By Belle Taylor-McGhee for Ms. Magazine.
Broadcast version by Mark Richardson for Michigan News Connection reporting for the Ms. Magazine-Public News Service Collaboration
"We had hoped the decision would come down on one of the days we were not doing procedures," Dr. Sanithia Williams said. "We had a waiting room full of people. People were horrified and desperate. There were people crying. There were people begging. Some people offered to pay extra if we could just do the procedure-not fully understanding what was happening. We had to turn all those people away.
"To know that you have the skills to provide care at that moment and make such a difference in their life-something they have asked for-and the state has decided that [it knows] best. It was a really hard day."
Fighting back tears, WIlliams, an ob-gyn and abortion provider in northern Alabama, recalls the day the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. It was the same day the state's abortion ban went into effect-a law that allows no exception for rape or incest or lethal fetal anomaly and carries a sentence of life in prison for doctors who perform the procedure.
The Alabama clinic where she worked has since closed its doors. The state now sits in the middle of what is known as an abortion desert-where people need to travel 100 miles or more, one way, to reach an abortion facility; where abortion access is virtually inaccessible.
Mississippi, the neighboring state at the center of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the case that dealt the final blow to Roe, has a total abortion ban with an exception for rape-but not incest.
Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas have total abortion bans with zero exceptions for rape or incest.
Georgia and South Carolina have six-week bans, and Florida has a 15-week ban.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a leading research and policy organization on sexual and reproductive health, at the start of this month, 66 clinics across 15 states have been forced to stop offering abortions. These 15 states-all in the South and the Midwest-were enforcing either total or six-week abortion bans as of Oct. 2
In Ohio, where abortion is banned at six weeks with few exceptions, doctors are not only grappling with the impact of the Dobbs decision on women's health and lives, but also on their own decision-making around abortion care.
"It has become devastating to practice medicine," said Dr. Ellie Ragsdale, an ob-gyn who specializes in high-risk obstetrics and fetal therapy at an academic medical center in Cleveland. "You come to work every day and hope that the decisions you make are the best decisions for your patients, and that those decisions don't land you in jail."
Many worry that in this post-Roe landscape, women will die because they are too sick to carry a pregnancy to term.
"We have seen women who had major medical care morbidities when their life was at risk by pregnancy who had to leave our state to have a termination," Ragsdale said. "We have seen patients who had lethal fetal malformations-babies who had no chance to survive outside the womb-who had to leave our state for a termination."
Research shows that despite the frequency with which women have abortions in the U.S., it is the only type of healthcare that requires such a large number of individuals to leave their state to obtain care. For those living in Ohio, the median distance at press time to access abortion is 162 miles, plus another 162 miles to get back home.
"Gas prices are incredibly expensive right now. [For] plenty of folks, gas is the reason they can't access their care," said Maggie Scotece, the interim executive director of the nonprofit Abortion Fund of Ohio, the only statewide abortion fund in Ohio. Scotece said she is encouraged, though, by how many people have stepped up to offer their support, including donations for the cost of the procedure, as well as assistance for childcare, lodging and transportation.
In Michigan, one of the few Midwestern states where abortion remains legal, Planned Parenthood told NPR that since Roe was overturned, three times as many out-of-state patients seeking abortion care have arrived at their clinics.
"I work in a hospital and an outpatient setting. [Before Dobbs,] I might see 10 to 28 patients a week who are from out of state; instead we're [now] seeing 50 to 60," said Dr. Lisa Harris, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology and associate chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan.
Harris said women and other pregnant people are coming from Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky and Texas. "The laws are certainly not stopping many people from ending their pregnancies; it's just making it more difficult for them to do that."
One solution is to expand the use of abortion pills, which can be safely self-administered until the 11th week of pregnancy. But while courts have ruled that banning medication abortion is unconstitutional, this has not stopped a wave of restrictive state laws limiting access to this effective, nonsurgical method. According to Guttmacher, "29 states now require that clinicians who administer medication abortion be physicians; two states prohibit medication abortion after a specific point early in a pregnancy; and 19 states require the clinician providing a medication abortion to be physically present when the medication is administered, prohibiting the use of telemedicine to prescribe medication for abortion."
Meanwhile, major medical institutions, including the World Health Organization; the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; and the National Abortion Federation, have found that mid-level providers, such as physician assistants and advanced practice nurses, can safely provide medication abortion-and they can do so by mail.
Harris said barriers to obtaining abortions compound problems faced by women of color, particularly Black women, whose maternal mortality rate is three times the rate for white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She asserts that because of the way racism intersects with economic inequity, as well as decreased access to healthcare and racism in medical systems, it is vital that every part of this issue is viewed through a racial equity lens.
