Attacks on reproductive freedom not slowing down
The attacks on legal abortion in the last two weeks alone have been staggering.
Since the beginning of April, state Supreme Courts in Florida and Arizona have both issued rulings that will effectively ban abortion care.
While both states already had curtailed abortion after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, now Florida’s Supreme Court ruling will trigger a sixweek ban beginning on May 1. And Arizona’s Supreme Court revived a near-total ban that carries with it a minimum two-year prison sentence for doctors who perform abortions that are not essential for saving a patient’s life.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump released a video in which he said he was “proudly the person responsible” for ending Roe v. Wade but that he now supports states determining abortion policy “by vote or legislation or perhaps both.” He insisted that “at the end of the day it’s all about the will of the people.”
Except that’s clearly not true. The American people never supported overturning Roe. Abortion policy in the U.S. has been out of step with the will of the people over the last two years.
The new rulings in Florida and Arizona are only the latest examples of how access to reproductive health care continues to be restricted by farright judges appointed by Republicans.
In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron Desantis appointed five out of seven justices to the state’s Supreme Court, while all seven justices in Arizona were appointed by Republican governors.
Let us not forget the Alabama State Supreme Court decision in February that invoked God to claim that frozen embryos count as “children” under state law. This “fetal personhood” ideology is being promoted by other judges too. In Florida, the state’s Chief Supreme Court Justice Carlos Muñiz recently suggested that abortion “take(s) a whole class of human beings and put(s) them outside the protection of the law.” Six of the seven Florida justices signaled they’d be open to a future fetal personhood case there.
These are state-level decisions. But judges on the federal bench have also used their positions to restrict abortion rights. Trump’s appointment of Matthew Kacsmaryk to a district court in
Texas, for example, led to the brazen effort to restrict medication abortion nationwide. Two more Trump-appointed judges on the 5th Circuit of Appeals also ruled in favor of restricting access to the abortion pill.
As Slow Boring writer and Vox co-founder Matt Yglesias recently wrote, one of the biggest risks to abortion rights should Trump win in November is that the judiciary will move even further to the right. Trump may say he’d let the states decide, but the judges he’d likely appoint wouldn’t, and there would be no recourse.
Slate writers Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern made a similar point this week, observing how anti-abortion lawyers plan to use the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that hasn’t been enforced in nearly a century, to ban medication abortion nationwide. Far-right judges, they note, can help make that possible by greenlighting legally absurd interpretations.
Voters in Florida and Arizona both will likely have the chance to vote to protect abortion rights this fall. Florida’s ballot measure, which would require 60% of voters to pass, would protect abortion access up to 24 weeks. Arizona’s ballot measure, which is not yet formally on the November ballot, would also protect abortion up to 24 weeks but would only require a simple majority to pass.
These will be expensive, competitive fights, even as voters in these states support access to legal abortion. More than two-thirds of Floridians say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, and in Arizona, 59% of registered voters say abortion should be mostly or always legal. This doesn’t mean all of those people will turn out to vote, though. Even if these ballot measures pass, there is no guarantee the “will of the people” will be respected.
Americans want federal standards for reproductive rights, not a patchwork of state laws that leave people vulnerable.