abortion should not be legalized essay

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Abortion Should not Be Legalized

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Published: Jan 29, 2024

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Background information on abortion, ethical perspectives on abortion, medical perspectives on abortion, socio-economic implications of legalizing abortion, alternatives to abortion, counterarguments and rebuttals.

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Princeton Legal Journal

The First Amendment and the Abortion Rights Debate

Sofia Cipriano

Following Dobbs v. Jackson ’s (2022) reversal of Roe v. Wade (1973) — and the subsequent revocation of federal abortion protection — activists and scholars have begun to reconsider how to best ground abortion rights in the Constitution. In the past year, numerous Jewish rights groups have attempted to overturn state abortion bans by arguing that abortion rights are protected by various state constitutions’ free exercise clauses — and, by extension, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. While reframing the abortion rights debate as a question of religious freedom is undoubtedly strategic, the Free Exercise Clause is not the only place to locate abortion rights: the Establishment Clause also warrants further investigation. 

Roe anchored abortion rights in the right to privacy — an unenumerated right with a long history of legal recognition. In various cases spanning the past two centuries, t he Supreme Court located the right to privacy in the First, Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments . Roe classified abortion as a fundamental right protected by strict scrutiny, meaning that states could only regulate abortion in the face of a “compelling government interest” and must narrowly tailor legislation to that end. As such, Roe ’s trimester framework prevented states from placing burdens on abortion access in the first few months of pregnancy. After the fetus crosses the viability line — the point at which the fetus can survive outside the womb  — states could pass laws regulating abortion, as the Court found that   “the potentiality of human life”  constitutes a “compelling” interest. Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) later replaced strict scrutiny with the weaker “undue burden” standard, giving states greater leeway to restrict abortion access. Dobbs v. Jackson overturned both Roe and Casey , leaving abortion regulations up to individual states. 

While Roe constituted an essential step forward in terms of abortion rights, weaknesses in its argumentation made it more susceptible to attacks by skeptics of substantive due process. Roe argues that the unenumerated right to abortion is implied by the unenumerated right to privacy — a chain of logic which twice removes abortion rights from the Constitution’s language. Moreover, Roe’s trimester framework was unclear and flawed from the beginning, lacking substantial scientific rationale. As medicine becomes more and more advanced, the arbitrariness of the viability line has grown increasingly apparent.  

As abortion rights supporters have looked for alternative constitutional justifications for abortion rights, the First Amendment has become increasingly more visible. Certain religious groups — particularly Jewish groups — have argued that they have a right to abortion care. In Generation to Generation Inc v. Florida , a religious rights group argued that Florida’s abortion ban (HB 5) constituted a violation of the Florida State Constitution: “In Jewish law, abortion is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman, or for many other reasons not permitted under the Act. As such, the Act prohibits Jewish women from practicing their faith free of government intrusion and thus violates their privacy rights and religious freedom.” Similar cases have arisen in Indiana and Texas. Absent constitutional protection of abortion rights, the Christian religious majorities in many states may unjustly impose their moral and ethical code on other groups, implying an unconstitutional religious hierarchy. 

Cases like Generation to Generation Inc v. Florida may also trigger heightened scrutiny status in higher courts; The Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) places strict scrutiny on cases which “burden any aspect of religious observance or practice.”

But framing the issue as one of Free Exercise does not interact with major objections to abortion rights. Anti-abortion advocates contend that abortion is tantamount to murder. An anti-abortion advocate may argue that just as religious rituals involving human sacrifice are illegal, so abortion ought to be illegal. Anti-abortion advocates may be able to argue that abortion bans hold up against strict scrutiny since “preserving potential life” constitutes a “compelling interest.”

The question of when life begins—which is fundamentally a moral and religious question—is both essential to the abortion debate and often ignored by left-leaning activists. For select Christian advocacy groups (as well as other anti-abortion groups) who believe that life begins at conception, abortion bans are a deeply moral issue. Abortion bans which operate under the logic that abortion is murder essentially legislate a definition of when life begins, which is problematic from a First Amendment perspective; the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prevents the government from intervening in religious debates. While numerous legal thinkers have associated the abortion debate with the First Amendment, this argument has not been fully litigated. As an amicus brief filed in Dobbs by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Center for Inquiry, and American Atheists  points out, anti-abortion rhetoric is explicitly religious: “There is hardly a secular veil to the religious intent and positions of individuals, churches, and state actors in their attempts to limit access to abortion.” Justice Stevens located a similar issue with anti-abortion rhetoric in his concurring opinion in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989) , stating: “I am persuaded that the absence of any secular purpose for the legislative declarations that life begins at conception and that conception occurs at fertilization makes the relevant portion of the preamble invalid under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Federal Constitution.” Judges who justify their judicial decisions on abortion using similar rhetoric blur the line between church and state. 

Framing the abortion debate around religious freedom would thus address the two main categories of arguments made by anti-abortion activists: arguments centered around issues with substantive due process and moral objections to abortion. 

Conservatives may maintain, however, that legalizing abortion on the federal level is an Establishment Clause violation to begin with, since the government would essentially be imposing a federal position on abortion. Many anti-abortion advocates favor leaving abortion rights up to individual states. However, in the absence of recognized federal, constitutional protection of abortion rights, states will ban abortion. Protecting religious freedom of the individual is of the utmost importance  — the United States government must actively intervene in order to uphold the line between church and state. Protecting abortion rights would allow everyone in the United States to act in accordance with their own moral and religious perspectives on abortion. 

