How the Abortion Rights Activists Found Their Radical Imagination
This is performative politics again.
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Politics
/ March 9, 2026
How the Abortion Rights Activists Found Their Radical Imagination
A long-shot campaign to restore public funding for abortion turned into the movement’s biggest success in a generation.
Amy Littlefield
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Reproductive justice advocates rallied on Capitol Hill on July 8, 2015, the day that Representative Barbara Lee introduced the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (EACH) Act.
(Jessi Leigh Swenson)
Nancy Keenan, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, was in San Francisco in early 2010 when she was jolted awake by a call from a Washington, DC, area code. It was 4:30 in the morning, California time. Half-asleep, Keenan answered. It was Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff for President Obama. Fellow Montanans, Messina and Keenan had known each other for years.
“Keenan,” Messina said. “It’s Jim.” “Hi, Jim,” Keenan replied sleepily.
Then she heard President Obama’s voice on the line.
In stark terms, he laid out some of the highest stakes Keenan had faced during her six years at the helm of the leading pro-choice political organization. Obama’s health reform law, which would extend healthcare coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, was nearing passage after months of political struggle. Obama had been fighting not just Republicans but also a contingent of anti-choice Democrats led by Michigan Representative Bart Stupak who were withholding their support over abortion.
A major sticking point was whether insurance plans created by the health reform law—which would be subsidized by the federal government—would cover abortions. Decades earlier, just three years after Roe v. Wade granted the right to abortion nationwide, abortion opponents had launched a successful attack on Medicaid funding, arguing that while abortion was legal, taxpayer funds should not cover it. The Hyde Amendment, named for Illinois Representative Henry Hyde, passed in 1976. (The ban actually wasn’t Hyde’s idea, but he became the face of it because he was charming and popular.) Hyde was candid about his wishes. “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman,” he famously said in 1977. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the…Medicaid bill.”
As I traced the death of abortion rights for my book Killers of Roe, I came to see the Democrats’ failure to mount a real opposition to the Hyde Amendment as the key to understanding how they could lose Roe itself, decades later. Congress has renewed it each year, with varying exceptions for a pregnant person’s health and for rape …
This is performative politics again.
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Current Issue
Politics
/ March 9, 2026
How the Abortion Rights Activists Found Their Radical Imagination
A long-shot campaign to restore public funding for abortion turned into the movement’s biggest success in a generation.
Amy Littlefield
Share
Copy Link
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Ad Policy
Reproductive justice advocates rallied on Capitol Hill on July 8, 2015, the day that Representative Barbara Lee introduced the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (EACH) Act.
(Jessi Leigh Swenson)
Nancy Keenan, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, was in San Francisco in early 2010 when she was jolted awake by a call from a Washington, DC, area code. It was 4:30 in the morning, California time. Half-asleep, Keenan answered. It was Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff for President Obama. Fellow Montanans, Messina and Keenan had known each other for years.
“Keenan,” Messina said. “It’s Jim.” “Hi, Jim,” Keenan replied sleepily.
Then she heard President Obama’s voice on the line.
In stark terms, he laid out some of the highest stakes Keenan had faced during her six years at the helm of the leading pro-choice political organization. Obama’s health reform law, which would extend healthcare coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, was nearing passage after months of political struggle. Obama had been fighting not just Republicans but also a contingent of anti-choice Democrats led by Michigan Representative Bart Stupak who were withholding their support over abortion.
A major sticking point was whether insurance plans created by the health reform law—which would be subsidized by the federal government—would cover abortions. Decades earlier, just three years after Roe v. Wade granted the right to abortion nationwide, abortion opponents had launched a successful attack on Medicaid funding, arguing that while abortion was legal, taxpayer funds should not cover it. The Hyde Amendment, named for Illinois Representative Henry Hyde, passed in 1976. (The ban actually wasn’t Hyde’s idea, but he became the face of it because he was charming and popular.) Hyde was candid about his wishes. “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman,” he famously said in 1977. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the…Medicaid bill.”
As I traced the death of abortion rights for my book Killers of Roe, I came to see the Democrats’ failure to mount a real opposition to the Hyde Amendment as the key to understanding how they could lose Roe itself, decades later. Congress has renewed it each year, with varying exceptions for a pregnant person’s health and for rape …
How the Abortion Rights Activists Found Their Radical Imagination
This is performative politics again.
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Current Issue
Politics
/ March 9, 2026
How the Abortion Rights Activists Found Their Radical Imagination
A long-shot campaign to restore public funding for abortion turned into the movement’s biggest success in a generation.
Amy Littlefield
Share
Copy Link
Facebook
X (Twitter)
Bluesky Pocket
Email
Ad Policy
Reproductive justice advocates rallied on Capitol Hill on July 8, 2015, the day that Representative Barbara Lee introduced the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (EACH) Act.
(Jessi Leigh Swenson)
Nancy Keenan, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, was in San Francisco in early 2010 when she was jolted awake by a call from a Washington, DC, area code. It was 4:30 in the morning, California time. Half-asleep, Keenan answered. It was Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff for President Obama. Fellow Montanans, Messina and Keenan had known each other for years.
“Keenan,” Messina said. “It’s Jim.” “Hi, Jim,” Keenan replied sleepily.
Then she heard President Obama’s voice on the line.
In stark terms, he laid out some of the highest stakes Keenan had faced during her six years at the helm of the leading pro-choice political organization. Obama’s health reform law, which would extend healthcare coverage to millions of uninsured Americans, was nearing passage after months of political struggle. Obama had been fighting not just Republicans but also a contingent of anti-choice Democrats led by Michigan Representative Bart Stupak who were withholding their support over abortion.
A major sticking point was whether insurance plans created by the health reform law—which would be subsidized by the federal government—would cover abortions. Decades earlier, just three years after Roe v. Wade granted the right to abortion nationwide, abortion opponents had launched a successful attack on Medicaid funding, arguing that while abortion was legal, taxpayer funds should not cover it. The Hyde Amendment, named for Illinois Representative Henry Hyde, passed in 1976. (The ban actually wasn’t Hyde’s idea, but he became the face of it because he was charming and popular.) Hyde was candid about his wishes. “I certainly would like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle-class woman, or a poor woman,” he famously said in 1977. “Unfortunately, the only vehicle available is the…Medicaid bill.”
As I traced the death of abortion rights for my book Killers of Roe, I came to see the Democrats’ failure to mount a real opposition to the Hyde Amendment as the key to understanding how they could lose Roe itself, decades later. Congress has renewed it each year, with varying exceptions for a pregnant person’s health and for rape …
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