The Battle Over the Future of the Anti-Abortion Movement if the Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade

BY ABIGAIL ABRAMS/WASHINGTON, D.C., TIME magazine
MARCH 25, 2022

On a cold, clear weekend in January, tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists convened in Washington for their annual gathering, the March for Life. The mood was triumphant. In the next few months, the U.S. Supreme Court is widely expected to pare back or overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that established the constitutional right to abortion. Anti-abortion activists have been fighting for this moment for nearly a half century. For three days surrounding the march, they danced and prayed and tearfully embraced in the streets.

But under the surface, the weekend was fraught with tension. For decades, the well-organized, largely grassroots movement has worked to unite a diverse cross-section of American society behind their cause: white evangelicals, as well as some Catholics, Black protestants, Hispanics, and conservative Democrats. Now, with their goal finally in sight, the different factions of the movement have disparate ideas of what a post-Roe world might look like, and how the movement should channel its considerable political power toward achieving those visions.

Continued: https://time.com/6160143/anti-abortion-roe-wade-supreme-court/


How White Nationalists Are Hijacking the Anti-Abortion Movement

The growing overlap between anti-abortion activism and far-right extremism has started to spill into the real world in high-profile ways.

By Tess Owen and Carter Sherman
Feb 3, 2022

On New Year’s Eve, a fire ripped through the last Planned Parenthood in East Tennessee, turning the Knoxville abortion clinic into a hunk of rubble. As the ruins smoldered, some anti-abortion activists and members of the far-right celebrated online.

A Telegram meme account affiliated with the Proud Boys, a far-right street-fighting gang, responded to the literal fire with a string of fire emojis. “Aww, what a shame,” they wrote. “That will set their genocidal plans and baby parts market back for months.”

Continued: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7n4bq/white-nationalist-anti-abortion-movement


White nationalists are flocking to the US anti-abortion movement

The white supremacist and anti-choice movements have always been closely linked. But more and more, they are becoming difficult to tell apart

Moira Donegan
Mon 24 Jan 2022

This weekend’s March for Life rally, the large anti-choice demonstration held annually in Washington DC to mark the anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision, has the exuberant quality of a victory lap. This, the 49th anniversary of Roe, is likely to be its last. The US supreme court is poised to overturn Roe in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, which is set to be decided this spring. For women in Texas, Roe has already been nullified: the court went out of its way to allow what Justice Sonia Sotomayor called a “flagrantly unconstitutional” abortion ban to go into effect there, depriving abortion rights to the one in 10 American women of reproductive age who live in the nation’s second largest state.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/24/white-nationalists-are-flocking-to-the-us-anti-abortion-movement


Is this the end of Roe v Wade, and the end of abortion rights in the US?

The 49th anniversary of the landmark US Supreme Court ruling on reproductive rights is this Saturday, 22 January. It’s likely to be its last

Chrissy Stroop
21 January 2022

Saturday 22 January marks 49 years since the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v Wade, the court case established a right to abortion across the US. While reproductive rights organisations such as Planned Parenthood are celebrating the occasion, they are also preparing for the likelihood that they won’t be celebrating its 50th anniversary, next year.

The Roe ruling currently stands in the balance as the Supreme Court prepares to issue a decision, this coming June, in the case of Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health. It is expected that the radically right-wing court, packed with Trump appointees, will support the anti-abortion side.

Continued: https://beta.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/is-this-the-end-of-roe-v-wade-and-the-end-of-abortion-rights-in-the-us/


Largest abortion protest in U.S. could be last under Roe

Ashraf Khalil, Paul J. Weber and Emily Wagster Pettus, The Associated Press
Friday, January 21, 2022

WASHINGTON -- Arriving by the busloads, thousands of anti-abortion protesters rallied in the U.S. capital Friday with a growing sense of optimism that their goal was finally in reach: a sweeping rollback of abortion rights.