"It means that women of color, including Black women, have less access to contraception in the first place, less access to healthcare in general, which means they are more likely to have an untreated underlying health issue or chronic illness," Harris said.
In addition to economic insecurities, Harris said Black women are more likely to face criminal penalties for self-managed abortions.
The criminalization of abortion alarms reproductive justice advocates like Janette Robinson Flint, executive director of Black Women for Wellness, a woman-centered, community-based organization in Los Angeles. Flint said for women and other pregnant people who experience intimate partner violence, abortion bans are dangerously harmful.
She recalled the story of a woman who chose to have an abortion after she realized she could not face a fourth pregnancy with a man who physically abused her, a man who was careful to ensure that she showed no visible signs of his ongoing abuse.
"You don't know what happens behind closed doors," Flint said. "We are talking now about laws that will weaponize pregnancy, which will give weapons to abusers who can threaten you with that pregnancy. They can threaten to send you to jail; they can threaten you with more physical harm."
Beyond abortion, health services overall are at risk, with the loss of abortion care creating repercussions along the full range of reproductive health services.
"When clinics close their doors, we lose access to birth control, pap smears, HIV and STI screening; we lose mammograms as well as prenatal care. ... It puts an interesting burden on women who seek services," Flint said.
She said this post-Roe landscape requires a different approach, and more people are being called upon to be revolutionaries. This includes medical providers.
"Doctors are going to have to figure out how to be bold and audacious," she said. "They are going to have to be not afraid to offer services, and absolutely not report women's data."
Abortion rights advocates caution that reporting requirements are part of a larger move to further criminalize abortion, pointing to an Indiana law that went into effect in 2021 and mandates that doctors report when a patient had the abortion, the county and state of her residence, as well as her race and age.
Dr. Jamila Perritt, president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health, an ob-gyn and self-described revolutionary, said part of her work involves combating misinformation-including getting the word out about mandatory reporting requirements and clearing up any confusion that surrounds it. She believes reporting on a woman's self-managed procedure is one example of how white supremacy shows up in our medical spaces.
"Just don't do it. Do not call the police on your patient. There is never a reason to ever do that," Perritt said. She calls for a different conversation about abortion, one that contextualizes access to abortion with an awareness of the conditions of women's lives.
"For people who are living in the intersection of multiple oppressions around our identities, ... the conversation has always been more complicated than abortion access. The challenge in this moment is to continue to push this complicated narrative and not to drill it down to oversimplified sound bites that single abortion out," Perritt said. "It really goes back to a lack of understanding around healthcare as a basic human right, and abortion is part of that."
Belle Taylor-McGhee wrote this article for Ms. Magazine.
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By Aviva Dove-Viebahn for Ms. Magazine.
Broadcast version by Trimmel Gomes for Florida News Connection reporting for the Ms. Magazine-Public News Service Collaboration
Scary. Fascist. Dystopic. Unreal. Painful. Absurd.
These are just some of the words Floridians used to describe the proposed HB 999, a specter that loomed over educators this spring. While ultimately tabled, HB 999 spawned SB 266, which passed in early May. Throughout its evolution, this legislation and its foreboding restrictions have targeted the free flow of ideas, threatening to inhibit progressive pedagogy and limit the possibilities for diversity and inclusion at the college level.
While Florida has long been treated as a punchline to a national joke about regressive politics, “this is about to be the entire country’s problem,” warned Lorna Bracewell, women’s, gender and sexuality studies program coordinator and an associate professor of political science at Flagler College in St. Augustine. “Every Republican-dominated state legislature is watching closely what is happening in Florida.”
Flagler is a private college that remains insulated from the effects of these bills, for now, but in many ways that is immaterial to the larger issue. HB 999 exemplified “an existential threat to academic freedom and all the ideals that underpin public education,” Bracewell said, ruminating on the bill prior to its tabling.
SB 266 is equally catastrophic. “If these policies are permitted to go into effect … it’s a death knell for public education in the state—and it’s not going to be confined to the state.”
The first women’s studies, ethnic studies, and gay and lesbian studies programs—so named at the time—were founded at U.S. universities more than 50 years ago. Since then, these disciplines have become well respected in academia, offering a place for students to challenge assumptions about gender, race and sexuality throughout history and in contemporary culture.
The legislative attacks on these fields of study illustrate an unprecedented overreach from a Republican-led legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis and are symptomatic of a widespread bid for power on the part of reactionary politicians and organizations, as well as their determination to prevent critical examinations of the role of gender, race and sexuality in our daily lives and in public policy.
