Before Roe v. Wade was overturned in June 2022, abortions in Florida were available until 24 weeks of pregnancy; soon afterward, a 15-week ban became law. Still, Florida remained an essential abortion haven for the Southeast. Then, on May 1, a six-week ban took effect, and the impact was immediate and drastic—and not just in the state, new data from the Guttmacher Institute shows. Clinician-provided abortions plunged in Florida by more than 30 percent in May and June, to an average of about 5,400 abortions per month. In contrast, during the first three months of the year, the state averaged about 8,000 abortions every month. 

“Our data paint a vivid picture of the chaos and confusion caused by Florida’s six-week abortion ban,” Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a Guttmacher data scientist, said in a statement.

Nationally, the average number of abortions in May and June fell by more than 7 percent from the first three months of the year, according to Guttmacher’s Monthly Abortion Provision Study. More than a third of that drop is the direct consequence of the Florida ban, highlighting how important a role the state has played in abortion access throughout the South. In 2023, an estimated 9,000 out-of-state patients traveled to Florida to obtain an abortion, with the largest number of them coming from Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia—all states where draconian abortion laws have been put in place since the Dobbs decision. Before Florida imposed its own six-week ban, more than 1 in 10 abortions in the US happened there.  

The drop off in Florida abortions in May and June likely reflects reductions in access to abortion for patients from neighboring states with total or near-total bans of their own, as well as for state residents, Guttmacher says.

“Our data paint a vivid picture of the chaos and confusion caused by Florida’s six-week ban.”

The new report comes as reproductive rights advocates are pushing hard to pass an abortion rights ballot measure that would override Florida’s six-week ban. If approved in November, Amendment 4 would guarantee the right to abortion up to fetal viability—around 24 weeks gestation—or when necessary to protect the patient’s health. Supporters collected almost 1 million signatures to get the amendment on the ballot, making Florida one of 10 states with abortion measures in the fall. But to pass in the Sunshine State, the amendment must receive at least 60 percent of the vote, unlike in states such as Ohio, where a similar ballot initiative in 2023 only required a simple majority.  

As my colleague Julianne McShane has reported, the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to be doing everything it can to undermine the amendment, including launching a new website that attacks the initiative with “a litany of false claims.” These include that the measure “threatens women’s safety,” would “eliminate parental consent” for minors seeking abortions, and could “lead to unregulated and unsafe abortions” by allowing people without healthcare expertise to perform the procedure. Abortion rights groups have sued to block the misinformation campaign.

DeSantis officials have also been scrutinizing tens of thousands of petition signatures for evidence of fraud, even sending election police to the homes of some voters to verify their signatures. State officials certified the signatures in February, and the deadline for challenging them has passed. The ACLU of Florida has threatened to sue on behalf of the group leading the Yes on Amendment 4 effort, Floridians Protecting Freedom. Meanwhile, seven Florida congressional Democrats have written a letter asking US Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate the DeSantis administration’s “brazen attempts at voter intimidation and election interference on Amendment 4,” the Florida Phoenix reported.

DeSantis signed the six-week ban in the spring of 2023, giving reproductive rights advocates in the state more than a year to prepare for the worst. The Florida Supreme Court upheld the ban this past April 1—the same day it also approved Amendment 4 to be on the November ballot. In April, abortions surged by 21 percent in the state. “Providers and patients went to great lengths to provide and access care, respectively, before the law went into effect,” on May 1, Guttmacher says. 

The Florida ban’s impact likely was also mitigated by the availability of medication abortion via telehealth from providers in states with abortion shield laws, Guttmacher notes. Telehealth abortions now account for nearly 1 in 5 abortions in the US.

But travel distances are adding additional burdens for abortion patients. If a Florida resident needs to have an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, the closest clinic would be in North Carolina—which would require traveling an average distance of about 590 miles, Guttmacher says. Add to that, patients have to jump through numerous unnecessary hurdles to access care there—including in-person counseling 72 hours before obtaining an abortion. Since abortion is now banned in North Carolina after 12 weeks, many Florida residents are being forced to travel farther distances to states with fewer restrictions, including Virginia and Illinois, or to Puerto Rico. “Raising money for the cost of
the abortion, travel and lodging, missed wages, child-care costs, and more means that the difficulties of receiving needed abortion care are substantially increased and for some, insurmountable,” the Guttmacher report says.

According to new polling by The Hill and Emerson College, 55 percent of likely Florida voters support Amendment 4—a solid majority of the electorate but shy of the threshold needed to pass the measure. Another 20 percent of voters said they were “unsure.” Among the wafflers has been former President Donald Trump, who appeared to support the amendment in an interview with NBC News last month, triggering a ferocious backlash among the conservatives whose support he needs if he has any chance of beating Vice President Kamala Harris in November. The next day, Trump said he would vote against it, even as he told Fox News that he still thinks the six-week ban is too strict. 

Back in 2003, when Kamala Harris was first running for office in San Francisco, she wasn’t just battling Terence Hallinan, the erratic, older white guy who’d served as district attorney for eight years (and been her boss for 18 or so miserable months). She was running against the city’s powerful Democratic machine.

To win, Harris had to pull together her own support system—a network of accomplished and well-connected friends who were passionate, and practical, about helping women get elected. One of those early boosters was Andrea Dew Steele, a Hillary Clinton ally and former Capitol Hill staffer who had recently moved to San Francisco. Her dismay at how few women held local office in the early 2000s led her to co-found a training program for women candidates called Emerge California, and a few years later, a national version, Emerge America.

“The minute I met Kamala I thought she should run for office,” Steele told me back in 2007 when I was interviewing her for a profile of Harris. “She is extremely smart and very good on the policy side, but also, such a charismatic person.” But Harris needed convincing. “Men wake up in the morning and they think, ‘Well, I think I’ll run for president,’” Steele said. “Women need to be cajoled and encouraged. And they need training.” Once she was in, Harris proved to be an extraordinarily quick study, honing a clear message, raising lots of money, and winning over some influential pols (including US Senator Dianne Feinstein but not House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a machine stalwart and Hallinan loyalist). After starting the race with just 6 percent name recognition, Harris went on to trounce her old boss with 56 percent of the vote.

“Men wake up in the morning and they think, ‘Well, I think I’ll run for president.’ Women need to be cajoled and encouraged. And they need training.”

That 2003 race was a proof of concept. Twenty years later, Emerge (as it’s known today) and its state affiliates have helped elect more than 1,200 Democratic women currently in office, including two governors, two lieutenant governors, and eight members of Congress. For 2023 races, Emerge claims a 74 percent win rate—nearly 250 alums elected; this November, more than 600 alums are on the ballot. Steele, a social entrepreneur and philanthropic advisor, is now an Emerge emeritus; the organization’s current leadership reflects what it calls the New American Majority—an increasingly diverse and youthful electorate that Harris herself embodies. “I don’t think we’re surprised to see the original Emerge woman at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket,” says A’shanti Gholar, Emerge’s president since 2020. “It is such an exciting moment.” 

But mixed with the exhilaration is also frustration with the racism and sexism that permeate politics and the media. Plus a serious concern with escalating and seemingly pervasive disinformation, which Gholar says, “really spikes when it comes to women candidates,” from the nation’s highest office to down-ballot races. Now, with Harris enjoying a historic candidacy, I was curious to learn more about how Emerge has evolved over these last two decades and what it is doing to make good on its mission of “creating a world where there are no more firsts”—where Black, brown and Indigenous women, young women, unmarried women, and LGBTQ women routinely run for office and win. I spoke with Gholar from her Washington, DC, base. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Both Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein—two of the most iconic women politicians of their era—came from San Francisco. But, the city’s Democratic power structure was dominated by men. What kind of hurdles did Harris face in taking that on?

People think, “Oh, San Francisco, it’s a Democratic city. There’s going to be lots of women in politics and expertise to tap into.” But that wasn’t the case when the vice president was starting out, and there was no place for them to go to get those basics of what it takes to run for office. It’s why our co-founders created Emerge. They were learning, right along with Kamala Harris: how to write a good bio. You have to put your contacts in order. You have to do the canvassing. You have to hustle.

Twenty years later, in most parts of this country, women candidates still seem to be outsiders.

Even in blue states, there are still so many offices where a woman has never been elected, a woman of color has never been elected, an LGBTQ person has never been elected. I say our work at Emerge has no end date because there are still a lot of good women that we need to get in office. 

Thinking back to that first Harris campaign, and then fast forwarding to today, what are the most important things you’re trying to give women candidates? Where do you start?

One of the reasons the vice president was able to be so successful was that she had that network of support with her throughout the campaign. From day one, a huge part of Emerge’s training program is making sure that women are not alone when they’re doing this. From the minute you join the program, we are with you throughout your whole journey. From being in the classroom where we’re demystifying what it takes to run for office, to when you put your name on the ballot, to when you are elected and wanting to run for higher office, we continue to give you those tools, those skills, that support that you need to be a great candidate and a great elected official.  

The core Emerge programs include a six-month training for newcomers and “boot camps” for women who are actually running. What do they consist of? I’ve heard they’re really intense.

A key part of our training is that participants are in a room with like-minded women who want to run for office, who have the same goals, the same values. It creates that sisterhood that is so important. 

