The War On Women

This is a righteous piece by Rebecca Traister:

I have been thinking, like so many people this week, about rage. Who I’m mad at, what that anger’s good for, how what makes me maddest is the way the madness has long gone unrespected, even by those who have relied on it for their gains.

For as long as I have been a cogent adult, and actually before that, I have watched people devote their lives, their furious energies, to fighting against the steady, merciless, punitive erosion of reproductive rights. And I have watched as politicians — not just on the right, but members of my own party — and the writers and pundits who cover them, treat reproductive rights and justice advocates as if they were fantasists enacting dystopian fiction.

This week, the most aggressive abortion bans since Roe v. Wade swept through states, explicitly designed to challenge and ultimately reverse Roe at the Supreme Court level. With them has come the dawning of a broad realization — a clear, bright, detailed vision of what’s at stake, and what’s ahead. (If not, yet, full comprehension of the harm that has already been done).

You can not compromise one inch with fanatics. The moment you buy into their framework of things (“ABORTION IS EVIL”) and start saying things like it should be “safe, legal, and rare,” you are losing the battle. The only acceptable answer is “I support it and fuck you for telling people what to do with their own fucking body.”

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If we’re still talking about abortion, here’s a dispatch from my current heartland location, where “Abortion Kills a Beating Heart” and “It’s a Child Not a Choice” billboards herald your arrival to a lot of little towns.

The South Dakota legislature has at least one anti-abortion bill on their to-do list every year. This year, they had two. One required that women wanting an abortion sign a 13 page document prepared by the Department of Health, and initial every page. This one was simple fuckery – the single Planned Parenthood location that provides abortions had its own consent form, but apparently it wasn’t enough of a waste of time and paper. That bill passed and is now law. The other bill was an attempt to force women to have an ultrasound prior to an abortion, and also to hear the fetal heartbeat. This one failed because the anti-abortion lobby thought it was unconstitutional.

The reason that the anti-abortion advocates here are sensitive to whether a law is constitutional, no matter whether the Supremes are now wired to overturn Roe, is because they played with fire and got burned in the last decade. A law prohibiting abortion was overturned by a referendum (with a healthy 56-44 majority) in 2006. One of the arguments in that referendum was that litigating Supreme Court challenges is an expensive waste of time. (Another was that this bill didn’t have the exceptions for rape and incest – only the life of the mother.) Since then, legislators have pretty much stuck to throwing as much sand in the gears of what little abortion machinery is left in the state, without causing a court challenge.

Even in this red state, a good majority of people are not ready to overturn abortion. People will vote for legislators who want to overturn it, because of party affiliation, but those legislators are handcuffed by popular opinion, at least in this state.

The lesson I take home from this little bit of politics is that, at some point, even in the fucked up political environment that we’re experiencing today, popular opinion matters.

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