Reframing the abortion rights debate as a question of religious freedom is the most viable path forward. Anchoring abortion rights in the Establishment Clause would ensure Americans have the right to maintain their own personal and religious beliefs regarding the question of when life begins. In the short term, however, litigants could take advantage of Establishment Clauses in state constitutions. Yet, given the swing of the Court towards expanding religious freedom protections at the time of writing, Free Exercise arguments may prove better at securing citizens a right to an abortion. 

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As the Supreme Court considers Roe v. Wade, a look at how abortion became legal

Nina Totenberg

The future of abortion, always a contentious issue, is up at the Supreme Court on Dec. 1. Arguments are planned challenging Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey , the court's major decisions over the last half-century that guarantee a woman's right to an abortion nationwide. J. Scott Applewhite/AP hide caption

The future of abortion, always a contentious issue, is up at the Supreme Court on Dec. 1. Arguments are planned challenging Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey , the court's major decisions over the last half-century that guarantee a woman's right to an abortion nationwide.

For nearly a half-century, abortion has been a constitutional right in the United States. But this week, the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in a Mississippi case that directly challenges Roe v. Wade and subsequent decisions.

Those rulings consistently declared that a woman has a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy in the first two trimesters of pregnancy when a fetus is unable to survive outside the womb. But with that abortion right now in doubt, it's worth looking back at its history.

Abortion did not become illegal in most states until the mid to late 1800s. But by the 1960s, abortion, like childbirth, had become a safe procedure when performed by a doctor, and women were entering the workforce in ever larger numbers.

Still, being pregnant out of wedlock was seen as scandalous, and women increasingly sought out abortions, even though they were illegal. What's more, to be pregnant often meant that women's educations were stunted, as were their chances for getting a good job. Because of these phenomena, illegal abortion began to skyrocket and became a public health problem. Estimates of numbers each year ranged from 200,000 to over a million, a range that was so wide precisely because illegal procedures often went undocumented.

At the time, young women could see the perils for themselves. Anyone who lived in a college dormitory back then might well have seen one or more women carried out of the dorm hemorrhaging from a botched illegal abortion.

George Frampton clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun the year that his boss authored Roe v. Wade , and he remembers that until Roe , "those abortions had to be obtained undercover if you had a sympathetic doctor" and you were "wealthy enough." But most abortions were illegal and mainly took place "in backrooms by abortion quacks" using "crude tools" and "no hygiene."

By the early to mid-1960s, Frampton notes, thousands of women in large cities were arriving at hospitals, bleeding and often maimed.

One woman, in an interview with NPR, recalled "the excruciatingly painful [illegal] procedure," describing it as "the equivalent of having a hot poker stuck up your uterus and scraping the walls." She remembered that the attendant had to "hold her down on the table."

The result, says Frampton, was that by the mid-1960s, a reform movement had begun, aimed at decriminalizing abortion and treating it more like other medical procedures. Driving the reform movement were doctors, who were concerned about the effect that illegal abortions were having on women's health. Soon, the American Law Institute — a highly respected group of lawyers, judges and scholars — published a model abortion reform law supported by major medical groups, including the American Medical Association.

Many states then began to loosen their abortion restrictions. Four states legalized abortion, and a dozen or so adopted some form of the model law, which permitted abortion in cases of rape, incest and fetal abnormality, as well as to save the life or health of the mother.

By the early 1970s, when nearly half the states had adopted reform laws, there was a small backlash. Still, as Frampton observes, "it wasn't a big political or ideological issue at all."

In fact, the justices in 1973 were mainly establishment conservatives. Six were Republican appointees, including the court's only Catholic. And five were generally conservative, as defined at the time, including four appointed by President Richard Nixon. Ultimately, the court voted 7-to-2 that abortion is a private matter to be decided by a woman during the first two trimesters of her pregnancy.

That framework has remained in place ever since, with the court repeatedly upholding that standard. In 1992, it reiterated the framework yet again, though it said that states could enact some limited restrictions — for example, a 24-hour waiting period — as long as the restrictions didn't impose an "undue burden" on a woman's right to abortion.

Frampton says that the court established the viability framework because of the medical consensus that a fetus could not survive outside the womb until the last trimester. He explains that "the justices thought that this was going to dispose of the constitutional issues about abortion forever."

Although many had thought that fetal viability might change substantially, that has not happened. But in the years that followed, the backlash to the court's abortion decisions grew louder and louder, until the Republican Party, which had earlier supported Roe , officially abandoned it in 1984.

Looking at the politicization of the Supreme Court nomination and confirmation process in recent years, one can't help but wonder whether Roe played a part in that polarization. What does Frampton think?

"I'm afraid," he concedes, "that analysis is absolutely spot on. I think they [the justices] saw it as a very important landmark constitutional decision but had no idea that it would become so politicized and so much a subject of turmoil."

Just why is abortion such a controversial issue in the United States but not in so many other countries where abortion is now legal? Florida State University law professor Mary Ziegler, author of Abortion and the Law in America , points out that in many countries, the abortion question has been resolved through democratic means — in some countries by national referendum, in others by parliamentary votes and, in some, by the courts. In most of those countries, however, abortions, with some exceptions, must be performed earlier, by week 12, 15 or 18.

But — and it is a big but — in most of those countries, unlike in the U.S., national health insurance guarantees easy access to abortions.

Lastly, Ziegler observes, "there are a lot of people in the United States who have a stake in our polarized politics. ... It's a way to raise money. It's a way to get people out to the polls."

And it's striking, she adds, how little our politics resemble what most people say they want. Public opinion polls consistently show that large majorities of Americans support the right to abortion in all or most cases. A poll conducted last May by the Pew Research Center found 6 in 10 Americans say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And a Washington Post -ABC poll conducted last month found that Americans by a roughly 2-to-1 margin say the Supreme Court should uphold its landmark Roe v. Wade decision.

