The Amazon Prime version cut out the protagonist of the 1992 original movie. It’s the best choice it could have made.
The new Amazon Prime series A League of Their Own comes 30 years after the classic original film hit a home run into the audience’s heart. The 1992 A League of Their Own, which tells the story of the short-lived All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, is one of those perfect movies you can watch at a sleepover when you’re 10 years old and on cable when you’re 30. Every time, it simply works. And, somewhat improbably, the new series lives up to its predecessor.
The new A League of Their Own, co-created by Abbi Jacobson and Will Graham, is a shining example of what an adaptation of a classic can be and rarely is. It is affectionate to its source material and true to its spirit, while at the same time aiming for an entirely new idea. The 2022 version is an adaptation that works by absence and by division. It removes one of the pillars of the original, and plays in the space left behind.
The TV show starts off by offering a few clear analogues to some of the major characters of the 1992 original. D’Arcy Carden and Melanie Field’s Greta and Jo fill the space of Madonna and Rosie O’Donnell’s Mae and Doris — the glamorous femme and the butch who are improbable best friends. Nick Offerman’s Dove fills in for Tom Hanks’s Jimmy, the dour coach more than a little skeptical about the idea of women playing baseball.
But the new show doesn’t quite have a character who fills the place of Geena Davis’s Dottie, the original movie’s protagonist. In the space where Dottie used to be, new and exciting storytelling possibilities flourish.
In the 1992 film, Dottie is the heroine. The film, which centers on the women who became pro ballplayers as men left to fight in World War II, is built around Dottie’s single season as the catcher for the Rockford Peaches.
There, Dottie is also so clearly the All-American League’s ideal lady baseball player that the team managers build their press narrative around her: Dottie, they declare, will be the Queen of Diamonds. While the persnickety charm school the baseball players are forced to attend has criticism for the looks of nearly every other player, they greet Dottie with “Lovely.” When the press appears bored by the team’s practice, Dottie’s able to stage a quick photo op by doing a split while she catches a baseball in front of photographers.
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20th Century Fox
An enormous part of Dottie’s appeal for the League is how natural she seems. Madonna’s Mae is all red lipstick and curlers, on the verge of being too feminine, but Dottie is positioned as the chaste and natural beauty next to Mae’s tryhard sluttiness.
The same emphasis on naturalness goes along with Dottie’s talent as a baseball player. Her kid sister Kit works like a demon to become a great player, but for most of the film, Dottie outshines her without apparently trying. Dottie is so good so easily, the implication is, that she can afford to throw her talent away if she wants to. She is not the sort of woman who will make a fuss when the men come home from the war and want their wives to go back to the kitchen. She is unambitious and so unthreatening.
The tension of the film comes from the ambiguity about how much Dottie actually does care about being good at baseball, and the question of whether she might in fact be trying — to be a great player, to grab attention from the press — while also working hard to appear that she’s not. That’s why the climax, in which Dottie loses a play to Kit and it’s not clear whether she does so intentionally or unintentionally, lands so well. Either interpretation of Dottie’s actions works with what we know of her character.
The new League of Their Own, though, looks at what happens to the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League with no Dottie at all, ambivalent or not. What do you do when there is no perfect player?
The clearest thing to a Dottie analogue in the reboot is Abbi Jacobson’s Carson. (Jacobson also co-created the new show.) Carson takes Dottie’s place as the point-of-view character, catcher, and eventual coach for the Peaches, with a husband away in the war.
Still, Carson is no one’s idea of a perfect representative for the All-American League. She is made up to look respectable, but not to look like a great natural beauty. She’s a talented player, but not the best on the team. She can’t hide the fact that she’s not completely happy in her marriage, that she doesn’t particularly want kids. She is not the kind of person the League wants to sell its fans.
In fact, none of the characters of the new League of Their Own slot easily into the ideal they’re supposed to fit, the Dottie, the Queen of Diamonds. As a result, it becomes ever more clear how unrealistic and unfair that ideal is.
The many butch players of the Rockford Peaches are punished one after another for not being feminine enough. One is kicked off the team for failing at charm school, while another is fined for wearing pants outside the house.
Heightening the problem of the players’ failure to live up to the League’s feminine ideal is the fact that here, many of them are explicitly gay. (Any queerness in the original film remained strictly subtextual.) “Why do you think they’re doing all this, Carson?” Greta asks as they make the rounds through charm school. “It’s to make sure we don’t look like a bunch of queers. That’s what all of this is.”
