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Remarks by President   Biden During Meeting on Reproductive Rights with State and Local   Officials

Roosevelt Room

(August 26, 2022)

11:12 A.M. EDT

     THE PRESIDENT:  Well, look, thanks for coming down.  And I know you’ve been meeting with my staff — (clears throat) — excuse me — and — and I’m just a — quote, a “drop-by.”  But I want to thank you for what you’re doing and your focus. 

I — you know, the — the leadership of state and local officials on this issue is incredibly important — incredibly important.

And as I said — excuse me for — I have thro- — frog in my throat here — (drinks water) — as I said, the Court got Roe right for nearly 50 years.  And Congress, in my view, should co- — codify cro- — Roe for — once and for all.  But right now, we’re short a handful of votes.  And it passed the House, but in the Senate, we’re short.  And the only way it’s going to happen is if the American people make it happen in November. 

Remember that line in the — in the court case — in the Dobbs case saying that women can speak?  Well, they have no idea about who — you’re going to hear women roar on this issue, and it’s going to be consequential.  So, I’m optimistic that we’ll get to a place where we’re already making your voices heard, like you saw what happened with Pat Ryan up in New York picking up that district.

I think you’re — I think the American people realize this is just beyond the pale.  It’s — it’s — it goes too far.      In the meantime, I signed two executive orders to protect access to reproductive healthcare, including emergency medical care, and to protect a woman’s right to travel to get healthcare she needs.  And I think one that’s going to turn out to be as consequential as anything we’ve done is to protect her right to privacy so they can’t access that information. 

And we also just had a big district court win in Idaho.  And so I’m here today to hear what you think, what you guys are doing.  And — and so I’m going to, as they say, yield the floor. 

And I want to — I came do a little listening, if I could, if that’s all right.

MS. RODRIGUEZ:  Yes.  Thank you, Mr. President.  We wanted to maybe first hear from the Mayor of Durham, North Carolina — Mayor O’Neal — who’s joined us today.

THE PRESIDENT:  Madam Mayor.

MAYOR O’NEAL:  Mr. President, I’m so happy to be here today and on this special day.  This is Women’s Equality Day.  And in North Carolina, we are still a relatively safe-haven state for a woman’s right to choose.  But where it is a threat anywhere is a threat for everybody. 

And so today, in North Carolina, we stand ready to help change the narrative.  I do you believe that it is time for us to talk about the encroachment — or non-encroachment — of reproductive rights for men.      The conversation in this arena has been primarily focused in on women’s reproductive rights.  But there are two partners when it comes to pregnancy, and we should look and see what the other side can contribute in this conversation when it comes to reproductive freedoms.

We are all at a crucial state in our nation in a number of arenas, but the — the right to choose is a fundamental right in so many areas.  And when it is threatened, we must all pitch in to make sure that it’s balanced. 

I’m a former judge.  I was a sitting judge for 24 years at the state court.  And so balancing and fairness is very important to me and my state and my city.  And so, I’m here today to try to tell us we must talk about the reproductive freedoms that men have that women do not currently enjoy.

MS. RODRIGUEZ:  Thank you so much.

THE PRESIDENT:  Tell me how you do that.  Now, I understand it — I mean, it’s clear in its face you’re accurate.  But how, in making the case of the freedom men have — what do you do to — other than to sort of embarrass men into — getting into the — into the argument and voting the right way on this issue?

MAYOR O’NEAL:  Well, I think that you can primarily list — I think one of my colleagues here this morning mentioned

Via- — Viagra.  If you start to talk about taking away the rights of men to take it, then what — what do we have?  Or if we think about the fact that there are medical procedures that men can have as well — because an abortion is a medical procedure — there are medical procedures that men can have that will help them not to contribute to the making of a child.      So there has to be some discussions about why that is not a part of the conversation.  Why is it solely focused on a woman?  And I think just having a conversation causes people to kind of rethink and reshape that narra- — narrative.  And we don’t talk about that because those are very personal and intimate issues.      But I do believe that it is a must that we focus in on what men can do to contribute physically to the making of a child or not making of a child.

     THE PRESIDENT:  Okay.      MS. RODRIGUEZ:  Thank you, Mayor.  And next, we wanted to hear from Judge Hidalgo from Harris County, Texas.  Judge?

     JUDGE HIDALGO:  Mr. President, as you know, I’m a county executive in Houston.  And it was tragic — just yesterday, the trigger law in Texas came into effect.  And it means that abortion is banned from the time of fertilization and that anyone who performs an abortion could be charged with a felony, and the penalty could be up to life in prison.  And so, as we celebrate Women’s Equality Day, we have everything but equality when it comes to this issue.      I’m hearing a lot of concern from our doctors in the community.  Our public hospital system provides abortions when they’re medically necessary.  And those doctors are telling us they’re not going to be able to determine anymore when it is legal to provide an abortion, because the law in Texas has no exemptions for rape or incest; only allows an abortion exception when the life of the mother is in danger or they’re at danger of irreparable harm.      So, how do you determine that if you’re a doctor?  And they’re agonizing over it.  They’re agonizing about whether they protect a life or put themselves at severe legal jeopardy.      So, we’ve worked to invest funds in some of the — some of the American Rescue Plan funds into tackling maternal mortality in Harris County.  We already have the highest maternal mortality in Texas.  Certainly, compared to the rest of the country, it’s very, very high, and this will only exacerbate the problem.      Abortions aren’t going anywhere.  They’re just going to become a bigger threat.      And look, I’ve dealt with fires, flood, pandemic, the winter freeze we had in Texas.  You visited, Mr. President, right after that tragedy.      THE PRESIDENT:  That’s where I saw you last.      JUDGE HIDALGO:  A lot of that — it was wonderful to have you, Mr. President.  And look, a lot of that — perhaps the winter freeze is an exception — they’re natural disasters.  This is a man-made disaster that we have in Texas.  It’s a man-made disaster.      And we got to change it, as you say, at the ballot box.  But, look, we have that, we have a bounty law, and we have a legislative session that’s going to start in January where they’re looking at tackling contraception — access to contraception.           They’re already talked about banning that — banning the pill that helps women seek abortion who can’t make it to a clinic physically; that would make it even harder for women to travel.       A woman in Houston would have to travel 600 miles to get to the nearest abortion clinic in New Mexico.  And so, we need help figuring out how to get women to be able to seek that abortion, to travel to these states that are offering us safe havens.      We need funding for additional support for contraception, for reproductive healthcare.     We’re using our local funding to additionally support those women, to tackle maternal mortality with some of the funds you guys have sent.  But it’s a difficult day for women in Texas.      And I will say, I speak this as the only woman leading the largest county in the state of Texas, third largest — third largest in the country.  And I am not out of step with the women of Texas, because the vast majority of Texans are opposed to this extreme law — which I refuse to call partisan, because it is extreme.  And all of us can join in determining that.      And so I speak for myself, I speak for women in Harris County, and I speak for the majority of Texans when I say this law has no place, and it’s a slap in the face to do this the day before Women’s Equality Day.      THE PRESIDENT:  I think you speak for women all over America.  I think you speak for beyond women.  I think you speak for the majority of the American people.      This is — the idea that there are no exceptions made as well is just not something that — you see what the — what the votes — who knows what happens in November, but you see what some of the votes that have occurred, that have taken place in the last — the last couple months here in the United States in various localities.  The American people — I think this is above and beyond where everybody thought they’d — we’d go.

MAYOR PATTERSON-HOWARD:  Thank you so much, Mr. President, for —      MS. RODRIGUEZ:  Oh —      THE PRESIDENT:  Oh, I’m sorry.      MAYOR PATTERSON-HOWARD:  She’s —      THE PRESIDENT:  I — I took control.  I shouldn’t do that.      MS. RODRIGUEZ:  No problem, Mr. President.      THE PRESIDENT:  I’m not allowed to do that.  Go ahead.  You tell me.      MS. RODRIGUEZ:  I think we’re going to go ahead and have the rest of the conversation closed press.  So, thank you all so much.      Q    Are you concerned national security could have been compromised at Mar-a-Lago?      THE PRESIDENT:  Let — we’ll let the Justice Department determine that.  We’ll see what happens.                              END                   11:24 A.M. EDT               

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Adams Delivers Floor Speech Supporting Abortion Rights

The speech comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s holding in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned the long-standing precedent established by Roe v. Wade.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (July 15, 2022) – This morning, Congresswoman Alma Adams (NC-12) delivered a speech on the floor of the United States House of Representatives in support of the Women’s Health Protection Act , which would codify a right to reproductive freedom and abortion care into law. The legislation comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s holding in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization , which overturned the long-standing precedent established by Roe v. Wade .

Video of the speech is available on C-SPAN here .

“I rise today because I’m pretty damn angry,” said Adams. “The Supreme Court’s decision overturning the right to abortion care is fundamentally wrong. The Supreme Court greenlit forced pregnancy, taking away the right to bodily autonomy for women. Abortion is still health care, and people will still need to access it. That’s why I’m supporting the Women’s Health Protection Act .”

Adams’ remarks as prepared for delivery are below:

I rise today because I’m angry. The Supreme Court’s decision overturning the right to abortion care is fundamentally wrong.

The Supreme Court greenlit forced pregnancy, taking away the right to bodily autonomy from women. However, abortion is still health care, and people will still need to access it.

That’s why I’m supporting the Women’s Health Protection Act.

In the wake of the Dobbs decision, we have a state-by-state patchwork that denies women equal protection under the law. While abortion is still legal in my home of North Carolina, the State of Texas is suing the government to compel women to carry pregnancies to term, even if it kills the mother. The Attorney General of Indiana wants to force rape victims – even 10 year old girls – to carry pregnancies to term.

We have a responsibility to stop this draconian overreach by state governments. We must make reproductive freedom the law of the land.

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Biden, in speech, aims to keep abortion top of mind for voters as midterms near

President Biden promised to prioritize abortion rights next year if Democrats can maintain control of Congress.

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As renewed concerns about the economy appear to be boosting Republicans’ chances in next month’s midterm elections, President Biden spoke pointedly about abortion Tuesday in an effort to remind voters what’s at stake for women and families.

With exactly three weeks until election day, Biden went further than he has in other recent remarks on the subject of reproductive rights. In a short speech at the historic Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C., the president promised voters that codifying the abortion protections enshrined for 49 years in Roe vs. Wade will be his first priority when the new Congress gets underway in January — so long as Democrats can hold the House and increase their Senate majority from 50 to 52.

“You gotta get out the vote; we can do this if we vote,” Biden said to an audience of younger Americans, describing the upcoming election as “the most consequential in our history.”

He added: “The choice and the stakes are crystal clear — especially when it comes to the right to choose.”

Democrats now control the evenly divided Senate because of Vice President Kamala Harris’ ability to break a tie vote . But they need 60 votes to avoid a filibuster, and two members of their caucus oppose a rule change that would allow them to codify Roe with a simple majority vote. With two more Democratic senators, Biden has argued, he’d be able to push ahead. Roughly half of U.S. states have imposed total or partial abortion bans that would be nullified by Biden’s proposed federal law.

