Latest news with #ComstockAct
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The truth behind the Trump administration's surprising birth control move
On Monday, lawyers for the Trump administration asked a Texas federal judge to toss out a lawsuit in which Missouri, Idaho and Kansas seek to restrict access to the abortion drug mifepristone. This welcome news may strike some as a surprise, but supporters of abortion rights shouldn't celebrate too much. The Department of Justice didn't say anything about whether it thinks the drug should remain available, there's no guarantee the right-wing judge assigned to the case will dismiss the lawsuit, and there are many other ways the administration and its allies can still restrict abortion pill access. The timeline of this case, called Missouri et al. v. FDA, begins in November 2023, when the Republican attorneys general of Missouri, Idaho and Kansas asked to join or 'intervene' in an existing lawsuit that anti-abortion doctors filed in Texas against the Food and Drug Administration over mifepristone. Nearly two-thirds of abortions in the U.S. in 2023 were performed with the pills mifepristone and misoprostol. In June 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that the doctors weren't injured by the FDA's actions and thus had no legal standing to sue. A unanimous court kicked the case back to Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk to dismiss. That should have been the end of the case for all plaintiffs, but Kacsmaryk, an anti-abortion lawyer and Trump appointee, said in January that the three states could continue the litigation. Unlike the doctors, the states were not challenging the approval of the drug, which dates back to 2000; rather, they wanted the FDA to roll back changes it made since 2016 that allowed mifepristone to be used through 10 weeks of pregnancy, be prescribed to minors, and be prescribed by health care providers via telehealth. (The AGs also argue that the drugs can't be mailed due to the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-vice law that conservatives want to resuscitate.) Missouri, Idaho and Kansas claimed these FDA actions undermined their abortion laws and caused economic and political harm due to lower birth rates. The Biden administration argued in its waning days that Kacsmaryk should dismiss or transfer the AGs' case, and the Trump DOJ asked for the same here. Both motions to dismiss say the entire case should have been thrown out once the Supreme Court said the original plaintiffs couldn't sue, and those physicians have since dismissed their claims — so it's as if the whole thing never existed. Beyond all that, both filings argue, the states of Missouri, Idaho and Kansas have no reason to file this case in Texas. The Trump filing reads: 'The States cannot keep alive a lawsuit in which the original plaintiffs were held to lack standing, those plaintiffs have now voluntarily dismissed their claims, and the States' own claims have no connection to this District.' While it's true that the Trump DOJ sided with the Biden administration, it did so only on the technical details of who sued and when, not on the merits of the case. The administration did the bare minimum here, according to Julia Kaye, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. 'The Trump Administration should not get a gold star for continuing to highlight the glaring legal flaws in Missouri's case — they could not do otherwise with a straight face,' Kaye said in a statement. As Politico health care reporter Alice Ollstein noted, the administration's move could be less about access to mifepristone and more about preserving executive power and agency decisions in the face of a flurry of lawsuits, especially from Democratic-led states. The filing doesn't mention the word 'abortion' once. Earlier this year, Trump's DOJ also defended a key part of the Affordable Care Act, a law the president tried to repeal in his first term, in part by arguing that the Health and Human Services Department has broad latitude to supervise a task force that makes recommendations for services insurers must cover. But it's now up to Kacsmaryk to decide to either accede to the Justice Department's request or to deny it. As Health Affairs explains, if the judge denies it and pushes the case forward, the Trump administration would then need to decide whether to defend the FDA's actions on the merits. Kaye said decades of evidence show that the drug is safe and effective, and abandoning that history would be dangerous. 'If, moving forward, the Trump administration stops defending the FDA's evidence-based decisions on mifepristone or orders the FDA to reconsider its regulations, that would tank the FDA's credibility,' she said in a statement. Conservatives' threats to mifepristone aren't limited to the courts. Trump told Time magazine in December it would be 'highly unlikely' that his administration would restrict access to abortion medication, but refused to be definitive. 'We're looking at everything, but highly unlikely,' he said. 'I guess I could say probably as close to ruling it out as possible, but I don't want to.' He also told NBC News the same month he probably wouldn't take action, but that 'things change.' Then, during Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s January confirmation hearing to become secretary of health and human services, he said Trump asked him to study the safety of the drug. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said in late April that he had 'no plans' to restrict mifepristone, but added that 'if the data suggests something or tells us that there's a real signal, we can't promise we're not going to act on that data.' In recent days, conservatives have latched on to what they claim is data, but what is really a methodologically flawed paper from a right-wing organization. Sen. Josh Hawley asked Makary to slash access to mifepristone based on the paper from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which overestimates complications and is not peer-reviewed. Hawley requested a response by May 15. The administration could also drastically limit abortion pill access by having Attorney General Pam Bondi rescind Biden administration guidance that said mailing abortion pills doesn't violate the Comstock Act. Ominously, Bondi told a Louisiana district attorney that she 'would love to work with [him]' on the prosecution of a New York doctor who allegedly prescribed pills to a Louisiana woman under a so-called 'shield law.' It remains to be seen if Trump will allow one of his Cabinet picks to restrict access to abortion pills, or whether he'd prefer to let judges like Kacsmaryk take the political heat instead. But one thing is for sure: Americans' continued access to mifepristone is not guaranteed. This article was originally published on
Axios
06-05-2025
- Health
- Axios
Trump administration urges court to dismiss abortion pill challenge
The Trump administration again defended the Food and Drug Administration's regulation of the widely used abortion drug mifepristone Monday, arguing in a legal filing that a case seeking to limit access to the pills should be dismissed. Why it matters: It's the second time in two months the administration has defended FDA's regulation of the pills. Catch up quick: The dispute dates back to November 2022 when a group of anti-abortion physicians and medical associations sued the FDA, arguing it didn't have authority to approve or regulate mifepristone as safe and effective. They also argued a 19th century anti-obscenity law known as the Comstock Act applies to mailing the drug. The case ultimately made it's way to the Supreme Court, which ruled last June the doctors and associations they lacked standing. They did not weigh in on the merits of the case. Soon after, Missouri's attorney general revived the state's push against mifepristone in District court. What they're saying: "Regardless of the merits of the States' claims, the States cannot proceed in this Court," the administration says in the filing. "The States' Amended Complaint should be dismissed or transferred for lack of venue." Between the lines: There have been a lot of question marks about how the Trump administration would treat the abortion pill and this offers a potential reason for optimism, Greer Donley, an associate professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told Axios. "It's also possible that due to procedural problems with this case, the administration just doesn't want to use it to put their stake in the ground, she said. "Things could change. But filings like this give the impression that maybe they aren't going to be as extreme as people like me feared." The big picture: Medication abortions make up most of abortions in the U.S. Polls show the majority of Americans strongly support access to the pills.
Yahoo
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump Still Has An Anti-Abortion Agenda, It's Just Sneakier Than Before
It's hard to keep track of the damage President Donald Trump has done in his first 100 days in office, from unlawfully deporting migrants andsome U.S. citizens and declaring a war on transgender children to dismantling federal agencies and imposing tariffs that cratered the stock market. But one dark fear has not yet been realized: an aggressive push to effectively outlaw abortion nationwide. There was widespread concern in 2024 — based on the positions of many people in Trump's orbit — that his administration might start enforcing the centuries-old Comstock Act or have the Food and Drug Administration pull approval for abortion drugs. While that hasn't come to pass, the Trump administration has chipped away at choice in less visible ways and done substantial damage to federal reproductive health services. Not too long ago, Trump was an unapologetic anti-abortion advocate who pandered often to his evangelical far-right base. He openly celebrated his role in repealing 50 years of federal abortion protections, telling Fox News that 'it's a beautiful thing to watch' states ban abortion. But once it became clear that abortion bans are inherently unpopular, Trump shied away from his record: softening his rhetoric around reproductive rights, waffling on a national abortion ban and peddling his lie that 'everyone' wanted Roe v. Wade repealed. Since winning the presidential election, Trump has continued this stance of purported moderation. But he still has an anti-abortion agenda — his administration has just gotten better at hiding it. 