But an NPR poll conducted in 2019 shows just how complex — and even contradictory — opinions are about abortion. The poll found that 77% of Americans support Roe . But that figure dropped to 34% in the second trimester. Other polls had significantly higher support for second trimester abortions. A Reuters poll pegged the figure at 47% in 2021. And an Associated Press poll found that 49% of poll respondents supported legal abortion for anyone who wants one "for any reason," while 50% believed that this should not be the case. And 86% said they would support abortion at any time during a pregnancy to protect the life or health of the woman.

All this would seem to suggest that there is overwhelming support for abortion rights earlier in pregnancy, but less support later in pregnancy, and overwhelming support for abortions at any time to protect the life or, importantly, the health of the mother. That, however, is not where the abortion debate is in the 25 or so states that have enacted very strict anti-abortion laws, including outright bans, in hopes that the Supreme Court will overturn Roe .

The negative health implications of restricting abortion access

December 13, 2021— Ana Langer is professor of the practice of public health and coordinator of the Women and Health Initiative at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Q:  Roe v. Wade may soon be overturned by the Supreme Court, while at the same time other countries are loosening restrictions around abortion rights. What are your thoughts on the current climate around this issue?

A: The trend over the past several decades is clear: Safe and legal abortion has become more widely accessible to women globally, with nearly 50 countries including Mexico, Argentina, New Zealand, Thailand, and Ireland liberalizing their abortion laws. During the same period, however, a few countries have made abortion more restricted or totally illegal, including El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Poland.

In the U.S., legal frameworks are increasingly limiting access to abortion. Even while Roe is in place, many people are currently unable to receive abortion care.

If the Supreme Court were to limit or overturn Roe, abortion would remain legal in 21 states and could immediately be prohibited in 24 states and three territories. Millions of people would be forced to travel to receive legal abortion care, something that would be impossible for many due to a range of financial and logistical reasons.

This situation does not surprise me because of the deep polarization that characterizes public views on abortion, and the growing power and relentless efforts of anti-choice groups. Furthermore, it does not surprise me because of the important gender gap that exists in this country, which is to a great extent due to the lack of strong and consistent policies and legal frameworks to support women in their efforts to better integrate their reproductive and professional roles and responsibilities.

The U.S. legalized abortion nearly 50 years ago, at a time when it was legally restricted in many countries around the world, setting an important international precedent and example. It disappoints me to see that while important progress has been made towards equality in other culturally polarized areas such as same-sex marriage, women’s right to terminate an unwanted or mistimed pregnancy is now severely threatened.

Q:  How do laws that restrict abortion access impact women’s health? 

A: Restricting women’s access to safe and legal abortion services has important negative health implications. We’ve seen that these laws do not result in fewer abortions. Instead, they compel women to risk their lives and health by seeking out unsafe abortion care.

According to the World Health Organization, 23,000 women die from unsafe abortions each year and tens of thousands more experience significant health complications globally. A recent study estimated that banning abortion in the U.S. would lead to a 21% increase in the number of pregnancy-related deaths overall and a 33% increase among Black women, simply because staying pregnant is more dangerous than having an abortion. Increased deaths due to unsafe abortions or attempted abortions would be in addition to these estimates.

If the current trend in the U.S. persists, “back alley” abortions will be the last resource for women with no access to safe and legal services, and the horrific consequences of such abortions will become a major cause of death and severe health complications for some of the most vulnerable women in this country.

The legal status of abortion also defines whether girls will be able to complete their educations and whether women will be able to participate in the workforce, and in public and political life.

Improving social safety net programs for women reduces gender gaps and improves girls’ and women’s health and chances to fulfill their potential, and could help reduce the number of abortions over time. Women who are better educated, have better access to comprehensive reproductive health care , and are employed and fairly remunerated will be better positioned to avoid a mistimed and unwanted pregnancy, hence the need for termination will become less common.

Q: Should abortion be considered a human right?

A: Numerous international and regional human rights treaties and national-level constitutions around the world protect the right to safe and legal abortion as a fundamental human right. Access to safe abortion is included in a constellation of rights, including the rights to life, liberty, privacy, equality and non-discrimination, and freedom from cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Human rights bodies have repeatedly condemned restrictive abortion laws as being incompatible with human rights norms.

While a supportive legal framework for abortion care is critical, it is not enough to ensure access for everyone who seeks the service. For universal access to become a reality, policies that cover the cost of abortion care and its integration into the health care system, in addition to societal measures that destigmatize the procedure, are needed.

— Amy Roeder

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About six-in-ten Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases

Note: For the latest data on views of abortion, read this July 2022 report .

Abortion has long been a contentious issue in the United States, and it is one that sharply divides Americans along partisan, ideological and religious lines.

Today, a 61% majority of U.S. adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 37% think abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. These views are relatively unchanged in the past few years. The latest Pew Research Center survey , conducted March 7 to 13, finds deep disagreement between – and within – the parties over abortion. In fact, the partisan divide on abortion is far wider than it was two decades ago.

Related: Explore an interactive look at Americans’ attitudes on abortion.

In the latest survey, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are 42 percentage points more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to say abortion should be legal in all or most cases (80% vs. 38%). This gap is little changed over the last few years, but the current divide is wider than it was in the past. For instance, as recently as 2016, there was a 33-point gap between the shares of Democrats (72%) and Republicans (39%) who supported legal abortion in all or most cases.

Pew Research Center conducted this study to better understand Americans’ views on abortion. For this analysis, we surveyed 10,441 U.S. adults in March 2022. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology .

