Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The share of funding to female founders declined last year, Vince McMahon settles a WWE lawsuit, and Roe v. Wade's 50th anniversary is here—sort of. Have a restful weekend.
- The almost anniversary. If not for the monumental Supreme Court ruling in June, this Sunday would have been a day of celebration for women’s rights activists. Jan. 22, 2023, marks the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that protected abortion as a constitutional right—and would have marked 50 years of nationwide reproductive justice.
Instead of a moment of celebration, this anniversary is now a somber milestone. Roe didn’t quite make it to 50 after the court's conservative justices reversed the decades-old precedent. Without blanket protections for abortion access across the country, 24 states have rolled back access to abortion over the past six months. Twelve states have enacted near-total bans on abortion while an additional four enforce bans ranging from six weeks to 18 weeks of pregnancy, according to the Guttmacher Institute. In at least two more states, abortion is effectively totally unavailable because of the closure of abortion clinics post-Roe. Another eight states either have abortion bans on the books that are currently blocked by courts or are likely to enact new anti-abortion legislation in the future.
Since the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in June, pregnant people have been denied access to abortions they sought out and made to suffer in dangerous medical limbo when terminating a pregnancy became a matter of life or death. Girls born today have fewer rights than some of their mothers and grandmothers.
Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, agrees. “Today is a sober moment,” she told me. “The reversal of Roe v. Wade was the biggest setback for women’s rights in U.S. history. For the first time in 50 years, the right to make decisions about one’s health, life, and future in connection with pregnancy is being denied.”
While it’s easy to think about the protections women have lost over the past year, some new protections have been put in place. Michigan, California, and Vermont all added the right to reproductive autonomy to their state constitutions, while voters in Kansas and Kentucky rejected efforts to amend their constitutions against reproductive freedom. Legal challenges are still winding through the court system, like a South Carolina Supreme Court ruling this month that determined the state’s constitution protects the right to abortion.
Businesses have taken some steps to preserve access to reproductive health care for their employees. But so far corporate America as a whole has failed to take the kind of action—from taking its business out of anti-abortion states to pulling donations to GOP politicians—that would lead to real change.
Only six months out from such a seismic shift in the nation’s social fabric, the reality of this new era can seem overwhelming. The conservative court that overturned the ruling may remain in place for years to come, so advocates for reproductive justice say the U.S. must look to other avenues to protect abortion access and save women’s lives. “To end the state-by-state patchwork of abortion access, we need Congress to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which is a federal law that would establish a right to abortion nationwide,” Northup says. That way, 50 years from now, we won’t risk sliding even further back.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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