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Amanda Ripley: Next week, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments over mifepristone, sometimes referred to as the abortion pill. It’s the first time they’ll take up the topic since Dobbs, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade back in June 2022. Ruth, can you talk a bit about the stakes in this case? What could actually happen here?
Ruth Marcus: Well, what could happen and what I think will happen are probably two different things. In the what could happen part, the stakes are huge because more than half of abortions now are performed through mifepristone and a combination of two drugs, actually, and they’re what’s called medication abortion. So the medical procedure has become, “take a series of pills” procedure. You can do it in the privacy of your own home.
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The justices are not going to take this drug off the market. But even the chances that they're going to roll back the availability of the medication to where it was back in 2016 are low.
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Alexandra Petri: It’s sort of terrifying, honestly. I’m scared. I was born in an era where just the fact that I was a person who would have the full protection of the law, and could do anything that anyone else could do, felt like a given. And now it’s like, oh, in fact, arbitrarily your rights will get taken away.
Ripley: It’s almost like you’ve fallen down a very deep well and you’re having to scream for help, in a way that you didn’t expect. Is that right?
Petri: Yeah. Not having fallen down a deep well, I can’t speak to that from my own personal experience. But I imagine it would be like falling down a deep well.
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Ripley: I do want to talk also about the politics of this. So far it seems like the Dobbs decision has driven more support for abortion. And so, therefore, it has become a political loser, right, for Republicans?
Marcus: You’re talking to somebody who could not have been more massively and gratifyingly wrong about the impact of Dobbs. As I started my career and watched abortion politics develop, it was always clear that abortion was a very motivating force for Republican voters, and not very much of a motivating force at all for Democratic voters. And then Dobbs happened.
I did not expect the beast of angry American women and angry voters generally, but a lot of women voters, both Democrat and Republican and independent, to be energized by this. But it turns out: Hello … completely obvious. If you take a right away from someone that they have always been told that they have through their entire adult life — and it affects them or it affects their children or it affects their wives — they are, many of them, very unhappy about this.
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Would the justices — justices like, for example, Brett Kavanaugh — have ruled the way he ruled in Dobbs as quickly, if he realized it was going to have the political awakening that it turns out to have had? That is cold comfort to women in states like Texas or Alabama or Louisiana or many other places where abortion is unavailable. But it is giving great comfort, and I think appropriately so, to Democrats who did very well with this issue in 2022 and are going to use it for all it’s worth in 2024.
Listen to the full conversation here:
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In the pilot episode of “Impromptu,” our new podcast, three Post Opinions columnists — Ruth Marcus, Alexandra Petri and Amanda Ripley — got together to discuss the politics of abortion in post-Dobbs America. An edited excerpt of their conversation is below.
Use the audio player or The Post’s “Impromptu” podcast feed to listen to the entire conversation.
Amanda Ripley: Next week, the Supreme Court is hearing arguments over mifepristone, sometimes referred to as the abortion pill. It’s the first time they’ll take up the topic since Dobbs, the case that overturned Roe v. Wade back in June 2022. Ruth, can you talk a bit about the stakes in this case? What could actually happen here?
Ruth Marcus: Well, what could happen and what I think will happen are probably two different things. In the what could happen part, the stakes are huge because more than half of abortions now are performed through mifepristone and a combination of two drugs, actually, and they’re what’s called medication abortion. So the medical procedure has become, “take a series of pills” procedure. You can do it in the privacy of your own home.
The justices are not going to take this drug off the market. But even the chances that they're going to roll back the availability of the medication to where it was back in 2016 are low.
Alexandra Petri: It’s sort of terrifying, honestly. I’m scared. I was born in an era where just the fact that I was a person who would have the full protection of the law, and could do anything that anyone else could do, felt like a given. And now it’s like, oh, in fact, arbitrarily your rights will get taken away.
Ripley: It’s almost like you’ve fallen down a very deep well and you’re having to scream for help, in a way that you didn’t expect. Is that right?
Petri: Yeah. Not having fallen down a deep well, I can’t speak to that from my own personal experience. But I imagine it would be like falling down a deep well.
Ripley: I do want to talk also about the politics of this. So far it seems like the Dobbs decision has driven more support for abortion. And so, therefore, it has become a political loser, right, for Republicans?
Marcus: You’re talking to somebody who could not have been more massively and gratifyingly wrong about the impact of Dobbs. As I started my career and watched abortion politics develop, it was always clear that abortion was a very motivating force for Republican voters, and not very much of a motivating force at all for Democratic voters. And then Dobbs happened.
I did not expect the beast of angry American women and angry voters generally, but a lot of women voters, both Democrat and Republican and independent, to be energized by this. But it turns out: Hello … completely obvious. If you take a right away from someone that they have always been told that they have through their entire adult life — and it affects them or it affects their children or it affects their wives — they are, many of them, very unhappy about this.
Would the justices — justices like, for example, Brett Kavanaugh — have ruled the way he ruled in Dobbs as quickly, if he realized it was going to have the political awakening that it turns out to have had? That is cold comfort to women in states like Texas or Alabama or Louisiana or many other places where abortion is unavailable. But it is giving great comfort, and I think appropriately so, to Democrats who did very well with this issue in 2022 and are going to use it for all it’s worth in 2024.
Listen to the full conversation here:
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