In June of 2022, the Supreme Court officially overturned Roe v. Wade, repealing federal protection of abortion and setting the stage for abortion restrictions across the nation. According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, abortion is now completely illegal (and punishable with felony charges) in 13 states, while 11 more states are pushing to make it illegal or making access to abortion difficult. New Hampshire, New Mexico and Virginia allow abortion but offer no legal protection. Twenty-two states have protected abortion rights and 11 of them have gone so far as to expand access to abortion services and health care.
This was the patchwork legal landscape for abortion before the Nov. 5 election.
In the election, 10 states had measures on the ballot to protect a woman’s right to an abortion. In seven states, measures to protect the right to an abortion passed (Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and New York) while in three states (Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota) measures to protect abortion right failed; in Nebraska moreover, a measure prohibiting abortions past the first trimester passed.
The larger concern for proponents of abortion rights, however, is that Republicans gained control of the White House, and both Houses of Congress. Given total Republican control of the executive and legislative branches, many fear that federal abortion restrictions, if not a nationwide abortion ban, might be on the short-term horizon.
Much of that concern stems from Project 2025, a policy agenda published by the conservative Heritage Foundation with contributions from high-ranking officials from Trump’s first administration. While Trump disavowed any connection to Project 2025 during the campaign, many including Russell Vought, a Project 2025 author and the former director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, have said that Trump supports the goals of Project 2025 and distanced himself from it because Democrats were using it to stoke fear prior to the election.
Much of that fear had to do with the project’s policy initiatives regarding abortion. While Project 2025 does not explicitly call for a nationwide ban on abortion as Kamala Harris’s campaign believe it did, it does call for three initiatives that would significantly curtail access to abortion nationwide. The Center for American Progress, a non-partisan, progressive policy institute, has concluded that the abortion policies in Project 2025 would amount to “a backdoor national abortion ban.”
According to Andrew Prokop of Vox Magazine, Project 2025 advocates three major anti-abortion policies. First, it calls for prosecuting anyone who provides or distributes abortion pills under the provisions of an 1873 anti-obscenity law called the Comstock Act. Second, the project calls for revoking Food and Drug Aministration approval for mifepristone, a drug used in about half of abortions in the United States. Third, the project urges Department of Health and Human Services to require all states to report how many abortions are performed and the home state of each woman who receives an abortion.
Several published reports have said that Trump is looking to people involved with Project 2025 for his administrative appointment’s including his choice to re-hire Vought as OMB director, raising concerns that his distance from Project 2025 was more about the campaign than his plans for the future.
Junior Isadora Lang fears what the future may hold when it comes to federally imposed limitations and restrictions were she to be put into a situation where access to abortion is severely restricted or illegal nationwide.
“It looks like everything is very restrictive and limiting, especially when it comes to abortion freedoms,” Lang said.
Lang added it seems the nation is moving in the wrong direction and going back in time.
“I feel like we are not moving forward and only reliving the past, and it is very hard for me to understand why women and my politically active generation can not have the choice over our own bodies.”
During the 2024 Texas Tribune Festival, a panel of authors gathered to discuss abortion. Authors Amanda Becker of You Must Stand Up, Lisa Lerer and Elizabeth Dias of The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a new America, and Shefali Luthra of Undue Burden joined to discuss the Dobbs decision and their books focused on abortion.
In Undue Burden, Luthra stresses the medical necessity of abortion and how the Dobbs decision and the ban of some medical procedures as a result will cause further problems with sexual health. Sexual healthcare refers to medical necessities and procedures relating to one’s reproductive system.
Luthra said that the idea of abortion is a topic that seems far removed from everyday life until you want to become a parent which Luthra says is a life-changing decision:
“This [abortion rights] was, for a lot of the country, a question that was treated as peripheral,” Luthra said. “It was always something people didn’t think about or took for granted or treated as a special interest, niche concern that only affected those who became pregnant, and then you realize that you might need it or that it is no longer available and you cannot imagine anything more important than the choice of whether to be a parent or not, and for many people it is not a choice, it either is or is not possible and I think that is just so profound.”
Luthra adds that banning abortions and some medical procedures abortion with limit healthcare options from women and lead them to seek illegal, unhealthy alternatives to the banned options.
Another problem clinics are seeing across the United States as a result of the overturning of Roe v. Wade is the access to transgender affirming care. As Luthra continued speaking about the dangers of limited access to abortion healthcare, she addresses that in certain states that continue to provide healthcare and protected abortion rights, clinics are seeing an influx of out-of-state patients which takes away time and resources to treat patients with other medical needs, such as gender-affirming care
The lack of time and focus on gender-affirming care is made even worse, Luthra said, because some state legislatures are now including bans on gender-affirming care along with abortion bans. Planned Parenthood sued, claiming that combining the two issues in one bill violated a Nebraska constitutional requirement that “no bill shall contain more than one subject,” but a majority of justices on the Nebraska Supreme Court agreed with the Lancaster County District Court that because both issues dealt generally with health care that the law did not violate the state constitution. The decision left in place the law’s 12-week abortion ban and its regulations to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors under the age of 19.
