Warning: I'm going to discuss the likely reversal of Roe v. Wade. I'm going to do this from the perspective of somebody who is staunchly pro-choice, but also somebody who is a not-very-woke, cis, straight, white, middle-age man. I'm going to engage in some serious "solutionism." If you aren't interested in hearing this perspective, simply click the little X in the corner of your window, and I will magically go away.
If you're still around, here are my thoughts.
The first thing is to recognize that this is not the death knell for reproductive rights. Women will still have access to abortion in all the blue states and some purple states. And the red states in which it will be outright banned have, sadly, been very effective at limiting abortion access so that it's practically banned already. Even if the Supreme Court leaves Roe in place (highly unlikely), they've made it clear they are not going to be the bulwark against anti-abortion laws they've been in the past. In some ways, a straightforward ruling is better than a convoluted patchwork of decisions effectively reversing Roe without actually reversing it. At least now everybody knows what time it is.
The flip side of this is that if the court is so bold as to overturn something as longstanding and popular as Roe, what's next? Gay marriage, birth control? That's the part that freaks me out. What does this bode for the future? And it would be different if I thought this was a principled states rights decision, but I don't think that. I have zero faith that this court would be similar deferential to the "voters" if it was overturning a law conservatives held sacred. I fear that the Supreme Court is now effectively a wing of the Republican party.
What to do about all this? Well, there's court reform, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. There's also legislation; Congress could pass a federal law legalizing access to abortion. But that also is not likely to happen. Democrats will very likely lose one or both chambers in the fall midterms, and they don't have the numbers to break the filibuster to pass such a law before then. You can rant and rave about Joe Manchin all you want, but he probably doesn't care. He's from a state Trump carried by, like, 40-points. If he's not there, some super right-winger is. Progressives have no leverage over him whatsoever. (Sinema is another story; I don't know what her deal is.)
There's not going to be a quick fix. We need to start playing the long game. It took conservatives four decades to get here after all. If we aren't willing to put in the same sustained effort then we will lose even more ground. We need to vote in every election for candidates who prioritize abortion access. We don't need to "hold Democrats accountable" because they didn't deliver everything (anything?) we wanted. That's not how things work. As I said above, Dems don't have the numbers right now -- and not voting for them will make these numbers smaller. The options to replace them are much, much worse. It makes no sense to punish a candidate in a House race in Indiana because Senators from Arizona and West Virginia won't end the filibuster.
This ambivalent attitude toward voting for "establishment" Democrats -- or voting at all -- by some folks on the left is likely what got us into this mess in the first place. Trump got to appoint three Supreme Court justices. Very likely at least two of these would have been Clinton's had she won and then this entire thing is moot. You don't think there is a tiny sliver of pro-choice people in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania who refused to their hold their noses and vote for Hillary in 2016? Do they regret it now?
So, for God's sake, vote! Let's try to keep the House, let's try to get enough Senators to change the filibuster rules, let's try to keep a Democratic president in the White House to appoint future justices. If we lose, we come back harder the next election; if we win, we come back harder the next election. And state and local elections become even more important now because abortion access might have to be won at the state level. We might have to go state-by-state the way we do with, say, marijuana or minimum wage laws. Again, it won't be easy or fast, but again, this is a hard, slow fight. But we don't have time to wait for your incremental change bullshit! Well, it's pretty much that or a further erosion of reproductive rights, so I don't know what to tell you. The revolution ain't happening, and, frankly, if it's anything like what's portrayed in this article,* it sounds quite terrible, anyway.
*This article is so awful I'm hoping to make time to do a separate entry just on it.
One of the biggest problems pro-choice folks like myself face is one we don't really like to admit: Abortion access isn't that popular in the US. It's definitely favored by over half the country, but it's probably more like 60-40 than 80-20, and it's heavily dependent on what exactly you mean by access. Also, I suspect that percentage drops significantly if you only consider people who have really strong feelings about it one way of the other. I think if we want to make the country more pro-choice, we need to start persuading more people our side is correct. This doesn't mean changing people's minds on the issue (usually impossible), it means getting to people before their minds are made up.
To that end, here are some of my suggestions.
