We baby boomers are big on 50th anniversaries. If fading memory serves, I've just passed one — the 50th anniversary of my first abortion story as a journalist.
Writing for the Coe College Cosmos, my student newspaper, I reported a move by my Iowa college's student senate to create a loan fund that abortion-seeking female students could quietly tap to travel to New York state, where abortion had been legalized in 1970.
It wouldn't be until Jan. 22, 1973, that the U.S. Supreme Court would legalize abortion throughout the land. Travel to another state to end an unwanted pregnancy would become unnecessary.
Until its return in 2022? Or now, in Texas?
The possibility looms that the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court will reverse Roe v. Wade next summer when it hands down its decision in the Mississippi case Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. If it does, American women will find their reproductive rights quickly reduced to the same state-by-state patchwork that sent desperate pregnant women across state lines 50 years ago.
And that will be "incredibly cruel," lamented Sarah Stoesz. "It will only ban abortion for people who are unable to travel. Such a ban is elitist at its heart. It flies in the face of everything Planned Parenthood stands for."
Stoesz would know. For more than 20 years, she has been president and CEO of St. Paul-based Planned Parenthood North Central States — a role that has put her on the front lines of efforts in Minnesota and its...
Read Full Story: https://www.startribune.com/in-post-roe-minnesota-abortion-could-be-a-potent-political-issue/600128457/
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