Three years after overturning Roe, the Supreme Court’s latest abortion ruling in Medina threatens vital healthcare for low-income women and deepens America’s reproductive rights crisis.
In a ruling last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a devastating blow to reproductive health clinics across the nation. In Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, a case out of South Carolina, the Court ruled that states have the authority to exclude reproductive health clinics from their Medicaid programs—even when those clinics provide essential care such as cancer screenings, birth control and STI testing. This is a ruling that will disproportionately impact low-income women, particularly those living in rural areas where health services are already limited.
“At a minimum, it will deprive Medicaid recipients in South Carolina of their only meaningful way of enforcing a right that Congress has expressly granted to them,” wrote Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor in their dissent. “And, more concretely, it will strip those South Carolinians—and countless other Medicaid recipients around the country—of a deeply personal freedom: the ‘ability to decide who treats us at our most vulnerable.’”
It’s a significant setback—and the timing is particularly poignant, as last week also marked the third anniversary of the overturn of Roe v. Wade.
A substantial slate of decisions issued by the Court Friday dealt several more severe blows to the rule of law and our constitutional rights—though a silver lining was the Court’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act’s preventive-care mandate.
The Senate parliamentarian also thankfully disqualified a number of concerning provisions in the GOP megabill, including some restrictions on Medicaid and a ban on Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program funding for gender-affirming care.
Despite the constant barrage of right-wing attacks on abortion access, including total bans in some states, the number of abortions have continued to rise—by almost 20 percent in the first two full years since the Dobbs ruling overturned Roe. And that’s likely an undercount. Ms. contributors Carole Joffe and David S. Cohen unpack why this might be the case, in a recent piece in Ms.
But we also know that in the three years since Roe’s overturn, women have died and suffered tragic health consequences due to the Court’s ruling, which rendered many unable to access medically necessary and life-saving health care. Although many cases have been reported, we don’t have an exact number of women who have died or suffered serious health impacts unnecessarily due to Dobbs—because those numbers aren’t tracked.
At the same time, recent polling from Gallup indicates that since 2022, support for abortion has surged among Democrats—particularly among women, though men also saw an increase. Support for abortion among Independents has also increased, with women once more leading the way. In the years since Dobbs, the gender gap between women’s support for abortion and men’s support has reached a historic high, suggesting an increasing potential for women’s votes to be decisive in the upcoming midterm elections.
In the wake of Dobbs, the U.S. as a whole has moved toward becoming more accepting of abortion. When will the patriarchs in the judiciary, Congress and state legislatures listen?