Glamorous Greta, who uses her femininity as a defensive weapon to hide her own queerness, makes a point of acing the charm school curriculum. It does her no good. Misogynistic fans mock her for blowing kisses to the crowd and then crow that she’s asking for their mockery. The League’s management tells her that she is, like her 1992 analogue Mae, “a little too much.”
All of the players in the 2022 show are explicitly ambitious, and all of them are belittled by both their coach and their fans for trying to take their work seriously. And Coach Dove, unlike Tom Hanks’s slowly redeemed Jimmy, does not stick around to have his mind changed by the sheer hard work of his players. As soon as he gets a better job offer, he abandons the Peaches to their fate.
There’s one other character on the new A League of Their Own who we might consider Dottie’s analogue. That’s Max, a Black woman who’s a brilliant pitcher, played by Chanté Adams. It’s Max who replicates the famous shot from the original film of Dottie plucking a viciously hurled ball out of thin air; Max whom other characters remark on as both the best natural talent they’ve ever seen and as a great beauty. For most of the season, though, Max can’t find anyone willing to let her play. Yet it’s Max who succeeds best at building a space for herself separate from the demands of the All-American League and its ideal woman.
Max is torn between the future imagined for her by her mother Toni, who owns a beauty salon and wants Max to take it over, and the alternative path symbolized by Bertie, Toni’s long-lost sister who turns out to be a trans man. In the end, Max is able to find her own way. She cuts off the hair Toni doted on; when Bertie gives her a suit, she wears the trousers and vest but not the jacket. So rejected is she from every seat of power that she is forced to build her own ideal. When at last she makes her way onto a real professional baseball team, it’s through the solidarity of another queer Black woman.
Meanwhile, Carson’s eventual transformation into a hero comes not through her athletic talent or beauty or modesty, but through her ability to build a community with her fellow teammates. With Coach Dove away, Carson takes over as coach, and is able to mold her fractious teammates into a loving and supportive group for one another. Under Carson, the Peaches start winning games, but their true redemption comes from learning how to take care of one another.
The 1992 League of Their Own is a great movie in part because of the attention with which it explores Dottie’s own ambivalence over the ideal she finds herself embodying, and her bond with the players who the press palpably considers to be lesser than she is. Most poignant is her relationship with Kit, who the world treats as less pretty and less gifted and less womanly than Dottie — but who wants, ferociously and without apology, to be a great player. In the end, she proves herself to be a better player than Dottie, and it’s impossible to tell whether Dottie gave her that moment as a gift or whether Kit wrestled it away for herself.
The new A League of Their Own does not offer a similar moment of ambiguity. It knows that to do so would be to face diminishing returns when compared with the original. What makes this new show a great adaptation is that instead, it removes the heart of the original film, and it builds a new one.
Because without a single Dottie ambivalently embodying the ideal demanded of the players — without a queen on the diamond — every character we see has to find her own way to tear down the picture of the woman who she is supposed to be.
How Moms Demand Action has pushed the conversation on guns forward over the last decade.
Shannon Watts started Moms Demand Action as a Facebook group in December 2012. It was the day after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, and Watts wanted to create a space where people could channel their sadness and rage over gun violence into activism.
She envisioned an organization of parents — not unlike Mothers Against Drunk Driving — that could force political and cultural change on a society that treated gun violence as an intractable problem. At the time, the National Rifle Association was the dominant voice for gun manufacturers and enthusiasts, while the constituency pushing to reform gun laws in the United States was much smaller and less powerful.
As Moms Demand Action approaches its 10th year, I spoke with Watts about the progress they (and others, like former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s organization to prevent gun violence) have made establishing a counterweight to the pro-gun lobby and pushing for legal changes on state and local levels. On the federal level, they celebrated the passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in Congress this summer, which strengthens background checks for gun buyers under 21, makes it harder for convicted domestic abusers to obtain weapons, and provides money to states implementing red flag laws.
We talked about how the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, was not the end of the gun control debate. “I would say it’s exactly the opposite: It marked the beginning,” Watts says. “The Sandy Hook school shooting was actually a galvanizing moment, particularly for moms and women, because now we are almost 10 million supporters — we’re twice as large as the NRA, one decade later.”
We also spoke about what the next decade of Moms Demand Action will look like in a country still plagued by gun violence, where the gun lobby is still outspending its opponents.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, happened on May 24. The shooting at the grocery store in Buffalo, New York, was 10 days before that. What has happened with gun reform in the months since?
