Restore abortion rights in America

Inside the $100 million plan to restore abortion rights in America

Leaders of the coalition say they want to make the procedure more accessible and affordable than ever before.

By Alice Miranda Ollstein

A new coalition of abortion-rights groups is marking the second anniversary of the fall of Roe v. Wade with a pledge to spend $100 million to restore federal protections for the procedure and make it more accessible than ever before.

In plans shared first with POLITICO, groups including Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and Reproductive Freedom for All are banding together to form Abortion Access Now — a national, 10-year campaign that will both prepare policies for the next time Democrats control the House, Senate and White House, and build support for those policies among lawmakers and the public. At a private event Monday evening in Washington, they will pitch a group of influential progressives on going on offense at a time when abortion is outlawed in a third of the country.

“Dobbs was a really devastating outcome, but we’re going to win back our rights much faster than they think,” Mini Timmaraju, the president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in an interview. “We’re not going to let the anti-abortion extremists define this moment. We’re coming for them and we’re going to make sure that they become increasingly irrelevant.”

The coalition, which also includes the Center for Reproductive Rights, In Our Own Voice, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum and the National Women’s Law Center, plans to push for the most sweeping federal protections possible — laws that make abortion not just legal but easily accessible and affordable. But its effort to project a unified battle plan comes amid deep divisions within the left about the best way to restore abortion access. Some abortion rights supporters, including President Joe Biden, are calling for a revival of Roe, which protected abortion only up to the point of fetal viability. Others argue that Roe failed to ensure meaningful abortion access for many people during the roughly 50 years it was the law of the land, and are calling for national protections that go further.

Abortion bans by trimester

The $100-million investment also comes as abortion rights groups have already outspent their anti-abortion counterparts in virtually every ballot initiative fight since the fall of Roe. And while some deep-pocketed groups on the right, including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, are pouring tens of millions into electing anti-abortion candidates and defeating proposed state constitutional amendments, the Abortion Access Now campaign is likely to fuel the perception among conservatives that they are the underdog in the fight.

“It feels like we’re David and they’re Goliath,” said Kristi Hamrick, chief policy strategist for Students for Life of America, which recently launched a modest six-figure messaging campaign in states with abortion ballot initiatives, as well as a digital billboard in Times Square featuring the stories of people conceived by rape. “There’s a glut of spending to sell all abortion and someone has to tell the other side of the story.”

As Democrats from Biden down the ticket center abortion in their 2024 campaigns, and as many as a dozen states prepare to vote on access to the procedure in November, Abortion Access Now is not yet endorsing any particular bill or policy, and its members stress the need to adapt to whatever court rulings or election results come their way. Still, the nine core organizations and dozen supporting groups in the alliance have an initial game plan as they start lobbying elected officials, organizing volunteers and holding events in Arizona, Delaware, Georgia, Michigan, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

“We are operating with a really big vision, but we’re also living in the world of the possible,” said Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity. “Our goal, really, is to galvanize what is currently a national outrage over abortion bans into action — into a mass movement.”

Abortion opponents have made public specific policy levers they want pulled to limit abortion if Donald Trump returns to the White House, such as enforcement of the Comstock Act to prohibit the mailing of any drug or medical device used for terminating a pregnancy. Abortion Access Now is, instead, pushing the broad goal of “ensuring a federal right to abortion, making it legal again, and securing access to abortion care in every state” — with details to come down the road.

“We’re not going to let them out-prepare us,” Inez McGuire said of anti-abortion activists.

Fights over whether to push for a restoration of Roe or something more expansive are largely happening at the state level, roiling efforts to restore abortion access via ballot initiative. But some activists are concerned the disagreements will also plague the new federal push.

When Pamela Merritt, executive director of Medical Students for Choice, received word of the launch of Abortion Access Now, she said she “immediately was worried that it would be Roe 2.0.”

“People need to understand that there is not agreement on reinstating a very flawed framework when we have the opportunity to build something that people actually need,” said Merritt, whose group was not invited to be a part of the coalition. “I will never understand leading with compromise, because that’s a sign of weakness that we should not be showing.”

Merritt noted that even under Roe, states imposed restrictions like waiting periods. Some banned taxpayer funding or prohibited the procedure later in pregnancy.

Haydee Morales, interim president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, agreed, adding that unless the coalition is willing to “explicitly affirm the right to abortion without limitations,” they’ll be choosing to “uphold the Roe framework on the backs of Black, Indigenous, other people of color, and all marginalized communities.”

The leaders of Abortion Access Now stress that the coalition is thinking bigger than “Roe 2.0,” and will call, for example, for scrapping the decades-old prohibition on federal funding for abortion.

“We are pushing for something beyond Roe and thinking about what it means to really rebuild infrastructure around abortion care and maternal care in the United States,” said Sabrina Talukder, director of the Women’s Initiative at the Center for American Progress and a member of the coalition’s steering committee. “This is not just about the bare minimum of ensuring that, regardless of who’s in power, Roe is restored. It is about reframing what reproductive care looks like for every American in the United States through a variety of policy mechanisms.”

Trump and many Republican lawmakers argue that abortion should be left to the states in the wake of the Supreme Court striking down Roe in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. But many anti-abortion groups, as well as close Trump allies who drafted a “Project 2025” policy manifesto to guide Trump if he wins, are still pushing for federal restrictions, with the ultimate goal of a national abortion ban.

Then vs. Now: Trump's shifting abortion stance

“We must fight against what I call the ‘great departure’ of so many elected officials, who after the Roe decision suddenly didn’t want to play a role anymore in the effort to limit abortion,” Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), the leader of the hard-line Freedom Caucus, said in a recent press conference. “Some of those who voted to restrict abortion when the Roe decision was in place became hyper-federalists saying, ‘Oh, we no longer have a federal role, a congressional role. It’s been given back to the states.’ That is not an accurate reading of the Dobbs decision.”

Though they’re pursuing a diametrically opposed goal, the leaders of Abortion Access Now agree that abortion rights must be a federal as well as a state-by-state fight — particularly because many states don’t allow the kind of citizen-led ballot initiatives that have protected or restored access in Michigan, Ohio and other battlegrounds over the past two years.

“Patients and providers should not be divided into states that are free and states that aren’t right,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of American and Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “The only way to secure equal equality is to fight for federal protections.”