The Conservative Strategy to Ban Abortion Nationwide

The council took up the ordinance at an October, 2023, meeting. ARFA members and their supporters, dressed in green, crowded the council chambers—as did their anti-abortion counterparts, dressed in red. “We love the fact that we are a full room,” Stanley said, with trepidation in his voice. When it was Scherlen’s turn to speak, he voiced his objections to the ordinance’s civil-enforcement provision: “I don’t believe in that at all. That takes me back to World War Two and what the Nazis did.” Other council members began to sound skeptical, too. The meeting dragged on for so long that the council ordered more than a dozen pizzas for the crowd. Several months later, they formally rejected the ordinance, by a vote of four to one. Amarillo didn’t join the mifepristone case, which, as Mitchell had predicted, the Supreme Court eventually dismissed based on a lack of standing. (Since then, Missouri, Idaho, and Kansas have signed on to a revised version of the lawsuit, which is working its way through the courts.)

“I was definitely the one in the group saying, ‘We’re not going to be able to change anyone’s mind, let’s please not use the A-word.’ I was so scared,” Mireles said. “But people have really started to open up. People would come up to me in public and say, Thanks for what y’all are doing. People are having conversations that never in a million years I thought would happen.”

In mid-October, ARFA held a meeting at a community center in a low-income neighborhood, where a handful of volunteers ate doughnuts under humming fluorescent lights. Although the sanctuary-city ordinance had been shot down by the city council, its supporters had gathered enough signatures to put it on the ballot in November. ARFA knew that defeating the measure a second time would be an uphill battle: elsewhere in Texas, when local governments had rejected sanctuary-city bills, Dickson had fought to put the issue directly to voters wherever city charters allowed. In every case, the ordinances had passed, albeit in low-turnout elections. Still, ARFA members believed that, if Amarillo residents understood what was at stake, they would oppose Proposition A.

“It’s about using language that people in the heartland of the Panhandle can understand,” Brown, the ARFA co-founder, said. “Language that isn’t, you know, woke.”

Mireles mentioned that when she’d attended a national conference for reproductive-rights activists, in September, someone had asked her whether ARFA used focus groups to shape its messaging for locals. Brown and Samad laughed incredulously.

“We know how to talk to them because we are them,” Samad said.

I accompanied two ARFA volunteers, Otto Beyer and Antoinette Grice, to a neighborhood of one-story brick houses for a canvassing session. Beyer, a goofy, gap-toothed Amarillo native, had attended evening programs at Trinity Fellowship Church until he’d had a political awakening in college. Today, he teaches A.P. world history at Amarillo High School, where many of his students assume he’s a Trump supporter. That week, two students had come to school wearing homemade shirts that said “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs.” Grice, a pharmacist, was a first-time volunteer, and a relative newcomer to Amarillo.

At the first half-dozen houses, no one was home. Beyer left a door hanger urging residents to vote against Proposition A. ARFA members jokingly called it “the conservative hanger”: it said “PROTECT YOUR RIGHTS” in large block letters, above a picture of an eagle and a quotation from Governor Greg Abbott: “If you want to start a fight with Texans, just try taking away their freedom.”

One house featured an elaborate Halloween display: skeletons lounging in an oak tree; a skeleton scaling a flagpole as if to seize the Texas flag atop it. A woman wearing leggings answered the door. She nodded as Beyer described Proposition A as government overreach. “I’m pretty sure I’m against it,” she said. At another house, a gruff man with a tattoo of a thin-blueline flag on his shoulder cut Beyer off as he made his pitch: “We know about it, and we’re already voting that way.” Down the block, a house with a freshly mowed lawn displayed Trump-Vance and Ted Cruz campaign signs. “We’re pretty conservative,” the man who opened the door said, but he, too, sounded uneasy about the ordinance. “You start putting a lot of pressure, like you can’t do this, you can’t do that—that just changes the whole deal,” he continued. “You have to look inside your soul and see what the Lord tells you to do.”

“Exactly,” Beyer said. “It’s a private choice, I feel like.”

As Beyer and Grice walked away, they seemed heartened. “It sounded like he was against it, right?” Beyer said. “I have a belief that if people hear about it, they’ll be against it. But sometimes I worry that I’m in a bubble, and that I’m underestimating the power of some of these churches.”

