34 TIME May 23/May 30, 2022
NATIONBirth control access has expanded, and
more women have entered the work-
force, pursued higher education, won
protections from being fired for getting
pregnant, and become bread winners.
Through it all, abortion has remained
one of the nation’s most fraught topics.
While support for legal abortion has
mostly gone unchanged—about 60% of
Americans believe it should be legal in
most or all cases—so has opposition to
the procedure. Since the early ’70s, ac-
tivists and lawmakers who believe abor-
tion is immoral have waged a long, care-
ful battle in state legislatures and the
courts in hopes that one day the Supreme
Court would overturn Roe v. Wade.
On May 2, it seemed that day was
imminent. A leaked draft opinion on
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Orga-
nization, a case directly challenging ex-
isting precedent, showed the majority
of Justices poised to overturn Roe in its
entirety. The news landed like a bomb.
Within hours, protesters on both sides of
the debate crowded outside the Supreme
Court building in Washington, dancing
in triumph or shaking with rage. Pastors
declared victory, politicians sprinted to
stake positions, and lawyers scrambled
to understand the extraordinary impli-
cations of the draft text, pointing to a list
of other constitutional rights suddenly in
jeopardy, including access to birth con-
trol and the ability to marry the person
of your choice, regardless of sex or race.
While the opinion leaked to Politico
may well change before a final version
is released, likely in June, its mere exis-
tence reshaped American politics in an
instant—upending midterm races and
political agendas, and refuting any argu-
ment that overturning Roe would affect
only a small number of people in con-
servative states. The fierce and immedi-
ate political fallout made clear that any
Supreme Court decision changing the
precedent that Roe set will affect us all.
For many liberals, the draft marked
focused on condemning the leak rather
than addressing the substance of the
draft, as political strategists debated
the political risk of opposing a proce-
dure that the majority of Americans
support in some form. A leaked memo
from the National Republican Senatorial
Committee advised candidates that “our
position should be based in compassion
and reason,” and emphasized, “Repub-
licans DO NOT want to throw doctors
and women in jail.” But at the same time,
some GOP members of Congress also
floated passing a national abortion ban.
The real action was in the states,
where Republican legislators rushed to
ready abortion bans, advance criminal
penalties for performing abortions, and
consider defining life as starting at con-
ception, a move that carries major impli-
cations for everything from miscarriages
to contraception like intrauterine devices
(IUDs) to the so-called morning- after
pill. “No compromises, no more waiting,”
said Brian Gunter, a pastor who helped
write a Louisiana bill classifying abortion
as homicide. In Georgia, state represen-
tative Ed Setzler, who sponsored a 2019In the 49 years since the U.S. Supreme
Court established a constitutional
right to abortion, the experience of being
a woman in this country has transformed.
the worst-case scenario, the doomsday
outcome they’d been warning about for
years. “It’s devastating, but it’s also a
critical wake-up call,” Mini Timmaraju,
president of NARAL Pro-Choice Amer-
ica, told reporters. The day after the draft
appeared, NARAL saw a 1,403% increase
in donations. Planned Parenthood re-
ported a 650% uptick in donations and
engagement. Democratic fundraising
platform ActBlue raised $12 million in
the 24 hours after draft was made pub-
lic, and the Abortion Care Network,
which supports independent abortion
clinics nationwide, raised $250,000 in
the first three days after the leak from
more than 12,000 donors, about 95%
of whom were new. Abortion providers
also reported a flood of patients seek-
ing birth control appointments, hoping
to stockpile emergency contraception,
or asking to proactively order abor-
tion pills. Just 16 states and Washing-
ton, D.C., have laws on their books that
explicitly protect abortion rights, should
Roe cease to be the law of the land.
For conservatives, the draft decision
was cause for celebration. “If this is the
opinion of the Court, it will be one of
the greatest opinions in Supreme Court
history. It will save millions of lives,” Re-
publican Senator Josh Hawley of Mis-
souri tweeted on May 3. The draft was
seen as validation of both conservatives’
strategy and their core belief: that Roe
was wrongly decided and that the only
way to redress that error was to deliver
conservatives onto the highest court. On
social media, religious leaders thanked
former President Donald Trump, whose
three Supreme Court appointments
brought this moment to fruition. If the
court’s final opinion is similar to the
leaked draft, 13 states with “trigger laws”
will ban abortion almost immediately;
at least 10 more are likely to implement
abortion bans or restrictions soon after.
In the days after the draft’s pub-
lication, many national RepublicansPREVIOUS SPREAD: THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES; THIS SPREAD: ROGELIO V. SOLIS—AP