Did the conservative members of the Supreme Court have any idea what they were unleashing on the people of this country when they overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022, effectively ending the federal right to abortion?
Do you think they understood that allowing states to determine their own laws regarding abortion would result in women sitting in parking lots while miscarrying, because doctors believed they had to wait for a woman’s organs to fail before performing life-saving abortions? Or that a pregnant woman with cancer who needs an abortion to start life-saving chemo treatments would be denied proper care?
That pharmacists would refuse to fill prescriptions for women of child-bearing age on the off-chance that the medications they needed for lupus, arthritis or psoriasis might cause abortions, even when the women were in no danger of becoming pregnant because they, for example, had had hysterectomies?
Did the justices know that women of reproductive age would no longer be included in some medical studies because the treatments being studied might have adverse effects on fetuses — even if the women were not pregnant, had no plans to get pregnant and did not plan to stay pregnant if they became so?
Did the justices understand that they’d be stymieing research on conditions like Gulf War illness — in which veterans with chemical exposures suffer from rashes, muscle pain and brain fog — because a promising treatment, mifepristone, also happens to be used as an abortifacient?
These grotesque outcomes of the court’s Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision are detailed in an important new book, “Side Effects: How Abortion Bans Affect Everyone’s Health,” by journalist Alice Miranda Ollstein, who covers reproductive health for Politico.
I would love to send copies to the six justices who blithely overturned Roe, especially to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wondered during oral arguments why women couldn’t just avail themselves of safe haven laws if they didn’t want children. Just drop that newborn off at the local firehouse and go on your merry way!
But Ollstein, 38, said she did not spend time pondering whether the justices understood or cared about the implications of their decision.
“I wanted to focus on what the consequences have been, because that’s not speculation,” Ollstein told me Wednesday. “We don’t have to guess what’s in somebody’s mind and heart. We can see in hard data and people’s real stories what the repercussions are. In one sense, it almost doesn’t matter what the intent was. This is the result.”
The result is a country where women are forced to cross state lines to receive abortion care. Where doctors are choosing not to practice (and residents are refusing to train) in states with draconian antiabortion laws, such as Idaho, Kentucky and Tennessee. Where military veterans cannot obtain abortions from Veterans Affairs even in case of rape or to save the mother’s life.
Where clinics that don’t even provide abortions anymore have been forced to shutter, depriving patients of access to HIV testing, contraception, PAP smears and breast exams.
And of course, where women are dying because doctors are terrified that giving appropriate medical care will result in criminal charges.
The simple truth is that legislating medical care can have terrible consequences, and politicians have no business doing it.
As Ollstein told me, “If you make the exception broad — ’You can only intervene in a life-threatening circumstance’ — it’s vague and people don’t know when they’re allowed to act. If you make it very specific — ‘You can have an abortion if your blood pressure is this exact number’ — no list can ever be comprehensive. Being too specific may be just as dangerous as being too broad.”
Having covered the abortion beat as a news reporter shortly after President Obama was first elected, I’ve always believed that Americans will never be able to reach a middle ground on reproductive rights. The sides are too polarized.
What I failed to realize, and what Ollstein pointed out, was that in Roe vs. Wade, we already had one.
“Many people argue Roe was the middle ground because it allowed states to impose restrictions later in pregnancy but had national protections for abortions earlier in pregnancy,” Ollstein said. “That was already a compromise because a lot of people believe there should be no restrictions at any point in pregnancy. That was the contested, uneasy compromise that held for 50 years, and now we’re in a new era.”
Thanks to the recent midterm elections, the aftershocks of Dobbs are about to give way to a new political reality. The reordering of power from red to blue in state legislatures, governor’s mansions and Congress is good news for those who believe Dobbs inflicted terrible unforeseen consequences.
“People should also pay attention to state attorneys general seats that flipped,” Ollstein said. “Those are very influential on abortion.”
Indeed, both Texas and Kansas were part of lawsuits trying to force the Food and Drug Administration to restrict abortion pills, but their new Democratic attorneys general have signaled they will not continue those fights.
The Supreme Court returned the power to regulate or outlaw abortion to the states, Ollstein said, “as though it was putting it to bed and washing its hands of the issue. That’s already proven untrue.”
In fact, the court has repeatedly had to address secondary conflicts over things like access to medication abortion, federal emergency care mandates and Medicaid provider exclusions.
As long as there are people who want to control women’s bodies, and people who refuse to let that happen, the battle over abortion in America will not go away anytime soon.
Bluesky: @rabcarian Threads: @rabcarian
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