How the Dobbs decision taught Democrats to leave nothing else to chance
Two years since the fall of Roe v. Wade, they’ve seized control of the national debate—even if institutional constraints have limited any meaningful progress on the federal policy front.
What a difference a couple of years makes: This time two summers ago, the Supreme Court shook the nation when it overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that protected the federal right to abortion care.
What was unique about the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is that the White House and congressional Democrats knew it was coming. Politico, in the most consequential scoop of our generation, published a leaked draft majority opinion by Justice Samuel Alito more than seven weeks before the Court issued the official decision.
Despite the leak, national Democrats seemed too shell-shocked from the decision to form a cohesive and galvanizing response.
But in the years since, Democrats have seized control of the debate even if institutional constraints have limited any meaningful progress on the policy front.
They’ve successfully broadened their messaging to demand federal protections for reproductive freedom—a catch-all term that encompasses the fight for access to abortion care, birth control, paid parental leave and protections from pregnancy discrimination.
The party has also demonstrated exceptional discipline to keep the issue in the news cycle as inflation, immigration, former President Donald Trump’s myriad court cases and two international conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza have also dominated headlines. President Joe Biden, a devout Catholic with historically complicated personal abortion politics, has been buoyed up by Vice President Kamala Harris whose identity and life experiences made her a shoo-in as the highest-profile White House surrogate on the issue.
And congressional Democrats have leveraged control of the White House and Senate to reject attempts from House Republicans to federalize anti-abortion policies in annual funding and defense bills while relentlessly blaring warning signs that the worst is still yet to come if Republicans secure wide enough congressional majorities after the November elections.
As a result, Democrats have overperformed in elections and ballot initiatives, including in deep-red states like Kentucky, Kansas, Ohio and Alabama, despite President Biden’s steadily low poll numbers.
“I think what we have learned is that things that we once took for granted cannot be taken for granted. The idea that Roe v. Wade, which was decided when I was in college and now 50 years later is overturned is staggering to me,” Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, whose district sits in southeastern Florida—a state with a six-week ban that excludes exceptions for rape or incest. “I think what we have learned is to not ever estimate the GOP in terms of their willingness to infringe upon people’s rights and liberties.”
Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison views the two years since the Dobbs decision not only from his perch as a party leader but also as a Black son of South Carolina whose grandparents grew up in the Jim Crow era.
“The price of freedom is not free, right? There’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears and even lives that are lost in order to gain freedom in this country,” he told me. “The second thing that I’ve learned is that when you lose one freedom, it becomes a slippery slope. It's easy to lose others. And that is what we’re seeing right now. We are seeing MAGA Republicans, led by [former President] Donald Trump take a full onslaught to the freedoms that we have in this country and we see it across the board. It's first reproductive freedoms, voting rights, freedom of speech.”
Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) won a special election in upstate New York almost four months to the day of the decision with a campaign in favor of protecting abortion rights.
He told me last week that listening was at the core of his strategy on the issue.
“We knew people were pissed. Of course, women of all generations and men and everybody—all people were like, ‘This is an American right? This is a core freedom,’” he said. “And it was just ripped away that easily with such disregard for how many people fought and sacrificed and worked to enshrine and protect and ultimately expand that right.”
Ryan explained his approach was to make the center his would-be constituents, not his personal ambitions to serve them and create a clear contrast between his vision for the district and his opponents’.
“The increasingly extreme GOP is anti-freedom and taking that away,” he said before pivoting to the November election. “I think this race is going to be about a choice between are you for freedom and expanding and protecting it or are you for taking it away? And I think we have to do that even more urgently than we did then, which is sad.”
Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said Ryan’s personal narrative is a hand-in-glove fit for an issue like reproductive freedom: He’s a veteran, businessman, former local politician and a young dad—all touchpoints that enable him to connect with voters at a human level.
“Much deep respect to our friends in Congress, but a lot of the older generation of men in Congress are like, ‘Well, I don’t know if this is my issue. I don’t know if I feel comfortable talking about it,” she added. “Whereas I’m seeing a lot of the younger men in Congress—particularly the dads are saying, ‘This is our issue too. So we’re seeing a generational shift in the way Americans are talking about it, the way members of Congress are leaning into it.”
Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.) told me her decision to introduce legislation to protect in vitro fertilization and other reproductive technologies came after she read the decision, which included a concurring opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas where he wrote a concurring opinion suggesting laws on same-sex marriage and birth control were unconstitutional.
“It was quite clear that there was much more on the chopping block of being envisioned,” Wild said. “And my thoughts immediately went to IVF because I have so many people in my circle of friends and family who needed it.”
Another lesson learned? The significance of highlighting the intersection between reproductive freedom and other individual rights under attack.
“We made the campaign about both protecting reproductive freedom but also that as a window and a lens into how far the right will go on all these other rights and freedoms,” Ryan said. “Whether voting rights, whether access to IVF and contraception, access to clean air and water, dropping my kids off at daycare and not worrying that assault weapons are going to show up—the same weapons I carried in combat.”
Since the Dobbs decision, one in three, or 27 million, women of reproductive age live under an abortion ban, according to the White House—including some without exceptions for rape or incest. For women seeking abortion care in a safe haven, the average travel time is 11.5 hours. And in this year alone, Republican elected officials have filed more than 300 bills to restrict access to abortion care with congressional Republicans proposing three bills that would impose a national abortion ban.
In recent weeks, Senate Republicans have blocked the chamber from opening debate on bills to protect access to IVF and contraception. When the Senate returns from the July 4 recess, Schumer is expected to call a vote to advance the Women’s Health Protection Act, which Senate Republicans are also expected to block.
