The District of Abortion

Note from The Flyteam: The Flytrap merch store is now open! Buy a poster of the art for this piece or get dripped out in the latest Flytrap merch here.

Washington, D.C. is one of the last outposts for abortion access throughout pregnancy in the United States. But the District of Columbia is not a state. Our murky legal status, a deliberate holdover from U.S. slavery, could have a devastating ripple effect on abortion seekers nationwide.

“Our” applies to the District’s more than 700,000 residents, including me. I am a longtime abortion journalist who covered the daily attacks that marked the first Trump administration and its most significant aftereffect, the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade via the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision in 2022. 

The Trump administration’s second go-around is working to grind the fractured legality of abortion into dust and deny access in the meantime.

The District exists in that liminal space. We have “home rule,” our limited right to govern ourselves under the paternalistic authority of a Congress that relegates D.C.’s non-voting delegate to the sidelines of the House of Representatives.

Every one of our laws is subject to congressional review, a muscle that Republicans love to flex and some Democrats can’t help admiring in the mirror. Dozens of Senate Democrats, including statehood stalwarts, overturned the District’s 2023 revised criminal code with support from then-President Joe Biden.

Home rule gives the president—this president—the power to seize leadership of the District’s police department in what he deems an emergency. He already “retains sole control over whether and when to call out the D.C. National Guard,” longtime local reporter Martin Austermule wrote in his comprehensive guide to home rule for local worker-owned newsroom The 51st.

Putting the District’s law enforcement into the allegedly spray tan-mottled hands of a virulently anti-Black, “pronatalist” president is a lose-lose. That level of presidential power endangers District abortion seekers and the many people who come to D.C. for care at all stages of their pregnancies.

Criminalization for miscarriages and self-managed abortions occurred even with Roe in place, as detailed in If When How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice’s Self Care, Criminalized report and Pregnancy Justice’s The Rise of Pregnancy Criminalization report. Black women and women of color remain at disproportionate risk in the deliberate Dobbs-era confusion of “letting the states decide.”

The Black majority in the District dropped from 59 percent to a 41 percent minority between the 2000 and 2020 censuses, according to a Politico feature on gentrification, and the city’s segregation remains in practice, if not in law. Most Black residents live “east of the river”—the Anacostia River, once the site of Indigenous displacement. Roughly 4,163 Indigenous people still live in what is now known as Washington, D.C., according to an American Library Association resource. 

From displaced Indigenous tribes, to enslaved laborers, to today’s majority Black Southeast, which historically lacks robust maternal health resources, and gentrified Northwest, including the majority white neighborhood where I live, D.C. statehood has always been a reproductive justice story. Overzealous prosecutors, overcautious medical providers, and police, police, police are a threat to pregnant people here and everywhere.

Our tenuous autonomy, political and bodily alike, staggers under constant threat from conservative-sponsored federal bills, past and present, which threaten to repeal home rule.

By 1800, the 6th U.S. Congress moved from Philadelphia to the barely decade-old Washington, D.C. “The next year, the District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801 gave Congress exclusive jurisdiction over the district’s territory, robbing its residents of the voting rights they previously enjoyed as citizens of Maryland and Virginia,” according to a Brennan Center for Justice explainer.

Enslaved people helped build the White House and the U.S. Capitol. The District’s Emancipation Day on April 16, 1862 effectively added 3,100 free Black people to Washington, D.C., and those who did not emigrate to another country, as the proclamation encouraged to the tune of $100, gained the right to vote in 1867.

“But just as Black voters started to exercise their political power in D.C., Congress quickly replaced D.C.’s local government with federally appointed commissioners, blocking the heavily-Black region from having full voting rights or control over its local government,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia’s statehood explainer.

The District would become the United States’ first majority Black city in the late 1950s and “Chocolate City” in the 1970s. Continued federal oversight, from commissioners to Congress, was a means of voter suppression and segregation.

The Home Rule Act finally provided limited power to the people in 1973, the same year as Roe. Home rule established the D.C. City Council, the District’s legislative branch. But Congress retained the power to review and strike down city laws, including the budget, paid for by D.C. taxpayers who have no representation in Congress.

— this is an ad! —

The Flyteam is overjoyed to announce The Flytrap’s first workshop, a feminist media literacy class developed and led by Nicole Froio, co-founder of this very newsletter and a feminist writer, reviewer and researcher with over a decade of experience in creating liberatory readings of all kinds of media.

Tickets are $50, and lucky you, discounts to ticketed events are one of your perks as a paid subscriber. Click below and use code INSIDER for $15 off your ticket!

What is worse than home rule? No home rule. Without home rule, the District could more easily become Trump’s testing ground for a federal abortion ban. And without statehood, the District cannot take proactive steps to safeguard the legality and accessibility that we’ve historically provided our abortion seekers, residents, and travelers alike.

Abortion care after 30 weeks has long been hard to find, even before Dobbs reversed Roe. The recent closure of the Boulder Abortion Clinic has for now left the Midwest without a 30-weeks-plus hub for care, though former staff is working to open a new clinic. Hope Clinic expanded abortion to 34 weeks in Chicago. An Ibis Reproductive Health referrals sheet lists a number of 20-week-plus clinics that will provide abortions “later” than the listed time frame “at [the] physician’s discretion” or “on a case-by-case basis.” In the southwest, Albuquerque, New Mexico’s VAG Clinic has a 34-week cutoff.

