The South after Dobbs

In July 2022, a month after the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation removed the US constitutional right to an abortion, Georgia imposed a ban on terminations after six weeks. In August 2022, as ProPublica reported recently, Amber Nicole Thurman, a resident of Georgia in the ninth week of an unwanted pregnancy, travelled to North Carolina to get an abortion. She was given mifepristone and misoprostol, but some of the foetal tissue remained in her body and she needed a dilation and curettage to remove it. She presented at Piedmont Henry Hospital in Stockbridge, Georgia, in urgent need of medical care, but was denied treatment – a felony under the new law – until it was too late. Within a day she was dead.

A judge in Georgia recently struck down the six-week ban. But total or near-total bans are still in place in sixteen other states. Florida, where I grew up, enacted a six-week ban in May. ‘We don’t want to be an abortion tourism destination,’ Governor Ron DeSantis said.

According to the New York Times, Florida saw an 18 per cent rise in abortions last year, including nearly ten thousand out-of-state patients. It has more abortion clinics than any other state apart from New York and California, and more than the rest of the Southern states combined. Until recently, 80 per cent of residents of child-bearing age lived in a county with abortion access. Although the state has consistently elected Republicans over the past decade, nearly 60 per cent of registered voters oppose the six-week ban and want to expand abortion access.

The Bread and Roses Women’s Health Centre in Gainesville, central Florida, is on a tree-lined street in a sedate neighbourhood, with well-kept lawns and LGBTQ flags outside several houses. When I went past a few months ago, there was an older white man with a beard outside, holding a four-foot sign with a picture of a foetus that said: ‘Preborn Human’. Another white man across the street had a smaller and more subtle sign: ‘We Will Help You.’

At the entrance to the clinic, Priya, a young woman of South Asian descent, was waiting to let patients know they had arrived at the right place and ensure they entered the building safely. ‘I think being a volunteer escort is the best way to support abortion access in Florida,’ she told me.

From Gainesville I travelled north to Tallahassee, where I met and spoke with Kara Gross, who works for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida. ‘The vast majority of Floridians … do not want these abortion bans,’ she said. ‘Floridians, you know, are by and large people that want to live freely and want their freedom to make medical decisions. They want their freedom to be able to work and to be able to live and to be able to exist. And to be able to read the books they want to read and talk about the things they want to talk about.’

Dobbs wasn’t the first legal setback to Roe v. Wade. The Hyde Amendment, passed by the House of Representatives in 1976, prevented federal funds from being used for abortions. As Johanna Schoen documents in Abortion after Roe, the National Right to Life Committee played a key role in getting the legislation passed.

Other anti-abortion activists turned to violence. Since 1977, the National Abortion Federation has documented ‘11 murders, 42 bombings, 200 arsons, 531 assaults, 492 clinic invasions, 375 burglaries and thousands of other incidents of criminal activities directed at patients, providers and volunteers’.Florida has seen more than its share. Early on Christmas morning 1984, the Ladies Center and two other abortion clinics in Pensacola were bombed by 21-year-old James Simmons, his 18-year-old wife, Kathren, 21-year-old Matthew Goldsby and his 18-year-old girlfriend, Kaye Wiggins. They said it was ‘a gift to Jesus on his birthday’. In 1986, half a dozen anti-abortion activists, most of them associated with the group Rescue America, invaded the Ladies Center and injured two women. One of the perpetrators was John Burt, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan who was convicted of child abuse in 2003.

On 10 March 1993, Dr David Gunn was shot dead by Michael F. Griffin, an anti-choice zealot, outside the Pensacola Women’s Medical Services clinic. A year later Dr John Britton was shot dead along with his bodyguard, James Barrett, by Paul J. Hill, a former Presbyterian minister who had been excommunicated the previous year.

Anti-abortion violence appeared to taper off in the late 1990s. But it has not gone away; instead, it has taken on new forms. According to the National Abortion Federation, stalking and obstruction by anti-abortion extremists increased sharply in states with access to abortion between 2021 and 2022.

And, as Amber Nicole Thurman’s death shows, anti-abortion legislation is itself a form of violence. Despite a state supreme court ruling in 1989 that ‘every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from government intrusion into the person's private life’, Florida was making it harder to get an abortion for years before Dobbs. In 2007, it passed a law requiring medical providers to show an ultrasound of the foetus to the person carrying it before providing an abortion. In 2015, the state legislature passed HB 633, requiring two visits to a medical facility 24 hours apart before an abortion could be administered. Within a week of the Dobbs decision, Florida banned abortions after 15 weeks.

The right to abortion will be on the ballot in Florida (and nine other states) on 5 November. If passed (a 60 per cent supermajority is required), amendment 4 to the state constitution would declare that ‘no law shall prohibit, penalise, delay or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.’