'The administration wants you to think that they are not paying attention to repro and that abortion is an issue left to the states … but that is completely untrue,' Ianthe Metzger, senior director of advocacy communications at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, told HuffPost. In his first week as president, Trump reinstated the 'global gag rule,' a policy that restricts abortion access around the world and hinders sexual and reproductive health access for many rural communities in developing nations. He signed an executive order to enforce the Hyde Amendment, a 50-year-old federal rule that bans the use of government funds for most abortions for people covered by Medicaid. And those were just the policy decisions generally expected of a Republican administration. Others have been more extraordinary — undermining decades of political precedent and quietly targeting abortion as well as basic reproductive health care like birth control and sexually transmitted infection prevention and testing. The administration is also working to 'change the culture' around family and childbirth. But instead of subsidizing child care or mandating paid parental leave, the White House is entertaining pro-natalist policy ideas, a few of which were once usedby the Nazis. One policy idea floated to the White House included awarding the 'National Medal of Motherhood' to any woman who has six or more children. In Nazi Germany, women were awarded a bronze medal for having four children, silver for six and gold for eight children. Days into his presidency, Trump made an unprecedented move when he limited enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act — a federal law created to safeguard abortion clinics, patients and providers. He dismissed a handful of current ongoing investigations and pardoned 23 people for FACE convictions, effectively declaring open season on already vulnerable abortion clinics, patients and workers. He also rejoined the Geneva Consensus, an extreme global anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQIA pact created during the first Trump administration that aligns the U.S. with socially conservative countries, some of which have been accused of rampant human rights violations. Trump, along with billionaire Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, dismantled the Department of Health and Human Services. These cuts have gutted critical expert teams that monitored in vitro fertilization, tracked national maternal and infant health outcomes, as well as published key contraceptive guidelines for physicians. The cuts also pulled funding from gender-based research, including one study grant meant to protect pregnant women from domestic violence. One Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team laid off in the larger DOGE cuts tracked maternal complications like gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, all of which can have lifelong health consequences for women and their children. The elimination of this team means losing the only source of data about the health and behavior of women before, during and shortly after pregnancy. 'Health will likely get worse, and you may not even know it. We won't see the effects until it's too late,' one former official in the CDC's reproductive health division told HuffPost earlier this month. One of the most alarming moves that will have significant consequences is Trump's decision to cut $65.8 million in family planning grants under Title X, a federal program dedicated to providing family-planning services for free or discounted prices to about 4 million low-income Americans every year. Title X has helped fund around 4,000 health clinics, supplying nearly 3 million low-income Americans in 2023 with reproductive health care including birth control, STI testing and cancer screenings. Despite GOP rhetoric, Title X funding cannot go toward abortions — meaning the Trump administration simply took away general health care for millions of Americans. The news flew under the radar, likely because many people don't understand what Title X is, and there has been a great deal of chaos in Trump's first 100 days. But the funding cut has already significantly hindered operations at health centers across the country, including Planned Parenthood, an organization that is historically one of the largest Title X providers. At least six Planned Parenthood health centers have already shut down due to the Title X cuts the administration announced just last month. 'Abortion really was just the beginning,' said Metzger from Planned Parenthood. 'An attack on Title X is an attack on birth control — that is what that program was funded for … None of these things are safe, they are all interconnected.' Recently, the Trump administration joined a Supreme Court case alongside South Carolina, arguing that states should be allowed to exclude Planned Parenthood from their Medicaid programs, even for health care services outside of abortion care. Similar to Title X funding cuts, this move would effectively defund Planned Parenthood, a long-held GOP goal. The Trump administration's unusual decision to join the case shows just how far they're willing to go to decimate abortion access as well as birth control, STI testing and other vital reproductive health care. One of the main focuses of Trump's first 100 days in office has been attacking LGBTQIA communities, specifically transgender kids in women's sports. And while some may not realize it, attacks on the trans community and attacks on reproductive justice are inherently linked. Trump's anti-trans executive order contained 'personhood' language, used often by extremist anti-abortion groups that believe life begins at conception and fetuses should have the same legal rights as born children. If