Happy Fourth! Now, About Abortion...
Abortion is a front in our current Civil War
Help avoid a plummet into a divided country: Talk about abortion at your family gathering today.
Our celebration of freedom has always been in contradiction to the facts on the ground. Today, Americans face the loss of reproductive autonomy, setting us back further than the abortion rights enjoyed during the time of the Founders. Trump and the Republican Party have a plan to institute changes that would effectively lead to a national abortion ban: repealing the right to mail birth control, the abortion pill, and abortion-related medical equipment across state lines; instituting fetal personhood laws that would end IVF procedures; and narrowing exceptions to abortion to the point of elimination.
These are uniquely unpopular positions, even among Republicans. So, please, talk about them with your friends and family. Show them the articles about Project 2025, authored by Trump allies, which lay out these very plans. Tell them about the tens of thousands of rape survivors who have been forced to give birth since Dobbs fell1, how infant and maternal mortality has increases in the wake of total abortion bans2, and about the women forced to carry non-viable fetuses or endure pregnancies that threaten their own lives. These stories and statistics are easy — too easy — to find.
If more people know and understand these threats, I believe Trump will be defeated in the fall. No matter your opinion on Biden, no matter what happens at the top of the ticket, the right to bodily autonomy will be fundamentally — fatally — eroded under a Republican administration. We are not free unless we are free to control our bodies; this is something all but the most conservative radicals understand.
Against any objection to Biden — his frailty, the economy, Israel-Gaza, conspiratorial charges of corruption — there is one response: A future in which millions of women will die — or, at best, be thrown into despair and lives of dependency and desperation. Make this argument. I believe we can triumph if we are not afraid to talk about the alternative.
64,000, according to one study
Infant mortality up 13 percent in Texas alone