The Morning Dispatch: Post-Roe Plans Come Into Focus

Happy Monday! We were this close to putting our life savings on 80-to-1 longshot Rich Strike to win the Kentucky Derby over the weekend. Oh well. Guess we’ll keep writing this newsletter.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday U.S. employers added about 428,000 jobs in April, keeping the unemployment rate unchanged at 3.6 percent. The labor force participation rate fell 0.2 percentage points—from 62.4 percent to 62.2 percent—but just 1.2 million fewer Americans are working now than were in February 2020, before the pandemic.

• The average rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in the United States hit nearly 5.3 percent last week for the first time since 2009, according to data from Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage company.

• President Joe Biden announced Friday he was authorizing another $150 million in military aid for Ukraine, bringing the total amount of American security support to $3.8 billion since Russia invaded in late February. The administration said it had “nearly exhausted” funding available for such weapons, and Biden called on Congress to approve his requested $33 billion supplemental aid package.

• The Taliban’s Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue issued a decree over the weekend mandating women in Afghanistan wear either a burqa or abaya that covers their body from head to toe. The rule—which comes with escalating punishments if violated, culminating in a woman’s “male guardian” being jailed—is a return to a similar Taliban policy from the 1990s.

• Northern Ireland’s Sinn Féin—once considered the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA)—won a plurality of the 90 seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly for the first time in its history. The party’s victory represents a shift toward nationalism in the territory, as Sinn Féin advocates for the reunification of Northern Ireland—currently considered part of the United Kingdom—with the Republic of Ireland. Such a decision would need to be made via constitutional referendum.

• Hong Kong’s election committee—whose 1,500 members are vetted by the Chinese Communist Party—formally selected John Lee on Sunday to serve as the next chief executive of the  special administrative region. Lee—a pro-Beijing security official who helped lead the crackdown on democracy protesters in recent years—will succeed outgoing chief executive Carrie Lam on July 1.

• Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Friday the House will implement a $45,000 minimum annual salary for House staffers in the coming months, paid for by the 21 percent increase in the Member Representational Allowance included in the government funding bill that passed earlier this year. The House is also set to vote on a resolution this week recognizing staffers’ right to unionize.

• State Administrative Law Judge Charles Beaudrot ruled Friday that freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene can remain on the ballot in Georgia this fall, dismissing claims she should be barred from public office due to her conduct on and leading up to January 6, 2021.

Prepping for a Post-Roe World

The fight over the leaked Dobbs v. Jackson draft opinion got uglier over the weekend, with protesters picketing outside several Supreme Court  justices’ homes with candles and signs, and vandals spraypainting “if abortions aren’t safe then you aren’t either” on the wall of a pro-life group’s offices in Madison, Wisconsin. A fire that broke out inside the office is being investigated as arson, as a Molotov cocktail was seen on the premises. 

But even as a small subset of opponents seek to use public pressure and extrajudicial means to ensure Roe v. Wade isn’t overturned, activists and lawmakers on both sides of the issue are already preparing for a world in which it is.

Pro-abortion groups are focused on securing abortion access for women, especially those in states where it is likely to be banned or restricted if Roe is reversed. The National Network of Abortion Funds lists about 100 groups that help pay for abortions, travel, childcare, hotels, and other abortion-related expenses. The network said its members supported about 44,880 people with an average grant of $215 in fiscal year 2020, and that when the draft opinion leaked “we received such an outpouring of support our website crashed.” The “Auntie Network” on Reddit is an informal online abortion network—members offer meals, car rides, and bedrooms for women seeking abortion and alert each other to opportunities to advocate for policy expanding abortion access. The group’s membership shot from about 45,000 members in late April to more than 67,000 last week. 

The Self-Managed Abortion Project by advocacy group Women Help Women offers workshops training women to use abortion pills and teach others. States that ban abortion pills may have trouble enforcing those bans, since the Food and Drug Administration in December allowed providers to prescribe abortion pills via telemedicine and mail them to women.

