In the immediate aftermath of Dobbs, Americans grappled with three distinct waves of abortion restrictions. First, Dobbs revived every pre-Roe law on the books: laws that state legislatures had not repealed in the intervening years. Second, laws took effect that were enacted after Roe and before Dobbs, either to probe the limits of Roe and Casey in hopes the laws would take effect if those cases fell, or as a symbolic act of protest, knowing that Roe precluded enforcement. Third, state legislature enacted new restrictions after Dobbs, with some states enacting laws in successive waves.
Progressive sates also moved into action ramping up capacity to perform abortions and becoming havens for abortion services, as many predicted in the days after Dobbs. They enacted lew laws to ‘shield’ providers in their states; to block prosecution or sanction by other states for providing abortions or pills to out-of-state women.
In the midst of the flux and upheaval after Dobbs: what is allowed, when, and under what circumstances in a given state? The degree of complexity Americans have been left to navigate cannot be overstated.
Robin Fretwell Wilson is the Fulbright Scholar in Law and Sustainability at NOVA School of Law in Portugal and the Mildred Van Voorhis Jones Chair in Law at the University of Illinois College of Law. Professor Wilson co-directs and founded the College of Law’s Family Law and Policy Program and co-directs its Epstein Health Law and Policy Program. She specializes in family law and health law, and her research and teaching interests also include biomedical ethics, law and religion, children and violence, and law and science.
Professor Wilson is the author of twenty-two books, including her most recent book, International Survey of Family Law (Intersentia, 2024, with University of Minnesota Professor June Carbone). Her other books include: Religious Freedom, LGBT Rights, and the Prospects for Common Ground, with Yale University Professor William Eskridge, Jr., which is now in paperback at Cambridge University Press; The Contested Place of Religion in Family Law (Cambridge University Press, 2018, ed.); Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008, with Douglas Laycock and Anthony Picarello, eds.); Health Law and Bioethics: Cases in Context (Aspen, 2008, with Joan Krause, Sandra Johnson, and Richard Saver, eds.); Reconceiving the Family: Critical Reflections on the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution (Cambridge University Press, 2006, ed.); and The Handbook of Children, Culture & Violence (Sage Publications, 2006, with Nancy Dowd and Dorothy Singer, eds.). She is also the co-author of a leading case book in domestic relations, Domestic Relations: Cases and Materials, 9th edition (Foundation Press, 2021 with the late Walter Wadlington and Raymond C. O’Brien) and a treatise, Understanding Family Law, 4th edition (LexisNexis, 2013, with John DeWitt Gregory and Peter N. Swisher). Professor Wilson’s book-length examination on the Medicalization of Poverty (with Lois Shepherd and David Shi) was published in China in 2021.