the coming legal battles of post-Roe America
and should you keep abortion pills at home, in case you need them later?
The first few months of my job has been pretty heavily focused on the coming- and - now - here overturn of Roe v Wade. Even as I anticipated it coming, reporting articles and interviewing experts who knew it was likely to happen, even following the leaked draft of the opinion in May, I still couldn’t have prepared for how gutted I felt on Friday. Every single person I spoke to said it felt way worse than they had expected, even though intellectually we all knew it was coming. It’s confusing, upsetting, enraging, heavy and scary.
I’ve shared previously my story on Aid Access and why philanthropy needs to step up on funding abortion access.
I have two more stories to share today, one out last Wednesday and one this morning.
The first is on this idea of “advance provision” of mifepristone and misoprostol. The drug former has a shelf life of about five years, the latter about two. And the two drugs work best if taken during the first 10-12 weeks of a pregnancy. I wrote about why more experts are saying this option — of getting it and keeping it at home just in case — is something more people should be considering, especially as restrictions ramp up and it can be harder to access abortion care in the time that you need it. Abortion pills are not a silver bullet, but nothing is. I hope this one is clarifying for you, and you can read it here.
The second story comes with information I’m not happy to learn about or report on but that I think is really important and poorly understood right now. It’s about all the legal battles that we very might likely see now that there is no longer nationwide right to end a pregnancy. The nature of how to provide, and how to obtain, an abortion has changed a lot since 1973, and so has what it means to “cross state lines” thanks to things like medication abortion, the internet, telehealth visits, etc. All of this works to create new legal questions and battles over state jurisdiction over abortion. Can an aggressive prosecutor in Texas hold a New York abortion provider responsible for an abortion a Texas woman may get-out-of-state? If a state passes one of these “fetal personhood” statutes which were illegal under Roe, could a prosecutor seek to hold a woman liable for violating the fetus’s rights, even across state lines? And can states ban medication abortion even if the drugs were approved by the FDA? I look at these and other questions and where the legal precedent + scholarship currently exists. You can read that here.
Thanks for reading and I hope you all are hanging in there.