Abortion and Reproductive Rights: We’re Hopelessly Divided

Thirteen states had already crafted anti-abortion statutes, dubbed “trigger laws,” just waiting for the Supreme Court to make the anticipated decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center (2022). The unprecedented leak of the majority opinion certainly gave anti-abortion advocates the green light they needed. As of the end of May, 2023, fourteen states have banned abortions outright: Alabama (no exceptions for rape or incest), Arkansas (no exceptions for rape or incest), Idaho (nearly all instances), Kentucky (no exceptions for rape or incest), Louisiana (no exceptions for rape or incest), Mississippi (except for rape, but not incest), Missouri (except for rape, but not incest), North Dakota (except for rape or incest), Oklahoma (no exceptions for rape or incest), South Dakota (no exceptions for rape or incest), Tennessee (no exceptions for rape or incest), Texas (no exceptions for rape or incest), West Virginia (except for rape or incest), and Wisconsin (no exceptions for rape or incest, being challenged). Georgia has a six-week ban in effect.

The Texas law was dubbed the “vigilante law,” which established a $10,000 court award, letting individual citizens sue anyone who helps a woman obtain an abortion after the six-week mark—that included suing the doctor who performed the abortion down to the person who drove the patient to the clinic. The Supreme Court declined to temporarily block the Texas vigilante law. Other states have now embraced this idea: the Washington Post noted that at least thirty-five copycat laws have been introduced throughout America, not only for abortions but for a wide variety of polarizing issues—like book banning, gun control, and transgender athletics.

In six states—Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Ohio, South Carolina, and Wyoming—bans imposed by state legislatures have been block by state courts. In five states—Nebraska, Arizona, Florida, Utah, and North Carolina—abortions are banned during the gestational period, from 12 to 20 weeks. In twenty-five states, abortions remain legal, and in twenty of those states, new legal or constitutional protections have been created. In 2024 ballot measures, five states added to their abortion rights protections and in two states, Arizona and Missouri, previous abortions bans had been lifted. At the same time, voters in three states (South Dakota, Nebraska, and Florida) rejected measures to enshrine abortion rights in their laws and constitutions.

Thanks to Dobbs, there is no national law regulating abortions. Congress is gridlocked on this issue: not enough votes to make this a national protection; not enough votes to severely restrict abortion access. Women living in abortion-restricted states have the difficult choice: carry the fetus to birth or leave the state, hoping to receive the care they need in states that offer abortion services. In 2023, over 171,000 women traveled from states that restricted abortions to states that permitted the procedure. More than 14,000 Texas women crossed over into New Mexico; 37,300 traveled from mostly southern and midwestern states to Illinois; and 12,000 traveled from Georgia or South Carolina to North Carolina. Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder of Whole Woman’s Health, stated that “we’re having people travel hundreds or thousands of miles for a procedure that typically takes less than 10 minutes and can be done in a doctor’s office setting. Nobody does that for any other medical procedure.” An embolden 2025 Republican majority in the House of Representatives continues to talk about a nationwide law to regulate and restrict abortions.

In 2015, the Pew Research Center found that in over 96 percent of the 146 nations surveyed women were allowed to terminate their pregnancies in order to save their lives. Only six countries did not allow women to receive abortions under any circumstances (and since that 2015 report, Ireland, one of the six, has completely reversed its policy).

How Did They Do It? How Ireland, a predominantly Catholic country, repeal its pro-life amendments and allowed abortions nationwide.

Fifty countries (26 percent) only allow abortions to save the life of the mother; eighty-two countries (42 percent) allow abortions when the mother’s life is at risk as well as for at least one other specific reason (rape, incest, fetal impairment, or social or economic reasons). Fifty-eight countries (30 percent) allow abortions on request for any reason, although many of these countries set a certain point in the pregnancy, such as twenty weeks, as the cutoff point for an abortion. In September 2023, the Mexican Supreme Court decriminalized abortion nationwide, making abortions legal in all of the country’s thirty-two states; previously the procedure had been available in only twelve states. In a brief announcement accompanying the ruling, the Supreme Court stated that penalizing women who sought abortions was “unconstitutional” and “violates the human rights of women.”

In March 2024, France became the first country to protect the right to have an abortion explicitly protected in its constitution. The vote in the French Parliament was overwhelmingly in favor of the abortion rights protection. In 1975, France had decriminalized abortion, permitting the procedure for any reason through the fourteenth week of pregnancy, and now that protection was enshrined in its constitution. As the Washington Post noted, French “activist and politicians have been transparent that this is, above all, a response to what has been happening in the United States” since the overturning of Roe.

Sources: Kimberly Kindy and Alice Crites, “Texas Abortion Law Created a Vigilante Loophole: Both Parties Are Rushing to Take Advantage,” Washington Post, February 2, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/22/texas-abortion-law-vigilante-loophole-supreme-court/; “Tracking the States Where Abortion is Now Banned,” New York Times, May 26, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/abortion-laws-roe-v-wade.html; Allison McCann and Amy Schoenfeld Walker, “How Ballot Measures Will Change Abortion Access,” New York Times, November 6, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/06/us/elections/abortion-ballot-results-laws-election.html; Molly Cook Escobar, Amy Schoenfeld Walker, Allison McCann, Scott Reinhard, and Helmuth Rosales, “171,000 Traveled for Abortions Last Year. See Where They Went,” New York Times, June 13, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/13/us/abortion-state-laws-ban-travel.html; Angelina E. Theodorou and Aleksandra Sandstrom, “How Abortion is Regulated Around the World,” Pew Research Center, October 6, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/10/06/how-abortion-is-regulated-around-the-world/; Simon Romero and Emiliano Rodríguez Mega, “Mexico’s Supreme Court Decriminalizes Abortion Nationwide,” New York Times, September 6, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/world/americas/mexico-abortion-decriminalize-supreme-court.html; Karla Adam, “France Becomes First Country to Explicitly Enshrine Abortion Rights in Constitution,” Washington Post, March 4, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/04/france-abortion-constitution/?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere&location=alert.