Nationally, abortion has faded as a campaign issue. Four years after it helped Democrats stave off a red wave, candidates in battleground races are focusing their attention on cost-of-living issues, immigration, and policing. As of mid-August, abortion was mentioned in less than 5 percent of Democratic Senate ads, a key difference from the past two cycles, according to the Wesleyan Media Project.

Maine is different. As of September 16, Democratic advertisers had spent roughly 15 percent of their $40.8 million broadcast TV and streaming dollars on ads focused on abortion rights, according to Nate Schwartz from AdImpact. It’s one of the biggest topics there, he told me, after ads about President Donald Trump and healthcare. Planned Parenthood’s political arm is also making its biggest ad buy of 2026 against Susan Collins, at $600,000, and WinSenate, a super PAC aligned with Senate Democratic leadership, has spent 70 percent of its TV, streaming, and digital money in Maine on abortion-focused ads.

The target is Collins, the only Republican senator up for reelection in a state Trump lost in 2024, and one of Democrats’ best chances to flip a seat. Seeking her sixth term, Collins is running in a year when Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by about 9 points. It’s also the first time she will face voters since Roe v. Wade was overturned — a decision Justice Brett Kavanaugh helped deliver after Collins, who has long described herself as “pro-choice,” cast the pivotal vote to confirm him in 2018. 

For the abortion rights movement, this is the race that has to work. Groups are pouring their biggest investments of the cycle into a state where fewer than half a percent of voters call abortion their top issue, in a year when Democrats have opportunities to win nearly everywhere. If a blue wave arrives and lifts every Democrat except the one running to avenge Roe v. Wade and remove the senator who famously sealed its fate, the organizations will have a harder time telling donors the issue still moves voters, and a harder time arguing that Republicans will pay a political price — even in blue states — for votes that restrict access to abortion.

“We know that abortion is the number one negative in Maine voters’ mind,” Lisa Margulies, a Maine spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Votes, told me. “It’s really the No. 1 dealbreaker.”

The first job for Democrats and abortion rights advocates is convincing Mainers the issue is still a pressing one. Seventy-two percent of Maine adults say abortion should be legal “in all or most” circumstances, and since Democrats took control of Maine’s government in 2018, the state has expanded who can provide abortions, required and subsidized insurance coverage for the procedure, eliminated most patient cost-sharing, loosened restrictions on care after viability, and shielded patients and providers from prosecution and lawsuits.

Collins has made that her defense. The Dobbs v. Jackson decision, she said in June, “has not had an impact on the state of Maine in that Maine actually expanded its law.” Advocates call that the central misunderstanding. 

“There’s this perception — and Sen. Collins herself has said it — that somehow Maine is immune, and that’s just not true,” Margulies said, pointing to their state-level efforts to keep access intact and to federal Medicaid cuts that have already hit Maine providers.

Also muddying the waters is the senator’s Democratic opponent. Collins is facing off against Troy Jackson, a longtime fixture in Maine politics who rose from the state House to the Senate presidency but fell short in bids for Congress in 2014 and governor this year. Early in his career, Jackson said that abortion “should never be legal” and that women should be required to view an ultrasound if they want to end a pregnancy. He has since renounced those positions and has earned 100 percent ratings from Planned Parenthood since 2017. (Jackson replaced Graham Platner, the original Democratic Party nominee, who quit the race after being accused of rape, an allegation he denies.)

While Collins prevailed for reelection in 2020 despite voting to confirm Kavanaugh, Democrats say her decision is much more salient for voters now that Americans live in a post-Roe world, one where more than 15 states have near-total abortion bans. 

If Collins loses, Democrats and abortion rights groups will say her Kavanaugh vote is no doubt partly why. A win for Collins would be harder to read, though the explanations that leave out abortion are already being prepared, including a messy nomination process that produced a candidate fewer voters were excited about, and a “unicorn” incumbent with decades of personal relationships across a small state and a long record of bringing federal money back home.

The abortion rights bet hinges on two things: that the Kavanaugh vote cost Collins something on top of what an unpopular president and rising gas prices already have, and that voters will judge Jackson by the positions he’s renounced rather than the ones he once held. 

The vote Collins won’t apologize for

When Collins voted to confirm Kavanaugh, she said she believed his assurances that he considered Roe v. Wade settled precedent. She had previously said that she would not vote for any nominee who expressed “hostility” toward the 1973 decision that established the constitutional right to an abortion.

As many observed at the time, Kavanaugh’s record gave strong signals that he would in fact vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. In her floor speech announcing her vote, Collins dismissed those warnings, suggesting opponents had been whipped into a “frenzy” by advocacy groups. When he ultimately did side with the conservative majority in Dobbs, Collins issued a statement calling the ruling “ill-considered.”

Four years later, though, Collins is doubling down on her vote for Kavanaugh, telling local media this summer that she does “not regret” it. “Given what subsequently happened to Roe, I don’t think that simply fades into the background,” Robert Glover, a political scientist at the University of Maine, told me.

Democrats are zeroing in on the fact that Collins has continued to confirm anti-abortion federal judges, even as recently as this month. Last fall she voted to confirm Joshua Dunlap, a Maine attorney, to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit over objections from 20 Maine organizations citing his record on abortion and marriage equality. 