When I spoke with Beyer again later that evening, he told me that he’d had a more alarming experience during his afternoon canvass: “This one guy was, like, ‘You’re talking to the wrong person. If there’s complications, I think the mother should die with the baby.’ And I can’t help myself—I was, like, ‘Well, can I leave some literature, just in case?’ ”

Mitchell and Dickson have achieved some unlikely victories, but it’s unclear whether their success will continue. Hearron, of the Center for Reproductive Rights, told me it was unlikely that a travel ban could ever be enforced. “They’re just fear tactics, and the more that we give them the space, the more that we talk about them, it could spread the fear.”

Dickson said he hopes that the threat of litigation will inspire clinics in New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas to refuse abortion care to women from Amarillo, or who’ve travelled through Amarillo. After all, S.B. 8 had prompted Texas abortion clinics to shut down even before a single lawsuit was filed. But, after dealing with Mitchell and Dickson’s tactics for years, some providers saw things differently. “In hindsight, my father and I often say, should we have kept seeing patients after S.B. 8? Because the lawsuits didn’t really come the way that we expected them to,” Gallegos, of Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services, told me. She said that, even if Proposition A passes, the clinic has no plans to alter its policies at its New Mexico and Illinois locations: “We’re not going to pick and choose who we take care of. If someone needs us from that area, we’re going to take care of them.”

But there are other concerning aspects to Proposition A. The ordinance cites the Comstock Act, a century-old anti-vice law that prohibits mailing pornography, contraceptives, or abortion-related supplies across state lines and has long been considered irrelevant. (In 1971, two years before the Roe decision, Congress removed the language about contraceptives.) “It’s clear that what they’re trying to do is find a venue and a fact pattern where they can breathe life back into the Comstock Act, to expand it to effectively be a national abortion ban,” Hearron said. “The anti-abortion movement is not going to stop at the state-by-state level, no matter what they say.”

Such a ban would be widely unpopular. A majority of Americans supported Roe, and, after Dobbs, every state that has had a popular referendum on the right to abortion has endorsed it. This may be part of the reason Jonathan Mitchell told the Times earlier this year that he believes “the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election.”

Dickson has no such qualms. One evening in Amarillo, I met him in a conference room at a Hampton Inn, next to the Big Texan, a novelty restaurant where diners who manage to choke down a seventy-two ounce steak, plus fixings, in under an hour don’t have to pay for their meal. (Otherwise, it costs seventy-two dollars.) He had been in and out of meetings all day, but he seemed to have boundless energy to discuss abortion. At one point in our conversation, he recited portions of the Comstock Act from memory; at another, he unzipped his laptop bag and pulled out two small models of fetuses, which he held in his cupped palm.

Dickson follows his opponents closely. “This came out yesterday,” he said, pulling an article from The Nation up on his phone. “There are lots of jabs at me in here—‘gestation-obsessed,’ ‘forced-birth activist.’ Oh, and this one made me laugh—‘men like Dickson, whom no one wants to have a baby with.’ ” (Dickson is unmarried and opposed to sex before marriage. “At this point in my life, I feel like I’m one of the most hated people in America, from the abortion industry side of things, and I’m also extremely hated by those who are Republican who don’t want to end abortion in America. So, uh, it’s tough,” he told me. “I would assume that I’m going to be single the rest of my life, until I’m killed or I die.”)

Dickson seemed baffled that his efforts in Amarillo hadn’t gone smoothly as he’d expected. “One of the most controversial things in Amarillo has been the private-enforcement mechanism—hello, that’s in all the sanctuary-city ordinances in Texas, and the Heartbeat Act. People say they support the Heartbeat Act, and then you start asking them questions, and they’re, like, ‘Oh, well, I’m against this part.’ ”

I said that the more people knew about the kinds of laws he was trying to get passed, the less they seemed to like them.

Dickson seemed undaunted. “I’m doing a lot of things that are pissing people off, but at the same time, to some degree, I’m a gift to the pro-abortion movement. Because if they’re right, and I’m wrong, and most of America is pro-abortion, then me going around to all these cities is just going to prove their point,” he said. “The only way that I’m a real threat is if I’m right that the majority of America is pro-life.” ♦