The administration of President Joe Biden has ensured widespread access to the abortion pill mifepristone despite significant health and safety concerns raised by pro-life doctors, particularly over the pill being provided without a doctor’s visit to check for conditions such as a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy. The Supreme Court recently permitted the pill to remain on the market as a court case brought by the pro-life Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine challenging the FDA’s approval of the drug continues.
Israel also regretted that “states like California, for example, are trying to make it easier for someone to come from out of state and get an abortion there in their state.”
Twenty states have enacted additional measures in the past year to ensure and expand abortion access. In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a series of measures in September aimed at thwarting other states’ investigations into abortions obtained in the state. The state also launched a website to assist those traveling from other states to obtain abortions.
Violence and vandalism
In addition to ongoing legal challenges in pro-abortion states, another significant challenge the pro-life movement has faced is violence and vandalism following the Dobbs decision.
Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, said that in the year following the decision, her group’s legal costs have tripled due to an increase in incidents involving free-speech violations.
“That’s something that we saw immediately after the fall of Roe,” she said. “We had over 100 instances of free-speech violations.”
Emily Osment, vice president of communications at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, also noted violence and targeting that the pro-life community has faced since the Dobbs decision. “Over the last year, nationwide, there have been nearly 90 attacks on pregnancy centers and pro-life groups,” she said. “Since Dobbs, we’ve seen firebombing and vandalizing of pregnancy centers across the county.”
Catholic churches have also faced more than 100 instances of vandalism and attacks in the year since the decision.
Ballot setbacks and strategies
Regarding the political landscape in the past year, the pro-life movement contended with setbacks, including the failure of pro-life ballot initiatives in Kentucky and Montana in the 2022 midterm elections and the success of pro-abortion ballot initiatives in California, Vermont, and Michigan.
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Steven Aden, chief legal officer and general counsel at Americans United for Life, believes the results of the ballot initiatives in the 2022 midterm elections “can’t be relied on to predict future public sentiment, since voter sentiment around abortion has cooled and the pro-abortion resolutions in California, Vermont, and Michigan relied on ambiguous verbiage that simply doubled down on a ‘right to reproductive freedom.’”
He said the “upcoming ballot initiatives in traditionally pro-life states like Ohio, South Dakota, and Missouri will tell us more, but when citizens in pro-life states speak through their elected representatives, they’ve strengthened protections for life.”
Osment emphasized the need for pro-life advocates to speak clearly on the abortion issue. She said abortion advocates have been “as ambiguous as possible with these ballot initiatives,” citing ambiguous wording in the proposed constitutional amendment in Ohio that leads with mentions of birth control and miscarriage care instead of focusing initially on abortion.
Ohio’s proposed amendment states that “every individual has a right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to decisions on: contraception; fertility treatment; continuing one’s own pregnancy; miscarriage care; and abortion.”
Pro-lifers have also raised concerns that the amendment would undermine parental-consent laws due to its broad wording. Republican state lawmakers are pushing a measure that will appear on an Aug. 8 ballot that would make it more difficult to amend the state’s Constitution, thereby making the pro-abortion amendment more difficult to pass.
Hawkins believes the state legislatures are a key part of continuing to fight for pro-life protections. In the 2022 midterm elections, Students for Life “identified states where we knew we were going to have the best chance to pass pro-life measures and identified the members in our previous work who had said that they were pro-life, who were holding up progress from taking place; and so, when we looked after November, we correctly knew that we had a more pro-life base going in the state legislatures in January 2023 than we did in January 2022.”
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