“Susan Collins says she has no regrets about confirming the judges who overturned Roe v. Wade, and has proved it by continuing to vote for Trump’s right-wing judges,” Maine Democratic Party spokesperson Misha Linnehan told me in an emailed statement. “Now, her approvals are underwater, and she’s trailing with women voters because Maine women have had enough of being betrayed.” 

George Hill, the president and CEO of Maine Family Planning, told me Collins “defied” them with her vote for Kavanaugh, causing “irreparable harm” across the country. He emphasized how vulnerable Mainers are if Republicans retake control of state government.

Blake Kernen, a spokesperson for Collins’s campaign, dismissed the criticism about anti-abortion judges, emphasizing that her pro-choice boss also voted for 188 judges nominated by President Joe Biden, including Julie Rikelman, who served as litigation director of the Center for Reproductive Rights. Collins, she noted, is the only Republican who voted to confirm all three of the court’s liberal justices, and she voted against Amy Coney Barrett.

Margulies rejects this accounting. “We deserve better than, ‘Well, she’s not as bad,’” she said. “When it comes to reproductive rights, she’s not a moderate anymore.”

While her judicial votes are facing scrutiny, Collins has also spent decades building up a brand as a Republican willing to buck her party on abortion when the issue comes up in the Senate. 

In May 2025, Planned Parenthood Maine Action Fund published a memo online titled, “Senator Susan Collins’ long history of supporting Planned Parenthood and access to essential health care.” Among other things, the memo highlighted Collins for speaking out against proposed Medicaid cuts, for co-sponsoring a bill in 2022 to codify Roe v. Wade, and for opposing a 20-week abortion ban bill in the Senate. This past summer, the memo was quietly taken down from their website.

Asked about the removed page, Margulies didn’t say when or why it was taken down, but pointed to what she described as a sharp shift in Collins’s record over the past year, particularly on judicial confirmations. “There are times when she’s been true to her word and put Mainers ahead of politics, but she closed that chapter this year,” she told me.

“Because she is a Republican, the national groups continue to twist themselves into a pretzel to support these male candidates with terrible records,” Kernen said, referring to Platner and Jackson. 

So far, Mainers appear to have split Collins in two in their minds: There’s the dedicated public servant who puts her state first on one side, and the partisan Republican who sometimes disappoints them on the other. A University of New Hampshire poll over the summer found Collins rated far better on bringing federal dollars home to Maine than on her Supreme Court confirmation votes. Maine voters, Glover said, “have historically been willing to separate Collins from the national Republican Party and evaluate her through a broader lens of incumbency, independence, and constituent service.” 

The turnout math

Even if Democrats can win the argument on abortion around Collins, it’s an open question how much it will move votes. “Right now, I feel quite confident that affordability, healthcare, and good jobs trump abortion access by a long shot,” Dan Shea, a political scientist at Colby College, told me.

But abortion rights advocates believe the ranking obscures how the issue actually works. Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, said her group has spent years testing how to talk to voters about abortion, consistently finding that it overperforms as an attack. “If you go to a voter in Maine and you say, what are your top three or five issues, they may not name abortion,” she told me. “But if you say to them, Susan Collins took the following vote — and one of them is Brett Kavanaugh, which led to overturning Roe — it is extremely salient, and it moves that voter.”

The Kavanaugh vote works, she argued, as a character verdict — “an indicator that you’re willing to side with extremism over your own constituents.” That, she said, is the piece that’s missing in the analysis of what voters say they care about. “It is one of the most salient attacks in Maine and in a lot of other parts of the country.”

Ashley Kirzinger, a pollster at KFF based in Maine, said priority rankings are a weak guide anyway, noting “the economy” means different things to different voters, and issues compete with candidate dynamics and party loyalty. What has changed since Roe’s overturn, she told me, is who the single-issue abortion voter is.

“Before the Dobbs decision, abortion was a motivating issue for Republican conservative voters,” Kirzinger said. “Now what we’ve seen is a complete shift.” Those voters are more likely to be Democrats, younger women and women of color, and include more people who don’t reliably show up in midterms.

Abortion messaging, therefore, is doing two jobs. The first is turnout. Kirzinger said the Kavanaugh vote is aimed at Democratic women “who are not as enthusiastic about Jackson as a candidate” and who “may be more motivated to turn out as a vote against Collins’ record on abortion rather than for Jackson.” In a tight race inside the margin of error, a couple of points of turnout could make the difference.

The second job is persuasion, and the target is older women, who reliably vote. Women made up nearly 60 percent of Maine’s turnout in 2020, and Collins won them by 3 points. What Democrats need from them is a switch, which is why many of the abortion ads are built around regret. One Planned Parenthood ad features a woman who voted for Collins and “will not make the same mistake twice”; WinSenate’s features a voter who “felt [Collins] was the better choice” and doesn’t anymore. 

Jackson’s change of heart

Complicating the race is Collins’ opponent, Troy Jackson, who is in some ways a mirror image of her own political persona: a Democrat with a history of culturally right-leaning positions to appeal to voters in the other party.

Jackson, who started his political career in the rural and fairly conservative county of Aroostook, used to earn 100 percent ratings from Maine Right to Life. In 2010, as CNN’s KFILE reported, when he filled out the group’s candidate questionnaire saying he thought abortion should never be legal, he declined to say whether there should be exceptions even to protect the life of the mother, for rape or incest, or because of fetal disability. Maine Right to Life, which has not issued an endorsement in the Senate race, did not return requests for comment.

