More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The Arizona Supreme Court resurrected its zombie pre-statehood criminal abortion ban earlier this month, which is slated to go into effect as early as June.
The decision, which took many by surprise, has sent Republican lawmakers and antiabortion activists in the state into a strategic tailspin as they seek to prevent the widespread outrage over the decision from transforming Arizona into a state that priorotizes reproductive freedom during the November elections.
The Arizona Supreme Court revived an 1864 pre-statehood ban on abortion (although the law will not go into effect immediately).
To quote the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the way of thinking embedded in these zombie laws from the 19th century reflects “ancient notions about women’s place in the family and under the Constitution, ideas that have long since been discredited.” The Arizona Supreme Court does not expressly traffic in these deeply gendered stereotypes that are contemporaneous with the abortion ban it has resurrected from the dead—but they are silently lurking in the margins of the opinion.
As Attorney General Mayes put it, the decision is “unconscionable and an affront to freedom… and will go down as a stain on our state.”
A general consensus seems to have emerged after last week’s oral arguments in the case against the abortion pill that the Supreme Court is likely to rule that the anti-abortion physicians and their umbrella group, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, lack sufficient legal grounds to challenge the FDA’s loosening of restrictions on mifepristone.
While dismissal based on a lack of standing would be a welcome result, it is not a guarantee given the Court’s anti-abortion supermajority. But even if this occurs, the apparent zest manifested by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas towards the Comstock Act from 1873 brings a lurking danger fully out into the open.
In 2023, seeking “to avoid a U.S.-like scenario for women in France, as hard-right groups are gaining ground,” President Emmanuel Macron promised a constitutional amendment affirming women’s right to abortion and to control over their own bodies. The amendment subsequently passed by a crushing majority of 780 to 72 votes and was inserted ceremoniously into the French Constitution on March 8, 2024, International Women’s Day.
Meanwhile in 2022, the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Supreme Court decision overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade that held abortion as a protected right under the United States Constitution
How do we explain the radically different trajectories on this critical dimension of women’s rights between two countries with strong feminist and anti-abortion movements that decriminalized abortion within a few years of one another?
The anti-abortion movement moved a step closer to realizing its goal of achieving fetal personhood when the Alabama Supreme Court held that frozen embryos are children for purposes of the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. However, the 8-1 ruling is a victory with a discernable twist. Republican lawmakers and their allies are now scrambling since at least three Alabama IVF providers have suspended their family-building services while they sort out the ruling’s implications.
Before the news cycle moves on, we must discuss the right-wing He Gets Us campaign’s two religious ads during the Super Bowl, which highlighted that “Jesus loved and cared for anyone and everyone” and which the Washington Post voted “the most controversial” of the game.
This claim of love and acceptance is directly undercut by the campaign’s connections to far-right anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion groups.
The Arizona Supreme Court ruled to let a law banning almost all abortions in the state go into effect. The justices ordered the state to wait 14 days before beginning to enforce the ban, to give advocates time to ask a lower court to pause it again.
Voters may be able to weigh in on the issue this November: Last week, Arizona for Abortion Access, a coalition of abortion rights organizations, announced it had gathered enough signatures for a ballot measure that would ask voters to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s Constitution.
After a resounding win for abortion rights in Ohio, one would hope that the issue had at last been put to rest in the state. But now, the city of Lebanon, Ohio, is debating whether or not to retain its status as a sanctuary city for the unborn.
It’s all in service of anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson’s vision: “outlawing abortion, one city at a time.”
On Oct. 23, three male Lubbock County commissioners approved an abortion trafficking ordinance making it unlawful to transport anyone seeking an abortion through the unincorporated area of Lubbock County—all thanks to tireless crusader Mark Lee Dickson, director of East Texas Right to Life and the founder of the Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn Initiative, who is pushing to bring about the day when “abortion is considered a great moral, social and political wrong and is outlawed in every single state.”
Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh—certainly no fan of Roe—expressed the view in his concurring opinion in Dobbs that a state cannot bar its residents from cross-border abortion travel.
In June 2019, the all-male city council in Waskom, Texas, unanimously voted to make the tiny town of just 2,000 residents the nation’s first “sanctuary city for the unborn.” Characterizing fetuses as the “most innocent among us [who] deserve equal protection under the law,” the ordinance expressly bans abortion within its municipal boundaries. The man behind the ban, anti-abortion zealot and pastor Mark Lee Dickson, has since expanded his campaign to outlaw abortion “one city at a time” into at least six other states.
(This article originally appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox!)