All-gestation abortion is legal in D.C. and Maryland, which are home to clinics that are open, willing, and able to provide services throughout the entirety of the “trimester” framework Roe created based on the common misconception that there are nine months of pregnancy. (Pregnancy is 40 weeks, beginning from the first day of a person’s last menstrual period, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ medical definition.)

The District’s DuPont Clinic offers care up to 32 weeks and 6 days. The Maryland suburbs are home to CARE Bethesda (35 weeks and 6 days) and Partners in Abortion Care (34 weeks), which give people from more restrictive areas of the country a last chance at getting an abortion.

Though Virginia’s legal cutoff is 26 weeks, 6 days, later than most of the South, in practice Virginians are often forced to travel for care beyond 20 weeks despite the letter of the law.

Dobbs further overwhelmed U.S. abortion clinics anywhere it remains legal to provide abortion. Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington (PPMW) has experienced a quadrupling of non-D.C., Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) abortion patients, primarily coming from Florida and Texas, according to CEO Laura Meyers. PPMW’s D.C. clinic provides abortions up to 20 weeks into pregnancy.

“I think it's very important for our region to remain a haven for people that are seeking reproductive health services and specifically abortion,” Meyers said in an interview with The Flytrap.

Right after Roe fell, the DC Abortion Fund (DCAF) still served a 60/40 split of DMV and non-DMV patients, according to Executive Director Alisha Dingus. “And then you could really watch who we were supporting or who was calling us for funding, based on the bans that would fall in the Southeast”—Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Florida, she told me. 

Funding requests from District residents doubled after the National Abortion Federation (NAF) stopped covering the full cost of first trimester abortions in D.C., which had allowed DCAF to put more money toward later abortions for travelers, Dingus said. NAF and Planned Parenthood Federation of America cuts created “pure hell” for abortion funds in the immediate aftermath, worker-owned Autonomy News co-founder Garnet Henderson reported for Rewire News Group in 2024.

Nearly one year later, Dingus said “it’s been a really difficult balancing act” to support people in the DMV and the abortion seekers for whom the DMV is a refuge. In the aftermath, DCAF’s funding split shifted to supporting 70 percent of patients from the DMV and 30 percent of patients traveling from elsewhere. “We say to ourselves, ‘That’s right, because this is our home,’ but that means that there are people who are traveling here that we just can’t fund,” she said. With a recently upped weekly budget of $38,000, or $152,000 monthly, DCAF is operating well below the $300,000 to $400,000 monthly it’d take to “feel like we were closer to meeting all the needs of everyone who reaches out and every solidarity thread we're put on,” Dingus said.

Every fiscal year, Congress subjects the District’s budget to the Dornan Amendment, our localized version of the federal Hyde Amendment, which prevents most Medicaid patients from using their own health insurance to obtain an abortion. Contrast us with Maryland, one of 20 states that puts the state’s portion of Medicaid dollars toward abortion care. This coverage narrows, though does not close, the abortion funding gap for low-income Marylanders. 

And while Medicaid reimbursement rates for health-care services are already notoriously low, Medicaid is nevertheless a valuable currency when every dollar counts for time-sensitive abortion care. The cost increases week by week as state restrictions push abortion seekers later into pregnancy.

Maryland voters enshrined reproductive freedom in their state’s constitution in 2024, but the District is by definition a district. We have no constitution. The proposed constitution on the D..C. government’s statehood site does not mention “reproductive” or “abortion” at all.

The city council instead enacted a 2020 law strengthening reproductive health protections and a 2022 law safeguarding self-managed abortions from criminal penalties. Both evaded congressional repeal. But they are not safe under right-wing federal control. As an example: Trump’s July 4 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—which includes “defunding” Planned Parenthood for one year—previously held Washington, D.C.’s budget hostage until the mayor conceded to strip the yellow “Black Lives Matter” mural from the blacktop plaza across from the White House.

When asked why she conceded to Trump’s demands, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said, “We have bigger fish to fry.” Without statehood, what will stop Trump and Republicans from going after other “fish”—such as abortion rights?

Advocates say staying silent in hopes that the administration will leave D.C. alone isn’t an effective strategy to protect abortion. Personally, I can pretty much guarantee that our worst-case scenarios have already wormed their way into Project 2025 or Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s head.

“We've been trying to make the connections between statehood and abortion access for a while now because it's so clear to us,” DCAF’s Dingus said. “Last year at every event, we were just talking about, ‘If you care about abortion access, you have to care about D.C. statehood.’ All of this is tenuous.”

The statehood advocacy group Free DC, named for “Mayor for Life” Marion Barry’s 1960s self-governance movement, was founded on principles of non-cooperation, including non-violent protest, boycotts, and worker strikes. Co-Founder Alex Dodds believes the District will win statehood through the sustained struggle of organizing, building relationships, and working together. 

“If this administration does come after D.C.'s very strong, currently very strong abortion services, if that does happen, that is too late to start organizing,” she said in a Flytrap interview. “I would invite people who care about abortion to organize to protect abortion before those attacks do happen.”

Put simply: the District is one of the nation’s last comprehensive abortion access points. Our ability to govern ourselves is key to preserving D.C.’s status as an access point for abortion throughout pregnancy, at least for those who are able to travel for care. Revoking D.C. home rule would severely impact the post-Roe abortion access landscape for the entire country. Statehood for the people of the District of Columbia protects us all.

This piece was edited by Andrea Grimes and copyedited by Katelyn Burns.