What Would It Mean to Defend All Abortions?

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/defending-all-abortions/

The care she is about to receive has been maligned and lied about from the national political stage. Later abortion is banned in all but nine states and Washington, DC, and performed in only a handful of clinics nationwide. It has divided the pro-choice movement, leading to bitter struggles and the resignations of high-profile leaders. Most of the widely celebrated abortion-rights ballot initiatives floated in a record number of states since 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned the national right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, have allowed states to ban it.

Democrats love to avoid it, and Republicans love to lie about it. Even among pro-choice voters, abortions that take place when the fetus looks less like a blob of tissue and more like a baby stir the kind of complex feelings that our political discourse seldom accommodates. As a result, later abortion has never had the widespread support that earlier abortion receives. And under the Trump administration, this care could get harder to provide and receive. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noted during his confirmation hearing in January that the administration wanted to end later abortions, signaling the possibility that Trump might pressure Congress to pass a ban on them or even attempt to do so himself through an executive order. More likely, the administration could restrict medication abortion, disrupting access to earlier abortions and driving up the need for later procedures.

Since Dobbs, abortion bans have already pushed some patients further into pregnancy. And even as clinics in many states have closed, there has been a rise in the number of places advertising later care. After third-trimester-abortion provider George Tiller’s assassination in a Kansas church in 2009, just four providers continued the work he once did, according to the 2013 documentary After Tiller. Today, a new generation of abortion providers has stepped into the breach. In the fall of 2022, the doctor-midwife duo Diane Horvath and Morgan Nuzzo opened Partners in Abortion Care. It’s the only clinic in the country that offers abortions to anyone up to 34 weeks; other clinics offer care that late at the discretion of the physician. Horvath estimates there are now at least 15 doctors at a handful of clinics in the United States offering third-trimester abortions, and more who are doing so in hospitals.

For Horvath and like-minded advocates, defending this procedure is a bright line for a movement that has lost Roe and must now build a new, more ambitious framework. Their clarity in fighting for the procedure stems from research showing that later-abortion patients are among the most vulnerable people in the country—disproportionately young, low-income, and people of color.

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R