Abortion has essentially been banned with a few rare exceptions in Texas since the legislature passed the “heartbeat law” in September 2021. At that time, most Republicans backed the measure, although that support has waned a bit since.
In December, a harrowing case challenged the law and undercut the public’s perception of it, thrusting the abortion debate, along with the changing, state-to-state patchwork of laws since the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, back into the national spotlight.
Kate Cox is a married mother who traveled out of Texas to have an abortion. The 31-year-old was carrying an unborn baby with a slew of health problems, including full trisomy 18, a diagnosis that is often terminal. Her own health was suffering, too: She’d already been to the emergency room a few times, once leaking amniotic fluid.
A district court judge said Cox qualified for an abortion under the exception in the state law. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton disagreed and announced that any medical provider who aided Cox’s abortion would not be immune from lawsuits. While a Houston-based medical doctor said Cox’s health could imminently be at risk, the Texas Supreme Court sided with Paxton, arguing Cox’s personal doctor hadn’t been persuasive enough about the pregnancy’s effects on her health. Cox and her husband have been devastated. She considered herself pro-life.
The reactions were felt nationwide.
“That Texas abortion case is worse than you think,” a Time magazine headline screamed. The New Republic took it a step further: “How Texas tried to torture a woman for being pregnant.” An opinion piece at CNN said, “The Kate Cox case shows the cruelty of Texas’ abortion law.”
It’s been about 18 months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe via Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, tossing the abortion question back to the states to decide. Abortions have significantly decreased in conservative states while spiking in more liberal ones. Texas’s trigger law, which passed following Dobbs, opened up medical providers who perform abortions to criminal prosecution and allowed for civil lawsuits.
The results have been dramatic. In 2020, there were more than 50,000 abortions reported compared to only 34 in the first nine months of 2023. There were about 115,000 fewer abortions in the 17 states that had essentially banned the procedure. More babies are being born, too. A June Texas Tribune article suggested at least 10,000 more babies had been born in Texas since its heartbeat law passed in 2021.
But in some states, such as Illinois and California, abortions have actually increased. According to one report, the year after Dobbs, there were 21,500 more abortions in Illinois, more than any other state. There were about 117,000 more abortions in the other states plus Washington, D.C., where abortion has remained legal. This amounts to a slight increase in abortions overall, by about 2,200 a year.
These numbers might be surprising, even disappointing, to most pro-life advocates, especially those who have been rallying against Roe for decades.
But it’s not surprising at all to Abby Johnson, a former clinic director at Planned Parenthood turned founder of And Then There Were None, a ministry dedicated to helping abortion clinic workers leave the industry. “I think there is a backlash against certain pro-life laws,” Johnson told the Washington Examiner during a phone interview. “I think some people are very angry. They no longer have easy access to abortion, and I think that’s very real. … Abortion is emotional. It is a feelings-driven topic. And that is why it tends to be so controversial for some people.”
Abortion advocates have become angrier and more resolved than ever since Dobbs, stunning some conservatives. In November 2023, Ohio voters passed constitutional protections for abortions. Ohio went for former President Donald Trump in 2020 by a healthy margin. The amendment, Issue 1, which declared an individual right to “one’s own reproductive treatment, including but not limited to abortion,” passed with a 57% majority vote.
Dobbs galvanized abortion supporters and Democrats in general, showing what could be possible in other more blue states when it comes to both abortion and using it as a tool to regain or maintain political control. “Abortion is now a constitutional right in Ohio. But the work isn’t done,” an Ohio Capital Journal headline said.
Democrats have harnessed abortion as a way to take back or continue a political majority in a handful of other states, too, and they’re making headway in Virginia and Kentucky. Arizona and Nevada are expected to have similar abortion measures on ballots this year. In November 2022, voters in Montana, Kansas, and Kentucky rejected ballot measures that would have banned abortion in their states.
“An issue that was once seen primarily as a mobilizing force for the religious right has risen to the forefront at the state and national level,” Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux wrote in a June 2023 FiveThirtyEight column. “And as the one-year anniversary of Dobbs approaches, many Americans are more supportive of abortion rights than they’ve been in decades.” She went so far as to say that “Dobbs turned abortion into a huge liability for Republicans.”
The backlash and cases like Cox’s raise a couple of key questions: Do pro-life laws change the culture? Was the public not as pro-life as conservatives hoped? “The unpleasant reality facing the anti-abortion movement is that most Americans don’t actually want to ban abortion,” Elaine Godfrey wrote in an April piece in the Atlantic.
In her career at Planned Parenthood, Johnson said she believed she was helping women in need by facilitating their abortions — until she actually saw the gruesome procedure firsthand. She now tries to educate people who work at abortion clinics. Johnson, a Texan, said she believes accurate abortion education is the only cure for the emotional backlash. Since the Cox case has been in the spotlight, she’s used it as an example of the need for this education when speaking to others.
“Cox had to travel out of state to get this procedure done. OK, what is this procedure? Let’s talk about it,” Johnson says. “Let’s talk about the suffering that’s going to happen to this fetus in the womb while it’s being aborted. The lives of the women matter 100%, and also there’s another life that matters. We can’t forget about that life. I’m not here trying to say the life of the child matters more than the life of the mother. … We as a collective need to say no and that they both matter equally.”
With Roe’s reversal no longer the beacon it was for half a century, some say the pro-life movement has stumbled or lost steam. Abortion had become the primary policy objective for socially conservative Republicans. Roe was an obvious enemy that presented a clear, present danger to babies and families, a foundational element of a healthy Western society: What would they do without Roe to rise up against?
Anecdotally, Johnson has seen the fallout: “People are not as engaged as they once were. People feel like abortion is not an issue, and I would tell people abortion is more of an issue now than it was before Roe was overturned because … you’ve seen this fringe — now they are the majority in the abortion movement, and now they’re pushing in the states for the extreme to be mainstream.”
States including California, Minnesota, Washington, Illinois, and New York expanded abortion access following Dobbs. In Minnesota, there are zero restrictions or limits on when a woman can have an abortion, a policy Democrats might have avoided 20 years ago. Now, it’s celebrated.
Yet Godfrey observed in the same Atlantic piece that even if most people aren’t as pro-life as conservatives want, pro-life advocates are still moving ahead. “Even as the anti-abortion movement lacks a Next Big Objective, a new generation of anti-abortion leaders is ascendant — one that is arguably bolder and more uncompromising than its predecessors,” Godfrey wrote. “This cohort, still high on the fumes of last summer’s victory, is determined to construct its ideal post-Roe America. And it’s forging ahead — come hell, high-water, or public disgust.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Dobbs didn’t end the battle for life. It was just a prerequisite for letting the people shape policy. In many ways, that fight is just beginning.
Johnson thinks the way ahead is simpler than almost everyone realizes. “I personally think that we need to get back to basics in the pro-life movement,” she said. “We’ve got to get back to basic education about life in the womb. We talk about abortion, but I don’t think people know what abortion is, and the perfect example of that was the Kate Cox case. … The primary victim in an abortion procedure is the baby being killed. We need to get back to: What is an abortion procedure? What is a child in the womb? When does a heart start beating? People need to know this information.”
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a mother of four and an opinion columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas.
