Inside the $100 million plan to restore abortion rights in America
A new coalition of abortion-rights groups is marking the second anniversary of the fall of Roe v. Wade with a pledge to spend $100 million to restore federal protections for the procedure and make it more accessible than ever before.
In plans shared first with POLITICO, groups including Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and Reproductive Freedom for All are banding together to form Abortion Access Now — a national, 10-year campaign that will both prepare policies for the next time Democrats control the House, Senate and White House, and build support for those policies among lawmakers and the public. At a private event Monday evening in Washington, they will pitch a group of influential progressives on going on offense at a time when abortion is outlawed in a third of the country.
“Dobbs was a really devastating outcome, but we’re going to win back our rights much faster than they think,” Mini Timmaraju, the president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in an interview. “We’re not going to let the anti-abortion extremists define this moment. We’re coming for them and we’re going to make sure that they become increasingly irrelevant.”
The coalition, which also includes the Center for Reproductive Rights, In Our Own Voice, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum and the National Women’s Law Center, plans to push for the most sweeping federal protections possible — laws that make abortion not just legal but easily accessible and affordable. But its effort to project a unified battle plan comes amid deep divisions within the left about the best way to restore abortion access. Some abortion rights supporters, including President Joe Biden, are calling for a revival of Roe, which protected abortion only up to the point of fetal viability. Others argue that Roe failed to ensure meaningful abortion access for many people during the roughly 50 years it was the law of the land, and are calling for national protections that go further. [Continue reading…]