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January 20 - January 26, 2025
Can you ever really be prepared for your country to tell you that you’re less than human?
The anti-abortion movement is hitting Americans with everything all at once in the hopes that those of us who want our rights back will be too exhausted and crushed to fight back.
We can’t win unless we know exactly what we’re fighting against, and fighting for.
relying on Americans’ fear of speaking up.
want to make sure that you don’t feel overwhelmed into inaction or too unsure to speak up.
I’m arming the choir. With facts, and with fury.
we never stop resisting.
Abortion is an essential freedom—necessary for the self-determination of women and anyone else with the ability to get pregnant.[*1]
Abortions are a proactive moral good because they allow people to control their own bodies, lives, and futures.
Those who would see abortion banned like to pose hypotheticals about the remarkable baby a woman could have if she just didn’t get an abortion: What if they cured cancer? Rarely, if ever, does anyone ask if that woman herself might change the world. They don’t consider that we could be the remarkable ones, if only given the chance.
All abortions create something. Paths forward, lives lived, connections made. Some are hard, some are beautiful, but all are chosen.
We’ve been robbed of our freedom, and our self-determination. And that, to me, is unforgivable.
After all, it’s tough to paint abortion as dangerous when someone can do it while home on the couch watching Netflix.
In fact, the study found that forcing a woman into pregnancy quadruples the odds that she and her child will live below the federal poverty line.
We’ve known for years that Americans support abortion rights. Asking the right questions makes it clear just how overwhelming that support really is.
Conservative lawmakers know that how your friends and neighbors feel about an issue impacts your own beliefs. Essentially, if voters knew that the people around them were actually pro-choice, they’d be a lot more comfortable thinking the same.
But there’s a difference between being truthful and being “balanced.” The latter suggests that journalists need to provide equal consideration to different sides of an issue and story—even when one side is clearly, unequivocally inaccurate.
This is not an issue of needing to persuade people to support abortion; it’s a problem of a small group of powerful legislators and lobbyists banning abortion against our wills.
The first is that anti-abortion legislators are desperate to divorce abortion from healthcare;
The second reason we must call abortions abortions is that when we don’t, people get hurt.
Abortion is quicker, safer, less painful, and less traumatic, but to those who believe fetal rights are more important than women’s lives, that truth doesn’t matter.
If we don’t fight back now against conservatives’ latest made-up terms, we run the risk of the same thing happening with abortion as an “intention” and all of the related language that goes with it.
Conservatives’ hope is to eradicate exceptions for fatal fetal abnormalities altogether, forcing people to carry doomed pregnancies to term.
eradicating the word ban is a proactive strategy to trick voters.
But that’s how this happens, not with an obvious attack but with a slow, methodical chipping away at our rights. Through small indignities and limitations of access that we won’t immediately see as a “ban” or deliberate attacks.
The people most likely to be impacted by attacks on access will be the most vulnerable, like young women and those who are low income.
That means birth control is a really dangerous topic for Republicans, and that Democrats should be talking about it all the time. Not just because it polls well but because Republicans are, in fact, attacking contraception.
In other words, we shouldn’t just be talking about birth control—but publicly asking Republicans what they think of certain kinds of contraception.
anti-abortion legislators are relying on American victim-blaming to ensure that victims can’t get care.
Cultivating that illusion of empathy is central to everything the GOP does when it comes to abortion.
The truth is that this has never been about the health of women, babies, or families. It’s about imposing extremist Christian nationalism and controlling and punishing women.
After Texas banned abortion, the state’s infant mortality rate went up by over 11 percent.
This is where Democrats and the pro-choice movement have a real opportunity to push back. We should be raising the alarm again and again about how exceptions aren’t real; but we also have the ability to point out the misogynist absurdity and hypocrisy of exceptions.
Reproductive rights and justice isn’t about who “deserves” care, or who has endured enough suffering to have “earned” an abortion. Forcing anyone to be pregnant against their will, for any reason, is immoral and cruel.
It also means that despite their rhetoric about being pro-family or pro-community, conservatives are actively trying to prevent communities from supporting each other.
They want us to be too scared to help each other, too anxious to share our abortion plan with a friend, too scared, even, to get medical help when we need it. It’s heartbreaking: they’ve criminalized community.
That’s what makes this all so distressing: the people who claim to stand for “family values” are depending entirely on our willingness to turn on each other. They’re incentivizing the breakdown of family and community trust and codifying betrayal. It’s a way to make us feel disconnected from each other, and to make women feel as if they aren’t safe anywhere or with anyone. In this way, abortion bans don’t just do damage to individual patients; they’re hurting the faith we have in each other.
That means as scared as we are, and as honest as we are about the legal risks in anti-choice states, we have to steer clear of spreading misinformation and scare tactics.
Now more than ever, we need accurate and up-to-date information.
Speaking of misinformation, something that we can all do, on a local or national level, is hold media outlets accountable.
That’s why we need to demand that abortion cases be reported carefully and accurately.
A publication uncritically reporting it as such is not doing its job. A reporter who writes about an abortion-related arrest or prosecution by only relaying the version presented in a police report, too, is failing their readers.
By passing particular restrictions on children, Republicans can test out their radical policies without too much public backlash. It’s a key part of a chipping away strategy for people of all ages: on abortion, travel, birth control, and more.
When we talk about minors, we’re talking about a community of people who have few or no legal protections, who have no say over what happens to their bodies, and who suffer disproportionately when forced into pregnancy and childbirth.
In what universe is someone too young to consent to taking a pill or undergo a ten-minute procedure but old enough to have a child?
young people are deprived of any bodily autonomy or choice.
Anti-abortion legislators and activists hope that because their laws target those whom this country historically cares about the least, maybe, just maybe, voters won’t be as mad.
That is who is telling our daughters what they can and can’t do with their bodies and lives: a guy who talks about pregnancy like a toddler.
When will we stop giving them the benefit of the doubt? Of course they know that women will die as a result of their laws. They can read statistics. They can see what happened before and what is happening again. For fuck’s sake, they’ve carefully crafted policies that give us fewer rights than a zygote in a country where pregnancy is twenty times more likely to kill you than skydiving. What did they think was going to happen?
I mean this literally: all this pain and suffering was not just “expected”—it was planned for carefully, strategically, and callously.