In this legislative session alone, Florida has either passed or proposed bills that would:
- institute a six-week abortion ban;
- allow individuals to carry concealed firearms without a permit;
- prohibit doctors from treating transgender minors with puberty blockers or hormone therapy;
- outlaw teaching about gender identity or sexual orientation in K-12 classrooms;
- prevent elementary-age girls from discussing menstruation at school; and
- expand eligibility for tuition vouchers, thus diverting funding from public education toward private and
- religious schools where the curriculum can more easily be manipulated.
“We’re all under siege right now,” said Bonnie Thornton Dill, immediate past dean of the College of Arts and Humanities and professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland.
Bills like HB 999 and SB 266 are “catching fire” in a number of states across the country, she said, as “part of a larger effort to turn back the clock [by] white supremacist patriarchal leadership.”
To aid these efforts, right-wing Republican governors have been appointing handpicked, far-right members to the boards of trustees at universities in states like Florida and Virginia for years. Related legislation, like the ban on tenure for new faculty winding its way through the Texas legislature, would then hypothetically allow these same boards to fire faculty whose research or teaching they find objectionable.
Like Florida’s Individual Freedom Act, colloquially known as the “Stop WOKE” Act, which passed last session but was blocked by a federal injunction, HB 999 speciously evoked free thought and expression as its impetus. What it and its successor, SB 266, really amount to are alarmingly broad, misleading and distorted catalogs of what far-right conservatives fear most: that younger generations will be taught to think critically about the rampant misrepresentation and sanitization of American history and the continued discrimination against women, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.
The original language of HB 999 signals the motives of its proponents: eliminating “critical race theory” from public education. This ideology has real meaning tied to the Frankfurt School model championed by a group of philosophers and social theorists in Europe in the early 20th century who challenged status quo assumptions about social roles and power structures. Now the term has become a fear-mongering buzzword used to imply that unchecked “woke-ism” will lead to the oppression of white people, especially those who are male and heterosexual.
No further evidence of this misinterpretation is needed than the list HB 999 first included as examples of the so-called critical theory that would be outlawed: “Critical Race Theory, Critical Race Studies, Critical Ethnic Studies, Radical Feminist Theory, Radical Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Critical Social Justice, or Intersectionality.”
The newly passed SB 266 is less specific, but no less detrimental, and will impact all of Florida’s 40 public colleges and universities. Under the guise of equality, it mandates that universities assess their academic units in order to safeguard against curricula “based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States,” which could decimate degree programs in gender and women’s studies, Africana studies, ethnic studies and queer studies, among others.
Under the new law, even general education courses cannot include the teaching of systemic forms of oppression or the invocation of “identity politics,” which the bill does not define.
Not only do bills restricting academic freedom have the potential to “destroy higher education,” said Leandra Preston, a senior lecturer of women’s and gender studies at the University of Central Florida, “[they] would not permit the kind of critical thought that higher education demands, allows and encourages,” or the research and learning that “leads to transformations and the kind of work that we need to help our ailing nation.”
While the language of the newly passed SB 266 seems deliberately ambiguous in order to mitigate a direct constitutional challenge, its origins and the fact that legislators even tried to pass the more explicit HB 999 “just to make a political point and to not run afoul of their overlords is terrifying,” said Amy Reid, director of gender studies and a professor of French language and literature at New College of Florida. “They think they can ban ideas.”
Despite the bills’ irrational scope and regardless of whether they pass as originally written, these attacks on gender studies, critical race theory and queer studies have a chilling effect on faculty and students, some of whom already self-censor in their classrooms for fear of reprisal. This is especially the case for junior faculty and graduate students. Diane Price Herndl, department chair of women’s and gender studies at the University of South Florida, laments that the only assistant professor her department has hired in the past decade recently resigned due to the political situation in Florida.
These bills and policies “are going to provoke a real exodus,” Reid said. “It’s going to take years to rebuild the universities.”
Price Herndl said, “My students are furious”; they are “almost apoplectically insulted” by the implication that young people are incapable of critically assessing the information provided them by professors or that they could be so easily indoctrinated as Republican lawmakers claim.
“Why go to college if you aren’t learning from scholars who are actively researching, who are producing knowledge and who you can be in dialogue with about their knowledge production?” asked Nicole Morse, director of the Center for Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and an assistant professor of media studies at Florida Atlantic University. “That’s the whole point of higher ed.”
Additional language in SB 266 outlaws campus programming and organizations that “advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or promote or engage in political or social activism,” effectively eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices that help make campuses welcoming to faculty, staff and students from marginalized communities. The bill will also affect hiring and firing, giving each institution’s president the final say in faculty hiring decisions, regardless of the input of current faculty, and curtail the ability to appeal firing decisions beyond the level of the university president.
“It’s really clear that they’re setting up a system that, if actually implemented the way that it’s designed, can fire people at will because we’re saying and publishing things that they do not like,” Reid warned.
