Republican politicians owe the pro-choice community a thank you card for saving the right from the worst impacts of their policies. After the Supreme Court overturned nearly five decades of abortion rights in the infamous Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health case, the fallout has been terrible: women nearly bleeding to death in hospital parking lots, women having to be airlifted to safer states for abortions, and, unfortunately, a few highly publicized deaths because abortion bans prevented timely care. Still, the impacts have fallen far short of what anti-choice activists hoped and what pro-choice activists feared. There haven't been hospitals filling up, as they did in the days before Roe v. Wade, with patients mutilated from botched abortions. It's not because women have, en masse, given up and submitted to forced childbirth. On the contrary, the birth rate continues to decline while the abortion rate went up after the Dobbs decision.
Sociologist Carole Joffe and law professor David Cohen explore a major reason why in their new book "After Dobbs: How the Supreme Court Ended Roe but Not Abortion." (Full disclosure: I blurbed the book.) Both abortion providers and activists reacted to the Dobbs decision by rising up and creating, almost overnight, an infrastructure of helpers to make sure that women in red states still had access to safe abortion, despite the bans Republicans were rapidly passing. Even though it's shielded Republicans from the political consequences of their hateful policies, this small army of pro-choice patriots has managed to protect women's health, despite the often-daunting obstacle before them.
