On the anniversary of Roe’s demise, abortion rights are a major election issue

WASHINGTON—The second anniversary of the Supreme Court’s guillotining of the national constitutional right to an abortion is—or should—remind voters their decisions in this November’s election, up and down the ballot, will determine not only whether that right may be restored, but so much more.

Abortion rights, worker rights, living wages, Social Security’s and Medicare’s future, controlling climate change, and voting rights will all be on the ballot this fall. Along with a host of other issues.

And, most importantly, so will be the future of small-d democracy in the U.S.

Its future will depend not just on whether pro-abortion pro-worker pro-Constitution Democrat Joe Biden and his supporters seeking lower offices win, but on whether Donald Trump and his lower-level legions of anti-abortion, anti-worker, pro-corporate, pro-fossil fuel worshipers all lose.

Sen. Warren was on national television last night laying out a path to restore the constitutional right to an abortion which was ripped away by the Supreme Court two years ago.

“First,” she said, “we must make sure that Trump is kept out of the White House and then that we win a Democratic majority in the House. Next, we must win at least 50 places in the U.S. Senate so that we can get rid of the filibuster. That would allow passage of a national law to restore Roe.”

Warren said it would also allow passage of a controversial law to deal with the right-wing majority on the Supreme Court. “We need to expand the size of the Court which the Congress can do” so that the extreme right loses its grip on that Court. This did not happen when Democrats, under Biden, initially controlled the White House and both legislative bodies. Some Democratic senators opposed ending the filibuster out of “respect for institutions” and President Biden himself opposed expanding the size of the Court, also allegedly out of “respect” for institutions. Unless they all revisit some of their “respect” for institutions they will continue trampling on the rights of the American people.

The killing of Roe has had much worse consequences than many thought it would have at the time of the ruling. So-called red states present a patchwork of laws that go far beyond the High Court’s two-year-old anti-abortion Dobbs ruling. Blue states hold themselves out as havens for women seeking medical care and rights and protections for all of us. The bottom line is that women are bleeding to death in hospital parking lots because doctors fear treating them inside the emergency rooms.

No one doubts that if Trump re-enters the White House there will be no “safe states” because Republican lawmakers will push for their long-time goal of completely outlawing abortion.

That same divergence exists over many other issues.

“Democracy and abortion rights are on the ballot” this fall “and nothing Donald Trump says on that debate stage” on June 27, when he battles Biden on national TV at 9 pm Eastern Time, “will convince us that he and his MAGA Republicans will stop attacking our institutions, elections, and basic freedoms the second they get more power,” warns one progressive group, Indivisible.

In that sense, a woman’s right to choose abortion—and have it done safely and without right-wing government interference—becomes a proxy for the choice of whether, we will have, as founder Ben Franklin once said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Politicians, from Democratic President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris on down, realize that. Further, the importance of abortion rights cuts both ways.

As fast as abortion rights backers—at least two-thirds of the country—realize Democrats and organized labor are on their side, Republicans, starting with prospective presidential nominee Trump, scramble to straddle or downplay the issue.

Costs them votes

They know it costs them votes, especially votes from a key bloc in swing states: Suburban and urban women. And their families.

Trump is a perfect example. He boasted to a right-wing political conference the weekend before the anniversary of Dobbs that he appointed the three justices who swung the balance to 5-4 against abortion. On the other hand, Trump backtracks and says “Leave it to the states.”Leaving it to the states” has resulted in the deadly consequences playing out all over the country.

Electorally, abortion boomeranged on the anti-abortionists, their Republican backers, and Trump in the 2022 balloting and afterwards. Everywhere the right to abortion free of government interference has been on the ballot, starting in red state Kansas and including blue states and purple ones (Ohio), the right to abortion won by substantial margins.

Support for abortion rights appears in surprising places, too. During AFSCME’s convention in Philadelphia last year, a woman who now lives in Arizona noted she was the sole Democrat in a staunchly conservative church-going family in rural Virginia, including nine rigidly Republican sisters.

Then the court decided Dobbs. Her sisters, who still live in Virginia said, rang the Arizonan’s phone off the hook. They’re rethinking their politics.

“Dobbs unleashed a shockwave of hardship for workers and our families, some of whom had to miss work and travel out of state just to see a doctor,” says AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “Access to reproductive health care is critical to women’s economic security, and the ability to make our own decisions about our lives and careers.

“Good union jobs equip working women with the tools to fight gender discrimination—from closing the wage gap to ensuring paid family leave and restoring reproductive freedom” through union contracts. “These rights were won over decades, and we have no intention of conceding them now.”

At least one right-wing justice on the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas, has indicated that he would like to review the Court decision that allowed same sex marriage in the United States, a decision he believes is as equally flawed as Roe. Under this Supreme Court, millions of LGBTQ people could be the next major group to have unimaginable suffering visited upon them.

When it comes to this election it’s workers’ rights, too, one pro-abortion group, UltraViolet Action, points out. It singles out the misnamed Republican Attorney Generals Association (RAGA), which really is a right-wing campaign finance committee, for its platform. RAGA not only would outlaw abortion nationally but it wants to crush workers.

Seeking to strike down wage hikes

“RAGA AGs Ken Paxton (Texas), Jeff Landry (Louisiana), and Lynn Fitch (Mississippi) sued the Biden administration seeking to strike down an executive order and related Department of Labor final rule raising the minimum wage for all federal contractors to $15 per hour and mandating overtime wages for employees working more than 40 hours per week,” UltraViolet reports.

