Search:
This story seems to be about:
This story seems to be about:
In a normal year, the March for Life would begin somewhere along the National Mall. The cavalcade of anti-abortion activists in Washington, D.C., would wind around museums and past monuments, concluding at the foot of the Supreme Court, a physical representation of the movement’s objective: to overturn Roe v. Wade. The march happens in January of each year to coincide with the anniversary of the Roe decision.
But this is not a normal year. Tomorrow’s march will be the first without Roe on the books.
[Read: The anti-abortion movement’s Gen-Z victors]
In recognition of that fact, the march has a new route. It will finish somewhere on First Street, between the Capitol and the Court building, an acknowledgment of the enormous and somewhat nebulous task ahead: banning or restricting abortion in all 50 states. That task will involve not only Congress, the courts, and the president but also 50 individual state legislatures, thousands of lawmakers, and all of the American communities they represent.
At the march, activists and other attendees will be jubilant. Speakers will congratulate their fellow marchers on a job well done. Yet at the same time, a current of uncertainty ripples beneath the surface of the anti-abortion movement. Advocates are technically closer than ever to ending abortion in America, but in some ways, the path forward is more treacherous now than it was before. The movement is not in disarray, exactly, but its energy is newly decentralized, diffused throughout the country.
“There’s a much more choose-your-own-adventure feel” to the movement now, Mary Ziegler, a University of California, Davis School of Law professor who has written about abortion for The Atlantic, told me.
Overturning Roe was only the first step. The next isn’t exactly obvious.
Since the 1980s, rescinding the Supreme Court’s 1973 ruling in Roe, which established a nationwide right to abortion, had been the movement’s top goal, because it was the key that unlocked everything else. There could be no real prohibitions on abortion as long as Roe was in effect. Charging into battle was easier under a single banner, with resources and energy directed toward a single national project: filling the Supreme Court with abortion foes.
Now, though, across all 50 states, different leaders are pressing for abortion restrictions of varying types and degrees: heartbeat bans, gestational limits, restrictions on the abortion pill, or outright bans with few or no exceptions.
America’s anti-abortion movement has always been a rich tapestry. Although its members share an overarching goal—ending abortion—they have disagreed on tactics and approach. Some groups—including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Americans United for Life (AUL), and the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC)—have prioritized legal and political strategies; others, including many Catholic organizations, have advocated more for funding the country’s 2,700 pregnancy centers or expanding the social safety net. But there was always a power hierarchy among these groups. “If you were wondering where the bills came from, the lawsuits, it was obvious: A handful of national groups dictated everything,” Ziegler said. The NRLC and AUL organized the troops and drafted model legislation. They planned judicial strategy and pushed court cases forward.
In the post-Roe world, those groups are less powerful and less relevant. The central players now are the thousands of state-level politicians, local leaders, and grassroots activists who are writing and passing legislation, often independent of those once-dominant national groups.
[From the May 2022 issue: The future of abortion in a post-Roe America]
The influence of the national groups has been waning since even before the fall of Roe. A Texas pastor and a former state solicitor general, for example, came up with Texas’s 2021 S.B. 8, which banned abortion once a fetal heartbeat was detectable (typically after six weeks) and authorized private citizens to sue abortion providers. The two men did so without much input from any national group, according to the experts I spoke with. Abortion restrictions in Alabama and Georgia, which passed in 2019 and went into effect in 2022, were drafted by different state activists and leaders and contain starkly different language, showing little influence from national groups.
The national anti-abortion movement clearly wasn’t ready for this flurry of activity. But it could have been better prepared, Daniel K. Williams, a history professor at the University of West Georgia, told me. When Amy Coney Barrett was nominated to the Court, or even as soon as Trump was elected president, national organizations could have put forward a single model law for lawmakers, and uniform guidance for health-care providers and hospitals. Instead, America ended up with a chaotic patchwork of abortion restrictions—a mixture of newly written trigger laws and dusty legislation from the late 19th century. Some of these new policies are vague or fail to address health complications such as miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy. They propose varying consequences for abortion providers and different mechanisms for enforcement.
In November, the AUL released its American Life Initiative and its model legislation, the Ready for Life Act, which bans abortion after conception and includes a life-of-the-mother exception, as well as clarifications regarding miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy. But it came five months after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning Roe. That groups were drafting these guidelines “months after Dobbs and not experiencing any uniformity in state legislatures is a sign of how decentralized and swift-moving all of this has been,” Williams said.
