COVER STORY BY CHRIS MCCOY
A HUMAN
RIGHTS DISASTER
As state legislatures introduce more restrictive anti-abortion bills, what does the future hold for the imperiled state of reproductive rights?
A
shley B. Coffield is a 51-year-old public health professional who holds a master’s degree in public administration from Texas A&M University. The mother of two college-age sons taught public policy at her alma mater Rhodes College for nine years, helped create the Snowden School Foundation, and serves as a deacon at Idlewild Presbyterian Church. Sometimes, when she’s walking to her car after work, people call her a murderer. As CEO of Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi, Coffield is on the front lines of one of the most consequential political battles of our time: the drive by conservative Christians and their Republican allies to overturn Roe v. Wade. Now that the Supreme Court seems poised to strip women of their constitutional right to safely obtain an abortion, Coffield and her allies are bracing for a return to the bad old days of limited reproductive rights — and perhaps worse. “This is a human rights disaster,” Coffield says.
March 24-30, 2022
The Rise and Fall of Roe v. Wade The debate over abortion rights in the United States is almost as old as the republic itself. In 1821, Connecticut passed the first law banning abortions in America. But juries would prove reluctant to convict women accused under such statutes, so the rare enforcement actions were usually taken against abortion providers. By the late 1960s, abortion on demand was available in five states and the District of Columbia. Women seeking abortions in the rest of the country either traveled to one of those states or resorted to less than legal means to end unwanted pregnancies. In some places, secret feminist organizations such as Chicago’s Jane Collective dodged police stings to provide safe and clean services. But for the most part, obtaining an abortion in the pre-Roe world meant paying exorbitant sums to back-alley practitioners, who may or may not have been doctors, and hoping for the best. In big cities, hospitals had entire wards devoted to treating women injured by unsafe abortion attempts. “Abortion rights are important because it gets at the dignity of the individual and 10 the autonomy of the individual to make
PHOTOS: COURTESY SAVANNAH BEARDEN
(top) Ashley Coffield, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi; (bottom) protest against anti-abortion legislation decisions about their bodies and their lives,” Coffield says. “Without abortion rights, people are subject to the whims of fertilization and pregnancy.” In 1973, the United States Supreme Court agreed by a vote of 7-2. Justice Harry Blackmun’s majority opinion found that precedents such as Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized contraception, had established a right of privacy, and the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments extended that right to include a woman’s decision to
terminate her pregnancy. But what many advocates thought would be the end of a long fight turned out to be just the beginning of a new phase. Abortion opponents who believe human life begins at conception, not at birth or at the quickening, organized a counter-offensive. They seized upon Roe’s framework that made first trimester abortion legal in all circumstances while allowing reasonable restrictions to protect the mother’s health in the second trimester onward to chip away
at the right to abortion. “The most recent case, Planned Parenthood of Pennsylvania v. Casey, from the ’90s, is really the current statement of the law,” says Steve Mulroy, the Bredesen Professor of Law at the University of Memphis. That decision replaced Roe’s trimester-based framework with a standard based on fetal viability and allowed abortion restrictions as long as they don’t impose an “undue burden” on women seeking to exercise their reproductive rights. Meanwhile, the Republican party discovered that abortion was an issue that allowed them to mobilize a large number of single-issue voters who could be counted on to show up at the polls. Ever since the Gallup organization began polling on abortion rights in 1975, a solid majority of voters have indicated they support abortion rights. In the most recent poll, conducted in 2021, 48 percent of respondents said abortion should be legal under certain circumstances, while 32 percent said abortion should be legal under all circumstances. Only 19 percent of respondents said abortions should be illegal in all circumstances. Even though support for the Roe consensus of regulated abortion has hovered around 80 percent for decades, abortion opponents have been steadily gaining ground in state legislatures, including Tennessee’s, where anti-abortion Republicans now hold a veto-proof supermajority. “I think people have taken this right for granted, and sometimes it is just a matter of human nature, where you don’t realize what you’ve got until it’s gone,” says Francie Hunt, executive director of Tennessee Advocates for Planned Parenthood. “The vast majority of people are pro-choice, but that may not be a makeit-or-break-it issue that they are voting on. They may be voting on personality, or they may be voting on other factors. I kind of feel like, if you can’t trust me to make my own decisions about my own family, then you don’t deserve my vote.” Coffield is blunt about the reproductive rights movements’ failures of the last 30 years. “We lost elections that were really critical to protecting our rights. That’s the bottom line: We lost. When Trump was elected, we knew we had four to six years left of Roe because of the opportunities