Without the votes in Congress, President Biden has flexed his executive power in the form of three orders directing federal agencies to safeguard access to reproductive health care. He established a task force to coordinate his administration’s government-wide actions on reproductive rights. The administration says it has acted to help ensure that women receive the emergency care they need, protect access to medication abortion, defend the right to travel for abortion care, expand access to affordable contraception and strengthen privacy protections for patients—including servicemembers and veterans.
Republicans, led by former President Donald Trump, mostly claim that Dobbs has returned the issue of abortion rights back to the states and accuse Democrats of stoking mass hysteria to score political points.
But Democrats argue that proof to the contrary is not in what Republicans say, but what they do.
Earlier this spring, the Republican Study Committee—the largest ideological caucus in Congress of either party of which 80 percent of House Republicans are members, including the party’s entire leadership—released a budget that calls for passage of the Life at Conception Act, a bill that establishes conception as the beginning of human life. This would make abortion illegal in all cases, including for patients who were impregnated through rape or incest.
It’s not just GOP legislative proposals that have Democrats up in arms either.
There’s also Project 2025, a plan conservative activists and former Trump administration officials have crafted for his second term, to institutionalize his vision for the nation.
In addition to proposals to revive a push to add an unconstitutional citizenship question to the US Census that could result in a recount due to suppressed participation from immigrants, eliminate the independence of the Justice Department, Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission and repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes the largest climate investment in world history, Project 2025 would attack reproductive health care even further.
A second Trump administration would pressure the FDA to revisit and withdraw its initial approval of medication abortion and force the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to adopt hostile messaging to birth control. And it provides a roadmap for the executive branch to misapply the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-obscenity law that bans mail-order drugs and instruments related to abortion. (Comstock is known as a “zombie law”—one considered unconstitutional or unenforceable but was never repealed—opening the possibility for it to be enforced under a Republican administration. And Democrats refer to the law as a “back-door abortion ban” because it doesn’t require congressional action.)
“If you live in a state where right now you feel that your rights are protected because of action that your governor and state legislature have taken, forget about it,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.), who proposed a bill last week to repeal the law, told reporters. “Because if Donald Trump as president believes, wrongly, that he has the power to roll that all the way and so that is why this issue is so important in this election.”
Jen Klein, director of the White House Gender Policy Council, said the Justice Department has issued a binding opinion that Comstock isn’t a barrier to the shipment, the mailing or the transport for lawful abortion and that the administration supports Smith’s legislation along with other bills that would protect reproductive freedom.
“The president has been quite clear that what we need ultimately, is a federal law restoring the protections of Roe v Wade, which is the only way we can ensure that women in every state are going to be able to make the decisions that are right for them and their families, to stop the erosion of reproductive rights that we're seeing across the country and to stop the other side from attempting to roll us back to the 1800s.”
Despite how prohibitive the restrictions in the RSC budget or Project 2025 may be, recent polling indicates that while two in three Americans support updating the Comstock Act to exclude abortion, the same number have heard nothing about the law.
“It is essential that we deliver a wake-up call to the American people that this archaic law is on the books and has been for 150 years, and that there's a deliberate explicit plan to weaponize it to take away freedom,” Ryan said. “There’s a huge need to educate and make people aware—and when people are aware, unsurprisingly, that there’s a plan to take away their rights and their reproductive freedom, they’re outraged and widely and in a bipartisan way reject the use of this law for that purpose.”
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In state legislatures with Republican supermajorities, the focus is on winnowing some of the conservative electoral power that has enabled abortion bans to proliferate.
“We believe that in November if we can get people to vote down ballot, we will break the supermajority. Now that doesn’t put us in the majority. We are not yet going to be a blue state but we will be able to protect women as our governor uses her veto to do that,” Jeanna Repass, Kansas Democratic Party Chair,” told me. “So we are very much encouraging people not just to vote for Joe Biden, which is so, so critical and important in this country. But we are pushing for down-ballot and we believe that on November 5, we will break the supermajority in both chambers in the state of Kansas. This will be a safe place for women and women who are pregnant and families.”
Lauren Necochea, Democratic Party Chair of Idaho, a state with the most extreme abortion ban in the nation, said that the state has never seen more momentum and energy due to what Idaho Democrats view as excessive government overreach.
“People are so shocked and disheartened by the extremism that’s taken over our state and the harmful impacts that that’s having particularly on women. And so we're going to be talking every day about all of those down-ballot races. We have more to go to break the supermajority in our state, but that’s what we’re focused on. And we know the voters are with us on this issue. The voters are with us on many other issues. And we’re doing the work and I think I think we're going to be picking up some seats.”
Meanwhile, Timmaraju is taking an all-of-the-above approach.
“We need to be running the table on ballot initiatives. We need to be running the table on legislative [seats],” she told me. “This is how we win back critical legislatures in red and purple states and this is how we protect our gains. It’s not enough to do one without the other. We have to do all of it.”
And according to the DNC’s Harrison, Democrats are going to do it with a fierceness that’s uncharacteristic of the party’s brand.
“We’re gonna fight with every damn thing we have because if I don't know anything else, I know this: There is no way in the world that I will allow my kids to live the lives that my grandparents lived, one in which they were not fully free, one in which they didn't fully control their own bodies and their own destinies,” he said. “ And that is what this election is about. And so you’re going to see a Democratic Party in a way that you don't normally see the Democratic Party. We are a cerebral party—we like policy—but we’re going to fight like hell to protect the freedoms that we have in this country. And we're going to use everything that we have to ensure that.”