fetal personhood ever became law, it would immediately create a total abortion ban and criminalize IVF, stem cell research and even some forms of birth control. Trump has also lined his cabinet with abortion opponents, creating one of the most extreme anti-choice administrations in history. Attorney General Pam Bondiinstructed the Department of Justice to dismiss a high-profile federal lawsuit over the right to emergency abortion care in Idaho — sending a clear message that the administration would rather pregnant women continue dying than offer safe abortion and miscarriage care. The federal law at the center of the suit, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, requires hospitals that participate in Medicare (the majority of hospitals in the country) to offer abortion care if it's necessary to stabilize the health of a pregnant patient while they're experiencing a medical emergency. The person in Trump's administration in charge of enforcing that law is Dr. Mehmet Oz, a former TV personality who is openlyanti-abortion and believes abortion decisions should be between 'a woman, her doctors and her local political leaders.' Now that the lawsuit is dismissed, the Trump administration has the ability to rewrite federal EMTALA guidance, which would follow the far-right Project 2025 playbook perfectly. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is responsible for gutting several HHS agencies as well as cutting Title X funding. Trump tasked him with studying the safety of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortion, despite over two decades of safe and effective use by millions of Americans. Many of the HHS agencies Kennedy decimated were also the ones that would have studied mifepristone. Kennedy himself could pull FDA approval of mifepristone, or FDA Commissioner Martin Makary could. The former Fox News contributor routinely spread anti-abortion misinformation before Trump made him head of the FDA. During Makary's confirmation hearing, he refused to answer questions about his plans for mifepristone. Legal challenges to reproductive freedom are sure to continue as the abortion opposition has only been emboldened since Trump took office. This means there will be more Supreme Court battles over abortion care — a frightening fact given the high court's conservative majority and that John Sauer, well-known for his dogged opposition to abortion and birth control access, was recently confirmed as solicitor general, a position sometimes referred to as the 'tenth justice.' 'President Trump has spent these first 100 days making it more dangerous to be pregnant in the United States, stacking every wing of his administration with anti-abortion extremists ready and willing to do his bidding,' Shannon Russell, federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told reporters in a Monday press call. 'Individually, these officials have great power,' Russell said. 'Together, they'll do long-lasting damage to our democracy and threaten people's reproductive freedoms.' 'We're Sitting Ducks': Abortion Providers Brace For Violence After Trump Limits Clinic Protections The Trump Administration Has Launched A War On Kids Trump Is Filling His White House With Men Accused Of Sexual Misconduct
NBC News
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- NBC News
Meet the 1940's secretary who used office time to produce the first lesbian magazine
In 1947, Edythe Eyde was a secretary working at RKO Radio Pictures in Los Angeles. A speedy typist who often completed work ahead of schedule, her boss told her: 'Well, I don't care what you do if you get through with your work, but … don't sit and read a magazine or knit. I want you to look busy.' The literary-minded lesbian saw an opportunity. Gay culture was largely underground, and it was difficult for 'the third sex' to meet like-minded others. Using a Royal manual typewriter and carbon paper, making six copies at a time, the 25-year-old launched Vice Versa — 'a magazine dedicated, in all seriousness, to those of us who will never quite be able to adapt ourselves to the iron-bound rules of Convention.' 'During those days I didn't really know many girls,' she told the lesbian magazine Visibilities in a 1990 interview. 'But I thought, well, I'll just keep turning out these magazines and maybe I'll meet some!' It worked. By Issue 4, the writer was awakened one night by readers tapping at her window. 'Their enthusiasm was gratifying indeed,' she wrote. Vice Versa featured original poems, short stories and reviews of books, films and plays; any dramatic work with the slightest undertone of attraction between women was fair game. Her 'Watchama-Column' was a catch-all for her musings, and she invited others to sharpen their pencils and contribute. Eyde distributed the photocopied magazine to friends, asking that they be passed along. ('But puh-leeze, let's keep it 'just between us girls.''). She also sent copies by mail, until a friend warned of illegality; the Comstock Act forbade sending 'obscene, lewd or lascivious' materials, without describing further. 'I don't know if she understood when she started typing the magazine that you could get in trouble for distributing work like that,' said acclaimed historian Lillian Faderman, author of 'The Gay Revolution.' 