When Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that granted women the constitutional right to abortion, was overturned in 2022, opponents of the procedure celebrated across the land.
At long last, the dream of outlawing abortion in many if not most places by returning the decision to the states had been realized. Finally, women would be required to carry their pregnancies to term, whether they wanted to or not.
But new data suggests that abortion foes may have celebrated a bit prematurely.
And the results last week of an off-year election, in which abortion rights advocates saw a string of victories across the nation, might suggest a further pause for the party.
A new survey found that in the year after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, something surprising happened: The total number of legal abortions in the nation didn’t fall. Instead, it rose slightly, by about 0.2%.
The increase came despite the fact that 14 states (including Texas) enacted near-total bans on the procedure, and others imposed new limits.
Experts attributed the increase to several things: A significant rise in abortions in states where the procedure remains legal; expanded use of telemedicine that allows women to obtain mail-order abortion pills, and monetary and other types of assistance for women who must now travel out of their home states to end an unwanted pregnancy.
The first and last factors bring this national issue close to home.
During the last budgetary cycle, the San Antonio City Council passed a budget that included $500,000 for a Reproductive Justice Fund, a new resource aimed squarely at the challenges wrought by Dobbs.
While the fund would provide funding to women for access to birth control and other non-abortion-related health care, at least two council members voiced support to send money to groups such as Jane’s Due Process and Lilith Fund, which help women with travel costs and other expenses in obtaining abortions in places where it remains legal.
There’s no doubt that women in San Antonio have traveled beyond the state to get abortion care since the fall of Roe; one clinic provider in New Mexico, where abortion remains legal, said the majority of new patients are women from Texas.
Two years before Dobbs, during the pandemic, when Gov. Greg Abbott signed an executive order halting all abortions for 30 days, a significant number of Texas women traveled out of state to receive such care.
After the City Council voted in favor of sending a half-million dollars to the justice fund — and even before a single cent had been allocated — a group of anti-abortion activists filed a lawsuit to stop it.
And who knows, they might win that legal skirmish.
But if recent headlines are any indication, abortion foes might want to be careful what they wish for.
For example, they no doubt imagined they were cutting off information with their Supreme Court victory, but the Dobbs decision instead triggered a wave of publicity about how to get the procedure, causing a rise among women who live in states with legal abortion — meaning foes of abortion actually helped spread word of its availability.
Of course, many women, including those in San Antonio — especially women who are poor or can’t get time off from jobs or have no one to watch their children to travel for the procedure — have been devastated by the Dobbs ruling.
Conservative leaders in Texas and other states that have outlawed or restricted abortion haven’t enacted concomitant policies to increase financial support for pregnant women and low-income families, a failure that reveals their true aim, which is to control female sexuality, not protecting “life” — at least life after it is born.
The group that tallied the numbers found that in states with total or six-week abortion bans, abortions decreased by nearly 115,000. But states where abortion remained legal beyond six weeks saw a cumulative increase of nearly 117,000 abortions in the year following the Dobbs ruling.
A separate survey found a similar increase.
The rise in abortions may actually be higher, because the one-year counts don’t include women who ordered abortion pills overseas or who traveled beyond the US border to end their unwanted pregnancies. The biggest jump in legal abortions occurred in states that border states where the right to choose has been eradicated.
Given all this, it’s not surprising that anti-abortion activists are no longer happy with merely banning abortion in their own states; they now seek to prevent women traveling to other states to procure a legal procedure.
Case in point: Lubbock County, where officials recently outlawed the use of public roads to transport women for the purpose of getting an abortion outside the state, the sixth jurisdiction in Texas to pass such a ban.
This legally dubious law would be enforced through private lawsuits aimed at those who “aid and abet” abortions, not the pregnant woman.
“This is an effort, one by one, to create a statewide ban against travel to other states, literally creating a reproductive prison in the state of Texas,” former state senator Wendy Davis told the Texas Tribune.
Supporters of the road ban call it an “abortion trafficking ordinance.”
Such moves to block women from exercising their right to determine their futures —because there’s no more personal decision than deciding when, or if, to have a child —mean efforts like the one the City of San Antonio recently enacted are even more crucial.
And it may be part of a sea change around the issue that is only just beginning.
Abortion and the outrage that has gripped women and their allies in the wake of losing a right they’d taken as settled for five decades is shaping up to be a lightning rod in politics, especially elections.
See: The 2022 midterms.
See: Kansas, where a constitutional amendment last year that would have let state legislators ban or significantly restrict abortion went down in flames in one of the most conservative states in the country.
Voters in red Kentucky and Montana shot down similar bans. Voters in California, Michigan and Vermont approved abortion-rights amendments to their state constitutions last year.
In Wisconsin this year, the pro-abortion access candidate handily won a judicial election in the state Supreme Court contest.
And last week’s elections have sent hope soaring through the stratosphere for abortion rights supporters, and may serve as a bellwether for the 2024 presidential race.
Rack it up: In Ohio (a state that went for Donald Trump not once but twice), voters enshrined abortion rights into the state constitution. In scarlet-red Kentucky, the Democratic governor was reelected after campaigning strongly for reproductive rights. A Democrat was elected to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court after doing the same. And Democrats took total control of the Virginia statehouse, kicking sand in the face of Republicans who planned to pass new abortion restrictions.
Democrats are strategizing to use referendums, like the one that passed in Ohio, to rally the base for next year. Efforts are underway to get measures on the ballot in Arizona, Florida, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
Structural issues due to gerrymandering and the gubernatorial veto make such actions impossible in Texas, but activists must still get busy and find ways to capitalize on the lingering if not growing fury over Dobbs, which exists in the Lone Star state just as it does in other red commonwealths.
We cannot depend on the stalwart efforts of city-level politicos like the ones in San Antonio to reinstate women’s rights.
It’s not a question of popular will: Polls consistently show that 61% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 37% say it should be illegal in all or most cases.
Prognosticators say the recent abortion rights victories suggest independent voters and even moderate Republicans have soured on the increasingly extremist direction of the GOP on this issue.
Indeed, the numbers and the headlines understandably have some Republican elected officials spooked. Many have shrunk from their full-throated support of bans or restrictions now that the issue is no longer largely theoretical, thanks to Dobbs.
Barring a meteorite hitting the Earth, or an unlikely incarceration, Trump is going to be the Republican nominee for president in 2024.
The former president recently tried to find wiggle room around abortion with bizarre statements, including one where he promised to find a solution that pleased both sides — which doesn’t exist.
Wiggle too much and Trump stands to lose the favor of Christian evangelicals, his largest and most faithful voting bloc, and for whom abortion is the be-all and end-all of, well, everything.
Which potentially means abortion could cost Trump a second shot at the White House, even with the dismal polling numbers of his doddering competitor.
If that happens, abortion opponents will truly have scored a Pyrrhic victory — a fancy term for what happens when you win the battle but suffer so many casualties in the process you actually lose the war.
That’s what the fight against women’s reproductive rights is shaping up to be.
