A few minutes after the annulment by the Supreme Court of Roe v. Wade on Friday, the Missouri Attorney General issued an opinion banning abortion in his state. Abortion clinics in several cities, including Montgomery, Alabama, and Sioux Falls, SD, closed. But others in Illinois and Ohio continued to see patients.
At a Phoenix clinic, 40 women were waiting to schedule appointments, which caused staff to shuffle for answers about whether abortions were still allowed. “We sent a lot of people home and they were hysterical,” said Dr. Gabrielle Goodrick, owner of the clinic.
In Ohio, Candice Keller, a former state representative who sponsored a law banning abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, burst into tears of joy. “I just started crying,” Ms. Keller said. “It was a real battle. It looked like you would never win. But we won. “
Roe’s outpouring on Friday, impressive though long anticipated, sparked waves of triumph and despair, from protesters on both sides gathering in front of the Supreme Court, to abortion clinics and pregnancy centers in crisis, and in texts with friends and exploding social media channels.
The reaction of the divided screen reflected a polarized nation: joy and relief on the one hand, indignation and pain on the other.
“If I had confetti, I would throw it high,” said Dale Bartscher, director of South Dakota Right to Life. “Today we celebrate a day we have long dreamed of, defended and worked for: overcoming Roe v. Wade.”
Anti-abortion activists celebrating in the Supreme Court. Credit … Shuran Huang for The New York Times
David Ripley, director of Idaho Chooses Life, said he didn’t think he was alive to see the day the Idaho abortion ban, which makes it illegal after Roe’s fall, goes into vigor.
“The court has finally admitted that its decision and the decisions of the federal courts over the last 50 years have been terribly wrong,” Mr. Ripley. “I’m ecstatic.”
On the other hand, advocates of abortion rights are concerned about the millions of women living in much of the country where abortion will be illegal or essentially unavailable because of the layers of restrictions that have added costs. and delays for women requesting the procedure.
Some women accumulated abortion pills. A group called Shout Your Abortion launched a campaign proclaiming #AbortionPillsForever, promising to help them reach women in need.
“I knew this was going to come, but I didn’t expect to feel so angry,” Amalie Hahn, 49, said in Jackson, Mississippi. “You want to ban abortions in the state of Mississippi, but you don’t want to take that into account. Note that Mississippi is one of the worst states to give birth to, if not the worst. We are in the midst of a shortage of formulas and poverty is in the historical high and force women to have children. That’s crazy. “
Jackson is the home of the clinic, known locally as the Pink House, at the center of the Supreme Court decision. On Friday, volunteers continued to accompany patients inside and lawyers said the clinic would continue to offer abortion for the next 10 days, until the Mississippi activation ban goes into effect.
The court ruling, which had been foreshadowed in the oral arguments in December and again when a draft opinion was leaked in May, means that in a month abortion will be banned, with one rare exception in 13 states. Both opponents and supporters say it is very likely to become illegal or inaccessible in about half of the states, with 33.6 million women of childbearing age living in states likely to lose access.
Credit … Morgan Lieberman for The New York Times
Millions of Americans have never known a world without the constitutional right to abortion.
In Kansas City, Missouri, one of them, Mallorie McBride, said she was “surprised and horrified” by the Supreme Court’s decision.
“We’re taking a lot of steps back,” Ms. McBride, 24, said. “I’ve always believed that older men shouldn’t make decisions about women’s bodies. As a single woman in my 20s, I haven’t felt very represented by my government in a long time, but that goes a step further. “.
“It’s also like, what else will happen after that?” said Briana Perry, 30, a board member of Healthy and Free Tennessee, a reproductive rights network in Nashville. “Not just in terms of reproductive rights, but other rights that we have that we thought were guaranteed through Supreme Court rulings that are now in question.”
The Supreme Court decision calls abortion “a profound moral issue on which Americans have very conflicting views.” But while Americans are more likely to say abortion is morally acceptable, the issue is very political. Friday’s ruling did so even more, sending the question of how to regulate abortion to states, and into a new era even more polarized.
Both sides quickly pivoted toward the fights ahead.
James Bopp Jr., general counsel for the National Committee on the Right to Life, which has fought abortion since Roe’s decision in 1973, called Friday’s ruling “a total victory for the pro-life movement and for the United States “. Still, he said, the work of the anti-abortion forces was “half done.” The group met for its convention in Atlanta when the decision was announced, and had already drafted a model law to ban abortion in all states, with exceptions only because of the risks to the mother’s life.
“It will be a huge task: there will be a number of forces against us,” Mr. Bopp. “This is the end of the beginning, as Churchill once said. A huge hurdle has been removed, and now we will make sure the law is used to protect the unborn.”
Troy Newman, president of Kansas-based Operation Rescue, which ran a long campaign of blockades outside abortion clinics, said the decision still left too much room for states like his, in much led by Democrats, would allow abortion.
“Now is the time for the pro-life movement to lift our big boy boots and win the rest of the states,” he said. “We will be cleaning up, leaving out of the business the remaining dirty and disgusting abortion factories.”
NARAL, the Planned Paternity Action Fund and other groups pledged to spend $ 150 million in the mid-2022 legislatures to elect supporters of the right to abortion in state houses and Congress. The Women’s March, which brought together protesters after the election of Donald J. Trump, called for protests in a “summer of rage”.
In Conway, Ark., Stacey Margaret Jones, 52, said she continued to think about the women she met when she volunteered at Planned Parenthood.
“I feel very desperate because I feel like there is nothing I could have done personally in a different way,” Ms. Jones. He has given candidates who support abortion rights, attended marches and written to his legislators. But in a conservative state like Arkansas, he doesn’t feel his voice being heard. Its state senator is Jason Rapert, a leading sponsor of the Arkansas Trigger Act that banned abortion on Friday.
“I’m looking for guidance from someone or some organization to say,‘ Okay, we knew this could happen and that’s what we’re going to do, ’” Ms. Jones said.
As protests escalated outside the Supreme Court, with supporters and opponents shouting back-and-forth slogans, Capitol police sent additional officers to align the barriers blocking the courthouse and Capitol building to the ground. across the street. They were preparing for larger crowds as people finished work. In the afternoon, protests had closed the next Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge.
Credit … Doug Mills / The New York Times
But the split reaction also occurred far from Washington.
In Leawood, Kan., A protester shouted through an amplifier, “You’re killing your son!” as Daniel Morrison and his girlfriend arrived in the rain at a Planned Parenthood clinic so she could have an abortion. “You came to an extermination camp. Babies are killed here.”
Mr. Morrison replied, “I’m helping my girlfriend, I’m helping her choose,” emphasizing the word “choose.”
Mr. Morrison said he worked at an Oklahoma restaurant and his girlfriend volunteered at a homeless youth shelter, and that they were not prepared either financially or emotionally for a child.
“I’m not here because I just want to go have fun and party more,” Mr. Morrison. “I want to be able to plan a life for a child and be able to support him in ways more than money: being able to give him time and everything a child would need to be able to develop. Having the option to do that is very important. I don’t consider it a murder. “
The Supreme Court decision will only cause pain and hardship to the people, he said.
Across the parking lot, the Advice & Aid Pregnancy Center had additional security at the site Friday morning due to what its executive director, Ruth Tisdale, said they were calls to attack facilities. like yours. Ms Tisdale said the Supreme Court decision was “an exciting time” but that her work needed to continue.
The reports were contributed by Austyn Gaffney, Jimmie E. Gates, Carey Gillam, Jack Healy, Carolyn Komatsoulis, Tom Lawrence, Erica Sweeney and Kevin Williams.