Clarke Forsythe, the senior counsel for AUL, defends his organization’s strategy: “We needed time to analyze Dobbs and its impact and implications and needed time to put the package together,” he told me. “It’s a long-term initiative and a long-term vision. There was no need to get it out before the election.”
Abortion opponents insist that a state-level free-for-all could turn out to be helpful for the movement. With more people involved and working toward different initiatives, the argument goes, activists might come up with innovative ideas and policy proposals. Democracy, by nature, is messy. “It’s good for the country and good for our politics to decentralize the issue,” Forsythe told me. “The Court sent it back to the local level, where public policy can be better aligned with public opinion, where the people responsible for it are responsive to people at the local level.” Decentralization is the movement’s strength, Lila Rose, the president of the national anti-abortion group Live Action, told me. “It requires a diverse and multifaceted approach. It’s not strategic conflict so much as strategic differences.”
This particular moment gives anti-abortion activists a chance to think creatively and to forge new alliances, some in the movement argue. Now that Roe is gone, do they need to keep up their ties with the GOP? “I would like to see the movement disentangle itself from particular political parties,” Erika Bachiochi, an anti-abortion writer and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, told me. Maybe, she added, there’s room for a return of the “old pro-life Democrat.”
But an unintended consequence of overturning Roe could be that the movement has inadvertently pushed its highest objective—ending legal abortion—further out of reach. “On the one hand, when there’s a free-for-all, ideas that may never have been given the time of day can emerge and work,” Ziegler said. “On the other, you can have bills that are damaging nationally get passed.” Texas’s S.B. 8—the Texas Heartbeat Act—frustrated some movement leaders because it empowered individual citizens to sue, which meant that those individuals would control the narrative, Ziegler said. Others worry about the vocal “abortion abolition” groups, which have been calling for women who obtain abortions to be punished.
These days, Ziegler says, “there’s no single voice in the movement to say, ‘No, that’s not what we stand for.’” A few extremists, in other words, could damage the movement’s reputation—and interfere with its ultimate goal.
Before Dobbs, anti-abortion advocates seemed confident that once a handful of states banned abortion, many more would follow—that they could build a “culture of life” in America that would put the country on a righteous path. In some ways, the opposite has occurred. As a few states put limits on abortion rights, others, such as Vermont, California, and Michigan, have reacted by enshrining those rights into state law. Meanwhile, voters in red states including Kansas, Montana, and Kentucky rejected attempts to restrict abortion. Former President Donald Trump—the man whose nomination of three Supreme Court justices led directly to the overturning of Roe—has gone so far as to blame Republicans’ disappointing midterm performance on the anti-abortion movement. (In response, Rose called his comments “sniveling cowardice.”)
Nationally, the movement’s relationship with the Republican Party is troubled. Last fall, when Senator Lindsey Graham proposed legislation restricting abortions after 15 weeks, only a handful of his Republican colleagues were publicly supportive. "Most of the members of my conference prefer that this be dealt with at the state level," Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters at the time.
[David Frum: Roe is the new prohibition]
Even in the new Congress, where Republicans have a House majority, one of the first pieces of legislation passed in the lower chamber was the so-called Born Alive bill, which would require health-care providers to treat babies in the vanishingly rare cases of failed abortions. Here was a chance for Republicans to pass a bill restricting abortion after 15 weeks or even six, in a show of support to the movement that they purport to champion. But they didn’t. Republicans in Congress are “afraid to do anything on this issue that’s meaningful” for fear of the political consequences, Ziegler says.
Anti-abortion leaders like Rose believe that they’re being unfairly blamed for these recent Republican losses and missed opportunities. They argue that in the midterms the GOP chose candidates who were insufficiently anti-abortion, or simply problematic, such as Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker. But there was also a communication issue, they say. Candidates weren’t outspoken enough about abortion; they should have talked more about the Democrats’ support for abortion at late gestational ages, and their plan to codify abortion rights into law. “That’s where the real problem was” in the midterms, Marilyn Musgrave, the vice president of government affairs for Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me. “Republicans weren’t pointing out the extremism on the other side.”
