DC advocates are concerned about the future of abortion access in their progressive city.

By Walker Whalen

While experts said it would be politically impractical for lawmakers on the Hill to meddle with local political affairs, continued threats to the District’s home rule by the Trump administration and a Republican-controlled Congress have left advocates apprehensive.

After the Dobbs decision in 2022, the precedent that established access to abortion was overturned by the Supreme Court, making it so that each state could independently legislate around abortion.

The District, through its local policy, has complete legal access to abortion without gestational age limits.

However, advocates are now faced with a series of threats to Washington’s political autonomy. On Feb. 6, Congressional Republicans announced legislation that would dissolve home rule in Washington and reestablish federal jurisdiction over the District. About two weeks later, Trump stated that the federal government should “take over” the running of Washington, according to reports from the Associated Press.

This was followed by a controversy over the District’s budget, where initial provisions in the Congressional spending bill would have potentially resulted in a $1 Billion cut to the city’s public services. Both the budget and home rule issues remain unresolved in the House and Senate.

As part of the home rule system, the District does not have statehood but has its own local government that Congress maintains oversight of. Congress can dismiss all proposed laws.

Abortion advocates like Alisha Dingus, the executive director of the D.C. Abortion Fund, said she is concerned about further federal meddling in local policies, given how ideologically opposed the city is to the present administration.

“One of the things that we worry about is them testing out some of their more radical anti-abortion policies on the District because we don’t have [statehood] protections,” Dingus said.

However, the Policy Counsel for the D.C. chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Melissa Wasser, said that there aren’t any immediate signs that Trump or Congressional Republicans are going to challenge local abortion policy in the District.

Even so, Wasser said that her organization is prepared to defend abortion access in the District.

“It’s scenario-dependent because it’s not a large issue at the moment. 
It doesn’t mean that tomorrow another bill won’t drop or another executive order won’t drop and then we’ll have to reassess,” Wasser said. “If something does happen, we will use those tools that we have with litigation, public education and advocacy to do everything that we can to protect abortion rights in D.C. and at the federal level.”

The question of home rule in Washington is similarly unresolved, according to Daniel Freeman. Freeman teaches government and law as a faculty fellow at American University and served as General Counsel to the House while it was considering the Home Rule Act.

Freeman said it’s unlikely that abortion opponents would waste political capital on influencing the local statutes in the District. However, he pointed out that for both abortion access and home rule, all it takes is a bit of political momentum to make something unexpected happen.

“The ridiculous is never out of the question,” Freeman said. “It may be that somebody in this new administration has got a problem with the District of Columbia. 
All you got to do is have somebody who gets pulled over for a traffic stop or something ridiculous like that.”

Dingus highlighted that Washington’s unique contribution to the landscape of abortion access adds to the threat of federal regulation. She said that because of the lack of gestational age limits on abortion in the District, clinics in the district provide care that patients can seldom get elsewhere.

The Dupont Clinic, located in Dupont Circle, is one of three clinics in the U.S. that provide abortion care past a 17-week gestational period. With the threat of federal interference with Washington politics, Dingus said clinics are worried about further restrictions being put in place that could cause clinics to close or reduce the services they offer.

“People travel from Australia, Poland, Germany and all across the country to Dupont clinic to get their abortions,” Dingus said. “And you can’t replace them.”

To both Dingus and Wasser, Republicans’ threats to home rule emphasize the importance of advocating for statehood in Washington — both to protect the political will of District residents and to ensure the District isn’t thrown into political chaos whenever there is a change in administration.

“This happens every time we have a hostile administration,” Dingus said. “We are like, ‘What’s going to happen to D.C. as a city?’ ‘What’s going to happen to our ability to rule ourselves and control where our dollars go and what we can do?’”

Wasser said, continuing to advocate for statehood is an important part of protecting the rights of Washington residents, on top of ensuring that the federal government can’t overturn the District’s voting will. 

“We can’t fully defend or protect people’s civil rights and civil liberties without D.C. statehood,” Wasser said. “So while that is hopefully in the future, right now we need to protect home rule and remind people who we are as D.C., and what D.C. residents really want and deserve.”