From the Magazine
November 2022 Issue

“In the End We Will Win”: The Faces of the Fight for Abortion Rights

The Supreme Court’s decision to end federal protections for abortion access didn’t just rewind the clock 50 years, it opened a Pandora’s box of confusing, potentially life-threatening legal complications. VF talks with five women on the front lines.
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EYE OF THE STORM Caitlin Bernard, MD, who provided abortion care to a 10-year-old rape victim, in Indianapolis.PHOTOGRAPH BY DIANA MARKOSIAN

CAITLIN BERNARD, MD

Physician, Indiana

Tattooed on Caitlin Bernard’s left foot is the image of a coat hanger and the words “Trust Women.” The 38-year-old Indiana-based ob-gyn got it years ago; it was intended as a reminder of life before Roe v. Wade. Bernard has long paired her medical career with advocacy. She was a plaintiff in an unsuccessful 2019 American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit to reverse Indiana’s near-total ban on second-trimester abortions. Post-Roe, Indiana became the first state to pass an abortion ban. Now, Bernard is girding for another legal fight—this time against Republican Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita, who she says maligned her practice as Bernard became a lightning rod in one of the most publicized cases after the Dobbs decision stripped federal abortion protections and turned the country into a patchwork of disparate laws.

Bernard is the doctor who gave a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio an abortion and spoke to The Indianapolis Star about the devastating case. Overnight, Bernard was forced into a glaring spotlight, a martyr to one side and a villain to the other. “It was very scary, not knowing exactly what was going to happen; not knowing if this was going to impact my ability to continue working where I work; my ability to continue seeing patients,” she says. “And certainly I was scared for my personal safety, for the safety of my family.”

For weeks, conservative politicians and members of even mainstream media sowed doubt that such a victim even existed. On national television, Ohio attorney general David Yost said his office hadn’t heard a “whisper” about the case. The Washington Post turned a suspicious “fact checker” on the story. Then The Columbus Dispatch reported that 27-year-old Gerson Fuentes confessed to police that he raped the girl on at least two occasions. As the truth sank in where it hadn’t before, ire shifted to Bernard. Rokita opened an investigation, claiming the doctor had failed to report that abortion and others to the state (official records show otherwise). Bernard cried defamation.

“The amount of work that we have to put in for each individual patient to be able to get the care that they need is really tremendous,” Bernard, who previously worked in Missouri before joining Indiana University, says. “That’s what people in all of these abortion-restrictive states face—a mountain of hurdles just to try to get basic health care for their patients.”

Even as she has faced threats—she had to hire security—more than fear, Bernard feels exhaustion. “We’re already having such a difficult time trying as hard as we can to take care of as many patients as we can,” she says of both working in Indiana and in Missouri. “It really solidified my understanding of how important it was to have providers in those states, and not just providers of abortion access, but also providers of whole reproductive health,” she says. “People sometimes ask, why do we become advocates; why is advocacy part of our job? And the reality is that we would all prefer to just be able to take care of our patients,” she says. “That’s why we became physicians.” —AT

FATIMA GOSS GRAVES

National Women’s Law Center president, Washington, DC

“It was shocking to see those words on paper,” Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, says of the Dobbs decision. She sees the country grappling not just with a public health crisis but a legal one too. “The deep reliance on the norms of 1865, a time where women in this country were not allowed to vote, weren’t allowed to own property, weren’t allowed to even practice law—those were the norms that had to guide a decision in 2022.”

Goss Graves, a longtime gender justice advocate and cofounder of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, took over the NWLC in 2017. A graduate of Yale Law School, Goss Graves, 46, cut her teeth clerking for Judge Diane Wood of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and as a litigator before establishing herself as one of the foremost voices on women’s and gender issues. Though she’s been sounding the alarm for years, the fall of Roe hit Goss Graves hard. “I, on the day of the Dobbs decision, found myself feeling like I had been punched in the gut,” she says. “I knew how many people were terrified for themselves. And I know how deeply personal abortion is—whether people tell their abortion stories or not. Everyone has one.”

Goss Graves operates alongside DC power brokers and often testifies before Congress and federal agencies. In the aftermath of Dobbs, her organization has worked closely with the Biden administration, which was criticized for appearing flat-footed in its response to the highly anticipated ruling. Among the NWLC’s recommendations was for the Department of Health and Human Services to issue guidance to physicians on providing abortion care in emergency cases, which was adopted in July. “We will continue our advocacy for a focused effort both publicly and quietly, including toward the White House and, importantly, across agencies,” she says.

