The Road Ahead: Abortion Rights Activists Respond to the Fall of Roe v. Wade
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On Friday, Americans learned we no longer have a constitutional right to an abortion. In a 6-3 vote, the U.S Supreme Court upheld Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks and overruled Roe. v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, two landmark cases that for nearly 50 years ensured the right to end a pregnancy safely.
The May leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion promising to erase Roe put abortion rights organizers on high alert, but they’d been preparing for this day long before the specifics were made public. Conservative lawmakers and activists had in recent years used state legislatures to chip away at access to the procedure, inching up the weeks of gestation after which abortion was banned and requiring that providers jump through medically unnecessary hoops to stay in business. While federal courts sometimes stood in the way of these anti-abortion laws taking effect, residents of many states – particularly in the South and Midwest – already had to travel hundreds of miles to get the healthcare they needed. On Friday, the highest court in the land put decision-making fully in the hands of state legislatures and our consistently deadlocked Congress. Reproductive justice organizer Monica Simpson was certain how her work will advance.
“Our next step is taking care of our people,” Simpson, executive director of SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, told Oprah Daily just after news of the ruling broke. Immediately, trigger bans dependent on the fall of Roe moved to outlaw abortion in 13 states, and the legality of abortion is now in question in dozens more. “We’re going to have to move people around this country to get access to abortions in the places where it is secure.”
Part of the challenge is knowing where access remains and for how long. The landscape is shifting rapidly as anti-abortion politicians move to seize the opportunity created by the Supreme Court. “Abortion is still legal in Ohio,” Iris Harvey, CEO and President of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio, said Friday afternoon during a media briefing. “Our number one strategy is to make sure our patients know that our doors are still open.” Trigger bans there are moving through legislative committee and have not yet become law. But within minutes of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the state’s Republican attorney general asked the courts to lift an injunction on a ban on abortion after six weeks that was signed into law in 2019. On Friday evening, a federal judge approved the request and lifted the court’s hold on the law.
“This is not over today in Ohio,” Jessie Hill, an attorney who litigates abortion rights cases in the state, said during the briefing. “There are still legal moves to be made and legal avenues to be pursued.”
The fight for abortion rights will take place in the courts and, as Monica Simpson of SisterSong stressed, through more intimate and practical acts of mutual aid. Over Juneteenth weekend, Simpson’s organization and Black Feminist Future, another reproductive justice group, hosted an event that brought more than 1,000 abortion rights activists to D.C. to rally and march from Stanton Park to the Supreme Court. The event, called Black Bodies for Black Power, featured speakers who repeated a key message: in the absence of a constitutional right to abortion, civil disobedience will be key. “These times require that we don’t just do what is legal. We have to do what is moral and what is just,” Paris Hatcher, executive director of Black Feminist Future, said at the June 18th rally. “We can’t depend on courts or the government to protect us.”
This will mean supporting abortion funds, organizations nationwide that raise the money people need to get the procedure and that offer wraparound services to meet the pregnant person’s needs. Abortion funds connect people with a range of resources, helping them pay rent, buy diapers for the babies they already have, and explain to their employer why they’ll be absent from work.
Resisting the overturn of Roe will also mean looking to Black, Indigenous and low-income women and communities of color for leadership, Simpson said. These groups have been hardest hit by existing abortion restrictions and so have a head start in knowing how to survive the ongoing assault on human rights, she said. For example, the Hyde Amendment, a federal prohibition on Medicaid coverage of abortion, was enacted in 1976. Systemic racism and high costs have long denied many in these communities access to healthcare, including sexual and reproductive health services. The stakes are particularly high for those who are denied an abortion, as Diana Greene Foster and her landmark Turnaway Study have shown. Women who want the procedure and can’t get one are much more likely to live in poverty, be unemployed, stay with abusive partners and suffer poor health impacts for years after their pregnancies, the study found.
