Supreme Court justices’ views on abortion in their own words and votes

The justices have had a lot to say about abortion over the years — in opinions, votes, Senate confirmation testimony and elsewhere


J. Scott Applewhite, The Associated Press In this Oct. 4, 2021 photo, the Supreme Court is seen on the first day of the new term, in Washington. Abortion already is dominating the Supreme Court’s new term, months before the justices will decide whether to reverse decisions reaching back nearly 50 years. Not only is there Mississippi’s call to overrule Roe v. Wade, but the court also soon will be asked again to weigh in on the Texas law banning abortion at roughly six weeks.

By MARK SHERMAN and JESSICA GRESKO | The Associated Press
PUBLISHED: October 11, 2021 

WASHINGTON — Abortion already is dominating the Supreme Court’s new term, months before the justices will decide whether to reverse decisions reaching back nearly 50 years. Not only is there Mississippi’s call to overrule Roe v. Wade, but the court also soon will be asked again to weigh in on the Texas law banning abortion at roughly six weeks.

The justices won’t be writing on a blank state as they consider the future of abortion rights in the U.S. They have had a lot to say about abortion over the years — in opinions, votes, Senate confirmation testimony and elsewhere. Just one, Clarence Thomas, has openly called for overruling Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the two cases that established and reaffirmed a woman’s right to an abortion. Here is a sampling of their comments:

Chief Justice John Roberts

Roberts voted to uphold restrictions in two major abortion cases, in the majority in 2007 to uphold a ban on a method of abortion opponents call “partial-birth abortion” and in dissent in 2016 when the court struck down Texas restrictions on abortion clinics in a case called Whole Woman’s Health. But when a virtually identical law from Louisiana came before the court in 2020, Roberts voted against it and wrote the opinion controlling the outcome of the case and striking down the Louisiana law. The chief justice said he continues to believe that the 2016 case “was wrongly decided” but that the question was “whether to adhere to it in deciding the present case.”

Roberts’ views on when to break with court precedent could determine how far he is willing to go in the Mississippi case. At his 2005 confirmation hearing, he said overturning precedent “is a jolt to the legal system,” which depends in part on stability and evenhandedness. Thinking that an earlier case was wrongly decided is not enough, he said. Overturning a case requires looking “at these other factors, like settled expectations, like the legitimacy of the Court, like whether a particular precedent is workable or not, whether a precedent has been eroded by subsequent developments,” Roberts said then.

In the same hearing, Roberts was asked to explain his presence on a legal brief filed by the George H.W. Bush administration that said Roe’s conclusion that there is a right to abortion has “no support in the text, structure, or history of the Constitution.’ Roberts responded that the brief reflected the administration’s views.

Justice Clarence Thomas

Thomas voted to overturn Roe in 1992, in his first term on the court, when he was a dissenter in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. He has repeatedly called for Roe and Casey to be overturned since.

In 2000, he wrote in dissent when the court struck down Nebraska’s ban on “partial-birth abortion.” Recounting the court’s decision in Roe, he wrote, “In 1973, this Court struck down an Act of the Texas Legislature that had been in effect since 1857, thereby rendering unconstitutional abortion statutes in dozens of States. As some of my colleagues on the Court, past and present, ably demonstrated, that decision was grievously wrong. Abortion is a unique act, in which a woman’s exercise of control over her own body ends, depending on one’s view, human life or potential human life. Nothing in our Federal Constitution deprives the people of this country of the right to determine whether the consequences of abortion to the fetus and to society outweigh the burden of an unwanted pregnancy on the mother. Although a State may permit abortion, nothing in the Constitution dictates that a State must do so.”

Justice Stephen Breyer

Breyer has been the lead author of two court majorities in defense of abortion rights, in 2000 and 2016. He has never voted to sustain an abortion restriction, but he has acknowledged the controversy over abortion.

Millions of Americans believe “that an abortion is akin to causing the death of an innocent child,” while millions of others “fear that a law that forbids abortion would condemn many American women to lives that lack dignity,” he wrote in the Nebraska case 21 years ago, calling those views “virtually irreconcilable.” Still, Breyer wrote, because the Constitution guarantees “fundamental individual liberty” and has to govern even when there are strong divisions in the country, “this Court, in the course of a generation, has determined and then redetermined that the Constitution offers basic protection to the woman’s right to choose.”

Justice Samuel Alito

Alito has a long track record of votes and writings opposing abortion rights, as a jurist and, earlier, a government lawyer.

Alito has voted to uphold every abortion law the court has considered since his 2006 confirmation, joining a majority to uphold the federal “partial-birth” abortion law and dissenting in the 2016 and 2020 cases.

As a federal appeals court judge, he voted to uphold a series of Pennsylvania abortion restrictions, including requiring a woman to notify her spouse before obtaining an abortion. The Supreme Court ultimately struck down the notification rule in Casey and reaffirmed the abortion right in 1992 by a 5-4 vote.

Working for the Reagan administration in 1985, Alito wrote in a memo that the government should say publicly in a pending abortion case “that we disagree with Roe v. Wade.” Around the same time, applying for a promotion, Alito noted he was “particularly proud” of his work arguing “that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Sotomayor joined the court in 2009 with virtually no record on abortion issues, but has voted repeatedly in favor of abortion rights since then. Recently, when the court allowed Texas’ restrictive abortion law to take effect, Sotomayor accused her colleagues of burying “their heads in the sand.” She was in the majority in the Texas and Louisiana abortion clinic cases.

Sotomayor’s displeasure with the court’s recent Texas ruling was evident at a recent virtual appearance she made. “I can’t change Texas’ law, but you can,” she said.

Justice Elena Kagan

Kagan also has repeatedly voted in favor of abortion rights in more than 11 years as a justice. She is also arguably the most consistent voice on the court arguing for the importance of adhering to precedents and can be expected to try to persuade her colleagues not to jettison constitutional protections for abortion.

Kagan was in the majority when the court struck down the Texas and Louisiana restrictions on abortion clinics. More recently, Kagan called Texas’ new abortion law “patently unconstitutional” and a “clear, and indeed undisputed, conflict with Roe and Casey.”

Kagan had already grappled with the issue of abortion before becoming a justice. While working in the Clinton White House she was the co-author of a memo that urged the president for political reasons to support a late-term abortion ban proposed by Republicans in Congress, so long as it contained an exception for the health of the woman. Ultimately, President George W. Bush signed a similar late-term abortion ban without a health exception. The Supreme Court upheld it.

