Chances are most voters didn’t have the 51st anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision circled on their calendars Monday. But a handful of Pittsburgh-area Democrats marked the date with a press conference urging voters to keep the reproductive rights it enshrined — and the revocation of them a half-century later — in mind throughout the 2024 election cycle.
Because the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, “we have less rights than our mothers. Our children have less rights than their grandmothers,” Congresswoman Summer Lee said. “We must organize to elect reproductive champions up and down the ballot to make reproductive health care a reality for all.”
In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the nation’s highest court reversed Roe by determining there was no Constitutional right to an abortion. That effectively allowed abortion foes at the state and federal level to roll out restrictions and outright bans that would have been impossible the day before. Since then, Lee noted, a 10-year-old rape victim had been denied an abortion in her home state of Ohio, while a woman in Texas whose pregnancy posed a serious risk had to cross state lines when her abortion was blocked by the state’s attorney general and the courts.
And while Lee noted that Pennslyvanians faced no imminent threat from the state level — Gov. Josh Shapiro supports abortion rights — “now is not the time for us to get comfortable and think … it will never happen in Pennsylvania. We know that what happens anywhere in this country is a threat to each and every one of us.”
The Supreme Court has, in fact, decided to take up a lower-court ruling from a federal judge in Texas — who was appointed by Donald Trump after working for groups opposed to abortion rights — that would impose a ban on mifepristone. The drug is widely used in medical abortions, and a federal ban could have an impact even on states where abortion is legal, like Pennsylvania.
Already “women are waiting on their literal death beds, watching doctors wait for lawyers to finish arguing about whether or not an exception qualifies,” said state Rep. Jessica Benham.
It remains to be seen how significant a role the abortion debate will play in Benham and Lee’s re-election efforts. But it is certain to be a key issue at the top of the ballot, where President Joe Biden likely faces Donald Trump, and in the state’s race for U.S. Senator. Bob Casey, who has long identified himself as pro-life but has supported efforts to codify Roe in federal law, faces a likely GOP challenger in Dave McCormick, who hailed the overturning of Roe as a “huge victory.”
“Abortion has been on the ballot every single election since Trump and his far-right-wing Supreme Court overturned Roe,” said Allegheny County Executive Sara Innamorato. “We need leaders at every level committed to protecting abortion access now more than ever.”
Similar messages went out from Democrats on the other side of the state, where Philadelphia-area Congresswomen Madeline Dean and Mary Gay Scanlon joined auditor general hopeful Malcolm Kenyatta in urging voters to remember that Harris and Biden were “the only candidates in this race who will defend and work to restore our rights.”
Not to be outdone, Lee’s most serious Democratic rival, Bhavini Patel, issued a statement of her own later in the day, asserting that Roe “is a cornerstone of women’s reproductive rights, and I firmly stand by its principles. … Every woman should have the right to make decisions about her own body, free from government interference.”
The statements offer early confirmation that Democrats will spend much of the year to come talking about abortion rights.
Polling suggests that a large majority of Americans favors abortion rights at least in the early stages of pregnancy. And abortion has proven a potent issue for Democrats since the Dobbs decision: Observers credit concern about reproductive rights with the fact that Democrats staved off a “red wave” of Republican Congressional victories that had been expected in 2022. The issue also was front-and-center in last year’s race for a seat on Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, and may even have contributed to Innamorato’s narrow win in the county executive race.
But for abortion rights supporters, the stakes are larger than a toting up of election night wins and losses. The Republican ticket, after all, will likely be led by a former President who recently said he was “proud” of appointing the judges who overturned Roe, calling the decision a “miracle.”
Lee acknowledged that, at the federal level, Democrats would be more likely to hold the line on abortion rights rather than advance them as long as Senate filibuster rules require a supermajority to pass contentious pieces of legislation.
“We know the Senate map and we know what it looks like,” Lee acknowledged. Bills passed by the House “for too long [have] gone to the Senate to die.” That just made fights at the state government more important, she said, at least “until the federal government is able to do something about the filibuster.”
But holding the line at the federal level may be no small accomplishment, since the Dobbs decision has been followed by a number of proposals to limit abortion rights at a variety of levels. Pennsylvania Congressman Mike Kelly, for one, has proposed a federal law that would restrict abortions after a period of about six weeks — a point at which a pregnancy may not even have been detected.
And even without a court ruling in the mifepristone case, some abortion rights foes hope a second Trump administration will invoke the Comstock Act, a century-and-a-half-old law that was cited in the lower-court mifepristone ruling. Conservatives contend the law could be deployed to prevent the distribution of any medication or devices used in abortions, though others have their doubts.
But while speakers on Monday decried the overturning of Roe, they said the status quo it created wasn’t perfect. Over the years, abortion rights opponents found other ways to limit access to the procedure, such that by Congresswoman Dean’s reckoning, the number of providers in Pennsylvania had dropped from a high of 145 to just 17. The procedure had already become difficult to obtain in rural areas, with provisions like waiting periods that also created obstacles for working people or those who had to travel far.
“While the Dobbs decision was and is still devastating, it only pulled back the curtain on the inequities that have existed for a very long time,” said Kelsey Leigh, who herself had once needed to abort a pregnancy after severe fetal abnormalities were discovered.
In her subsequent advocacy to prevent stricter limits on abortion, she said she had been “so moved at the power of truth, and how individual stories can rise above the noise of decades of abortion stigma. ”Still, she said, “We need to remember what happens when we sit out elections, when we don’t pay attention to judicial nominations, and … especially we white women need to reflect on the hubris of thinking, ‘We’ve got Roe, we’re good.’”