Recognize that while some people are only "pro-life" for political reasons, other people really do have deep-seated moral objections to killing (in their view) a fetus. I think even a lot of pro-choice women feel some sense of this, and of the women I know who have gotten an abortion (and talked to me about it) most of them felt at least a little bit of sadness and guilt over their decision. It does no good to belittle people for feeling this way, and we should at least acknowledge that there is a big difference between an abortion and, say, removing a cyst. Even I -- one of the most unfeeling, rational people I know -- don't like the "it's just a bunch of cellular matter" framework, nor do I like assuming every anti-abortion activist is acting in bad faith or some sort of fringe nutjob.
To me, the key messages should be: Abortion is a very difficult moral decision that only a woman can make for herself; government should not intervene in an individual's personal choices pertaining to their own body; safe and legal access to abortion will prevent more suffering than will outlawing abortion and creating a black market.
Also, don't frame the issue as the white-supremacist patriarchy oppressing women of color. For one thing, it's simply not true. It's been an annoying tic of the left over the past half-decade or so to frame every social ill as something white people are inflicting on BIPOCs, even if it is not at all apt to do so. In the case of abortion, there are plenty of Black people who echo the thoughts of Clarence Thomas that abortions by Black women are akin to "eugenics." I remember football commentator Tony Dungy cosigning a tweet by NFL player Benjamin Watson that basically said the same thing. (Both Dungy and Watson are Black.) And a lot of Latinos are anti-abortion because they follow the canons of the Catholic Church. When it comes to whom is most affected by abortion bans, it's poor women much more so than women of color. A wealthy Black woman is much better off in this regard than a destitute white woman.
As for the patriarchy, yes, that's part of it, but I sure see a lot of women in pictures of anti-abortion rallies too. You've probably heard the line that if men could get pregnant, the right to an abortion would have been constitutionally protected a long time ago. I think that's true, but it's also true that if women were as overwhelmingly pro-choice as pro-choice women often imply, you could say the same thing. One of my friend's mantra is No man should be able to tell me what I can do with my body. Right on. But what if it's Kristi Noem? Because if you live in South Dakota, that's probably going to happen.
For another thing, we need a broad pro-choice coalition and language like this turns off a lot of white male could-be-allies when they are at an impressionable age. Not me -- I honestly am not offended in the least by this type of rhetoric, but I know a lot of white dudes who are, even if they don't announce it publicly. And really, why shouldn't they be? They have feelings. No matter how much privilege you have, you're still subject to the same human frailties as everybody else. If you feel people are stereotyping you and blaming you for holding views you don't hold, or lumping you in with people with whom you don't agree (and may not even like), then, yeah, you might feel some kind of way about it, especially since doing this for any other combination of race and gender is considered a grievous transgression.
Also concerning language, just say "woman" when talking about abortion, don't say "birth-giver" or "uterus-haver" or "female-bodied person" or some other such gender-neutral neologism. Most people don't talk like that and don't understand why you are doing so. I get that you want to include trans men who can get pregnant, but just remember this analogy -- women : reproductive rights :: Black men : police reform. It's not exclusively for them, but we can just say it is as a shorthand.
Here's another uncomfortable truth: There is a strong contingent of pro-choice advocates who aren't really down with trans people. Poking around various threads a bit outside of the traditional left-leaning media sources, I've been surprised at how many women either straight-up identify as TERFs or espouse some TERFish ideology. This isn't my cup of tea, but presumably these people are very pro reproductive rights, and we probably should work with them on this issue, maybe under some sort of tacit DADT agreement. Broad coalition, remember.
Politics makes strange bedfellows. To quote Frederick Douglass, “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.” We need to bring back the one-issue coalition -- people uniting around a common goal even they if they disagree (or worse) with one another on other things. I mean, look at the type of people who are likely to be pro-choice -- neo-liberals, democratic socialists, "squad" members, BLM activists, hardcore libertarians, tech bros, centrist Republicans, LGBTQ activists, gender-critical feminists, "dirtbag" lefties, new-agey spiritual folks, skeptics/atheists, etc. There's a decent chance these groups don't have anything else in common but being pro-choice.
The last thing I'll say, in reference to the Defector article I linked to above, don't riot, don't be violent. It doesn't work, and it's not right. It will turn so many would-be allies against you, and it's a great way to inflict suffering on innocent people and put yourself in jail or a grave. You know what's worse than a woman not being able to get an abortion in Mississippi? Burning Portland to the ground because a woman can't get an abortion in Mississippi.
Until next time...
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