Jackson told MS NOW he evolved on the issue thanks to “a lot of conversations over time” with women, doctors, and community members. “It became more and more clear to me that abortion access was healthcare,” he said.

In 2023, while serving as Senate president, he co-sponsored a bill allowing abortions after fetal viability when a physician deems them necessary, one of the most expansive such laws in the country. In 2024, he shepherded through the Senate a shield law protecting Maine providers and patients of reproductive and gender-affirming care from other states’ bans, despite bomb threats that emptied the statehouse and a letter from 16 Republican attorneys general threatening to sue. “Troy stood up for and never wavered in his commitment to reproductive rights during some really harrowing moments,” Margulies said, “when it would have been a lot easier to step down.”

“I’m rock solid on this now, and Susan has been the opposite,” Jackson said in an interview with Maine Public Radio this summer. Kernan, Collins’s spokesperson, has charged Jackson with flip-flopping for “political convenience.”

The national environment is looking strong for Democrats, and Jackson has been narrowly ahead in recent polls, though all have been within the margin of error. A CNN poll released this month found nearly two-thirds of Mainers feel negatively about the Dobbs decision, including about half saying it makes them angry. A Fox News poll in August found 55 percent worried Collins votes with Trump too often. 

Whatever happens, the explanations are ready. If Collins loses, abortion rights groups will cast it as proof that the issue still moves voters even where it doesn’t top their lists, and as a warning to all Republicans running in 2028. Timmaraju previewed the argument in our conversation: A loss would signal “a crack in the armor” of so-called moderates, and show that voters “are not going to tolerate” incumbents complicit with an extremist administration. 

If Collins wins, the groups that spent millions on abortion ads are unlikely to conclude that doing so was a mistake. Kirzinger pointed to the turmoil that followed the Democratic primary and the late swap of Platner for Jackson, which she said benefited Collins “in a way that is hard to capture in polls.” Glover, the political scientist, noted the things Mainers have always weighed alongside her votes, including decades of relationships, the Senate Appropriations gavel, and federal money. Even Timmaraju, the abortion rights leader, offered the same hedge in advance: A Collins win, she told me, “says more about Susan Collins and Maine than it does about 2028.”

A win wouldn’t show that judicial votes carry no consequences, Glover added. But if Collins holds substantial support among voters who support abortion rights despite the Kavanaugh vote and the fall of Roe, “that would certainly suggest limits” for retrospective accountability for downstream consequences of Supreme Court confirmations.

Though the race is supposed to clarify whether voters will punish elected officials for taking actions that restrict abortion access, it probably can’t — at least not definitively. It will decide, though, who holds the seat, and reproductive rights leaders have been clear that without a Democratic Senate, nothing they want gets a vote.

“From the outset, reproduction is a collaborative venture,” writes Anna Louie Sussman, a journalist who has spent years reporting how people all over the world try, and too often fail, to build the families they want. Her work explores how the collaborators of reproduction keep multiplying: doctors, employers, legislators, insurers, and a fertility industry that increasingly promises not just a baby but a better one. 

In her new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, Sussman traces the economic, political, and psychological negotiations that stand between people and the children they say they want. Her reporting challenges the assumption that falling birth rates can be fully explained by metrics like income, marriage and education that demographers tend to focus on. She argues the answers are much more personal and resistant to measurement. 

I wanted to better understand what Sussman meant by this idea of “impossibility of family” — and how one would even determine that, whether as a prospective parent or as a policymaker. What are the biggest barriers to having kids and how do people tell the difference between what they can’t afford and what they’ve come to believe they need? How much does the media conversation about these issues inform people’s choices? 

I spoke with her about what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s egg freezing reveals about women who aren’t running for president, what countries that subsidize fertility treatment tell us about the demand going unmet here, and why she hesitates to say outright that having children is good. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

You started working on this book seven years ago. What has most surprised you about how the conversation around fertility and family formation has changed in that time? 

There are some people on the left who have always paid attention to family issues, like Elizabeth Warren with her work on bankruptcy and the “two-income trap,” but I do think we’ve been seeing a lot more movement there, with groups like the Congressional Dads Caucus [in 2023], and care infrastructure ideas like those in the Build Back Better Act. There’s also been all this movement around paid leave in the states, 3-K and pre-K, and attempts for more affordable child care. 

On the right there’s been the rise of this strange pronatalism and the turn that’s taken with what I’ve wound up calling “kid-maxxing.” Plus this embrace in Silicon Valley and among the super rich with so-called super babies and the really overt embrace of technology to make children on this industrial scale. I also did not expect Roe to be overturned. I would have hoped that would’ve come with a lot more attention on the right to support for mothers and children, but that really hasn’t come to pass in a big way.

I was startled to read that you found some philosophers attempting to reclaim the term “eugenics.” You cite one who wrote a paper called “Defending eugenics,” which sets out to “reclaim the spirit” of eugenicists like Charles Darwin and Francis Galton. You cite another who calls for “liberal eugenics” grounded in the freedom of parents to choose how to enhance their children in accordance with their own values.

One Oxford philosopher even says parents have a duty of “procreative beneficence” and should select embryos or fetuses “most likely to have the best life” based on the genetic information they have.

That was also surprising to me. Like you, I also thought it was a discredited and taboo word. It’s hard to know how widespread those views are. I mean to be clear, eugenics has always been part of our culture in the US. I think people forget that a lot of Nazi policy was inspired by American eugenic policies, and it’s an attitude that has never really gone away. We still see it in a lot of subtler forms that I mention in the book. I mean, even just how people are choosing embryos and terminating pregnancies based on certain genetic conditions. 