Every time there’s a horrific national shooting tragedy like Buffalo, like Uvalde, like Highland Park, there is a Klieg light on the fact that we have too many guns and too few gun laws in this country. Any time that happens, we are ready to absorb people who want to get off the sidelines. And it’s frustrating because those are the shootings that get the attention, but as we were just discussing, over 110 Americans are shot and killed every day, and hundreds more are wounded. When people are paying attention, that’s when we need to educate them about these shooting tragedies that are the result of lax gun laws. But it’s not just mass shootings and school shootings. It’s the daily gun violence, whether it’s gun homicide or gun suicides or domestic gun violence.
Just weeks after these horrific tragedies, we were able to break a nearly 30-year logjam in Congress. We broke the dam of cynicism. This idea that nothing can change and nothing will ever happen — we proved that’s not true. I understand people who were like, well, that’s not enough. No, it’s not, but it is a step forward on a longer path.
Our theory of change has been that this progress is going to be incremental because of the way the system is set up. It is incrementalism that leads to revolutions. We have shown that over and over again. If you go back to 2012, when I started doing this work, about a quarter of all Democrats in Congress had an A rating from the NRA. Today, none do. Now we have to do that for Republicans. We want all lawmakers to be on the right side of this issue.
You mentioned the federal legislation — the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — that Congress just passed, but most of your organization’s work, and success, has been on the state and local level. How did that happen?
I started Moms Demand Action as a Facebook page on December 15, 2012. We had marches and rallies for about two months. I was very naive and I thought, oh, we’re going to pass this federal legislation in a few months at a maximum, and we’ll all go back to our normal lives. Then the Manchin-Toomey bill surfaced, and we put all our energy into that. I was sitting in the Senate gallery when it failed by just a handful of votes in the spring of 2013.
I thought, okay, well, clearly this isn’t going to happen. America is not ready for this. I guess we will go back to our normal lives. Our brilliant volunteers said, no, we’ve created the beginning of this army — we’ll just pivot and start doing this work in the school boards and city councils and statehouses where we live. That’s exactly what they did. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a governor thank Moms Demand Action. I just thought, oh, wow, we have something here. We’re creating political power. We realized we could pass good bills, that there were governors who were willing to do that.
At the same time, in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting, there were a whole lot of states that did the opposite. We did not predict how much time we would spend playing defense. So in addition to passing hundreds of good gun bills in the last decade, things like universal background checks and red flag laws and disarming domestic abusers and secure storage bills, we’ve also stopped the NRA’s agenda on bills like arming teachers, forcing guns onto college campuses, and expanding shoot-first laws. It’s not just about passing good laws, it’s also about undoing the damage that bad laws have caused.
We saw again in the wake of these shooting tragedies this year that there were governors who were willing to do the right thing. I was standing with the governor of Rhode Island when he passed sweeping gun reform legislation wearing a Moms Demand Action shirt. In Delaware we passed the first assault weapons ban in a state since we started doing this work. New York, Delaware, Rhode Island, California, New Jersey — there are many states this year that have acted.
How are you feeling about both the candidates and the issues that are going to be on the ballot this fall? What’s the most important objective for Moms Demand Action this year?
Everything we’re seeing in the states around gun safety raises the stakes for November. The NRA is hellbent on passing permitless carry laws everywhere. At the same time, we have small majorities that we need to protect. We have states where we’re in the minority and we just need to flip a few seats before we can actually pass good gun laws. Lives are on the line in this election. Our safety is on the ballot.
There’s a reason that [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell voted for the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, and that’s because he saw swing voters were gun safety voters. Swing voters are also women. They’re suburban women. I know sometimes the words “suburban women” can be a racist dog whistle, but suburban women are an increasingly diverse community.
We know those suburban women supported Joe Biden in the last election. We know they support gun safety. We know they’re worried about sending their kids into the streets, into public places, into their schools. And look, if I’ve learned anything over the last decade, it is that there is nothing more powerful than an army of angry mothers.
You started this right after the Sandy Hook tragedy. You’ve seen it grow into this network of millions of people. What does that tell you about where the reform movement is at in this country? And what will the next 10 years of Moms Demand Action look like?
When I look back on the last 10 years, I’m incredibly proud, first of all, of the fact that we exist. There were so many times and ways this fledgling, faltering organization could have dissolved in the early days, but we didn’t. We never gave up. It’s miraculous that we’re here.