This wider gap is mostly attributable to a steady increase in support for legal abortion among Democrats. In 2007, roughly two-thirds of Democrats and Democratic leaners (63%) said abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Support among Democrats has risen by nearly 20 points since then, and 80% now say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Views among Republicans have remained relatively steady during this period. In 2007, around four-in-ten Republicans (39%) said abortion should be legal in all or most cases; today, 38% say this.

There are ideological differences within both parties over abortion, though the divide is starker within the GOP. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 60% of moderates and liberals say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared with just 27% of conservative Republicans.

While liberal Democrats are 18 percentage points more likely than conservative and moderate Democrats to say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, wide majorities of both groups (90% and 72%, respectively) say this.

Support for legal abortion varies by race and ethnicity, education and religious affiliation.

Majorities of adults across racial and ethnic groups say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. White adults and Hispanic adults, however, are slightly less likely to say this than Black and Asian adults. Roughly six-in-ten White (59%) and Hispanic adults (60%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared with larger majorities of Black (68%) and Asian (74%) adults.

Support for legal abortion is greater among those with higher levels of education. While majorities of those with a postgraduate degree (69%), bachelor’s degree (64%) and those with some college experience (63%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, adults with no more than a high school education are more divided on the issue: 54% say abortion should be legal in at least most cases, while 44% say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.

White evangelical Protestants continue to be opposed to abortion in all or most cases. Nearly three-quarters of White evangelicals (74%) say it should be illegal in all or most cases, while 24% say it should be legal in at least most cases. In contrast, a majority of White Protestants who are not evangelical (60%) say abortion should be legal in all or most cases.   Religious “nones” – those who are religiously unaffiliated – overwhelmingly support legal abortion. Over eight-in-ten (84%) say it should be legal in all or most cases, while just 15% say it should be illegal.

Among the public overall, there is a modest gender divide in views of whether abortion should be legal: 58% of men and 63% of women say it should be legal in at least most cases. Within both parties, the views of men and women are largely aligned. Among Democrats, 80% of both men and women say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Similarly, 36% of Republican men and 39% of Republican women say the same.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published July 17, 2017. Here are the questions used for this report, along with responses, and its methodology .

Hannah Hartig is a senior researcher focusing on U.S. politics and policy research at Pew Research Center .

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Democrats, Sensing Shift on Abortion Rights Among Latinas, Push for More Gains

Hispanic views on the issue vary widely, and Democrats face hurdles, but opportunities, too. As one House candidate said: “I go to Mass, but I also support a woman’s right to choose.”

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By Jazmine Ulloa

Jazmine Ulloa reported from Phoenix and interviewed about two dozen voters, organizers and elected officials and candidates on different sides of the abortion debate.

Hours before Arizona state legislators voted to repeal an 1864 abortion ban last month, a group of mostly Latina Democrats huddled at a nearby Mexican restaurant for a strategy session on galvanizing Latina voters over abortion rights.

“I am 23 — why do I have less rights than my abuelita in Mexico?” Melissa Herrera, a Democratic campaign staffer, asked the cluster of women at the restaurant, referring to her grandmother.

The question crystallized what Democrats hope will be a decisive electoral factor in their favor this year, one that upends conventional political wisdom: A majority of Latino voters now support abortion rights, according to polls, a reversal from two decades ago. Polling trends, interviews with strategists and election results in Ohio and Virginia, where abortion rights played a central role, suggest Democrats’ optimism regarding Latinas — once considered too religious or too socially conservative to support abortion rights — could bear out.

Since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022, stringent curbs have been taking effect in Republican-dominated states. In Arizona, for one, the May 2 repeal of the blanket ban from 1864 still leaves abortions governed by a two-year-old law prohibiting the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with no exception for rape or incest.

As of April 2023, according to the Pew Research Center , 62 percent of Latinos believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Twenty years earlier, most Hispanics told Pew that they opposed abortion rights by a nearly two-to-one margin. (The most recent polling has been conducted online, instead of over the phone, but the surveys show an overall gradual shift in opinions.)

Latino majorities came out in favor of reproductive rights in 2023 elections in Ohio and Virginia, according to other surveys, and women played a major role in stalling the shift of Hispanic voters toward the Republican Party in 2022, when many voted for Democrats, citing abortion and reproductive health as the most important issue.

“Abortion is going to be an essential issue this cycle,” said Victoria McGroary, the executive director of BOLD PAC, the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. “We are going to see what I think is going to be crystal-clear evidence that reproductive freedom matters to Latino voters.”

Surveys show the diversity of the Latino voting population still poses some obstacles for Democrats, with support for abortion rights varying based on factors including age, geography and party affiliation. Latino voters in South Texas and South Florida remain more culturally conservative, and a majority of Latino evangelicals , a growing segment of the population, still says abortion should be illegal.

Within that culturally conservative world, many remain unmoved.

Leaving a shopping plaza in Phoenix, Daisy Ochoa, 31, a paralegal, said she was planning to vote for Republicans in November because their stances on the issue are in line with her Christian faith.

“I believe that if there is life, there is life,” she said. “I don’t think anybody should take life, unless there’s some threat to the mom.”

But outside a grocery store near downtown, Gina Fernandez, 52, a Democrat and an administrative assistant, offered signs that Democrats had struck a nerve. She said she had been raised in a Mexican American and Roman Catholic household but had considered her right to abortion a foregone conclusion until the Supreme Court overturned Roe. That jolted her and her 19-year-old daughter. She used to vote for the best candidate regardless of party affiliation, Ms. Fernandez said.

“This cycle, I’m voting for all Democrats,” she said.

Democratic officials and activists in Arizona point to lingering uncertainty over abortion access in the state, since the repeal will not take effect until 90 days after the Legislature adjourns for the summer. That, they say, is fueling support for a November ballot initiative that would enshrine the right to abortion in the state’s Constitution — and could lift Democrats up and down the ballot.

