Help Us Fight Back Against Efforts to Roll Back Gender Justice
Extremist judges will not stop endangering the lives of pregnant people or people who may become pregnant—overturning Roe v. Wade, attacking medication abortion, threatening the future of IVF, and this week at SCOTUS, emergency abortion care.
Our lawyers are waging strategic fights that make clear what is at stake for people who can become pregnant and seek to bolster our fundamental rights to control our lives, futures, and destinies.
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We must fight to ensure that the legal right to abortion is meaningful for all women, not just a privileged few: Having a legal right without the means to access it renders it essentially ineffective. That has been the case for decades for many low-income women and women of color who have been unable to exercise the legal right to abortion due to restrictions and barriers like cost or accessibility. That is why we must support legislation like the EACH Woman Act, which would eliminate the Hyde amendment and other restrictions that restricts access to the legal right to abortion for too many women.
We must expose policies, laws, and practices at the state and local levels that seek to deprive women of the legal right to abortion. This past year, in the case of Whole Woman’s Health, the Supreme Court struck down thinly veiled attempts by the state of Texas to place arbitrary and discriminatory restrictions on abortion providers to limit women’s access to abortion. Fortunately, the Supreme Court saw past Texas’ attempt to limit women’s access to abortion and exposed such laws as unconstitutional. However, at all levels, politicians continue to attempt to interfere with and eliminate women’s access to legal abortion. This is why we need legislation that would bar attempts by states to limit access to abortion.
We must have an inclusive and diverse movement if we are to be effective. In order to effectively combat attacks on women’s access to abortion, we must ensure that the pro-reproductive health, rights and justice movement is an inclusive one. We must contextualize our current struggles within broader social justice movements. This means engaging in fights that might not historically be considered pro-choice fights, such as racial justice, immigrant rights, LGBTQ rights, and anti-poverty efforts. Only by recognizing that these fights are inextricably linked—for example, we cannot have reproductive justice without economic justice—can we who believe in legal abortion ensure that all are able to meaningfully exercise their legal rights.
History can teach us a lot if we are willing to listen to its lessons. The complex life and legacy of Norma McCorvey has a lot of teach us all. For the pro-reproductive health, rights, and justice movement, her death and legacy should be a reminder to remain vigilant, steadfast, and united in our work to preserve and strengthen our hard-fought right to legal abortion.