Reproductive Rights

The Supreme Court took away the constitutional protection that Roe provided, so the way to put that protection back is for Congress to pass it as a federal law. I support the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would establish a statutory right to abortion access that no state can override, and I support repealing the Hyde Amendment so that the right to access reproductive care is not conditioned on income.

Federal law also has to protect the things people need to actually exercise the right. We need clear protection for the right to travel between states to access abortion, for access to medication abortion including mifepristone, and for doctors who provide legal medical care from criminal prosecution. Anti-abortion state legislatures are already writing laws to criminalize people who help others access care across state lines, and those laws need to be preempted at the federal level.

The standard counterargument is states’ rights, but constitutional rights aren’t contingent on what zip code you happen to live in, and the right to bodily autonomy is no exception.

The argument that abortion is murder rests on a specific religious doctrine about when human life begins. That doctrine isn’t shared by all religions, and it isn’t based on any scientific consensus. People who hold that belief are entitled to hold it and to live their own lives by it, but they aren’t entitled to write it into law and force everyone else to live by it too.

The First Amendment exists precisely because the founders had seen what happens when the government takes sides in a religious dispute. Imposing one tradition’s doctrine on when personhood begins is exactly the kind of religious establishment the Constitution was written to prevent. The fact that the Supreme Court ignored this principle in Dobbs doesn’t change the underlying truth.

This applies to contraception and IVF too. Both are under sustained legal attack from the same movement that overturned Roe, using the same religious framework. The Right to Contraception Act and the Right to IVF Act are both bills that need to pass, and we need members of Congress willing to introduce them as priorities and to vote for them when they come to the floor.

State-level abortion bans are not just political symbolism. They are medical policy written by people who have never practiced medicine, and they have already killed women. In Texas and Georgia, women have died because doctors hesitated to treat miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies, afraid that intervening would expose them to criminal prosecution. Pregnancy complications that used to be routinely managed in a hospital are now legal hazards that doctors talk through with lawyers instead of treating in the moment.

OB-GYN residency applications in states with bans have dropped sharply, and experienced physicians are retiring early or relocating to states where they can practice without the risk of criminal liability. The result is a public health collapse, with fewer providers and worse maternal outcomes in entire regions of the country. The states that pushed the hardest for these laws are the same states whose pregnant women now have nowhere to go for safe care.

This is what happens when politicians who do not understand medicine try to legislate medical practice. The decision to continue or end a pregnancy belongs to the woman and her doctor, not to a state legislature that has never seen the inside of an exam room. We trust people to make their own medical decisions about cancer treatment and end-of-life care, and reproductive care is no different.

The political movement that has spent fifty years trying to overturn Roe likes to call itself pro-life and pro-family. The policy record tells a different story. The same legislators who pass abortion bans vote against paid family leave, universal child care, and the expanded child tax credit that cut child poverty roughly in half in 2021. They want the births and not the responsibility that comes with them.

This is not a footnote, it is the actual position. A movement that forces women to give birth while voting against the policies that make raising a child possible is not pro-life. It is anti-choice and it is anti-woman, and we should stop allowing it to launder that position through language it has not earned.

None of this changes the underlying principle. The right to make this decision belongs to the woman regardless of what the opposition believes about families, regardless of her income, and regardless of whether the state approves of her choice. The hypocrisy of the people passing these laws is real and worth naming, but the right does not depend on whether they are consistent. The right stands on its own.