Where the Future of Abortion Access Lies

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To win over more voters on the issue of abortion, Donald Trump has tried to push responsibility onto the states—whose varied approaches, even just in recent weeks, demonstrate the uncertain future of abortion access.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Matt Gaetz is winning.
• A child’s-eye view of 1970s debauchery
• Larry David learned nothing, and neither did we.

A Question for the States

Donald Trump has a history of flip-flopping on abortion. On Monday, he released a video in which he claimed credit for the fall of Roe v. Wade before suggesting that abortion access should be left up to the states. He did not weigh in on whether he would support outlawing abortion on the federal level—a ban he’d favored during his 2016 campaign and first term. Then, pressed by reporters in Georgia yesterday, he said that, if elected, he wouldn’t sign a nationwide ban.

Trump seems to be responding to the political toxicity of harsh abortion restrictions, likely softening his current stance to win over more moderate and swing-state voters. Most Americans say in polling that they support legal access to abortion in some form, with certain limits, so his statements this week should be viewed not as some kind of fundamental shift, my colleague Elaine Godfrey advised, but as a purely political play.

“He knows which way the political winds are blowing, and they’re against the pro-life camp at this point,” she told me. Trump waited until after the Republican primaries to announce his stance, she explained, because he didn’t want to lose votes from social conservatives. “Now that he’s the presumptive nominee, he can afford to piss off a few anti-abortion people—in the pursuit of winning over moderates in a general” election, she said.

The fall of Roe has been steadily remaking America’s political landscape since 2022, energizing Democratic voters and turning swing areas blue. Seizing on the issue, the Biden campaign has released a series of emotionally wrenching ads telling the stories of American women who were denied access to abortions. One video, released on Monday, features a woman who developed sepsis after a miscarriage for which she was denied an abortion in Texas, where the procedure is banned in most instances. She may not be able to have another child as a result of the infection, and wept as the message “Donald Trump did this” appeared on the screen.

Abortion will shape the 2024 presidential election—and its outcome will determine access to reproductive health care across the country. Biden has promised to restore federal abortion rights if he wins, but such a vow faces massive challenges in today’s political landscape, including legal hurdles and right-wing objections. His success will not be guaranteed—and the measures he has tried to introduce during his current term have suffered from a fractured Congress.

Trump, for his part, has taken policy advice in the past from a group of anti-abortion activists and attorneys, and Elaine reminded me that they will seek to influence his policy decisions if he wins. A major focus of some anti-abortion activists’ efforts, as Elaine has written, would be to revive the Comstock Act, a mostly dormant law that prohibited the shipment of objects used for terminating or preventing pregnancies, effectively criminalizing abortion everywhere. “The idea seems to be that Trump is so uninterested in the technical details of abortion-related matters that he’ll rely on this trusty circle of advisers to shape policy,” she wrote earlier this year. (He privately signaled in February that he supported the idea of a national 16-week ban—in part because he reportedly liked how the even number sounded.)

For the past two years, the issue of abortion access has largely been left up to the states. Americans now face a wide range of reproductive-health restrictions depending on where they live. By last summer, some 25 million women were living in states where abortions had become harder to get. Fourteen states, largely conservative strongholds in the South and West, currently ban abortion in almost all circumstances, and another seven states restrict the procedure earlier in pregnancy than the limit set by Roe.

On Tuesday, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that a particularly restrictive law from the Civil War era—before women could vote—could be reinstated. The law bans nearly all abortions, with no exceptions for rape or incest, and providing an abortion would be a felony that could carry a two-to-five-year prison sentence. Earlier this month, Florida’s top court issued a ruling that allowed for a six-week abortion ban to soon take effect. The state’s ruling also requires any abortion pills to be dispensed in person, effectively outlawing mail orders of the medication.

The overturning of Roe has injected chaos into an established element of American life. Abortion-related ballot measures are expected in a swath of states this fall, and the future of abortion access remains unsettled on the federal level. Now abortion rights are an open question for the states to answer.

Related:

• A plan to outlaw abortion everywhere
• Anti-abortion conservatives’ first target if Trump returns

Today’s News

1. A vote on a bill to reauthorize a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act failed to pass the House yesterday. Despite House Speaker Mike Johnson advocating for its passage, 19 Republicans voted against the measure.
2. A senior U.S. military commander arrived in Israel amid fears that Iran will retaliate for a strike in Syria that killed several Iranian commanders earlier this month.
3. O. J. Simpson, the retired football player acquitted of killing his former wife and her friend in 1995, died at age 76 from cancer.

Dispatches

• Time-Travel Thursdays: Faith Hill dug through The Atlantic’s archival musings on dating. It turns out that romance in America has never been easy.
• The Weekly Planet: New federal rules require public systems to measure and mitigate PFAS, Zoë Schlanger writes. The U.S. is about to uncover a crisis in drinking water.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

What O. J. Simpson Means to Me

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

(From 2016)

My reaction to O. J. Simpson’s arrest for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman was atypical. It was 1994. I was a young black man attending a historically black university in the majority-black city of Washington, D.C., with zero sympathy for Simpson, zero understanding of the sympathy he elicited from my people, and zero appreciation for the defense team’s claim that Simpson had been targeted because he was black …

Two things, it seemed to me, could be true at once: Simpson was a serial abuser who killed his ex-wife, and the Los Angeles Police Department was a brutal army of occupation. So why was it that the latter seemed to be all that mattered, and what did it have to do with Simpson, who lived a life far beyond the embattled ghettos of L.A.?

Read the full article.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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