On May 2, American political journalism company Politico revealed Justice Samuel Alito’s first draft opinion overturning abortion rights, which had been protected as a constitutional right since 1973 by the Roe v. Wade ruling. The following month, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) announced its decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a landmark ruling that allows individual states to set their own laws governing, and in some cases outlawing, abortion. In particular, many students and organizations have raised their voices over how the ruling has impacted their universities and personal lives. To explore more into the action students have made in response to the overturning, Ewha Voice went on a two-week trip to Washington D.C., New York City, and Boston to hear out students from Georgetown University, the George Washington University, Columbia University, and Boston University.
Sanchi Rohira, a rising junior from Georgetown University, was one of the first few people to show up at the SCOTUS after Politico leaked the news to the public. When she first arrived, there were approximately seven to eight protesters who were sitting down with candles and looking up at the building — almost as if they were grieving.
The solemn scene shifted as counter-protesters arrived. Shortly thereafter, the number of protesters and counter-protesters surged, turning the quiet sit-in into a rally.
Rohira made the effort to organize and maintain order within the protest. She and an older woman whom she had met for the first time stood arm in arm with their backs turned toward the counter-protesters, forming a shield between themselves and her friends. As more supporters joined, the protective shield drove the counter-protesters away.
“The picture of a chain of young people sitting there in solidarity and in conviction of what they were doing along with the statement of what they were making in the midst of all the noise and yelling was definitely the most memorable part of the protest,” Rohira said.
Rohira and a group of students returned to SCOTUS every night after the leak. Although the crowds were much smaller than before, they made sure to keep the area occupied at every point of the day. Their presence gave a sense of hope that there would be a slim yet significant chance to lead the decision to a better outcome if the protesters fought hard enough.
When the final decision was announced, it was difficult for Rohira to face the stark reality that young women today had fewer rights than their grandmothers’ generation. However, she is determined to push through and continue to make changes with new strategies, including putting pressure on federal lawmakers to protect individuals at local and state levels in danger of losing access to safe abortions.
On the same campus, members of H*yas for Choice (HFC) were upset and furious to find out about the leak. Since 1991, HFC worked as a prochoice, sex-positive, reproductive justice organization at Georgetown University. The organization immediately responded to the leak, providing public transportation subsidies to students who were interested in protesting in front of the SCOTUS.
Even before the leak and the final decision, HFC had been fighting against its own university, which has a tradition of restricting the reproductive health rights of students.
Georgetown University is renowned as the oldest Catholic institution of higher education in the United States. The university refuses to provide birth control, emergency contraceptives, and STI tests through its student health insurance plans. While reproductive and sexual health issues are freely discussed, the university does not permit trademarks of reproductive health student organizations like HFC to use the school’s name. Yet, it continues to host the largest annual pro-life conference, bringing in even high school students who are interested in attending the university.
Nina Yee, a rising senior and current president of HFC, shared that the organization plans on pushing new agendas in response to the final decision amidst the university’s traditionalist setting. For the upcoming semester, HFC plans to put pressure on the university to stop funding for pro-life related events by working with other pro-reproductive advocacy groups within different graduate schools like Georgetown Law Center and School of Medicine and running a no-donation pledge on the school.
Yee explained that the organization has been consistently providing direct needs such as condoms to students who do not have access to a single place on campus for sexual health necessities. HFC plans to expand educational events with OBGYN professionals to go through the advantages and disadvantages of various birth control products, especially for students who are worried after SCOTUS’s decision to restrict abortion. The group looks forward to working with law school professors to provide accurate information on reproductive health rights and to concentrate on community-building.
“We are in a unique situation at Georgetown where reproductive health is an afterthought,” Yee said. “I realized that reproductive health is a desperate need that students have. Since the university is not going to meet it, it is important that students take charge.”
Just a five-minute drive away from Georgetown University, another group of eager students at George Washington University have raised their voices about the overturning of Roe v. Wade. This time, it was the concurring opinion of Justice Clarence Thomas, who also worked as a professor at the George Washington University Law School, that mainly sparked outrage. For pro-choice students, the employment of Justice Clarence Thomas as a professor at the very institution where they are receiving education, conflicted with their beliefs and was intolerable.
