Conflict over abortion laws won’t abate if Roe v. Wade falls
On both sides of America’s abortion debate, activists are convinced that Roe v. Wade — the 1973 Supreme Court ruling establishing a nationwide right to abortion — is imperiled as never before.
Yet no matter how the current conservative-dominated court handles pending high-profile abortion cases — perhaps weakening Roe, perhaps gutting it completely — there will be no monolithic, nationwide change. Fractious state-bystate battles over abortion access will continue.
Roe’s demise would likely prompt at least 20 Republican-governed states to impose sweeping bans; perhaps 15 Democratic-governed states would reaffirm support for abortion access.
More complicated would be politically divided states where fights over abortion laws could be ferocious — and likely become a volatile issue in the 2022 elections.
“Many of these states are one election away from a vastly different political landscape when it comes to abortion,” said Jessica Arons, a reproductive rights lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.
Those states include Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which now have
Democratic governors and Republican-controlled legislatures. GOP gubernatorial victories next year could position those states to join others in imposing bans if Roe were nullified.
The net effect on abortion prevalence is difficult to predict, given that many people in states with bans would persist in seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Some could face drives of hundreds of miles to reach the nearest clinic; others might obtain abortion pills by mail to end a pregnancy on their own.
Among the briefs filed with the Supreme Court as it considers a Mississippi law banning most abortions after 15 weeks is one reflecting input from 154 economists and researchers. If abortions became illegal in 23 states, they calculate, the number of abortions at clinics nationwide would fall by about 14%, or about 120,000, in the following year.
Abortion-rights activists predict women of color, rural residents, low-income women, and LGBTQ people would be disproportionately affected.
Under this scenario, the economists say, bans would affect 26 million women of child-rearing age, and the average distance to the nearest abortion clinic would increase from 35 miles (56 kilometers) to 279 miles (449 kilometers).
Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights, says a gutting of Roe would galvanize some Democraticgoverned states and abortion-rights groups to accelerate programs assisting people to cross state lines for abortions.
“But things will get complicated and difficult very quickly,” she said. “You’re disrupting the entire abortion care network across the country, and people will be seeking abortion in locations which may not have enough capacity for people in their state already.”
A possible preview is unfolding at Planned Parenthood’s clinic in Fairview Heights, Illinois, just outside St. Louis. It opened in 2019 as an abortion option for people from Missouri and other nearby Republicangoverned states. It’s seeing an increase in patients from farther away as a tough ban in Texas creates appointment backlogs throughout the south-central U.S.
Dr. Colleen McNicholas, Planned Parenthood’s chief medical officer for reproductive health services in the St. Louis region, said the clinic is bracing for a possible influx of an additional 14,000 women per year seeking abortion services if postRoe bans proliferate.