And not just that we’re here, but that we are larger than the NRA, that we have this incredible brand that empowers women and not only encourages them to be active politically, but to run for office. We have over 120 volunteers running this election cycle. That’s really a testament to the brilliance of our volunteers. We never gave up. We always call it “losing forward.” When we’ve lost, we’ve learned and we’ve pivoted and figured out how to win the next time. I think we’ve really changed the political calculus.
The Reproductive Freedom for All Act reveals deeper debates about post-Roe America.
Amid threats over the last year that the Supreme Court might abolish the right to an abortion, Democrats and advocacy groups have used an imperfect but popular phrase as a synonym for protecting reproductive freedom: “codify Roe.”
“When we go back to Washington, we will be putting Roe v. Wade codification on the floor of the House to make sure that women everywhere have access to the reproductive health that they need,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pledged last September. When a draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision leaked in May, President Joe Biden stressed the need for “legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law.”
A bill introduced earlier this month aims to do exactly that, writing into law the holdings of Supreme Court decisions that guaranteed the right to contraception and to abortion before fetal viability, usually in the 22nd to 24th week of pregnancy.
But translating abortion-related court decisions into legislative language that everyone can agree on has turned out to be more difficult and controversial than lawmakers have publicly acknowledged.
The bill, known as the Reproductive Freedom for All Act, is a bipartisan effort, sponsored by Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and Democratic Sens. Tim Kaine and Kyrsten Sinema. It has sparked outrage among the leaders of abortion rights groups: They argue it would not actually codify key Supreme Court decisions and could even be a step backward from what Americans had before Dobbs. The measure does much less to protect abortion rights than the Women’s Health Protection Act, abortion rights groups’ favored bill, which passed the House but has failed twice in the Senate.
Their reaction underscores a key debate over Democrats’ legislative strategy in post-Roe America. Even as Democrats say they want to codify Roe, national reproductive rights groups and their allies in Congress see a political window to move beyond Roe’s weak framework and more meaningfully protect abortion access.
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These groups, including Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and a dozen others, think it’s unlikely that the Kaine-Collins bill could attract much Republican support beyond its two co-sponsors. Energized by recent pro-abortion rights victories, they express confidence about sticking to their original plan: elect two more senators, maintain control of the House, and then overturn the filibuster to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would not only restore the pre-Dobbs status quo but dismantle a slew of state restrictions on abortion.
“We have this really clear political opportunity to realize some big, big wins,” NARAL president Mini Timmaraju said. “And we owe these folks who are at risk of losing their lives because of things like ectopic pregnancies, we owe them the biggest, boldest solution possible.”
The Kaine-Collins bill, by contrast, is intentionally less ambitious. “It’s like a time machine bill,” Kaine said. “We wanted to put something on the table that would give back Americans exactly what they had, and lock in a statutory protection that women had relied on for 50 years. Not expanding, not subtracting.”
Vox spoke with top Democratic lawmakers, legislative aides and strategists, leaders of reproductive rights groups, and legal scholars to understand the choices and challenges ahead for federal abortion policy. The interviews illuminated a simmering debate over whether it’s worth trying to return to the legal frameworks of June 23, 2022 — the day before Dobbs was decided — and deeper divisions over what baseline abortion rights the federal government should, or realistically can, guarantee.
The Reproductive Freedom for All Act, explained
In addition to enshrining the right to contraception, the bill prohibits state rules that impose an “undue burden” on abortion before fetal viability, the same standard established by the Supreme Court in its 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision.
Outright bans are illegal under this undue burden framework, but restrictions that significantly curtail access to abortion have often been upheld. The Reproductive Freedom for All Act also affirms health care workers’ right to refuse to provide abortion for religious reasons — something currently allowed in over 40 states, and a key demand from its Republican co-sponsors.
The bill sponsors readily admit there are not 60 votes in the Senate to pass the legislation, and Collins, Murkowski, and Sinema do not support overturning the filibuster. But the sponsors say they wanted to signal that a bipartisan majority of their chamber supports codifying Roe. (Kaine and Sinema also support the Women’s Health Protection Act, but Collins, Murkowski, and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin opposed that legislation, depicting it as too expansive.)
Kaine compared his bill to lawmakers who fought for gun control when they also lacked 60 votes. “We spent a decade pushing for that, and then tragedies made the Senate move,” he said. “I think life post-Dobbs is a series of tragedies, and we have a sense that real life is going to push votes our way.”
The response to Kaine-Collins from reproductive rights groups and some Democratic lawmakers has ranged from chilly to hostile, with objections falling into four general buckets, of varying legitimacy.
Would the bill actually codify Roe?
