It’s been three years since the Supreme Court reversed its 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade. As Justice Samuel Alito promised in Dobbs v. Jackson, all it was supposed to do was “return that authority to the people and their elected representatives because the Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion.”
But even before the Dobbs opinion dropped, everyone knew that returning things to the states wasn’t the actual goal. The goal was to eradicate abortion everywhere—or to at least make it as inaccessible as possible.
Despite the fact that a large majority of Americans want abortion to be legal, access to abortion keeps getting worse—making this Dobbs anniversary a celebration for anti-choicers and no one else.
The lie about returning abortion laws to the states
Anti-choice activists have been very cagey about not calling for a nationwide ban, as did President Donald Trump when he was running for office. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t want one.
Rather, they think they can get there through the 1873 Comstock Act, which criminalizes the mailing, sale, or possession of “obscene materials.” That was read, in the past, to include information about birth control and abortion. Now, conservatives want to use it to ban the mailing of abortion pills and possibly even any equipment needed for a surgical abortion.
Justices Alito and Clarence Thomas are already into it.
But the problem anti-choicers ran into when abortion was returned to the states was that even people in red states want abortion to be legal. That’s why voters keep approving ballot initiatives to protect abortion. They’re doing exactly what Alito said they could: using their authority as citizens to determine whether abortion should be legal in their states.
You won’t be surprised to learn that red states have suddenly decided that they don’t really want to hear from the people.
In Missouri—where voters approved a ballot initiative to legalize abortion—GOP legislators are working frantically to undo it. Several state legislatures are also preemptively working on laws to limit citizen initiatives so people can’t directly vote on abortion rights … because people keep directly voting to protect abortion rights.
Travel bans, but for abortion
States with abortion bans are working hard to try to impose their anti-choice laws on blue states. Texas is suing—and Louisiana is criminally charging—doctors who allegedly prescribe abortion pills via telemedicine to out-of-state residents.
In Alabama, which completely bans abortion, the Republican attorney general floated the idea of criminally charging people, including doctors, if they help someone obtain an abortion in a state where it’s legal. Thankfully, a federal judge shut it down.
And Idaho, which also has a complete abortion ban, passed a law that would make it a felony to help a minor obtain an abortion out of state—including providing any information or education about abortion, soliciting donations for abortion funds, or advocating for a legal right to abortion. Most of that law is currently enjoined while litigation continues, but the 9th Circuit Court recently ruled that the law’s prohibition on “harboring” or “transporting” a minor can stay in effect.
Meanwhile, cities and counties across Texas keep trying to pass ordinances that would make it a crime to drive on their roads while traveling to get an abortion out of state. No idea how that would be enforced if it ever sticks.
The Supreme Court still sucks
If you thought that things would settle down after the conservative justices achieved their lifelong dream of overturning Roe, you were very wrong.
The Supreme Court just agreed to hear a case about fake pregnancy clinics, which actively try to deceive people into thinking they’re in an actual medical clinic that provides abortions, lying about how far along they are so they don’t seek abortions in time and spewing dangerous medical misinformation.
In the past, the Supreme Court has displayed mad love for these clinics, even protecting them from the onerous requirement of posting a sign saying that abortions can be obtained elsewhere in the state.
Meanwhile, we’re waiting to see when the court will drop its opinion on whether Trump can defund Planned Parenthood in South Carolina by barring it from receiving Medicaid funds. This would devastate access to reproductive health care in a state where 40% of the counties are already “contraceptive deserts.”
The court’s term ends on June 30, so at least we will have the bad news relatively soon.
Welcome to the surveillance state
If a state’s goal is to prevent all abortions, it needs to constantly make sure that no one gets one. That’s where law enforcement comes in.
Earlier this month, the sheriff of Parker County, Texas, arrested a man who allegedly secretly slipped abortion pills into his girlfriend’s coffee. That is super bad and an actual crime. But Justin Anthony Banta is being charged with capital murder, under the theory that harming an embryo is the same as deliberately killing a full-grown autonomous human.
That would be bad enough, but when you see that Parker County worked with the Texas Rangers, the U.S. Secret Service, the Regional Organized Crime Information Center, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it becomes clear that this case isn’t about Banta at all. It’s about Texas building a case to attack out-of-state abortion providers.
Since states with abortion bans have failed to criminalize seeking abortions out of state, they need a way to make life hell for anyone who succeeds. That plan just got a big assist from one of Trump’s most loyal judicial foot soldiers, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk.
Last week, Kacsmaryk threw out a Biden-era rule that expanded protections of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to bar prosecutors from getting private reproductive health records to investigate abortion patients and providers. Not illegal providers in Texas, mind you, but providers anywhere, including in legal states.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott thinks you had an abortion when you headed to New York for a few days? Then he can get your private medical records to prove it.
