Friends,
We had an email planned today to share some of our favorite moments from the last year as we celebrate our two-year BANiversary, but then the news came that the Supreme Court is taking up Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that could upend the entire precedent of Roe v. Wade, and it just no longer felt right.
Dobbs v. JWHO is a challenge to a Mississippi law that bans abortion completely – and with no exceptions – at the point of 15 weeks gestation (just barely into the second trimester). The ban cuts off abortion entirely at a point that is still more than a month before the even slightest possibility of viability, which is exactly what anti-abortion activists want. Allow a state to ban abortion prior to viability and that line is shattered, and Roe itself is no more.
We want to be frank with you: this is a terrifying moment. We have until summer of 2022, which is when the ruling is expected to be handed down from the bench, to be sure we are ready for whatever they may decide. And we will be ready. As our executive director Laurie Roberts (who is also the co-founder of Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund) says:
We’ve been waiting for this moment to come for over a year, and the timing is absolutely no surprise. The Supreme Court has become more aggressively partisan with every Trump appointee seated, and gearing up an abortion case that could overturn Roe v. Wade to conclude just before midterms is as blatant as you can be.
Losing the right to a legal abortion wouldn’t be the worst thing that has happened to us in Mississippi or through the South. We are the children of the Freedom Fighters, the grandchildren and great grandchildren of enslaved Africans, and the parents of toddlers who cannot drink the water coming out of our faucets, of teenagers who cannot walk down the street without fear of being murdered by police. We have weathered enslavement, disenfranchisement, pollution, prison, and we will weather bearing children forced on us by the government, or finding our own solutions to ending pregnancies, just like we always have.
We will always find a way, because that is what we do. And Yellowhammer Fund will always be there to make that path easier in any way possible. No matter what the Supreme Court decides in the summer of 2022 regarding Roe, abortion will always remain a human right – even if it is no longer a constitutional one – and Yellowhammer Fund will stand by, ready to help.
We hope you are standing with us, too. To donate for today’s patients and tomorrow’s, click here. And if you can commit to a monthly donation in any amount, please consider it. The next two years will require more resources than we have ever needed before.