We also want to get them into the immediate mindset of, “Yes, you.” We start the first day by saying, your candidacy begins today, and really getting the women to start to see themselves as candidates, as future elected officials, and honing in on their “why.” For most women who run for office, there’s a singular “why” that drives them.

We then get down to, OK, how do you put your name on the ballot? How do you hire campaign staff? How do you fundraise? How do you do public speaking, debates, canvassing, phone banking— everything that you need to know, going through that very intensively. It’s not “OK, Phone banking 101.” It’s, “How do you run an effective phone bank? What are the different scripts that you need based upon the voters in your community?” A big piece is, calculating your win rate—what are the number of votes that you need to win? And helping build that campaign and their overall operation to be a great candidate.

So many of our alums say, “There’s no way I would have won if I didn’t do Emerge.” We’ve had alums who said, “I literally thought campaigning was going to be me canvassing in my heels, in a suit, because I still had to look professional.” And we’re like, “Please don’t do that!”  

Campaigning in heels sounds extremely painful!

One of the most important things we impart to our alums is to be authentic. You don’t have to change who you are in order to get people to vote for you and to get elected. We see that with Vice President Harris. She has an authenticity that is showing through. Be true to you, because if you’re not comfortable in your skin, that’s going to show. Especially in this day and age, people feel like so many of their elected officials have failed them. Candidates who are from the community, who have the same shared experiences, who want to do good work—those are the candidates that people are looking for. 

“Be true to you, because if you’re not comfortable in your skin, that’s going to show. Especially in this day and age, people feel like so many of their elected officials have failed them.”

You also mentioned hustle. In some quarters, it could have a bit of a negative connotation— “Oh, Harris is just hustling us.”

There’s a story the vice president told at our annual meeting this year that I love. She talked about putting her ironing board in her car and then setting up the ironing board at the grocery store—during that first campaign, that was her table. She was very grassroots; she had good hustle. I think that is something that we will continue to see from her.

You gotta be scrappy. I’ll take this from the fundraising point of view. We know that women candidates, especially first-time candidates, will almost always get heavily outspent. And we say, what you don’t have in money, you make up with in shoe leather and a good message. It’s putting your ironing board in the backseat of the car. Contacting that friend who is a great cook and asking them to do the catering for your event. It’s throwing house parties in the backyard to create an intimate environment. Just you DM-ing that local reporter saying, “Hey, do you want to come to my home, sit on my couch, and talk about my race?” Because that can lead to good press. Our alums regularly beat those smooth, “I-got-tons-of-consultants” type of candidates with their scrappiness and their hustle.

A lot of people are really surprised by how well Harris has been doing since The Big Switch. You hear all the time, “She doesn’t seem like the same candidate she was in 2019, or 2020.” And, “Where did she learn to give speeches like this?”

The person we see now is who the vice president has always been. I think that some people don’t want to recognize it, they don’t want to see it, and that’s something that we’re also very honest about. We tell our alums, “You’re not going to be for everyone.” 

We also have to look at the role that the media plays in shaping the narrative about women candidates. I mean, there can be a race full of women, and they will somehow find ways to make the article about what they wore and not their policies. We see it all the time. We’ll hear, “Those men are running for the same seat.” But the women, “They’re running against each other.” We can have multiple men, but, why do there need to be multiple women? Why do there need to be two Latino women?

I’m very honest in telling our alums: We can teach them how to be confident on the campaign trail. We can make it a lot less lonely when they’re running for office. But we can’t take away racism and misogyny. At the same time, every time a woman puts her name on the ballot, every time a woman is elected, we are changing that narrative. When you see multiple women running for the same position, we’re normalizing that. 

Another frequent complaint from journalists: Why hasn’t Harris done any press conferences? Why won’t she sit down for more interviews? 

The reality is, we know that the vice president has done interviews before. There have been lengthy articles about her. It goes back to the whole media narrative: “Where’s Kamala? What’s Kamala doing?” My response is, “Everything and everywhere!” I get the e-mails from her team, and reading her daily schedule makes me exhausted. 

They’re not avoiding the press, they’re being thoughtful about it. Frankly, they should be thoughtful because it’s a coveted interview—she is the prize. I say, take your time and do it right. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. 

When she did finally sit down with CNN, how do you think it went?

It was more about asking her to respond to a lot of the things that we have been hearing on the right from Donald Trump, and not a lot about her vision, how she’s going to govern. I felt it could have been a lot more forward-looking. That question about her ethnicity—“They’re saying you aren’t Black enough, you’re not Indian enough”—was that really something they needed to ask her? She gave the perfect response. But why are we constantly asking women to defend who we are?

As you see the candidate Harris has become, is there something she does that you wish you could bottle and hand out to all your Emerge candidates? 

I actually will take this back to the vice presidential debate in 2020. It was her being there in her power. She let Mike Pence be Mike Pence, just like I expect she’s going to let Donald Trump be Donald Trump when they debate. And she’s going to focus on answering the questions about the real issues and talking about why she is the perfect candidate for this moment.

It’s what I love about her, something that women are seeing on the campaign trail and that little girls are seeing as they grow up. People are trying to diminish her, but she is not letting that happen. She is keeping that energy going and not letting the negativity seep in. Because the negativity, the racism, the sexism are all a part of wanting to scare us into not wanting to run for office and not making change. When she says, “You do not let people tell you who you are—you show them who you are,” it is such a masterclass in leadership and women owning their power.

Shyamala Gopalan Harris did not believe in coddling. Pay her daughters, Kamala and Maya, an allowance for doing chores? “For what? I give you food. I give you rent,” scoffed the woman who would someday launch a million coconut memes. “If you do the dishes, you should get two dollars? You ate from the damn dishes!” Reward the future vice president of the United States—and possible future president—for getting decent grades? Ridiculous. “What does that tell you?” her mother chided as if I had disagreed. (I didn’t.) “It says, ‘You know, I really thought you were stupid. Oh, you surprised Mommy!’ No.”

When the breast cancer researcher and single mother had to work in her lab on the weekends, her daughters went with her, like it or not. “I’m not going to get a babysitter,” Dr. Harris laughed between bites of an utterly unmemorable salad at a downtown San Francisco bistro. 

It’s been 17 years since I interviewed Kamala Harris’ mother, and 15 years since she died from colon cancer at the age of 70. I met her back in 2007, when I was an editor and writer at San Francisco magazine profiling her daughter—the city’s popular district attorney, who was running for reelection. Kamala was also helping her still-largely-unknown friend, the first-term Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, in his race for president. In a city that churned out political superstars—Pelosi, Feinstein, Newsom, Jerry and Willie Brown—Kamala Harris stood out for all the reasons she has energized previously dispirited Democrats as she hit the campaign trail this summer. She was sharp, empathetic, self-assured, funny. Highly polished but not too slick. The child of immigrants, she looked like the future. Her policies sounded like the future, too, progressive enough for her most liberal constituents but commonsense enough to appeal to the moderates who also wanted to feel safe. 

Everyone told me, if you truly want to understand who Kamala Harris is and how she got that way, you need to talk to her mother. I wrangled a meeting with Dr. Harris, then a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She arrived at the restaurant off Union Square freshly manicured and coiffed, a ferocious bundle of energy and opinions in a tiny frame. If I wanted to know what made Kamala Harris tick, I could see it in this formidable woman—the same piercing intelligence, the same easy laughter, the same withering side-eye.

During that long-ago lunch, Harris’ mother explained why she hauled her two daughters, then still in elementary school, to her lab. “I had to go, we had to go,” she said. “And when they got there, I would make them do something”—maybe label test tubes or help with one of her experiments involving sex hormones and tumors. None of this did much to encourage artsy Kamala’s interest in science, though thanks to her mother she can knit, embroider, and crochet. “She painted, she drew, she did all kinds of stuff,” her mother recalled. “They couldn’t watch TV unless they did something with their hands—even though I controlled the shows as well.” 

The contradictions of the 2007 Kamala Harris intrigued me: A 42-year-old Black and brown woman from the scruffy Berkeley-Oakland flats whose political rise was largely financed by rich white Pacific Heights socialites. A die-hard career prosecutor who often sounded like a social justice warrior. A wannabe thought leader whose brand was “smart on crime,” yet who squandered much of her early political capital by opposing the death penalty for a cop-killer. Harris was also maddeningly elusive, friendly and open even as she firmly latched the door and pulled down the shades on anything remotely private. All of which left me wondering: Who was this person? How could I distinguish the appealing packaging from the authentic self? 

I could ask her mother.

Since our conversation, Shyamala’s daughter has been California’s attorney general, a US Senator, a failed presidential candidate, the vice president, and now the first woman of color to be nominated by a major political party for president. Throughout, she has often referred to her mother as her greatest influence and her True North. Shyamala and her aphorisms have become part of the Harris mystique—consider the famous coconut story that’s all over TikTok. Harris was delivering remarks at a White House swearing-in ceremony for Hispanic leaders in May 2023 when she veered into one of those earnest tangents that I remember from her San Francisco days, reaching into her trove of goofy-momisms and pulling out zinger. “My mother used to—she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people,” Harris recounted with a laugh. “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’”

I’m not sure what the vice president was talking about, though it had something to do with communities and context. I do know that it sounded exactly like something her mother would say. What I heard was love and yearning, a daughter honoring the person who, perhaps more than anyone else, helped shape her into what she has become, but who wasn’t there to see how it had all turned out. After Harris secured the presidential nomination, I started going through my computer files and came upon a transcript of my conversation with her mother. In rereading it, I realized that now, when millions of Americans may have the same questions I had all those years ago, revisiting my visit with Shyamala might provide some meaningful clues. 

