The Dobbs Decision Unleashed An Unapologetic Abortion Rights Movement

The most common response Jade Hurley used to get when she told people she works at an abortion fund was something along the lines of: “What is that?” Now, a year after the repeal of Roe v. Wade and over a dozen states banning abortion across the country, most reply to Hurley’s line of work with: “Oh, fuck yeah.” 

The last year has been devastating for abortion rights in the U.S. since the Supreme Court repealed nearly 50 years of precedent in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling. The suffering that Dobbs has brought is hard to comprehend on a national scale. But from something so terrible, so unthinkable, came a full-blown resistance that centered abortion rights in the national conversation.

People like Hurley, the communications manager at DC Abortion Fund , which finances abortion care and is one of the largest such funds in the country, can feel that difference. Public support for abortion has grown louder and more unapologetic, she said.

She’s right: Nearly 70% of Americans — a record-high — believe abortion should be legal at least through the first trimester of pregnancy, according to a Gallup poll from this month. 

“It took something really, really terrible for people to shift their opinions,” she said. “Now, we’re having a lot of honest conversations around Roe and how it was the floor. Now, there’s a lot more boldness and a lot more truth-telling and abortion storytelling — that’s really powerful.” 

From that awareness has come a wave of policy change and unapologetic activism. Less than two months after Dobbs, over half a million people in Kansas a state that former President Donald Trump had carried by 15 points in 2020  voted to reject an anti-choice referendum. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have codified abortion protections.

In a historic first, an abortion rights activist described in front of Congress, on national television, how to self-manage an abortion using pills. Democrats embraced abortion rights like never before, winning big in the 2022 midterms and reshaping how abortion politics have played out for decades. Abortion funds have experienced an increase in visibility and an influx in donations. Voters protected abortion care in all five states where it was on the ballot during the midterms, and the majority of candidates who were openly pro-choice won critical seats. And despite the very real threat of criminalization , people are promising to “aid and abet abortion” — with many everyday Americans doing just that . 

Reproductive rights groups had been warning the country about the potential fall of Roe for decades. But it took the bad thing actually happening to convince people that it could — what many in the abortion rights movement call the “believability gap.”

“Voters across the country really never believed that the court was going to overturn Roe — they never anticipated that the highest court in the land would do what it had never done before. But Dobbs closed that believability gap,” Laphonza Butler, president of EMILY’s List, told HuffPost. 

“The overturning of Roe made it clear that if an extreme court was capable of undermining and overturning the right to an abortion, it was also capable of overturning every other right.” 

The confusion and devastation after the Dobbs decision were immediate. Trigger bans in several states went into effect hours after the ruling, while a handful of others were enacted weeks later. Abortion patients sitting in waiting rooms were turned away that morning, scrambling to figure out if they could travel to a nearby state or if they would be forced to carry their unwanted pregnancy to term. A year later, 14 states have near-total abortion bans in effect, while five others  have implemented severe restrictions. Women are being denied life-saving miscarriage care and the fear of criminalization is forcing doctors to leave their home states . Between impending six-week bans in Florida and South Carolina and another restriction in North Carolina, the entire Southeast is on the precipice of becoming an abortion care desert. 

“We didn’t want it to ever come to this,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “But now that it’s happened, it’s opened up a window to where Americans really stand, and we have to do everything we can to capitalize on that to save folks’ freedoms.” 

It has woken people up — people like Janelle Bogart, a salesperson from Wichita, Kansas, who realized she couldn’t sit back and let an anti-choice ballot referendum in her home state take away her future child’s rights. 

“I don’t want to have a daughter and when she asks, ‘Where were you when Roe fell and Kansas took away abortion protections?’ I don’t want to say, ‘Well, we were just really busy,’” Bogart told HuffPost last July . “I want to be able to tell her, ‘Girl, I busted my ass trying to protect your right to choose, too.’”

It was people like Bogart who helped accomplish what many believed was impossible: a win on abortion rights in a red state after the fall of Roe . And in a primary election, no less, which usually sees lower voter turnout and skews Republican. 

“It’s probably the most rewarding campaign or work that I have done and ever will do in my career,” said Ashley All, the former communications director at Kansans for Constitutional Freedom, the group that led the charge against the anti-choice referendum. 

“There’s no better poll than an election,” Timmaraju said. “Now that people understand the full scope of the impact of losing access, the full range of crises for women, pregnant people and families – they clearly understand where we’ve [reproductive rights organizations] been all along. It was so hard before. The believability gap was so high with Roe on the books because people just weren’t paying attention.”

Kansas set the tone in a post-Roe world, signaling to Democrats that abortion could be a winning issue ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. 

Politicians who supported abortion rights largely won out, and when the American people were able to vote directly on abortion, they chose to protect it.

“That says a lot about where we are today because I’m not positive that would have been the case five or 10 years ago,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) told HuffPost. “But now people realize that they can’t just sit back and hope for the best, they gotta fight for the best. And we’re seeing that in elections.”

The pro-choice surge at the polls and uptick in donations is what many are now calling “the Dobbs effect.” NARAL had around 2.5 million members when Timmaraju first started at the national organization in 2021. Now, the group boasts over 4 million members, many of whom have moved from being passive to active members — phone banking or knocking on doors during midterms. NARAL, EMILY’s List and Planned Parenthood collectively raised and spent $150 million toward electing pro-abortion rights candidates. 

Abortion funds across the country have also seen a historic uptick in donations. In the year since Roe was repealed, DC Abortion Fund has worked with 3,381 callers and given over $2.28 million to abortion care — catering to callers in the region but also from states like Georgia and Florida. The New York Abortion Access Fund , the state’s only fund, has spent $1.7 million dollars on behalf of 2,000 abortion seekers since the Dobbs decision — an over 200% increase in donations from the year prior. 

Despite the chaos and confusion of the current post-Roe landscape, people are still accessing care. The website AbortionFinder.org , which helps people find abortion care, saw a 543% increase in visits since the Dobbs decision was leaked in May 2022. More people than ever before know about mifepristone , one of the two pills used in medication abortion. There has been an increase in requests for self-managed abortion through access points like Aid Access and community-based care groups like Red State Access. 

“When I think about how the opposition is trying to completely eliminate our human rights to bodily autonomy, and how people are still getting abortions in spite of that — that is something. That’s a silver lining,” Oriaku Njoku, executive director of the National Network of Abortion Funds , told HuffPost. 

If Hurley really takes a moment to think about the day-to-day at DC Abortion Fund, things can feel really bleak. Folks are being pushed further into pregnancy, making abortion care even more expensive. There is a general lack of secure and sustainable abortion and practical support funding across the country. Clinics are overworked and understaffed, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to care for patients. People are spending every dollar they have to get to clinics, and case managers are reporting that it’s more common for callers to break down crying on the phone. 

But Hurley, a self-described eternal optimist, hopes that from Dobbs comes a phoenix effect.

“This is something really, really horrifying that happened to our movement and to our country, but I really do hope that from the ashes something better will rise. Because Roe wasn’t enough,” she said. “When we have nothing, we’re forced to be imaginative. I’m looking forward to seeing what we can build.”

CLARIFICATION: This article has been updated to note that the 543% increase in visits to AbortionFinder.org happened since May 2022.