20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY MAY 11-17, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com Chipping Away The ongoing legal challenges to abortion rights show that reproductive rights are not safe. By Katha Pollitt FORUM It took five Supreme Court justices to take away the right to end a pregnancy. It took only one judge to ban the most popular method of doing so. That would be Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed judge in Texas, with a substantial record of anti-abortion views. On April 7, in a case brought by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a group of anti-abortion doctors, Kacsmaryk ruled that mifepristone, one of two pills used in combination to produce a medication abortion, had been wrongly approved by the FDA—23 years ago. Never mind that mifepristone has been used safely by millions. The fate of mifepristone is up in the air. Moments after Kacsmaryk’s ruling, a federal judge in Washington State ruled in favor of full access to the drug. The Fifth Circuit temporarily limited Kacsmaryk’s ruling, while restricting access to seven weeks and banning the pill’s delivery through the mail—a “compromise” with no medical basis. The Department of Justice has challenged the decision, and the Supreme Court agreed to let mifepristone stay on the market until it has a chance to review it; meanwhile Democratic governors in California, Massachusetts and Washington are stockpiling the medication. The eventual Supreme Court decision will have implications for regulatory agencies, Big Pharma, states’ rights, the legitimacy of the judiciary, and, of course, anyone who needs an abortion or ever might need one. These cases are unfolding day by day. But the conditions that led us here aren’t going away soon. One reason people didn’t take candidate Donald Trump seriously is that they thought reproductive rights were safe. That was the conventional wisdom for decades: Americans were pro-choice, and Republicans would never ban abortion, because it would mean electoral suicide. Abortion rights campaigners, who warned that our rights were fragile, were dismissed as Chicken Littles looking for donations. The pro-choice movement had long placed its faith in the courts. Turns out it takes only a few shifts in the right places to undermine long-standing precedent. What happens in Texas doesn’t stay there. If you live in a blue state, restrictions that closed clinics in distant red states might’ve seemed irrelevant. But the anti-abortion endgame has always been to ban abortion throughout the land. Kacsmaryk’s decision is a step forward on that path. Right now, nothing is certain. Electorally, abortion bans have not worked well for the GOP, but abortion opponents are forging ahead. On April 14, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a six-week ban. In Idaho, a new law prohibits people from helping minors travel for abortion care without parental consent. In North Carolina, a Democratic state legislator suddenly changed parties, giving the GOP a one-vote supermajority. The outcome of Kacsmaryk’s ruling will tell us a lot about whether there are limits to the campaign against abortion or whether we will lose the right, in Hemingway’s famous words, gradually, then all at once. Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation. OPINION People thought reproductive rights were safe. PRESENTED BY
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