“It is still not over,” said Mary Rose Wilcox, a former city councilwoman and elected county official who owns El Portal, the restaurant that has served as a center of Latino political activity in Phoenix and hosted the April strategy session. “We need a straight law that safeguards protections.”

The women also said they needed to counter what they called misconceptions about Latino voters’ conservatism.

“I always say I’m a pro-choice Catholic,” Raquel Terán, a Democratic House candidate who convened the round-table meeting, said in an interview. “I go to Mass, but I also support a woman’s right to choose.”

Rosie Villegas-Smith, a Mexican immigrant who founded Voces Unidas por la Vida, an anti-abortion organization in Phoenix, said she believed Hispanic support for abortion rights in recent polling was overblown. She accused Democrats of fear-mongering and misleading voters on the issue.

“They speak in euphemisms and say abortion is health care but abortion is not health care,” she said. “Once Latinos learn what abortion truly is, they are against it.”

Republicans at the national level argue that abortion is not going to matter more to Latinos than crime, border security or the economy, particularly among working-class families worried about the cost of gas and groceries.

“You have seen Republicans making up ground with Latino voters because of a message on those issues,” said Jack Pandol, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans. “They have a better message on improving quality of life, on bringing costs down, on making communities safe.”

A crop of Latina Democratic candidates is nonetheless running on abortion rights in districts with large or fast-growing Hispanic populations. In interviews, some said the fall of Roe had made the issue more urgent for their constituencies — and made voters more receptive to their message that abortion access was crucial to personal freedom and health care, even if the voters themselves were against the procedure.

In Oregon, Representative Andrea Salinas, who in 2022 became one of the first two Hispanic candidates elected to Congress from the state, said she cast the issue of abortion rights as a matter of “empowering women to make their own personal choices with their doctor.”

“I didn’t have as much as my competitors to put out glossy mailers or fancy television ads, but what I did have I used to lean into reproductive rights,” said Ms. Salinas, adding that the issue helped fuel her victory in a northeastern district home to the most Latinos in the state.

Ms. Terán, who is running to become the first Latina to represent Arizona in Congress, recalled that Democratic operatives cautioned her not to talk about her past work experience with Planned Parenthood, an abortion rights group, when she first ran for a state legislative seat in 2018 because it was a Latino-heavy district. She disregarded that advice and won.

She went on to make abortion rights central to her platform in the Arizona House. In 2019, she and other state lawmakers visited El Salvador to study the impact of the nation’s abortion ban, and they met with women who had been imprisoned for having the procedure done. She later co-wrote the measure that repealed Arizona’s 1864 abortion law.

Jazmine Ulloa is a national politics reporter for The Times, covering the 2024 presidential campaign. She is based in Washington. More about Jazmine Ulloa

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Insulin Takes Center Stage:  Biden says lowering the cost of insulin for seniors is among his proudest domestic policy achievements. He now faces the challenge of selling it to Americans of all ages .

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The Kids Are Not All Right. They Want to Be Heard

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

In the final weeks of this tumultuous academic year, colleges and universities across the country have erupted in renewed protest against Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip. At Columbia University, on April 18th, school officials tried to shut down a student tent encampment by enlisting the New York Police Department , which then arrested more than a hundred protesters. The administration’s move not only further emboldened activists at Columbia but also sparked a national uprising of students to end the war in Gaza and, for some, to end their institution’s financial ties to Israel. Since then, more than two thousand people have been arrested on at least forty-six campuses in the U.S. (At Princeton University, where I am a professor, I have participated in antiwar activities in recent weeks.) Student protests continue at schools that are still in session. This youth revolt will linger as a backdrop to the Presidential election, threatening Joe Biden’s bid for a second term.

For months, pundits have identified Biden’s underwhelming polling among young voters as a problem as he continues to lag behind Trump. In 2020, Biden rode a wave of anger expressed by younger constituents, who had been filling the streets in some of the largest protests in U.S. history. He won the election, in part, with nearly sixty per cent of the youth vote. But today’s youth have Biden, not Trump, as the focus of their demonstrations. As the U.S. persists in its provision of weapons to the Israeli military, Biden has been described as “Genocide Joe” and hounded during public appearances. Only eighteen per cent of young voters approve of the way he is handling the war in Gaza. Though some Democrats may believe that, if Israel ends the war by the fall, students will move on and recognize Trump as the larger threat, the ways in which their demonstrations have been denigrated, disbanded, and denounced as antisemitic will not easily be forgotten.

For months, university presidents have been under the glare of Republican-led congressional hearings for what conservatives broadly deride as pandering to a contingent of students radicalized by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and “grievance”-studies programs that view the world through the lens of “oppressed” and “oppressor” frameworks. This, the G.O.P. complains, has created a hostile environment for conservative students and is now posing unique threats to Jewish students. The danger to university administrators is real, as evidenced by the resignations of the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, soon after their appearance before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and by legislation in Texas, Florida, and Utah forbidding public colleges and universities from providing any services related to D.E.I. As if to dispel any assumption that they are woke-coddling, permissive administrators of campuses run amok, college presidents have responded to the recent protests with disproportionate force: students have faced cops in riot gear wielding tear gas, pepper spray, tasers, and batons. When administrators at Columbia University called the N.Y.P.D. onto the campus to end the student occupation of Hamilton Hall and tear down the encampment, a SWAT team was part of the action.

