Gov. Janet Mills fired up a Portland crowd of abortion rights activists Monday in Monument Square, calling the U.S. Supreme Court extreme for its 2022 decision on abortion.

“Two years ago, the extremist majority of the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the right to safe and legal abortion in America, a horrific decision that eradicated a fundamental right for the first time in generations,” Mills said.

Across the country on Monday, National Day of Action rallies took place to mark the anniversary of the day the court overturned Roe v. Wade, removing a decades long federal protection for abortion rights.

In the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, the court sent the issue back to the states and 21 have now either banned abortion or restricted it significantly.

In Maine, Mills and legislative Democrats expanded access to abortion in 2023 with a law that allows women to have an abortion at any point in pregnancy if a doctor deems it medically necessary.

But this year, an effort to amend the Maine Constitution with language to enshrine a right to an abortion failed to get any Republican support, leaving it far short of the two-thirds necessary for a fall ballot question.

Nevertheless, Mills and others who spoke Monday linked the issue of abortion to the November election for state offices and most especially, the presidential contest.

Maine House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross (D-Portland) told the crowd that reproductive health care continues to be “under attack” since the court decision.

“Our country has grappled with the incredible uncertainty as one in three women have lost their basic rights and ability to make their own decisions about their own pregnancy,” she said. “Nearly 50 years of federal protections have been rolled back and the consequences have been devastating.”

Talbot Ross and Mills urged those who care about reproductive rights to vote in November, with Mills speaking specifically about former President Donald Trump, a Republican seeking a second term in a race against Democratic President Joe Biden.

Trump has taken credit for appointing justices to the Supreme Court who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. In the months since, he said he would like to continue to leave it up to states to decide their own policies on abortion.

Two days ago, he told a group of Christian conservatives that a nationwide abortion ban has hurt other Republican candidates in the past and reiterated his support for allowing states to set policies, according to USA Today.

But on Monday, Mills said she doesn’t believe him.

“Do you trust him?” Mills asked the crowd. “I sure as hell don’t.”

Maine Women’s Lobby Executive Director Destie Hohman Sprague said the 2022 ruling has had far-reaching impacts on many types of people across the country.

“Women, poor women, rural women, Black women, Indigenous women, trans women, women of color,” she said. “It is time for us not just to look back but to look forward. It is time for us to recognize that the systems that built this country, that preserve power mostly for white landowning men, that needs to end.”