medication abortions, which make up the majority of US abortions. Last year, an association of anti-abortion organizations and doctors, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the FDA had overstepped its authority when it approved mifepristone in 2000.In April, a Texas federal judge appointed by former president Donald Trump issued a preliminary ruling to suspend the FDA’s approval of mifepristone and pull the medication off the market. The US court of appeals for the fifth circuit – one of the most conservative federal appeals courts in the US – ruled in August that, while it was too late to suspend the FDA’s approval, the agency should significantly restrict access to mifepristone. The Biden administration and Danco Laboratories, which manufactures mifepristone, then asked the supreme court to weigh in on the case.The supreme court paused lower-court rulings while the case plays out, so mifepristone remains widely available in states that permit abortion. If the court allows the fifth circuit ruling to stand, it would roll back recent FDA efforts that refined the drug’s dosage and expanded access by allowing it to be prescribed later on in pregnancy and through telehealth.On Wednesday, the supreme court agreed to hear the consolidated petitions from the Biden administration and Danco Laboratories, which asked the justices to focus on the legal attempts to roll back those later FDA efforts. Those petitions also asked the justices to consider whether the challengers have the legal right, or standing, to bring the case in the first place.“You can’t just bring random lawsuits in court. You actually have to have been harmed by something,” said Greer Donley, an associate law professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. “That’s really what standing analysis is all about, to try to figure out if if the people who bring the lawsuit actually have a stake in the case.” Numerous legal experts have questioned whether the challengers in this case have properly demonstrated that they have been harmed by mifepristone’s continued legality.The supreme court also denied a petition from the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine that asked the justices to explicitly consider the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone. That move suggests that the supreme court is unlikely to pull mifepristone off the market entirely.In Donley’s view, the outcome of this case will probably signal whether the supreme court, which is controlled 6-3 by conservatives, wants to be involved in the post-Roe war over abortion rights. If the justices decide to focus on the standing issues in the case, they could sidestep having to rule on the substance of the case entirely.“I could see the more moderates on the supreme court thinking: ‘we don’t want to touch this,’” Donley said. “It might make the supreme court look like less of an activist court if it were to dismiss this case on the basis of really legitimate standing problems.”Any ruling by the court would affect all 50 states, including those that have protected abortion rights. (In recent months, officials in states such as Washington and California have announced that they have begun to stockpile mifepristone.)A ruling could also imperil the FDA’s regulatory power writ large and pose an existential threat to pharmaceutical companies. If courts can rewrite the FDA’s approval of abortion pills, any kind of drug – including, for example, drugs used to protect against HIV or to provide gender-affirming care – could end up in conservative jurists’ crosshairs.The ruling from the federal appeals court, Danco Laboratories warned in its briefs to the supreme court, “destabilizes the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries by questioning when scientific studies – accepted by FDA – are sufficient”. More than 100 studies, conducted across 26 countries, have concluded that mifepristone is safe, a New York Times review found.If deprived of access to mifepristone, several abortion clinics have said that they would keep providing medication abortions using only misoprostol, the other drug typically used in medication abortions. Although misoprostol-only abortions are still overwhelmingly safe, they can have more side-effects and are slightly less effective than the two-drug protocol.Ultimately, regardless of how the supreme court rules, its decision will not curtail the thriving underground networks that routinely supply mifepristone to women looking to end their pregnancies, including in the 16 states with near-total abortion bans. In fact, a move to ban mifepristone is likely to cause a sharp rise in demand for the drug through those networks.In the wake of Roe’s fall, a vast web of abortion rights supporters and opportunistic merchants have sprung up to ship abortion pills to Americans. Inducing your own abortion is not illegal in most US states, even in states that have banned in-clinic abortions, and medical experts widely agree that it can be safe to use pills to “self-manage” an abortion early in pregnancy. More

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      Kate Cox begged Texas to let her end a dangerous pregnancy. She won’t be the last | Moira Donegan