The path forward is unclear, Goss Graves says, but the goal is to amend the Constitution to enshrine the protections Roe had provided. “Our ultimate North Star is that abortion should be available and accessible to all who want it,” Goss Graves says, whether that means deploying an existing network of lawyers to give legal advice to health care providers and individuals, or educating businesses on their powers. A critical piece of the puzzle, Goss Graves explains, is working to destigmatize abortion—“turning it into something shameful has been a successful tactic by those who want to continue to oppress,” she says. She’s also looking ahead to future battles, like the right to contraception.

“I have been, in these last few months, watching our legal system absorb this shock on top of the individuals,” Goss Graves says. “And lawyers like certainty, right? When you’re in the business of building your advice on past practice and precedent, you like certainty. And so we’re also in this situation where our very foundations that have undergirded the rule of law, that have sort of allowed us to feel very stable around the advice we give around what the parameters are, all of that also feels fragile and not secure.”

“What I know is that in the end we will win. And so the question is just gonna be, you know, what is the timetable? When does it happen?” —AT

KATHRYN KOLBERT

Retired reproductive rights attorney, Pennsylvania

The scene outside the Supreme Court was chaotic as media crews, reporters, and activists awaited a landmark decision. Kathryn Kolbert, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who had argued the case on behalf of abortion providers and clinics, was bracing for the worst. But in a shocking turn, three justices appointed by Republican presidents—Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, and David Souter—tipped the scales in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. It was June 29, 1992. Roe v. Wade stood.

The only inclination Kolbert had received that perhaps she might prevail came from one of the opposing counsel, Kenneth Starr. As Kolbert recalls it, he said, “The Court of Appeals has been vindicated”—a hint that he had “obviously seen the opinion and it wasn’t as I expected.” But it was significant. “The reality is we still had legal abortion for 30 years as a result of Casey,” she says.

MARCH OF TIME Retired attorney Kathryn “Kitty” Kolbert, who cofounded the Center for Reproductive Rights, in Portland, Oregon.PHOTOGRAPH BY DRU DONOVAN

Kolbert, 70, grew up in Michigan and attended Cornell University before getting her law degree from Temple University. She was recruited to work as a staff attorney at the Women’s Law Project in 1979. Her first day on the job, she was sent to the Philadelphia City Council to try to defeat an antiabortion bill on behalf of abortion providers in the state. She was successful. In her career she’s argued on behalf of abortion providers in front of the Supreme Court twice. “It’s so personal,” she says, explaining why she chose a career fighting to protect access to abortion. “Everybody has a story. ‘My mom had an abortion,’ ‘my aunt had an abortion,’ ‘my daughter had an abortion.’ ‘I had a problem with a pregnancy.’ Everybody’s story is a deep thing.”

She added: “As a lesbian with a partner, now wife, two children, and now four grandchildren, I always cared deeply about reproductive freedom and the ability of all people to freely decide whether, when, how, and with whom to have children.”

In 1992, Kolbert and a number of her colleagues from the ACLU cofounded the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, now known as the Center for Reproductive Rights—a global legal advocacy organization. From 1992 to 1997, Kolbert headed the legal and policy teams, during which time the organization won two landmark cases in Alaska and Minnesota, strengthening abortion protections at the state level.

Now retired, she has continued to speak publicly about the end of Roe, discussing with lawyers and activists across the country how to navigate the new landscape. Last year, Kolbert and Julie F. Kay, a women’s rights attorney and activist, cowrote the book on it: Controlling Women: What We Must Do Now to Save Reproductive Freedom. After a career of fighting these battles in the judicial system, she’s had a change of heart. “I learned from Casey and Dobbs that it is dangerous and foolish to depend solely on the courts to protect our reproductive freedoms,” she says. “The most effective safeguard is to maintain political power in all branches of government, particularly state legislatures and Congress.”

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Kolbert had steeled herself all over again for the fall of Roe. But she says today’s court is far different; Kolbert wasn’t prepared for the Dobbs ruling to be littered with what she has characterized as “radical” language. The Dobbs ruling created “a road map on taking away other rights that are based on substantive due process,” she says. “It’s just striking in its breadth.… It also uses the language of the antiabortion movement in a way that really confirms the partisan nature of the decision.”