Shyamala Gopalan was raised in a progressive Brahmin family in southeast India in which everyone was expected to earn an advanced degree and have a high-achieving career in public service. Her father, once part of the Indian movement to gain independence, was a civil servant and diplomat. Her mother, betrothed at age 12, became a fierce feminist, sometimes taking to the streets with a bullhorn to talk to poor women about accessing birth control, Kamala later wrote. Having children whose professional lives were not focused on making money was a point of pride for Shyamala’s father. “Teachers, doctors, lawyers—these are supposed to be service professions,” Dr. Harris told me. “When you make money on people who require legal and medical help, you are taking advantage of the very vulnerable. That’s tacky.” 

Coddling was out of the question. In 1958, after graduating from college in Delhi at 19, Shyamala headed to the University of California at Berkeley to earn her doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology. “My father just put me on a plane. There was not a soul I knew in the entire place. My family has done that with everybody—my sister, my brother, It was all normal.” After she completed her studies, the assumption was that she’d return to an arranged marriage in India. 

But as Berkeley became the center of the Free Speech and anti–Vietnam War movements, that changed. Shyamala fell in love with a fellow grad student and activist, Jamaican-born Donald Harris, who eventually became an economics professor at Stanford. The birth of their daughters—Kamala in 1964, Maya in 1967—did not hinder Shyamala’s studies. She earned her PhD the same year Kamala was born and was working in her lab when her water broke. Should a political rally demand their attention, she and Harris strapped the girls into their strollers and took them along. In her 2018 book The Truths We Hold, Kamala tells the story of when she was a fussy toddler and her mother tried to soothe her. “What do you want?” Shyamala pleaded. “Fweedom!!!” Kamala supposedly replied. 

After the couple’s 1971 divorce, Shyamala and the girls could have settled into one of the area’s vibrant South Asian enclaves. Instead, they gravitated to predominantly Black neighborhoods in Berkeley and Oakland. “I raised them in an African-American community, for a very special reason,” Shyamala told me: racism. “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if your color comes from India or African Americans, because this country is racist based on color.” Her children’s Indian identity was secure. Rooting them in the Bay Area’s Black community was an act of pride and protection, connecting them to the civil rights movement’s rich history but also schooling them in “what they need to know…to maneuver [in this country].” She added, “I’m the one who told them to do all that.”

“One of the first rules I taught my children is, don’t let anybody tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.”  

Shyamala would not have been at all surprised by Donald Trump’s attacks on her daughter’s racial identity—he was exactly the kind of person she was teaching her children to stand up to—or by Harris’ deft dismissals of someone she considered beneath contempt. “If you don’t define yourself, people will try to define you,” Shyamala told me. “One of the first rules I taught my children is, don’t let anybody tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.”  

Thanks to their far-flung extended family, her girls had many opportunities to escape the stultifying American attitudes towards race and gender. “When Kamala was in first grade,” Shyamala recalled, “one of her teachers said to me, ‘You know, your child has a great imagination. Every time we talk about someplace in the world she says, Oh, I’ve been there.’” Shyamala quickly set the teacher straight: “‘Well, she has been there!’ India, England, the Caribbean, Africa—she had been there.” In their travels, and in the examples of the matriarchs in their own family, Kamala and her sister saw something that, in America of the 1960s and ’70s, was relatively rare: women wielding power. 

Another Shyamala life lesson: Don’t just sit on the sidelines and complain, and definitely don’t expect anyone to come to your rescue. In a 2007 interview for my profile, Harris told me that from the time she was little, “I’d come home with a problem, ‘Oh, Mommy, this happened, that happened.’” Instead of consoling her, “my mother’s first response was always, ‘What did you do?’” The young Kamala hated this. “You’re not coming to my defense! I want a mother to come to my defense!” Later she felt empowered. “If you can see where you fit into a problem, you can figure out where you could fit into a solution,” Harris told me. Perhaps as a result, she said, “I love problems, because they’re an opportunity to fix something— there’s nothing more gratifying.”

When I shared what her daughter had said, Dr. Harris offered a slightly different spin. “I wanted to know the situation. Always,” she confirmed. “But I’m not going to put on a Band-Aid when I don’t even know what the problem is. Because it could be a problem for a Band-Aid or it could be a problem for a [bigger] treatment.” And lest I missed her deeper motivation, she added, “I also think that it is patronizing from a mother’s point of view to underestimate the intelligence and the resilience of children.”

Dr. Harris brought the same tough love to the many students she mentored over the years. “It’s a very simple rule: You would not be in my lab unless I thought you were good,” she said. “Because I don’t believe in charity.” She believed they could succeed at whatever she threw at them, so they usually did. But not always. “My bottom line is just do it, and if you fall, I’ll pick you up. Because when else are you going to have this opportunity?” She could not abide young people being ruled by their laziness, or insecurity. “I’m not doing this because I’m being given millions of dollars to do this. It’s my time. And because my time is worth a lot of money, and I’m putting that time into you, you got to understand how good I think you are!” This, by the way, is the same hard-ass attitude her daughter has displayed as a boss and mentor—one of the reasons she’s sometimes been called “difficult” to work with. (Her mother’s description was “really strict.”) When it came to their expectations of the people around them, Shyamala said, they both wanted “the good stuff.”

Around 1976, Dr. Harris got a job at a research hospital at McGill University and moved the girls, then 12 and nine, to Montreal. Kamala hated being uprooted, but eventually she made some good friends. One of the recurring stories she tells is about what happened when she discovered that one of them was being molested by her father. “I said, ‘You have to come live with us.’ My mother said, ‘Absolutely.’”

Kamala had long known she wanted to be a lawyer like her idol, Thurgood Marshall, attending Howard University like he had. Given her family’s progressive world view, the assumption was that her focus would be civil rights, perhaps as a defense attorney. (Years later, her sister and close adviser Maya Harris headed the Northern California office of the ACLU.) But after returning to the Bay Area for law school, Kamala surprised her mother by announcing she wanted to become a prosecutor and champion victims like her high school friend. “She told me, ‘If you’ve not been unjustly prosecuted, you don’t need a very hot-shot defense lawyer, do you? That is only necessary when the prosecutor doesn’t do their job.’” Kamala insisted she would be a different kind of prosecutor—one who understood that “a criminal is much more than the crime he or she commits,” Dr. Harris said. “Crime in a society doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Therefore you have to integrate law enforcement in the context of the society.” When you lose sight of the context, she said, “you lose sight of humanity.”  

Then she launched into a story—another entry in the Kamala canon—about her daughter’s first job in the Alameda County DA’s office, which includes Oakland. An innocent bystander, a woman with kids, had been rounded up during a drug bust. If the woman didn’t get out that day, she’d be stuck in jail all weekend. Harris spent the afternoon looking for someone to approve the woman’s release, finally plunking herself down in a courtroom until the judge relented and signed the necessary paperwork. As Shyamala recalled it, Kamala was particularly distraught by the potential impact on the woman’s kids. “Because they are the future,” Shyamala said. “You don’t destroy them.” 

“And people here think it is such a big deal that they’re going to nominate a woman?Please! I’m supposed to be impressed by that? No, I’m not.”

In 2007, campaign season was already in full swing and the Democratic frontrunner was Hillary Clinton. Shyamala didn’t have much to say about the presidential race, other than to grumble that the idea of a woman leading the ticket was hardly worth the hoopla. India’s Indira Gandhi had served as prime minister for almost 15 years. What about Margaret Thatcher? “And people here think it is such a big deal that they’re going to nominate a woman?” Dr. Harris said dismissively. “Please! I’m supposed to be impressed by that? No, I’m not.” As for Obama, who’d visited the Bay Area to fundraise with Kamala, “I didn’t spend that much time with him,” Shyamala told me. “He’s a great guy, but I don’t know him enough. But on my limited exposure to him, there is nothing about him that offends me.” If that seemed like faint praise—well, that’s who she was. “Anybody will tell you, I am not that easily impressed about anything.”

And now, former Secretary of State Clinton, and former President Obama, have given soaring speeches at the Democratic National Convention in praise of Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential standard bearer. In November, Shyamala Harris’s oldest daughter could become this country’s first woman president.

In our long-ago conversation, it didn’t occur to me to ask Dr. Harris about the very American myth that anyone can grow up to be president. But it doesn’t sound like something she would have believed. Certainly she never pushed her daughters in any particular direction, with any particular goal. “To some extent, I believe that life takes you,” she told me, waxing philosophical. “You let life take you without putting up enormous resistance.” 

All Shyamala Harris wanted to do was to give her girls the emotional tools—toughness and discipline and a deep-down belief in themselves that came from knowing they were truly loved—to take on whatever life threw at them. In that, she seems to have succeeded. “What my children tend to do, I have noticed, is when they see a challenge in front of them and they feel they can take it, they will go for it,” she said proudly. “Because [if] you’re affirmed in that manner, you think, ‘I’m not going to be afraid…. I can do this.’”