Justice Neil Gorsuch

Gorsuch has perhaps the shortest record on abortion among the nine justices. He was in the majority allowing Texas’ restrictive abortion law to take effect. In dissent in 2020, he would have upheld Louisiana’s abortion clinic restrictions. As an appeals court judge before joining the Supreme Court in 2017, Gorsuch dissented when his colleagues declined to reconsider a ruling that blocked then-Utah Gov. Gary Herbert from cutting off funding for the state branch of Planned Parenthood. But Gorsuch insisted at his Senate confirmation hearing that he was concerned about procedural issues, not the subject matter. “I do not care if the case is about abortion or widgets or anything else,” he said.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh

Kavanaugh’s name was added to former President Donald Trump’s shortlist of Supreme Court candidates shortly after he sided with the administration in a 2017 case involving abortion. Trump chose him for the court the following year. As a justice, Kavanaugh dissented from the Louisiana decision and voted to allow the new Texas law to take effect, though he has taken a less absolutist stance than some of his conservative colleagues. In the Louisiana case, for example, Kavanaugh wrote that more information was needed about how the state’s restrictions on clinics would affect doctors who provide abortions and seemed to suggest his vote could change knowing that information.

Kavanaugh’s most extensive writing on abortion came while he was a judge on the federal appeals court in Washington. The Trump administration had appealed a lower court ruling ordering it to allow a pregnant 17-year-old immigrant in its custody to get an abortion. The administration’s policy was to decline to help those minors get abortions while in custody.

Kavanaugh was on a three-judge panel that postponed the abortion, arguing that officials should be given a limited window to transfer the minor out of government custody to the care of a sponsor. She could then obtain an abortion without the government’s assistance. The full appeals court later reversed the decision and the teenager obtained an abortion. Kavanaugh called that decision out-of-step with the “many majority opinions of the Supreme Court that have repeatedly upheld reasonable regulations that do not impose an undue burden on the abortion right recognized by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade.”

Kavanaugh was criticized by some conservatives for not going as far as a colleague, Judge Karen Henderson, who stated unambiguously that an immigrant in the U.S. illegally has no right to an abortion. At his appeals court confirmation hearing, Kavanaugh dodged questions on his own personal beliefs on Roe v. Wade.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett

Barrett’s one public vote on the Supreme Court concerning abortion was to allow the Texas “fetal heartbeat” law to take effect. She also cast two votes as an appeals court judge to reconsider rulings that blocked Indiana abortion restrictions.

In 2016, shortly before the election that would put Trump in office, she commented about how she thought abortion law might change if Trump had the chance to appoint justices. “I … don’t think the core case — Roe’s core holding that, you know, women have a right to an abortion — I don’t think that would change,” said Barrett, then a Notre Dame law professor. She said limits on what she called “very late-term abortions” and restrictions on abortion clinics would be more likely to be upheld.

Barrett also has a long record of personal opposition to abortion rights, co-authoring a 1998 law review article that said abortion is “always immoral.” At her 2017 hearing to be an appeals court judge, Barrett said in written testimony, “If I am confirmed, my views on this or any other question will have no bearing on the discharge of my duties as a judge.”

Experts debunk 5 common myths about abortion

Korin Miller
Tue, March 7, 2023 

There are several abortion myths, which experts say can be difficult to dispel. (Getty Images)

Abortion has been a hot-button topic in the U.S. for years, but debate about the consequences of having an abortion ignited again last year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that guaranteed the right to abortion in America.

Now, nearly 60% of American women between the ages of 13 and 44 live in a state that's considered hostile or extremely hostile to abortion rights, per the Guttmacher Institute. Given how much abortion is debated and discussed in person and online, it can be tough to know what's real and what is a total myth.

But why is there so much misinformation out there about abortion? Many "facts" about it have been repeated so many times that people think they're real, Andrea Miller, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, tells Yahoo Life. "People who are opposed to anyone having access to abortion care simply state something about a lack of safety as fact with no facts to back it up," she says. "Anti-abortion extremists have spent decades trying to create stigma and shame around abortion. It means that these kinds of lies work their way into the zeitgeist and become difficult to eliminate."

How can you tell myth from reality? These are some of the biggest falsehoods about abortion that continue to circulate.

Myth No. 1: Abortion can impact your future fertility

"There's no evidence to suggest that abortion affects future fertility — it's a common myth," Antonia Biggs, associate professor and social psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco's Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, tells Yahoo Life. Abortion is "one of the most common, safest medical procedures performed in the U.S.," she says. "There is no impact of an abortion procedure — whether through medication or aspiration abortion — on future fertility," Biggs says.

What can affect your fertility is having an abortion through unsafe means outside of a medical setting, she says. According to the World Health Organization, up to 13.2% of maternal deaths worldwide can be attributed to unsafe abortions.

Consider this too: "The majority of patients who have an abortion and do not start on hormonal contraception following their abortion will return to their prior menstrual cycles within the next three months — and many within seven weeks — indicating the likely ability to get pregnant," Dr. Rebecca Simon, family medicine physician in Pennsylvania and fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, tells Yahoo Life.

Myth No. 2: Abortion increases your risk of mental health issues and suicide

Research has repeatedly debunked this myth, but it still persists. A recent study published in the Archives of Women's Mental Health analyzed data from nearly 7,200 women who had an unplanned pregnancy within the past year, and found that "psychological distress" was the lowest for people who had a baby that they wanted. It increased for people who had an abortion, gave their child up for adoption or had an unwanted birth.

But the study found that abortion was linked with lower distress scores than those for people who engaged in adoption and unwanted birth. "Compared to the wanted birth, adoption and unwanted birth showed significantly higher levels of distress," the study reads.

On the flip side, however, research has found that not having access to abortion care can raise the risk of mental health issues.

The University of California, San Francisco's Turnaway Study found that women who are denied access to an abortion and have to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term are four times more likely to live below the federal poverty level. These women are also more likely to experience anxiety and loss of self-esteem after being denied access to an abortion.

"The myth that abortion causes mental health harm is something that has been propagated by anti-abortion groups," Biggs says. "But we have very good evidence to dispel that common myth."

Myth No. 3: Abortion is linked to eating disorders

The data on this one is a little muddled. Research has found that people with anorexia nervosa are more likely to have unwanted pregnancies, but there's nothing that states that having an abortion causes an eating disorder.