The corporate class is happy to back the anti-abortion politicians, as their firms trample workers’ rights, too. UltraViolet points out that just a few firms: CVS, T-Mobile, and Elevance Health, parent of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, have given between $180,000 and $400,000 each to RAGA alone—and thousands more to Trump and his political legions.

The result? Issues like abortion and workers’ rights don’t register with Republican politicians, from Trump on down. They’re reflexively against both. To paraphrase what Trump himself openly admitted, such corporate dollars buy political clout. Constitution or no constitution, rights or no rights.

The politicians have made it hard for women in anti-abortion red states to even get to pro-abortion blue states for medical care. State legislatures and governors, with Texas and Florida in the lead, virtually outlawed abortion within their borders. It takes a long time to drive the length of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas to get to a pro-abortion state.

And it takes even longer to drive across the width or breadth of Texas. There, several cities whose acreage includes likely interstate routes women need to travel to get to pro-abortion states outlawed such pro-abortion travel within their borders. In Mississippi, Dobbs not only outlawed a federal constitutional right to abortion, it closed the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the state’s last remaining abortion clinic—which had challenged the state’s ban.

Democratic President Biden and Vice President Harris place the blame on the GOP in general, and, as Harris told Unite HERE convention delegates in New York, Trump in particular.

“Nearly two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to choose, millions of Americans are living under extreme state abortion bans,” a March 7 White House statement says.

“These dangerous laws are putting women’s health and lives at risk and threatening doctors with jail time, including life in prison, for providing the health care they have been trained to provide. And Republicans’ extreme out-of-touch agenda has put access to fertility treatments at risk for families who are desperately trying to get pregnant.”

Trump “vowed that he will be a dictator on day one,” Harris told Unite HERE, setting off a round of boos. “He said he is—and I’m going to quote—‘proudly responsible’ for overturning Roe v. Wade and taking freedom of choice from millions of women in our country.” The crowd booed twice during that one sentence.

Except it’s not just Trump. The Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the political arm of the pro-abortion group, plans a $40 million nationwide campaign to emphasize the threat to abortion from all levels of the anti-choice movement, starting with Trump and the court majority and moving down to state legislatures, governors and even city councils.

Planned Parenthood’s “We Decide program will make strategic investments to defend the White House and the Senate, take back the House, state legislatures, governors’ offices, and state supreme courts. Planned Parenthood Action Fund will also support critical abortion rights ballot measures across the country and launch voter registration efforts,” its announcement on June 24, exactly two years after the justices handed down Dobbs, said.

Won’t allow it

“We won’t let them win,” added Jenny Dawson, executive director of Planned Parenthood Votes. “For politicians like Donald Trump who oppose abortion, ending Roe v Wade was just a warm-up lap. They may try to downplay, spin, or outright lie about their records, but the end goal has always been full control of our bodies and our medical decisions. The 2024 election is our time to decide.

“And full control of everything else.

“We demand the power to decide what’s best for our families, our bodies, our lives, and our futures. When we decide–we win.”

Planned Parenthood reports that since the Dobbs ruling, 21 states banned some or all abortions, “including restrictions on lifesaving care for people with complications.” That’s not counting states—like Wisconsin and Arizona, both now “purple” politically—where the Dobbs decision activated complete state abortion bans dating back 100 years or more.

“Due to overlapping factors of discrimination, racism, and economic inequality in our health care system, Black women, trans and non-binary people face the hardest barriers to accessing the care they need and deserve,” Planned Parenthood adds.

“This analysis only shows what we’ve known all along: Far too many women are living under abortion bans, and they are disproportionately Black women. We cannot let this remain our reality for much longer. Behind these numbers are real people with real lives,” says Planned Parenthood Action Fund President Alexis McGill Johnson.

Progressive groups and lawmakers made political hay out of the two-year mark after Dobbs, including using the anger over outlawing abortion to seek more campaign cash for pro-abortion candidates.

“When Trump stands behind that podium on Thursday, he will be doing so as the man most responsible for ripping away our reproductive freedoms,” Indivisible says in a typical ad. “Republicans are gearing up for a nationwide ban if they win in November. We know it’s up to us to stop them–and we know there are many, many Americans out there who oppose these bans that we can rally to our side.”

And if that’s not possible, it’s back to the states and back to court. The anti-abortionists tried that via their lawsuit to overturn the federal Food and Drug Administration’s decades-old approval of a drug women use to prevent pregnancy, mifepristone. That was too much even for this right-wing dominated court. The nine justices unanimously tossed the so-called Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine out on its ear, saying the anti-abortion group of doctors weren’t personally injured by the drug so they didn’t have the right to sue.

The catch is that judges in lower courts had split, with Trump-named, Senate-approved judges voting for the ban. Which shows the importance of retaining or even expanding a pro-abortion Senate majority in this fall’s election. And the justices ruled on technical grounds—standing—not on the drug itself.

But abortion supporters face two more threats. One is the 1873 Comstock Act, a backdoor way of outlawing all abortion medication, by invoking the law’s ban on mailing it. The law is still on the books.

“The 1873 act–which is actually a set of anti-vice laws–bans the mailing of ‘obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile’ material, including devices and substances used ‘for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose,’” New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg pointed out this year.