Why overturning Roe v. Wade only made America's abortion rate rise [View all]

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Why overturning Roe v. Wade only made America's abortion rate rise
"They will never stop abortion": "After Dobbs" chronicles "the extraordinary efforts" to help women get healthcare

By Amanda Marcotte
Senior Writer
Published March 25, 2025 5:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) 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.

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In your previous book "Obstacle Course," you wrote about the hoops that women have had to go through to get abortions, even in the pre-Dobbs era. This book is "After Dobbs." What changed in the years since Roe vs. Wade was overturned?

Joffe: It's like before Roe, but on steroids. People have to travel further. Before Dobbs, 1 out of 10 patients had to go out of state. Now it's 1 out of 5. But even though things are harder, many people are surprised that the number of abortions has risen in the United States since Dobbs. Our book helps explain that. It's because of the extraordinary efforts of the abortion-providing community, the advocacy community, the activist community. There's been a huge amount of money and organization that mobilized right after Dobbs. For some, abortion became more feasible. Not necessarily easier, but more feasible. Obviously, some people were still left behind.

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Anti-choicers were ecstatic after Dobbs. You heard highfalutin' rhetoric about how they were going to end abortion in the U.S. forever. Project 2025 has language about "ending" abortion. What does your research tell us about how realistic that goal is?

Joffe: Even if the FDA manages to withdraw the approval of mifepristone, the first pill used in a medication abortion, they're not going to withdraw approval of misoprostol, which is widely used in other medical procedures. [Note from the editor: While both pills are recommended, misoprostol by itself will usually terminate a pregnancy.] Now that these networks exist, even if there's a national ban, there always are going to be these pills available. There are also groups sending them over the border from Mexico, or ordering the pills from Aid Access. You can but these pills in Europe. However, there will likely be more cases like what happened to this midwife in Texas. There will be more prosecutions, I assume, but they will never stop abortion. ...................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/03/25/why-overturning-roe-v-wade-only-made-americas-abortion-rate-rise/