Shyamala Gopalan Harris did not believe in coddling. Pay her daughters, Kamala and Maya, an allowance for doing chores? “For what? I give you food. I give you rent,” scoffed the woman who would someday launch a million coconut memes. “If you do the dishes, you should get two dollars? You ate from the damn dishes!” Reward the future vice president of the United States—and possible future president—for getting decent grades? Ridiculous. “What does that tell you?” her mother chided as if I had disagreed. (I didn’t.) “It says, ‘You know, I really thought you were stupid. Oh, you surprised Mommy!’ No.”

When the breast cancer researcher and single mother had to work in her lab on the weekends, her daughters went with her, like it or not. “I’m not going to get a babysitter,” Dr. Harris laughed between bites of an utterly unmemorable salad at a downtown San Francisco bistro. 

It’s been 17 years since I interviewed Kamala Harris’ mother, and 15 years since she died from colon cancer at the age of 70. I met her back in 2007, when I was an editor and writer at San Francisco magazine profiling her daughter—the city’s popular district attorney, who was running for reelection. Kamala was also helping her still-largely-unknown friend, the first-term Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, in his race for president. In a city that churned out political superstars—Pelosi, Feinstein, Newsom, Jerry and Willie Brown—Kamala Harris stood out for all the reasons she has energized previously dispirited Democrats as she hit the campaign trail this summer. She was sharp, empathetic, self-assured, funny. Highly polished but not too slick. The child of immigrants, she looked like the future. Her policies sounded like the future, too, progressive enough for her most liberal constituents but commonsense enough to appeal to the moderates who also wanted to feel safe. 

Everyone told me, if you truly want to understand who Kamala Harris is and how she got that way, you need to talk to her mother. I wrangled a meeting with Dr. Harris, then a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She arrived at the restaurant off Union Square freshly manicured and coiffed, a ferocious bundle of energy and opinions in a tiny frame. If I wanted to know what made Kamala Harris tick, I could see it in this formidable woman—the same piercing intelligence, the same easy laughter, the same withering side-eye.

During that long-ago lunch, Harris’ mother explained why she hauled her two daughters, then still in elementary school, to her lab. “I had to go, we had to go,” she said. “And when they got there, I would make them do something”—maybe label test tubes or help with one of her experiments involving sex hormones and tumors. None of this did much to encourage artsy Kamala’s interest in science, though thanks to her mother she can knit, embroider, and crochet. “She painted, she drew, she did all kinds of stuff,” her mother recalled. “They couldn’t watch TV unless they did something with their hands—even though I controlled the shows as well.” 

The contradictions of the 2007 Kamala Harris intrigued me: A 42-year-old Black and brown woman from the scruffy Berkeley-Oakland flats whose political rise was largely financed by rich white Pacific Heights socialites. A die-hard career prosecutor who often sounded like a social justice warrior. A wannabe thought leader whose brand was “smart on crime,” yet who squandered much of her early political capital by opposing the death penalty for a cop-killer. Harris was also maddeningly elusive, friendly and open even as she firmly latched the door and pulled down the shades on anything remotely private. All of which left me wondering: Who was this person? How could I distinguish the appealing packaging from the authentic self? 

I could ask her mother.

Since our conversation, Shyamala’s daughter has been California’s attorney general, a US Senator, a failed presidential candidate, the vice president, and now the first woman of color to be nominated by a major political party for president. Throughout, she has often referred to her mother as her greatest influence and her True North. Shyamala and her aphorisms have become part of the Harris mystique—consider the famous coconut story that’s all over TikTok. Harris was delivering remarks at a White House swearing-in ceremony for Hispanic leaders in May 2023 when she veered into one of those earnest tangents that I remember from her San Francisco days, reaching into her trove of goofy-momisms and pulling out zinger. “My mother used to—she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people,” Harris recounted with a laugh. “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’”

I’m not sure what the vice president was talking about, though it had something to do with communities and context. I do know that it sounded exactly like something her mother would say. What I heard was love and yearning, a daughter honoring the person who, perhaps more than anyone else, helped shape her into what she has become, but who wasn’t there to see how it had all turned out. After Harris secured the presidential nomination, I started going through my computer files and came upon a transcript of my conversation with her mother. In rereading it, I realized that now, when millions of Americans may have the same questions I had all those years ago, revisiting my visit with Shyamala might provide some meaningful clues. 

Shyamala Gopalan was raised in a progressive Brahmin family in southeast India in which everyone was expected to earn an advanced degree and have a high-achieving career in public service. Her father, once part of the Indian movement to gain independence, was a civil servant and diplomat. Her mother, betrothed at age 12, became a fierce feminist, sometimes taking to the streets with a bullhorn to talk to poor women about accessing birth control, Kamala later wrote. Having children whose professional lives were not focused on making money was a point of pride for Shyamala’s father. “Teachers, doctors, lawyers—these are supposed to be service professions,” Dr. Harris told me. “When you make money on people who require legal and medical help, you are taking advantage of the very vulnerable. That’s tacky.” 

Coddling was out of the question. In 1958, after graduating from college in Delhi at 19, Shyamala headed to the University of California at Berkeley to earn her doctorate in nutrition and endocrinology. “My father just put me on a plane. There was not a soul I knew in the entire place. My family has done that with everybody—my sister, my brother, It was all normal.” After she completed her studies, the assumption was that she’d return to an arranged marriage in India. 

But as Berkeley became the center of the Free Speech and anti–Vietnam War movements, that changed. Shyamala fell in love with a fellow grad student and activist, Jamaican-born Donald Harris, who eventually became an economics professor at Stanford. The birth of their daughters—Kamala in 1964, Maya in 1967—did not hinder Shyamala’s studies. She earned her PhD the same year Kamala was born and was working in her lab when her water broke. Should a political rally demand their attention, she and Harris strapped the girls into their strollers and took them along. In her 2018 book The Truths We Hold, Kamala tells the story of when she was a fussy toddler and her mother tried to soothe her. “What do you want?” Shyamala pleaded. “Fweedom!!!” Kamala supposedly replied. 

After the couple’s 1971 divorce, Shyamala and the girls could have settled into one of the area’s vibrant South Asian enclaves. Instead, they gravitated to predominantly Black neighborhoods in Berkeley and Oakland. “I raised them in an African-American community, for a very special reason,” Shyamala told me: racism. “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if your color comes from India or African Americans, because this country is racist based on color.” Her children’s Indian identity was secure. Rooting them in the Bay Area’s Black community was an act of pride and protection, connecting them to the civil rights movement’s rich history but also schooling them in “what they need to know…to maneuver [in this country].” She added, “I’m the one who told them to do all that.”

“One of the first rules I taught my children is, don’t let anybody tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.”  

Shyamala would not have been at all surprised by Donald Trump’s attacks on her daughter’s racial identity—he was exactly the kind of person she was teaching her children to stand up to—or by Harris’ deft dismissals of someone she considered beneath contempt. “If you don’t define yourself, people will try to define you,” Shyamala told me. “One of the first rules I taught my children is, don’t let anybody tell you who you are. You tell them who you are.”  

Thanks to their far-flung extended family, her girls had many opportunities to escape the stultifying American attitudes towards race and gender. “When Kamala was in first grade,” Shyamala recalled, “one of her teachers said to me, ‘You know, your child has a great imagination. Every time we talk about someplace in the world she says, Oh, I’ve been there.’” Shyamala quickly set the teacher straight: “‘Well, she has been there!’ India, England, the Caribbean, Africa—she had been there.” In their travels, and in the examples of the matriarchs in their own family, Kamala and her sister saw something that, in America of the 1960s and ’70s, was relatively rare: women wielding power. 

Another Shyamala life lesson: Don’t just sit on the sidelines and complain, and definitely don’t expect anyone to come to your rescue. In a 2007 interview for my profile, Harris told me that from the time she was little, “I’d come home with a problem, ‘Oh, Mommy, this happened, that happened.’” Instead of consoling her, “my mother’s first response was always, ‘What did you do?’” The young Kamala hated this. “You’re not coming to my defense! I want a mother to come to my defense!” Later she felt empowered. “If you can see where you fit into a problem, you can figure out where you could fit into a solution,” Harris told me. Perhaps as a result, she said, “I love problems, because they’re an opportunity to fix something— there’s nothing more gratifying.”

When I shared what her daughter had said, Dr. Harris offered a slightly different spin. “I wanted to know the situation. Always,” she confirmed. “But I’m not going to put on a Band-Aid when I don’t even know what the problem is. Because it could be a problem for a Band-Aid or it could be a problem for a [bigger] treatment.” And lest I missed her deeper motivation, she added, “I also think that it is patronizing from a mother’s point of view to underestimate the intelligence and the resilience of children.”

Dr. Harris brought the same tough love to the many students she mentored over the years. “It’s a very simple rule: You would not be in my lab unless I thought you were good,” she said. “Because I don’t believe in charity.” She believed they could succeed at whatever she threw at them, so they usually did. But not always. “My bottom line is just do it, and if you fall, I’ll pick you up. Because when else are you going to have this opportunity?” She could not abide young people being ruled by their laziness, or insecurity. “I’m not doing this because I’m being given millions of dollars to do this. It’s my time. And because my time is worth a lot of money, and I’m putting that time into you, you got to understand how good I think you are!” This, by the way, is the same hard-ass attitude her daughter has displayed as a boss and mentor—one of the reasons she’s sometimes been called “difficult” to work with. (Her mother’s description was “really strict.”) When it came to their expectations of the people around them, Shyamala said, they both wanted “the good stuff.”

