On Wednesday, June 24, President Donald Trump will headline the kickoff event for the White House’s Great American State Fair, celebrating 250 years of American freedom. The rally, which will set the stage for Trump’s “Freedom 250” programming, also coincides with the four-year anniversary of the Supreme Court handing down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that stripped away the constitutional right to abortion access that had been held for 50 years. Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices he knew would overturn Roe v. Wade, fulfilling his 2016 campaign promise. The irony of Wednesday’s events on the National Mall should be lost on no one.
Despite Republicans’ claims that Dobbs would settle the issue of abortion once and for all, abortion restrictions have proved unpopular among voters. Still, leaders of the anti-abortion movement have doubled down since the fall of Roe; anti-abortion lawmakers have just learned to hide their fingerprints.
Despite Republicans’ claims that Dobbs would settle the issue of abortion once and for all, abortion restrictions have proved unpopular among voters.
Congressional Republicans haven’t introduced a federal abortion ban since 2022, for instance. In an amicus brief filed in Louisiana v. FDA — the case that threatens to strip mifepristone access for millions — only 113 Republican members of Congress signed, down from the 228 who signed the Dobbs brief. Zero Republican incumbents in the most competitive seats put their name on it.
Vulnerable Republican candidates with years of anti-abortion extremism, including Reps. Juan Ciscomani, R-Ariz., Tom Barrett, R-Mich., and Ryan Mackenzie, R-Penn., scrubbed their anti-abortion records from their websites — while voting to gut Medicaid, defund Planned Parenthood and confirm judges and agency heads to do their bidding.
Their efforts to distance themselves from abortion politics stand in sharp contrast to what’s happening in state legislatures, where anti-abortion lawmakers continue to introduce some of the most extreme and dangerous legislation we’ve seen since Dobbs.
In South Carolina, a Republican lawmaker introduced legislation that would have banned abortion, eliminated exceptions for rape and incest and put people who received abortions in prison for up to two years.
In Georgia, the state’s fetal personhood ideology embedded in state law led a hospital to keep Adriana Smith on life support for more than three months after she was declared brain dead.
In Florida, where the legislature has spent years writing fetal personhood ideology into law, two Black women in labor were separately forced into virtual court hearings from their hospital beds over C-sections they had explicitly refused. The emergency petitions to override the pregnant patients’ medical decisions were filed out of concern for the fetuses, not for the patients themselves. In one case, the judge granted the hospital the power to proceed if an emergency arose, and it did; in the other, the judge ruled outright in the hospital’s favor and she was forced to have the procedure.
Inside the Trump administration, anti-abortion advocates don’t need public support to advance their agenda. After Marty Makary resigned as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, his replacement promised anti-abortion leaders that he would be “the most pro-life head of FDA we’ve ever had” and that completing a baseless review of mifepristone is his top priority. The review is rooted in junk science condemned by more than 260 expert researchers. Over 100 peer-reviewed studies and 25 years of FDA data confirm that mifepristone is safe.
This fight has always been about control. And anti-abortion groups intend to take it further than abortion.
They intend to establish legal control over every stage of reproductive decision-making. Embryo personhood bills, which extend legal rights to fertilized eggs, directly threaten IVF. Emergency contraception and birth control face the same threat.
Abortion bans are designed to be exported across state lines. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has spent years pursuing providers and patients in states where abortion remains legal, to sue them in Texas. Shield laws enacted by states like California are targets for anti-abortion groups and politicians.
Dobbs was never the final objective. It was the entry point for exerting broader control. Every freedom anti-abortion activists claim to celebrate has an asterisk next to it.
We know affordability is top of mind, but what pundits who question abortion’s salience misunderstand is how closely reproductive freedom is tied to economic security. According to research across 16 battleground states, 82% of voters say it has gotten harder to afford to raise children compared with five or 10 years ago. The freedom to decide when to start a family and the ability to afford that decision are inseparable questions. Globally, the strongest indicator of whether a country can lift its people out of poverty is women’s control over their own reproductive lives.
For 250 years, Americans have fought to expand freedom. For 50 of those years, the constitutional right to make decisions about your own body was part of what it meant to be free in this country.
This year, Trump’s “Freedom 250” rally is being headlined by the man who took that right away from American women, on the anniversary of the day it happened. Come November, voters will have their say in how free they feel in Trump’s America.
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