Pro-life groups are also preparing. In 2019, 2,700 pregnancy centers provided an estimated $266 million in services to about 1.85 million people, according to a report by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute. Many clinics have expanded their services beyond pregnancy tests and ultrasounds to include parenting and prenatal classes, help finding housing, and supplies like baby clothes and strollers. A handful offer prenatal care, but most provide just prenatal vitamins and referrals to outside care. The National Maternity Housing Coalition in 2019 listed more than 400 organizations running homes where new moms can live together.

But pregnancy centers can’t provide everything parents need to succeed. “There’s a perspective that the pregnancy center movement is the answer to overturning Roe v. Wade,” Roland Warren, head of pregnancy center network Care Net, told The Dispatch. “The reality is, it’s part of the answer, but it’s not the full answer.” A Christian group, Care Net emphasizes teaching churches to offer mentoring and supportive friendships along with practical help like housing for parents who decide against abortion. “You’re not just trying to save a baby, as God-honoring as that is,” Warren said, adding that after his then-girlfriend got pregnant in college, they decided not to abort and got married. “You’re trying to help them build a family.” 

For those who can’t or don’t want to parent, pro-lifers recommend improving adoption options. “We can present adoption as an alternative, while simultaneously acknowledging that adoption always involves loss,” Chelsea Sobolik, an adoptee and policy director at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, wrote. “[We can] walk with all parties involved in adoption to ensure they have trauma-informed care and resources.”

But activists on both sides of the abortion issue want to complement private charity with policy changes. New York’s legislature, for example, is considering a bill to give abortion providers extra staff and security, a potential constitutional amendment codifying abortion access, and a bill that would block the state’s law enforcement from cooperation with out-of-state prosecution of abortion providers or women seeking abortions. Oregon in March set aside $15 million to fund abortion procedures and women’s travel to receive them. Connecticut passed a law allowing abortion providers to countersue anyone who sues them for providing abortions. And the Washington Post reported the White House is considering using Medicaid to fund travel to states that allow abortion.

Several states that will likely restrict abortion if Roe falls already have higher-than-U.S.-average rates of child poverty, abuse, and lack of prenatal care, according to an Associated Press analysis, but some are trying to improve their family safety nets. Along with its unorthodox abortion prevention law, Texas passed an expansion of Medicaid for mothers up to six months after giving birth and expanded to $100 million its funding for parental support services. Several states have similar “Alternatives to Abortion” funds, and nine states have their own child tax credits. Oklahoma, whose Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a near total abortion ban into law last week, is weighing an adoption tax credit.

Some policy analysts want more. “A world in which states have the power to restrict abortion is one that compels a greater claim on public resources to support expectant mothers facing crisis pregnancies and to seek to make all parents’ lives a little easier,” Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Patrick Brown wrote this weekend, urging steps that include expanding Medicaid for postpartum mothers and babies, requiring some paid leave for parents, and attacking high health care, child care, and housing costs. “This policy agenda will require Republicans to restrain their usual impulse to reach for tax cuts as a cure-all.” That idea doesn’t sound as unlikely as it once might have—Republican Sens. Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney have both supported boosting monthly cash benefits for families with young children. Then again, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz told the Washington Post that Republicans will try to “enact policies that make it easier for families to raise kids,” but “there is always support in the Republican conference for tax cuts.”

Meanwhile, pro-life activists are ready to push state by state for more abortion restrictions. “After Roe falls, the work is just beginning,” Savanna Deretich, public relations and policy coordinator at Students for Life of America, told The Dispatch. The group is pushing for more limits on abortion along with support for pregnant college students. “[Roe] is like the brick wall we’ve been trying to push to get to the real work.”

Worth Your Time

• In her latest Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan argues the fall of Roe will make both our major political parties healthier. Republicans, she argues, now have an opportunity to “change [their] party’s reputation” by coming forward as “human beings who care about women and want to give families the help they need.” Democrats, meanwhile, will have been given a gift with the removal of the abortion issue from the national conversation, as they could become “a normal party” again. “The end of Roe could be a historic gift for both parties, a chance to become their better selves,” Noonan concludes. “And if Roe is indeed overturned, God bless our country that can make such a terrible, coldhearted mistake and yet, half a century later, redress it, right it, turn it around. Only a thinking nation could do that. Only a feeling nation could do that. We’re not dead yet, there are still big things going on here.”