Around 1976, Dr. Harris got a job at a research hospital at McGill University and moved the girls, then 12 and nine, to Montreal. Kamala hated being uprooted, but eventually she made some good friends. One of the recurring stories she tells is about what happened when she discovered that one of them was being molested by her father. “I said, ‘You have to come live with us.’ My mother said, ‘Absolutely.’”

Kamala had long known she wanted to be a lawyer like her idol, Thurgood Marshall, attending Howard University like he had. Given her family’s progressive world view, the assumption was that her focus would be civil rights, perhaps as a defense attorney. (Years later, her sister and close adviser Maya Harris headed the Northern California office of the ACLU.) But after returning to the Bay Area for law school, Kamala surprised her mother by announcing she wanted to become a prosecutor and champion victims like her high school friend. “She told me, ‘If you’ve not been unjustly prosecuted, you don’t need a very hot-shot defense lawyer, do you? That is only necessary when the prosecutor doesn’t do their job.’” Kamala insisted she would be a different kind of prosecutor—one who understood that “a criminal is much more than the crime he or she commits,” Dr. Harris said. “Crime in a society doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Therefore you have to integrate law enforcement in the context of the society.” When you lose sight of the context, she said, “you lose sight of humanity.”  

Then she launched into a story—another entry in the Kamala canon—about her daughter’s first job in the Alameda County DA’s office, which includes Oakland. An innocent bystander, a woman with kids, had been rounded up during a drug bust. If the woman didn’t get out that day, she’d be stuck in jail all weekend. Harris spent the afternoon looking for someone to approve the woman’s release, finally plunking herself down in a courtroom until the judge relented and signed the necessary paperwork. As Shyamala recalled it, Kamala was particularly distraught by the potential impact on the woman’s kids. “Because they are the future,” Shyamala said. “You don’t destroy them.” 

“And people here think it is such a big deal that they’re going to nominate a woman?Please! I’m supposed to be impressed by that? No, I’m not.”

In 2007, campaign season was already in full swing and the Democratic frontrunner was Hillary Clinton. Shyamala didn’t have much to say about the presidential race, other than to grumble that the idea of a woman leading the ticket was hardly worth the hoopla. India’s Indira Gandhi had served as prime minister for almost 15 years. What about Margaret Thatcher? “And people here think it is such a big deal that they’re going to nominate a woman?” Dr. Harris said dismissively. “Please! I’m supposed to be impressed by that? No, I’m not.” As for Obama, who’d visited the Bay Area to fundraise with Kamala, “I didn’t spend that much time with him,” Shyamala told me. “He’s a great guy, but I don’t know him enough. But on my limited exposure to him, there is nothing about him that offends me.” If that seemed like faint praise—well, that’s who she was. “Anybody will tell you, I am not that easily impressed about anything.”

And now, former Secretary of State Clinton, and former President Obama, have given soaring speeches at the Democratic National Convention in praise of Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential standard bearer. In November, Shyamala Harris’s oldest daughter could become this country’s first woman president.

In our long-ago conversation, it didn’t occur to me to ask Dr. Harris about the very American myth that anyone can grow up to be president. But it doesn’t sound like something she would have believed. Certainly she never pushed her daughters in any particular direction, with any particular goal. “To some extent, I believe that life takes you,” she told me, waxing philosophical. “You let life take you without putting up enormous resistance.” 

All Shyamala Harris wanted to do was to give her girls the emotional tools—toughness and discipline and a deep-down belief in themselves that came from knowing they were truly loved—to take on whatever life threw at them. In that, she seems to have succeeded. “What my children tend to do, I have noticed, is when they see a challenge in front of them and they feel they can take it, they will go for it,” she said proudly. “Because [if] you’re affirmed in that manner, you think, ‘I’m not going to be afraid…. I can do this.’”

When Barack Obama takes the stage in Chicago tonight to support the candidacy of his old friend Kamala Harris, many Americans will see it as another torch-passing moment in a Democratic National Convention that’s already been replete with them. This one is extra emotional because of the sheer improbable nature of what the former president and current vice president have achieved. What many people won’t realize is that without Harris’s early and enthusiastic support, Obama’s career might have taken a different trajectory. Maybe he would have ended up in the White House anyway in 2008, maybe later, but Harris gave him a critical boost at a time when he was still largely unknown. And she did it at enormous risk to her own standing with the Democratic Party’s donor class.

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed.

Back in 2007, Harris was a rising star in Bay Area politics, a “progressive prosecutor” before that became a thing, with a catchphrase that was already being borrowed by legislators and law enforcers across the country. Instead of claiming to be tough on crime, she insisted she was “smart on crime.” She was a shoo-in to win reelection as San Francisco district attorney after coming from way, way behind in her first race against a well-known incumbent—a victory that was made possible thanks to the support of rich socialites and other deep-pocketed San Franciscans who also happened to be extremely active in national politics. 

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to publicly endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed. It wasn’t that they didn’t like Obama—they thought he was amazing. But this was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s moment. 

The New York Times covered some of this territory in a story about the longstanding Obama-Harris friendship and alliance. But it didn’t quite get at the audacity of what Harris was doing when she sided with the junior senator from Illinois over the former first lady and feminist icon whose supporters believed the nomination should be hers for the asking. 

Harris told me in 2007 that she met Obama when he was running for the Senate three years before. “We had a lot of common friends, and he and his wife and I—we know a lot of the same people. The world”—by which she meant the universe of Black and brown politicians with grand ambitions as it existed two decades ago, which of course was pre-Obama—“is very small.” Not only did they share similar cultural backgrounds, “We shared a lot of values, so it’s been easy to develop a friendship around shared experiences and values,” she told me. They also shared a gift for communication and a charisma that people found thrilling. “It has been phenomenal to watch how he is exciting to the incredibly large number of people who have never been involved [in politics] or who have walked away from it because they’ve been turned off,” she told me. They did fundraising events for each other, but the bond went beyond the mere transactional: “We just have forged a great friendship.”

Because of that friendship, Harris never faltered when Obama asked for her support, people around her told me back then. They had something else important in common: Harris knew what it was like to be told that now wasn’t the right time, that this was someone else’s moment, that people “weren’t ready.” “It was the same as the [first] DA’s race many years ago,” she told me in an interview a few years later.

Harris expounded on the theme in a commencement speech to San Francisco State University students in 2007 that was picked up by the New York Times. “I remember the day I got my first poll results back [in the DA’s race],” she told the crowd. “I was sitting in a small conference room, a little nervous, but very hopeful. Then I read them. I was at 6 percent. And that wasn’t good. So I was told what you all have probably heard in your life, and that you will certainly hear in your future. I was told that I should wait my turn. I was told that I should give up. I was told that I had no chance.

“Well, I didn’t listen. And I’m telling you, don’t you listen, either. Don’t listen when they tell you that you can’t do it…. And surround yourself with people who will support you and will encourage your ambition.”

When Barack Obama takes the stage in Chicago tonight to support the candidacy of his old friend Kamala Harris, many Americans will see it as another torch-passing moment in a Democratic National Convention that’s already been replete with them. This one is extra emotional because of the sheer improbable nature of what the former president and current vice president have achieved. What many people won’t realize is that without Harris’s early and enthusiastic support, Obama’s career might have taken a different trajectory. Maybe he would have ended up in the White House anyway in 2008, maybe later, but Harris gave him a critical boost at a time when he was still largely unknown. And she did it at enormous risk to her own standing with the Democratic Party’s donor class.

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed.

Back in 2007, Harris was a rising star in Bay Area politics, a “progressive prosecutor” before that became a thing, with a catchphrase that was already being borrowed by legislators and law enforcers across the country. Instead of claiming to be tough on crime, she insisted she was “smart on crime.” She was a shoo-in to win reelection as San Francisco district attorney after coming from way, way behind in her first race against a well-known incumbent—a victory that was made possible thanks to the support of rich socialites and other deep-pocketed San Franciscans who also happened to be extremely active in national politics. 

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to publicly endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed. It wasn’t that they did like Obama—they thought he was amazing. But this was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s moment. 

The New York Times covered some of this territory in a story about the longstanding Obama-Harris friendship and alliance. But it didn’t quite get at the audacity of what Harris was doing when she sided with the junior senator from Illinois over the former first lady and feminist icon whose supporters believed the nomination should be hers for the asking. 

Harris told me in 2007 that she met Obama when he was running for the Senate three years before. “We had a lot of common friends, and he and his wife and I—we know a lot of the same people. The world”—by which she meant the universe of Black and brown politicians with grand ambitions as it existed two decades ago, which of course was pre-Obama—“is very small.” Not only did they share similar cultural backgrounds, “We shared a lot of values, so it’s been easy to develop a friendship around shared experiences and values,” she told me. They also shared a gift for communication and a charisma that people found thrilling. “It has been phenomenal to watch how he is exciting to the incredibly large number of people who have never been involved [in politics] or who have walked away from it because they’ve been turned off,” she told me. They did fundraising events for each other, but the bond went beyond the mere transactional: “We just have forged a great friendship.”

Because of that friendship, Harris never faltered when Obama asked for her support, people around her told me back then. They had something else important in common: Harris knew what it was like to be told that now wasn’t the right time, that this was someone else’s moment, that people “weren’t ready.” “It was the same as the [first] DA’s race many years ago,” she told me in an interview a few years later.