As Simon points out: "Carrying a pregnancy to term can worsen chronic medical conditions, including eating disorders." According to the Guttmacher Institute, "there is still no conclusive evidence directly linking abortion to subsequent mental health problems."

Myth No. 4: Abortion isn't safe

This is simply "not true," Dr. Lauren Streicher, a clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, tells Yahoo Life. "It is far more likely for a woman to die during pregnancy and childbirth than from having an abortion," she adds.

There is a lot of chatter right now about mifepristone, one of two medications used in a medication abortion, now that anti-abortion advocates have filed a lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) asking it to remove its approval of the drug, despite the fact that mifepristone has been approved for 23 years and has a long-standing safety record. Meanwhile, there's another lawsuit filed by 12 states with the opposite goal: to get the agency to drop some restrictions on mifepristone. "Medication abortion is exceedingly safe and effective," Miller says. "The FDA has reviewed extensive data for years" about its use.

"Abortion is very common and, because of this, we also know it is very safe," Simon says. "Abortion is safer than continuing a pregnancy to term — especially in the U.S., where the maternal death rate is higher than any other high-income country."

Myth No. 5: Women often regret having an abortion

Research has found the opposite is true. A University of California, San Francisco study published in the journal Social Science & Medicine analyzed five years of longitudinal data, collected one week postabortion and semiannually for five years, from women who sought abortions at 30 American clinics between 2008 and 2010. Women were asked about their emotions and whether they felt that abortion was the right decision for them over five years.

After five years, the researchers discovered that more than 95% of women in the study said getting an abortion was the right decision for them.

"This myth that women regret an abortion has been perpetuated and is not evidence-based," Biggs says.

Overall, experts stress the importance of knowing the facts around abortion and abortion care. "These myths can be very hurtful," Biggs says. "Not only do they misinform policies, but people internalize these myths and are misinformed about the safety of abortion — that can impact the care that they receive."

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Why didn’t Congress codify abortion rights?


In the 49 years since the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade, lawmakers have attempted to both shore up abortion rights and to overturn the decision — all while abortion transformed national politics.

Demonstrators at the March for Women's Lives at the Capitol on April 9, 1989. 

(MARK REINSTEIN/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES)


Amanda Becker
Washington Correspondent
Published January 26, 2022

When the U.S. Supreme Court in September left Texas’ restrictive six-week abortion ban in place, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly responded that the conservative majority’s “dark-of-night decision” was “flagrantly unconstitutional” and would be met with swift congressional action.

It was. Three weeks later, the House passed by a 218-to-211 vote the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would prohibit states from passing most abortion restrictions prior to fetal viability. It was opposed by all House Republicans, along with Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, the chamber’s last anti-abortion Democrat.

The Senate has yet to act. Even if it did, the bill is unlikely to pass the evenly divided 100-seat chamber, where nearly all legislation needs 60 votes to overcome the filibuster. So even as Republican state lawmakers introduce copycat bans based on the Texas law, and the Supreme Court weighs a case that could upend abortion rights, the chance of federal legislation making it to President Joe Biden’s desk by November, when Democrats could lose control of the House, the Senate or both, is basically nonexistent.

Forty-nine years have passed since the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade established the constitutional right to an abortion before fetal viability. There have been congressional attempts to pass a constitutional amendment overturning Roe, as well as efforts to codify the decision. All have failed. Along the way, abortion has transformed national politics and created a gulf between voters and party leaders to the extent that by 2019, as many as 3 in 10 Democrats and Republicans did not agree with their party on abortion, according to the Pew Research Center.

Calls from Democrats to “codify Roe” have intensified in recent months, with Roe’s 49th (and potentially last) anniversary last week, several intermediary decisions on the Texas law, and a separate case — Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — before the Supreme Court concerning a 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi. Last month during oral arguments in that case, a majority of justices indicated that they are willing, at minimum, to weaken the viability standard set by Roe at approximately 24 weeks pregnancy.

A Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs is expected by summer, and it has the potential to cap a decades-long effort by conservative abortion opponents to gut the Roe ruling and leave the issue up to the states.

How the two parties arrived at this pivotal moment for abortion access involves the emergence of a new wedge issue, a realignment of the political parties, and decisions they made along the way about when and how to push for abortion regulations and to what extent.

And it all happened within the past 50 years.

Cecile Richards, president of the reproductive health organization Planned Parenthood and its affiliated political arm from 2006 to 2018, bristles when she hears the word “controversial” used to describe abortion. Public opinion has shown a majority support for abortion access that has remained remarkably consistent, she said.

A June 2021 survey of U.S. attitudes about abortion rights and Roe from public opinion polling firm Gallup, for example, showed that 58 percent of Americans opposed overturning the 1973 ruling and 32 percent favored it — mirroring public opinion in 1989.

“I think some people have a hard time wrapping their head around two different ideas: One is that people have their own personal feelings about abortion, their own experience with it, what they feel like they would do, what they would want their daughter to do,” Richards told The 19th. The other is that they “absolutely do not want the government to make these decisions.”

More from The 19th

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“The only thing that’s changed is the politics of the Republican Party and frankly, the Democratic Party,” she added.

In 1975, when abortion was a newly established constitutional right, 19 percent of Democrats told Gallup that abortion should be legal in “all or most cases,” 51 percent said it should be legal in certain cases, and 26 percent said it should be illegal in all cases. Among Republicans, the numbers were strikingly similar: 18 percent said abortion should be legal in “all or most cases,” 55 percent said it should be in some and 25 percent said it should be illegal in all.

The same poll taken in 2021 showed more Democratic voters supporting abortion in “all or most cases” and more Republicans supporting it in none, with sizeable majorities in both parties — 91 percent of Democrats; 69 percent of Republicans — continuing to support abortion access in at least some cases.

But the parties in Congress are less nuanced. In the House, Texas’ Cuellar is considered the only reliably anti-abortion Democrat and, as of 2019, there are no Republicans who support abortion rights. In the Senate, Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Bob Casey of Pennsylvania both self identify as “pro-life,” though they have at times supported forms of abortion access, and Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine have both embraced some abortion rights.

As political scientists Scott Ainsworth and Thad Hall write in the 2010 book “Abortion Politics in Congress”: When it comes to abortion, “the increasingly partisan nature of abortion politics represents a case of issue evolution driven by party elites and filtering down to the masses.”

