Call to Action
Know your rights! What is the status of reproductive rights in your state? Look up your state’s laws here. It will be different in every state. The details and the subtleties matter a lot.
Support abortion rights groups such as Planned Parenthood Action Fund and NARAL who have led the fight for abortion rights from the beginning. We need their expertise more than ever.
Support abortion access funds across the nation who provide women living in abortion restricting/denying states with the support they need to make their own reproductive choices.
Make a personal commitment to be fully engaged in the 2022 election and help mobilize like-minded friends to do the same.
American social and political life is about to change completely. It is time to wake up, study up and choose sides. Apparently, the US Supreme Court has decided that women have no fundamental rights over reproduction and so nearly 5 decades of legal precedent is being wiped out - soon Roe v Wade will no longer be the law.
American women are one month away from losing their fundamental rights over reproduction, birth control and sexual health that they have relied upon for the past 49 years. Last week a leaked draft opinion from the US Supreme Court made it clear that the era of national recognition of women’s rights to control their bodies will end abruptly this summer. When the court follows through with a final ruling, one half of all women of reproductive age will be immediately subject to state laws banning or severely limiting abortion. Equally shocking, the draft opinion sets no limits of any kind on the type and degree of state regulation and interference in women’s private lives. Put starkly, a state can make seeking or providing abortion a capital offense even in the case of rape, incest or imminent danger to the life of the woman.
This will be the first time in the history of the Supreme Court that it has withdrawn rights after previously upholding them. Previous decisions to reverse precedent were all written to expand rights and create a more inclusive notion of who and what is protected from the will of a malicious government. But as dramatic as this reversal is, the draft opinion sets the stage for a complete reassessment of everyone’s individual rights including the right to marry who you choose, the right to use contraception, the right to seek gender transition.
The only protection any of us will have from living in a dystopian religious tyranny will be our ability to win and maintain legislative majorities state by state at the ballot box. Anyone living in states with Republican governors and legislative majorities will be immediately affected. But even in the bluest states our rights will only be protected so long as the legislature is comfortably controlled by pro women’s rights majorities.
You know what to do!
First, make sure you know what the laws related to abortion in your state are. When Roe falls every state will have a different set of rights and restrictions A recent poll indicated that more than half of all Americans have no idea what the status of abortion related laws in their own state is. Many states have “trigger laws” that will ban abortion once the Supreme Court invalidates Roe v. Wade. Some states have very old laws that banned abortion prior to Roe v Wade; these laws will now come back into effect. Several states are now considering bans on “medical abortion” which accounts for nearly half of all abortions in the first trimester. In a few states conservative legislators are moving to include emergency contraception such as Plan B in the definition of “abortion”. If you live in one of these states, your resistance work is close to home.
If your state is among those that have strong legal protections for the rights of reproduction and choice take up the national fight to reassert our fundamental rights. The draft opinion was shockingly broad and angry. Its language makes it clear that in the future this court would uphold any national law to restrict or outlaw abortion. Or perhaps the Court will move to outlaw abortion itself. The battle to secure our rights is local, state and national. Every election is an election about reproductive and personal rights.
The basics of all our recommendations still apply:
Get involved in every election in which you can vote - especially those at the state and federal level that determine the makeup of your state judiciary, legislature and the U.S. Congress.
Get friends and family involved as well.
Give money to advocacy groups and candidates that support your values at home and in Red states.
Volunteer and give money to the “get out the vote efforts” of such organizations as Swing Left, Vote Forward, Voto Latino, Movement Voter Project and Fair Fight all of whom target potential Democratic voters.