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      In most cases, we would never have learned her name. Kate Cox, a Texas woman, is in a sadly common set of circumstances: a 31-year-old mother of two, Cox was pregnant with her third child when doctors informed her that something was wrong. Pregnancy complications are common, but in a state like Texas, they have become newly dangerous, threatening women with potentially disfiguring health complications, along with unimaginable heartbreak, as the state’s multiple bans have mandated grotesque and inhumane treatment of doomed pregnancies.Cox’s fetus had trisomy 18, a chromosomal disorder. Trisomy 18 is a devastating diagnosis. Most pregnancies end in stillbirths; those infants born alive with the disorder live anguished, short and painful lives. Cox was informed that her fetus, in the sterile medical parlance, “could not sustain life”. The fetus had malformations of the spine, heart, brain and limbs. The pregnancy also posed dire threats to Cox’s health; most significantly, she was at risk of losing her future fertility if she remained pregnant.If Cox made it to delivery – a big if – the child would live for perhaps an hour, perhaps a week. It would have to be treated with pain medications for the entirety of its brief life. None of these were cognizable concerns under Texas’s abortion ban. The law said that she would have to remain pregnant – would have to get sicker, have to endure greater and greater pain and grief, and then would have to labor and give birth to a daughter, who she would watch suffer and die.There are hundreds of women like Cox living in Republican-controlled states, women carrying pregnancies in which there is no hope that a living baby will result at the end of nine months. These are pregnancies that – because of abortion bans that provide no actionable exemptions for medically futile pregnancies or maternal health – women are forced to keep carrying anyway.Most people in this situation suffer in private; they endure the cooing at their bellies from oblivious strangers while they remain pregnant, and they purchase tiny urns in the brutal days after. Cox is different only because she made the decision to share her situation publicly. As her health deteriorated and she made multiple visits to the emergency room, she published an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News, and petitioned Texas courts for an abortion. It is the first recorded instance of an adult woman having to ask for government permission to end her pregnancy since Roe. On Friday night, the Texas supreme court refused. On Monday, Cox left the state, seeking an abortion elsewhere.There is a tendency, in coverage of abortion law, for writers to try and discipline their language. The issue is fraught and passionate enough, the thinking goes, surrounded as it is by stigma, ignorance and misinformation. There is one line of journalistic thought that holds that the best way to serve one’s readers, and to maintain their trust, is to write with as strict neutrality as the facts will allow. If I were to follow that line, I would tell you that the case raises vexed and unresolved legal questions about the extent of medical exemptions to abortion bans, and that the actions of Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, whose office intervened to prevent Cox from receiving an abortion, is signaling a maximalist view. I might not mention, in the interest of neutrality, that among the Texas supreme court justices who denied Cox her abortion was John Devine, an extremist Christian conservative with a long history of anti-choice activism, including, according to his boast at a campaign event, being arrested 37 times in harassment actions outside abortion clinics.But there is another line of thought that holds that euphemism is dishonesty, and that the effort to maintain journalistic neutrality in situations of grave injustice winds up obscuring more than it reveals. If I were to follow this latter method, I would tell you plainly that, by refusing to let her end this pregnancy, Paxton and the state of Texas in effect allowed Kate Cox to be tortured, and that she was forced to flee to escape that torture.Cox will not be the last woman in this position. She will not be the last woman to make a public plea to be permitted an abortion for a dangerous and non-viable pregnancy; she will not be the last one who is denied. She is part of a growing cast of abortion rights plaintiffs, a product of Dobbs’s cruelties and of the shifting strategic posture of the reproductive rights movement. These new claimants are not the traditional pro-choice litigators – clinics or doctors – but prospective patients themselves. In particular, the new plaintiffs are women who are seeking medical exemptions to terminate wanted but dangerous pregnancies. (In her op-ed, Cox referenced Zurwaski v Texas, a lawsuit in which 20 such women are suing to clarify and expand medical exemptions to Texas’s abortion ban.)Think of it as a crusade of the medically endangered: women who are faced with tragic, dangerous and heartbreaking circumstances in their pregnancies are emerging as a new face of the pro-choice legal movement. Like the anti-choice movement spent decades chipping away at the abortion rights and expanding restrictions, these