Biden’s remarks, delivered at a Democratic National Committee event at the theater a few miles from the White House, marked something of a departure from his recent approach to the midterms.

Although he typically mentions abortion in his stump speeches, it has not been his main focus at recent events, which have centered instead on the benefits of the infrastructure, drug prices and manufacturing legislation Democrats have already passed.

In Tuesday’s speech, though, Biden framed the election as a choice between the two parties with diametrically opposed positions on abortion.

“Republicans are doubling down on their extreme positions,” Biden said, standing in front of rows of women onlookers and beneath a large banner that read: “RESTORE ROE.”

In Western swing, Biden looks to make Democrats’ case without making waves

On his four-day tour, Biden is skipping the states with the tightest Senate races and making his case without drawing too much attention to himself.

Oct. 13, 2022

The Supreme Court’s June ruling overturning Roe upended five decades of precedent and outraged supporters of abortion rights across the country. In August, Kansas voters overwhelmingly rejected an initiative that would have removed abortion protections in the state, giving Democrats new optimism that the issue could galvanize voters in November and help them buck the historic trend of the incumbent president’s party losing seats in their first midterm election.

Biden said he wanted to “remind” voters of “the anger, the worry, the disbelief” they felt when the ruling came down this summer. “Remember how you felt that day,” Biden said, detailing the fallout from the court ruling that enabled states to impose restrictions on abortion.

“In just four months, abortion bans have gone into effect in 14 states,” Biden said. “If Republicans get their way with a national ban, it won’t matter where you live in America,” he added, noting that the court could go on to take away other constitutional rights, including same-sex marriage.

Last month, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said that his party would advance federal legislation banning abortion after 15 weeks of gestation if it gains control of Congress in the midterms.

Although only some Republicans have backed that proposal, other GOP candidates have tried to turn the question around and put Democrats on the defensive for supporting abortion rights with no exceptions.

In the closely contested Arizona race for U.S. Senate that may determine which party controls the chamber, Republican challenger Blake Masters has softened his own anti-abortion rights stance; and he’s gone after Sen. Mark Kelly for backing legislation allowing abortions in the third trimester of pregnancy. Kelly, in response, has noted that such late-term abortions are exceedingly rare and usually due to serious health problems.

“Doubling down on an extreme agenda of abortion on demand until birth won’t stop Democrats from losing Congress,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. “Clear majorities of Americans — including women, independents and rank-and-file Democratic voters — support commonsense limits on abortion, including a minimum federal standard to stop brutal late-term abortions when unborn babies feel pain.”

In recent weeks, numerous polls have shown Republicans gaining ground as the abortion issue has been overtaken by ongoing concerns about inflation and high gas prices. Biden plans to speak about gas prices on Wednesday. His staff is eager to show that he is focused on both matters, not prioritizing one above another. The economy and abortion rights are “not an either/or,” Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, wrote in a tweet Tuesday.

Column: Can the abortion issue save the Senate for Democrats? This race offers a test case

The Supreme Court abortion ruling has boosted Democratic Sen. Patty Murray’s reelection hopes. Her Republican rival is focusing on inflation, crime.

Sept. 23, 2022

Democrats believe they stand to benefit from refocusing voters on abortion. Majorities of Democrats (82%) and independents (59%) identify as “pro-choice,” according to a recent poll by Navigator, a progressive polling firm. Similarly, 76% of Democrats and 54% of independents disagree with the court’s ruling overturning Roe, the survey found.

Three organizations that support abortion rights — Planned Parenthood Action Fund, NARAL Pro-Choice America and Emily’s List — announced Tuesday that they plan to collectively spend $150 million to target voters in key battleground races around the issue of abortion.

“It’s time to send an unmistakable message to politicians who have run roughshod on our freedoms: When you come for our rights, we’ll come for your seats,” said Mini Timmaraju, NARAL’s president.

The Democrats’ new push on abortion rights comes as early voting is already underway in many states.

More to Read

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Aug. 26, 2024

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Aug. 19, 2024

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Eli Stokols is a former White House reporter based in the Los Angeles Times’ Washington, D.C., bureau.

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Why Freedom of Speech Is the Next Abortion Fight

A legal battle in Mississippi will test whether states can criminalize those who merely provide information.

I n the middle of July, three big blue billboards went up in and around Jackson, Mississippi. Pregnant? You still have a choice , they informed passing motorists, inviting them to visit Mayday.Health to learn more. Anybody who did landed on a website that provides information about at-home abortion pills and ways to get them delivered anywhere in the United States—including parts of the country, such as Mississippi, where abortions are now illegal under most circumstances.

A few days ago, the founders of the nonprofit that paid for the billboard ads, Mayday Health , received a subpoena from the office of the attorney general of Mississippi. (The state has already been at the center of recent debates about abortion: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade , upheld a Mississippi statute by allowing states to put strict limits on abortion.) The subpoena, which I have seen , demands a trove of documents about Mayday Health and its activities. It may be the first step in an effort to force Mayday Health to take down the billboards, or even to prosecute the organization’s leaders for aiding and abetting criminal conduct.

Mayday Health is not backing down. This week, it is taking out a television ad on Mississippi channels and putting up 20 additional billboards. This makes the legal fight over the Jackson billboards a crucial test in two interrelated conflicts about abortion that are still coming into public view.

Read: The abortion-rights message that some activists hate

The first is that the availability of abortion pills, which are very safe and effective during the first three months of pregnancy, has transformed the stakes of the abortion fight . The pro-life movement has hoped that states’ new powers to shut down abortion providers will radically reduce the number of abortions around the country. The pro-choice movement has feared that the end of Roe will lead to a resurgence of back-alley abortions that seriously threaten women’s health.

Yet the changes wrought by the recent Supreme Court ruling may turn out to be more contained than meets the eye: Legal restrictions on first-trimester abortions have become much harder to enforce because a simple pill can now be used to induce a miscarriage. Abortion by medication is widely available in large parts of the country; as Mayday Health points out on its website, even women who are residents in states where doctors cannot prescribe such pills can set up a temporary forwarding address and obtain them by mail.

The second brewing conflict is about limits on free speech. So long as abortions required an in-person medical procedure, the pro-life movement could hope to reduce them by shutting down local clinics offering the service. Now that comparatively cheap and convenient workarounds exist for most cases, effective curbs on abortion require the extra step of preventing people from finding out about these alternatives. That is putting many members of the pro-life movement, be they Mississippi’s attorney general or Republican legislators in several states who are trying to pass draconian restrictions on information and advice about abortions, on a collision course with the First Amendment.

S ome limits on speech are reasonable. States do, for example, have a legitimate interest in banning advertisements for illegal drugs. If a cocaine dealer took out a billboard advertising his wares, the government should obviously be able to take it down. Especially when it comes to commercial speech, some common-sense restrictions on what people can say or claim have always existed and are well-justified.

But the laws that Republicans are now introducing in state legislatures around the country go far beyond such narrow limits on objectionable commercial speech. In South Carolina, for example, Republican legislators have recently sponsored a bill that would criminalize “providing information to a pregnant woman, or someone seeking information on behalf of a pregnant woman, by telephone, internet, or any other mode of communication regarding self-administered abortions or the means to obtain an abortion, knowing that the information will be used, or is reasonably likely to be used, for an abortion.”

Read: The coming rise of abortion as a crime

This law—which is modeled on draft legislation that the National Right to Life Committee is trying to get passed in many states around the country—would seriously undermine the right to free speech. It could potentially make doctors in states where abortion is actually legal liable to prosecution for discussing their services with someone who calls them from a state where abortion is illegal. It could even outlaw basic forms of speech such as news stories containing information that might be used by someone seeking an abortion. Theoretically, even this article could fall under that proscription.

The subpoena issued by the office of Mississippi’s attorney general is objectionable for similar reasons. Mayday Health is not advertising a commercial product or service. The organization does not handle or distribute abortion pills. All it does is provide information. Although one could reasonably believe that the information Mayday Health is providing may be used to commit acts that are now illegal in some parts of the United States, a ban on informational speech that can be used for the purposes of lawbreaking would be unacceptably broad and vague. After all, would-be lawbreakers might also consult the blog posts of lawyers who explain how to object to an improper search of a vehicle or study the pages of a novel to figure out how to make a Molotov cocktail. Should the attorney or the novelist also be considered to have aided or abetted a crime?

Recent efforts to suppress speech about abortion would seriously undermine the nation’s ability to debate the topic openly and honestly. Anybody who believes in the importance of the First Amendment should oppose them. As Will Creeley, the legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has pointed out , “These proposals are a chilling attempt to stifle free speech … Whether you agree with abortion or not is irrelevant. You have the right to talk about it.”

I n recent years , the wider debate about free speech has undergone a strange transformation. Historically, the American left staunchly defended the First Amendment because it recognized the central part that free speech played in the struggles against slavery and segregation, and in the fight for the rights of women and sexual minorities. But as establishment institutions, including universities and corporations, became more progressive, and parts of the left came to feel that they had a significant share in institutional power, the absolute commitment to free speech waned.

Progressives started to find the idea of restrictions on free speech appealing because they assumed that those making decisions about what to allow and what to ban would share their views and values. Today, some on the extremist left endorse restrictions on free speech, demanding campus speech codes and measures to force social-media sites to “deplatform” controversial commentators and censor what they claim is “misinformation.”

Mary Ziegler: Why exceptions for the life of the mother have disappeared

The transformation of the left’s position on freedom of speech has allowed both principled conservatives and the less-than-principled protagonists of the MAGA movement to cast themselves as defenders of the First Amendment. In the mind of many people, the cause of free speech has astoundingly quickly shifted from being associated with left-wing organizations such as the ACLU to becoming the property of right-leaning pundits and politicians.

This makes the new front in the fight over abortion rights an important reminder of why the left should never abandon the cause of free speech. If the left gives up on the core commitment to free speech, what people can say is as likely to be determined by the attorney general of Mississippi as it is by college deans or tech workers. Curbs on free expression have always been a tool of governments that seek to control the lives of their citizens and punish those who defy them. The same remains true today.

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‘The Pro-Life Generation’: Young Women Fight Against Abortion Rights

Many American women mourned the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe, but for others it is a moment of triumph and a matter of human rights.

Kristin Turner, the communications director for Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising. Some relative newcomers to the anti-abortion movement include young women whose activism is not connected to religious belief. Credit... Rachel Bujalski for The New York Times

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By Ruth Graham

• July 3, 2022

DALLAS — The rollback of abortion rights has been received by many American women with a sense of shock and fear , and warnings about an ominous decline in women’s status as full citizens.

But for some women, the decision meant something different: a triumph of human rights, not an impediment to women’s rights.

“I just reject the idea that as a woman I need abortion to be successful or to be as thriving as a man in my career,” said Phoebe Purvey, a 26-year-old Texan. “I don’t think I need to sacrifice a life in order to do that.”

The Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade was a political victory, accomplished by lobbyists, strategists and campaign professionals over the course of decades. But it was also a cultural battle, fought by activists across the country including those in the exact demographic that abortion-rights advocates warn have the most to lose in the new American landscape: young women.

Often pointed to by anti-abortion leaders as the face of the movement, a new generation of activists say they are poised to continue the fight in a post-Roe nation.