• In American Purpose, Peter Ackerman, Larry Diamond, and Cara Brown McCormick respond to a critique of ranked-choice voting (RCV), arguing it is more democratic than our current first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. “In late 2020, the Chamberlain Project Foundation polled 50,000 Americans and asked whether they wanted more independent candidates winning elections. Nearly 7 out of 10 said yes,” they write. “The only way to give them what they want is with an electoral system—ranked-choice voting is the most viable—that does not force them into a single choice between a Republican and a Democrat. … The logic of RCV is not to elevate conviviality but to punish gratuitously polarizing candidates who might mobilize an intense first-round following but are unacceptable to most of the electorate. That is a democratically worthy goal. Moreover, if we want to avoid ‘anti-democratic’ methods, what is more anti-democratic: a candidate winning an election with just a plurality of the vote, or a series of instant runoffs that produces a majority winner?”

• In his latest newsletter, John McWhorter, a pro-choice Democrat, reflects on the friends with whom he disagrees politically, and how those relationships shaped his response to last week’s Roe v. Wade news. “A major lesson I took from those law students was to avoid a tempting, all-too-common misimpression: that if people have views different from yours, then the reason is either that they lack certain information or are simply bad people,” he writes. “I have to work to imagine prioritizing a fetus as a person in the way that they do. But I think I manage it, and with a deep breath, even though it’s not where I stand, I cannot view the equation of abortion and the taking of a life—or even, as some suggest, a murder—as an immoral position. For many, including me, the priority is what a woman does with her own body. As such, many suppose that to be against abortion is to be anti-feminist. But for pro-lifers, a woman’s right even to controlling her own body stops at what they see as killing an unborn child. To many of them, being anti-abortion is quite compatible with feminism.”

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Toeing the Company Line

• On Friday’s Dispatch Podcast, Sarah, Jonah, and David discuss the leaked Alito draft opinion and its political ramifications. Who benefits most from a post-Roe world? Will states be able to hash out workable compromises, or will legislatures use the opportunity to posture for partisan gain? Plus: J.D. Vance’s victory in Ohio and what it says about Donald Trump’s staying power in the Republican Party.

• Last week’s third Uphill (🔒) touched on Senate Democrats’ upcoming abortion vote, congressional staff pay, new sanctions punishing a contributor to the Uyghur genocide, and growing impatience with third-party contractors involved in NASA’s Space Launch System. “In the time since it was created,” Haley notes, “critics have acerbically described the Space Launch System as the ‘Senate Launch System’ for its priority of creating jobs around the country, often at the expense of efficiency.”

• The legacies of slavery and Jim Crow remain today, but Friday’s G-File dings the left for failing to celebrate the “massive” racial progress the United States has made over the past 70 years. “As racism has shrunk in American life and politics, racism as an explanatory theory for American life and politics has expanded,” he writes. “​​I’m not saying Democrats should give up caring about racism—no one should. But the America-is-racist Unified Field Theory persuades almost no one not already in the fold.”

• In his latest Sunday French Press, David responds to a critique of Tim Keller that argues the pastor’s “third way” approach to politics is not suited to our current moment. “To be committed to biblical justice while also rejecting political partisanship doesn’t put you out of the fight. It instead subjects you to periodic gang-tackling, from both sides of the field,” David writes. “The ‘third way’ approach represents the humble recognition that Christians can in good conscience (and consistent with orthodox Christian theology) reach different positions on the political spectrum.”

• And on this week’s Good Faith podcast, David and Curtis talk about integrity and its role in the abortion debate. How should we assess the intellectual integrity of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion? What will that opinion mean for the integrity of the Supreme Court itself?

• On the site today, Chris takes us back in time to remind us Donald Trump isn’t the root cause of a dysfunctional Republican party—he’s a product of it. And Andy Smarick outlines how our high-stakes politics threaten the norms that help us transcend cultural flashpoints. 

Let Us Know

Do you think childcare and family policy—both in your state and on a national level—needs to meaningfully change to account for Roe v. Wade being overturned?  Or do you view abortion policy and welfare policy as unrelated to one another in any meaningful sense?