What to Do When Hope Seems Lost
- Rachel Branaman
- May 10, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Editor’s note: Following the official release of the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on June 24, 2022, a half-century of legal precedent was overturned. This ruling stripped the constitutional right to abortion from millions of Americans and paved the way for states to criminalize reproductive healthcare. This decision threatens the lives of everyone who can become pregnant, removes personal autonomy over the bodies of people with uteruses, and forces pregnancies onto people who do not want to be pregnant. We continue to update our resources to support grassroots networks, policy efforts, and organizers fighting for bodily autonomy and collective rights.
For those working within the reproductive justice space, the overturning of Roe v. Wade is egregious, yet historically consistent. It joins a long line of Supreme Court decisions that protect institutional power at the expense of human dignity, including:
Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857): Held that Black people, whether free or enslaved, could not be considered American citizens
Civil Rights Cases (1883): Struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, allowing racial discrimination in businesses and public accommodations
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): Established the “separate but equal” doctrine, codifying Jim Crow segregation
Buck v. Bell (1927): Upheld forced sterilization of people with intellectual disabilities
Korematsu v. United States (1944): Upheld the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II
Bowers v. Hardwick (1986): Criminalized same-sex relationships under state sodomy laws
Bush v. Gore (2000): Halted contested ballot recounts in Florida effectively deciding a presidential election in favor of George W. Bush
Kelo v. City of New London (2005): Permitted the condemnation and transfer of private land to commercial developers
Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker (2008): Dramatically slashed financial damages (from $5B in damages to $500M, increasing Exxon’s stocks by $23B in two days) owed by Exxon following the Exxon Valdez spill, one of the greatest environmental disasters of all time
The Broader Legal Threat: Unraveling Implied Constitutional Rights
Beyond its immediate impact on reproductive healthcare, the core legal rationale of the Dobbs decision poses a systemic threat to civil rights nationwide.
Roe v. Wade was anchored in the constitutional right to privacy, derived from the 14th Amendment’s protection of life, liberty, and due process. By asserting that abortion access is not protected because it is not “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions,” the Court opened a roadmap to challenge other implied rights built on the same foundation, including:
Obergefell v. Hodges (2015): The right to marriage equality for same-sex couples
Lawrence v. Texas (2003): The decriminalization of same-sex intimate relationships
Loving v. Virginia (1967): The legal protection of interracial marriage
For people with uteruses who have lost their right to personal choice and bodily autonomy, hope seems lost. The Supreme Court is the highest Court in the land and there is limited immediate recourse in a ruling like this. Those who seek to suppress civil rights use these victories to overwhelm and exhaust activists and nonprofits.
When judicial systems strip fundamental rights, suppressing bodily autonomy and exhausting activists, movement efforts must operate on two parallel tracks: systemic policy reform and immediate direct action.
Systemic Reform: State-Level & Administrative Policy Shifts
Twenty-six states are certain or likely to ban abortion within the year. On the other side, 15 states and the District of Columbia are insulated against future abortion bans. With federal protections dismantled, policy strategy must pivot toward state legislation and administrative reform:
Expand Telehealth & Medication Access: Protect and normalize the delivery of FDA-approved medication abortion (mifepristone and misoprostol) by mail without mandatory, in-person clinic visits.
Reclassify Medication Standards: Remove mifepristone and misoprostol from restrictive administrative lists (such as the NIOSH List of Hazardous Drugs), aligning regulatory policies with clinical evidence showing greater than 95% efficacy and negligible complication rates.
Overturn State-Level Restrictions: Mobilize behind state legislative candidates pledged to repeal anti-choice legislation and protect clinic access. In 2021, states enacted 106 laws restricting abortion access, more than in any year since 1973.
Combat Contraceptive Deserts: Advocate for publicly funded health centers. Currently, over 19 million women live in contraceptive deserts and 1.2 million women live in counties without access to a single health center that provides the full range of contraceptive methods. This forces patients to spend hundreds out-of-pocket for basic reproductive care, travel and accommodations across county lines, and childcare - assuming that a person’s job provides the flexibility needed to accommodate these appointments.
Push Comprehensive Family Support: Pass broader social safety net policies such as expanded Medicaid coverage, universal paid family leave, and accessible childcare that support individuals and families across their entire lives.
Direct Action: Mobilization & Mutual Aid
Systemic change takes time, but immediate community care is actionable now:
Access & Direct Care
Use private, secure tools like Abortion Finder to locate verified, independent providers.
Support independent community-based clinics, which provide the vast majority of abortion care in the U.S.
Connect individuals with direct support tools. These include AidAccess, M+A Hotline, Repro Legal Helpline, Abortion on Our Own Terms, INeedAnA.com, Plan C, SASS, and practical support organizations.
Narrative Change & Advocacy
Donate to nonprofits that help patients find and pay for abortions or abortion pills online.
Destigmatize Care: Share and listen to personal abortion stories. Share abortion fact sheets to dismantle incorrect beliefs around abortion rights. One in four women will have an abortion in her lifetime, with the vast majority occurring in the first trimester and among individuals who are already parents.
Mobilize Locally: Participate in rallies through networks like We Won’t Go Back and Abortion Access Front’s Operation Save Abortion and write op-eds for local media (templates available here).
Educate with Disaggregated Data: Highlight research challenging mainstream assumptions. For example, The Institute on Social Policy and Understanding’s (ISPU) research shows that a majority of American Muslims support legal abortion access across most or all cases, demonstrating broad cross-cultural support for reproductive freedom. Pew Research highlights how the American public feels about abortion by political affiliation, gender, race/ethnicity, age, and level of education.
Support Legislative Champions of Reproductive Rights: The Guttmacher Institute’s State Legislation tracker provides updates on major developments in sexual and reproductive health legislation. Hold your legislators accountable on reproductive freedom and individual civil liberties in local, mid-term, and national election cycles.
Resources
Alito Roe v. Wade draft may open the door to overturn other cases by Mia Salenetri (WUSA9) and Abby Llorico, WUSA9, May 2022.
13 Worst Supreme Court Decisions of All Time by Casey C. Sullivan, Esq., FindLaw.com, October 2015.
Efficacy and safety of medical abortion using mifepristone and buccal misoprostol through 63 days by Mary Gatter, Kelly Cleland, and Deborah L. Nucatola, April 2015.
Effectiveness of medical abortion with mifepristone and buccal misoprostol through 59 gestational days by Mary Fjerstad, Irving Sivin, E Steve Lichtenberg, James Trussell, Kelly Cleland, and Vanessa Cullins, September 2009.
Safety and effectiveness of mifepristone and misoprostol, IPAS, last reviewed January 2021.
Here's How Abortion Access Would Change if Supreme Court Erodes Roe by Christine Vestal, Pew Trusts, January 2022.
Who Gets Abortions in America? By Margo Sanger-Katz, Claire Cain Miller, and Quoctrung Bui, New York Times, December 2021.
Birth Control Access, Power to Decide.
Resource Hub for State Based Organizations, Liberate Abortion.