Harris expounded on the theme in a commencement speech to San Francisco State University students in 2007 that was picked up by the New York Times. “I remember the day I got my first poll results back [in the DA’s race],” she told the crowd. “I was sitting in a small conference room, a little nervous, but very hopeful. Then I read them. I was at 6 percent. And that wasn’t good. So I was told what you all have probably heard in your life, and that you will certainly hear in your future. I was told that I should wait my turn. I was told that I should give up. I was told that I had no chance.

“Well, I didn’t listen. And I’m telling you, don’t you listen, either. Don’t listen when they tell you that you can’t do it…. And surround yourself with people who will support you and will encourage your ambition.”

It turns out the most consequential reproductive rights case before the Supreme Court this past term—arguably, the most significant since the overturn of Roe v. Wade—wasn’t the religious right’s attack on the abortion drug mifepristone, or the battle over whether the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires hospitals to provide emergency abortions in states with strict bans. It was a fight over who should pay to monitor commercial fishing boats so they don’t deplete the herring population off the Atlantic coast.

Reproductive health and gender equality advocates are just beginning to digest the sweeping implications of the ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, in which the court’s conservative supermajority overturned a 40-year-old cornerstone of US administrative law known as “Chevron deference.” In doing so, the justices vastly limited the power of federal agencies to issue regulations on everything from financial markets to industrial pollution to drug pricing to workplace safety. 

And abortion. And birth control. And trans equality. And pregnant workers’ rights. 

“It’s hard to overstate the significance of the Loper Bright and Relentless decision” on reproductive and gender issues and federal policy more broadly, says Shaina Goodman, director for reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women and Families. “It has deep and far-reaching consequences that we will see play out over the coming years.” That’s because many of the major regulations protecting or expanding reproductive and gender rights have been the result of federal agencies interpreting statutes enacted by Congress.

Certainly, anti-abortion groups were pleased at their new power to disrupt how federal laws are made and implemented. Eric Rassbach, vice president and senior counsel at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a leading law firm focusing on religious issues, called Loper Bright “a landmark ruling” for groups that oppose abortion and birth control, such as nuns who’ve been fighting the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate for a decade. He predicted that the decision “would likely be the death knell” for, among other things, new Biden administration rules interpreting the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act to include workplace accommodations for people having abortions. 

“From this day forward,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote, “administrative agencies can be sued in perpetuity over every final decision they make…Even the most well-settled agency regulations can be placed on the chopping block.” 

Then the Supreme Court gave the foundations of American law another vigorous shake. On the last day of the term, the same coalition of far-right justices amplified the likely impact of Loper Bright by opening the door to new, broad challenges to regulations long after they take effect. In Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, a case involving a North Dakota truck stop and debit-card swipe fees, the court granted litigants virtually unlimited time to file suit over federal rules they claim cause them harm, instead of the six-year statute of limitations that had been in place.

If the implications for reproductive rights weren’t immediately obvious, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made the stakes clear in a blistering dissent. She pointed to efforts by anti-abortion doctors to overturn the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of mifepristone—a case the justices rejected in June on the narrow grounds that the doctors didn’t have standing to sue. Now, Jackson suggested, the FDA’s approval of mifepristone in 2000 would be “fair game.” “From this day forward,” she wrote, “administrative agencies can be sued in perpetuity over every final decision they make…Even the most well-settled agency regulations can be placed on the chopping block.” 

Taken together, the Loper Bright and Corner Post decisions cast a new light on the justices’ strategy this term to essentially punt the mifepristone suit and the federal-vs-state battle over EMTALA. Both of those cases centered on federal rules that are likely to be challenged under the court’s new reasoning—along with rules governing many other areas of health policy for decades to come, the think tank KFF warns.

The impact is likely to be felt particularly strongly in ideologically “combustible” issues such as reproductive health, gender rights, and climate change, predicts Georgetown Law professor Lisa Heinzerling. “These are areas where, it seems to me, [courts are] treating any protective regulation with some hostility,” she says. Long-settled federal rules on issues such as birth control and emergency contraception could make especially tempting targets for conservatives under Corner Post, legal experts say.

Some of the first effects are being felt in cases involving trans issues. Two days after the Supreme Court term ended, federal judges in Mississippi, Texas and Florida cited Loper Bright to block the Biden administration from enforcing a new rule that interpreted the Affordable Care Act to bar discrimination in health care on the basis of gender identity. “Any deference that would have been automatically given to the Biden administration has just been completely eliminated,” Sarah Parshall Perry, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. 

As my Mother Jones colleagues have written, this term’s Supreme Court rulings were the culmination of a years-long campaign by conservative groups to throttle the federal government’s regulatory power and dismantle what they like to call the “administrative state.” Overturning the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision in Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council was central to that goal. In Chevron, the justices held that when a federal statute was ambiguous on a certain issue, administrative agencies with specific expertise, such as the FDA or the Environmental Protection Agency, had wide latitude to issue rules interpreting and implementing the law—and if those rules were reasonable, lower courts had to defer to them. The rationale was simple: Congress couldn’t possibly weigh in on every last practice of every industry to which a law might apply. So it made sense for agencies to make the rules and for judges to mostly go along.

Conservatives began to argue that courts shouldn’t have to defer to the expertise of federal agencies to decide whether a regulation should be upheld; instead, judges should be able to use their own judgment.

At first, Chevron was seen as a victory for conservatives, becoming one of the most-cited precedents in American law. But when the Obama administration began using Chevron to push through its policy agenda, they changed their tune. In law journal articles and amicus briefs, conservatives began to argue that courts shouldn’t have to defer to the expertise of federal agencies to decide whether a regulation should be upheld; instead, judges should be able to use their own judgment. In his majority opinion in Loper Bright, Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with those arguments, asserting that agencies “have no special competence” to resolve statutory ambiguities. Whereas, he said, “courts do.” 

The Corner Post case received much less attention while it was moving through the courts, perhaps because what it was proposing—basically ending the statute of limitations to challenge federal regulations—seemed so improbable. Certainly, its potential consequences for reproductive issues flew under the radar. According to the official transcript, the words “abortion,” “mifepristone,” and “gender” didn’t come up once during oral arguments this past spring.

But there were plenty of signs that anti-abortion groups were keenly interested in the outcomes of both cases. The law firm challenging the federal regulations in Corner Post happens to be the same firm representing the main Idaho lawmaker suing the Biden administration over EMTALA and emergency abortion care. In Loper Bright, a group of Christian businesses, represented by the powerhouse religious law firm Alliance Defending Freedom, filed an amicus brief that lists a string of issues that conservative groups are likely to target now that Chevron has been overturned, including Biden administration rules on Title X family planning funds, the mailing of abortion pills, pharmacy requirements for stocking contraceptives, and the patient privacy law known as HIPAA. (“Unelected federal bureaucrats frequently disrespect Americans’ most cherished liberties by imposing personal political agendas that ignore science and that bypass what Congress has authorized,” ADF senior counsel Julie Marie Blake said in an email, adding that thanks to the new SCOTUS ruling, courts are now “recognizing their duty to interpret these laws as written.”)

By contrast, with all their attention focused on the potentially blockbuster mifepristone and EMTALA cases, reproductive and LGBTQ rights organizations did not file amicus briefs in either Loper Bright or Corner Post. Now they are scrambling to figure out how to proceed. And because many of the coming battles will be happening in the super-wonky administrative law context, with courts chipping away at regulations one easily-overlooked decision at a time, repro groups could have a much harder time stirring up the level of passion among their supporters that has made the Dobbs decision one of the defining issues of the 2024 election cycle. 

That’s ironic, because Loper Bright and Corner Post are likely to intensify the ideological battles around abortion and reproductive rights. “We’re unsettling 40 years of administrative precedent in a way that is really going to politicize a lot of these issues,” warns Skye Perryman, the CEO and president of Democracy Forward, a national legal organization that focuses on democracy issues and social justice. “Under Chevron deference, you had judges that might be considered to be conservative upholding rules that came out of liberal administrations. You had judges that might be considered liberal upholding rules that came out of conservative ones. Chevron really operated right to help depoliticize a lot of these things.” 

Another irony: Those court battles are likely to be much more frequent and more heated if Joe Biden is reelected, says abortion historian Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis. “Clearly Corner Post makes it a lot easier to win if you’re a conservative advocacy group, even when the statute of limitations would otherwise have expired,” she says. But with Trump officials running the administrative state, “conservatives may not be as enthused to argue that the courts rather than agencies should have primacy. There may not be as much of a need for those lawsuits if you have a Trump administration doing your work for you.”

Take, for example, the Chevron deference: Back in 1984, the case was a clear victory for the deregulation-minded Reagan administration. Overturning that precedent was part of “a strategy devised by conservatives at a time when federal agencies were mostly in the hands of Democrats,” Ziegler says.

There could well come a time when progressive lawmakers and courts could use Loper Bright to their own advantage, she adds. “It’s kind of like presidential immunity,” she says. “Obviously, if Trump is vowing to prosecute Biden, maybe that looks different to you. [Regulations and opinions] that are written with an eye to the world as it is now, may read differently if the White House changes hands.” 