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Once a liability for Democrats, abortion gets new life with Harris as nominee

Some Republican-led states with ballot measures that would expand abortion access have wide support for abortion. In Florida, 69 percent of likely voters said they would vote “yes” on a proposed state constitutional amendment protecting a right to abortion before viability to protect a woman’s health, according to a University of North Florida Public Opinion Research Lab survey released on July 30. The proposal needs more than 60 percent approval to be enacted. The same survey found that Florida voters preferred Donald Trump over Harris, 49 percent to 42 percent, and GOP Sen. Rick Scott over Democratic challenger Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, 47 percent to 43 percent. 

Trump said in an interview on NBC News on Aug. 29 that his administration would protect access to in vitro fertilization and have either the government or insurance companies pay for the treatment if he’s elected in November. Republicans in Congress have repeatedly blocked efforts by Democrats to move legislation that would protect access to IVF. 

“The desire of the Republican Party is to not talk about abortion ever again in this election,” said Ryan Stitzlein, vice president of political and government relations at Reproductive Freedom for All, formerly known as NARAL. 

Stitzlein said that in the post-Dobbs world, there’s been a change in attitudes about campaigning on abortion, and it is overall a less polarizing issue than it used to be. Before Dobbs, some Democrats saw it as a liability to campaign on the issue. 

“I think there were a lot of people who thought that this was just an issue that it was better to just not talk about. We’ve never felt that way. We always knew that this was a huge, deeply popular issue and would be a motivator for voters. And that’s proven to be accurate,” Stitzlein said. 

With Harris’ significant focus on abortion in her short campaign so far, an issue that past politicians have shrugged off as a risk is now something she can use as an asset, abortion rights advocates say.

“It matters a lot that the person holding the highest office in the land is able to understand what’s happening with people in the country that they’re leading, and this issue of abortion has been an uphill battle for decades in this country,” Simpson said. 

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Key facts about the abortion debate in America

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade – the decision that had guaranteed a constitutional right to an abortion for nearly 50 years – has shifted the legal battle over abortion to the states, with some prohibiting the procedure and others moving to safeguard it.

As the nation’s post-Roe chapter begins, here are key facts about Americans’ views on abortion, based on two Pew Research Center polls: one conducted from June 25-July 4 , just after this year’s high court ruling, and one conducted in March , before an earlier leaked draft of the opinion became public.

This analysis primarily draws from two Pew Research Center surveys, one surveying 10,441 U.S. adults conducted March 7-13, 2022, and another surveying 6,174 U.S. adults conducted June 27-July 4, 2022. Here are the questions used for the March survey , along with responses, and the questions used for the survey from June and July , along with responses.

Everyone who took part in these surveys is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.  Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

A majority of the U.S. public disapproves of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe. About six-in-ten adults (57%) disapprove of the court’s decision that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion and that abortion laws can be set by states, including 43% who strongly disapprove, according to the summer survey. About four-in-ten (41%) approve, including 25% who strongly approve.

About eight-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (82%) disapprove of the court’s decision, including nearly two-thirds (66%) who strongly disapprove. Most Republicans and GOP leaners (70%) approve , including 48% who strongly approve.

Most women (62%) disapprove of the decision to end the federal right to an abortion. More than twice as many women strongly disapprove of the court’s decision (47%) as strongly approve of it (21%). Opinion among men is more divided: 52% disapprove (37% strongly), while 47% approve (28% strongly).

About six-in-ten Americans (62%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to the summer survey – little changed since the March survey conducted just before the ruling. That includes 29% of Americans who say it should be legal in all cases and 33% who say it should be legal in most cases. About a third of U.S. adults (36%) say abortion should be illegal in all (8%) or most (28%) cases.

Generally, Americans’ views of whether abortion should be legal remained relatively unchanged in the past few years , though support fluctuated somewhat in previous decades.

Relatively few Americans take an absolutist view on the legality of abortion – either supporting or opposing it at all times, regardless of circumstances. The March survey found that support or opposition to abortion varies substantially depending on such circumstances as when an abortion takes place during a pregnancy, whether the pregnancy is life-threatening or whether a baby would have severe health problems.

While Republicans’ and Democrats’ views on the legality of abortion have long differed, the 46 percentage point partisan gap today is considerably larger than it was in the recent past, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling. The wider gap has been largely driven by Democrats: Today, 84% of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 72% in 2016 and 63% in 2007. Republicans’ views have shown far less change over time: Currently, 38% of Republicans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, nearly identical to the 39% who said this in 2007.

However, the partisan divisions over whether abortion should generally be legal tell only part of the story. According to the March survey, sizable shares of Democrats favor restrictions on abortion under certain circumstances, while majorities of Republicans favor abortion being legal in some situations , such as in cases of rape or when the pregnancy is life-threatening.

There are wide religious divides in views of whether abortion should be legal , the summer survey found. An overwhelming share of religiously unaffiliated adults (83%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as do six-in-ten Catholics. Protestants are divided in their views: 48% say it should be legal in all or most cases, while 50% say it should be illegal in all or most cases. Majorities of Black Protestants (71%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (61%) take the position that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while about three-quarters of White evangelicals (73%) say it should be illegal in all (20%) or most cases (53%).

In the March survey, 72% of White evangelicals said that the statement “human life begins at conception, so a fetus is a person with rights” reflected their views extremely or very well . That’s much greater than the share of White non-evangelical Protestants (32%), Black Protestants (38%) and Catholics (44%) who said the same. Overall, 38% of Americans said that statement matched their views extremely or very well.

Catholics, meanwhile, are divided along religious and political lines in their attitudes about abortion, according to the same survey. Catholics who attend Mass regularly are among the country’s strongest opponents of abortion being legal, and they are also more likely than those who attend less frequently to believe that life begins at conception and that a fetus has rights. Catholic Republicans, meanwhile, are far more conservative on a range of abortion questions than are Catholic Democrats.

Women (66%) are more likely than men (57%) to say abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to the survey conducted after the court’s ruling.

More than half of U.S. adults – including 60% of women and 51% of men – said in March that women should have a greater say than men in setting abortion policy . Just 3% of U.S. adults said men should have more influence over abortion policy than women, with the remainder (39%) saying women and men should have equal say.

The March survey also found that by some measures, women report being closer to the abortion issue than men . For example, women were more likely than men to say they had given “a lot” of thought to issues around abortion prior to taking the survey (40% vs. 30%). They were also considerably more likely than men to say they personally knew someone (such as a close friend, family member or themselves) who had had an abortion (66% vs. 51%) – a gender gap that was evident across age groups, political parties and religious groups.

Relatively few Americans view the morality of abortion in stark terms , the March survey found. Overall, just 7% of all U.S. adults say having an abortion is morally acceptable in all cases, and 13% say it is morally wrong in all cases. A third say that having an abortion is morally wrong in most cases, while about a quarter (24%) say it is morally acceptable in most cases. An additional 21% do not consider having an abortion a moral issue.

Among Republicans, most (68%) say that having an abortion is morally wrong either in most (48%) or all cases (20%). Only about three-in-ten Democrats (29%) hold a similar view. Instead, about four-in-ten Democrats say having an abortion is morally  acceptable  in most (32%) or all (11%) cases, while an additional 28% say it is not a moral issue. 

White evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly say having an abortion is morally wrong in most (51%) or all cases (30%). A slim majority of Catholics (53%) also view having an abortion as morally wrong, but many also say it is morally acceptable in most (24%) or all cases (4%), or that it is not a moral issue (17%). Among religiously unaffiliated Americans, about three-quarters see having an abortion as morally acceptable (45%) or not a moral issue (32%).

• Religion & Abortion

Carrie Blazina is a former digital producer at Pew Research Center .

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Abortion Is About Freedom, Not Just Privacy

It wasn’t a protest, but a defense against a protest. For much of 1989, the year I turned seventeen, I would wake up on Saturdays, at around 6 A.M ., and head to a local abortion clinic. The clinics in Buffalo, New York, where I lived, had recently become ground zero in the battle over abortion. Each day, anti-abortion protesters showed up, armed with signs showing images of what they claimed were aborted fetuses, and tried to blockade the clinic doors to prevent clients from entering. Our counter-protest aimed to get there first, and to form a moving picket that kept the protesters away and allowed clients to pass through.

By the end of the eighties, the war against abortion was in full swing. It had been revitalized by Reagan’s rise and the platform that his Presidency provided for a growing evangelical right. Gaudy televangelists decried “feminazis” and argued that abortion threatened women’s traditional roles as caretakers and mothers. A street movement of anti-abortion activists engaged in intimidation tactics, attempting to stop women from entering clinics. In upstate New York, the most prominent activist group was called Operation Rescue. Randall Terry, a former used-car salesman who became a born-again Christian in the nineteen-seventies, led it. Terry likened his crusade to the civil-rights movement and welcomed comparisons between himself and Martin Luther King, Jr. In an interview in 1989, he remarked , “The blacks were demonstrating for their own rights, and we are rescuing other people and standing up for babies’ rights. . . . There can be absolutely no compromise on this, any more than there was compromise on whether white southerners should have slaves.”

Failing to persuade women through conventional forms of protest, the anti-abortion right adopted increasingly violent tactics. In 1989, Terry said, “I believe in the use of force.” He added, adopting a more moderate tone, “I think to destroy abortion facilities at this time is counterproductive because the American public has an adverse reaction to what it sees as violence.” But the inflammatory rhetoric of Terry and the right in describing fetal tissue as “unborn babies” justified in the minds of protesters the growing use of force. According to Susan Faludi’s classic book “ Backlash ,” “between 1977 and 1989, seventy-seven family-planning clinics were torched or bombed (in at least seven cases during working hours, with employees and patients inside), a hundred and seventeen were targets of arson, two hundred and fifty received bomb threats, two hundred and thirty-one were invaded, and two hundred and twenty-four vandalized.” According to the Times , men opposed to abortion killed at least eleven people, including abortion providers, at clinics between 1993 and 2015.

A few months before my seventeenth birthday, my mother bought me a subscription to Seventeen magazine. It seemed an odd choice, given its conventional makeup ads and utterly normative portraits of white girls. I was in the midst of coming out as a lesbian and found the whole thing jarring. But, in the mix of ads and grooming tips, there were articles that captured my attention, including one about the erosion of rights for teen-agers. A small sidebar noted, as an example, that teen-agers were required to get parental consent before receiving an abortion. The issue struck me viscerally. I had been fighting constantly with my father and stepmother about curfews, smoking, and the socialists I was hanging out with. The idea that they might decide whether or not I had a baby was enraging, obliterating any notion of self-determination.

I had never thought much about abortion before, but I had thought often about pregnancy; my mother had said, almost in a whisper, that her grandmother had told her that, as soon as girls have their periods, they can’t let boys touch them. In Texas, where I had spent junior high, everyone knew that when some girls suddenly disappeared from school they were probably pregnant. During my freshman year of high school, a friend wore a coat every day until she, too, eventually disappeared. She had hidden her pregnancy for months before finally delivering a baby. It seemed to be only women and girls who suffered any consequence for pregnancy. Girls, not boys, disappeared from school. Girls, not boys, carried the weight of social stigma. Girls, not boys, had their entire lives turned upside down if they carried the pregnancy to term. It was terrifying; it was also radicalizing.

