It is completely banned in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. Indiana’s abortion ban went into effect just this Wednesday. Banned in six weeks – effectively a total ban – in Georgia and Ohio. West Virginia also passed an abortion ban. It won’t be the last. The Republican 15-week national ban that Graham has introduced will not help women in those states, who will not have their rights restored. It is not a floor on the legality of abortion: it is a ceiling. The goal is to ban abortion in blue states. Currently, 58% of American women of childbearing age live in states that are “hostile or extremely hostile” to abortion rights, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Republicans want to raise it to 100%. One way we know Republicans will ban abortion nationwide once they get the chance is because they keep saying they want to. This is the sixth time Graham has introduced a national abortion ban bill. The previous five were, by his standards, less extreme: they all banned abortion at 20 weeks. That Graham pushed back his ban earlier in pregnancy is a sign of rapidly lowering standards for American women. Now we are told that 15 weeks is a compromise. But 15 weeks is no compromise. It’s the beginning of the second trimester – before fetal abnormalities and other health risks are identified, before many women in red-hot states, burdened by poverty and travel and state-mandated medical unnecessary burdens, can get an abortion. And there is no stage of pregnancy where a woman deserves the humiliation of a ban. There is no point at which it becomes unworthy to control her life and health. There is no point at which a legislator knows more about what is best for her than she does. Any ban is unacceptable. a national ban, like the one Republicans are now seeking, is repugnant. That was always their plan. The anti-choice movement, and their servants in the Republican party, have long understood the overturning of Roe v Wade – the coveted goal they achieved this summer, on June 24, when the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v Jackson – as the first leap in their attack on women’s rights. Their real goal is a national abortion ban, starting with the kind of legislation Graham introduced this week. They’ve made no secret of it: anti-choice groups announced their plan for a national ban even before the Dobbs ruling was officially released. They don’t have the votes for it now, but they could get the votes in the future. And when they do, a combination of factors, including pressure from fundraisers and their grassroots and what appears to be a genuine hatred of abortion and the freedom it affords women, combine to create a political certainty: the next time Republicans will hold both houses of the US Congress and the White House, ban abortion nationwide. It is time for liberal Americans, and all American women, to face this reality: soon there will be no safe states, no place in America where abortion is legal. In the future, we will see this horrific era—the era after the fall of the Roe, but before abortion was banned nationwide—as an interregnum, when the suffering and loss inflicted on women by abortion bans was confined to red states. . As horrible as this situation is, one day we will look back on it with love. As women bleed for days, little girls are kicked out of school and thousands of dreams are abandoned for forced childbirth – even those, after all, may seem like the good old days. Because while Republicans will surely ban abortion nationwide at their first opportunity, they may not even have to wait for an electoral victory to do so. A group calling itself Catholics for Life has already asked the high court to designate embryos and fetuses as persons under the 14th amendment, a move that would grant them constitutional rights. From there, “it’s a short step to say that laws allowing abortion are unconstitutional because they deny equal protection to those individuals who are unborn human beings,” Berkeley Law School Dean Ervin Chemerinsky told the Journal Ms. “I think there might be a majority on the Court to take that position.” The unelected, life-appointed judges on the court could extend their claim in Dobbs that it is legal to ban abortion, and instead say that it is actually illegal to allow it. To get that result, Republicans don’t need to win a single more vote. These are the stakes of every election now, for the rest of our lives. A national abortion ban will be on the ballot every time Americans vote for congressmen and senators. will be on the ballot every time they vote for president. In previous years, while Roe was still in place, a vote for a governor or state legislatures could significantly affect practical access to abortion within a state. Red states have been able to cut funding, impose tortuous requirements, drive up costs for patients, and impose uniquely onerous burdens on providers. But Roe preserved a bare-bones floor for abortion rights: no state could ban abortion before viability. Now, any state – or the United States at the federal level – can ban abortion as early as they want. There is no bottom, and Republicans are determined to keep pushing back further and further, dragging the rights and dignity of American women further and further into the dirt. This is the possibility we must resist every time we vote. It’s also the possibility that Democrats accept — any day now — that they won’t expand the court.