Alisa Von Hagel is a political science professor and coordinator of the gender studies program at the University of Wisconsin–Superior who tracks the emergence of abortion policy, particularly at the state level. She said one key to understanding abortion politics in 2021 is knowing that just several decades ago it was not considered a political issue at all.

Von Hagel recalled a student who told her about a conversation with their grandmother and several others from that generation about studying the politics of reproductive rights. “These older ladies were just like: Why in the world is this a political issue? We never talked about it like that in the past,” Von Hagel remembers the student relaying. “I can still picture her face, thinking: ‘How is this possible?’”

“It was a very, very purposeful realignment that happened,” Von Hagel added.

Heading into the 1970s, political affiliation was not an accurate predictor for whether an individual supported abortion rights — for voters or elected officials. But over the next 20 years, a political party realignment around abortion would begin to take shape.

Brother John of the Holy Faith kneels facing a group from Catholics for Choice during a morning of demonstrations outside the Supreme Court on June 29, 1989. 

(KEVIN LARKIN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)

The term “pro-life” was not even in the political lexicon in 1972, when Republican Richard Nixon adopted anti-abortion positions during his presidential reelection campaign in a successful bid to win over Catholic voters, who had traditionally backed Democratic presidents, including the two before Nixon.

The Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade energized the anti-abortion coalition of evangelical as well as Catholic voters that began to emerge during Nixon’s presidency and still exists in politics today. Privately, Nixon told top aides that while he feared the ruling could encourage sexual promiscuity, he believed abortions should be available in certain circumstances, such as for pregnancies resoluting from incest or interracial relationships.

Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University who studies abortion, believes that the Senate probably had a bipartisan majority that supported abortion rights when Roe was decided, but advocates did not feel a pressing need to pass legislation.

“It seemed to be kind of like overkill, because at the time, the abortion rights movement trusted the courts to protect abortion rights for some time,” Ziegler told The 19th.

During the 1976 presidential campaign, both Republican Gerald Ford and Democrat Jimmy Carter opposed abortion in some cases. That year Congress for the first time approved the Hyde Amendment, which bars using federal dollars for most abortions, including in the government’s Medicaid health insurance program.

More Democrats than Republicans voted for for it, handing abortion rights opponents their first post-Roe victory. But some of those Democrats did so because it seemed like abortion rights were settled law and the Supreme Court would step in when it was challenged, according to Ziegler.

“There were some Democrats and progressives who voted for the Hyde Amendment in part because they thought the Supreme Court would invalidate it — it was part of an appropriations bill, so if you liked other stuff in the appropriations bill, that was fine, because the Supreme Court would take care of it,” Ziegler said.

It didn’t. The court upheld the constitutionality of the Hyde Amendment in 1980.

Marchers protesting the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe fill Pennsylvania Avenue NW in front of the Capitol on January 22, 1981. (HERBERT K. WHITE/AP)

It was around this time that “abortion started to become linked to ideology and party in ways that had not occurred before,” according to Ainsworth and Hall. Republican Ronald Reagan — who had relaxed abortion restrictions as California’s governor — called for the appointment of anti-abortion judges during his 1980 White House campaign. By the late 1980s, he had nominated more federal judges than any president before or since, and abortion rights groups began to realize “we can’t really rely on the courts anymore, we need to find a way through the political process to protect access to abortion,” Ziegler said.

When Democrat Bill Clinton campaigned for the White House in 1992, he did so with the message that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” At the time, that was the most forceful support for abortion rights from a post-Roe president, but it has since become outmoded in Democratic politics. When Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii repeated it during the 2020 presidential primary, abortion rights advocates said she was out of step with a movement that believed “rare” was a concession to their opponents.

Once president, Clinton marked the 20th anniversary of the Roe decision by reversing abortion restrictions put in place by the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. But legislation proved harder. Though Clinton began his presidency with Democrats in control of both the House and Senate — and with a majority that backed abortion rights, according to Ziegler — disagreements in his own party remained over how to handle the Hyde Amendment and other specifics.

Abortion rights demonstrators at the March for Women’s Lives rally in Washington, D.C., on April 5, 1992. (MARK REINSTEIN/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES)

In 1992, the Supreme Court had affirmed the right to an abortion in the case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which challenged restrictive Pennsylvania laws. But the ruling also said states had some leeway to add some limits to abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. So Democrats revived the Freedom of Choice Act — that era’s attempt to codify Roe. When it failed in 1993, Democratic leaders turned their focus to health care legislation.

“When it starts to take too long, you see the Democratic Party essentially saying: Well, we’re not going to worry about this, we’ll get to this later,” Ziegler said.

According to Michele Swers, a government professor at Georgetown University, the “most aggressive Democrats got” on abortion rights during this time period was the FACE Act, a law that protected clinic entrances. The window for any broader effort closed when Democrats lost control of both chambers of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections.

In 1994, the Republican Party ran on its newly released Contract with America. Though by that time the party’s candidates and lawmakers were increasingly aligning with the anti-abortion movement, the contract focused on “60 percent issues” that had broad support from the electorate like slashing welfare programs and a balanced budget amendment. Overturning Roe was not one of them, so it was silent on abortion. The contract fueled Republican victories in the House and Senate, putting them in control of both congressional chambers for the first time since the 1950s.

In early 1995, the Christian Coalition, a group founded in 1987 by religious conservative and former presidential candidate Pat Robertson that became emblematic of the Christian right, released its own “contract with the American family” at a news conference alongside then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, one of the authors of the party’s 1994 platform. That “contract” did not propose a constitutional amendment to ban abortion outright due to practical concerns, political analysts said at the time, but it did call for restrictions on late-term abortions. Even still, intraparty divides over abortion existed. Then-Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, who was considering a Republican presidential bid based on curbing religious influence on the party, told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that he would not support it because “it opposes a woman’s right to choose.”

What followed was a period when increasingly socially conservative Republican lawmakers and abortion opponents became more tenacious in supporting incremental restrictions. Republicans attached abortion-related riders to appropriations bills and repeatedly introduced what would become known as the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which the Republican-controlled Congress passed twice only to be vetoed by Clinton, then eventually signed into law by Republican President George W. Bush in 2003.