On those mornings in Buffalo, anti-abortion protesters trickled out of their cars wielding their grotesque signs. The protesters—white men accompanied by women and, in some cases, even children—yelled at patients who showed up for their appointments, saying that they were killing their babies. We chanted back, “Pro-Life, your name’s a lie, you don’t care if women die.” The clinic defenders, as we counter-protesters called ourselves, were a combination of campus activists, socialists, lesbians, and feminists—a motley crew of the Buffalo left. We had some inevitable tension with the owners of the clinic, who worried that our counter-protests might alienate patients, too. But, as the right escalated its tactics to shut clinics down, we came to feel that we were keeping the clinics open and allowing women to exercise a constitutional right.

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has brought old feelings of astonishment and disgust back to the surface. The Court’s utter disregard for the rights of women and of trans and nonbinary people who have the capacity to become pregnant is shocking in the twenty-first century. In the text of the majority opinion—as, indeed, in the original 1973 Roe opinion—the rights of women as full citizens hardly seem to register.

Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote for the Roe-affirming majority in 1973, included a brief list of the potential detriments of forcing women to carry pregnancies to term:

Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved.

In the recent majority opinion overturning Roe, Justice Samuel Alito makes the fantastical claim that a world hostile to pregnant women no longer exists. Alito contends that, in “many” cases, women now have access to maternity leave. (He doesn’t bother to mention that it is often unpaid.) He claims that medical care associated with pregnancy is covered by private insurance or government assistance. (He neglects to mention that many women must still pay large out-of-pocket expenses.)

Yet women should have the right to control their reproduction, not only because of the potential emotional or financial hardship but because it is a precondition to their full and free participation in our society. If women cannot dictate this most basic aspect of their being, then the Supreme Court has effectively consigned them to a distinctly secondary tier of citizenship. Alito rationalizes that the late arrival of civil rights for women makes those rights less real than if they had arrived earlier. He argues that the right to abortion, because it was enshrined only in the seventies, is not “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” He seems unworried that this might actually only serve to emphasize the profound misogyny endemic throughout American history; women did not even gain the right to vote until well into the twentieth century.

The original rationale for Roe relied on arguments about privacy. Blackmun, arguing that abortion should be permitted in the first trimester, wrote, “Up to those points, the abortion decision in all its aspects is inherently, and primarily, a medical decision, and basic responsibility for it must rest with the physician.” Of course, the right to privacy is crucial in mitigating the power of the state to interfere with personal decisions. But, beyond any notion of privacy, it is also important to protect the more fundamental freedom of women to control their own bodies. Even in the 1973 decision, women’s bodily autonomy goes largely unremarked upon. J. D. Vance, who is running to become a Republican senator in Ohio, recently argued, “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term; it’s whether a child should be allowed to live.” But the hard truth about the reversal of Roe is that women will be forced to bring a child to term. As Betty Friedan , author of “ The Feminine Mystique ,” wrote, in 1969, “There is no freedom, no equality, no full human dignity and personhood possible for women until we assert and demand the control over our own bodies, over our own reproductive process.”

But Friedan’s vision of freedom was incomplete. Access to abortion was the bare minimum necessary for women to achieve equality in America. Real self-determination and equality could only be achieved by ending the socially and economically subordinate role of women in our society—a burden that fell heaviest on poor and working-class women of color. Women cannot be free so long as society perpetuates the expectation that they are the unpaid stewards of household labor: cooking, cleaning, child rearing, and keeping their husbands sexually satisfied. Working-class women, especially Black and brown women, were expected not only to perform this work inside their homes but to work outside their homes, too, to financially support their families. Freedom and equality could only be realized through fair and equal pay—for work at home and as part of the workforce. This also meant that society had to take seriously the provision of safe, sound, subsidized child care. Women’s rejection of their role as the central pivot in the reproduction of society put them in conflict with the rising religious right, and also with elected officials who rejected the growth of the state agencies and institutions necessary to relieve women from caretaking roles. The rising expectations of young women, fuelled by their participation in the civil-rights movement in the nineteen-sixties, erupted in the years that followed. Women demanded birth control, freedom from sterilization, and freedom to abort unwanted pregnancies. Those who seek to roll back the clock not only intend to strip women of the right to abortion but to undermine their efforts to be independent of men and the nuclear family as well.

In the twenty-first century, it is easy to be deluded that the increased presence of women, including women of color, in politics and business is evidence that women have achieved equality. The Mississippi attorney general, in arguing this year that Roe should be struck down, noted, “Sweeping policy advances now promote women’s full pursuit of both career and family.” In fact, women make up the majority of those who live in poverty in the U.S. Women make only eighty-three cents on the dollar that men earn. Broken down along lines of race and gender, the wage gap widens dramatically: Black women make sixty-four cents for every dollar made by a white man; Latinas make fifty-seven cents. Forcing women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term only adds to their economic burden. But the Supreme Court’s ruling, by ushering in a regime of forced births, will be devastating even among those who have some financial means. No woman can escape the cloud of inferiority that is necessarily attached to having no say over when and whether to be pregnant. Moreover, pregnancy itself is a physical and emotional burden that sometimes has deadly consequences. The U.S. has a higher rate of maternal mortality than Canada, the U.K., and eight other European nations. There is no equivalent medical condition imposed on men. This creates a disparity of experience and consequence in the law that is a perfect example of basic discrimination.

Life-altering poverty and potential death are, of course, the most extreme examples of what can go wrong when unintended and unwanted pregnancy is forced upon women. But the right to abortion should not only be tied to the most tragic outcomes. Newscasters trying to get anti-abortion elected officials to affirm their support of draconian restrictions even in extreme cases—such as when a “thirteen-year-old in Arkansas is raped by a relative,” an example presented to that state’s Governor, Asa Hutchinson—miss the point that abortion is a human right. The bans on abortion even in the event of rape or incest, or when the health of the mother is threatened, certainly betray the extraordinary misogyny that animates opposition to the procedure. But the right to abortion is an affirmation that women and girls have the right to control their own destiny. Without the ability to control when, where, how, and if one chooses to become pregnant or give birth, no other freedom can be achieved.

In 1992, the abortion wars came to a head in Buffalo. For months, Operation Rescue had been planning to lay siege to Buffalo abortion clinics during what they called the Spring of Life. The mayor, Jimmy Griffin , had invited them to do so, saying, “I want to see them in this city. If they can shut down one abortion mill, they’ve done their job.” It seemed like a clear indication that the police would not interfere with their efforts. Counter-protesters from around the country mobilized in the beleaguered Rust Belt city. In the end, we stopped Operation Rescue. Arrests of anti-abortion activists helped to publicize their cause, but we were able to keep the clinics in Buffalo open.

Eight years later, after I had moved to Chicago, I once again experienced the fear involved in being at an abortion clinic. This time, I was not a clinic defender but a client. In the spring of 2000, I became pregnant, after having sex with a male friend after a party at my apartment. I knew within a week that something was happening to my body: I was exhausted, and the spicy food that I usually liked to eat made me nauseated. A pregnancy test confirmed my fears. My friend and I decided to split the cost of an abortion, and my girlfriend at the time drove me to a Planned Parenthood office in Chicago. A year earlier, the office had received a letter with no return address oozing a mysterious liquid, and had been evacuated. I worried about going to the facility and being accosted by bigots and fanatics.

But, on a cold and rainy day in the middle of the week, only people working at the facility were there. The procedure was quick, not entirely painless, and then over. Driving home, I threw up on the side of the road. There was nothing tragic or extraordinary about my experience. I had unprotected sex with a friend and became pregnant. Neither of us intended to be in a relationship, let alone have a child together. I was gay and in my own relationship, and he was straight and single. We were both broke but not poor, and we were able to scrape together the three hundred dollars necessary. But, if I had been forced to carry that pregnancy to term, my life would have been forever changed. A key strategy in the fight for reproductive freedom has involved “ abortion speak-outs ,” or “shouting out your abortion”—an attempt to fight against the right’s contention that abortion is harmful, tragic, and always regretted. We should trust women, and others, to know what to do with their own bodies.

The Supreme Court’s reversal of the right to abortion has usurped the rights and freedom of people who have the capacity to become pregnant. But anyone—including lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people—whose freedoms are not directly enshrined in the Constitution could see their rights threatened. Justice Clarence Thomas minced no words when he argued, in an opinion he wrote concurring with the majority, that precedent-setting cases that used the right to privacy and due process to guarantee the legality of contraception, gay sex, and gay marriage should be next in the firing line. There is no doubt that, if Republicans gain a congressional majority and win the White House, they will try and impose a national ban on abortion. The recent flurry of attacks on trans youths’ access to prescriptions and medical care has helped to legitimize the power of the state to control the bodies of women and girls when it comes to pregnancy. We are quickly being thrust into a nightmarish web of authoritarian, theocratic rule. The right wants to assert control over an array of non-normative sexualities, family units, and ways of being in the world. And in allowing for some discrimination, largely against trans youth and athletes, the door to rank bias has now been kicked in, legitimizing all of it. Today we reap the whirlwind.

A generation ago in Buffalo, a wide range of ordinary people came together to protect access to abortion clinics. In that instance, it was clear to us how the right’s broad goals were knotted together. We understood that, if they were successful in shutting down Buffalo’s clinics through brute force, it would generate momentum for the rest of their agenda, which included attacking gays, Black women on welfare, single mothers, undocumented immigrants, and anyone else that did not fit in or conform to their narrow “family values” world view. This is a frightening new world, but we can learn from earlier eras. We can also use these renewed attacks to form the solidarity necessary to rebuild the movements that can and will challenge the right’s growing momentum. ♦

More on Abortion and Roe v. Wade

In the post-Roe era, letting pregnant patients get sicker— by design .

The study that debunks most anti-abortion arguments .

Of course the Constitution has nothing to say about abortion .

How the real Jane Roe shaped the abortion wars.

Black feminists defined abortion rights as a matter of equality, not just “choice.”

Recent data suggest that taking abortion pills at home is as safe as going to a clinic. 

When abortion is criminalized, women make desperate choices .

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Abortion is Our Right, and We Won’t Be Silenced

If you thought anti-abortion extremists were going to stop at banning abortion, punishing pregnant people, and allowing bounty hunters to sue abortion providers, you’d be wrong. Politicians across the country have proposed bills taking aim at our right to discuss abortion care, to express the benefits of being able to determine if and when to become pregnant, and even to create art about reproductive health care. They're continuing their attacks on our reproductive freedom by going after our right to free speech and our access to life-saving information. This isn’t just about taking away people’s decisions during pregnancy; politicians are trying to erase our health care needs, our stories and experiences, and our existence.

Bills in Iowa and Texas were recently introduced that force internet providers to block websites that give information about abortion and allow anyone to sue an internet provider who fails to block those websites. In order to avoid the risk of lawsuits, internet service providers — which may even include places that supply internet access like colleges and libraries — would be forced to block any website that discusses abortion, including those of abortion funds working around the clock to make sure pregnant people know their options for accessing abortion and where they may need to travel. The Texas law even targets specific websites that would have to be blocked, some of which are simply sites to get educational information about abortion pills and their safety. Anti-abortion extremists are clearly aiming to ensure people who need abortions in their state can’t even learn about their options.