Students who engage in civil disobedience do so with the expectation of some reprisal. That is, after all, the moral imperative at the heart of this particular form of activism: self-sacrifice in the name of a higher political goal. But many of the student activists had not anticipated being arrested; they were shocked when set upon by police aggressively seeking to clear an area or simply to forbid public demonstration. In some instances, schools enacted last-minute changes to their policies in response to student protests, making the encampments or other practices against the rules. The University of Indiana, where law enforcement dispatched what appeared to be snipers to the roofs of campus buildings, changed its rules regarding tents on campus one day before students created encampments on school grounds. (The State Police superintendent later said that the rooftop officers “weren’t intended to be sniper positions. They were over-watch positions.”) Whatever the cause of arrests, the punishments pursued by school administrations have been excessive and cruel. Students and faculty members who have participated in the protests have been suspended and banned from campuses, and evicted from university housing, before disciplinary proceedings have begun. Some have been expelled; others have been banned from graduation ceremonies, have faced uncertainty about their legal records, and have generally been treated as pariahs. The level of repression has been shocking.

The crackdown on Palestinian-solidarity activists has exposed the limits of the right’s hypocritical crusade for the expansion of speech rights on campus. In the past several years, Republicans in Texas have described a war against free speech on college campuses and declared themselves the catalyst for changing it. The University of Texas at Austin went so far as to even protect the rights of students to engage in “hate speech.” As one official said, “Imagine if the government at the whim of a political party could just decide at any time what constitutes hate speech, and then just start arresting people for engaging in it.” Although hate speech may be allowed, Palestinian solidarity is apparently viewed as a threat. This past March, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott , signed an executive order that directed colleges to update their free-speech policies to “address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech.” It also pledged to “stand with Israel” and to insure that “groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine are disciplined for violating” those policies. When, in April, antiwar students gathered to march on campus, they were met by state troopers in riot gear and police officers who deployed pepper spray and flash-bang explosives. Dozens were arrested. U.T. Austin’s president, Jay Hartzell, claimed that the police action was preëmptive, intended to stop students from “using the apparatus of free speech and expression to severely disrupt a campus for a long period.”

In mid-March, House Republicans began advancing the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act to staunch what they saw as “the longstanding and pervasive degradation of First Amendment rights.” The bill encourages colleges and universities to enshrine the so-called Chicago Principles for free speech, which say, in part, that universities should not “attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.” Then, reacting to the encampment at Columbia University, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican senators Tom Cotton , of Arkansas, and Josh Hawley, of Missouri, called for Biden to send in the National Guard. The double standard can hardly be lost on students. Liberals and conservatives appear to converge on believing that the strongest protections for speech are afforded only to those causes with which they agree. Those who oppose the efforts of the students dismiss complaints about the suppression of speech by simply declaring the students to be antisemites.

It is not only the G.O.P. peddling these misrepresentations. In his first statement about the resurgent protests, Biden said, “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” as if there were no need to differentiate between antisemitism and criticism of the state of Israel. And in response to the building occupation at Columbia, a White House deputy press secretary, Andrew Bates, released a statement that said, “Forcibly taking over buildings is not peaceful—it is wrong. And hate speech and hate symbols have no place in America.” Bates added, “President Biden has stood against repugnant, antisemitic smears and violent rhetoric his entire life.”

As has become all too typical, there is no effort to acknowledge the leading role in the movement played by Jewish students. Five days after the first crackdown at Columbia, hundreds were arrested at a Passover celebration organized by antiwar Jewish groups near the Brooklyn home of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer . This, of course, does not mean that there have not been incidents of antisemitism in any of the protests, which cumulatively include thousands of students across the country. But characterizing the protests as prima facie antisemitic has been a way to discredit the movement. And, for all the public concern expressed about the well-being of Jewish students, there has been a near-absence of concern or media coverage about the health and safety of Arab or Muslim students. (The Council on American-Islamic Relations says that it received more than eight thousand complaints of anti-Muslim bias last year, almost half of which came in the last three months of the year. This is a fifty-six-fold increase from 2022 and the highest number of complaints lodged in twenty-eight years—even more than following 9/11.)

When students haven’t been accused of racism, they have been described as “brainwashed,” ignorant of the “complexity” of U.S. support for Israel, or inappropriately invested in a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Eric Adams , the New York mayor, was panned for describing the Columbia protests as the work of “outside agitators” attempting to “radicalize our children.” But even David Axelrod, the architect of Barack Obama’s Presidential campaigns, wrote on X , “It will be interesting to learn how many of those arrested in Hamilton Hall at Columbia are actually students.” Reports have indicated that at least thirteen of the forty-four people arrested in Hamilton Hall were not students. The reality is that social activism pulls support from wherever it can for the sake of a successful movement. We celebrate the solidarity evinced by student activists of the nineteen-sixties, who left the comfort of their campuses to travel to Mississippi to register people to vote. They were also derisively described as “outside agitators” by white Southerners who couldn’t believe that Black people on their own would challenge the status quo. Before the panic about the role of outsiders in the protests, the complaint was that left-wing professors were at the root of student anger. The New York City councilwoman Vickie Paladino wrote on X, “The NYPD confirms that 99% of arrests at NYU were indeed students, not ‘outside agitators’. The sad reality is that our schools are producing monsters, and it’s now our job to slay them.”

What explains this growing student movement? Sometimes the correct answer is the one right in front of you. The students want an end to a war that has been executed with breathtaking violence and killed more than thirty-four thousand Palestinians, most of them women and children. Every university in Gaza has been destroyed or severely damaged. More than seventy-seven thousand people have been injured, and at least seventeen thousand children have been orphaned. Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes, while the United Nations reports that parts of Gaza are experiencing “full-blown famine” and continues to worry about the spread of disease as the weather warms.