“Clearly you could have a lot more children being born if these technologies were more accessible.”

This eugenicist rhetoric is gaining steam at a moment when some people are also really hard at work on developing technologies that could enable this sort of thing. While some of these philosophers will definitely make a distinction between parents making some individual choices vs. a state sponsored program, I think it’s the attitude that’s at the root of this, and that’s what we really need to work on criticizing and dismantling.

So the book is arriving just as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been documenting her egg freezing journey, and talking about how she wants to push to expand insurance coverage and federal support for fertility treatments. What does her experience — and the reaction to it — say about our current moment? Some on the right were so mad, as if she should just throw in the towel or eschew hope and agency at age 36. 

What’s so interesting about her experience that I think that people miss is, yes, is it exceptional that she’s contemplating a run for president? Sure. Not many of us are doing that. But on many other levels, she’s doing what a lot of women who can afford to do in their late 30s do when they’re still single. In the book I mention the research of Marcia Inhorn, who interviewed about 150 women who sought to freeze their eggs. And what’s interesting is if you look at their profiles, they were city-dwelling professionals who were on average nearly 37 at the time of freezing.

That is AOC to a tee, and if you asked those study participants why they were doing it, most were not doing so because they felt like they needed to put their families on hold to pursue careers. A full 82 percent cited their lack of a partner as the prime motivation. They wanted to have a family at some point and didn’t want to rule that out. 

What do you think we should take from other countries that do subsidize egg freezing?

So the city of Tokyo has subsidized egg freezing and they were totally oversubscribed. So many women took up the city’s offer, and France has also started offering it. More places offer IVF coverage for people who need it because they treat infertility like a disease, which is how the World Health Organization defines it.

What’s interesting is when you look at places where there is more coverage, it also gives you a sense of the scale of need for it. So in Denmark, where you can get something like up to six rounds of treatment publicly funded for your first child and another six rounds for your second child; I believe about one in nine children is born there with assisted reproductive technologies. If you compare that with the US, it’s closer to one in 36. So clearly you could have a lot more children being born if these technologies were more accessible.

In the book you cite historian Sara Matthiesen, who argues that since legal abortion helped transform having a child into more of a personal choice, pregnancy thus became understood as chosen, with parents then sacrificing or forfeiting some of their claim on societal help. I couldn’t tell where you landed on that argument. Do you find it persuasive?

So I find it persuasive in the sense that I feel like conservatives will grab onto any argument to avoid state responsibility towards families and children. The fact that you can terminate a pregnancy is one more reason that can be provided to individualize the responsibility of parenthood. 

But I think that we’re also seeing the mirror image of that — where the choice to remain or not remain pregnant has also been taken away in so many places post-Roe. And I don’t think that has resulted in the converse of her argument, which is that when that choice is taken away and you can no longer sever pregnancy and motherhood, then states and society will step up to acknowledge that reality. 

In the middle of your book you recall an ex-boyfriend, who was divorced and felt it would be impossible to afford a second kid. You were surprised by this, and later cite a pregnant woman in Venezuela you met while traveling, who was worried about money but excited about parenthood. She told you the Venezuelan proverb that “a baby comes with a loaf of bread under his arm.” The subtext was that they believe things will work out. The subtitle of your book is The Impossibility of Family in Age of Uncertainty. So where do you land? Is it impossible, as your ex said?

I think that’s what people are trying to negotiate with themselves. That’s where things like faith, agency, and disposition come into play. One of the reasons I wanted to write this book was I feel like birth rates and demography are always discussed in terms of these data points that people can measure, like how many people are married and how old are they, and do they have college education or not? Do they earn X, Y, Z income, or not? Do they have a job? 

But it’s just all so personal. So the Venezuelan woman was an optimist, whether that’s culturally or dispositionally, and she did believe things would be okay. And I think we all know stories of people who’ve grown up who came from very challenging backgrounds and wound up achieving some sort of fame, fortune, success…so we know that things are always possible. And that’s where questions of what one is prepared to sacrifice come into play, or what expectations do you have of what you want to provide a child. 

The thing I really want to highlight is how individual these negotiations are, whether you come down on it being impossible or whether you want to lower your standards and maybe your child doesn’t get in-home violin lessons or if music’s really important to you and you can’t imagine a universe in which your child doesn’t play an instrument.

I cover these issues too and I think about a lot about what our role in the media is. I share your view on reproductive justice, and wanting to help people live the lives they want. But you also wrote about experiencing what you called “money dysmorphia” — when someone is feeling insecure about their financial situation even when they are in fact okay. What role do we have as journalists to help people distinguish between genuine financial impossibility and the fear that they can never be secure enough? And if we don’t do that, how do we not end up in a world where only rich people are encouraged to have kids?

So I try to be optimistic, but I also feel like as a country, there’s no bottom to how far someone can fall in America. As Elizabeth Warren found, having a child is a huge predictor of bankruptcy. I would like to be more positive. And I do believe that there’s so many easy policy fixes, so many ways to make parenting easier. But for people I know who’ve gone through serious financial distress because of things in their life changing, there’s a limit to what I can do or say without giving them all my resources. 

