Abortion has faded from the headlines since the Dobbs decision of 2022, and Republicans like it that way. In the immediate aftermath of the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, as millions of women lost access to the dignity and self-determination that abortion provided them, clinics shut their doors, and the extent of Dobbs’s horrendously adverse public health implications started to become clear, abortion was always, it seemed, in the headlines. There were plenty of stories. There was the first known woman to die as the result of an abortion ban; and then the second; and then the third. There were the various lawsuits and ballot initiatives that for a while turned access off and on and then off again in various states; then there were the state supreme court elections, races that were newly transformed by the abortion debate and on which the health and status of a state’s women now relied. There were the clinics that shut their doors in Republican-controlled states, many of which had provided the essential, stigmatized care for decades, under hostile conditions, with persistence and innovation and determination that were staggering.
But the stories have faded from the headlines as the years have gone by. Feminism has gone dramatically out of style, with the big women’s rights NGOs wounded enough by Dobbs and attacks from the Trump administration that they have been largely unable to push their agenda in either media or policy, and algorithmic social media driving a rise in gender conservatism and politicized misogyny, particularly among young men. But maybe more importantly, abortion has ceased to be a story because the horrors of abortion bans have ceased to be news: the US has grown used to the swift and dramatic erosion of women’s health and status that has followed Dobbs, grown used to the horror stories and upward ticking body counts, grown into ease, and even a kind of compliant boredom, with women’s death and indignity.