It was during debate over the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which banned abortions by “dilation and extraction” in the second trimester of pregnancy, that public opinion about an absolute right to legal abortion began to shift, according to tracking polls and Ziegler’s research — and reproductive rights advocates worried they were losing the messaging battle. Even the name of the law, which adopted a term not used in medicine to describe late-term abortions, was seen as a victory for abortion opponents. In the House, the final version of the legislation was backed by 218 Republicans and 63 Democrats; in the Senate, 47 Republicans and 17 Democrats. Its constitutionality was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007.

Richards said that when she got to Planned Parenthood in 2006, the Democratic Party was still recruiting congressional candidates who did not support abortion rights. The organization “really worked hard to establish that it was a fundamental right, and that it was something that the Democratic Party needed to lead on.”

Abortion rights advocates found an ally in then-Sen. Barack Obama, who told Planned Parenthood early in his Democratic White House bid that “the first thing I’d do as president” would be to codify Roe by signing the latest iteration of the Freedom of Choice Act. But four months into his presidency, Obama said it was “not my highest legislative priority” and suggested energy would be better spent reducing unintended pregnancies.

But Democratic differences on abortion threatened to derail Obama’s namesake health care law. With Republicans united in opposition, Democrats could not afford to lose a single senator, and Ben Nelson, an anti-abortion Democrat from Nebraska, was the final holdout. To win his support, party leaders included a version of an amendment that prohibits Affordable Care Act plans from covering abortion, which was originally offered by another anti-abortion Democratic representative, Bart Stupak of Michigan. To appease opponents, Obama also issued an executive order reiterating that federal money would not be used to pay for abortions. Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates tried to take solace in the fact ACA plans would cover contraception.

Anti-abortion activist stage a “die-in” in front of the White House in on January 21, 2015. 

(NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)

In the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans picked up more than 60 House seats to retake control of that chamber and added seven in the Senate as part of the tea party wave. Republican efforts picked up to “defund” Planned Parenthood by denying the organization state and federal money throughout the rest of Obama’s presidency, many of them spearheaded by then-Rep. Mike Pence. In 2015, Republican House Speaker John Boehner resigned in part due to repeated battles with the conservative Freedom Caucus over their desire to shut down the government over Planned Parenthood funding.

In January 2016, Planned Parenthood, under Richards’ leadership, endorsed Democrat Hillary Clinton’s White House bid. It was the first time the organization had made an endorsement in a presidential primary, but as Richards told the New York Times: “Everything Planned Parenthood has believed in and fought for over the past 100 years is on the ballot.” When Clinton accepted the endorsement and announced that she supported repealing the Hyde Amendment, the Guardian called it “truly surprising” and Salon said it was a “game changer.” Hyde Amendment repeal ended up in the Democratic Party’s official policy platform — a move polling showed was popular with the party’s base but less so with the broader electorate.

Clinton went on to lose the November 2016 election to Republican Donald Trump, who said he was running to be a “pro-life president” and had taken a number of anti-abortion stances during his campaign. He was the first sitting president to attend the annual March for Life rally and appointed three Supreme Court justices — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — who cemented the court’s conservative anti-abortion majority.

By the time the 2020 Democratic presidential primary got underway, the sizable field of contenders all supported some version of Roe codification and the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, citing the Trump administration’s attempts to curb abortion access and restrictive laws recently enacted in Georgia and Alabama. To run for president as a Democrat in 2020 meant unequivocally supporting abortion rights — and for Joe Biden, an observant Catholic, it necessitated an evolution.

After Biden joined the Senate in 1973, he voted for a failed constitutional amendment that would have allowed states to overturn the court’s Roe ruling. In a Washingtonian magazine interview at the time, he said of Roe: “I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” But times changed, and so did he. In a 2007 book, Biden said he had arrived at a “middle-of-the-road position on abortion.” In 2008, he described Roe as “close to a consensus that can exist in a society as heterogeneous as ours.” As Obama’s vice president, Biden said the government had no “right to tell other people that women, they can’t control their own body.”

By the 2020 presidential primary, his abortion politics matched the party’s base.

Biden went on to drop the Hyde Amendment in his first budget proposal. Early in his presidency, he also rescinded the Mexico City Policy, known as the global gag rule, which requires foreign organizations to certify they will not promote abortion as a condition for receiving U.S. aid for reproductive health care. In October, his administration reversed a Trump-era regulation that barred health care providers receiving Title X family planning funds from mentioning abortion care to patients as an option.

People attend this year’s March for Life rally on the National Mall in Washington on January 21. (SUSAN WALSH/AP)

Biden has emphasized codifying Roe as a proxy for his larger abortion messaging and has said he would sign the Women’s Health Protection Act if it were to make it to his desk. But, with anti-abortion conservatives anticipating judicial victory, it is unclear what, if anything Biden’s administration — or Democrats in Congress — can deliver legislatively.

Since Democrats lack a legislative path to head off the Dobbs decision, they have turned to making the case that voters should reinforce their congressional majorities in the 2022 midterms, believing the party’s support for abortion access will benefit their candidates up and down the ballot.

“We are in a total stalemate in Congress and it would take extraordinary leadership by this president and frankly, by the Democrats in the United States Senate, to do anything legislatively to codify Roe,” Richards said.

“I don’t think most people, unless they live in the state of Texas, know what is potentially coming,” she added.

 

The Fight to Defend Abortion Rights

FEMINISM  •  May 9, 2022  •  Erin Brightwell

In many countries around the world, winning or defending the right to abortion access has been a key feature of women’s movements in recent years. From the historic repeal of the constitutional ban on abortion in Ireland in 2018 to the Green Wave movement which won legal abortion last year in Argentina, millions across the world have mobilized to fight for new reproductive rights gains, and to defend abortion rights from right-wing attacks. But these are part of a longer trend: since 2000, 31 countries have expanded access to abortion.

Campaigns to win abortion rights are part of a broader global women’s revolt which has exploded on every continent in recent years. Women have stepped forward to lead movements fighting for feminist demands, and have come to play outsize roles in struggles where the primary demands are not around women’s rights, such as in the revolutionary movements in Sudan and Myanmar. In the years just prior to the pandemic, International Women’s Day was revived as a major event with mass rallies and walkouts in many countries. #MeToo has been a truly international phenomenon, and the fight against sexual violence has fueled movements in the streets in countries all across the world, and spurred a recent wave of high school walkouts in the US.

