THE PERSONHOOD PRINCIPLE

The anti-abortion movement's new North Star.

- BY MARGARET TALBOT

In the first two years after the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, the number of abortions performed annually in the United States went up. On the face of it, this might seem perplexing. After all, many states seized the opportunity presented by the Court's 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization to enact daunting new restrictions on abortion: twelve adopted near-total bans, and four more imposed gestational limits of six weeks, a point at which many people may not yet realize they are pregnant. Yet, suddenly, the U.S. was seeing an increase in abortions—from about nine hundred and thirty thousand in 2020 to more than a million in 2023. The best explanation for this apparent paradox was that providers and activists in states where abortion was still accessible devoted considerable energy and resources into making it more so. This was especially true for medication abortions provided via telehealth. In December, 2021, the F.D.A. had lifted its requirement that mifepristone be prescribed in person; the number of virtual clinics, which assess a patient's eligibility online or by phone, and mail out the medications, proliferated.

The post-Dobbs restrictions plainly had an effect. Some states reported that they had reduced the number of abortions to virtually zero, and they made already hard circumstances harder for patients who have to travel from, say, Texas or Kentucky to North Carolina or Illinois, in many cases pushing abortions later into desperately unwanted pregnancies. Draconian new laws compounded the risks to patients carrying pregnancies that threatened their lives or health. And the over-all number of abortions in the U.S. may eventually decrease as a result of