At a rally in front of the U.S. Supreme Court during deliberations over the availability of mifepristone, NOW President Christian F. Nunes delivered the following remarks.
I stand proudly in solidarity with the survivors, the activists, and all our coalition partners who are here for the continued fight to keep bans off our bodies.
This case today was filed by a group designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and a lifelong activist judge hand-picked by the former President decided it.
The judge’s ruling sided with the view that a 19th-century law called the Comstock Act prohibits the distribution of abortion pills by mail.
Now, that ridiculous logic is being used as the basis for an attack to use telemedicine as the conduit to continue the attack on reproductive rights—from mifepristone to IVF.
Make no mistake, this strategy is not new, but another vile attempt to gain power and control by oppressing those who have fought and continue to fight for full legal protections under the law: the most marginalized communities.
They want to keep women and nonbinary persons from accessing abortion care in a doctor’s office, a clinic, a hospital, or now, in their own homes.
The extremists behind this Supreme Court case want to send us back to the dark ages when women had no rights of their own, no bodily autonomy, and no independent future.
But this is 2024, not 1824. We have rights, we have power—and we have the collective power of our voices.
We know that medication abortion is an essential lifeline for those who can’t take time off work to make multiple visits to a doctor’s office, can’t afford childcare, or live hundreds of miles from the nearest clinic.
With health disparities only exacerbated by the multiple intersecting identities in our communities, Mifepristone has been a resource to narrow the gap in healthcare deserts.
It creates access to care and saves lives from maternal mortality, especially for black women, who are still 3x more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women.
We must have access to proven, safe, modern medicine—and we can’t let radical judges undermine the FDA’s authority to oversee public health and safety.
This is not just an abortion access fight, but abortion access is a social justice fight—everyone’s fight.
Because abortion access and this fight for access to mifepristone is ultimately about the greatest, ungoverned right to bodily autonomy, privacy, and dignity.
Don’t turn back the clock on women’s health! Join me, and let’s continue to raise our voices loud enough that no one can ignore our call for reproductive liberation for all.