At the same time as states are trying to shut down access to information about abortion, public colleges are responding to legislative attacks from extremist politicians by curtailing free speech and artistic expression — even going beyond the bounds of the law out of fear they may face political punishment. Last summer, for example, Indiana University told faculty that they had committed a policy violation by writing a letter in support of a colleague and opposing a proposed abortion ban in the legislature.

More recently, Lewis-Clark State College announced that it would pull several artists pieces addressing abortion from an upcoming exhibition, “Unconditional Care,” for fear of violating the state’s No Public Funds for Abortion Act. A far cry from providing unconditional care to its community, the college is censoring work that gives voice to a range of topics that are often heavily stigmatized and rarely spoken about.

An Idaho College Censored Their Reproductive Health Care Art, But These Artists Won’t be Silenced

Three artists whose work was removed from an exhibit at Lewis-Clark State College speak out about attempts to silence stories about abortion.

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

We know that freedom of speech, artistic expression, and reproductive freedom go hand in hand. We must be allowed to talk about our experiences and exchange information about our health care in order to truly make decisions about our bodies and our families free from political interference. We cannot allow extremist politicians to get in between us and the information we need, or to tell us what we can and can’t say — online or off.

The ACLU is fighting in courts and state legislatures across the country to stop bills like these (and many more), but we need you to stand with us. Whether you live in a state where politicians are taking away your free speech and abortion rights or not, you can make a difference in this fight. Join the ACLU in fighting back against attacks on abortion access and other civil liberties across the country by signing up for information and ways to take action below.

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4 Easy Ways to Fight for Abortion Rights

Oct. 25, 2021 4 min read

By Miriam @ Planned Parenthood

It’s a critical time for reproductive rights. Politicians and activists who oppose abortion are trying to take away our right to control our bodies. State governments have already enacted more than 1,300 abortion restrictions since Roe v. Wade , and 2021 has been the worst year on record for abortion rights. This year alone, more than 560 restrictions have been introduced in 47 states, and more than 100 have been enacted . In September, Texas's S.B. 8 law banned abortion after six weeks — before most people even know they’re pregnant — and other states are set to follow.

Abortion restrictions hurt real people, especially Black, Latino and Indigenous communities for whom systemic racism and discrimination in this country have created huge barriers to health care and economic opportunities. They hurt people who don’t have enough time or money to travel long distances for an abortion. They hurt people who have low incomes, inflexible work schedules, or don’t have access to childcare or transportation. And they hurt some immigrants who may be afraid to travel or cross state lines.

You have the power to help protect and expand abortion access. Here are four ways to fight back:

1. Shout Your Support for Abortion Access

Talk to your friends, family, and social media followers about why access to abortion is important to you. The more we speak out, the more others will feel comfortable sharing their stories and support, too. With our voices united, we can end the stigma and be a powerful force for change.

Post about abortion rights on social media. You can make a simple statement like “Abortion is health care,” share content from other advocates, or use the hashtag #BansOffOurBodies. 

Repost shout-outs from your favorite abortion rights supporters, like Billie Eilish or Megan Thee Stallion .

If somebody close to you is having an abortion, follow these tips to help support them.

2. Support Abortion Funds

When you support abortion funds, your money goes directly to help patients and people on the ground who work to provide access to abortion. Abortion funds play a super important role in protecting and expanding access to abortion: they help patients who can't afford an abortion pay for their care, and may sometimes provide other resources like transportation, lodging, and child care.

Visit the National Network of Abortion Funds website to connect with your local abortion fund and make a donation .

3. Support Reproductive Justice Organizations

Reproductive Justice means the human right to decide when and whether to have children, and the right to raise your family in a safe, healthy environment. Because of white supremacy and structural racism, Black, Latino and Indigenous people often face extra barriers to abortion and other types of health care, and live in communities with fewer resources. 

Reproductive Justice centers the lives, experiences, and needs of marginalized people, particularly people who identify as Black women and other women of color. Here are some of the organizations leading the fight for reproductive justice:

SisterSong: Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective is the largest national multi-ethnic reproductive justice collective. Become a member and follow them on Facebook and Instagram . 

The Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice builds Latina/x power to fight for the fundamental human right to reproductive health, dignity, and justice. Join their email list and follow them on Facebook and Instagram .

We Testify amplifies the stories of people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and others who’ve had abortions. Get involved , and follow them on Instagram .

The Texas-based Afiya Center helps Black women overcome disparities in health access. Volunteer and follow them on Instagram .

4: Follow Planned Parenthood

We’ve been in this fight for a long time, and we’re not going anywhere. You can always count on Planned Parenthood for breaking news on reproductive rights and plenty of ways to take action:

Learn about the politics of sexual and reproductive health at the Planned Parenthood Action Fund website . 

Sign the #BansOffOurBodies pledge here or text ACCESS to 22422 to stand with us and show your support for abortion access.

Speak out about why access to abortion is important to you by sharing your story .

Connect with us on social media:

Follow Planned Parenthood on Facebook , Instagram , Twitter , and YouTube .

Follow @PPBlackComm , @Latinos4PP and @PPglobe on Twitter, and @PPGenAction on Instagram.

Donate to local Planned Parenthood affiliates to directly support our health centers that provide critical sexual and reproductive health care , including abortion .

Tags: Abortion , Reproductive Rights , Abortion restrictions , abortion access , activism , Reproductive Justice

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US abortion debate: Rights experts urge lawmakers to adhere to women’s convention 

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A week since the US Supreme Court overturned a landmark, 50-year-old judgement guaranteeing access to abortion, top UN-appointed independent experts urged United States lawmakers on Friday to adhere to international law that protects women’s right to sexual and reproductive health. 

The UN women’s rights committee said that the US is one of only seven countries throughout the world that is not party to the international convention that protects women’s human rights, including their right to sexual and reproductive health.

“The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) urges the United States of America to adhere to the  Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women  in order to respect, protect, fulfil and promote the human rights of women and girls,” the committee said in a statement.

UN Treaty Bodies

CEDAW noted that while the US signed the convention in 1980, it has yet to ratify it.

Standing in solidarity

UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet described the US Supreme Court ruling to strike down the Roe v Wade as “ a huge blow to women’s human rights and gender equality .”

The committee again reiterated its call for States parties to remove punitive measures for women who undergo abortion and to legalize abortion – at least in cases of rape, incest, threats to the life or health of the pregnant woman, and in the case of severe foetal impairment.

“With 189 States parties, the CEDAW Convention is the only near-universal treaty that comprehensively protects women’s human rights , including their sexual and reproductive health rights”, the statement said.

Articles of protection

The UN-appointed panel drew specific attention to article 16, which “protects women’s rights to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of their children”, adding that unsafe abortion is a leading cause of maternal mortality. 

They also spelled out that under article 12, the right to health includes bodily autonomy and encompasses women’s and girls’ sexual and reproductive freedoms.

Freedom to choose

Access to safe and legal abortion and to quality post-abortion care, especially in cases of complications resulting from unsafe abortions, helps to reduce maternal mortality rates, prevent adolescent and unwanted pregnancies and ensure women’s right to freely decide over their bodies.

The committee has repeatedly stressed that denying access to safe and legal abortion is “a severe restriction on women’s ability to exercise their reproductive freedom, and that forcing women to carry a pregnancy to full term involves mental and physical suffering amounting to gender-based violence against women and, in certain circumstances, to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, in violation of the CEDAW Convention”.

The UN-appointed committee reiterated its committed to uphold the human rights of women and girls around the world and “will not resile from this mandate, especially in relation to access to safe and legal abortion for all women”.

• women and girls
• United States

Hardest Speech: Lawmakers Now Speaking Out About Own Abortions

For Ohio state representative Teresa Fedor, that moment came this March, as she listened to her fellow lawmakers debate a bill that would forbid abortions once a heartbeat is detected, which can sometimes be as early as six weeks. A former schoolteacher who’s served in the legislature since 2002, she says she knew it was time to tell her own story.

“I knew when I decided to stand up, there was no looking back,” she says. Fedor, 59, began indirectly, noting that she had not heard any discussion of exceptions for rape. She said she respected her opponents’ reasoning. And then, a minute into her speech, she stunned her colleagues.

“You don’t respect my reason—my rape, my abortion,” she said, her voice growing louder. “What you’re doing is so fundamentally inhuman, unconstitutional, and I’ve sat here too long.”

It was a rare moment of personal drama on the floor, but one that has become more common from both sides as the fight over abortion moves from Capitol Hill to statehouses. Hundreds of abortion restrictions have been introduced in state legislatures since the 2010 elections, when anti-abortion conservatives gained majorities in many state governments. States’ efforts to enact the Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, has also reignited the debate, as legislatures grapple with how to provide reproductive care with taxpayer money. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health think tank, 231 abortion restrictions have been enacted on the state level in the last four years, compared to 189 restrictions over the previous 10 years combined. The Center for Reproductive Rights, a non-profit advocacy group promoting access to abortion and contraception, has tallied more than 330 reproductive health restrictions introduced so far in 2015, making this one of the most active years on record.

As these debates intensify, more female lawmakers are publicly airing their own histories in support of abortion and in opposition to it. “We’ve definitely noticed an uptick, and part of that is the more restrictions that are passed, the more personal it becomes, and that really compels people to share something personal in response to that,” says Kelly Baden, director of state advocacy for the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Both sides are encouraging women to speak up. “We wouldn’t be having this debate if there weren’t anguish at the root of the problem,” says Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, a group dedicated to getting more anti-abortion women elected to office. “There wouldn’t be any anguish if this was an appendectomy.”

The trend of statehouse revelations may have started with Texas lawmaker Wendy Davis, who drew national attention in 2013 when she mounted an 11-hour filibuster against a state bill that would impose tight restrictions. But it wasn’t until the following year, in the middle of an unsuccessful run for governor, that she revealed in an autobiography that she had undergone two abortions.

Most of the women who have spoken publicly about their abortions are pro-choice, since women opposed to abortion are of course less likely to have one. But Molly White, a 57-year-old freshman Texas lawmaker who has spoken publicly about her two abortions, ran for office specifically to keep other women from the abortion table. “It’s a choice that I deeply regret, that deeply hurt me, and I hurt others because I was hurt,” she says. “The first thing I wanted to do as an elected member was craft a coerced abortion prevention bill.”

None of women in this story said they spoke up as part of an orchestrated movement towards reproductive transparency. Instead, many said they did it because they were angry: angry at the proposed restrictions, angry at male lawmakers opining about women’s health and angry at their colleagues who talked about abortion as an abstract evil rather than a lived experience. “I had so much rage,” said Arizona state representative Victoria Steele, 58, who told her personal story in March. “How dare they do this without any regard for women’s lives?