Regardless of our job as media, I wish I could say that everything will work out fine. And in some cases it can. Again, people do really great jobs being parents with so much less than I have, which is something I try to keep in mind all the time. But I also would say as a society that we let people fall all the way through the floor and then some. We just don’t have a safety net. So I find it hard to say that everything will work out and you’ll wind up fine.

At the beginning of your book you talk about how having children is an intensely personal decision and you’re not interested in writing about if it’s “good” or “bad” or “worth it.” One of the critiques conservatives make about people like us is that we can be so averse to making any kind of normative statement about having kids that we’ve lost the plot. I’m curious for your thoughts on that. In a book arguing that we need more family-friendly policies, do you think you need to more explicitly say that having kids is a good thing to do?

What I would say is loving relationships are good, and having kids is one of those. I think parenthood is an exceptional one just in the level of responsibility that you’re inviting. Having kids for people who want to have kids is good. But I don’t know, I do hesitate to privilege that relationship above all others because of what doing so means. If you say having kids is good, well, who has kids? That immediately has gendered implications and instantly puts an onus on women.

Though we say public libraries are good and that doesn’t mean we have to make libraries against people’s will. But yeah, I guess I wonder if that position avoids the ways this kind of relationship is different from other loving relationships. While this isn’t what personally motivates me, I think one can definitely make a case that having kids is more of a social good than some other kinds of relationships.

When we say society should be more family-friendly and fund it with tax dollars, it’s not just so everyone can live out the lives they want, but also so we can support our society now and in the future.

Lyman Stone I think gets at this, he says children are good because people are good. Again, I would say if you feel like you might be a good parent and enjoy that relationship, that specific relationship, the whole point of my book is I want that to be more accessible because from what I’ve seen and now in my own experience, it is an amazing relationship. It’s not a relationship like any other one I’ve ever had. But I guess it’s not clear to me what the corollary is of saying having kids is good. It’s definitely good for people who want to have kids, but it’s definitely not good for people who don’t want to have kids.

Though I’m not someone who always wanted to have kids myself. And while I’m strongly against coercing people into having children, I think there are millions of people like me who are like, “I don’t know. I’m not sure. I can’t really picture it.” 

There are people on the right who say, “Therefore, just do it because you’ll like it.” And I don’t think that’s appropriate. But it’s also true that for most of human history, people were simply not asked to come down on this question of: “Do I want it or not?” Now today I’m so glad I have a child and the choice to decide, but if you had asked me five years ago I would have said, “I don’t really like little kids. It’s never been my thing.”

So the identity question becomes interesting and confusing to me, and I think it leaves me more uncomfortable with the idea that we should just support whatever anyone’s choice or desire is today when we know that our choices and desires do change, including based on what people absorb in the media.

I think a lot of young people are just really struggling. I see this all the time on Reddit threads or listening to young people talk about their lives who say, “If I can barely take care of myself, how can I take care of someone else?” We don’t have a society that makes any form of caregiving easy, and people are really struggling to find work. We have a society that doesn’t make it easy to care for oneself, for one’s parents, for one’s friends, for one’s partner.

I mean I did have a kid before I felt totally comfortable and I was just really fortunate that it worked out. I do agree with some of the people on the right who say that a lot of the things you think you need to become a parent, you don’t. And we know that really great people grow up all over the world where they have much fewer resources and infrastructure and everything. So I do think kids need a lot less than we often imagine they need. And that is part of thinking about your own expectations and what you want for a child and also, again, what you’re prepared to sacrifice.

I joke that I go to an annual yoga class fairly regularly. I don’t really cook anymore. I had a single mom who was just resourceful, though she was lucky to be in New York City, where there actually are resources to access. If you’re living in Tennessee or Mississippi those types of resources would probably not be available. 

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of things that, as recently as seven years ago, we could reliably do without a smartphone:

• Read a restaurant menu while seated inside, and pay your check. 
• Enter a concert or sporting event
• Use a parking garage or park your car on the street
• Receive packages or retrieve purchases
• Complete the sign-in process for work, banking, or government services
• Attend school events or communicate with your kid’s school
• Access health care and other kinds of appointments 
• Take public transit
• Get a taxi 
• Get into a gym or fitness class

I’ve been thinking about this drift toward mandatory apps and QR codes a lot lately, as a new millennial parent unhappy with my addictive tendency to mindlessly scroll near my baby. I also know that, parent or not, the research on ways that heavy smartphone use negatively affects our own well-being, attention spans, and relationships has become near-impossible to ignore. And people don’t need meta-analyses to be convinced: It’s why so many are turning to tools and hacks that aim to help us limit our phone use, or at least time spent scrolling on certain apps. It’s also why we’re seeing a wave of new clubs and social events that are proudly phone-free.

I think these “digital detoxes” are encouraging, and I’ve been researching so-called dumb phones myself. But none of these trends will really matter if we’re continually forced into a world of apps for every element of daily life. 

Late last month, Meta agreed to pay at least $12.1 billion to settle claims that it deliberately designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children, and announced it would be redesigning the platforms for younger users to include daily time limits, overnight lockouts, and restrictions on like counts and beauty filters.

It’s a start, but we have to think bigger than just the algorithms that keep us glued to our phones. Because they’re not the only forces that make quitting so hard. Increasingly, it’s just basic access to services and companies and public institutions that are making a smartphone exit feel elusive. 