At New College, where Reid teaches,
the right-wing takeover is already in high gear. A small public liberal arts college with a student-centered curriculum, the school has been attacked by Republicans for ostensibly being a bastion of liberalism. Its DEI office has already been eliminated. In January, its president, Patricia Okker, was fired and replaced by one of DeSantis’ close associates. Even before SB 266, its board of trustees, further stacked with DeSantis appointees, was discussing getting rid of gender studies at the college.
At the University of Florida, another DeSantis ally has been installed as president, a sign of the proliferating attempts by the right to take over public education from myriad angles.
A recent report from Inside Higher Ed shows that college and university presidents in Florida have been unwilling to speak out against these bills, perhaps for fear of reprisal. Many faculty and administrators have been told not to make public comments about the legislation, according to a university employee who asked to remain anonymous.
“DeSantis is known to be vindictive, and everybody is worried that if they come against [HB 999], that he will target whatever college or university speaks out against it, that there will be a special veto of their funding,” the source told
Ms.
In January, public colleges and universities in Florida were required to provide the governor’s office with a list of diversity and critical race theory (CRT) “initiatives” on their campuses.
“The sweeping directive, which provided no instructions for interpreting what constitutes DEI or CRT, yielded a grab bag of hundreds of student organizations, mentorship programs, community outreach initiatives, offices dedicated to federal compliance and a seemingly random assortment of classes,”
according to the Miami Herald.
“What’s been really incredible in this moment is to see the solidarity from colleagues who weren’t on these lists toward those of us on the lists,” Morse said. “I thought I would be facing this mostly alone, and instead everyone came together.”
Public education has become both a smokescreen and a convenient scapegoat for radical politicians to enact unpopular policies and attempt to stem the tide of progressive ideas prevalent in younger generations. None of this is new, Thornton Dill stressed. Conservatives are “draw[ing] from the playbook of U.S. history and the actions to suppress and deny and repress and push back strides that Blacks have made, in particular.”
Money and power lie at the root of these acts. In fact, over at least the past decade, far-right ideologues like the Koch brothers have been donating multimillion-dollar sums to major universities in states like Arizona, New York, Florida and Virginia, potentially garnering the ability to influence public education through endowed professorships, input on hiring and firing decisions made by at least one university, and the creation of new departments and centers that promote their conservative ideology.
While students and faculty have little control over the financial and political machinations of their institutions, when it comes to these bills,
they are fighting back: protesting, organizing panels and teach-ins and forming coalitions with groups on campus and beyond. Labor unions across Florida have been meeting weekly and joining with faculty and graduate student unions to help combat the advance of a number of bills and policies that would impact workers’ rights, academic freedom and freedom from harassment and discrimination.
The attack on higher education in Florida has been receiving pushback not just on a local and statewide level but also from many national organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA).
“We believe that this struggle is not just a struggle in the academy but it impacts every aspect of education, particularly PK-12,” said Karsonya (Kaye) Wise Whitehead, president of NWSA. “This is our battle,” she said of her organization, which primarily supports feminist and gender, women’s and sexuality studies programs, and can use its reach and platform to speak up for members in contested parts of the country.
Educators
Ms. spoke to for this story echo the warning that what is happening to higher education is only one aspect of a series of attacks on education more broadly.
On top of the expansion of the school voucher system, other proposed bills in Florida would:
- allow anyone in a given county the right to lodge complaints against books in school libraries or other instructional materials they find objectionable;
- give authority to the Department of Education (which reports to the governor) to design the sex education curriculum statewide; and
- ask K-12 schools to create disciplinary policies to punish students for using bathrooms that do not correspond to their sex at birth.
Far from separate issues, these and other restrictions at the K-12 level dovetail with regressive plans for Florida’s public colleges and universities—and further intersect with other attacks on reproductive rights, the LGBTQ+ community and labor unions. Put together, they constitute a concerted effort to push back a century of progress on civil rights.
“We know that constitutionally a ban on an idea cannot hold,” Reid said, “but what damage is done between when they articulate that ban and when you can finally get it thrown out? There are several years of pain, of not learning, of students being driven away, of people being too afraid to speak out, of teachers being afraid, of individuals’ careers being destroyed, of families being uprooted.”
Florida Atlantic University’s Morse added, “The rest of the country can sometimes dismiss what happens in Florida, [but] this is a nationwide right-wing movement to take over education. People who might want to dismiss it as just a wacky Florida thing need to be ready to learn from our experience.”
We can all learn from the organizing and resistance of the students and faculty leading the charge to preserve academic freedom in Florida—and turn the tide of these attacks on higher education, women, people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, immigrants and other marginalized communities nationwide.
Aviva Dove-Viebahn wrote this article for Ms. Magazine.
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