To our friends in the fight:
June 24th marks four years since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. At the time, I called the decision “nothing short of devastating”—and it has been.
Dobbs put a target on the autonomy of women and girls. Indeed, it’s the thread that runs through the entire Trump administration agenda. When the state decides what a person can do with their own body—whether to continue a pregnancy, whether to leave a violent relationship, whether to cast a vote without being intimidated or suppressed—it exercises the same fundamental claim: that bodies are subject to control.
It’s a rationale that has led extremists to limit medication abortion access, slash Title X funding, and to push an agenda of rabid pronatalism: championing bigger families while slashing the child care and paid leave and nutrition assistance needed to actually sustain them.
And yet, the administration suppresses women—it underestimates women—at its own peril. Women have been in this fight—organizing, petitioning, marching, and building civic power—through every step forward, and every lurch back.
So at the National Women’s Law Center, we know how to use the law to fight the unlawful: to protect emergency abortion care under EMTALA in California, and fight the EEOC when the federal government refuses to protect transgender workers.
We know how to use our voices to speak truth to power: to expose pronatalism, uplift trans youth, and destigmatize reproductive health.
And we know how to use our organizing power to grow our movement. To educate the public about what’s at stake, and to inspire them to vote, march, run, and govern their way out of this mess.
The last four years have been devastating—but while we may be down, we sure [as hell] aren’t out. Thank you for your resilience and resolve…for investing in this movement…and for believing, as we do, that a freer, fairer future is possible.
In solidarity,
Fatima Goss Graves
President and CEO
National Women’s Law Center