You should not have to have an addictive device in your pocket at all times in order to do ordinary things. We should be pushing for a world where adults can meaningfully reduce their smartphone use, or quit it altogether if they want.

And it’s not just about personal self-improvement. The status quo has already been long untenable for many people, especially the elderly, the disabled, the unhoused, and anyone who just can’t afford a data plan. 

Pushing for a non-smartphone option is about accessibility, affordability, and agency. It’s about demanding the kind of freedom in a society we deserve to have. There should never be any essential service that requires phones as the only way in. 

We can fix this, and some people are already showing how. 

How we got here

Even if it takes us another decade to unwind, it’s important to remember these changes are less than ten years old.

Smartphone ownership exploded over the 2010s, rising from 35 percent of US adults in 2011 to 81 percent in 2019, according to Pew. It has since climbed to roughly 9 in 10. 

In other words, smartphones stopped being a device many people had and started becoming a device every institution could assume you had. What happened next was part real improvements in convenience, part cost-cutting that pandemic-era policy made easier to justify, and part what sociologists call “isomorphism” — organizations converging on a practice not because it works best, but because everyone else has adopted it. 

Isomorphism is one of my favorite concepts I learned in college, and you know it when you see it. For example, you’re planning a conference, and somewhere along the way it became true that a “good” conference has its own app, even though nobody wants to download an app to learn when lunch is on the schedule. Or it’s the way every mission statement sounds like every other mission statement.

I’d say the charitable reason we drifted toward handling so much by smartphone is that a lot of it genuinely is better, faster, and harder to lose. Tapping a turnstile with my phone, and never wondering whether I left my DC metro card at home, has made my life easier.

The less benign reasons are that digital systems let companies and governments cut labor and operating costs. Apps and QR codes replace cashiers, waitstaff, printed materials, and customer service reps, and shift new work onto us, the customer. The smartphone systems also generate a lot of personalized data which companies love to collect, and sometimes sell.

Then there’s control, which companies certainly like. Not all of it is sinister. (Think blocking tickets from being resold, or prices and menus being updated instantly.) But when sellers control the interface and know a lot about us, two people can open the same app at the same moment and see different prices. Economists call this price discrimination, and it’s much easier to pull off when there’s no posted price we can compare against.

But just because inertia is leading us toward a universal smartphone society, that doesn’t mean it’s where we’ll end up. We have options to push back.

Let’s protect the non-smartphone option

Smartphones aren’t going anywhere. But it’s eminently reasonable to demand that whatever cost a company or government pays to keep a viable non-smartphone option is a cost worth paying. 

While the “march of digitization” might feel inevitable, Clare Morell and Brad Littlejohn of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center remind us that Americans have a long history of taking on technology in the name of humanity, from automobiles to firearms, and forcing some reasonable accommodations. There has been a push in recent years to preserve paper options for people who struggle to apply for benefits online. Some cities also have laws requiring businesses to accept cash. New York state just passed a ban on “cashless establishments,” which ensures people will still be able to dine out or shop without needing to go through a QR code or app.  

Morell and Littlejohn point to other solutions, like the Americans with Disabilities Act, which they say could be read to require businesses to serve customers who don’t use apps, or adding smartphone ownership to state anti-discrimination statutes. 

Europeans have gotten further with this than we have. In 2023, the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly urged member states to keep non-digital access to public services available, and in early 2025, a coalition of anti-poverty, disability, and digital-rights groups delivered an open letter asking the European Parliament to guarantee offline access to all essential services. Their argument is that the EU wants everything online by 2030 while more than 40 percent of Europeans still lack basic digital skills.

In the US, we’re also learning that Big Tech isn’t unstoppable. On top of the Meta settlement, school phone bans have spread to at least 40 states, with school districts now considering policies to limit laptop and tablet time, too. 

Focusing on child safety first makes sense both morally and politically. Reformers have amassed a decent track record of getting companies and governments to redesign products around children’s vulnerability, and such redesigns rarely stay confined to kids. In 1997, cigarette mascot Joe Camel was dropped under federal pressure over marketing to kids, but the advertising restrictions that followed reshaped how cigarettes were ultimately sold to everyone. I’d be surprised if Meta keeps a chronological feed and a nighttime cutoff walled off for teens alone.

And yet, we shouldn’t rely solely on osmosis from kid reforms to fix our adult problems. For starters, reforms don’t always trickle down. Congress passed COPPA in 1998 to keep companies from harvesting kids’ data online, and the rest of us still have no equivalent federal safeguard. 

Not every fix would require regulation. Afreka Ebanks, a spokesperson for Dumb.co, which sells smartphone alternatives, told me she’s optimistic that pressure on individual businesses can spark change, in part because marketing has shifted so heavily toward community and belonging in recent years. Companies that want to seem grounded in their neighborhoods, she argued, are more susceptible to locals asking for a non-phone option. She’s been asking her own gym to bring back the key fobs it used to issue, so members can leave their phones at home while they exercise. 

Dumb.co is also betting that if enough people give up smartphones — not a majority, but a large enough minority — businesses won’t want to lose those customers. She cited Capital Bikeshare in Washington, DC, which still makes it easy for riders to unlock bikes with a physical key even as most users go through the app. “They do want to serve those people who aren’t carrying around phones,” she said.

At the end of the day, we’re not going to restore less phone-dependent childhoods for our kids if we can’t also build a less phone-dependent society for the rest of us. And we deserve to have that choice. Opting out just cannot be functionally impossible. 

