Rosen: We must keep fighting for reproductive freedom in a post-Roe world

By Jacky Rosen

Sunday, Jan. 21, 2024 | 2 a.m.

Fifty-one years ago, the Supreme Court finally recognized that women in America had the constitutional right to make their own reproductive choices. This landmark decision meant that women would no longer have to risk their lives when seeking reproductive care.

Our world changed nearly two years ago when the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. This decision was the product of decades of national efforts from anti-choice politicians to turn back the clock on abortion rights, and the outcome has given Republican-controlled states the permission they needed to pass dangerous legislation taking away women’s access to health care.

This has opened the floodgates to restrictive abortion bans across our nation. Since Roe was overturned, more than 20 states in this country have started either enforcing total abortion bans or severely restricting abortion access in ways that previously would have been deemed unconstitutional.

These rigid and extreme abortion bans have led to devastating horror stories ­— like that of the 13-year-old girl in Mississippi who was raped and forced to give birth before she even started the seventh grade because of her state’s restrictive abortion ban. Or the gut-wrenching story of the 10-year-old girl from Ohio who was also raped and had to travel to Indiana to get an abortion because her state banned abortion access without exceptions.

And more recently, we’ve heard the story of Kate Cox, a working mom of three in Texas who learned that the baby girl she was carrying had a fatal condition. Doctors made clear that this pregnancy was not viable and that delivering the baby would endanger Kate’s life and ability to have children in the future. But Texas’s restrictive abortion ban forced Kate to flee her home state to get the lifesaving health care she desperately needed.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, such heartbreaking stories are becoming all too common. The horrific reality is that there will be more because anti-choice politicians have made it clear that they will stop at nothing until they pass a nationwide abortion ban.

The Dobbs decision has opened the door for attempts to go even further to restrict health care access. In fact, the Supreme Court will decide two cases this term related to women’s health care. One of the cases threatens to make it harder for hospitals to provide abortions in emergency situations when the life of the mother is at risk. The other case will decide the future of women’s access to the abortion pill, mifepristone, which has been used widely and safely for decades.

These two efforts at the Supreme Court cases are being led by anti-choice special interest groups who are determined to keep using every tool available to keep rolling back reproductive freedom. The results could further erode our freedom and make women’s access to health care even more difficult in dozens of states.

Nevada’s voters took decisive action in 1990 to ensure abortion rights are enshrined in state law, but the Supreme Court’s radical decision to overturn Roe has highlighted the urgent need to strengthen and modernize these state-level protections while guarding against federal action that could supersede our state’s pro-choice policies.

Now that Roe has been overturned, all it would take to undo Nevada’s reproductive freedom laws would be an anti-choice Congress passing a nationwide abortion ban. A group of Senate Republicans introduced federal legislation to ban abortion just last year — a plan to strip women in every state, including Nevada, of their right to control their own bodies.

We cannot give up any ground in the fight to protect a woman’s freedom to make these deeply personal and private decisions for herself. There is simply zero place for Washington politicians in this conversation.

That’s why I will continue fighting every day to restore and protect women’s reproductive rights. On this anniversary of the Roe decision, I’m as committed as ever to standing up for women’s reproductive freedom.

Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen represents Nevada in the U.S. Senate.