Anti-abortion bills mount as GOP-led states angle for Supreme Court fight over Roe v. Wade

The extremity of the proposals represents a shift in strategy, one abortion rights advocate said.

Republican-led states are charging ahead with a spate of restrictive anti-abortion bills designed to trigger a legal battle that lands at the doorstep of the Supreme Court, lawmakers and experts said.

Alabama, poised to pass the country’s toughest limits this week in what would amount to an outright ban on abortion, is just one of two dozen states that have proposed or passed measures to restrict abortion this legislative session, an onslaught abortion rights supporters say is both unprecedented and strategic.

With the new conservative majority cemented on the Supreme Court, many politicians and anti-abortion rights groups see an opportunity to provoke a case that could finally put a dagger through Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

“It simply criminalizes abortion,” Alabama state Rep. Terri Collins, a Republican, told The Associated Press last month of the proposal she sponsored. “Hopefully, it takes it all the way to the Supreme Court to overturn (Roe v. Wade).”

Alabama state Sen. Clyde Chambliss, a Republican, vowed that the bill would pass and reportedly told constituents at a town hall last week that the bill “is a direct plan to challenge Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court,” urging the crowd to “pray for that.”

Elizabeth Nash, the state policy analyst for the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights, said the extremity of the new proposals represents a tactical shift.

“What we’re seeing is unprecedented in the sense that we’ve never seen this many near-total abortion bans moving through state legislatures and getting enacted,” Nash said in a phone interview. “What we typically see is legislation that places further restrictions on abortion, makes it harder to get to the clinic, makes it harder to keep the clinic doors open. This is a real shift in the strategy and moving toward near-total and total abortion bans.”

More than 300 proposals to restrict abortion were introduced in states from January to March, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Georgia, Mississippi, Ohio and Kentucky passed bills this year that ban abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, which occurs around the sixth week of pregnancy — before most women are even aware they are pregnant, say abortion rights groups. None of these bills are in effect yet. (A federal judge suspended the Kentucky law after a lawsuit.) Read more

Read also: Cory Booker says this Elizabeth Warren proposal sounds like ‘a Donald Trump thing to say’