The first objection — voiced by virtually every national advocacy group for reproductive rights — is that the Reproductive Freedom for All Act does not include explicit enough language to bar pre-viability abortion bans, like the 15-week ban in Mississippi that sparked the Dobbs case to begin with. For this reason, they say, the bill doesn’t actually codify Roe v. Wade.
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Sandy Huffaker/AFP via Getty Images
This is the most controversial objection. The bill clearly states a government cannot impose an undue burden on a woman’s right to an abortion before fetal viability, and that fetal viability is determined by a woman’s attending doctor, not the state. While it’s likely that medically unnecessary restrictions such as mandatory waiting periods could withstand the murky undue burden standard, an outright ban is a different question.
Kaine says the bill was specifically written to prevent pre-viability bans. “I practiced civil rights law for 18 years and virtually any intellectually honest judge would look at this and say Congress says you can’t impose an undue burden, which a ban clearly is,” he said. “While you may have rogue judges here or there, returning to the undue burden standard would give the judiciary not just the tools but also the mandate to throw out those kinds of laws.”
So what’s going on? Pressed for answers, reproductive health groups and senators pointed to a concurring opinion in Dobbs from Chief Justice John Roberts. Writing alone, Roberts argued that the right to an abortion does not necessarily need to be paired with fetal viability. Roberts suggested Mississippi’s 15-week ban could potentially be legal, as long as a woman had a “reasonable opportunity” to get an abortion before then.
“Senator Kaine’s legislation is missing the core protection of Roe, which prohibited any ban on abortion before viability, and replaces it with a dangerous legal standard that could permit extremist state laws like Mississippi’s 15-week ban,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren told Vox in a statement. “This bill is closer to codifying Chief Justice Roberts’s concurrence in the Dobbs decision than it is to codifying Roe, and I do not support it.”
But the idea that John Roberts’s interpretation of the undue burden standard — which was rejected by the Court’s five-member conservative majority — would triumph now is unpersuasive, said several legal experts.
Ben Eidelson, a Harvard constitutional law professor, said the Reproductive Freedom for All Act “very clearly precludes pre-viability bans” and noted the Roberts concurrence “really has no legal relevance here.”
The majority opinion in Dobbs — not the concurring one — would define the legal backdrop for interpreting what Congress does next, Eidelson said. “It would be extraordinary for the Court to turn around, after Congress relies on that, and say that actually Roe and Casey meant something completely different than they themselves had said or anyone ever thought,” he added.
Sherif Girgis, a Notre Dame law professor who argued the Supreme Court should overturn Roe, said the Kaine-Collins bill prohibits abortion bans “even a little bit” before viability and “there is no serious argument to the contrary.”
Girgis noted that “every judge at every level of the judiciary” who has considered the abortion question in the last 30 years — including very conservative judges like James Chiun-Yue Ho on the Fifth Circuit and Amul Thapar on the Sixth — has held that Casey’s undue burden standard precludes any pre-viability ban, and that even Roberts didn’t disagree in Dobbs.
Rachel Rebouché, the dean of Temple Law School and co-author of an influential paper on coming legal battles in a post-Roe America, also said she doesn’t see how Roberts’s concurrence would be significant here. “Even if the bill is not explicit as you might want it to be, it is pretty explicit,” she said. “And even if John Roberts argues that Casey never necessarily intended the viability line to be the line Roe prohibits, there is no other vote on the Court for that view.”
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Drew Angerer/Getty Images
There are a few dissenting scholars. Leah Litman, a constitutional law professor at the University of Michigan, argues the operative section of the Kaine-Collins bill needs to be more specific, given Roberts’s opinion in Dobbs and because states like Texas and Mississippi, and conservative groups, have been arguing that undue burden doesn’t necessarily prohibit pre-viability bans.
“That gives the Court wiggle room to say it’s not so clear,” she said. “It’s a sloppy bill that is foolish and naive and fails to take the federal courts as they are.”
Could the bill pass and withstand a court challenge?
The second objection is practical: The Kaine-Collins bill doesn’t have the votes. Timmaraju, president of NARAL, describes the Reproductive Freedom for All Act as a “political stunt that should not be taken seriously” given that its sponsors have not backed overturning the filibuster.
Advocates say their best path to protect abortion rights is to elect two more Democratic senators to overcome its last failed vote of 49-51. Democrats are favored to at least retain control of the Senate next year, but to lose the House. Performing well enough in November, though, doesn’t mean the filibuster’s death is a foregone conclusion; just as many lawmakers pledged support for Medicare-for-all only when the possibility seemed remote, more objections to ending the filibuster might emerge if it were a real possibility.
