SLATE
If Joe Biden wins a second term, his team says that his No. 1 priority will be restoring abortion rights across America.
“First of all: Roe,” as Biden’s deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks put it on NBC’s Meet the Press in early January. “It is unfathomable that women today wake up in a country with less rights than their ancestors had years ago,” he said.
Fulks is right: It is unfathomable, although pregnant women across red America have certainly spent the last year and a half fathoming it. Since the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022 and ended the era of legal abortion nationwide, thousands upon thousands of women have had to flee their home states to end their pregnancies, or have ordered abortion pills online and taken them clandestinely. Many others have been forced into unwanted motherhood. Still others have nearly lost their lives after doctors would not—legally could not—provide them with the same level of care they would have received in more liberal states.
Americans overwhelmingly dislike this new “pro-life” normal, in which doctors are threatened with prison time if they help desperately ill patients, women may be criminally prosecuted for allegedly mishandling the aftermath of their miscarriages, conservative legislators try to force women into motherhood, child rape victims are refused abortions and turned into public spectacles, women with wanted but doomed pregnancies are told they must carry to term and birth a baby who will die in minutes, and pregnant women with serious complications have to turn septic or otherwise be on death’s door before they can have a legal termination. Indeed, only about 1 in 10 Americans—a small minority—agree with most major anti-abortion groups that abortion should always be illegal, which is roughly the same proportion who think that the Earth is flat.