Ultimately, in her view, the Constitution must be amended—an effort that has stalled at the federal level, with Republicans standing in staunch opposition and Democrats unable to overcome the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold on their own. “It took our opponents 50 years to overturn Roe. And it may take us nearly that long to win back the legal protections we had that Roe gave us, in their full sense…that’s a long, long fight,” she says. “What do we ultimately need in the shorter term?… We need to win that political power in the states and in Congress. And the only way to do that is hard work. It’s not just one election. It is every election, every year.” —AT

CECE CARUSO

Organizing manager, Plan C, Nevada

About twice a month, Caitlyn “Cece” Caruso logs in for a Zoom call from a bright Las Vegas workspace and gets face-to-face with a new batch of volunteers ready to be trained. In the calls, Caruso walks a couple dozen recruits through the basics of self-managed abortion while weaving a broader story about the reproductive justice movement and the way a generation of young activists are looking to understand the mistakes that led to the erosion of abortion rights. After the Dobbs draft decision leaked in May, the sessions grew larger and larger, and within three months, Caruso says, they had trained more than 1,500 people.

Caruso, 25, is the digital organizing manager for Plan C, a political advocacy group that runs a website with up-to-date and accessible information about medical abortions. Its name is a play on Plan B, the brand name for a common form of emergency contraception. But “Plan C”—the abortion pills—works even after an embryo has implanted.

Caruso’s interest in policy and progressive advocacy was informed by a series of childhood experiences. They were in and out of homelessness in New York City until age 10, when their mom moved the family to Nevada. In middle school they wanted to start a gay-straight alliance, and their principal blocked the effort. “I have a problem with authority, and I wouldn’t take no for an answer,” they say. “I never stopped organizing after that.” In college, at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Caruso learned the history of reproductive justice and movement building. But their passion comes from a few personal early lessons.

“My mom always told me, ‘I had you and your sister, I put up a child for adoption, and I had an abortion, and all three were difficult in their own way, and in all three I deserved and needed support,’ ” Caruso says. “That’s how I found myself in the reproductive justice movement. This movement has the opportunity and the potential to really create the world that my mom deserves.”

Caruso’s work at Plan C illustrates how much has changed since the antiabortion movement first agitated against medical abortions, long before the drug reached the American market. Mifepristone was initially publicized as RU-486, a science-fiction-sounding name assigned by the scientists who synthesized it in the 1980s, and early media discussions foregrounded factual uncertainty about its safety. But after a concerted effort by a handful of abortion proponents, the FDA approved the combination of misoprostol and mifepristone in 2000. Since then, medical abortions have been prescribed to millions of patients and have accounted for 54 percent of the nation’s total. Understanding the shifting landscape, antiabortion groups are renewing their attacks on the drug in the Dobbs era with a rehashing of old rhetoric—along with creative laws targeting telemedicine prescriptions.

“Unfortunately, we’re seeing this great push toward self-managed abortion because many people aren’t going to have other options,” Caruso says. But Plan C’s mission is as ideological as it is practical. Caruso’s training teaches abortion supporters how to spread the message that self-managed abortions can be done safely and discreetly, in the hope that the notion of the dangerous “back-alley” abortion can remain in the past. Caruso’s work also emphasizes intersectionality and gender inclusivity, they say, to make sure “that people know the legacy of the movement that we’re working within so that we don’t necessarily risk repeating the mistakes of the past.” —EV

MARVA SADLER

Senior director of clinical services, Whole Woman’s Health, Texas

When Marva Sadler first began working in reproductive healthcare, she didn’t exactly understand the controversy she was diving into. “I walked into my first day of work absolutely floored that there were protesters outside of the clinic and by what they were saying. I could not believe that,” she explained recently. Her upbringing in Waco, Texas, led her to see abortion as necessary but not a topic of polite conversation. “In a house with my mother and my grandmother and my two sisters, so a house full of women where it was just—we didn’t talk about abortion. If you needed it, and that’s what you wanted to do, you went and did that.”

There’s no more time for subtlety, says Sadler. “I’d like to think, in a perfect world, that there are people who could agree to disagree, but it’s not enough to do that at this point,” she says. “My human rights need to be protected. My daughter’s human rights need to be protected. My granddaughters, my future great-great-granddaughters—their rights should be protected.”