Attacks by the right-wing on abortion have also been a growing feature internationally, including in the United States. In some countries, right-wing parties and governments, often linked to conservative religious forces, are using the issue of abortion to mobilize their bases. The 2016 Polish “Black Monday” protest saw over 100,000 workers, mainly women, walk off the job to defeat the right-wing Law and Justice party’s attempt to push through a total abortion ban. This protest was a watershed event, inspiring activists and movements around the world to fight for women’s rights in general, and the right to abortion in particular.

Class Society and the Control of Women’s Fertility

With abortion access now under dire threat in the US, and with political polarization increasing generally in many countries, the stage is set for fierce battles against reactionary forces around reproductive rights in the coming year. If the right succeeds in dismantling protection for abortion rights on the national level without an all-out fight to oppose this, it would have significant costs to the credibility of the political establishment. Furthermore, other hard-won social gains such as marriage equality could be the next target of the right-wing agenda.

Women’s oppression has its roots in the origins of class society, when, in order to maintain control of wealth, the male-dominated ruling class needed to ensure a clear line of inheritance. Control of women’s reproduction by the ruling class also has an ideological component. A tiny handful of people cannot expect to maintain control over a brutally exploitative economy if the working class, who represent a majority of society, are united and organized. The ruling capitalist class has always used sexism to divide the working class. Working class men may have no control over their lives while they’re at work, but they are offered instead the domination of their female partner and children according to the ideology of capitalism.

Male domination of the family is now rejected by large sections of working class people in many countries. However, even in countries where women’s mass movements had a transformative impact on women’s roles in society, the idea that men have the right to control women’s sexuality and reproduction persists in different ways, and plays an important role in maintaining divisions in the working class.

As more women go to work outside the home, entrenched views of male domination of women’s sexuality and reproduction tends to weaken as women earn their own wages and have more independence. The monumental women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s in the US occurred as a large influx of women were moving into the workplace. The further globalization of the world economy under neoliberalism led to the growth of industries such as textiles in poor countries and an increase of women in the workforce in many countries. This process is also connected to the increasing urbanization of the population in poor countries.

The increasing presence of women in the workplace worldwide is a key factor in the trend of women demanding freedom from traditional patriarchal control, including on the reproductive front. Social factors, particularly the role in society of organized religion, are also important in influencing abortion restrictions. Positively, internationalism has played a big role in recent years with women’s movements taking inspiration from movements in other countries.

The need for the ruling class to control women’s reproductive capacity continues to be a feature of capitalist society. A number of capitalist regimes today are concerned with the reproduction of the working class and maintaining the population at a level where there will be enough workers to avoid economic stagnation and crisis. In both Iran and China, the regimes are facing long-term trends toward declining population and part of their response has been to strengthen penalties for abortions in Iran, and to begin to restrict abortion access in China.

The Revolt Against Patriarchal Norms

A significant feature of movements for abortion rights in a number of countries, especially in Latin America, in the past period has been women revolting against the social power of the Catholic Church and its highly sexist, even misogynistic policies and practices. The power of the church in many countries has been a form of social control utilized by the ruling class to shore up the capitalist state, and the political elite historically has been tightly linked with the church hierarchy. The legalization of abortion in Ireland and Argentina represents major defeats to the social control of the church. This has been a broad process: pro-abortion protests occurred in several Latin American countries on September 28, International Safe Abortion Day. Significant movements for abortion rights are building particularly in Chile and the Dominican Republic, and in Mexico the decriminalization of abortion was recently won.

Protests erupted again in Poland last year against a new draconian abortion ban imposed by the right-wing government with the full support of the Catholic hierarchy, with which this government is tightly linked. This time, much of protesters’ rage was targeted at the church itself – a sharp development in a country where the church has a special status and role in the state, as it played a major role in the restoration of capitalism following the collapse of the Stalinist regime. Images and videos went viral of a young woman holding a sign saying, “Let us pray for abortion rights,” in front of a church altar, and crowds chanting “fuck the clergy” at a historic church site in Krakow. Unfortunately, the movement in Poland was not able to reverse the abortion law last year, but the protests showed that working class people and particularly young people are becoming increasingly opposed to the domination of religious ideology over some of the most personal aspects of their lives.

Liberalization of abortion laws is occurring around the globe. The longstanding abortions ban was removed by the Supreme Court in South Korea in 2019, where a campaign by activists pushed the regime to act. Abortion has been both widely practiced and deeply taboo in South Korea. Despite being formally illegal since 1953, abortion was relatively easily accessible as the government was interested in reducing population growth, particularly during the 1960s. The situation changed around the turn of the 21st century, when the Korean government became concerned about the slow population growth, and some medical practitioners who performed abortions were prosecuted for it.

This happened against the background of a decades-long increase in the percentage of Korean women who were in the workplace, with an even sharper increase beginning in 2014. In 2017, campaigners gathered over 200,000 signatures for a petition demanding legal abortion. Thousands joined street protests, taking inspiration from the victory of the Irish campaign to repeal the anti-abortion eighth amendment. Public opinion was undergoing a sea change: in 2010, 33% of Koreans supported repealing the abortion ban, but by 2017, 51% did.

Abortion laws have recently been liberalized in Thailand and Benin. A new law loosened abortion restrictions somewhat this year in India, though the procedure still requires a doctor’s authorization and unsafe abortions remain a major cause of maternal mortality. The new Israeli government is discussing relaxing abortion restrictions.

While the general trend internationally is toward women’s movements winning increased abortion rights, there are important exceptions, such as the US and Poland, where abortion crackdowns are used mainly to stoke the voting bases of major right-wing parties, as well as China and Iran. The attacks of the Chinese and Iranian regimes on reproductive rights are more focused on increasing the birth rate in the face of rapidly aging populations, and both regimes also trade in promoting sexist gender roles that emphasize male domination in the family. In China, the regime has moved somewhat cautiously, restricting abortion rights in a piecemeal fashion because they are concerned about provoking a backlash from the world’s biggest working class. In November, the Iranian government approved a broad set of new regulations which restrict women’s access to contraception and strengthen penalties for performing abortions, including potentially the death penalty.

Situation in the US

Since the oral arguments in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case were heard at the Supreme Court on December 1, it is no exaggeration to say that Roe v. Wade, the crowning achievement of the US women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s, is hanging by a thread. It’s fairly clear that the six conservative justices, which include Trump’s three right-wing appointees, intend to uphold the Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks – the law being challenged in the Dobbs case. The Court could uphold the Mississippi law either by moving the limit for banning abortions from fetal viability outside the womb to 15 weeks, or by dismantling Roe completely and leaving abortion law entirely up to the states. If they choose to weaken Roe by limiting abortion protections to apply only to the first 15 weeks of pregnancy, that will likely be just the first step in removing protection for abortion entirely.