women’s lawsuits seek to expand access in the most sympathetic of cases – those of medical emergencies – to carve out slightly larger loopholes for more women to access abortion through.It’s an incrementalistic strategy, one that assumes that legal abortion bans like those in Texas are here to stay for the foreseeable future. And it is also a strategy that makes some concessions to the bigotries and biases of the Texas court, to say nothing of American public opinion. Like many of the medically endangered plaintiffs, Cox is white and married. She is already a mother, and wants to be pregnant – she speaks extensively, and movingly, of desiring more children, and of wishing that she could have this one. Unlike many in her shoes, when faced with a horrible consequence of a sadistic law, she was able to seek both publicity and legal help. Unlike many in her shoes, when she was denied an abortion, she was able to flee.None of these things about Cox – neither her privilege not her palatability – make her a bad person, or make her suffering any less horrific. But they do make her an appealing face for a movement that is seeking to reason with a rabid and revanchist cadre of judges. There is nothing the right can object to in her, the thinking goes, and there is nothing they can get from making her suffer: her child will die. And yet her plea was rejected by the Texas courts, which suggests that the anti-choice movement does feel that they can get something out of Kate Cox. They get the ability to make her beg. Then, they get the satisfaction of saying no.The way we talk about abortion has warped in the wake of Dobbs. We use bloodless language of gestational limits; we may even be tempted to describe once-unheard of 15 week bans as comparatively “moderate”. We look on the bright side, like to the fact that Cox, denied the care that will keep her healthy and alive in Texas, was able to go elsewhere. Amid these adjusted expectations it is easy to lose track of how far we’ve fallen in our standards for women’s dignity and freedom. Two years ago, a woman in Cox’s shoes was able to control her own body and life on her own terms; now, she has to go before a court, all her virtues on display, and beg not to be maimed. “I am a Texan,” Cox said in her op-ed. “Why should I or any other woman have to drive or fly hundreds of miles to do what we feel is best for ourselves and our families, to determine our own futures?” It was an appeal to her dignity as a citizen. But Texas only saw her as a woman.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Dozens of independent abortion clinics closed in 2023 post-Roe, study finds

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      Dozens of independently owned reproductive health clinics shuttered in 2023, the year after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, according to a new report from the Abortion Care Network.The group found that 23 independently owned clinics closed this year, on top of the 42 that shuttered in 2022, leaving over a dozen states, mainly in the American south and midwest, without a single brick-and-mortar clinic that provides abortion.“Even before Roe fell, we were the only abortion clinic in a very rural, very underserved state with limited access to health care, and now that’s all been exacerbated,” said Katie Quinonez-Alonzo, executive director of Women’s Health Center of West Virginia.Like most independent clinics in the United States, the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia struggled to keep its doors open after the supreme court decision paved the way for the state to ban abortion last year. The clinic still provides other reproductive and sexual health services, like gender-affirming care for transgender patients.“We want to stay here in our community and help the patients that are still counting on us, but it’s been one uphill battle after another,” Quinonez-Alonzo told the Guardian.The Women’s Health Center of West Virginia is an especially crucial lifeline for low-income, uninsured people in the state, who rely on the clinic for routine gynecological check-ups. Those services became harder to offer after West Virginia banned abortion, slashing the clinic’s revenue by roughly half a million dollars.This year, Quinonez-Alonzo anticipates a roughly $350,000 budget deficit.Independently owned clinics – in contrast with bigger players like Planned Parenthood – provide the majority of abortions in the United States. According to the ACN report, “indie” clinics make up the majority of clinics operating in states that are most hostile to abortion, and offer the broadest range of options for patients seeking the procedure. ACN researchers found that 73% of indie brick-and-mortar clinics offer both medical and surgical abortions, compared with just 42% of Planned Parenthood affiliates – so as they dwindle in number, so do options for women seeking care.Before the supreme court overturned Roe, the West Alabama Women’s Center provided over half of the abortions in the state.“In the deep south, it was always indie providers that were the ones providing abortions. Very few Planned Parenthoods existed in our region,” said Robin Marty, executive director of West Alabama Women’s Center.