Lang said that coupling abortion bans and restrictions on gender-affirming care sets a troubling precedent.
“Unfortunately, I think it could be a very scary outcome with these abortion laws because sometimes medical procedures that are related to abortion laws are necessary for someone’s survival or someone’s needs,” Lang said.
During the Tribune panel, the subject of abortion included a discussion of in vitro fertilization, also known as IVF, a medical procedure in which a sperm egg is fertilized outside of the womb.
Lisa Lerer, co-author of The Fall of Roe:The Rise of New America, said that the book and the fight towards the legalization of abortion always included other sources of healthcare and women’s rights.
According to Karla Torres, the human rights counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, abortion restrictions and IVF relate because of personhood laws. Personhood laws classify that fetuses, embryos and fertilized eggs are humans at the point of conception. Classifying a fertilized egg as human limits the choices available to IVF patients, Torres says, because they limit the patients’ decision-making power.
This connection was an important topic of conversation during the Tribune panel especially because of the recent banning of IVF in Alabama as of February 2024.
“[The anti-abortion movement] was always a much broader effort to transform the American family and in some ways strike at the heart of the sexual revolution,” Lerer said. “Now we’re seeing that play out more clearly because it was all sort of channeled through abortion.”
Lerer added that the consequences of the Dobbs decision has motivated direct efforts to protect abortion rights and sexual healthcare at the state level.
“Now in this post Roe era, I think part of what’s happened is this country has had a very rapid education process where all of a sudden everyone was learning, ‘Well, this miscarriage that you had was actually an abortion,’ or realizing that state legislature is suddenly debating if a 10-year-old gets pregnant, is that is allowed is that not allowed,” Lerer said.
At the Tribune Festival before the election, Lerer said that the new generation is directly impacted by the reversal of Roe v. Wade and that she felt that younger voters would be inclined to show up to the polls to cast their ballots for candidates who support abortion rights.
“We’re seeing more voters who say abortion is a motivating issue that gets them out to the polls, or who place it at the top of their list,” Lere said, “so having abortion remain second, third, fourth place on some people’s high priority rankings is quite significant seeing that we’re already two years out since Dobbs [the 2022 supreme court case Dobbs V. Jackson which resulted in the banning of abortions after 15 weeks, with exceptions for medical emergencies and fetal abnormalities].”
In addition to a voter’s youth being a reason to choose abortion as a primary voting issue, Lerer and her co-author Elizabeth Dias also said a voter’s view of abortion can be affected by geographic location. Texas, where Roe was born and died, according to Lerer, is a perfect example of the geographic difference in opinion about abortion.
Dias said there is a wide variety of opinions about constitutional laws and mandates regarding abortion in Texas. She also said that their book digs deeper into the lives of people who support and oppose abortion in Texas.
“One of the big themes we [Lerer and Dias] explore in our book is the tension between conservative Christianity and liberal feminism,” Dias said. “Obviously Texas is a place where that story takes place all the time. We were always really interested in the biographies of women from both the right and left and how their own stories and values drove their action throughout the course of their lifetime.”
Even though there has been more attention paid to abortion awareness in the wake of the Dobbs decision, Amanda Beckar, author of You Must Stand Up, said that U.S. citizens still can be more active in their community in order to bring back rights to women across the nation.
“After being involved in politics for 20 or so years, I have family and friends often come to me asking, ‘How should I get involved if I care about something?” Beckar said. “I have always responded that you should really get involved as close to home as possible and as close to your own communities if you can.”
Luthra added that because women across the nation are starting to become more open to sharing their story about personal experiences concerning abortion, that reporters need to report these stories fully and accurately because of how much they matter to young people especially women affected by newly imposed abortion restrictions.
“Something I think is really striking is that people do want to talk more about their abortions now than they did prior to Dobbs,” Luthra said, “which creates more of an opening for us to cover it and help people realize that access to abortion was and still is dangerous, and actually was a reality.”
She added that sharing the stories of American women is spreading necessary information that could lead to a reconsideration of Roe and eventually the reinstatement of women’s rights across the nation.
While Luthra stressed the importance of covering the abortion issue, she criticized journalists for not taking full advantage of the opportunity to talk to women who have real-world experiences with abortion and the risks that come with that experience.
“We are, as an industry, still struggling to cover this in a way that is comprehensive and actually accurate, as well as the real challenge of covering who are the people who actually have abortion because it is largely women of color and it is largely low-income women,” she said. “We are not doing a good job of reflecting that [reality].”
Luthra said that reporters need to acknowledge and document that race and income are leading factors that affect women who are affected by the Dobbs decision. To ignore that relationship, she said, is to fail to report fully on the issue.
“If we don’t really interrogate the role that race and class and how they connect to gender affects our coverage, we will never be able to actually do a meaningful job of illustrating what abortion rights have looked like in this country for decades, let alone what it looks like now,” she said.