In many ways, the end of Roe v Wade didn’t happen when the US Supreme Court issued its decision to overrule Roe in the Dobbs case in June 2022. Rather, it came nine months earlier, on September 1, 2021, when the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as SB8, took effect. The law banned abortion after embryonic cardiac activity became detectable, around six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for fetal abnormalities. The job of enforcement was outsourced to private citizens (also known as “bounty hunters”), thereby making the law much harder to challenge in court. Since then, as wave after wave of post-Dobbs abortion restrictions have been enacted in deep-red states, reproductive rights advocates and journalists have—rightly—focused their attention on the effects of those draconian laws on the health and autonomy of women.

The reports of harm to pregnant patients, however, though wrenching, have been anecdotal, which has limited their ability to move the most conservative hearts and minds. Then there is an additional factor: It’s not clear that many far-right lawmakers and courts actually care about the well-being of women.

But they do claim to care about babies, which is why a new study about SB8 and infant mortality is so important. A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University has spent the two-and-a-half years since SB8 took effect crunching data on infant deaths in Texas and other states, then re-crunching it to confirm their results. They found that as women whose access to abortion was drastically curtailed by SB8 began to give birth in 2022, those infants were dying at much higher rates compared both to the period before the law took effect and to other states that didn’t have near-bans. 

The likeliest reason, according to Alison Gemmill, a lead author on the study, is that more women were forced to carry what are sometimes called “medically futile” pregnancies to term. These are pregnancies in which the fetus had catastrophic genetic and other anomalies incompatible with life outside the womb. Unsurprisingly, many of those newborns quickly died. The study’s measured academic language— “Restrictive abortion policies may have important unintended consequences in terms of trauma to families and medical cost”—barely hints at the depth of suffering imposed by SB8. 

Today, with even more restrictive bans in effect in Texas and 13 other states since Dobbs, the human toll is only becoming more profound. But why might the process of examining infant deaths provide the kind of undeniable evidence of harm that studies about women have so far lacked? I reached out to Gemmill, a demographer and reproductive epidemiologist with 113 peer-reviewed studies to her name, to find out the answer to this and other questions.

What made you decide to take on the topic of abortion bans and infant mortality?

I mostly study pregnancy and fertility. Recently I’ve been really interested in what I call macro social stressors—large changes in the political and social environment that can disrupt health care access and affect outcomes. Often those occur through policy shocks, like legislation. I’ve also studied things like the 9/11 terrorist attacks and how population-wide stressors can impact pregnancy outcomes for both the mom and the baby. 

So when Texas passed its six-week ban, my colleagues and I were very interested in measuring the spillover effects. At that point, SB8 was the most restrictive abortion policy in the country. It was the first time that we could actually look at the impact of severe abortion restrictions on health.

There had been some prior studies that showed that living in an abortion-hostile state was associated with higher rates of infant mortality. But the links were correlational. With SB8 we had the opportunity to see if there was a causal link between more severe restrictions and infant deaths. ​​

Since the end of Roe v Wade, there has been a lot of discussion about how abortion bans will likely contribute to a rise in maternal mortality. But the data has been lacking. Why is it easier to study abortion bans’ impact on infant mortality?

The problem is that maternal deaths are quite rare. According to data [from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], there were 817 maternal deaths in the US in 2022—and that’s out of 3.6 million live births. Those deaths can be hard to identify. The data can be very messy. 

Infant mortality is likewise a somewhat rare event. But the number of infant deaths in the US is a little over 20,000 a year, which dwarfs maternal deaths. Because the numbers are so much bigger, we get more statistical power with infant mortality data to detect the real effects from the bans. 

Counting infant deaths also turns out to be a lot more straightforward than counting maternal deaths. Whereas a lot of factors go into determining whether the death of a mother is related to pregnancy or childbirth, infant deaths are, by definition, based only on age—a death before the first year of life. So they are less likely to be misclassified.

To measure the impacts of the Heartbeat Act, you had to wait for babies to be born. The first study you published showed a big jump in overall births.

Yes, we found a greater-than-expected number of births in Texas in the months after SB8 went into effect. Almost 10,000 more births from April through December of 2022.

Then it took another year before you could assess the impact on infant mortality. Once you did your analysis, what stood out? 

Overall, we found a 13 percent increase in the number of infant deaths in Texas after the law went into effect. For the rest of the United States, the increase was 2 percent. And deaths due to congenital anomalies—a fancy term for birth defects and the leading cause of infant mortality overall—rose by 23 percent in Texas, while in the rest of the US, there was a decline. 

“We expected to find an increase, based on the prior studies. But I was surprised at the magnitude of the change, especially the increase in babies who died from congenital anomalies. “

We expected to find an increase, based on the prior studies. But I was surprised at the magnitude of the change, especially the increase in babies who died from congenital anomalies. 

We did our analyses in a number of different ways, and the findings were consistent. All of this very much points to a causal connection between the abortion policy and an increase in infant deaths. 

Do you have an idea of what might have caused that spike in infant deaths? 

No doubt, some deaths were related to complications suffered by the mother. The connection between maternal complications, for example preeclampsia [pregnancy-related hypertension], and the health of the infant is very real. But above and beyond that, there’s a more direct mechanism. Before SB8 parents who got a diagnosis of a serious fetal abnormality had the option to terminate. But after the law took effect, abortion was completely off the table. So you’re going to see more births of babies with congenital anomalies that are incompatible with life. And shortly after birth, those infants are going to die.  

Could you explain what kind of birth defects you are talking about?

There are many types of congenital abnormalities, some of which are less serious. But in the case of this study, these were profound abnormalities—things like major heart defects, or vital organs that are missing or incomplete or not functioning properly. These are conditions that wouldn’t be detected before six weeks of pregnancy and once they were detected, might lead many parents to choose termination, because there’s a lot of potential suffering and pain associated with those cases, for the infant and for the families that have to go through that. But because the Texas law didn’t have an exception for fetal anomalies, they had to carry the pregnancy to term, even knowing the baby would die.

One would assume, based on other research, that Black and brown babies would have the highest rates of infant mortality. But your study doesn’t go into racial disparities. 

No, that is work that we’re doing right now. Because infant deaths are already such a rare outcome, when you start looking at subgroups, it gets more challenging from a statistical standpoint. 

I imagine that people on the anti-abortion side might respond to your study by saying, “Well, how do you know it’s the heartbeat law that’s responsible for this increase in infant deaths? Maybe women aren’t eating the right foods, or maybe they’re not going to their prenatal appointments.” Instead of blaming the policy, blame the mom. What’s your response to that kind of pushback? 

I have a really hard time coming up with an alternative explanation that could explain such a big increase in infant deaths in Texas. Any other explanation for these findings would have to be unique to Texas and unique to this post-SB8 period. 

I’ll also say that our analyses have been replicated by others—studies that haven’t been published yet but have been shared with me personally. Replication is important. When it comes to this research, there are many cooks in many kitchens, and we’re all working on the same kinds of questions. I’ve heard from colleagues, “Oh, well, I was working on that too. But glad you found the same thing.” 

Since Dobbs, 14 states have enacted laws that are more draconian than SB8, including Texas itself, which now has a near-total ban. What would you expect to see as you begin looking at infant mortality data in states that ban abortions at any gestational age with no exceptions for fetal anomalies?  

We have no reason to think that the relationship between those abortion policies and infant mortality would be any different in other states. This is something we’re looking into now.

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot of anti-abortion leaders taking up the same message: abortion supporters who talk about pregnancy emergencies and life-threatening complications are just “fear-mongering.” You know, “Complications hardly ever happen, you’re exaggerating the risks.” Your study seems to show the opposite—a big rise in infant mortality is not what I’d call “fear-mongering.”

To be clear, from the maternal health standpoint, pregnancy can be very dangerous for women. While maternal death itself is rare, severe maternal complications are not nearly as rare as people might think, especially if you have risk factors. In the US, a lot of people have risk factors. 

And then there are complications like miscarriage, which are a very common experience that people don’t talk about enough. About 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies in the US end in miscarriage. Miscarriage management is an important issue to bring into this conversation because sometimes you need to have an induced abortion to treat that miscarriage. 

Another complication that comes to mind is preterm birth. In the US, 1 in 10 babies are born prematurely, and the rate is much higher if you’re Black or live in certain states. About 1 in 12 babies are born too small. These are not rare outcomes, and they have lifelong impacts. 

As you study the effects of abortion restrictions on infant health, what are the kinds of things you and your colleagues are looking at next? 

We’re looking at the subgroup effects—disparities by race and other characteristics. We’re interested in infant morbidity [complications] because deaths are just the tip of the iceberg. Are abortion bans associated with changes in rates of complications like preterm birth and low birth weight? How long do infants have to stay in neonatal intensive care? For children with severe congenital anomalies, what kinds of medical interventions will they require?

And we’re looking at impacts on pregnancy care—what happens to people who show up to the clinic with life-threatening conditions in states that have bans? Did they experience severe maternal morbidity that potentially could have been avoided if they had received the care that they would have gotten prior to these bans? 

How do you hope this new research on abortion bans and infant health might improve care for mothers?