“Alabama used to have three Planned Parenthoods, we have just one now, the others have closed,” Marty said. “We’re still here, though.”After Alabama enacted a sweeping ban on abortion, the Tuscaloosa clinic refocused on protecting newly pregnant people’s access to affordable prenatal healthcare.But Alabama is one of 10 states that has not expanded Medicaid, leaving roughly one in seven women of childbearing age without any form of health insurance. The state allows newly pregnant women to apply for Medicaid, but that requires a doctor’s letter confirming the pregnancy.“But of course, as these people do not have insurance, they can’t get into a doctor in order to get this letter for Medicaid,” Marty said. “This is why we’re seeing so many people in Alabama who don’t have prenatal care in the first trimester.”Even after a patient receives a doctor’s letter confirming their pregnancy, it can take four to six weeks for the state to approve coverage. To help care for uninsured and pregnant people in Alabama, Marty said her clinic provides free prenatal care until a patient’s Medicaid coverage is approved. If financial trouble forces the clinic to close, a bad maternal health landscape will get worse.“The people in our community need prenatal care and birth control and STI testing just as much as they need abortion,” Marty said. “For these patients, there isn’t another healthcare provider here for them.” More

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      House speaker Mike Johnson likened abortion to ‘American holocaust’

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      Before he became speaker of the US House of Representatives, the Louisiana Republican congressman Mike Johnson likened abortion to “an American holocaust”.“The reality is that Planned Parenthood and all these … big abortion … they set up their clinics in inner cities,” Johnson told a radio show in May 2022, in comments aired by CNN on Tuesday. “They regard these people as easy prey.”But while these remarks may sound stunning, anti-abortion activists often refer to abortion in the United States as a “holocaust”. This isn’t even the only time that Johnson has made the comparison.“During business hours today, 4,500 innocent American children will be killed,” Johnson wrote in a 2005 op-ed for the Shreveport Times, which was recently resurfaced by CBS News. “It is a holocaust that has been repeated every day for 32 years, since 1973’s Roe v Wade.”In that op-ed, Johnson also said the judicial philosophy that undergirded Roe – and allowed for the removal of the feeding tube of Terri Schiavo, a womanwith severe brain damage who became a cause célèbre among anti-abortion activists – to be “no different than Hitler’s”.Johnson went on to add that abortion had led to a dearth of “able workers” and a crisis for social security, a claim he would repeat at a House hearing years later.Comparisons between US abortion and the Holocaust date back decades, with anti-abortion advocates writing books in the 1980s with titles such as The Abortion Holocaust: Today’s Final Solution. Although the mainstream United States may have grown less tolerant of the comparison, it has never disappeared from anti-abortion circles, which are predominantly Christian.In fact, it’s sometimes used as a recruitment tool. One prominent anti-abortion group even claims anyone born after the supreme court decided Roe in 1973 is a “survivor of the American abortion holocaust” and invites young people to become “boots on the ground” in recognition of their aborted peers. In 2019, Texas Right to Life – a powerful anti-abortion group in Texas – held a training for young anti-abortion activists where leaders screened documentaries about the Nazi Holocaust and urged the activists to “write down three similarities between the Holocaust and abortion”.These kinds of comparisons have even made their way into law. In a 2019 abortion case, the supreme court justice Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion claiming that abortion was on the verge of becoming “a tool of modern-day eugenics”. Alabama’s near-total abortion ban, which was first passed in 2019 and took effect after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year, suggested abortion was worse than famous 20th-century atrocities.“More than 50 million babies have been aborted in the United States since the Roe decision in 1973,” the ban reads, “more than three times the number who were killed in German death camps, Chinese purges, Stalin’s gulags, Cambodian killing fields, and the Rwandan genocide combined.” More

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      ‘Abortion is a winning issue’: rights victories in 2023 US elections raise hopes for 2024