Shortly after the SCOTUS decision, students at George Washington University went on to take matters into their own hands and started a petition to demand the university’s removal of Justice Clarence Thomas from employment.
Among these many eager students was Jon Kay, a rising junior at George Washington University, who created the petition and ignited nationwide attention.
“His concurring opinion made explicit his intention to overturn the right to contraception, to overturn gay marriage and to pave the way for homosexuality to be criminalized in any state,” Kay said. “I was pretty outraged that GW would hire this person, so within 30 minutes, I wrote a petition outline and posted it to Change.org.”
Kay wished the petition to have an impact, but its effect surpassed his highest expectations. It only took a few months for the petition to garner no fewer than 11,000 signatures and successfully drive Justice Clarence Thomas into eventually stepping down from his teaching position.
While the vast majority of people were supportive of the result, a subsection of students showed their disapproval of the resignation and the petition in general because it silences conservative ideas — a position with which Kay disagrees.
“There already is a number of conservative professors at the George Washington University,” Kay argues. “But the difference between them and Clarence Thomas is that he is the person actually instituting and responsible for change that is going to harm students.”
The shock from the dissenting opinion of Justice Clarence Thomas further rippled through New York City as well. Emma Warshaw, a graduate student doing her master’s degree focusing in population and family health at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, recalls being both terrified and enraged when the opinion was opened to the public.
The dire situation brought her to her feet, assembling a heated Zoom meeting demanding access to abortion pills on campus with a couple of other students and a professor from Barnard College and Columbia University. They are part of an organization called the Reproductive Justice Collective, a group of students striving for reproductive justice at Columbia University and New York City as a whole.
“The meeting was not held to just vent how sad we were about Roe v. Wade being gone,” Warshaw said. “Everyone was really motivated to get things going. We have been emailing the school to make medication abortion available on campus for the past two years, but have constantly been ignored by the administration.”
In a situation where students need the university’s support the most, the lack of cooperation was utterly disappointing.
“They say there are clinics right outside campus that provide abortion pills,” Warshaw said. “But I do not see why students have to run around elsewhere when they can simply access it at their universities. I mean, why not?”
The New York State government has proposed a bill that would provide medication abortion at state university campuses. The Reproductive Justice Collective plans to continue to advocate on its behalf and more importantly has begun pouring effort into drafting a bill to do the same at the city level.
In New York City and beyond, medical schools nationwide have begun to suffer from the aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade. David J. Skorton, the president of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), posed the possibility of restrictions on comprehensive training across the spectrum of reproductive healthcare and other forms of OB-GYN care, according to the AAMC’s statement in response to the court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Medical students also shared their concerns about the court’s decision at the student level, by participating in protests held on campus and walking out of a whitecoat ceremony that was held at the University of Michigan on July 24.
Kendra Lujan, Margaux Zimmerman, and Hannah Nguyen who attend Boston University School of Medicine strive to ensure that the proper amount of training for abortions is provided in medical schools even after the overturning. They are co-leaders of the Boston University chapter of Medical Students for Choice (MSFC), which supports medical students and physicians in abortion training.
Nguyen has been passionate about reproductive rights and healthcare issues since she was an adolescent as she has believed that the right to abortion is something all women deserve. Above all, working as a medical assistant at an abortion clinic in New Mexico, she had an eye-opening experience, and it led her to apply to medical school to be an OB-GYN.
Unlike Nguyen, Lujan was not exposed to abortion rights and reproductive health cares until she got into medical school. The main purpose of joining in MSFC was to understand how abortion and reproductive health care operated. However, participating in SPaRC, the MSFC’s volunteer service, brought about her belief in ensuring abortion rights, and she now sees herself specializing in OB-GYN and abortion healthcare.
A fellow SPaRC volunteer, Zimmerman could also fully understand the emotional trauma when patients undergo abortions from her work with SPaRC where medical students support patients going through the abortion and shadow the doctors.