In a lot of ways, the mother is an afterthought. Too often, it’s all about the baby. We need to be thinking about the mother-infant dyad more holistically. It’s like, why not care for both in a way that is reasonable and respectful? But if the mother’s life is in danger, I would say, prioritize the mom. Because, obviously, what is that infant without their mother? 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In many ways, the end of Roe v Wade didn’t happen when the US Supreme Court issued its decision to overrule Roe in the Dobbs case in June 2022. Rather, it came nine months earlier, on September 1, 2021, when the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as SB8, took effect. The law banned abortion after embryonic cardiac activity became detectable, around six weeks of pregnancy, with no exceptions for fetal abnormalities. The job of enforcement was outsourced to private citizens (also known as “bounty hunters”), thereby making the law much harder to challenge in court. Since then, as wave after wave of post-Dobbs abortion restrictions have been enacted in deep-red states, reproductive rights advocates and journalists have—rightly—focused their attention on the effects of those draconian laws on the health and autonomy of women.

The reports of harm to pregnant patients, however, though wrenching, have been anecdotal, which has limited their ability to move the most conservative hearts and minds. Then there is an additional factor: It’s not clear that many far-right lawmakers and courts actually care about the well-being of women.

But they do claim to care about babies, which is why a new study about SB8 and infant mortality is so important. A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins University has spent the two-and-a-half years since SB8 took effect crunching data on infant deaths in Texas and other states, then re-crunching it to confirm their results. They found that as women whose access to abortion was drastically curtailed by SB8 began to give birth in 2022, those infants were dying at much higher rates compared both to the period before the law took effect and to other states that didn’t have near-bans. 

The likeliest reason, according to Alison Gemmill, a lead author on the study, is that more women were forced to carry what are sometimes called “medically futile” pregnancies to term. These are pregnancies in which the fetus had catastrophic genetic and other anomalies incompatible with life outside the womb. Unsurprisingly, many of those newborns quickly died. The study’s measured academic language— “Restrictive abortion policies may have important unintended consequences in terms of trauma to families and medical cost”—barely hints at the depth of suffering imposed by SB8. 

Today, with even more restrictive bans in effect in Texas and 13 other states since Dobbs, the human toll is only becoming more profound. But why might the process of examining infant deaths provide the kind of undeniable evidence of harm that studies about women have so far lacked? I reached out to Gemmill, a demographer and reproductive epidemiologist with 113 peer-reviewed studies to her name, to find out the answer to this and other questions.

What made you decide to take on the topic of abortion bans and infant mortality?

I mostly study pregnancy and fertility. Recently I’ve been really interested in what I call macro social stressors—large changes in the political and social environment that can disrupt health care access and affect outcomes. Often those occur through policy shocks, like legislation. I’ve also studied things like the 9/11 terrorist attacks and how population-wide stressors can impact pregnancy outcomes for both the mom and the baby. 

So when Texas passed its six-week ban, my colleagues and I were very interested in measuring the spillover effects. At that point, SB8 was the most restrictive abortion policy in the country. It was the first time that we could actually look at the impact of severe abortion restrictions on health.

There had been some prior studies that showed that living in an abortion-hostile state was associated with higher rates of infant mortality. But the links were correlational. With SB8 we had the opportunity to see if there was a causal link between more severe restrictions and infant deaths. ​​

Since the end of Roe v Wade, there has been a lot of discussion about how abortion bans will likely contribute to a rise in maternal mortality. But the data has been lacking. Why is it easier to study abortion bans’ impact on infant mortality?

The problem is that maternal deaths are quite rare. According to data [from the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], there were 817 maternal deaths in the US in 2022—and that’s out of 3.6 million live births. Those deaths can be hard to identify. The data can be very messy. 

Infant mortality is likewise a somewhat rare event. But the number of infant deaths in the US is a little over 20,000 a year, which dwarfs maternal deaths. Because the numbers are so much bigger, we get more statistical power with infant mortality data to detect the real effects from the bans. 

Counting infant deaths also turns out to be a lot more straightforward than counting maternal deaths. Whereas a lot of factors go into determining whether the death of a mother is related to pregnancy or childbirth, infant deaths are, by definition, based only on age—a death before the first year of life. So they are less likely to be misclassified.

To measure the impacts of the Heartbeat Act, you had to wait for babies to be born. The first study you published showed a big jump in overall births.

Yes, we found a greater-than-expected number of births in Texas in the months after SB8 went into effect. Almost 10,000 more births from April through December of 2022.

Then it took another year before you could assess the impact on infant mortality. Once you did your analysis, what stood out? 

Overall, we found a 13 percent increase in the number of infant deaths in Texas after the law went into effect. For the rest of the United States, the increase was 2 percent. And deaths due to congenital anomalies—a fancy term for birth defects and the leading cause of infant mortality overall—rose by 23 percent in Texas, while in the rest of the US, there was a decline. 

“We expected to find an increase, based on the prior studies. But I was surprised at the magnitude of the change, especially the increase in babies who died from congenital anomalies. “

We expected to find an increase, based on the prior studies. But I was surprised at the magnitude of the change, especially the increase in babies who died from congenital anomalies. 

We did our analyses in a number of different ways, and the findings were consistent. All of this very much points to a causal connection between the abortion policy and an increase in infant deaths. 

Do you have an idea of what might have caused that spike in infant deaths? 

No doubt, some deaths were related to complications suffered by the mother. The connection between maternal complications, for example preeclampsia [pregnancy-related hypertension], and the health of the infant is very real. But above and beyond that, there’s a more direct mechanism. Before SB8 parents who got a diagnosis of a serious fetal abnormality had the option to terminate. But after the law took effect, abortion was completely off the table. So you’re going to see more births of babies with congenital anomalies that are incompatible with life. And shortly after birth, those infants are going to die.  

Could you explain what kind of birth defects you are talking about?

There are many types of congenital abnormalities, some of which are less serious. But in the case of this study, these were profound abnormalities—things like major heart defects, or vital organs that are missing or incomplete or not functioning properly. These are conditions that wouldn’t be detected before six weeks of pregnancy and once they were detected, might lead many parents to choose termination, because there’s a lot of potential suffering and pain associated with those cases, for the infant and for the families that have to go through that. But because the Texas law didn’t have an exception for fetal anomalies, they had to carry the pregnancy to term, even knowing the baby would die.

One would assume, based on other research, that Black and brown babies would have the highest rates of infant mortality. But your study doesn’t go into racial disparities. 

No, that is work that we’re doing right now. Because infant deaths are already such a rare outcome, when you start looking at subgroups, it gets more challenging from a statistical standpoint. 

I imagine that people on the anti-abortion side might respond to your study by saying, “Well, how do you know it’s the heartbeat law that’s responsible for this increase in infant deaths? Maybe women aren’t eating the right foods, or maybe they’re not going to their prenatal appointments.” Instead of blaming the policy, blame the mom. What’s your response to that kind of pushback? 

I have a really hard time coming up with an alternative explanation that could explain such a big increase in infant deaths in Texas. Any other explanation for these findings would have to be unique to Texas and unique to this post-SB8 period. 

I’ll also say that our analyses have been replicated by others—studies that haven’t been published yet but have been shared with me personally. Replication is important. When it comes to this research, there are many cooks in many kitchens, and we’re all working on the same kinds of questions. I’ve heard from colleagues, “Oh, well, I was working on that too. But glad you found the same thing.” 

Since Dobbs, 14 states have enacted laws that are more draconian than SB8, including Texas itself, which now has a near-total ban. What would you expect to see as you begin looking at infant mortality data in states that ban abortions at any gestational age with no exceptions for fetal anomalies?  

We have no reason to think that the relationship between those abortion policies and infant mortality would be any different in other states. This is something we’re looking into now.

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot of anti-abortion leaders taking up the same message: abortion supporters who talk about pregnancy emergencies and life-threatening complications are just “fear-mongering.” You know, “Complications hardly ever happen, you’re exaggerating the risks.” Your study seems to show the opposite—a big rise in infant mortality is not what I’d call “fear-mongering.”

To be clear, from the maternal health standpoint, pregnancy can be very dangerous for women. While maternal death itself is rare, severe maternal complications are not nearly as rare as people might think, especially if you have risk factors. In the US, a lot of people have risk factors. 

And then there are complications like miscarriage, which are a very common experience that people don’t talk about enough. About 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies in the US end in miscarriage. Miscarriage management is an important issue to bring into this conversation because sometimes you need to have an induced abortion to treat that miscarriage. 

Another complication that comes to mind is preterm birth. In the US, 1 in 10 babies are born prematurely, and the rate is much higher if you’re Black or live in certain states. About 1 in 12 babies are born too small. These are not rare outcomes, and they have lifelong impacts. 

As you study the effects of abortion restrictions on infant health, what are the kinds of things you and your colleagues are looking at next? 

We’re looking at the subgroup effects—disparities by race and other characteristics. We’re interested in infant morbidity [complications] because deaths are just the tip of the iceberg. Are abortion bans associated with changes in rates of complications like preterm birth and low birth weight? How long do infants have to stay in neonatal intensive care? For children with severe congenital anomalies, what kinds of medical interventions will they require?

And we’re looking at impacts on pregnancy care—what happens to people who show up to the clinic with life-threatening conditions in states that have bans? Did they experience severe maternal morbidity that potentially could have been avoided if they had received the care that they would have gotten prior to these bans? 

How do you hope this new research on abortion bans and infant health might improve care for mothers?

In a lot of ways, the mother is an afterthought. Too often, it’s all about the baby. We need to be thinking about the mother-infant dyad more holistically. It’s like, why not care for both in a way that is reasonable and respectful? But if the mother’s life is in danger, I would say, prioritize the mom. Because, obviously, what is that infant without their mother? 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.