It is the most personal of decisions, yet it has become a defining issue of our time: whether to bear a child.
And in the year since the United States Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, eliminating a nearly 50-year federal right to abortion, the impact has been profound.
Overnight, U.S. women of childbearing age went from having a largely nationwide right to bodily autonomy to living in a country where one’s reproductive rights can vary dramatically from state to state. In post-Dobbs America, tens of thousands of fewer abortions have taken place, compared with the prior year, according to the Society of Family Planning, which specializes in abortion and contraception science. Several dozen clinics have closed.
In many cases, pregnant women and girls seeking abortions, even in the earliest stages, must travel out of state to receive services, either at great personal expense or with the help of travel aid organizations. Use of medication to terminate a pregnancy, whether under physician supervision or not, has skyrocketed – and accounts for more than half of all abortions.
Legal challenges abound, in both state and federal courts, and abortion promises to be a hotly debated topic in the 2024 elections up and down the ballot. But if there’s one thing activists and scholars on both sides of the divide agree upon, it’s this: that the U.S. abortion landscape, dramatically altered on June 24, 2022, by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, is still in flux. And no one is resting easy.
“It’s certainly been a nonstop year,” says Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America. Her organization’s volunteers have not relented, continuing to go door to door nationwide since the day Roe went down to tell people about alternatives to abortion.
From the abortion-rights perspective, the sense of urgency is no less evident.
“The biggest surprise is that people had predicted the worst – that all the states that had expressed hostility toward abortion would have fully banned abortion” by now, says Tracy Weitz, a sociology professor at American University and director of the Center on Health, Risk, and Society. “We’re not there.”
Abortion on the ballot
Outside a courthouse in Florida’s Broward County on a recent spring day, Democratic volunteers are registering people to vote – and gathering signatures to put a state constitutional amendment on the 2024 ballot that would guarantee abortion rights up to the point of fetal viability, which is when a fetus can survive outside the womb, generally considered to be between 23 and 24 weeks.
Broward is a Democratic bastion in a state that turned sharply Republican in last fall’s gubernatorial election. But the volunteers are confident that Florida voters support abortion as a fundamental right, as expressed in the name of the coalition working to pass the amendment: Floridians Protecting Freedom.
“We don’t want politicians telling us what to do,” says Marsha E., a volunteer who declines to give her last name, but suggests she be photographed in her “I’m With the Banned” T-shirt depicting controversial books. About half the people she and her fellow volunteers approach agree to sign the abortion amendment petition, Marsha says.
Florida is consequential in many ways: It’s the third most populous state in the country, with 29 electoral votes. It’s the home state of the GOP’s top polling presidential candidates – former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis. And it’s a destination, for now, for people in nearby anti-abortion Southern states seeking abortions.
The Sunshine State highlights how the battle over abortion rights has evolved in the last year. In anticipation of Dobbs, Florida at first enacted legislation that bans most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Then in April, with new GOP supermajorities in both houses, the state Legislature limited abortion to six weeks, effectively an outright ban, as many women don’t know they’re pregnant at that point. Mr. DeSantis signed the bill late at night, without fanfare; with a majority of Americans opposing the overturning of Roe, he doesn’t bring up the subject much on the campaign trail.
Florida’s original 15-week ban is currently before the state Supreme Court, but even if it’s upheld, the new six-week ban would go into effect. And that would mean women and girls from nearby states with abortion bans – Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana – would effectively no longer be able to use Florida clinics as an option for services.
Abortion’s potency in 2024
Democrats are counting on the potency of abortion as an issue in the 2024 election, as it was in 2022. Kansas, a red state, upheld abortion rights in a stand-alone ballot measure last August. And in the November midterms, Michigan – a major battleground state – enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution. That set up the state as a regional hub for abortion services, given near-bans in nearby states…….