The Nation July 10/17, 2023

THE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO AN ABORTION OFFICIALLY ENDED ONE YEAR ago, on June 24, 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. But for many in the United States, the promises supposedly offered by Roe had never been kept. In 1970, three years before the Roe decision, the first nationwide abortion restriction took effect, preventing organizations that received federal grants under the newly created Title X family planning program, which provides affordable contraception and reproductive health care to people with low incomes, from using those funds for abortion services. And every year since 1976, Congress has attached the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of Medicaid funds for abortion, to the federal budget. State legislators, often backed by the Supreme Court, imposed so many obstacles on abortion care during…

ON JUNE 24, 2022, THE US SUPREME COURT TURNED one of the most intimate choices a person can make into a decision that will be imposed on millions of people by politicians. In some ways, the Dobbs ruling marked the culmination of a multi-decade campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade, but in other ways, it was just one more battle in a larger war, one that aims to take decisions about our bodies and our lives out of our hands. As The Nation looks back on the first year of the post-Roe era, we’ve asked our contributors and correspondents to reflect on the impact of Dobbs. To read the full article, please visit TheNation.com/dobbsforum. Elie Mystal, Nation justice correspondent: In most disaster movies, there is a scientist or a professor…

“Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practices Act, but what good will it do if profit-generated automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, Black and white? We want integrated public schools, but that means we also want federal aid to education—all forms of education.” —A. Philip Randolph,at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963 MY LAST COLUMN TRACED AN ALMOST FOR-gotten history: It emphasized that Black and other advocates of racial justice, through the first two decades or so after World War II, commonly assumed that winning and securing advances for Black Americans depended on the pursuit of universal social wage policies. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the character of what we understand as Black politics changed, to the extent that by the early…

BY THE CLOSE OF JUNE, THE SUPREME COURT WILL AL-most certainly end affirmative action in college admissions. For Edward Blum, who spearheaded the lawsuits against the University of North Carolina and Harvard—claiming the schools’ race-conscious policies admit unqualified Black and Hispanic students, while “intentionally discriminating” against deserving Asian American applicants—the verdict would fulfill a decades-long quest. In 1992, Blum, who is white, lost his only political run, failing to unseat the Black Democratic incumbent in a majority-Black Houston congressional district that had never elected a Republican. Blum sued Texas, citing racial gerrymandering, and eventually won the case in the US Supreme Court in 1996. By the late 1990s, he had quit his day job as a stockbroker to focus on overturning racial equality legislation. Since then, Blum has made a…

WHEN BRANDON JOHNSON, A UNION ORGANIZER, joined Karen Bass, a community organizer, as the second progressive elected as mayor of a big city in the past two years, it signaled that the Fox News fixation on crime and disorder in urban America didn’t translate to majority support for local law-and-order candidates. A decade of organizing—including high-profile contract negotiations and strikes—by revitalized teachers’ unions in Chicago and Los Angeles has educated the electorate about the true causes of each city’s challenges: privatization and tax breaks to corporations, real estate developers, and the rich, which have been steadily draining resources from public education, affordable housing, and key social services. How “crime and disorder”—a Trojan horse for racist messaging and divisive fearmongering—will play in the presidential election is yet to be seen. But…

How to Get Help Find an abortion clinic or a US-based telemedicine provider at AbortionFinder.org or INeedanA.com. If you live in a state where abortion is illegal and you can’t travel, your options include international telemedicine services, ordering pills yourself, or using mail forwarding. PlanCPills.org has options by state and vetted websites to buy pills. For questions about the legal risks of self-managing an abortion, call the Repro Legal Helpline at 844-868-2812. If you’re self-managing an abortion and have medical questions, call or text the M+A Hotline at 833-246-2632. Their website, mahotline.org, explains how to safely self-manage an abortion. If you need emotional support, call All-Options at 888-493-0092 or, for post-abortion support, text Exhale Pro-Voice at 617-749-2948. How to Help With abortion in crisis, you might automatically think of donating…