Maricopa Superior Court Judge Greg Como struck down three state laws that restricted access to abortion in Arizona Feb. 6. The laws required women to provide a reason for seeking an abortion, barred abortion in cases of nonfatal genetic abnormalities, prohibited doctors from prescribing and mailing abortion pills and ordered women seeking an abortion to schedule at least two documented doctor visits before legally having the procedure. These restrictions had remained on the books despite voters overwhelmingly approving a state constitutional guarantee of women’s right to choose to have an abortion in 2024.
“Each of these laws,” Judge Como ruled, “infringe on a woman’s ‘autonomous decision making’ by mandating medical procedures and disclosure of information regardless of the patient’s needs and wishes.”
“For the first time in a long time, my patients will not have to jump through hoops to get the care they need,” said Paul Isaacson, one of the doctors who filed the suit against the restrictions.
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, for good reasons, handing the issue over to the states and the people to decide, millions of working people have debated the issue. Voters upheld state pro-abortion-rights laws in a large majority of them. Today abortion is a woman’s affair to decide in 30 states and Washington, D.C. Abortion restrictions will be on the ballot in at least two more states in 2026, Missouri and Nevada, and possibly more.
“The Socialist Workers Party champions the decriminalization of abortion as part of the broader fight to advance the rights and lives of women and working people as a whole,” Margaret Trowe, the party’s candidate for governor of California, told the Militant.
“The crisis of capitalism makes it harder for workers to sustain families and have children today,” she said. “In contract fights across the country, unions are fighting for wages that can support a family, work schedules that allow family life and affordable medical care. We need a union-led fight for a government-funded public works program, with jobs at union-scale wages, to build affordable child and elder care centers, housing and other things workers sorely need.”
According to the latest Gallup poll, 51% of Americans now identify themselves as “pro-choice,” an increase from 2021 and product of the debate over the issue.