I’ve spent 17 years working in public health, reproductive rights, and abortion rights advocacy, and I can tell you from experience: nothing Republicans do to control women is by accident. They play the looooooong game, like a very long game, like decades long.
Think about it. In the late 1970s, conservative leaders elevated abortion as a political issue, not because it had always been central to their movement, but because they needed a unifying cause after losing battles over school desegregation and tax exempt status for Christian colleges. Televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich turned abortion into a cornerstone of the Religious Right, merging religious moralism with partisan politics to consolidate long-term power.
They used this strategy to chip away at abortion rights—day after day, year after year, decade after decade—until 2022 when they toppled Roe v. Wade. But that was never the endpoint. Today, on what would’ve been Roe’s 53rd anniversary, we need to see the full architecture of what they’re building, because understanding it as a coordinated system changes everything about how we fight back. Let’s dive in.
To start, Republicans don’t rely on sweeping bans. They know bans are highly unpopular among the majority of American voters. Instead, they deploy a thousand seemingly innocuous bills, each designed to make women’s full participation in society incrementally more difficult, more expensive, more dangerous.
Start with abortion access. After Dobbs, Republicans immediately targeted medication abortion, the most accessible form of care, especially in clinic deserts. They manufactured “safety concerns” about mifepristone, a drug safer than Tylenol with decades of safe use. When courts rejected that, they claimed fetal remains contaminate water supplies. When that failed, they proposed “catch kits,” forcing people to collect their own miscarriages from the toilet, turning private medical care into surveilled shame.
If they can’t ban it outright, they’ll make it psychologically unbearable.
Then they attacked emergency care. Under state abortion bans, hospitals in Idaho, Texas, and Oklahoma have turned away women with ectopic pregnancies, severe preeclampsia, septic miscarriages, forcing them to reach organ failure before intervening. Republican attorneys general have fought in court to prevent federal emergency care requirements from overriding state bans.
Their values could not be clearer: a woman’s life is worth less than a nonviable pregnancy.
Continue reading over at the Women in America Substack.
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