For those in charge, one of the lessons of the Vietnam War was to limit the public’s access to scenes of death and injury. Typically, this exposure was reserved for the deaths of American soldiers. But the general message is that the death of perceived innocent people is upsetting, disquieting. In the course of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, the endless images of dead civilians have shaped young Americans’ understanding of the war. In ways reminiscent of the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement, Palestinians have captured scenes of unimaginable brutality and narrated their experiences. Every smartphone has become a portal into Gaza. The obliteration of civil society, pictures of dead children, and the wails of their mothers are no longer mediated by the press. They come to you directly. (This, Mitt Romney recently said, was the reason for the bipartisan support for a ban on TikTok : “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social-media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts, so I know that’s of real interest, and the President will get the chance to take action in that regard.”)

The B.L.M. movement came to life in the twilight of the Obama Presidency, precisely because of the Administration’s failures to adequately address unemployment, a housing crisis, police brutality, and racism in the criminal-legal system—issues that had motivated a historic number of Black voters to turn out on his behalf. Young Black people concluded that only through protest could they actually be seen and heard. In the fall of 2019, when Biden was running in the Democratic primaries, he promised donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he became President; huge protests in the summer of 2020 compelled him to shift course in order to capture the votes of young people in the streets. More than anything, this generation has been schooled in the power of protest to pressure the political establishment to act on an issue that it would otherwise ignore. These young people have also come to reject the anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia that have undergirded two generations of U.S. wars, occupations, and other interventions across the Middle East. Most recently, when a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, was asked whether there were different standards of human rights applied to different countries, Patel ambled about, saying, “Each country in which we have a security relationship is different. There are different protocols and procedures in place in those respective countries.” Whatever you think of the policy, when sliced and diced and fed through social-media platforms, it sounds like Orwellian doublespeak, which is fuelling the deep cynicism that shrouds formal politics today. According to one poll focussing on respondents aged eighteen to twenty-nine, since 2015 “trust in the presidency” has dropped by sixty per cent and trust in the Supreme Court has fallen by fifty-five per cent. Fewer than forty per cent trust the U.S. military, whereas only ten per cent trust “the media.”

Biden has been denied the deference to the military and Commander-in-Chief that is typically afforded American Presidents. There was no war honeymoon with Gaza. The eruption of the student movement threatens to deepen the problem for Biden’s campaign. The singling out of students may make it appear as though they are extreme and out of touch with the public when, in fact, they are giving expression to widely held sentiment. Since Israel began its offensive, in the wake of Hamas’s attack on October 7th , American support for the war has steadily eroded. According to Gallup , last November fifty per cent of the public approved of Israel’s military action; by this past March, that support had dropped to thirty-six per cent with fifty-five per cent disapproving. And for Democrats the collapse of support for the war has been even more dramatic, falling from thirty-six per cent last fall to eighteen per cent. Even the College Democrats of America, the student wing of the Democratic Party, which is certainly not known for its radical politics, has exalted students for enduring “arrests, suspension, and threats of expulsion to stand up for the rights and dignity of the Palestinian people.”

In the broader scope of American politics, Israel’s war in Gaza has not ranked as a top issue among young people, compared with inflation, health care, or housing. But an overwrought and violent attack by the state can quickly turn a marginal movement into a central one, pulling in people who might otherwise not have paid attention or would have remained on the sidelines. At SUNY New Paltz, about a hundred and fifty baton-wielding cops in riot gear and two attack dogs reportedly confronted more than a hundred and thirty students sitting on the ground, refusing to move, in a show of solidarity with the besieged Palestinians. The police arrested the students and cleared out the camp. One bystander, a first-year student, said, “I wasn’t too involved in what was going on. I saw what happened last night, and it was completely unnecessary and disgusting. Now I feel like I need to get involved.”

The school year is wrapping up, but it feels like this movement is just beginning. The Democratic Convention, which is scheduled to take place in Chicago in August, just weeks before school resumes, will be a site of enormous protest. Cook County, home to Chicago, has the largest Palestinian American population in the U.S. Given the general unpopularity of Biden, there is no reason to believe that students still smarting from the chaotic ending of this academic year will not reconvene to register their discontent. ♦

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Why American Jews Should Oppose the Antisemitism Awareness Act

Hatred in the u.s. is real. the bill that passed the house will only make it worse..

Last week, the House of Representatives passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act. But American Jews who care about fighting antisemitism should be against it.

HR 6090, the Antisemitism Awareness Act, passed 320–91. Seventy Democrats and 21 Republicans voted against it (including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who noted that she was against antisemitism but wanted to protect her Christian right to say that Jews killed Jesus). The legislation would see the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism .

There are some who have long opposed codifying this particular definition because it comes with troublesome examples, most of which have to do with Israel. These include things like “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” “applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation,” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” Under this definition, then, Masha Gessen’s New Yorker essay on Holocaust memory and Israeli policy in Gaza would be considered antisemitic under the law. Gessen is a Jewish descendant of Holocaust survivors and victims.

There are many, including Zionist Jews, who have long warned that the IHRA standards could be used to chill pro-Palestinian speech. After the House passed the bill, Americans for Peace Now CEO Hadar Susskind warned in a statement :

Antisemitism is the hatred of Jews. Unfortunately, one doesn’t need to look far to find it these days. But the supporters of this bill are looking in the wrong places. They aren’t interested in protecting Jews. They are interested in supporting right-wing views and narratives on Israel and shutting down legitimate questions and criticisms by crying “antisemite” at everyone, including Jews, who oppose the Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich government.

Congressman Jerry Nadler of New York also opposed the bill :

I will take lectures from no one about the need for vigorous efforts to fight antisemitism on campus or anywhere else. I am also a deeply committed Zionist. … But while this definition and its examples may have useful applications in certain contexts, by effectively codifying them into Title VI, this bill threatens to chill constitutionally protected speech. Speech that is critical of Israel—alone—does not constitute unlawful discrimination. By encompassing purely political speech about Israel into Title VI’s ambit, the bill sweeps too broadly.

