One Year After the Dobbs Decision

June 24, 2023
One year ago today the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Learn about the reproductive rights work we have done over the past year.

It’s been exactly a year since Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that “Roe v. Wade was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences,” and concluded that the principle of reproductive liberty “is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.” Poof! With the stroke of Alito’s pen, there went one of the most important structural foundations of a modern notion of full citizenship: the constitutional right to make fundamental decisions about your own health, body, and future. 

But it’s not like we didn’t see it coming. We did. Before the Supreme Court decided Dobbs, all of us at Columbia Law School’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Law both hoped for the best and prepared for the worst.   

Here’s a snapshot of our strategic vision for a post-Roe world, protecting and advancing reproductive justice, sex equality, bodily autonomy, and fundamental constitutional liberties.

The Law, Rights, and Religion Project (LRRP)

The Law, Rights, and Religion Project promotes social justice, freedom of religion, and religious pluralism. We analyze and develop strategies to address the complex ways in which religious liberty rights interact with other fundamental rights. 

  • Shortly before Dobbs was released, LRRP hosted a private convening for faith leaders, litigators, and religion law experts on how abortion bans might infringe on religious liberty rights. Participants were invited to share how abortion bans could impact people of faith's ability to act on their conscience, to consider how state and federal legal protections might shield those who are religiously motivated to offer, seek, or facilitate abortion care, and to discuss the potential benefits and risks of various strategies to protect abortion access as a religious right.  

  • In August 2022, LRRP published "A Religious Right to Abortion: Legal History and Analysis," which explores how religious liberty protections might limit the reach of anti-abortion laws. The report includes an appendix of lawsuits arguing for a religious right to abortion that reaches as far back as 1970.

  • This spring, LRRP created a condensed version of our “Religious Right to Abortion” report to be distributed at screenings of the new short documentary "Under G-d," which will be aired at religious congregations nationwide. 

  • Since Dobbs, LRRP has contacted over 50 faith, legal, and reproductive rights organizations to assess their understanding, interest, and any concerns regarding activism and/or litigation at the intersection of religion and abortion rights. 

  • LRRP has provided education and support on religion law for attorneys and religious leaders bringing or considering religious right-to-abortion cases in over 10 states. 

  • In March of this year, LRRP Director Liz Reiner Platt helped draft and signed an amicus brief in support of Indianans who are arguing that their state’s total ban on abortion violates their right to religious liberty. The brief, submitted by historians of religion, reproduction, and the law, showed that “[f]aith communities across the state of Indiana and the United States have a long record of viewing access to abortion or contraception as a matter of faith.” 

  • LRRP has provided legal information to a burgeoning coalition of faith groups that aims to provide practical support to people seeking abortion care.

  • LRRP has also published three fundamentally important in-depth reports on the role of religion in shaping and limiting reproductive healthcare: The Southern Hospitals Report: Faith, Culture, and Abortion Bans in the U.S. South, Bearing Faith: The Limits of Catholic Health Care for Women of Color, and Unmarried & Unprotected: How Religious Liberty Bills Harm Pregnant People, Families, and Communities of Color.

The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) Project

The ERA Project develops academically rigorous research, policy papers, expert guidance, and strategic leadership on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the U.S. Constitution, and on the role of the ERA in advancing the larger cause of gender-based justice. The text of the ERA is simple. It states: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

  • In anticipation of the Dobbs decision, the ERA Project published talking points on how the ERA can and must protect access to abortion.

  • During our 2022 ERA Symposium, we also hosted a session titled The ERA and Abortion: Equality Arguments for Reproductive Rights, featuring Reva Siegel (Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law, Yale Law School), Serena Mayeri (Professor of Law and History, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School), Cary Franklin (McDonald/Wright Chair of Law and Faculty Director, Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law) and Katherine Franke (James L. Dohr Professor of Law and Faculty Director, ERA Project, Columbia Law School.) Watch the recording here.

  • We submitted an amicus brief in Allegheny Reproductive Health Center v. Pennsylvania Department of Human Services explaining how Pennsylvania’s ban on funding for abortion violates explicit sex equality language in the Pennsylvania constitution (a state ERA added to the Pennsylvania constitution in 1971). Our brief provides the court with several ways to understand the restrictions on funding for abortion is a form of sex discrimination.  As we await the decision from the PA Supreme Court, we continue to deepen our research and analysis on state-based efforts to expand and protect reproductive rights through a constitutional ERA.

  • Members of Congress and state elected officials continue to rely on the ERA Project’s analysis of the relationship between the ERA and reproductive rights. Our testimony submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee when it held a hearing on the ERA last February is available here.

  • We briefed the Democratic Association of Attorneys General on how access to abortion was a fundamental tenet of sex-based equality.

  • In the aftermath of Dobbs, our ongoing partnerships with advocates including Planned Parenthood, National Women’s Law Center, North Star Project, and state ERA coalitions in Nevada, Minnesota, and California build a stronger constitutional foundation for reproductive rights through the ERA.

  • Looking ahead to 2024, we continue to work closely with lawmakers, advocates, the media, and others to explain the potential of New York State’s expansively worded ERA to advance reproductive justice and sex equality. The New York ERA will be on the ballot in the fall of 2024. It would prohibit discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, and sex — including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes.

Abortion As The Curriculum

Additionally, last fall the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law teamed up with faculty members from Columbia Law School to hold a special session for first-year law (1L) students focused on the law through the lens of the Dobbs decision. The first-year curriculum often strikes students as unrelated to the most pressing legal issues of the day. In Abortion As The Curriculum, five professors who teach 1L courses in Torts, Property, Civil Procedure, Constitutional Law, and Contracts “taught their subject” through the lens of the right to abortion, showing how each of their respective subjects is critical to the legal questions surrounding the right to abortion, reproductive autonomy, or sexual liberty.

Watch a recording of this event below.