Black women have used workarounds for generations and will have to lean into this ancestral know-how as abortion gets further out of reach. “Midwives were providing abortions as well as catching the babies,” Simpson said. “They were our first abortion clinics and our first abortion funds — the sister circles in our communities. We’re not doing anything new here. I know we’re prepared for this moment, even though it’s hard. Even though it’s scary.”
While some Americans will deepen their commitment to community self-reliance, others will stay focused on the federal government’s responsibility to ensure women’s rights. Last year, the House passed the Women’s Health Protection Act. The law, which would have protected abortion rights nationwide, failed in the Senate. Voting in the midterms and beyond to change the makeup of Congress and state legislatures is important, but Simpson urges a multi-pronged approach, given that conservatives’ assault on human rights is itself multi-pronged. “Voting rights are also under attack in this country,” she said.
Electoral change also takes time, and for many Americans the need for relief will be immediate. With Roe overturned, people may risk arrest and prosecution for engaging in activities such as crossing state lines, purchasing certain medications online, or visiting a hospital after having a miscarriage. Americans can expect to face greater levels of surveillance and policing, advocates said. We’ve seen in recent years how pregnant people can be made to suffer when bodily autonomy is criminalized and a fetus is given more rights than the person carrying it: Healthcare providers, law enforcement officials and child welfare workers are given incredible power to act on their suspicions and biases and, sometimes unwittingly, ruin lives.
Brittney Poolaw, a 21-year-old Oklahoma woman, was sentenced to four years in prison for manslaughter last year after she suffered a miscarriage and sought medical attention. Prosecutors built their case using reports from healthcare providers, with whom Poolaw shared that she had used illegal substances. Christine Taylor in Iowa was also treated as a perpetrator against her own womb. The 22-year-old pregnant mother was arrested after she tripped and fell down a flight of stairs and then sought medical treatment. Neither she nor her fetus were harmed, but hospital staff contacted law enforcement because she shared with them that at one point in her pregnancy, she had considered an abortion.
This month, the organization National Advocates for Pregnant Women released a toolkit geared toward helping law enforcement, defense attorneys, medical examiners, hospital staff and legislators better understand their roles and responsibilities when interacting with pregnant people. According to the group’s research, many in these professions believe they are required to make reports that can go on to result in a woman being investigated, having her children taken away, or even being incarcerated. But this is often a misinterpretation of their duties, the group argues. “The health and just treatment of pregnant women and their families depends on individuals in the community choosing to disrupt these cruel cycles of surveillance and criminalization,” the report reads.
Clarifying the appropriate role of healthcare providers in a post-Roe America is especially important, as many people of reproductive age will turn to procuring the pills mifepristone and misoprostol by mail and managing their abortions at home. Three states explicitly ban self-managed abortion. But in more than a dozen states, existing laws could be used to criminalize people whose miscarriages or stillbirths are deemed suspicious and reported to police. During a livestream hosted by the news organization The Intercept Friday, Hayley McMahon, an abortion access researcher who focuses on self-managed abortion, recommended resources to help navigate these legal gray areas: the experts at If/When/How, PlanCPills.org, and the abortion privacy guide created by Digital Defense Fund.
The road ahead will require that supporters of abortion rights engage in self-advocacy, community care through mutual aid, and political organizing. In overturning Roe, the Supreme Court has cleared the path for states to force women to carry their pregnancies to term and give birth. It’s also motivated reproductive rights and reproductive justice activists to expand the networks and alliances they’ve been building for years.
“We have the highest court in the land saying you don’t have control over your body,” Simpson of SisterSong said. “This gives us an opportunity across our movements to build collective power.”
Dani McClain reports on race, parenting and reproductive health. McClain's writing has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, TIME, The Atlantic, Harper's Bazaar and EBONY.com. Her work has been recognized by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, the National Association of Black Journalists, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and she received a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. McClain is a Puffin Fellow at Type Media Center and a contributing writer at The Nation. She was a staff reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and has worked as a strategist with organizations including Color of Change and Drug Policy Alliance. Her book, We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood, was published in 2019 by Bold Type Books and was shortlisted in 2020 for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award
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