Speaking of Texas, in a quest to find a woman believed to have had a self-managed abortion last month, the Johnson County sheriff spent a full month running searches in an automated license plate reader database—searching more than 83,000 cameras, including in places where abortion is legal, like Illinois. The reason? They were very worried she might bleed to death, so they had to get her to a hospital. Given that it wouldn’t take someone a month to bleed to death, we don’t even need to consider that explanation.
Pregnancy criminalization is also on the rise. In states where a fetus is considered a full person, pregnant people can be arrested for things like drug use during pregnancy. There’s also the effort to surveil and criminalize people who miscarry, forcing them to somehow prove that their miscarriage wasn’t an abortion.
In West Virginia, a prosecutor said he would consider bringing criminal charges against anyone who disposed of fetal remains after a miscarriage. How would someone avoid those charges? Immediately after miscarrying, per the prosecutor, one should “call your doctor. Call law enforcement, or 911, and just say ‘I miscarried. I want you to know.’”
Blue states are struggling, too
With so many states banning abortion, clinics in blue states where it’s legal are struggling. Planned Parenthood is closing four clinics in Michigan, citing rising costs and increased demand for telehealth abortion services. It’s also likely that Trump will again prevent Planned Parenthood from receiving Title X funding, which provides affordable family planning and related preventive health services.
In both New York and Illinois, four Planned Parenthood clinics shuttered. Iowa and Minnesota will each be losing four clinics, too.
Since things like cancer screenings and family planning are now “woke,” the Department of Health and Human Services froze $27.5 million in Title X grants. While none of that money could have been used for abortions, it is necessary for clinics to continue providing other services.
People are going to keep dying …
ProPublica has done the difficult work of tracking how many people are dying from being denied abortion care. That work is difficult because states with bans do not seem at all interested in tracking that information.
After ProPublica reported that two women had died in Georgia after being denied abortion care, the state dismissed everyone from its maternal mortality committee. Texas still technically has a maternal mortality committee, but it stopped tracking deaths after the Dobbs decision. Can’t find out more people are dying under your abortion ban if you just stop tracking whether people are dying under your abortion ban.
And it isn’t just Georgia and Texas. Pregnant people in states with abortion bans are nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy or shortly thereafter as those in states where abortion is legal. Doctors in states with bans have seen deaths that were preventable if abortion care had been provided.
… but they don’t have to
Pregnancy is far more dangerous than abortion, particularly medication abortion. The death rate from the abortion pill mifepristone is 0.0005, lower than penicillin, and lower than Viagra. Doctors can prescribe it via telehealth, pills can be sent right to your door, and you can take the medicine at home.
No wonder conservatives want to outlaw it. Republicans in Texas are proposing to go after companies where patients can order abortion pills online. They would face civil liability for “the wrongful death of an unborn child”—aka an abortion.
The law would also allow for civil suits against websites that just share information about abortion pills and any financial company that processes orders for abortion pills. The FDA has now committed to a full review of mifepristone, which is not a thing that really happens with drugs that have been legal and safe for decades. But conservatives see that as the best way to achieve a nationwide medication abortion ban.
How dare anyone point out who is responsible for all this
In May 2024, Kat Cammack, a GOP congresswoman in Florida, went to an emergency room because she had an ectopic pregnancy. Ectopic pregnancies, where the egg implants in the fallopian tube rather than the uterus, are never viable and, left untreated, can kill you. The simple and life-saving treatment is a shot of methotrexate. One problem—that is one of the drugs used in the two-drug version of medication abortion.
Florida had just passed its six-week ban, which works almost as well as a complete ban because many people do not even know they are pregnant that early. Per Cammack, she was at five weeks, but doctors wouldn’t give her the shot, fearful that they could lose their license or be sent to jail.
After several hours, a doctor administered the shot, and Cammack was fine. However, per Cammack, who co-chairs the House Pro-Life Caucus and supports a complete abortion ban with very minimal carveouts for cases of rape or incest, still thinks the ban is dandy. Because you know whose fault it is that doctors were too scared to give her methotrexate? Leftists. Yes, because talking about how doctors could go to jail under Florida’s law is scary, but having a state law telling doctors they could go to jail is not.
A few months later, Florida issued a statement “correcting misinformation” about their law that did nothing but quote the law and then declare that “a miscarriage is not an abortion.” Doctors already knew that, buddy. The fact that multiple states with bans have to pass additional laws “clarifying” what their ban means does not inspire confidence, nor should it inspire a sense of safety in providers.
These attacks are relentless, because the goal of the anti-choice movement was never the reversal of Roe and a return to the states. They’re not going to stop until it is banned everywhere, and despite pretending otherwise, the Trump administration is going to do everything it can to help them.
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