It’s true that some Republicans campaigned successfully on abortion restrictions last year, including GOP Governors Ron DeSantis of Florida, Kay Ivey of Alabama, Brian Kemp of Georgia, and Greg Abbott of Texas, each of whom won reelection by a substantial margin. Still, the recent state referenda and post-Dobbs polling suggest that the anti-abortion movement is too optimistic about the level of support for their goals.
“We’ve clearly lost the narrative,” Charlie Camosy, an ethics professor at Creighton University School of Medicine and a columnist for the Religion News Service, told me. Activists like Camosy hope that the movement’s new emphasis will be a grassroots effort to educate Americans and persuade them to oppose abortion. Camosy isn’t attending the March for Life tomorrow; instead, he’s giving a speech at a Catholic seminar in Freehold, New Jersey, where he lives. “Something is wrong in our ability to communicate what’s at stake,” he said of the broader movement. “Focusing on the national level distracts from getting Michigan or Montana or Kentucky or Kansas right.”
But eventually, Camosy’s movement will have to face the reality of abortion in America: Some states just aren’t going to budge. “Fewer than 50 percent of states are likely to meaningfully curtail abortion,” Williams estimates. Even if the movement gains ground in some states, “that’s likely only to harden the resistance in more strongly pro-choice states.” Which means that, rather than a growing national consensus on abortion, Americans probably can expect more polarization—a cultural standoff.
Tomorrow’s March for Life will be the first time activists have held a major national gathering since Roe was overturned in June. But it will probably be a much smaller event than before. Some activists have wondered whether it should happen at all. More states and cities will be hosting their own rallies, because that’s where the next round of work needs to be done. And many people will be at those local marches instead—to start, or maybe to double down, on their difficult project of creating a “culture of life.”
This story seems to be about:
Last May, when it became clear that Ferdinand Marcos Jr. would ascend to the presidency of the Philippines, Maria Ressa, the Nobel laureate (and Atlantic contributing writer) who has become legendary in her fight for freedom of the press and democracy, was despondent. “This is how it ends, I said to myself that evening,” Ressa wrote in her book How to Stand Up to a Dictator. “You can’t have integrity of elections if you don’t have integrity of facts. Facts lost. History lost. Marcos won.”
Marcos’s win represented a decisive victory for authoritarianism in the Philippines. The new president is the son and namesake of the dictator and kleptocrat Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. His victory also represented a direct threat to Ressa. Marcos’s supporters are among those who, like his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, have targeted and harassed both Ressa and Rappler, the Manila-based news organization she co-founded and runs.
This week, however, Ressa is celebrating an unexpected victory of her own. A Philippine court acquitted her, and Rappler, of four charges of tax evasion—charges drummed up in “a brazen abuse of power” that was intended “to stop journalists from doing their jobs,” she told reporters who had gathered outside the courthouse after her acquittal. The charges would have carried a maximum prison sentence of 34 years if she were convicted. “Of course it was emotional,” she said, her voice breaking repeatedly. “Today, facts win. Truth wins. Justice wins.” When I spoke with Ressa shortly after the verdict, she told me she was feeling “triumphant.” Also: very tired.
Her fight is nowhere near over. Before her acquittal, Ressa had 10 criminal charges against her, all brought under the former presidential administration in quick succession, prompted by Rappler’s aggressive coverage of the administration’s corruption during the country’s drug wars. “We kind of live in this uncertainty,” she said, referring to the remaining pending cases, which include another charge of tax evasion and her appeal of a cyberlibel conviction. (That conviction stems from a publishing decision that Rappler made before the cyberlibel law even existed.) But in some ways, she told me, “we’ve been through the worst already. We survived six years of Rodrigo Duterte and we did our job.”
Ressa’s steadfastness and devotion to that story, despite Duterte’s attempts to silence her, helped earn her the Nobel Prize in 2021. Several journalists who have spoken out against government corruption have been murdered in the Philippines, including 23 under the Duterte administration and two since Marcos took office last year. In September, the radio journalist Renato Blanco was fatally stabbed. In October, the broadcast journalist Percival Mabasa was shot dead in what police claim was a hit ordered by the country’s prisons chief.
Now, Ressa says, she wants to focus all her energy on “2024, which is, I believe, the tipping point for democracy globally. As of now, 60 percent of the world is living under autocracy. We’ve rolled back to 1989.” By that, she meant that the level of democracy experienced by the average person around the world has reverted to 1989 levels. The number of liberal democracies was down to 34 in 2021, the lowest it has been since 1995. Closed autocracies are on the rise. Thirty-five states now suffer from major deteriorations in freedom of expression at the hands of governments, compared with only five a decade ago. The situation is particularly bad in the Asia Pacific, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, according to a report last year by the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden.
