Abortion Opponents Think They’re Going to Win. They’re Wrong.
State legislators are passing cruel and blatantly unconstitutional abortion bans in states like Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, and Utah. Brett Kavanaugh now sits on the U.S. Supreme Court, creating an enduring 5–4 majority opposed to abortion rights that is poised to overturn or gut Roe v. Wade, which recognized the federal constitutional right to abortion. In this climate, abortion opponents may think they’re about to win.
They’re wrong. Abortion is still legal in all 50 states. Even if the Supreme Court does ultimately give a pass to states that outlaw abortion, people in those states will keep having abortions. Abortion pills can’t be stopped and will exist no matter what the laws say, and much to the consternation of conservative lawmakers — the majority of whom are old white men on a power trip — women aren’t stupid and can’t be controlled.
Before the 1973 Roe decision, some states allowed legal abortion and others did not. Women outside those states with access to money and ability to travel were also able to circumvent their state bans. These facts will not change in a post-Roe context. What has changed dramatically is the self-managed abortion options available. Replacing coat hangers with abortion pills means that the threat to people who self-manage their abortions is no longer medical. It’s legal, on account of zealous prosecutors who believe the punitive criminal justice system has a role in reproductive healthcare and pregnancy outcomes.
Abortion pills, including mifepristone and misoprostol, have been used to end pregnancies in the United States for more than 20 years. Not only are abortion pills safe and effective, when they are taken orally during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy according to the World Health Organization protocol, success presents as a miscarriage with no traces of medication present in the bloodstream of the person who used them. It is because of the innovation of abortion pills that abortion opponents cannot use the law to summon the return of pre-Roe days.
This is not to say everything is fine. It must be noted that attempts to render abortion functionally inaccessible didn’t start in 2019; since 2010, state legislatures have passed hundreds of laws restricting access to abortion and rendering Roe meaningless for large portions of the population, especially women of color in red states. A lack of access to abortion providers is already causing immense suffering for those who need it, and abortion opponents can be expected to cause more and worse problems in their quest to create laws that could be put in front of a newly conservative Supreme Court. What is happening now is not an aberration, nor have we hit bottom.
We know abortion opponents will deny more people access to the care and resources they need to end pregnancies with the support of compassionate, legal abortion providers. In one such example of how that plays out in the present, the six-week abortion bans currently coursing through state legislatures would render in-clinic abortion care illegal before many of those who would have abortions have even noticed a missed period, much less taken a pregnancy test. Additional state lawmakers have attempted to criminalize abortion with increasingly draconian means, such as a failed ‘pro-life’ bill in Texas that would have made abortion punishable by death penalty.
The criminalization of abortion is the second reason why abortion opponents are unable to win. They can make abortion illegal, but they cannot stop people from ending their pregnancies safely and effectively with the abortion pills they will never be able to control. So too, they can throw people in jail for abortion, miscarriage, or their behavior during pregnancy — which is already happening in the United States — but, with increasing awareness, this will prove deeply unpopular and unsustainable, just as the bans themselves are unpopular and do not reflect the will of a strong majority of voters who want abortion to be legal.
One year ago, two-thirds of Irish voters voted to repeal its long-standing abortion ban. No matter how much suffering anti-abortion policy causes here in the now and future, it will ultimately fail for similar reasons.
Erin Matson is co-founder and co-director of Reproaction, a national organization using bold action to increase access to abortion and advance reproductive justice.