Should the Supreme Court overturn Roe either via Dobbs in 2022 or in a subsequent court case, an enormous swath of the country will lose the right to abortion within weeks or months, meaning 42% of women of childbearing age in the US will live in a state where abortion is illegal. Abortion will remain legal in other states, and clinics in these states will see an increased caseload as women who have the means will travel to get abortion access.

Women seeking abortions who are in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy may be able to use abortion pills at home, which the FDA has recently authorized to be prescribed through telemedicine and sent to patients by mail. However, 19 states currently prohibit telemedicine visits to dispense abortion pills, and right-wing forces in Republican-controlled states are already looking to further criminalize the use of abortion pills. The Biden administration has legal options to challenge the anti-abortion pill laws as a recent piece in the New York Times details. Many women will be forced to seek out illegal and potentially unsafe abortions, or carry unwanted pregnancies to term.

How Did We Get Here?

Roe v. Wade established the legal right to an abortion in the US in 1973. For most of the nearly 50 years since Roe, it has been under attack by organized anti-abortion forces that are organized by the Christian Right which represent a powerful Republican voting block. Literally hundreds of laws have been passed by legislatures in Southern and Midwestern states that restrict access to abortion or make it illegal. The courts have overseen the slow chipping away of abortion rights by allowing laws to stand which make abortion more difficult to access, while striking those down that outlaw abortion outright.

Some of the abortion restrictions imposed in Republican-controlled states are inhumane and are evidence of a truly disturbing degree of hatred for women. A 2019 Kentucky law that requires abortion providers to perform an ultrasound, describe the fetus in detail to the patient, and force the patient to listen to the fetal heartbeat before performing an abortion was allowed by the Supreme Court to go into effect. For women who are nine weeks or less into pregnancy, this ultrasound must be done transvaginally – forcing women seeking abortions to undergo a highly invasive and completely unnecessary medical procedure that constitutes a form of assault by the state.

Twenty-six states require women to attend an initial appointment and then undergo a waiting period, which is completely unnecessary on any medical basis, before receiving an abortion. In six states this waiting period is 72 hours, and in one state, Utah, the law specifies that weekends and holidays can’t be included in the 72 hours. Waiting periods especially target working-class and poor women who have to take time off work or arrange childcare for two appointments instead of one. In the many states where there are only a few or even just one abortion clinic, women often have to drive hundreds of miles to get to a clinic for two appointments, and pay for lodging during the waiting period.

The prosecution of women who have had miscarriages and stillbirths has been a horrifically dystopian measure that reactionary state governments and individual district attorneys have taken against mostly poor women. Two women in rural California were charged with manslaughter after they had miscarriages and the prosecutor says they used illegal drugs. One of these women, Adora Perez, remains in jail serving an 11-year sentence. In Alabama, an estimated 500 women have been arrested for pregnancy loss, including a woman who lost her pregnancy when she was shot in the abdomen. (The charges were eventually dropped.) Right-wing authorities are actually stepping up the criminalization of pregnancy, with three times the number of women facing prosecution for allegedly harming their fetus between 2006 and 2020, compared to the period of 1973 to 2005.

The leadership of the anti-abortion right argues that any fertilized ovum constitutes a person, and their concern for “unborn persons” consistently outweighs concerns for the person who is pregnant. This serves as a very thin cloak for the reactionaries’ broader program of trying to turn the clock back to the norms of the traditional male-dominated family as a core unit of society. While a clear majority of Americans agree that women should have the right to abortion, there is a significant right-wing minority, especially within more conservative states, who can be mobilized against abortion rights. This makes abortion one of several useful wedge issues for right-wing politicians whose broader programs of unbridled free market economics – pro-business tax cuts, deregulation and privatization – are becoming less and less popular. At the same time, among younger evangelicals for example, there is less enthusiasm for the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ themes of the right.

Abortion has been weaponized in a different way by the Democratic Party establishment, which, despite being dominated by nominally pro-choice politicians, has proven itself of little use in defending abortion rights from right-wing attack. Democrats have long voted for the Hyde Amendment as part of spending bills, which bans the use of federal Medicaid dollars for abortion care. Biden campaigned on a promise to repeal the Hyde Amendment, but promptly abandoned that promise when West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin objected. 2021 saw an enormous escalation in anti-abortion lawmaking with the introduction of over 100 new abortion restrictions, including the horrific Texas abortion ban, and yet the traditional women’s organizations linked with the Democratic Party offered no response in terms of mass actions.

One of Biden’s campaign promises was to codify Roe v. Wade as “the law of the land.” The House has passed the The Women’s Health Protection Act which would guarantee the right to an abortion in law. There’s no doubt that passing it in the Senate will not be easy – it will require eliminating the filibuster and putting heavy pressure on anti-abortion Democratic Senator Bob Casey and potentially Joe Manchin, who has a mixed record on abortion. But the Biden administration didn’t even pretend to try.

The Democrats are now preparing the ground to use the threat to Roe to drive left-leaning voters to the polls in 2022’s midterm elections, when big sections of progressive and especially younger voters are deeply disappointed in the Democrats’ general inaction. A powerful defense of Roe will require mass mobilizations, civil disobedience, walkouts and possibly strikes. The Democratic Party has proven over many decades and countless opportunities that it won’t lead a fight for abortion rights, or anything else, based on a mass movement strategy.

Texas Abortion Ban

On September 1, 2021, the second most populous state in the US suddenly lost meaningful abortion access when the Supreme Court let Texas SB8, the infamous law banning abortions past six weeks of gestation, stand despite the fact that it clearly defies the Roe decision. Since SB8 went into effect, abortion clinics in neighboring states have been overwhelmed by demand from Texans seeking abortions, while the number of abortions performed in Texas has been cut in half. Copycat legislation has been introduced in several states to replicate the legal trick that was used in SB8 to give the reactionary Supreme Court majority an excuse for voting to let the law stand.

The Biden administration and various liberal organizations have launched lawsuits to try and suspend the Texas abortion ban, but the federal courts including the Supreme Court are stacked with right-wing judges appointed by Trump. Some legal challenges to the ban have been thrown out, and others are working their way through courts, but it will likely be years before the lawsuits are resolved, and in the meantime, the law still stands.

