Abortion Rights
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Larry Cohler-Esses December 27, 2016
This year saw the Supreme Court issue its most consequential abortion rights decision of the last quarter century. In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt the court ruled that the restrictive plethora of laws and rules that some states were issuing to regulate abortion—purportedly to ensure the health and safety of women—were in fact a violation of their constitutional rights.
Prohibited by Roe v. Wade from banning abortion, states like Texas, Michigan and Oklahoma were basically seeking to regulate it out of existence. And they were succeeding. In Oklahoma, to take just one case, 96% of the state’s counties have no abortion provider.
The June 27 Supreme Court decision promised a sea change in this reality, provoking abortion rights advocates to cheer. But that was before the election of Donald Trump, who has vowed to restore a conservative majority to the Supreme Court. With the Republican Senate’s success in freezing President Obama’s nomination of a moderate to the bench, Trump will be free to make good on his pledge to fill the evenly divided court’s longstanding vacancy with a hardline jurist of the right who is committed to overturning Roe v. Wade.
For those born too recently to know what this would mean—or what it means now for thousands of women in states with harsh restrictions—the Forward published the account of one of its own editors, Larry Cohler-Esses, a man, who as a 16-year-old Chicago high school student, helped his best friend and his friend’s girlfriend to arrange an illegal abortion by an unknown doctor in a strange city far from their home in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
