In times like these, it’s important to take pleasure in the little things — like the fact that Monday was probably not a great day for Samuel Alito. The Supreme Court justice, who always looks like he just got a parking ticket, has been the best friend the anti-abortion movement could ever hope for. In 2022, he handed them a ruling that ended abortion rights, which was so breathtaking in its contempt for women’s humanity that he even cited jurists from the 13th and 17th centuries who argued that women’s “position is inferior to that of men,” defended men who raped their wives and prosecuted women for witchcraft.
But these contributions to the field of legal misogyny did not buy Alito any grace with the religious right on Monday when he stayed a Fifth Circuit Court ruling that would have restricted women’s access to safe abortion pills to in-person prescriptions. The stay allowing mifepristone prescriptions via telehealth appointments and sent through the mail is brief — it expires after just one week — and yet the anti-abortion crowd lost their minds. Leaders of anti-choice groups flooded social media with outraged posts, accusing Alito and President Donald Trump of betraying their cause. They also demanded the firing of Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary because he hasn’t yet rejected the science that shows the pills are safe.
Leaders among the Christian right suspect, with good reason, that the White House and the GOP would rather not reopen an issue placing them on the wrong side of public opinion — especially in an election year.
This all came after a Wall Street Journal report revealing how anger has been building at Trump within the anti-abortion movement for not doing more to stop women from accessing the abortion pill mifepristone. But those activists a problem: Abortion bans are wildly unpopular and keep getting voted down even in red states. Leaders among the Christian right suspect, with good reason, that the White House and the GOP would rather not reopen an issue placing them on the wrong side of public opinion — especially in an election year, when they’re already hurting from the president’s unpopular war in Iran and its economic damage.
“It’s very clear that [abortion] is perceived as the third rail, and you just have to stay away from it,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Journal.
This was not conventional wisdom following the 2024 election, in which then-Vice President Kamala Harris, the pro-choice candidate, lost to Trump. At that point, the Beltway class concluded that after two years of outrage at the overturn of Roe v. Wade, voters had lost interest in the abortion issue. But many in the GOP are clearly still worried it’s an issue that could hurt the party in the upcoming midterm elections.
They have good reason to worry. While it’s true that abortion slightly declined as a priority for voters in 2024, the issue still proved motivating, especially for younger female voters that turned out for Harris, even as more of their male counterparts switched to Trump. Abortion rights faded for a couple of reasons. For one thing, a lot of states put abortion rights up as ballot initiatives, which allowed at least some ostensibly pro-choice voters to feel safer backing Republicans, knowing they were prevented from taking away the right to choose.
Likely even more important was that the ease of getting mifepristone dramatically blunted the impact of abortion bans in states that still had them. Even pro-choice activists, who rarely underestimate women’s tenacity, were surprised at how quickly people in red states figured out how to connect with doctors in blue states that would send them abortion pills in the mail. Abortion rates actually rose after some states banned the procedure, as word quickly spread about how to terminate a pregnancy at home. Some patients were still forced to travel to obtain abortions, providing further evidence that women will not be stopped so easily from ending unwanted pregnancies.
Like the villains in “Scooby Doo,” anti-abortion activists have been raging at how their wicked plans have been thwarted by the scrappiness of their would-be victims. They have been spinning out baroque new strategies to force childbirth on the unwilling. They’ve demanded that Trump revive the Comstock Act, a long-defunct 19th century law that could also be used to censor erotic materials and restrict contraception, two other major goals of the anti-choice movement.
The White House has pointedly ignored their pleas. Activists did successfully get Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to promise a “review” of the safety of the abortion pill, in the hope that he could use junk science to yank the FDA approval of the drug. But the FDA has only said it “continues to work” on the review, and anti-abortion leaders suspect he is in fact slow-walking the process.
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That there is a review is an outrage. Every reputable medical organization, both nationally and internationally, recognizes that the risks of abortion medication are low, and that at-home abortion is exponentially safer than giving birth. But Kennedy and his team of anti-science appointees are only too happy to use bad studies and outright disinformation to attack vaccines, anti-depressants and even Tylenol. Anti-choice activists aren’t wrong to wonder why they don’t just use the same unethical tactics to please the mandatory childbirth brigade.
This Supreme Court case is their main hope, and it rests on the same debunked studies demonizing abortion pills that prompted the FDA review. The religious right knows that the Court’s conservative majority has a history of rejecting science when it conflicts with their ideological preferences, so the fact that mifepristone is actually quite safe is likely not an obstacle for the justices in arguing the pills need to be taken away to “protect” women.
That said, the corrupt, highly-partisan leanings of the current Supreme Court could end up working in women’s favor. The justices are no doubt aware that access to the abortion pill has defanged this as an election issue, and they would be smart to worry it could hurt the already-troubled Republicans in the midterms if millions of women suddenly lost access.
The over-the-top reaction from anti-choice activists to a very short, very temporary stay on the Fifth Circuit’s efforts to end abortion-by-mail was telling. Clearly, they’re worried that the justices could protect the GOP over the movement’s desire to punish American women for the perceived sin of having sex without wanting to be pregnant. Hopefully, the religious right’s fears are well-placed.
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