For Ressa, today’s democratic backsliding calls to mind September 1972, when the elder Marcos declared martial law, citing a national crisis of communism and crime, and promised to build what he called “the New Society” while retaining for himself virtually unlimited presidential powers. Marcos oversaw the torture, kidnapping, and extrajudicial executions of tens of thousands of citizens. At least 50,000 people—many of them human-rights activists, journalists, labor leaders, and church workers—were arrested and detained from 1972 to 1975 alone, according to Amnesty International.
During this tumultuous time in the Philippines, Ressa was in the third grade. She had just moved from Manila to New Jersey. She was not thinking primarily about martial law. She was trying to figure out what a pajama party was.
It’s a party where everyone wears pajamas, her mother told her. But when she showed up to her friend Sharon’s house dressed for bed, she saw that none of the other girls was in pajamas. “I turned in panic to my mom, who sheepishly admitted she didn’t really know what a ‘pajama party’ was, either,” Ressa wrote in her autobiography. Ressa remembers how her friend shrugged it off and quickly helped her inside the house to change. Her lesson from that day: “When you take a risk, you have to trust that someone will come to your aid; and when it’s your turn, you will help someone else. It’s better to face your fear than to run from it because running won’t make the problem go away. When you face it, you have the chance to conquer it. That was how I began to define courage.”
Few people have had their courage tested the way Ressa has in recent years. For now, she has a to-do list with three very big priorities on it: (1) avoid prison, (2) fix the internet, and (3) save democracy. “If we don’t put any guardrails—significant guardrails—around technology, we’re jumping off the cliff,” she told me. “What’s at stake is the future of journalism and the survival of democracy.”
Ressa co-founded Rappler in 2012, in part because she could see the immense potential of the web—and she was drawn to the idea of harnessing people’s snap emotional reactions for good. People like to think of the web as a marketplace of ideas, but Ressa understood early on that its current architecture makes it first and foremost a marketplace of feelings. So while sites like Facebook built algorithms that invisibly rewarded and prioritized posts that elicited anger, Rappler gave its readers a mood map, crowdsourcing reactions to articles and sharing the findings openly. “If you actually go through the exercise of identifying how you feel, you’re more prone to be rational,” she told me at the time. “If you can identify how you feel, will you be more receptive to the debate that’s in front of you? I hope.”
Ressa built Rappler in a far sunnier era of web history, when people were still celebrating the Arab Spring as a success for democracy, and the big social platforms seemed like they had the potential to be forces for good. Today she puts it starkly: “Social media prioritizes the spread of lies over facts,” she told me. “Our information ecosystem, it’s corrupted right now. If your information ecosystem is corrupted, then that leads to the corruption of your institutions. And when you don’t have working institutions, you don’t have checks and balances. We’re electing illiberal leaders democratically, and they’re corrupting the institutions from within. And when the institutions are corrupted, when that happens, you lose your freedom.”
Yet despite horrific targeted harassment, death threats, and attempts by some of the most powerful men in the world to silence her, Ressa has been relentless in her belief that it does not have to be this way. She believes that global democratic decline is a temporary condition; that authoritarianism will be beaten back; that the people and the press can be free; that tyranny will be stopped. She believes all of this because, for one thing, she is basically the Energizer Bunny of Nobel Peace Prize winners, and also because she knows that any other outcome would be intolerable. “Compared to others in hiding, in exile, or in jail, I am lucky,” she wrote in her latest book. “The only defense a journalist has is to shine the light on the truth, to expose the lie—and I can still do that.”
Ressa has watched in real time as government operatives have attacked her and her news organization, attempted to discredit her and destroy her livelihood, and charged her with numerous crimes to frighten her into submission. You can see why Ressa has argued that we ought to treat this technocultural moment not as a beginning but as an ending—as the aftermath of a war. She argues for the creation of NATO-like partnerships and a new Declaration of Human Rights to protect democratic values in the age of the social web. The outcome she is after may not come to pass. The solutions she poses may not be exactly right. But what she is fighting for is most certainly worth the risk.
This story seems to be about: