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THE TWO YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF DOBBS V. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH
ORGANIZATION  
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Heather Cox Richardson
June 24, 2024
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_ In the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, for
the first time in our history, rather than conveying rights, the court
explicitly took a constitutional right away from the American people.
_

Letters from An American,

 

Two years ago today, on June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court handed
down the _Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization_ decision,
overturning the 1973 _Roe v. Wade_ decision that recognized a
woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. The vote was 6–3. 

The three justices appointed by former president Trump joined Samuel
Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts to strip a
constitutional right from the American people, a right we had enjoyed
for almost 50 years, a right that is considered a fundamental human
right in most liberal democracies, and a right they had indicated they
would protect because it was settled law. For the first time in our
history, rather than conveying rights, the court explicitly took a
constitutional right away from the American people. 

Andy Kroll, Andrea Bernstein, and Ilya Marritz of ProPublica reported
that the night before the decision came down, 70 or so partygoers,
including two dozen state and federal judges, met to drink champagne
and eat fine food at the Maine home of the man who had hatched and
then executed a plan to stack the courts with extremist judges:
Leonard Leo. It was Leo who had helped pick or confirm all six of the
justices who would, the next day, announce to the world they were
overturning _Roe_. 

In the decision, written by Alito, the court said that the right to
determine abortion rights must be returned “to the people’s
elected representatives” at the state level. This construction of
American law is central to the right-wing project of dismantling the
federal government which, under the Fourteenth Amendment, is charged
with protecting equal rights in the states. Centering the states,
which determine who can vote within them, enables a minority to
dominate the majority. In this case, a strong majority of Americans
has always backed abortion rights while only about 10% of Americans
wanted a complete ban on the procedure.

In the late 1970s, presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan courted
religious traditionalists who objected to women’s equality with the
promise of ending abortion access. Indeed, in her first statement on
abortion in January 1972, right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly focused
not on fetuses but on women who wanted equal rights. 

“The ‘women’s lib[eration]’ movement is not an honest effort
to secure better jobs for women who want or need to work outside the
home,” she said. It “is a total assault on the role of the
American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit
of society. Women’s libbers are trying to make wives and mothers
unhappy with their career, make them feel that they are
‘second-class citizens’ and ‘abject slaves.’ Women’s libbers
are promoting free sex instead of the “slavery” of marriage. They
are promoting Federal ‘day-care centers’ for babies instead of
homes. They are promoting abortions instead of families.”

Business leaders who wanted to slash taxes and government regulations
led the Reagan coalition, but winning elections always depended on the
votes of racists and the religious traditionalists who opposed
women’s rights. But since a majority of Americans has always
supported the protection of access to abortion, Republican leaders
generally promised to end abortion without intending actually to do
it. 

But the extremist religious judges Leo helped Trump put in place had
their own agenda. 

As soon as the court overturned _Roe v. Wade_, Republican-dominated
states began restricting abortion access. Now, two years later, 14
states ban abortion entirely. Seven others have restrictions that
would have been unconstitutional two years ago. 

The overturning of _Roe v. Wade_ upended American politics. The
majority of Americans alive today have always lived in a country with
abortion access recognized as a constitutional right, and had not
thought they could lose it. Exactly what that loss means became clear
just days after the _Dobbs_decision, when news broke that a
ten-year-old rape victim had been unable to obtain an abortion in Ohio
and had to cross state lines to Indiana, where the state attorney
general, Todd Rokita, publicly attacked the doctor who treated the
girl. Similar stories, as well as those of women who desperately
needed abortions to save their lives or fertility, have driven support
for abortion higher than it was before _Dobbs_. 

As state laws prohibiting abortion took effect, voters worked to
protect abortion rights. In seven states, including
Republican-dominated Kansas, Kentucky, and Ohio, voters have protected
abortion rights when they were on the ballot. Pollster Tom Bonier
today called abortion rights “the most powerful single issue in
politics.” 

Bonier recalled looking at the Kansas vote and finding such a
surprising statistic he thought he had miscalculated. After_ Dobbs_,
almost 70% of the people in that state registering to vote were women.
He said he has “never seen a registration surge among any specific
group like this before, and [doesn't] expect to again.” He went on
to find substantial gender gaps in registration in states where access
to abortion was at risk, but not in states where it seemed secure. 

In 2022, Bonier said, “[i]n states and races where abortion rights
were perceived as at stake, Democrats overperformed massively,”
including in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Arizona, but in
states like New York and California, where abortion rights are
protected, “the election was as you would have expected in a
‘normal’ midterm.” Bonier added that abortion rights “is
likely more salient now than it was in 2022.” 

As the votes indicate, _Dobbs_ has created a huge problem for
Republicans, especially as Trump continues to boast that he is
responsible for overturning _Roe_, a boast that the Biden campaign is
highlighting. Voters eager to protect abortion rights are moving away
from the party toward a more moderate and popular position on
abortion.

It has also created a problem for the party on the hard right. Having
lost the abortion issue as a way to turn out voters, leaders are
whipping up the party’s base with ever-increasing extremism. In the
realm of reproductive rights, that extremism has led MAGA Republicans
to call for national bans on abortion, contraception, and in vitro
fertilization (IVF). More generally, it has increasingly made them
call for violence against their opponents. On June 21, for example,
Representative Chip Roy (R-TX) posted on social media: “I do want to
‘ethnic cleanse’ by deporting white progressive Democrats—with a
special bonus for rich ones with an Ivy League degree. I really do not
like ‘those people.’”

Those extremists appear to be threatening Trump from the right,
possibly considering a move to back Trump’s conspiracy theorist
former national security advisor Michael Flynn at the July Republican
National Convention. Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Isaac Arnsdorf of
the _Washington Post_reported Saturday that there has been a revolt
against Trump in the Arizona delegation to the Republican National
Convention, some of whom apparently worry that Trump has been captured
by the “deep state” and is not extreme enough for them.

The promise to return decision making to the states has always been an
attempt to enable a minority to impose its will on the majority, but
the _Dobbs_decision revealed that minority to be so extremist it
appears to have engaged, and enraged, people who before it were not
paying much attention to politics. In the _Dobbs_ decision, Alito
wrote: “Our decision returns the issue of abortion to [state]
legislative bodies, and it allows women on both sides of the abortion
issue to seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public
opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office. Women
are not without electoral or political power.”

Amen. 

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chiproytx/status/1804145532920578301
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tbonier/status/1805404146331210116
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* Dobbs v. Jackson; Abortion Rights; Women's Rights; Democratic
Rights;
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