Dobbs’ decision sparked an unapologetically abortion-rights movement

The most common response Jade Hurley used to get when she told people she works at a abortion background was something like: “What is that?” Now, one year after the repeal of Roe vs. Wade and more than a dozen states that ban abortion across the country, most respond to Hurley’s line of work with, “Oh, fuck yeah.”

The past year has been devastating for abortion rights in the US since the Supreme Court overturned nearly 50 years of precedent in the Women’s Health Organization ruling Dobbs v. Jackson. The suffering that Dobbs has brought is hard to comprehend on a national scale. But out of something so terrible, so unthinkable, arose full-blown resistance that centered abortion rights in the national conversation.

People like Hurley, the communications manager for DC Abortion Fund, which funds abortion care and is one of the largest abortion funds in the country, can feel that difference. Public support for abortion has grown stronger and less remorseful, she said.

He’s right: Nearly 70% of Americans (a record number) believe that abortion should be legal for at least the first trimester of pregnancy, according to a Gallup poll of this month.

“It took something really terrible for people to change their minds,” he said. “Now, we’re having a lot of honest conversations about Roe and what the floor was like. Now, there’s a lot more audacity and a lot more truth and abortion storytelling, that’s really powerful.”

Out of that awareness has come a wave of unapologetic policy change and activism. Less than two months after Dobbs, more than half a million people in Kansas, a state former President Donald Trump won by 15 points in 2020, voted to reject an antichoffice referendum. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have codified abortion protections.

In a historic first, an abortion rights activist described in front of Congress on national television, how to self-manage an abortion using pills. democrats embraced the right to abortion like never before, winning big in the 2022 midterm elections and reshaping the way abortion politics has played out for decades. Abortion funds have experienced an increase in visibility and an influx of donations. Voters protected abortion care in all five states where he was on the ballot during the midterms, and most of the candidates who were outspokenly pro-abortion won critical seats. And despite how very real threat of criminalizationpeople are vowing to “aid and abet abortion,” with many everyday americans doing just that.

Reproductive rights groups had been warning the country about Roe’s potential downfall for decades. But it took the bad stuff that actually happened to convince people that she could do it, what many in the abortion rights movement call the “credibility gap.”

“Voters across the country never really believed that the court was going to strike out Roe; they never anticipated that the highest court in the land would do what he had never done before. But Dobbs closed that credibility gap,” Laphonza Butler, president of EMILY’s List, told HuffPost.

“Roe’s annulment made it clear that if an extreme court was capable of undermining and nullifying the right to abortion, it was also capable of nullifying any other right.”

The confusion and devastation following the Dobbs decision was immediate. Trigger bans in multiple states entered into force hours after the ruling, while a handful of others were enacted weeks later. Abortion patients sitting in waiting rooms they were rejected that morning, struggling to figure out if they could travel to a nearby state or if they would be forced to carry their unwanted pregnancy to term. A year later, 14 state have near-total abortion bans in place, while five others They have implemented severe restrictions. women are being denial of miscarriage care that saves lives and the fear of criminalization is force doctors to leave their home states. Between looming six-week bans in Florida and South Carolina and another restriction in North Carolina, the entire Southeast is on the brink of becoming an abortion-service desert.

“We never wanted it to come to this,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “But now that it’s happened, it’s opened a window into where Americans really stand, and we have to do everything we can to capitalize on that and save people’s liberties.”

It has woken people up, people like Janelle Bogart, a saleswoman from Wichita, Kansas, who realized she couldn’t sit by and let an anti-choice referendum in her home state take away the rights of her future daughter.

“I don’t want to have a daughter and when she asks, ‘Where were you when Roe fell and Kansas took away abortion protections?’ I don’t want to say, ‘Well, we were very busy,’” Bogart he told HuffPost last July. “I want to be able to tell her, ‘Girl, I busted my ass trying to protect your right to choose, too.'”

It was people like Bogart who helped achieve what many believed to be impossible: a victory over abortion rights in a red state after the fall of Roe. And in a primary election, no less, which typically sees lower voter turnout and skews Republican.

“It’s probably the most rewarding campaign or job I’ve ever done or will do in my career,” said Ashley All, former communications director for Kansas for Constitutional Freedom, the group that led the charge against the anti-choice referendum.

“There is no poll better than an election,” Timmaraju said. “Now that people understand the full scope of the impact of the loss of access, the full range of crises for women, pregnant people and families, they clearly understand where we (reproductive rights organizations) have been all along. It was so hard before. The credibility gap was so high with Roe on the books because people just weren’t paying attention.”

Kansas set the tone in a post-Roe world, signaling to Democrats that abortion could be a winning issue before the 2022 midterm elections.

Politicians who supported abortion rights won by far, and when the American people were able to vote directly on abortion, they chose to protect it.

“That says a lot about where we are today because I’m not sure that would have been the case five or 10 years ago,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) told HuffPost. “But now people realize they can’t just sit back and hope for the best, they have to strive for the best. And we are seeing it in the elections”.

The rise in favor of abortion at the polls and the increase in donations is what many now call “the Dobbs effect.” NARAL had about 2.5 million members when Timmaraju started in the national organization in 2021. The group now has more than 4 million members, many of whom have gone from passive to active members: phone banking or knocking on doors during midterms. NARAL, EMILY’s List and Planned Parenthood collectively raised and spent $150 million to elect pro-abortion rights candidates.

Abortion funds across the country have also seen a historic increase in donations. In the year since Roe was repealed, the DC Abortion Fund has worked with 3,381 callers and donated more than $2.28 million for abortion care, serving callers in the region but also from states like Georgia and Florida. . He New York Abortion Access Fundthe state’s only fund, it has spent $1.7 million on behalf of 2,000 abortion seekers since the Dobbs decision, an increase of more than 200% in donations over the previous year.

Despite the chaos and confusion of today’s post-Roe landscape, people are still accessing care. The website AbortionFinder.orgthat helps people find abortion services, saw a 543% increase in visits from 2020 and 2021 to 2022. more people than ever know about mifepristone, one of two pills used in medical abortion. There has been a increase in requests for self-managed abortion through access points like Aid Access and community-based care groups like Red State Access.

“When I think about how the opposition is trying to completely remove our human rights to bodily autonomy, and how people continue to have abortions despite that, that’s something. That is a positive side”, Oriaku Njoku, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Fundshe told HuffPost.

If Hurley really takes a moment to think about the day-to-day life at the DC Abortion Fund, things can look really bleak. People are being pushed further into pregnancy, making abortion care even more expensive. There is a general lack of safe and sustainable abortion and funding for practical support across the country. Clinics are overworked and understaffed, and there are not enough hours in the day to care for patients. People spend every dollar they have to get to clinics, and case managers report that it is more common for callers to break down in tears over the phone.

But Hurley, a self-described perennial optimist, hopes that a phoenix effect will emerge from Dobbs.

“This is a really horrible thing that happened to our movement and our country, but I really hope something better rises out of the ashes. Because Roe wasn’t enough,” she said. “When we have nothing, we are forced to be imaginative. I’m really looking forward to seeing what we can build.”