Almost five years ago now, I published a number of articles about anti-choice candidates on the left, and how they are a slap in the face to everyone who has ever had a uterus. And I got hundreds of emails from men lecturing me about my selfishness. How very dare I? Abortion will never go away. Women need to play nice and stop being extremists. If only we just hold our nose and vote for whoever we’re told to, all will be well.
Well.
Here we are.
It is clear that stridency on abortion is the only thing that gets anything done. Almost no one supports banning abortion; in one survey, just 22% of Republicans said all abortions should be illegal. This hasn’t mattered. What has is the unrelenting aggression on the right. Their dogged determination to kill abortion (and, by extension, women) has won against public opinion, against justice, against common sense, against all of us.
Fifty years ago, it didn’t look like they would ever win. But they kept pushing. They made abortion a litmus test. They demanded ever more extreme abortion stances. They set up shop at hundreds of abortion clinics every single day for decades. They trained children to protest abortion. They made abortion central to every election.
It worked.
Abortion rights are gone in many states. Women are dying. So many families are suffering. And the right continues to demand even more restrictions. They want more.
It’s not enough to make women bleed to death from miscarriages. They should have to do it in prison if they so much as ask about surgical care. And it’s definitely not enough to force women to carry their rapist’s baby to term, then fight with him over custody for the next 18 years. Women should also be executed if they attempt to no longer be pregnant.
Last year, I wrote that those of us on the left can learn a lot from the right. I’m afraid we’re still playing to lose.
We let anti-choice judges slip in because somehow this is supposed to be good for democracy (and I guess you might think it is if you don’t think women and people with uteruses are actual people).
We don’t push our candidates at every opportunity to do more on abortion.
We allow the right to steadily shift the Overton window by engaging in discourse on their terms and constantly playing defense.
When they tell us women regret abortion, we argue that they don’t. Which is true for more than 95% of abortion-seekers, but also, some women do regret abortion and women are allowed to make decisions they regret.
They prattle on about “late-term abortions” so we tell them that the majority of abortions occur early in pregnancy, inadvertently admitting that there’s something wrong with later abortions. We don’t tell them that people have a right to end pregnancies later on, that anti-choice policies increase later abortions, and that there is absolutely nothing wrong with getting a later abortion. And we sure don’t tell them to shut the fuck up and stop denigrating the lives of wanted, beloved babies (because that’s who gets aborted late in pregnancy) whose mothers made impossible, gut-wrenching decisions.
They talk about the horror of abortion, so we concede that abortion is indeed a tragedy, and we talk about abortion-seekers as fallen, weak, incompetent women rather than talking about them like they are us, even though they are us. We rarely talk about abortion as a blessing, as something that saves lives, as something that women are grateful for, as a moment of triumph.
We accept that abortion has to be relegated to tiny abortion clinics with few resources, rather than demanding that abortion be fully integrated into healthcare everywhere. Most of us wouldn’t dare demand abortion doulas, or anything else that would make abortion a good experience. Because we have all been raised to believe that we should just be grateful to access basic healthcare. After all, women aren’t really people. At least not in the discourse of any of the mainstream discussions surrounding abortion.
On the left, many of us believe the right’s abortion myths because they’ve been so constantly repeated.
Where are our nonstop daily vigils across the country?
Why are we still allowing anti-choice candidates into leftist politics?
Why do we continue to act as if the fundamental right to control your body is some nice add-on rather than the foundation upon which freedom is built?
Women and their allies are putting together underground networks so they can access life-saving healthcare, and it’s just been normalized.
Meanwhile, pregnant people are dying at higher rates than they did 25 years ago, the United States is the most dangerous place in the wealthy world to give birth, and medical neglect pervades maternity wards across the nation (especially for Black women), and we act as if it’s just some naturally occurring phenomenon we have to live with.
We can do better than this. And we must.
Until the left can commit to the sort of 50-year all-out abortion war that the right did, until pro-choice men are as loud and aggressive as anti-choice men, until the value of women’s lives and sovereignty over women’s bodies becomes central and vital to leftist politics, we are going to keep losing ground.
The right fought for 50 years, and this is the result.
It’s time for the left to learn how to fight like the right.