'It was a sort of blessed naivete, I think, that made it possible for her to do that.' From June 1947 to February 1948, Eyde produced nine monthly issues, stopping only when Howard Hughes bought the studio and new work in secretarial pools did not afford privacy or extra time. She could not have known then that her humble magazine would be heralded well into the next century as a first in the lineage of lavender press. 'It was revolutionary,' Faderman said of Vice Versa. 'I don't think she realized how revolutionary it was. I don't think she realized how brave and meaningful it was.' Faberman noted that Vice Versa inspired several female writers, who took courage from Eyde's friendship and undertaking, to contribute content to the male-centric ONE Magazine, which launched in 1953 (and in 1958 was at the center of a landmark Supreme Court case that protected free speech around homosexuality). In the mid-1950s, Eyde also got involved with the first lesbian rights organization, Daughters of Bilitis. Adopting the name Lisa Ben (a clever anagram of 'lesbian'), she contributed to the organization's magazine, The Ladder — the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the U.S., which ran from 1956 through 1972. 'It was a very brave little magazine, and I was happy to be a part of it,' she said of The Ladder in a 1988 interview with Manuela Soares for the Daughters of Bilitis Video Project at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. 'I was bubbling over with this sense of gayness, and it was easy to transpose it onto paper and send it in.' Eyde's brand of activism was not overt, though her talents were wide-reaching, and she used creativity as a counterpoint to society's disdain 'of our inclinations,' as she called them in Vice Versa. An assiduous student of the violin in earlier years, Eyde took up guitar for a cause. The inspiration took root at a West Hollywood drag bar Club Flamingo, which drew gay people in the afternoon and, toward the evening, a broad audience who enjoyed impersonations of Golden Age divas. Eyde stayed late one night and was horrified by the 'filth' she witnessed, particularly the willingness of gay performers to 'debase' themselves — and, specifically, lesbian nightclub singer Beverly Shaw — to get laughs from the general public. Eyde set to writing parodies that cast gays and lesbians in a positive light. She performed at parties and private homes. 'Gee, my phone rang off the wall,' she told Soares. 'I would bring my guitar and sing all these gay parodies — and I had an awful lot of fun doing that.' As for those lesbian pulp novels, she told Soares she 'read as many as I could get my greedy little hands on.' 'It was so nice to be able to read things like that and not have parents breathing down my neck,' she said. As a teen, her overbearing parents even monitored her library books. 'Her parents were very conservative,' recalled Vicky Venhuizen, 81, a distant cousin by marriage. Venhuizen met Eyde when the writer came to Rockford, Illinois, with her parents. 'My impression … was that she was glamorous,' Venhuizen said, noting that she was in awe of Eyde's independence. 'She was unmarried, which was rare for a '50s kid like me, and she lived in California.' 'She was ahead of her time,' Venhuizen said. 'Her writings proved that.' Though not identifying as a SciFi writer, Edye was an enthusiastic consumer of horror stories and fantasy; a card-carrying member of the Fourth World Science Fiction Convention Society; and, to the delight of the modern admirer, can be seen in a 1945 photo in a bikini top reading the pulp magazine Weird Tales. She preferred frilly dresses over trousers and loved dancing with the 'gay gals' at the If Club, a low-lit Los Angeles bar considered safe for the butches that she favored — and great spot to distribute Vice Versa. Eyde 'ran with a hard-drinking crowd,' but she didn't care for alcohol herself. In a 1995 interview, Eyde recalled meeting a gorgeous girl at a party who wasn't fit to drive her home: 'She was a hell of a lover — golly, she was great, and I enjoyed being with her and all that, but she just couldn't leave the booze alone: couldn't drive the stick shift.' Eyde maintained her vivacious spirit over the decades. In 1989, Eric Marcus, creator of the Making Gay History podcast, tracked her down in her small Burbank bungalow, attained through many years of secretarial work and frugal living. 'She was absolutely charming,' Marcus said of Eyde, then 68. 'She had curly hair and was very girlish in a lovely, charming way — very welcoming and eager to talk and happy to play her music for me.' As an only child on a fruit ranch in Los Altos, California, her friends had been animals — a dog and cat, then later, a goat and riding pony. So, too, in later years, she settled into a quiet isolated life, caregiver to 15 cats. Edythe Eyde, aka Lisa Ben, was inducted into The Association LGBTQ+ Journalists' Hall of Fame in 2010, and in 2015, she received the association's first Lisa Ben Award for Achievement in Features Coverage. She died later that year, at 94. She may never have fully appreciated her own courage, but it appeared she knew no other way. 'My feelings in such matters have always seemed quite natural and 'right' to me,' she wrote. 'Right' like that exquisite time that she never did let go of — when a wavy-haired high school girl took her in her arms to dance around the living room. 'As our acquaintance grew, we found out how pleasant it was to kiss one another and hug one another ... and I just really thought she was tops. I just loved her.'