The March for Life, for decades an annual protest against abortion, was held as the Supreme Court has indicated it will allow states to impose tighter restrictions on abortion with a ruling in the coming months -- and possibly overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that affirmed the constitutional right to an abortion.

Continued: https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/largest-abortion-protest-in-u-s-could-be-last-under-roe-1.5749008


Americans are divided on abortion. The Supreme Court may not wait for minds to change

January 21, 2022

JULIE ROVNER

When he was running for president in 1999, George W. Bush, then governor of
Texas, famously fended off the strong anti-abortion wing of his party by
suggesting the country ought not consider banning abortion until public opinion
shifted further in that direction. "Laws are changed as minds are
persuaded," he said.

Bush was no moderate on the abortion issue. As
president he signed several pieces of anti-abortion legislation, including the
first federal ban on a specific abortion procedure, and used his authority to
severely limit federally funded research on embryonic stem cells.

Continued: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/21/1074605184/abortion-roe-v-wade-supreme-court


We Need a Left Strategy for Confronting the Anti-Abortion Movement

The anti-abortion movement has grown increasingly militant in recent years — and increasingly successful. The liberal pushback isn’t cutting it. We need a leftist strategy to defend abortion rights.

BY ANNE RUMBERGER
July 14, 2021

Abortion access has been uneven and inadequate for decades. But with the recent announcement that the Supreme Court will hear a major abortion case next term concerning a Mississippi state law that would ban almost all abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, the threat has reached new levels.

Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization strikes at the heart of the precedent set in Roe v. Wade in 1973 that abortion is permitted until fetus viability, generally at around twenty-four weeks. As it hears the case, the Supreme Court will consider one clearly delineated question: whether or not “all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.” Mary Ziegler, author of Abortion and the Law in America, said recently that the court taking up the case could result in overturning Roe, but it could also get rid of viability as the point at which states can ban abortion.

Continued: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/07/anti-abortion-movement-choice-reproductive-justice


F.D.A. Will Allow Abortion Pills by Mail During the Pandemic

The agency said it would stop enforcing a rule requiring women to get the first of two pills in person at a medical clinic or hospital.

By Pam Belluck
Published April 13, 2021

The Biden administration has decided to allow women to receive abortion pills by mail for the duration of the coronavirus pandemic, the latest development in an issue that has increasingly taken center stage in the American abortion debate.

In a letter sent Monday to two leading organizations representing reproductive health physicians, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration said that the agency would temporarily stop enforcing its requirement that the first of two drugs needed to terminate an early pregnancy be dispensed in a medical clinic.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/health/covid-abortion-pills-mailed.html


How Trumpism Fostered Anti-Choice Violence

The same violent brew of paramilitary warriors, white supremacists, and Christian militants that we saw descending on the Capitol building merged to oppose abortion with lethal force decades ago.

2/9/2021
by CAROL MASON, Ms. Magazine

Two weeks ago in Tennessee a gunman shot out the door of a Planned Parenthood. As more researchers of the January 6 Capitol siege forecast months if not years of increased domestic terrorism, it is likely that some of it will be aimed at reproductive health care workers. Abortion opponents not only were part of the destructive melee at the Capitol—they also have modeled radicalization techniques used in building insurrectionary fever by successfully deploying incendiary lies and conspiracy theories.

The pro-life presence in Washington on January 6 has been, with few exceptions, largely underreported.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2021/02/09/trump-capitol-riots-women-abortion-anti-choice-violence-anti-abortion-extremists-propaganda/


USA – Why we might soon see a surge in antiabortion violence

By ROBIN ABCARIAN, COLUMNIST

JAN. 31, 2021

In 2009, four months after Barack Obama, who supported abortion rights, was
sworn in as president and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, a
religious zealot murdered the late-term abortion doctor George Tiller in the
vestibule of Tiller’s church.

I have always believed those two things were related.

Continued: https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-01-31/column-why-we-might-soon-see-a-spike-in-antiabortion-violence