FORGING A PATH Marva Sadler, senior director of clinical services of Whole Woman’s Health, in San Antonio.PHOTOGRAPH BY DIANA MARKOSIAN

Whole Woman’s Health has given its name to two major Supreme Court cases; Sadler is the senior director of clinical services for the entire organization. She took the job in 2008 after three years working at other clinics and has been immersed in the group’s political project ever since. A major facet of the job is addressing racial disparities in maternal mortality and the inequities that women in poverty face.

When Texas passed Senate Bill 8 in May 2021, the state banned abortion at approximately six weeks and made bounty hunters out of citizens, who are authorized to sue anyone who helps provide an abortion—a doctor, a driver, someone who donates funds—and collect $10,000 or more if successful. Last spring, Sadler, alongside former gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis and two other advocates, became a plaintiff in a suit that challenged aspects of that law.

Rupali Sharma, lead counsel on the case, Davis et al. v. Sharp, says the law runs afoul of Texans’ rights even without federal abortion protections. “You can’t—without any connection to an incident, without any connection to someone—haul them into court and then get potentially hundreds and thousands of dollars,” she says.

For Sadler, the vitriol that some in her state have lobbed at her colleagues made her participation in the suit imperative. “My husband asks me the same thing probably every day at this point: What made me decide to get involved in that?” she says. “It was time to step out into a different realm, to be a part of saying, ‘Enough.’ ” —EV

OPPOSING FORCE: CATHERINE GLENN FOSTER

President, Americans United for Life, Washington, DC

In a July hearing about a post-Roe America in front of the House Judiciary Committee, Catherine Glenn Foster left California representative Eric Swalwell confused. Foster, a lawyer and the chief executive of Americans United for Life, had just said that a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio forced to travel across state lines for an abortion—the subject of a widespread news report—had technically not gotten an abortion.

“Wait,” said Swalwell. “It would not be an abortion if a 10-year-old, with her parents, made a decision not to have a baby that was the result of a rape?” Foster responded coolly and assuredly. “If a 10-year-old became pregnant as a result of rape, and it was threatening her life, then that’s not an abortion,” she said. “So it would not fall under any abortion restriction in our nation.”

Foster’s argument about the definition of abortion has become more commonplace in her movement, in an attempt to put intent ahead of physical procedure. Foster and her group rhetorically exempt an array of situations, such as an ectopic pregnancy or a case like the 10-year-old’s, from its legal definition of abortion. But the actual laws AUL advocates for are written in grayer terms. In Texas, such uncertainty around miscarriage and ectopic care has already led to increasing maternal morbidity.

When AUL announced Foster’s appointment in May 2017, board members praised both her legal mind and her willingness to tell her life story. In 2000, she accidentally became pregnant and went to an abortion clinic. She says she changed her mind as the procedure was about to begin and asked to leave. In interviews, often in Christian and Catholic news outlets, Foster goes on to describe a sadistic assault, in which the doctor called for nurses to hold her down as he aborted her pregnancy while she screamed. (In a 2019 interview with Foster, The Daily Caller noted, “Due to the traumatic nature of the incident, Foster said she cannot recall the qualifications of staff in the abortion clinic and the name of the doctor.”)

Founded in the years before Roe v. Wade, AUL quickly established itself as a major player in antiabortion legal strategy, pushing successfully for informed consent laws and other barriers to access. In the five years since Foster was named the head of AUL, she has become a frequent guest at congressional hearings about reproductive health and abortion at the behest of Republican lawmakers. In statements submitted to lawmakers ahead of time, she shows off finely tuned legal argumentation befitting someone trained at the Georgetown University Law Center. In the chair, she uses more extreme, visceral language.

Fetuses are “torn limb from limb,” she said during a May 2022 House Judiciary Committee hearing. “Bodies are thrown in medical waste bins and, in places like Washington, DC, burned to power the lights of the city’s homes and streets. Let that image sit with you for a moment. The next time you turn on the light, think of the incinerators.”

The fall of Roe appears to have expanded Foster’s and her group’s ambitions. “Our workload just tripled,” Foster told Catholic outlet Aleteia, boasting about how many state abortion restrictions her group has inspired. “And we’re going to be in those blue states. We have a blue state strategy, and we’re going to do everything we can to educate, to push back, to defend life.” —EV