There’s a third objection: that the Reproductive Freedom for All Act is inadequate because it would invariably return questions back to the same anti-abortion federal judiciary that just overthrew Roe. This objection is a little tricky, since the Women’s Health Protection Act would also get embroiled in legal challenges, and be reviewed by those same hostile judges.
But advocates say at least the Women’s Health Protection Act is much more specific on what types of restrictions would violate the law, an improvement over the “undue burden” standard that leaves so much to court discretion.
Mary Ziegler, a professor at the UC Davis School of Law who has authored several books on reproductive rights history, said federal courts would likely strike down both bills because Congress has limited authority to legislate in this area.
“It’s either going to be relying on Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, or the commerce clause, and quite likely you’ll get a conservative Supreme Court that says Congress doesn’t have the authority to do either of those things,” she said. “Which is a reason why there will have to be some kind of conversation about court reform, because there would be real jeopardy for any federal legislation protecting abortion rights.”
Sarah Standiford, the national campaign director for Planned Parenthood Action Fund, agreed there are real hurdles right now for federal bills. “I think there is a hunger for Congress to solve this problem, but the solution is not simple, and the solution is going to be using every avenue we have, and the fact is many of those avenues are at the state level,” she told Vox. “We have to be honest with ourselves about the limitations that structurally exist in Congress.”
Advocates want to focus beyond Roe and Casey
The final category of objection is the biggest one: that restoring the Roe and Casey standards would not do enough to address the abortion care crisis in the United States. Before Dobbs, it was perfectly legal to enact medically unnecessary restrictions that crippled abortion clinics and which made terminating pregnancies practically too difficult to do. The overturn of Roe has wiped the slate clean, and activists see an opportunity to fight for stronger protections.
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In explaining her objection to the Kaine-Collins bill, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) told Politico it doesn’t “fully [guarantee] a woman’s right to reproductive choice.” Warren said returning to the status quo before Dobbs “is not good enough.” A joint statement from 15 reproductive rights, health, and justice groups stressed they’re looking for “legislative solutions that make abortion truly accessible.”
Timmaraju, NARAL’s president, emphasized that activists have developed a much clearer understanding of how restrictions permitted under the undue burden standard can decimate access to care. “To those who say we want to go back in a time machine to the day before Dobbs, that was still a bad day,” she said.
Democratic senators and activists also stress the Kaine-Collins bill does not explicitly prohibit SB 8, the novel citizen-enforced abortion ban that Texas passed last September and which several states are looking to copy.
The Women’s Health Protection Act doesn’t explicitly bar these bans either, but does include language its drafters hope could grant advocates grounds to challenge the “bounty hunters” in court.
Kaine, for his part, thinks his bill would protect against laws like SB 8. “A bounty hunting law is an undue burden, and a six-week ban is before viability,” he said. “Our bill would wipe out all those state schemes.”
Eidelson, the constitutional law professor, thinks that if Congress passed the Reproductive Health for All Act and if the Supreme Court upheld it (both big ifs), that would, in fact, substantially undercut SB 8 and similar laws. Much of the chilling effect in Texas over the last year stemmed from the interaction of SB 8’s threat of liability and pending uncertainty over Roe v. Wade.
The Kaine-Collins bill’s opponents aren’t just disinclined to accept the pre-Roe status quo — they’re less certain they need to compromise. An increasing share of Democrats and independents say the Dobbs decision has motivated them to vote in November. Advocates are energized by the recent ballot victory in Kansas, two special elections where Democrats outperformed their 2020 vote share, and midterm polls that show voters are concerned about abortion rights. Democratic Senate staffers say privately that there’s no reason to tamp down on bold rhetoric now, and there will be time to moderate later if the political landscape shifts.
“I think the thing that is most useful for abortion rights advocates to be doing now is to be as aggressively chest-thumping as possible,” one senior aide told me, speaking anonymously to candidly describe Senate discussions. “It helps to position ourselves so that when the next meltdown comes, what emerges out of it will be as strong as possible.”
The strategically optimal path to federal abortion rights is for now unsettled, but the stakes are high. Ziegler, of UC Davis, said she’s not surprised the national groups aren’t defending bills to codify Roe and Casey now that those decisions have been overturned.
“I do think Casey from the standpoint of most national groups was never good enough,” she said. “I also think from the standpoint of a person of color living in Arizona with a fetal personhood law, Casey probably looks awfully good right now.”