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      More than a year after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, handing states the power to decide if and how to ban abortion, voters have again overwhelmingly rejected attempts to curtail access to the procedure. A string of successes for abortion rights groups on Tuesday are raising hopes among Democrats that, despite recent dismal polls, the issue will lift their odds in 2024.In Ohio, the only state to hold an abortion-related ballot referendum in 2023, more than 56% of voters agreed to enshrine the right to the procedure into the state constitution. In Virginia, Democrats won back full control of the state legislature after Republicans campaigned on the promise of a “sensible limit” that would ban most abortions past 15 weeks of pregnancy. In Kentucky, the incumbent Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, bested his anti-abortion Republican opponent. And in Pennsylvania, in a race dominated by talk of abortion, Democrats won a seat on the state supreme court.On Tuesday evening in downtown Columbus, Ohio, abortion rights advocates crowded into a hotel ballroom to watch as results streamed in. Once the vote was called in their favor, the conversation in the room immediately turned to the topic on everyone’s minds: what does the victory mean for next year? In 2024, abortion-related referendums may be on the ballot in roughly a dozen states, including in critical swing states like Nevada, Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Iowa. Democrats will almost certainly lean on the issue to buoy their party in races for Congress and the White House. And Tuesday’s results in Ohio raise hopes that they might be able to pluck voters from the other side. While Joe Biden lost Ohio in 2020, garnering only about 45% of the vote, Issue 1, the proposal to add abortion rights into the state constitution, won with an estimated 56% of the vote on Tuesday. That sweep indicates that Republican voters are abandoning their party on this issue.“Abortion is a winning issue, including in states that are considered red,” said Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of Urge: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity. “Young people, black voters, rural voters – voters all across the state came out and we saw support in every single corner of the state. The lesson for other states is: don’t take anyone for granted. Don’t assume they’re gonna support you, but also don’t assume that they’re gonna oppose.”The issue turns voters out in high numbers, which could also prove a boon for Biden at a time of low enthusiasm: nearly 4 million people voted this year on Issue 1, according to early data from Ohio’s secretary of state office. That’s only slightly less than the 4.2 million people who turned out to vote in Ohio’s gubernatorial race last year – even though 2023 was considered an “off-off” election year.The failures in Ohio and Virginia also leave Republicans without a clear roadmap for messaging on abortion – an issue that led them to underperform in the 2022 midterms. In Ohio, opponents of the ballot initiative, Issue 1, focused much of their message not on the morality of abortion, but on the idea that Issue 1 threatened parents’ rights to know if their children underwent an abortion or gender-affirming care. (That claim is dubious, legal experts told the Guardian.) In Virginia, Republicans tried to take advantage of Americans’ lack of support for abortion in the second and third trimester by proposing to ban abortion past 15 weeks with exceptions for rape, incest and medical emergencies.Both efforts were viewed as tests for next year – had either message won over voters, Republicans across the country may have adopted them in their own races in 2024. Now, their strategy is in question, and any course they choose risks alienating key constituencies. “If the GOP moves to the center on abortion, they’re afraid that they’ll lose conservative donors and base voters – who are the ones who tend to be the most passionate Republican voters, the ones who turn out the most reliably and also people who donate a lot of money,” said Mary Ziegler, a University of California, Davis School of Law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. “Republicans have been trying to finesse that, with pretty much no success to date.”Despite being directly responsible for overturning Roe v Wade through his appointments to the supreme court, Donald Trump has attempted to stem the damage by distancing himself from much of his party, coming out against a national abortion ban. But polling shows that voters don’t necessarily trust Republicans who say they will not totally ban abortion. That may be in part due to their decades-long partnership with an anti-abortion movement that would like to eliminate the procedure entirely.Hours before polls closed on Tuesday, Jamie Curry, Ohio regional coordinator for the anti-abortion group Students for Life, tried to convince passing Ohio State University students that Issue 1 was too extreme. “You seem to be in favor of a commonsense, middle of the road, but there’s plenty of people who align more pro-choice and are voting no on this issue,” Curry told one student.But Curry’s message of moderation and compromise were contrasted by her group’s nearby poster board, which read: “All human beings are valuable persons, no matter their stage in life.”“Republicans can spend their money saying that, ‘We are the moderates on this,’” said Joey Teitelbaum, vice-president of research for Global Strategy Group, a Democratic polling firm. “But in voting for Democrats in Virginia and voting for Andy Beshear, where abortion was a major part of that race and the communications, voters are clearly saying, ‘We do not trust Republicans on this.’” More