THE REVELATIONS Lucy Flores hadn’t planned to speak at all on the day she told her fellow lawmakers about her abortion. Earlier that day, a colleague had sent Flores a text message asking for some last-minute support on a bill that would revamp comprehensive sex education. “I was walking towards the hearing room, and that’s when I thought to myself, ‘Should I bring up my choice to have an abortion?’” she says. Previously in the same session in 2013, Flores, 35 and at that time a member of the Nevada Assembly, had revealed to her colleagues that she was a survivor of domestic abuse. “I thought, ‘I’ve shared so much this session, I’ll just go ahead and tell you some more,’” she says.

Flores is the rare lawmaker to publicly talk about choosing to have an abortion that was not because of medical concerns or because she had been raped. She got pregnant at 16, right after she had finished juvenile parole for driving a stolen car, evading a cop, and violating probation. She looked at her sisters struggling to raise their children on public assistance, and knew she didn’t want to go down that road. “I went to my dad and I had to ask him for the money so I could go get an abortion,” she recalls, “And having that conversation with my dad was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life.”

“I don’t regret it,” she said in her testimony to the Assembly Education Committee, as she wiped away tears. “I’m here making a difference…for other young ladies.”

Arizona state representative Victoria Steele didn’t get an abortion. But in March she revealed a different secret while testifying in committee against a bill that would make it harder for women to get abortion coverage through the Affordable Care Act. “I was asked a question in a very nasty way. The question was: ‘So, representative Steele, do you think abortion is a medical service?’ with this air of incredulity,” she says. That’s what prompted her to reveal that she had been molested and raped by a male relative for many years. And though she did not get pregnant, other victims of the same abuser did.

“One of [the other victims had asked their attacker] ‘What if I get pregnant?’ and he told her ‘Don’t worry, we’ll just stick a pencil up there and take care of it.’ And another one got pregnant, and she ended up having to go to the emergency room at the hospital because she nearly died from an illegal abortion,” she said.

Abortion restrictions that exempt rape and incest put victims in a vulnerable position, Steele says. “Can you imagine being raped and being pregnant and wanting to get an abortion and having to explain to your insurance company that you are eligible for an exemption?” she said. “What if they don’t believe you, what if there’s no police report, what if you didn’t report it? Can you imagine how re-traumatizing that would be?” She calls the Arizona legislation, which passed two weeks after her testimony, a “cruel joke.”

Steele says her only regret is that she did not have more time to ready her thoughts. “If I had had a chance to be prepared, I would have done it without crying.”

White remembers leaving the clinic a “walking dead woman” after her second abortion. She says her family coerced her into aborting a baby she wanted to keep and her doctor performed the unwanted abortion for financial gain. She opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and regularly speaks about the devastation she says it has wrought on her life. To White, a rape victim aborting her pregnancy is just perpetuating a cycle of violence. “She was a victim of a violent crime, and then after her abortion she feels like she’s committed a violent crime against her child,” she says. “The trauma of a rape is not healed by the trauma of an abortion.”

White ran for office specifically to prevent other women from choosing abortion. She’s the state leader for Operation Outcry, a national support network for people hurt by abortions. After speaking to hundreds of women, including rape victims, she concluded that “every woman that aborted her child regretted it,” and if they don’t regret it, they’re in denial. Her bill to criminalize abortion coercion is her first act as an elected representative.

On the other side of the issue is North Carolina representative Tricia Cotham, 36. She testified in April against a bill that would enforce a 72-hour waiting period before all abortions. “I heard the shaming of women,” she said. “It was portrayed that women just run to the bank, grab a latte at Starbucks, and have an abortion and do their thing.” She said she went home and wrote out her speech describing the induced physician-assisted abortion of her non-viable fetus.

“I knew that I was not going to change the minds of those who were going to vote yes. And it wasn’t about them,” she said. Instead, she said, she spoke so “somebody out there could feel maybe not feel shamed.”

Only one member of Congress has ever talked about her own abortion on the House floor. In 2011, U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier of California, 65, talked about how her unborn baby had slipped out of her uterus decades earlier, a complication that threatened her life and forced her to get a second-trimester abortion.

“One of my Republican colleagues was reading from a book about a second-trimester abortion, and he started reading an excerpt where it talks about how they were sawing off the limbs of the fetus,” she said. “It just sent me into orbit.”

“I had really planned to speak about something else,” she started when she took the floor to argue against a budget amendment that would defund Planned Parenthood, a measure that was later defeated in the Senate. “I’m one of those women he spoke about just now… the procedure that you just talked about was a procedure that I endured.”

“I lost a baby,” she continued. “But for you to stand on this floor and to suggest as you have that somehow this is a procedure that is welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought is preposterous. Last time I checked, abortions are legal in this country.”

The effect on her colleague was immediate, Speier recalls. “Someone said to me afterwards, ‘he was like a deer in the headlights.’”

THE REACTION Revealing your abortion rarely elicits mass public support. Some of these women were flooded with hate mail and death threats. “It was one of the worst experiences of my entire life,” says Nevada’s Flores of the initial response. “I wasn’t sure if I walked out of that legislative building if there was going to be some crazy person who was ready to shoot me and kill me.”

Representative Fedor says she saw one of her Republican colleagues laughing during her testimony. “I don’t appreciate that,” she said in her speech, “and it happens to be a man who’s laughing.” Fedor says she got her abortion after she was raped while serving in the military in her 20s.

“I’ve had people flip me off, I’ve had people swerve at me” in their cars, North Carolina’s Cotham says, recalling that a Republican colleague came up to her and called her a “baby-killer,” after the session adjourned.

But many say they were surprised by the level of support from across the aisle. Flores said that when a Republican colleague got a nasty email calling her “trash” and suggesting she be thrown out of the legislature, his staffer came to her office in tears because she was so upset about the backlash.

“They wrote back saying, ‘That kind of language will not be tolerated, that is our legislative colleague duly elected by the representatives of her district,’” Flores said.

Others learned that their fellow lawmakers had carried similar burdens in secret. “I had colleagues, female members who came up to me afterwards,” said Speier. “They said, ‘Jackie, I had one too, but I never could have spoken about it on the House floor.’”

For Cotham, the response from her colleagues and constituents wasn’t as important as the change her testimony made in her own life. “I left there, and I felt like 100 pounds had come off of me. I could not believe how alive I felt afterwards,” she says. “Kind of like: ‘Don’t mess with me.’”

THE FALLOUT Powerful as the personal testimonies were, they did not change the politics–on either side.

Steele’s testimony was intended to stop an Arizona bill that makes it harder for women to elect for abortion coverage through Affordable Care Act health plans, among other restrictions. That bill passed two weeks after she spoke out against it, and was subsequently signed into law.

Molly White’s bill to criminalize abortion coercion was sent back to the drawing board in order to bolster the legal language. Anti-abortion groups supported the idea of White’s bill, which included an extended waiting period for coerced abortions, but raised concerns about its ability to withstand legal challenges from pro-choice groups.

Cotham spoke out against a North Carolina bill that would require 72-hour waiting periods to get an abortion. That bill passed and was signed into law in June, making North Carolina the fourth state to enact such a long waiting period.

The budget amendment to defund Planned Parenthood passed the U.S. House of Representatives despite Speier’s testimony, although it later failed in the Senate. And the fetal heart-rate bill that Fedor opposed passed the Ohio House and is currently being debated in the state Senate.

Still, those who have done it are encouraging more women come forward about their abortions. “I think for women who are weighing whether or not they should speak out, I think we have an obligation to do so,” says Speier. “Because it’s got to come out from the shadows.”

“I don’t think I had emotionally moved on,” says Cotham. “The real healing came that day on the floor.”

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August 3, 2022

A Proposed Antiabortion Law Infringes on Free Speech

A law would make it illegal to share abortion information on the Internet and raises serious concerns about freedom of speech nationwide

By Hayley Tsukayama

flyparade/Getty Images

After the June Supreme Court Dobbs decision overturned nearly 50 years of abortion care precedent, several states have moved quickly to pass abortion-related legislation . This has frequently been in the form of restricting or protecting access to the medical procedure. But efforts to limit abortion aren’t solely about what happens in a medical facility. They can go far beyond that. A bill under consideration in South Carolina seeks to restrict what its residents will be able to read online about abortion. As a consequence, it also threatens to restrict what all of us can say.

I work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation , a nonprofit that fights for digital civil liberties, including free expression, privacy and innovation. And while we are not a reproductive rights group, we pay close attention to areas where restrictions on abortion and other reproductive care infringe on these core issues.

Those who oppose abortion often seek to limit the ways we can talk about it. On the federal level, the late Republican representative Henry Hyde of Illinois inserted language into the Communications Decency Act during the 1990s, which effectively sought to ban online speech about abortion.* The Clinton Department of Justice refused to enforce the provision. It remains in the law today but has so far survived legal challenges to its constitutionality only because federal prosecutors have said they do not intend to enforce it.

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The South Carolina bill comes from Republican state Senators Richard Cash, Rex F. Rice and Daniel B. Verdin III, S. 1373 , the Equal Protection at Conception—No Exceptions—Act, makes abortions illegal in South Carolina, and also makes it a crime to, broadly defined, “aid, abet, or conspire” with someone to procure an abortion. It mirrors a National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) blueprint bill, which was meant to be copied by state lawmakers nationwide. The South Carolina bill is part of a new national blitz by antiabortion activists to alter not only access to abortion, but whether and how we can even discuss it. This is downright un-American.

There are glaring free-speech issues in the bill. First, it allows the prosecution of any person who provides information regarding self-administered abortions or the means to obtain an abortion to a “pregnant woman” or someone acting on “behalf of a pregnant woman.” If you have a phone conversation, exchange e-mails or have an online chat with a pregnant person in South Carolina about seeking an abortion, you violate the bill. Even posting information that they’re “reasonably likely” to access—for example, through a public post—puts you at risk.

Second, the bill prohibits hosting or maintaining a Web site, providing access to a Web site, or providing an Internet service that provides information on how to obtain an abortion, if the site is “purposefully directed to a pregnant woman” who lives in South Carolina. That could affect companies that host Web sites that share information describing the availability of legal abortion services in other states or support sites intended for pregnant people living in states that ban abortions.

Together, these two pieces of the bill represent a prohibition on sharing information in just about every way you can share information online. Furthermore, this law equates sharing information with aiding and abetting abortion—and classifies it as a felony.

On its face, then, this bill contemplates a troubling level of government intervention into what we say online. The bill’s somewhat hand-wavy, dismissive provision saying it shouldn’t be construed to conflict with the First Amendment doesn’t actually prevent it from doing so. This disclaimer doesn’t stop people in and outside of South Carolina from having to carefully consider what online information they post about legal abortion services in fear of how a prosecutor in the state may view that information. Even if someone’s post doesn’t specifically target South Carolinians, the uncertainty over whether someone in that state will read or hear it, and the threat of legal liability, will discourage many people from writing. If people are afraid of speaking up, they don’t.

The Internet doesn’t and can’t stop at state lines, and this bill fails to recognize that it’s not easy to block speech between states. It’s absurd to consider that posting about something that’s legal in your state could get you and the platform you’re posting on prosecuted in South Carolina. If I, a California resident, posted a news story that said the nearest state to South Carolina with legal abortion protections is Maryland, and that post reached someone in South Carolina, would that run afoul of the law? Should this bill pass, and law enforcement pursue prosecutions under it, South Carolina will become the speech police for the whole country.

