This summer the Supreme Court will likely gut Roe v Wade, which will pull the trigger on a bunch of state laws across the country that limit or outright ban abortion access. Clinics will close in states without protections, forcing pregnant people who want to terminate their pregnancies to travel across state lines or to self-medicate with abortion pills, as most of them did in Texas at the end of last year.
If the Court ends up allowing for a total ban, the Guttmacher Institute predicts a 385% increase in the number of “women of reproductive age” from nearby states who would see Washington as the closest place to get an abortion.
We could start seeing a surge in people seeking care here in short order. Idaho’s narrower version of Texas’ abortion bounty law passed the Senate last week, and the state already passed a trigger law to ban virtually all abortions 30 days after SCOTUS fully overturns Roe and Casey.
To help manage the expected influx and to shore up abortion protections in Washington, on Monday the State House signed off on minor (but important) changes the Senate made to House Bill 1851, but the whole process did not go without completely unfounded histrionics from Republicans, some of which I could see them repeating ad nauseam during the 2022 election cycle.
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