Republicans have been turning transgender athletes into a wedge issue since Idaho passed the first state ban in 2020. This year, it’s already playing a major role in midterm ads, with Democrats in competitive races almost always on the defensive. At this point, the fight doesn’t even need a trans athlete: The WNBA spent the summer at the center of a culture war over a hypothetical conflict, after two ex-NBA players declared themselves eligible for the women’s draft as a stunt. There have been no known trans women on any team, and the league confirmed it had “no immediate eligibility matters” on its hands. 

It became such a political priority in part because it polls well: Surveys show most Americans, including many otherwise Democratic-leaning voters, favor barring trans women from sports leagues. This November, though, marks the first time voters will confront the issue directly at the ballot box themselves.

Most notably, in Washington state, the public will decide whether to go further than any red-state legislature has even managed. A ballot initiative, I-638, would require every girl who wants to play school sports to first prove their sex assigned at birth, via an inspection of their reproductive anatomy or a test of their sex chromosomes or hormone levels. Competing campaigns in the state are mobilizing voters for and against the measure, which will deliver the clearest test yet of how liberal and moderate voters feel about this issue.

Twenty-seven other states have already imposed measures to restrict trans athletes from participating in girls’ and women’s sports in recent years, and the US Supreme Court ruled earlier this summer that such bans are constitutional. Yet nearly all of those bans passed through Republican-controlled legislatures, mostly in states Donald Trump won three times, and none went directly before voters. That changes this fall, not only in Washington but also with Arizona, Colorado, and Nebraska voters weighing in.

The blue-state ballot battle comes at a time when the Democratic Party is still struggling to figure out how it wants to talk about transgender athletes. Democrats have broadly supported anti-discrimination protections for trans people, but on the specific questions that have dominated the political debate — namely whether trans women and girls should play on sports teams matching their gender identity, and whether minors should have access to gender-related medical treatment — most Democrats have been reluctant to adopt clear positions, while some swing-state candidates have actively distanced themselves from the party.

But the Washington state referendum is forcing its opponents, and allied Democratic politicians, to tackle the issue head-on. And they think they may have found a way to win — by convincing even voters who agree with the ban’s goals that enforcing it will create more problems than it solves. 

What’s different about the Washington sports ban

The measure in Washington state is more far-reaching than other state bans in one key way, as it would require verification from every student seeking to join a girls’ sports team, not just those whose eligibility has been challenged. According to the text for I-638, athletes would need to document their sex assigned at birth based “only on one or more of the following: the student’s reproductive anatomy, genetic makeup, or normal endogenously produced testosterone levels.”

Opponents, organizing under the banner of No Hate in WA State, are seeking to defeat the measure by framing it as the most extreme proposal of its kind. On paper, they face an uphill battle: 73 percent of Americans told Pew last year they were uncomfortable with transgender athletes playing on teams that don’t match their assigned birth sex. Opponents are also being massively outspent by Let’s Go Washington, the PAC campaigning for the measure, which is bankrolled by the conservative hedge fund manager Brian Heywood.

But No Hate in WA State hopes the ballot text will help them show that the proposed ban on transgender athletes would be a nightmare to implement. Even if Let’s Go Washington didn’t intend the outcome, they argue, no defensible reading of I-638 could avoid the conclusion that thousands of children will face either invasive new genital exams or the loss of a spot on a girls’ team altogether because their families can’t afford the genetic or testosterone testing the initiative offers as alternatives.

“Brian Heywood’s Initiative Wants To Inspect Your Daughter’s Body” reads a typical post from the No Hate in WA State campaign account, warning the initiative would yield “medically unnecessary” and “potentially traumatizing” genital or pelvic exams.

Let’s Go Washington disputes this, saying documentation of a genital exam from any routine past checkup, including the physical performed at birth, would suffice. But more than 150,000 school-age girls in Washington lack a regular family doctor with the medical records the campaign says would already be on file, and many schools conduct sports physicals publicly in group settings, where examining a student’s reproductive anatomy would be unthinkable.

Let’s Go Washington could not connect me with an attorney willing to defend its interpretation of the legislative text on the record, though campaign spokespeople Darren Littell and Hallie Herzberg said they consulted lawyers while crafting the ballot language. “I agree with you that it should have been explicit to say, ‘Here’s all the ways in the universe that you could verify a child’s sex’ and we didn’t do that, and that’s where we are now,” Herzberg told me.

Critics of the initiative warn the campaign will stir up more anti-trans sentiment and put vulnerable students in danger. The lead supporters say I-638 is necessary to protect the “integrity and fairness” of girls’ sports, and has nothing to do with targeting trans children. “This is not being motivated because we don’t like trans kids,” Littell said. “I’ve got family members who are trans, and I still love them and care about them.”

The Washington Interscholastic Activities Association is aware of about 10 transgender middle and high schoolers who play sports, out of more than 200,000 student-athletes statewide. Since 2007, the organization has allowed trans students to play on teams that align with their gender identity, with their handbook stating once a student-athlete is granted eligibility, they do not need to seek to renew eligibility every season or school year. 

“School sports is a place where kids can belong, a place of inclusion, where they can learn to work as a team and learn dedication,” Kelsey Gellner, a pediatric nurse based in Seattle, told me. “Tens of thousands of girls will be impacted by this to purposely exclude 10 children. That’s insane.”