While there was a real mood among pro-choice people, and particularly young people, for taking action to oppose SB8 in September, the historic organizations of the women’s movement, that are linked with the Democratic Party, refused to call mass demonstrations. The leadership of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization with more than 90,000 members, didn’t move to organize demonstrations and build a movement, instead calling for people to give money to abortion funds that help low-income people access the procedure.

Eventually, Women’s March, the organization that came out of the mass protests in 2017, did call nationwide protests for October 2, but left the organizing of them to local affiliates, which in many cases consisted of one or two individuals who weren’t necessarily experienced activists. That tens of thousands of people came out to hundreds of protests all across the country despite the lackluster organization shows the anger that exists against abortion bans and the desire to defend reproductive rights. A big opportunity to bring much broader forces into active struggle was missed due to the absence of leadership from the traditional women’s organizations or from DSA. The right-wing, including the Supreme Court majority, were likely emboldened by the relatively subdued protest response to the Texas ban, and that can have an impact on their deliberations on the Dobbs case.

In Texas, the small forces of Socialist Alternative worked alongside students at University of Houston and organized a student walkout and rally to help build for the October 2 action. Young people showed in the uprising against the murder of George Floyd that they are prepared to take action against injustice and oppression. This fall, young women have led protests and school walkouts against sexual assault at universities and high schools across the country, a development that has mostly gone under the radar in the national corporate media. Stopping the right-wing attack on abortion will require a mass movement that is driven by the energy and radicalism of young people.

What Strategy to Defeat the Right?

The movements that have won abortion rights internationally in recent years show that mass struggle is what is needed to overcome the patriarchal control of women’s bodies that is at the root of abortion bans. Historically, liberalization of abortion regulations has often accompanied movements for the broader liberation of working class people. Abortion was legalized within a few years of the working class taking power in the 1917 Russian Revolution. In South Africa, the right to abortion was passed by the first parliament to be seated after the defeat of the apartheid regime, and abortion was legal for brief periods in Spain in territory controlled by leftist forces during the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s. Abortion rights in the United States were won by the massive women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s which was part of a broader uprising of workers and oppressed people with revolutionary characteristics during the same period.

However, the urgent need for a mass movement to defend abortion rights is not a universally-held conclusion. A layer of left activists, including substantial sections of the active members of DSA, are committed to mutual aid as a key organizing strategy as opposed to mass struggle. This layer will probably look to reinforce existing networks that raise money for working class people to travel to states where they can receive legal abortions, or possibly even develop a safe but illegal abortion service in states with bans.

Mutual aid will no doubt be a huge help for many individuals looking to end pregnancies. The left should set its sights higher, however, and launch a determined struggle for full reproductive medicine including abortion, accessible to all, as part of a Medicare For All system. As the third largest socialist organization in US history, the DSA should take a decisive turn toward taking a lead in mass struggle on abortion and other crucial fights for working class people. To not do so risks the DSA’s becoming completely irrelevant as a force that working class people will look to in struggle

Publicly defying abortion bans by taking abortion pills in a very visible way, and linking this action to a mass campaign, was a potent tactic in building support for ending the Irish abortion ban. The use of abortion pills, which can now be legally dispensed through the mail, as a direct action tactic has been employed at a recent Supreme Court protest. Whether this kind of action will be a key feature of the abortion fight in the US seems less likely, although abortion pills obtained legally or not will undoubtedly be utilized more if the Court does dismantle Roe.

In Ireland, the reactionaries were already very much on the defensive in the run up to the 2018 referendum which made the public defiance very effective in exposing their weakness and hypocrisy. The situation in the US today is not the same, as the reactionaries have consolidated their control over big parts of the country as well as the Supreme Court, and will likely make further gains in the 2022 midterms. This in no way means that we should be defeatist, but it makes crystal clear that only a determined and sustained mass movement can defeat the reactionaries here. The use of abortion pills can be an important auxiliary in this struggle but it will not be the central tactic.

As we approach a spring where the Democrats and the liberal establishment will likely ensure that the impending Dobbs decision stays in the news cycle, the idea that we just need to vote Democrat will be repeated by politicians, the liberal media, and other figures in the Democratic Party orbit ad nauseam. Even when elements of the establishment, such as the Democratic Party – aligned women’s organizations, do organize marches or days of action, the main message from the rally stage will likely be to go vote for Democrats in the midterms. This will fall flat with many young women as young people generally are the most disillusioned in Biden, having had the fewest illusions to start with. A key role of revolutionary socialists is to counter the failed strategy of vote–blue–to–defend–Roe and to raise the need to build a mass movement with new organizations of struggle that are independent from the Democrats and their record of failure on defending abortion rights.

At this moment of overlapping public health, political, and economic crises, a disruptive mass movement on abortion rights is not what the Biden administration wants. However, the capitalist class is too divided and Biden and the Democrats are too weak to lead a progressive advance to codify Roe. Biden is amassing a long list of legislative failures: voting rights, labor law reform, policing reform, and most recently the Build Back Better debacle. The possibility of defending and extending abortion rights depends on the development of a youthful, combative and sustained mass movement.

If Roe is dismantled by the Supreme Court, and especially if a substantial mass movement doesn’t develop in response, the consequences are very serious for working class people. It would be the biggest victory for the right in a generation. In addition to the horrific hardships imposed on women by abortion bans, the right-wing could be emboldened to go even further in rolling back other basic human rights that rest on the same fragile legal foundation as Roe. Marriage equality would likely be the next target. Arch-conservative legal arguments hold that abortion, birth control, interracial marriage, and LGBTQ rights are not explicitly referred to in the text of the constitution and therefore are issues that should be left up to the states. Ultimately our rights are not guaranteed by the Supreme Court or capitalist democracy, but by the strength of working-class and oppressed people’s movements to defend those rights.

The road to a victory for the left in the US on abortion rights is nothing if not difficult and uncertain. Building a sustained mass movement, throwing up new organizations of struggle, developing a capable leadership, and avoiding the trap of the Democratic Party are some of the many tasks ahead of us. But in this struggle we can take inspiration from the victories of mass movements around the world in expanding reproductive rights, from Argentina and Mexico to Ireland and South Korea, and from the reality that the majority of working class people in America oppose the reactionary agenda of the right. •

This article first published on the Socialist Alternative website.