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Real Supreme Court Endgame for Abortion Foes
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, conservative judges and politicians argued that the court was to blame for the polarization of the abortion issue in the first place. Roe, the argument went, ruled out compromises that might have cooled off the debate. And nearly three years ago, when the Supreme Court undid the right to choose abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the justices picked up on this claim too—suggesting that restoring abortion decisionmaking to voters and their elected representatives might make the conflict less ugly. Today, the federal right to choose is gone. States are free to set their own abortion policies. In some instances, voters can bypass politicians and approve ballot initiatives. And yet with Roe a thing of the past, the nation's abortion divide only seems deeper. States have eschewed compromise measures and passed sweeping bans. Penalties under these laws are sometimes more severe than those in place before Roe. Physicians are refusing to treat patients with potentially life-threatening complications because they worry about inadvertently violating the law. States are launching a new war about travel, with jurisdictions passing shield laws that claim to protect residents from criminal prosecution and conservative states experimenting with the idea that they can punish their own citizens for facilitating an abortion in places where the procedure is legal. Rather than allowing voters to express preferences about abortion through ballot initiatives, some Republicans are experimenting with strategies that make it harder for voters to have a say. And ironically, it is abortion opponents who spent decades railing against the antidemocratic federal courts who have invested the most in the federal judiciary, litigating about the fate of the Comstock Act, access to abortion pills, and much more. Overturning Roe has polarized the debate partly because most Americans deeply oppose the Dobbs decision. But the end of Roe did little to demobilize the anti-abortion movement. Many abortion foes rallied to the fight for fetal personhood before the Supreme Court intervened and saw constitutional protection for the unborn, not the mere elimination of an abortion right, as the endpoint of their struggle. To understand the past and future of the American war over reproduction, then, we must tell the story of the fetal personhood movement. It may be tempting for supporters of abortion rights to see fetal personhood as nothing more than a tactic for activists whose real ambition is simply to ban abortion or control sexuality and reproduction. There is no denying that some personhood arguments emerged and changed for strategic reasons—not least in the 1960s, when what was at the time a Catholic movement looked for a way to avoid faith-based arguments and broaden its base. But for more than half a century, the fight for fetal personhood was a singular point of agreement in a fractious movement. Personhood arguments came and went in Congress, the Supreme Court, and the front pages of the nation's newspapers. But within the anti-abortion movement, claims for fetal rights never went anywhere. Ideas about personhood remained a constant in the strategy sessions and private correspondence of those who define themselves as pro-life. That personhood arguments had an emotional pull for their proponents does not mean that nothing lies below the surface of beliefs about the fetus. Nor does it mean that personhood had a stable definition. Indeed, personhood partly captivated so many conservatives because its meaning could and did change. Arguments around fetal personhood reflected other convictions about race, sex, motherhood, religion, and the possession of a soul. Within the anti-abortion movement, sharp disagreements emerged about what personhood meant and how to enforce it. But we will fail to understand conflicts over reproduction in the United States if we dismiss the anti-abortion movement's personhood arguments as nothing but a strategic ploy, or see personhood as nothing more than an argument for banning abortion. Personhood today is shorthand for fetal rights, and fetal rights are synonymous with the criminalization of abortion. The history of struggles over fetal personhood suggests that there was nothing inevitable about this carceral turn. Even today, it is possible to imagine a vision of fetal rights less focused on criminalization. Perhaps personhood could even accommodate those who think abortion should be legal—or