That’s not merely a hypothetical. Companies that worry about being held liable for posts from people who use their site often over-censor content to cover their bases. They have clear problems controlling how information (or disinformation ) passes through their networks, which makes them more likely to take a heavy-handed approach, if pushed. It’s already happening with information about abortion. Vice and Wired have both reported that platforms are taking down more posts related to abortion care, including statements such as “abortion pills can be mailed.” If the South Carolina bill moves forward, this suppression of speech will likely carry on to all posts that relate to reproductive care—not only abortion, but also miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies or other conditions.

Social media or other Internet companies have the protection of Section 230—an important federal law that says online services that people use to post speech that violates criminal laws aren’t also liable for that speech. Yet, given the way the South Carolina bill is written, it’s likely some social media or hosting companies would ban abortion content completely rather than risk prosecution or litigation.

This hindrance of online free speech is unlikely to stop with abortion-related content. States are also pushing back against gender-affirming care or trying to roll back LGBTQ+ rights. We at EFF expect to see similar bills that criminalize information about those topics. Imposing years-long prison terms for sharing legal abortion information is a slippery slope toward authoritarian rule in which all sorts of social and political speech carry heavy penalties. Think, for example, of Russia’s “ gay propaganda ” bill that bars sharing any information about LGBTQ+ people’s lives, or a similarly draconian bill proposed in Ghana.

Laws sometimes restrict our actions, but they shouldn’t restrict our ideas. While the Dobbs ruling allowed some states to revoke a long-standing right, we can’t allow anyone to criminalize the free expression of thought and speech about that right. Anyone who cares about the freedom of expression—regardless of how they feel about reproductive care—should contact lawmakers considering such legislation and tell them to oppose this bill and others like it.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

*Editor’s Note (8/11/22): This sentence was edited after posting to correct the state of the late representative Henry Hyde.

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The Perfect Storm Threatening Abortion Access

Funding cuts from pro-choice groups are affecting abortion access at the same time that clinics are seeing more patients in need of expensive procedures not covered by insurance.

A procedural abortion room at Equity Clinic in Champaign on May 21, 2023.

Case managers at the DC Abortion Fund never ask callers why they need an abortion. But in recent weeks, some women have been disclosing that they received a diagnosis of a fetal anomaly or that the pregnancy puts their health at risk. To Alisha Dingus, DCAF’s development director, this is a clear sign that people have contacted multiple funds in desperation, only to hear they’ve already hit their budget.

Abortion funds have been struggling in the face of cuts to patient grants from national pro-choice groups that took effect in July , and the crunch comes at the same time that more people need procedures later in pregnancy that cost tens of thousands of dollars, not including travel.

National Abortion Rights Groups Have the Wrong Priorities for Our Movement

“There’s this pressure being put on callers who are already in a really difficult situation to overshare their medical information because they know it might help them get an extra $1,000 or $2,000,” Dingus said.

Karishma Oza, director of care coordination at DuPont Clinic, an all-trimester provider in Washington, DC, said that 30 percent of their patients reported fetal anomalies last year and, so far in 2024, they’re seeing a 30 percent increase over that baseline.

DuPont doesn’t turn anyone away who walks in their doors, Oza said, but that means “we are hemorrhaging money” and may be forced to close. Since July 1, DuPont has lost more than $80,000 in discounted care to provide abortions for people in the building, she said. DuPont has a new nonprofit arm, the Lavender Fund , that accepts donations to try to help offset its operating losses, a step Oza said was necessary “if we want to keep our clinic doors open.”

Before Dobbs , many pregnant patients with life-limiting fetal diagnoses—that is, impairments that mean the baby will be stillborn or only survive for a few hours—would have been able to receive a dilation and evacuation abortion in their local hospital . Women who got such diagnoses later in pregnancy, like after an anatomy scan, would typically have labor induced. Health insurance, if they had it, would usually cover either procedure.

Now, these patients are increasingly traveling to independent clinics like DuPont. Independent clinics—that is, non–Planned Parenthood providers—provide the vast majority of later abortions: Of clinics providing care after 22 weeks, 86 percent are independent ; after 26 weeks, it’s 100 percent indies. Later abortion patients are either paying out of pocket or trying to get assistance from abortion funds to help them afford second- and third-trimester abortions, the most expensive procedures that are done over two or three days and often require hotel stays.

Independent clinics and funds are caring for this small but growing universe of patients on top of their typical clients, the majority of whom are receiving first-trimester abortions, at a time when funds are already facing a financial crisis due to cuts from the National Abortion Federation hotline fund and the Planned Parenthood Justice Fund. As of July 1, the groups said patient grants would be cut from up to 50 percent of procedure cost down to a maximum of 30 percent. Each NAF member clinic now also has a monthly cap , meaning some patients may not even get 30 percent. Dingus said a 16-year-old Illinois caller who needed $16,000 received just $600 from NAF. These drastic funding gaps are less likely to hit Planned Parenthood affiliates, because they typically don’t provide later abortion care.

Diane Horvath, cofounder and chief medical officer of Partners in Abortion Care, an all-trimester clinic in Maryland, said the clinic has always seen patients with fetal indications, but the numbers have increased since Florida’s six-week ban took effect in May. Patients who get early prenatal testing could receive a diagnosis of a life-limiting fetal condition at 13 or 14 weeks, but abortion is banned before that point across the Southeast . While some state laws do have exceptions for fetal anomalies, there has to be a provider at a hospital willing to perform the abortion, and Horvath said many are scared by the threat of losing their medical license or facing criminal charges.

“Even if they get [testing] at 10 weeks, by the time they could go up to North Carolina,” which bans abortions after 12 weeks, “there may not be an appointment available for them,” Horvath said.

“When people are forced to delay care, they could go from a same-day procedure to a two-day procedure, or from a two-day procedure to a three-day procedure,” Oza said. “That’s not how abortion care should be provided. It’s really a shame.”

Abortion funding cuts are affecting anyone across the country who needs help paying for an abortion, including if the pregnancy was wanted. As a result, people are scrambling to find money and then seeking care later in pregnancy, said Megan Kovacs, board member of Northwest Abortion Access Fund, which focuses on Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska. Kovacs said NWAAF had budgeted $1.5 million just for later abortions in 2024, but recently had to allocate another $825,000 to make it through the end of the year—that $2.3 million for later care is up from $1.1 million budgeted in 2023, and $702,000 in 2022. Still, she said the fund hasn’t noticed an increase in people disclosing fetal anomalies.

There are more mundane reasons people seek later care. Horvath said she recently provided an abortion to a woman whose OB’s office closed mid-pregnancy. The woman had to wait a few weeks to get into another practice, and her new doctor told her the fetus was unlikely to survive. “In that time, [an abortion] went from being a procedure she might have been able to get in her home state or closer to home, to something that she could only have in five clinics across the country,” Horvath said.

On top of these patients with anomalies, Horvath said, “there’s a giant chunk of people that have been trying to get an abortion for sometimes months, and now find themselves needing an abortion that’s gonna cost them a lot more money, take a lot more time, more childcare, more travel.” That’s more money abortion funds don’t have, and it’s a vicious circle that’s slamming clinic budgets, too.

Before the NAF cuts, Horvath said patients might show up and be missing 5–10 percent of their procedure fee. Now, they’re short 30–50 percent of the balance. Partners sees six to eight later abortion patients per week, and the shortfalls add up fast. Horvath told Rewire News Group that the clinic discounted nearly $15,000 in the first week of August alone.

Oza said this gap amounts to thousands of dollars: specifically, DuPont lost an average of $1,800 for every patient it’s served since July.

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Amid this perfect storm slamming abortion providers and funds, yet another hit came on September 1: The nonprofit group Resources for Abortion Delivery is sunsetting a clinic-facing program called The Access Fund (TAF), which helped cover the cost of abortions up to 12 weeks for low-income people traveling from states with bans. TAF funds went to clinics in Illinois, New Mexico, Kansas, Georgia, and Florida, which have been considered “receiving states” for traveling patients.

Qudsiyyah Shariyf, deputy director of the Chicago Abortion Fund , said CAF estimated that the loss of TAF funding for clinics would represent “at least a $1 million hole nationally” each month, and noted that the majority of TAF-funded patients were getting care in Illinois. The Nation contacted Resources for Abortion Delivery to confirm the monthly budget and for comment about why TAF was ending; the group said it does not respond to press requests, as “a matter of long-standing organization policy.”

Any change in the funding ecosystem affects resources available for people across the country. When informed of TAF assistance ending, Dingus said, “I feel like you just punched me in the stomach because that’s so much money and so many people’s abortion care. It just feels like everything keeps getting squeezed.”

There is a program designed to help independent clinics, but it’s also struggling to keep up with what providers need, said Nikki Madsen, co–executive director of Abortion Care Network , a national member organization dedicated to supporting independent clinics. Since 2020, ACN has operated the Keep Our Clinics program, which fundraises for providers who lack the name recognition of affiliated clinics or hospitals, and members can apply for grants to cover equipment and supplies, rent, staffing, legal fees, and more.

Madsen said that member clinics have made $2 million in requests this year, but ACN expects that number to hit $4.5 million by the end of 2024. Madsen said Keep Our Clinics has only raised $750,000 so far. By comparison, the program raised and distributed more than $3 million in 2023 and nearly $5 million in 2022—and neither amount met the total need.

Repro Nation

Some of the requests are coming from clinics in states where abortion is still legal, while others are from providers in places like Florida, where there’s a six-week ban in effect, though it could get overturned by a ballot measure in November . (She said there are 71 independent clinics in states with bans providing ultrasounds, miscarriage management, and abortion aftercare; 36 of them are in Florida alone.)

Independent clinics are critical “to all abortion care in America, but particularly care in the second trimester and beyond,” Madsen said, adding, “Truly, we cannot afford to lose any more clinics .” She said keeping them open “needs to be both a philanthropy and political priority.”

Kovacs said NWAAF was able to increase its budget for later care in part because it received an influx of institutional support since Dobbs , including $1 million from the state of Oregon, plus grants from the city of Portland and King County in Seattle. Other funds have also received such state and local grants , but it’s often not enough to meet the demand.

A collective of more than 30 abortion funds published an open letter in The Nation in August saying that national reproductive rights groups are directing gargantuan amounts of money to “vague, multiyear electoral strategies” rather than supporting people who need abortions now—and, in fact, cutting support to those people. Of the $100 million legislative campaign called Abortion Access Now, Horvath said, “I really hope that we are able to capitalize upon that. But, God, that would have paid for a lot of abortions—and, in a time when people are in crisis.”

To reduce the number of people traveling out of state, Congress needs to pass federal abortion protections. But clinics and funds say there are more immediate steps the Biden-Harris administration—or a future Harris-Walz one—could take.

The White House could provide federal funding for out-of-state abortion travel like it’s doing for military members, declaring a reproductive health emergency if necessary. Funding travel rather than procedure costs gets around the federal Hyde Amendment, which Congress doesn’t have the votes to repeal. “It wouldn’t be perfect,” Dingus said, “but it would at least help us get people here, which is a huge barrier right now.”

