Abortion battles and a blooming civil war
An extremist schism encouraged by SCOTUS
Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.
Voters in New Hampshire today participated in the first presidential primary of the 2024 election, producing results that were largely in line with expectations. President Biden won as a write-in candidate thanks to a well-financed, outside awareness campaign. Donald Trump turned away Nikki Haley, who did well e her alive in the race to see if anybody in her hometown state of South Carolina decides to back her.
Now before we get to the main event tonight, about abortion law, I have one quick thing to explain:
The story that’s caught my eye over the past week concerns the growing tensions between Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the federal government.
Abbott, who revels in others’ pain, had the Texas National Guard line 29 miles of the Mexican border with heavy razor wire and block other parts with a border wall. Abbott’s refusal to allow the federal government to access the border or rescue trapped migrants drew a lawsuit from the Biden administration; on Monday, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-4 decision that Abbott must provide the feds access to the border.
Abbott still refuses to comply, further cranking up the risk of an armed showdown between the federal government and Texas National Guard. He’s also feeding the beast of a violent separatist movement that includes some members of Congress, including Clay Higgins, who wrote “The feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground.” on Twitter after the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday.
Most worrisome is that the Supreme Court came so close to ruling in Texas’s favor, which would have blown up the very foundation of the US government overnight. Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh were really ready to end federalism and grant states power over the federal government, and there’s no way that this will be a one-time event. It’s a very hostile takeover.
Hey, on the subject of those Supreme Court justices, it’s time for a newsletter about one of this current court’s most destructive legacies.
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Monday marked the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, an occasion that has become more somber than celebratory since the far-right Supreme Court overturned the decision in 2022. The subsequent rush by red state governments to pass or implement statewide abortion bans continues to have a profound impact on the lives of millions of women while scrambling the traditional fault lines of American politics.
We exist in dismal times for reproductive rights, which has turned those freedoms into a politically potent motivator for progressive activists and politicians. There have been both positive and negative developments on the abortion front, so let’s walk through the more recent events.
The Bad
There are now 14 states with total bans on abortion, two more that ban the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy, and five states ban abortion somewhere between 12 and 18 weeks. Three additional states have had their bans blocked by judges, at least temporarily. All told, that’s 22 of 50 states with abortion bans on the books, the systemic consequences of which are beginning to become clear.
In November, a study found that in those states with total abortion bans, the birth rate climbed by an average of 2.3% during the first six months of 2023, with a total of about 30,000 extra births in total. The study’s authors saw a direct connection between the bans and the increased birth rate.
“[The number] reflects about a fifth to perhaps a fourth of people in those states who are seeking abortions and who otherwise would have obtained abortions, who aren't accessing abortion services as a result of the ban,” explained Caitlin Murray, a professor at Middlebury College who studies abortion and contraception policy.
Another study, released last Friday, found that the fertility rate rose by 2% across Texas in 2022. The jump included the first increase in teen birth rates in 15 years, a catastrophic outcome that has forever altered the lives of thousands of teenagers. Only half of teen mothers receive their high school diploma by the age of 22 and often slip into poverty. Texas is well on its way to turning a generation of young women into low income workers who live subservient to older men.
Poverty is a major driver of teen pregnancy, especially now that many states no longer have working clinics. Those clinics that are still open are increasingly inundated with appointments from people who have traveled from far and wide for their services. The abortion funds that help those women travel and pay for the services are now struggling under the weight of the demand for their assistance.
Donations, they say, have dried up considerably as focus has shifted to other political issues, including ballot initiatives meant to secure abortion rights. Some have been forced to temporarily pause operations, schedule patients a month in advance, and limit who receives help.
Progress Report launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for clinics across the country when Roe fell, and it raised well over $1 million. Now, I’m reopening the fund to help the clinics that are most in need.
Some states and municipalities are so determined to prevent even the most vulnerable people from obtaining abortion services. Counties in Texas continue to ban using public roads from being used to leave the state and state get an abortion, while a lawmaker in Tennessee just filed a bill that would make it illegal to drive a teenager to a clinic to terminate a pregnancy, which it refers to as “abortion trafficking.”
The other major issue that activists face right now is a shift in strategy by anti-choice lawmakers, who are now trying to snuff out ballot initiatives that would enshrine abortion protections in state constitutions.
State officials have been abusing their role in the initiative process by refusing to certify perfectly good petition language, most recently in Montana, where Attorney General Austin Knudsen blocked a proposed amendment using a bit of circular logic that made absolutely zero sense.
“Ballot Measure 14 creates an express right to abortion but denies voters the ability to express their views on the nuance of the right,” Knudsen wrote in his rejection of the measure. There was no ambiguity in the ballot language, Knudsen simply did not like that it precluded the state from limiting the rights that it would protect.
The same thing is happening in Arkansas, where Secretary of State Tim Griffin has been hard at work turning away every progressive initiative submitted to his office.
The Good
Speaking of ballot initiatives, not all of them are going to face so much official resistance from anti-choice state lawmakers.
In Minnesota, legislators in the state House are adding abortion protections to the state’s equal rights amendment, which cleared the Senate last year. Should they be successful and both chambers passed the new version of the state ERA, voters will get the opportunity to codify it via ballot question in November.
This would add another layer of protection for abortion rights in the state, where Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill protecting reproductive freedom into law just last year. Similarly, activists have been given the green light to begin collecting signatures for a codifying amendment in Colorado, where the legislature has already passed stringent protections.
There are now officially two competing constitutional amendments in Missouri. One, a spoiler run by a Republican operative, would protect abortion up to 12 weeks, while the amendment just qualified by Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, which would establish the right to an abortion up to the point of fetal viability.
In response, conservative anti-choice groups are backing an effort to make it harder to pass an amendment by requiring that it earns the majority of votes in five of Missouri’s eight Congressional districts. The state has a significant urban-rural divide, which would in theory make it harder to pull off passing an abortion rights amendment.
Speaking of conservatives and abortion, while I usually don’t pay too much attention to exit polls, there was one tonight in New Hampshire that did catch my eye: NBC News found that 67% of Republican primary voters in the state were opposed to a total abortion ban, while just 27% said they wanted to see such a ban implemented.
Even with the caveats that New Hampshire Republicans tend to be more moderate and libertarian, that’s a very significant difference. The question is whether having that kind of ban on the table would move them to either vote for Democrats or stay at home, as abortion ranked at the bottom of GOP voters’ list of concerns.
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Thank you Jordan. I’m an OBGyn MD in Austin. We are here in Texas trying to take care of women and children, despite crumbling funding and a growing at risk population. Please don’t say we should leave. We stay and fight.
To the Abbott/Paxton/Patrick trio: beware the wrath. Greg Abbott. We are gunning for you.
Or in his case, just wheel him to a boat dock along the Rio Grande and let go.
People need to remember that the National Guard is still ultimately under federal control and they are not play toys for the states. It is time for Biden to federalize the Texas National Guard just like Eisenhower did with the Arkansas National Guard in the Little Rock Crisis. That was also a case to enforce a Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education.