In partnership with Future Forward.
It has been two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade and ended the right to reproductive health care. Since then, more than 1 in 3 women of reproductive age in America now live under an abortion ban, and the right to contraception and start a family is on the line. Politicians want the right to monitor women’s pregnancies so that they can be prosecuted, leading to more fear, despair, and confusion. Two years of life and death decisions being made not by patients and doctors, but by extreme politicians and law enforcement. But the most important thing to recognize about the second anniversary of the fall of Roe is that we have the power to block a national abortion ban this November.
This November we are being presented with a stark and unmistakable choice about bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. We are either going to see further encroachments from the government — more regulations, more controls on women and families, more forced pregnancies, more death and suffering — or we will regain our right to make these difficult decisions for ourselves; Decisions to continue a pregnancy or to end it, to deliver a life that will not be long for this world or to curtail its suffering before it knows what suffering is, to put ourselves in the present over the possibility of what could be can be stressful and complicated. A mark on the ballot beside a (D) or an (R) will save or destroy our families.
What has become abundantly clear since the end of Roe is who is on the side of American families and our capacity and freedom to shape and develop lives of our choosing. Republican-run states either already had or quickly passed laws preventing citizens from setting our own goals, building our own futures, investing in our children, and preserving the lives we want to lead. Instead, in states like Texas, Idaho, Florida, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, pregnancies — both actual and anticipated — come with onerous obligations and terrifying consequences. Approximately one in three women now live in a state where their reproductive rights belong to the government rather than themselves. Republican legislators, governors, and judges have repeatedly demanded limitations on where a potentially-pregnant person can go, what they can do, and even who they can trust. Rather than support the freedom of people to make the choices that are best for them, Republican laws have made the world a cage — and extremist Republican politicians have promised a national abortion ban should they win the White House and Congress in November.
Democrats, on the other hand, have made havens for reproductive freedom almost everywhere they hold power. States like California, New York, Vermont, Michigan, Washington have accommodated both the influx of out-of-state patients seeking their reproductive needs and the well-being of their own citizens by passing laws that affirm the right of pregnant people to make choices for themselves and to support pregnancies however they can. And at the federal level, it is only Democratic lawmakers who have sought to push back at state abuses against personal autonomy, promising to protect contraception, secure in-vitro fertilization (IVF), and restore the individual right not to be pregnant.
But this battle isn’t merely ideological or theoretical. Over the last two years we have seen the contrast between a citizenry that knows how important the right to bodily autonomy is and the legislators who would make our bodies and lives function at the whim of the state. In Kansas and Ohio, voters pushed back at efforts to control and subjugate women; in Arizona and Virginia, public backlash to proposed limits on reproductive rights resulted in securing a freer status quo. Over and over again, where our rights to craft families for ourselves have been on the ballot, we as voters have voted aggressively to defend them.
After two years of misery, death, suffering, we have a simple decision to make about whether we want this turmoil to continue, or whether we’re ready for it to stop. This election, the choice we make to vote will shape all the choices we have — and the ones of generations to come.
PAID FOR BY FF PAC, FFPAC.ORG. NOT AUTHORIZED BY ANY CANDIDATE OR CANDIDATE’S COMMITTEE.