“Patients experience multiple feelings like self-hatred, loneliness, and shame caused by surrounding circumstances,” Zimmerman said. “Meeting patients made me want to keep pushing and fighting. I think it is unacceptable that women should internalize negative feelings.”
Looking back to when the draft of the decision leaked, Lujan and Zimmerman spoke of their reactions to the news in a relatively composed manner, as the overturning was foreseen.
“In a way, it was expected, but I still felt heartbroken,” Lujan said. “Co-leaders and I once had a sense of helplessness as it seemed bigger than at this point and we are just medical students. But soon we sat down and realized that we certainly have more power as we are medical students, and that is when we start mobilizing.”
Although co-leaders stood tough on the evening of the leaked, what empowered them was how quickly they began to fight back. They wrote emails to inform their class of what they would do and asked OB-GYN advisors what they could do as medical students as they refused to take the change lying down.
The co-leaders indicated that abortion-banning states will only be able to ban safe abortion as a result of the overturning. The rate of abortion care by unqualified individuals, the so-called coat hanger method, will increase, followed by a surge in death rates.
The co-leaders highlighted the degradation of education about abortion which must be mixed in with proper sex education and sexual harassment education as the most significant repercussion of the overturning.
“Having an adequate amount of discussion about abortion and sexual education is nowhere near what it should be, even in politically progressive states like Massachusetts,” Zimmerman said.
Lujan and Nguyen revealed that they are already hearing stories from medical students from some schools in abortion-banning states that they do not allow medical students to learn how to conduct abortions.
As a prime example, Nguyen cited the story of Dr. Bernard who was targeted by false accusations by media and politicians for providing abortion to a 10-year-old rape victim.
It happened in Indiana, where lawmakers passed a law in August to prohibit abortion after 22 weeks into a pregnancy with exceptions for some cases of rape or incest. Nguyen worried that ever since the incident, OB-GYNs might not practice abortions in abortion-banning states that already have high maternal mortality rates.
“Residents who have complete training in states with abortion bans or who are in the middle of training are questioning if they can even continue their practices,” Nguyen said.
Some states’ legislation following the overturning of Roe v. Wade seemed completely ridiculous to the co-leaders as they were settled without a basic understanding of medicine.
Zimmerman criticized that Ohio once suggested House Bill 413 that banned ectopic pregnancy termination and required reimplanting an ectopic pregnancy. She stressed that if a patient cannot remove fertilized eggs grown outside the uterus by ectopic pregnancy termination, the mother cannot survive. Since many states have not carved out an exception in abortion-banning law for ectopic pregnancies, doctors are still in danger of being sued for conducting ectopic pregnancy termination.
The MSFC co-leaders share the opinion that the amount of support in abortion training and education at each medical school depends on the funding and history of each university.
“I am from Tucson, Arizona, and the major university there was the University of Arizona,” Nguyen said. “In the 1970s, the University of Arizona got a grant to reconstruct their stadium. The stipulation for that grant was prohibiting the abortion training and education in the medical school.”
According to Nguyen and Zimmerman, even progressive medical schools like Boston University did not provide a sufficient amount of education on abortion care due to the school’s concentration on physiology and pathology. They mostly learn about abortion care by sparing their time to go to abortion clinics to shadow doctors.
“Compared to other universities, I feel confident that our university has spoken out that they stand behind the right to choose and will provide abortion education,” Lujan said.
The co-leaders run a volunteer program going into the clinics to support patients having an abortion. The program is held both in-person and online in order to reach a greater number of recipients. They anticipated seeing more patients in need of their help, who would come to Massachusetts looking for abortions after the court’s decision.
In addition, the co-leaders held a couple of sessions where medical students and doctors all came together to sign a poster to show that numerous medical students stand against the overturning. Some of them joined in demonstrations taking place in Boston.
For all the women who have to live during this time, the co-leaders want to let them know that medical students will keep fighting for abortion rights.
"If any woman does find themselves in the situation of needing to get an abortion, but do not have the support, I just hope they understand the fact that there are people out there who care so much about patients and the rights that should have been protected,” Zimmerman concluded.