For decades, the anti-abortion movement in the United States worked toward one major goal: the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that established a federal right to abortion. In 2022, it finally succeeded, and states across the country began banning abortion immediately. Today about half the states either ban or severely restrict abortion. But now the anti-abortion movement is regrouping around a new goal: using the federal government to ban abortion in the rest of the country.
Exactly how Trump could ban abortion
Whether the US bans it everywhere could be up to the next president.
Adam Freelander was the interim executive producer on the Vox video team.
If Republicans take control of Congress in the 2024 election, it’s possible they could pass a national abortion ban law. But experts don’t consider that the most likely way a national abortion ban could come about, for two reasons: polling shows it would be extremely unpopular, and it would require the elimination of the Senate filibuster. Instead, they point to a different branch of the federal government — the president’s office and all the federal agencies it oversees.
In the federal agencies, opponents of abortion could fashion a de facto abortion ban by chipping away at abortion access in numerous ways; for example, limiting access to medication abortion, which now constitutes nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US. The biggest way that the president’s office could limit abortion is by deciding to enforce something called the Comstock Act: a 150-year-old abortion ban made obsolete by Roe v. Wade but possibly revived by its repeal.
The final way the next president could determine the future of abortion rights is through federal court appointments. The anti-abortion movement’s “next Roe v. Wade” is the national legal recognition of fetal personhood, an idea that would by definition outlaw all abortion. The current Supreme Court isn’t yet right-wing enough to endorse this idea. But after another Trump term, that could change.
Watch the video above for the details of how this all could happen.
