NAWL Joins Women Lawyers' Joint Statement on the Fourth Anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization

Women Lawyers On Guard Inc., the National Association of Women Lawyers, and the Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia issue this joint statement on the fourth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Before Dobbs, we co-led the amicus brief filed in the Supreme Court on behalf of women’s legal organizations, urging the Court to preserve nearly 50 years of settled precedent. That brief explained that women and their families, including women attorneys, have relied on the constitutional guarantee of autonomy over decisions affecting their lives, health, families, and futures. We warned that overturning those precedents would inflict immediate and lasting harm on the health, dignity, equality, and futures of all people who can become pregnant.1

Four years later, our warnings have proven correct. Dobbs stripped millions of people of a federal constitutional right, allowed states to intrude into the most intimate medical and family decisions, and created a perilous legal landscape in which basic rights depend on geography, income, and access to legal and medical resources. This is not abstract. It is a daily, preventable harm caused by laws designed to restrict and, in many cases, eliminate access to abortion care.

Across the country, abortion bans and restrictions have forced patients into medical emergencies, delayed or denied essential care, and deepened long-standing inequities for those with the fewest resources, including people of color, rural communities, young people, immigrants, and those already facing barriers to health care. In Texas, for example, reporting has documented women who died after emergency pregnancy or miscarriage care was delayed because doctors and hospitals feared that treatment could be viewed as a violation of the state’s abortion ban.

Dobbs has also created a two-tier system of rights in which access to essential health care depends on state lines: patients from Texas and other ban states must travel hundreds or thousands of miles, often at great personal cost, while protective states use shield laws and expanded services to preserve access in the face of escalating interstate conflict. Access to fundamental health care should not depend on a person’s ZIP code, income, age, race, or ability to navigate a hostile legal landscape.

The fight for access has now moved beyond state bans to nationwide attacks on medication abortion. Mifepristone, part of the most common medication abortion regimen, has been approved by the FDA for more than two decades and is used in a majority of abortions in the United States. Yet current litigation over mifepristone seeks to reimpose medically unnecessary limits on telehealth prescribing, pharmacy dispensing, and mailing—restrictions that might function as a national ban on practical access to medication abortion, even where abortion remains legal. So much for leaving abortion to the states.

The dissent by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan recognized what the majority rejected: “Respecting a woman as an autonomous being, and granting her full equality, meant giving her substantial choice over this most personal and most consequential of all life decisions.” On this anniversary, we renew our commitment to the work required to restore and protect reproductive freedom. We call on lawmakers, courts, bar leaders, and members of the legal profession to meet this moment with urgency, courage, and action. As women lawyers’ organizations, we will continue to use our voices, our expertise, and the power of the law to fight for reproductive health and justice.

[1] Read our brief here: https://reproductiverights.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Organizations-of-Women-Lawyers-Amicus-Brief.pdf.