Oza suggested that the government could fund free or low-cost ultrasounds so people can get accurate pregnancy dating rather than getting turned away by clinics for being too far along. Now, many patients receive free, non-diagnostic ultrasounds at crisis pregnancy centers, which vastly outnumber legitimate clinics and lie to people about abortion to convince them not to seek the care.

Advocates envision funding to open clinics in states with legal abortion and funding to train for more full-spectrum reproductive healthcare providers that would result in more providers in the longer term, Dingus said. “The fact that people come to DC from California and New York to get care doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

Dingus said statehood for Washington, DC, could also expand access. “Every time the [federal] budget comes up, there are riders attached to it that ban DC from spending any of our dollars on abortion care,” she said. If DC had full control of its own budget, its lawmakers could not only vote to have state Medicaid cover abortions, they could also advocate for grants to support abortion access. “There’s a lot we could do if we stopped talking about restoring Roe and actually talked about the ways to really expand access,” Dingus said.

But lifting insurance bans isn’t enough: Both Oza and Horvath said states need to raise Medicaid reimbursement rates for abortion, because programs only cover a fraction of the true cost.

And philanthropy could step up to fill the gaps. Both NWAAF and DCAF name-checked Melinda Gates and MacKenzie Scott as people who could fund every abortion in the US if they wanted. (Scott gave $275 million to Planned Parenthood in 2022, yet the organization still said it had to cut patient assistance this year.)

Many clinics and funds do still support legislative efforts like repealing Hyde and passing federal protections that overturn state bans—but they recognize that much bigger change is needed to ensure everyone who needs an abortion can get one in the years ahead. To Horvath, that change is the end of insurance as a for-profit industry, and universal healthcare that covers abortion. “Insurance companies make money by denying people care,” she said. “Nothing short of an overhaul of the way we pay for healthcare and the way that people access care is going to be a long-term solution. I truly, truly believe that.”

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12 misleading or lacking-in-context claims from Harris’ DNC speech

Domenico Montanaro

Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, made 12 misleading or lacking-in-context statements during her speech at the Democratic National Convention last week. Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

There were about a dozen statements that Vice President Kamala Harris made during her roughly 40-minute acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that were either misleading or lacking in context.

They range from characterizations of former President Trump’s stances on abortion rights and Social Security to her plans to address housing and grocery prices.

It’s the role of the press to try and hold politicians to account for the accuracy of their statements in a good-faith way. The dozen Harris statements lacking in context are far less in comparison to 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies that NPR found from Trump’s hour-long news conference Aug. 8.

Nonetheless, here’s what we found from Harris’ convention speech:

1. “His explicit intent to jail journalists, political opponents, and anyone he sees as the enemy.” 

Trump has promised retribution against his political enemies, has called reporters “the enemy of the people,” and has made vague threats of jail time for reporters.

“They’ll never find out, & it’s important that they do,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform after the leak of a draft of the Dobbs decision was published. “So, go to the reporter & ask him/her who it was. If not given the answer, put whoever in jail until the answer is given. You might add the editor and publisher to the list.”

He’s made other such comments, but there’s no explicit and specific policy from Trump on this because, as with many things involving Trump, he has been vague about his specific intentions.

2. “[W]e know and we know what a second Trump term would look like. It's all laid out in Project 2025, written by his closest advisers. And its sum total is to pull our country back to the past.” 

Project 2025 is the work of people with close ties to Trump through the Heritage Foundation. Trump has disavowed parts of Project 2025, and a campaign official called it a “ pain in the ass .” There’s good political reason for that. Many of the detailed proposals are highly controversial and unpopular. The website for Project 2025 lays out some of the connections to the Trump administration in black and white, as well as the group’s belief that a Trump administration will use it as a blueprint:“The 2025 Presidential Transition Project is being organized by the Heritage Foundation and builds off Heritage’s longstanding ‘Mandate for Leadership,’ which has been highly influential for presidential administrations since the Reagan era. Most recently, the Trump administration relied heavily on Heritage’s “Mandate” for policy guidance, embracing nearly two-thirds of Heritage’s proposals within just one year in office.

“ Paul Dans , former chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) during the Trump administration, serves as the director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project. Spencer Chretien , former special assistant to the president and associate director of Presidential Personnel, serves as associate director of the project.”

In fact, CNN reported that “at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025,” including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and adviser Stephen Miller.

What’s more, CBS News found at least 270 policy proposals that intersect with the about 700 laid out in Project 2025.

3. “We're not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare.” 

Former President Trump has pledged not to cut Social Security, the popular retirement program. While he was in office, Trump did try, unsuccessfully, to cut benefits for people who receive disability payments from Social Security.

Social Security benefits could be cut within a decade anyway, unless Congress takes steps to shore up the program. With tens of millions of baby boomers retiring and starting to draw benefits, and fewer people in the workforce paying taxes for each retiree, Social Security is expected to run short of cash in 2033. If that happens, almost 60 million retirees and their families would automatically see their benefits cut by 21%.

The problem could be solved by raising taxes, reducing benefits or some combination of the two. – Scott Horsley, NPR chief economics correspondent

4. “We are not going to let him end programs like Head Start that provide preschool and childcare for our children in America.”

This is again tied to Project 2025, but not something Trump has specifically talked about. Trump has talked about shutting down the Department of Education, but Head Start is funded through the Department of Health and Human Services.

5. “[A]s president, I will bring together labor and workers and small-business owners and entrepreneurs and American companies to create jobs to grow our economy and to lower the cost of everyday needs like healthcare and housing and groceries.”

High supermarket prices are a common complaint. Although grocery prices have largely leveled off, rising just 1.1% in the 12 months ending in July, they jumped 3.6% the previous year and a whopping 13.1% the year before that. Vice President Harris has proposed combating high grocery prices with a federal ban on “price gouging,” but her campaign has offered no specifics on how that would work or what would constitute excessive prices. The Biden-Harris administration has previously blamed some highly concentrated parts of the food chain – such as meat-packers – for driving up prices. The administration has tried to promote more competition in the industry by bankrolling new players. – Scott Horsley

6. “And we will end America's housing shortage.”

The U.S. faces a serious shortage of housing, which has led to high costs. The average home sold last month for $422,600. Last week, Harris proposed several steps to encourage construction of additional housing, including tax breaks intended to promote 3 million new units in four years. (For context, the U.S. is currently building about 1.5 million homes per year, including just over a million single family homes.) Harris has also proposed $25,000 in downpayment assistance for first-time homebuyers and a $40 billion fund to help communities develop affordable housing. She has not said where the money for these programs would come from. – Scott Horsley

7. “He doesn't actually fight for the middle class. Instead, he fights for himself and his billionaire friends. And he will give them another round of tax breaks that will add up to $5 trillion to the national debt.”

While the 2017 tax cuts were skewed to the wealthy , it did cut taxes across the board.

Large parts of that tax cut are due to expire next year. Trump has proposed extending all of them, and while also calling for additional, unspecified tax cuts. Harris has proposed extending the tax cuts for everyone making less than $400,000 a year (97% of the population) while raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

Under the Biden-Harris administration, the IRS has also beefed up tax enforcement to ensure that wealthier people and businesses pay what they owe. GOP lawmakers have criticized that effort, and it would likely be reversed in a second Trump administration. Both Harris and Trump have proposed exempting tips from taxation. While popular with workers in the swing state of Nevada, where many people work in tip-heavy industries like casinos, the idea has serious problems. Unless the lost tax revenue were replaced somehow, it would create an even bigger budget deficit. It would treat one class of workers (tipped employees) differently from all other workers. And it would invite gamesmanship as other workers tried to have part of their own income reclassified as tax-free tips. Depending on how the exemptions were structured, it could also result in lower retirement benefits for tipped workers. – Scott Horsley

8. “And all the while he intends to enact what, in effect, is a national sales tax? Call it a Trump tax that would raise prices on middle class families by almost $4,000 a year.”

This appears to be a reference to tariffs. Donald Trump raised tariffs sharply while he was in office, and he’s pledged to go further if he returns to the White House. During his first term, Trump imposed tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, washing machines, solar panels and numerous products from China. Many trading partners retaliated, slapping tariffs of their own on U.S. exports. Farmers and manufacturers suffered.

Despite the fallout, the Biden/Harris administration has left most of the Trump tariffs in place, while adding its own, additional levies on targeted goods from China such as electric vehicles. In a second term, Trump has proposed adding a 10% tariff on all imports, with a much higher levy on all Chinese goods. Researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics estimate such import taxes would cost the average family $1,700 a year. – Scott Horsley

9. “This is what's happening in our country because of Donald Trump. And understand he is not done as a part of his agenda. He and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, and enact a nationwide abortion ban with or without Congress. And get this, get this – he plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women's miscarriages and abortions.”

It is accurate to point out that the lack of abortion access across the country for millions of women particularly in the South is directly because of Trump and his decision to appoint three conservative justices to the Supreme Court who voted to overturn Roe . As president, he sided with employers , who for religious or moral reasons, didn’t want to pay for contraception, as he tried to change the mandate that contraception be paid for under the Affordable Care Act.

But it’s unclear what Trump will do again as president. He has made conflicting comments about access to contraception. Harris’s charges about an “agenda” again seem to be based on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 . It would be accurate to warn that it’s possible, if not likely, Trump would take up the recommendations given that people close to Trump were instrumental in writing it and given that in his first term as president, he adopted many of the Heritage Foundation’s recommendations. But it’s not entirely accurate to say “he plans to create” these things when Trump himself and his campaign have not advocated for this. Trump himself has said that abortion should be left up to the states – and insisted that he doesn’t support a national ban.

10. “With this election, we finally have the opportunity to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.”

This is another one of those traps politicians fall into – overpromising when it’s not something they can control. Harris needs Congress to do this, and her winning the presidency does not guarantee that any of what she wants done legislatively will get done, even if Democrats take control of both chambers.

11. “Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades.”

While Donald Trump stood in the way of this bill passing, and it had been written with conservative Republicans, it’s not accurate to say this was the “strongest border bill in decades” unless you count 11 years as decades. The 2013 comprehensive immigration overhaul that got 68 votes in the Senate and was killed by the GOP House, did far more than this bill did.

12. “He encouraged Putin to invade our allies, said Russia could quote, do whatever the hell they want.”

While an alarming thing for an American president to say about a NATO ally, this is lacking in some context. Trump said he would say Russia could “do whatever the hell it wanted” – and Trump would not defend an ally – if that country didn’t “pay.” Trump continues to get wrong, however, that no countries in the alliance “pay” anything to anyone except themselves. What Trump is talking about is NATO countries’ goals of funding their own defense to 2% of their gross domestic product. But not defending a country from a hostile invasion would violate Article 5 of the 1949 treaty that binds the countries in battle and was created as a way to thwart any potential efforts by the former Soviet Union to expand beyond its borders.

It reads : “[I]f a NATO Ally is the victim of an armed attack, each and every other member of the Alliance will consider this act of violence as an armed attack against all members and will take the actions it deems necessary to assist the Ally attacked.”

It has been invoked once: After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.

• Vice President Kamala Harris