I agree with all of this. I think a bill that effectively restricts speech on the country’s foreign policy has no business being passed in the United States. This bill would be a problem if it only restricted Palestinian Americans from describing their families’ histories or present realities. That codifying this definition in a bill fighting antisemitism would also deem many Jews antisemitic—including the quarter of American Jews who in 2021 said Israel is an apartheid state —undercuts its stated reason for being.

But I also think you do not have to disagree with the IHRA—you can, in fact, feel that this definition is a sound one—to believe that this law is a mistake. All you have to do is remember that, as a minority in the United States, American Jews have been as safe and secure as we are because of liberalism, pluralism, and civil rights.

American Jews take pride in American Jewish participation in the Civil Rights Movement, and for good reason. But it isn’t just that some American Jews have stood up for civil rights, though that is true. Protection of civil rights has also helped American Jews. When American Jews stood up for freedom of expression and the right to be full political participants, they were also standing up for their own rights. In 1963, speaking before the March on Washington, Rabbi Joachim Prinz said, “America  must not become a nation of onlookers. America must not remain silent. Not merely Black America, but all of America. It must speak up and act … not for the sake of the Black community but for the sake of the image, the idea, and the aspiration of America itself.”

He might have added “for the sake of every minority community.” Freedom of religion and the right to express that religion in public by, say, freely speaking out against prayer in schools has long protected Jewish equality in American life. The same goes for the freedom to protest American domestic or foreign policy—against, for example, the Vietnam War (as many American Jews did). These fundamental rights are a large part of why American Jews are free to participate in public life as both Americans and Jews.

So, this debate is about not just one piece of legislation or even freedom of speech. It extends to First Amendment rights more generally. A recent YouGov poll found that 59 percent of American Jews believe that colleges have not been harsh enough in their responses to pro-Palestinian, anti-war protests. Many may have thus been heartened to see police break up the protests. I can understand that some American Jews dislike the protests, filled as they are with calls of “From the river to the sea” and “intifada revolution,” which many American Jews hear as cries to violently get rid of Jews, even as most of those chanting insist that that’s not what they mean. Many Jews may think the protests are singling out Israel in a world full of atrocities, or that the protesters are failing to mention Oct. 7 and the hostages.

But even those who cannot admit that the students have been moved to protest by months of war and tens of thousands of deaths in Gaza, including thousands of children, should remember that come January, it is entirely possible that the U.S. president will once again be Donald Trump. And when that happens, all of these rights may soon be tested not only on the issue of U.S. support for Israel in this war but in every facet of American life.

Under a second Trump administration, many Jews will want to protest its actions—not only the plight of Gaza’s civilians and of the Israeli hostages—and this law will endanger the right to do that. Trump has, for example, said that he would let states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who have abortions. American Jews overwhelmingly support the right to an abortion, which was, for many American Jews, a top electoral issue two years ago. (Some have even argued in court that protecting abortion rights is required by Jewish law .) But agitating against state policy on abortion and for abortion rights has historically involved protests—and will surely continue to do so. Sometimes that protest involves being places you have been asked to leave . Given the timing, it is difficult not to see the Antisemitism Awareness Act as at least in part a justification for police crackdowns on protest. Establishing a precedent for more violent crackdowns mere months before the arrival of an administration that will push policies opposed by most American Jews seems, at best, shortsighted.

But this isn’t about just the constitutional right to protest. It’s also about American Jewish autonomy. Indeed, there is another, self-serving reason for American Jews to oppose the government’s defining antisemitism or passing legislation that could be used to restrict speech around American policy: Stopping this bill from becoming law will protect the right of American Jews to define for themselves what it means to be American Jews in a pluralistic country.

Trump has repeatedly said that he feels that Jews who did not vote for him are disloyal and need to be spoken to, and he dined with Nick Fuentes , a white nationalist and Holocaust denier. But even generously leaving that aside for a moment: Trump’s allies are, per Politico, planning “to infuse Christian nationalist ideas in his administration should the former president return to power .” They have listed Christian nationalism—the idea that, despite this country’s separation of church and state, Christianity should be prioritized through the government and in the public sphere—as a priority for his second term. This effort is reportedly being overseen by Russell Vought, Trump’s former Office of Management and Budget director, who is close to Trump administration official William Wolfe, “who has advocated for overturning same-sex marriage, ending abortion and reducing access to contraceptives.” (It is perhaps worth noting here that the current speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, believes that separation of church and state is a “misnomer” and has ties to explicitly Christian nationalist groups.)

These are the people who could soon be back in power. There are already many American Jews who oppose the new proposed legislation because we believe in freedom of speech and because we know that imposing a definition on a particular type of hatred and combating that hatred are two different things. But for others, perhaps it is worth remembering that the people who will be in power come January may well care more about policing speech around the Jewish state than they do about the Jews who live here, in this country.

Biden, in his speech at the Capitol for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Days of Remembrance on Tuesday, said, “On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class. Antisemitism, antisemitic posters, slogans, calling for the annihilation of Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.” He also said, “From the very founding, our very founding, Jewish Americans represented only about 2 percent of the U.S. population and helped lead the cause of freedom for everyone in our nation. From that experience, we know scapegoating and demonizing any minority is a threat to every minority and the very foundation of our democracy.”

Threats to minorities and the foundation of democracy can come in many forms. The Antisemitism Awareness Act imposes a definition of antisemitism. Actual awareness of antisemitism, on the other hand, means holding on to the civil liberties that have helped us fight antisemitism in this country—not hampering them.