MassLive.com | ‘We’re not safe’: In Boston, experts, advocates warn the fight over abortion rights isn’t over
By John L. Micek | jmicek@masslive.com
Originally published on MassLive.com
Two years after the toppling of Roe v. Wade sparked a wave of abortion bans and restrictions from coast to coast, reproductive freedoms and gender equity rights are more at risk than ever.
And with Americans heading to the polls this November to choose members of Congress and the next president, the decision they make will reverberate for years to come.
That’s the simple and stark message that a panel of lawyers, physicians and reproductive rights advocates delivered Wednesday as the commonwealth’s two Democratic U.S. senators held a hearing surveying the state of abortion rights as Election Day draws ever nearer.
“We’re not safe,” Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties of Massachusetts, told U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, who co-chaired the two-hour session in a conference room at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, high above Boston.
“Aggressive antiabortion efforts at the federal level threaten the rights of all people, including Massachusetts,” where the procedure remains legal, and protections are enshrined in state law, Rose said.
Rebecca Hart Holder, the president of the advocacy group Reproductive Equity Now, cast the current debate in even more binary terms, warning that attacks on abortion access have opened the door to attacks on marriage rights, gender equity, and other privacy-related protections Americans take for granted.
“If you look at a Venn Diagram of the antiabortion movement and the anti-gender equity movement, it is a circle,” she said.
Since the high court’s ruling, 21 states have moved to ban or restrict access to the procedure, according to a New York Times tracker.
Warren and Markey, Biden White House loyalists both, laid the blame at the feet of former President Donald Trump, who packed the nation’s highest court with antiabortion justices, handing abortion foes a win they’d been seeking for a half-century.
“Reproductive freedom, even here in Massachusetts, may disappear,” Warren said in her opening remarks, noting that, with their ruling in the case known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, conservative justices on the high court “[completed] the job that Donald Trump sent them there to do.”
But the high court’s ruling two years ago was far from the final salvo in the battle over abortion access. The court is expected to issue a likely hostile ruling on access to a widely used abortion medication.
And attacks on contraception also could pose wider public health threats, particularly to Black and brown Americans, the panel of experts said Wednesday.
“It’s no secret how dire the state of reproductive health care is, not only in Massachusetts but across the country,” state Attorney General Andrea J. Campbell said. “Massachusetts is a beacon ... but much work remains.”
Campbell’s office has been in the vanguard of some of that work.
Earlier this month, Democratic attorneys general from across the nation, led by Campbell, launched a new effort to protect access to abortion, contraception, and gender-affirming care at the state level — even as battles over those same issues continue to play a major role in the race for the White House.
And, last October, Campbell’s office launched a reproductive justice unit, charged with taking “an intersectional approach” to a complicated public health challenge that includes not only protecting abortion access but also ensuring gender-affirming care for transgender youth and addressing yawning racial disparities in maternal health care, MassLive previously reported.
“Everyone should care about this issue … you never know what your reproductive journey will be,” Campbell said.
Other efforts on Capitol Hill to constrain access, including a possible nationwide ban and legislation stating that life begins at conception, also have upped the stakes.
“Members of Congress are working relentlessly to place national restrictions on this care,” Markey said. “We will show radical Republicans that their playbook will not work … We will fight to protect the right to essential health care by law. We will show what GOP really stands for: ‘Grossly Oppressive Politicians.’”
Seven months before Election Day, the issue of abortion rights and abortion access remains a politically potent one.
More than two-thirds of respondents (67%) to a CommonWealth Beacon/WGBH poll last month said they believed the U.S. Supreme Court made the wrong decision when it toppled Roe v. Wade in 2022, returning the issue to the states.
The poll also underlined the personal nature of the debate, with more than half of respondents (51%) saying they had known someone who had an abortion.
The issue is particularly critical among younger voters who played a key role in Biden’s election in 2020 and who helped roll back an expected Republican wave in 2022. Reproductive rights ranked second only to the economy in a Harvard University poll of young voters released last month.
Trump, the twice-impeached, four-times indicted former chief executive, has said he won’t ban birth control, but he could move to make it much harder to get, according to Politico.
Some antiabortion activists also have floated using an 1873 federal law known as the Comstock Act, which banned the mailing of obscene matter and articles used to produce abortion, which also could impact Massachusetts, the lawmakers and advocates warned Wednesday.
“Dobbs was a clear and devastating loss. But it’s not the endpoint,” Dr. Kathryn Fay, of Physicians for Reproductive Health and a doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said.
The only thing left to do?
Fight, they said.
“I’m furious that millions of women have lost fundamental rights. I’m furious that their freedom to make their own decisions has been taken away by a small number of extremists. I’m alarmed by what the radical Supreme Court and congressional Republicans are prepared to unravel under a future Trump presidency,” Warren said.
