Ongoing fallout from the Dobbs decision (Gettysburg Times op-ed)

Since the highest court in our land ignored precedent by overturning a Constitutional, nationwide right to an abortion in June 2020, the results have been staggering. As states now have the right to make their own laws on abortion, women in nine mostly Southern states immediately were stripped of their bodily autonomy and reproductive healthcare due to trigger laws banning abortion completely that went into action. (Utah’s attempted complete ban is still being challenged in its courts. It would have been the tenth state.) Six other states quickly made abortion extremely difficult, with bans early in pregnancy (from six to 15 weeks) and few exceptions such as the life of the mother.

Most women seeking an abortion already have children. Many are also poor, which is not to say that wealthy women do not suffer from a forced pregnancy. It can upend their lives as well.

Poor black women make up a large number of those seeking abortions, often to save their lives, given their high maternal mortality rate: in 2021, 69.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, 2.6 times the rate for white women (National Center for Health Statistics). Untreated miscarriages have brought patients close to death before they could get medical care. Some females seeking an abortion are children, often victims of rape and abuse. A landmark study by the University of California at San Francisco found that people unable to have an abortion suffer from long-lasting economic struggles, including greater probability of eviction, bankruptcy, and food insecurity.

States that already have six-week bans on abortion are a snapshot of what is to come. Some women will be denied treatment for miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and severe pregnancy complications because treatments for these are related to abortion. The case that struck me involved a Louisiana woman who, at 12 weeks pregnant, learned that her fetus was missing the top of its skull, a fatal condition. She had three children already, including a toddler, that she cares for at home. If her state refuses her an abortion, she will need to drive to another state, a costly and difficult trip.

Bordering states that still have access to abortion were inundated with women seeking abortions as those states geared up to accept them. Planned Parenthood and other groups all over the country raised money to help women travel to a state where abortion was still legal. Single moms with small children in their care, however, often could not make the journey. Guttmacher data indicates that in the first six months of 2023, about 511,000 abortions occurred in states where abortion was legal, though being challenged, compared to 465,000 abortions nationwide in a comparable period in 2020.

Many of the fights over state abortion bans have now moved to the courts, as legal challenges are being made all over the country. At least five states’ draconian laws have been challenged in the courts, blocking them temporarily: Georgia, Ohio, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming (Guttmacher Institute). As the Brennan Center for Justice recently reported, however, the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld its state’s six-month abortion ban, reversing a prior decision that struck down a similar law.

Last April, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Kacsmaryk tried to ban the use of mifepristone, the drug to induce abortion approved by the FDA more than 20 years ago and used safely ever since. The case then went to a federal appeals court that put mifepristone back on the market, but upheld parts of the original ruling that would cut back on access to the pills. CNN called this dramatic case “the most consequential legal battle over abortion since the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade precedent that protected abortion rights nationwide.” Birth control pills may be targeted next.

To the Republican party, one of the surprising outcomes of the Dobbs decision is how strongly so many women and their partners came out against it. The first indication was Kansas, a staunchly Republican state, where women came out in droves in a primary election in 2022 to reject a state constitutional amendment that would have denied them the right to an abortion. In June 2023, Gallup, which has been polling people on abortion since 1975, indicated that the preference for abortion being legal under any circumstances had risen from 25% in 2019 to 35% in 2022. Americans wanting abortion illegal in all circumstances had fallen from 21% to 13% in those same years. A poll taken after the release of the Dobbs decision showed a record high of 69% of Americans saying that abortion should be legal at least in the first three months of pregnancy.

During the Republican presidential primary, Fox News moderator Martha MacCallum remarked that “abortion has been a losing issue for Republicans since the Dobbs decision.” Millions of women see the decision as an assault on their bodily autonomy and the freedom to live the kind of life they wish and deserve to have. Many men support them.

But Republicans haven’t given up, making their next goal a federal law outlawing abortion nationwide. Democrats are working to do the opposite with protection of that right at the federal level.

As a fallout of the Dobbs decision, many Southern states and some in the Midwest, led by conservative governors (Florida being a prime example), have been emboldened to attack the LGBTQ community, attempting to ban essential medical treatments, as well as school and town library books that illustrate gender and other kinds of diversity. Parallel to this comes the whitewashing of our country’s ignominious history of the treatment of blacks and Indians--anything that may cause “discomfort” to children. As they try to impose their fundamentalist Christian conservative values on an entire nation that has become incredibly diverse, these states are violating the “Establishment Clause” of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. To quote Rachel K. Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, “As America continues to realize the diversity our founders intended, we’re going to need church-state separation more than ever. This is precisely the wrong time for the Supreme Court, or any arm of government, to undermine this foundational principle.”

Jeanne Duffy, Ph.D., has served as a college professor, an analyst and project manager for several large companies, and a college administrator in charge of foundation and government support. She is a member the DFA Steering Committee and both the Healthcare and the Government Accountability task forces.