Some opponents doubt the measure is really about protecting competition in female sports at all. Earlier this summer, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank closely aligned with the Trump administration, released a report attacking Title IX, the federal law barring sex discrimination in federally funded schools and programs. The report argues for “unwinding our current regime” and blames the law for imposing a male model of competition on women, encouraging girls toward dominance and aggression, and pulling them away from femininity and motherhood.

“Preventing girls from playing sports is the whole point,” Megan Rapinoe, a two-time World Cup champion and Olympic gold medalist, wrote in a recent op-ed lambasting the ballot measure in Washington. “Spaces that leave girls and women feeling empowered are the spaces they want to constrict — and then eliminate.” 

Bringing adult restrictions down to children

The initiative’s proponents point to alternative means of verifying sex at birth, rather than genital exams. But hormone and genetic testing, the less invasive alternatives on offer, are very unusual for minors, and typically have only been required for certain elite adult athletes. 

Earlier this summer, for example, the Women’s Tennis Association announced it would require all players to undergo genetic sex testing in order to compete on the WTA Tour, a move that came on the heels of World Athletics requiring the same for participation in the female category for world ranking competitions. The goal would be to provide blood, saliva, or a cheek swab to test for any presence of the gene associated with the Y chromosome.

These tests are expensive, though, and require specialized training that public school staff virtually never have. 

“The language in the [Washington state] measure is quite alarming because it quite literally would codify sex testing for youth athletes into law,” Anna Posbergh, a professor at the University of Illinois Department of Recreation, Sport, and Tourism, told The Cut.

I-638 doesn’t specify how these tests would work in practice or who would pay for them. The ballot measure is also silent on intersex students, whose anatomy, chromosomes, and hormones may not point to the same answer. Littell says they would leave these questions “up to the doctors and patients, and at the end of the day this is common sense.” 

I asked the Washington State Medical Association what share of primary care and family medicine practices in the state could even run genetic or hormone testing in-house, and what referrals would look like for a rural practice.

“We don’t have that level of data, unfortunately,” Graham Short, a spokesperson for WSMA, told me. He added that his association does not yet have a formal position on the ballot measure, though their policymaking delegation convenes in September and may formulate a stance then. 

The Washington State Nurses Association has come out against the proposal. Gellner, who sits on its board, said it’s been disturbing to watch the idea of sports physicals shift from checking whether a student is healthy to play — i.e., checking their muscles, joints, blood pressure, and signs of asthma — to determining “whether the child themselves is a risk.”

The state chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which has not taken a formal position, asked Let’s Go Washington to stop invoking the national group in the state’s official voter pamphlet, where the campaign cites AAP guidelines on routine childhood checkups. (The campaign refused.) Dr. Erica Li, a Spokane-based pediatrician who has been Let’s Go Washington’s most vocal physician in support of the measure, insisted to me that the process outlined in I-638 just “does not pose any barriers to any female” looking to participate in school sports.

Yet other states have backed away from language like this. A 2021 Florida law signed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis originally had language saying that students would have to undergo a genital exam or get hormone or genetic testing if there were ever disputes over a student’s eligibility. That language sparked major controversy and was ultimately stripped from the final bill. House Republicans in Ohio also passed a bill in 2022 that would have required any student athlete whose sex was disputed to prove their sex assigned at birth through those same three options. After backlash, lawmakers removed the language from the Senate version, and put in a birth certificate requirement instead. 

A time of Democratic hesitance

Democrats have broadly supported anti-discrimination protections for trans people, but on sports specifically, the party has struggled to find agreement.

The Biden administration proposed a Title IX rule in 2023 that would have rejected blanket bans but allowed schools to restrict trans athletes’ participation in some cases, but the president never spoke about this nuanced rule publicly. Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign didn’t raise trans rights either, even as Republicans made them a centerpiece of their attacks against her. 

Democratic strategists have urged candidates to address transgender-related attacks more directly this time, but that hasn’t translated to a policy consensus. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger spent millions on ads acknowledging concerns about fairness and safety in school sports, for example, although even Spanberger’s actual position on the subject remains vague. 

Nationally, as the New York Times recently reported, Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts appears to be the only high-profile Democrat “eagerly campaigning as a supporter of transgender rights” this cycle.

In Washington state, some prominent Democrats have come out against I-638, including five Democratic members of Congress, such as Rep. Suzan DelBene, chair of the House Democratic Caucus, and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The state’s top two legislative leaders, Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen and House Speaker Laurie Jinkins, have also come out against it. Gov. Bob Ferguson and Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, though, have not publicly joined them. 

Polling thus far is unclear. A September 2025 poll of Washingtonians found 69 percent statewide support for the school-sports initiative, although the survey used language highly favorable to the measure, describing it as protecting “integrity and fairness” and did not explicitly say it would bar transgender girls from girls’ teams. 

No Hate in WA State referred me to May polling conducted by the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a progressive group that tracks state ballot measures. Their survey rated I-638 a toss-up, finding voters sharply divided, with 43 percent strongly in favor, 21 percent strongly opposed, 17 percent fully undecided, and another 11 to 14 percent not firmly committed. BISC said they did not have more recent polling to share.

The measure, however it ultimately goes at the ballot box, will be a verdict on how the issue is playing out beyond red states, and directly with voters. For the handful of trans students the WIAA knows about, and for every other girl who wants to play sports, November will decide something more immediate. Voter pamphlets go out in October.