“My goal, and the goal of many of those joining me here today, is to make abortion at any stage a thing of the past.” That line, spoken nearly 12 years ago by Texas’ then-Gov. Rick Perry while he was stumping outside a Houston-area anti-abortion pregnancy center, has been on my mind a lot over the past few days, thanks to new evidence showing more people are having abortions today than before Donald Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
The latest Society of Family Planning #WeCount report shows in-person and telehealth abortion care with clinical supervision have increased, and new research out of the University of California-San Francisco shows self-managed abortion care is also becoming more common post-Roe.
As a means of eliminating abortion in the United States, the Dobbs decision and the resulting proliferation of state-level abortion restrictions and bans seem to have failed spectacularly.
As a means of eliminating abortion in the United States, the Dobbs decision and the resulting proliferation of state-level abortion restrictions and bans seem to have failed spectacularly. Today, Rick Perry’s political career is more a “thing of the past” than is abortion care. But I am not given to believe that eliminating abortion was ever the goal of the anti-abortion movement or of the Republican (and some Democrat) politicians who have backed abortion bans and sought to criminalize care.
It’s more clear than ever — and it’s been plenty clear for a while — that anti-abortion politics and policies are about punishment, predominantly for perceived noncompliance with Christian, patriarchal sexual customs. Rhetoric around eliminating abortion, more recently couched by anti-abortion propagandists as making abortion “unthinkable,” is a smokescreen. It’s intended to divert attention away from the deeply misogynist, oppressive heart of anti-abortion thinking and policymaking, which are primarily concerned with writing the subjugation of pregnant people into law.
The sooner the public — including the Beltway press and mainstream and legacy journalists, pundits and public intellectuals — get their heads around this, the better positioned we’ll all be to stamp out the GOP’s sexist chicanery and get moving on pro-abortion-rights and pro-family policies that will really make positive differences in people’s lives.
But I worry we’re still a long way away. I was struck by a recent column in The Hill by the conservative law professor Andrew Koppelman, who wrote that “pro-life voters, who want more than anything else to minimize the number of abortions,” should vote for Kamala Harris. Now, sure: anyone whose goal is to “minimize” abortions would do well to support practically any Democrat over practically any Republican. Dems have long backed common-sense policies that enable people to make decisions about their reproductive lives that are less likely to result in unplanned pregnancies, from improving contraceptive access to promoting evidence-based sex education. And of course, Democrats also back the safety-net policies and institutions that are more likely to enable people who want to become pregnant and experience parenthood to do so.
But presuming “pro-life voters” are those who “want more than anything else to minimize the number of abortions” begs the question to an incredible, even irresponsible, degree. Voters — and politicians — who oppose abortion have had the same opportunities anyone else does to support access to contraception, sex education, and safety-net programs. But, again and again, they’ve chosen not to. Perhaps they have other priorities — such as enriching America’s modern-day robber barons, attacking transgender kids and adults, or accelerating climate disaster to the benefit of the oil and gas industry. Even then, ushering in climate change and supporting bodily autonomy are hardly mutually exclusive.
There’s plainly another motivation at play here: rank misogyny. The regressive, conservative desire to control strangers’ sexual behavior — especially women’s sexual behavior and our reproductive capacities — makes a hell of a lot more logical sense than the knotty mental gymnastics required to reconcile crowing about making abortion “unthinkable” with voting against the Right to Contraception Act.
Telemedicine shield laws are keeping options open for folks living in the most abortion-hostile geographies.
That people who do not wish to remain pregnant at the behest of the government have found the means to do so even after the fall of Roe is a testament to the ingenuity, resilience and resourcefulness of pregnant people themselves, and of the reproductive health, rights and justice movements and their political supporters, and especially of local abortion funds. Despite the closure of hundreds of clinics between the onset of TRAP laws in the early 2010s and the Dobbs decision, medical providers — notably, mostly independent clinics — have done all they can to stretch their capacity in places where abortion remains legal. Telemedicine shield laws are keeping options open for folks living in the most abortion-hostile geographies. Doulas, educators, accompaniers and other supporters of safe self-managed abortion care are sharing information despite the odds, and at great legal risk.
But we should not assume the new data from SFP and UCSF means that everyone who needs an abortion can get one or can get care by the means they would prefer. There will always be abortions, and there always should be abortions, as many as are necessary to ensure that people have complete control over their reproductive lives.
Even with abortion numbers going up, that’s not the case. We’re in a new status quo, and it’s totally unacceptable, and untenable in the long term (and the long term could be shorter than we think, with a Trump-Vance presidential ticket on the line). We know that, post-Dobbs, tens of thousands of people are likely being forced to carry pregnancies to term when they would have chosen otherwise. Infant deaths are on the rise, with thousands of families navigating terrible, and unnecessary, trauma and grief as a direct result of abortion bans. So-called “exceptions” to abortion bans, for rape or incest or medical emergencies, are demonstrably inadequate; even people with unviable ectopic pregnancies are being turned away by medical facilities unwilling to run afoul of abortion bans.
Forced pregnancy, rising infant deaths and the despicable treatment of pregnant people seeking urgent medical care have one thing in common, and it isn’t reducing abortion: it’s the anti-abortion movement’s sadistic obsession with the subjugation of women.