even a protected right. Fully sketching this vision is beyond the scope of this book. But deemphasizing criminalization would be a good starting point. Stronger protections against domestic violence during pregnancy, better sex-discrimination laws, paid family leave policies—and more support from the government for women and children, including those whose families have few resources—might be ways to express respect for fetal life while honoring the equality, dignity, and autonomy of pregnant patients. Fetal personhood has been a fluid concept, one that reflected and reinforced changing ideas of liberty and equality in other areas of the law. In advocating for personhood, abortion foes insisted that a fetus was a unique, separate individual and as such, had fundamental rights. In other ways, however, personhood arguments changed. Those advocating for personhood drew on ideas about desegregation, consumer protection, sex discrimination, affirmative action, sex and pregnancy outside of marriage, civil rights, corporate power, religious liberty, criminal punishment, the rights of civilians in wartime, and the shape of the welfare state. Arguments for personhood thus offer a window into how socially conservative Americans understood discrimination across issues and decades. Personhood arguments first took shape in response to a push for abortion reform in the 1960s. Changing sexual mores and concern about the discriminatory effects of criminal bans had fueled a push to loosen existing restrictions. Abortion opponents sought to defeat reform and eventually insisted that more liberal laws were themselves unconstitutional. But personhood became much more than a reaction to reform. By the 1960s, personhood proponents challenged the idea that those who had suffered past injustice had the most urgent claim to constitutional redress. Equality, personhood proponents stressed, was less about lifting up those at the margins than it was about restoring long-standing protection for the weak. The ultimate victim of discrimination in America, abortion opponents maintained, was the fetus. By the 1980s, many in the movement insisted the unborn was a victim of violent crime. To treat the victims of violence as equal to the rest of us required the criminalization of abortion—and perhaps other acts that harmed fetuses. Some anti-abortion advocates insisted on mercy for some, women first among them. But they agreed that there could be no equality, no justice in America, until abortion was a crime. Proponents of personhood also joined an effort to transform the role played by history or tradition in constitutional interpretation. They resisted the argument that the nation's traditions were fluid, even as the idea of fetal personhood itself had consistently changed. Like other conservative allies, personhood champions insisted that the court should recognize rights that were deeply rooted in a fixed tradition—and that Americans should look back to past eras that were more moral. None of this is to say that most personhood proponents were distracted from their quest for fetal rights. But if abortion opponents wanted protections for the fetus, what they proposed would have had deeper consequences. Personhood arguments have already changed how the court approaches the recognition of rights under the due process clause. If abortion opponents are successful, they will also change how the court understands equality under the law in the context of race, sex, and sexual orientation. More than anything, the story of fetal personhood is a searing reminder of where Americans find themselves in the war over reproduction. Everyone understands that the effects of the Dobbs decision will take years to fully grasp, but Dobbs may feel like a final conclusion. It appears to be the result that Americans opposed to abortion yearned, marched, and voted for. It is true that Dobbs is the end of one story, one about what it means to lose a constitutional right. But the anti-abortion movement has never been just a fight to eliminate the right to choose abortion. It has always been a fetal personhood movement. History tells us that personhood has had different meanings, but one thing has remained constant: If fetal personhood became a part of our constitutional law, the meaning of equality would change for everyone, and in contexts well beyond abortion itself. Once, Dobbs struck many as unimaginable. But if history teaches us anything, it is that Dobbs is just the beginning. This article has been lightly adapted from the book Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction, by Mary Ziegler.
