I’ve been telling every man in my life to read Andrea Dworkin’s Right-Wing Women in the wake of Samuel Alito’s leaked draft indicating the Supreme Court will formally overturn Roe v. Wade on the federal level. And, that’s why I’m writing this particular newsletter laying out some basic ideas that a whole lot of people don’t seem to grasp so without further ado:
The crux of why abortion rights are about to be decimated on the federal level is that abortion galvanizes the right in a way it doesn’t galvanize the left. Right-wing men care more about taking away women’s bodily autonomy than left-wing men do about preserving it, and that’s without acknowledging the uncomfortable fact that many women (of all races) are also virulently anti-choice.
The primary fallacy of the pro-choice movement in its current incarnation is that there a whole lot of squishy pro-choicers who will maintain they never want to get an abortion and find the concept distasteful but gun to head, don’t want Roe overturned and want abortion to remain safe, legal, and accessible. Yelling that “abortion is rad” (cc: ACLU) doesn’t help the cause! The majority of Americans who want abortion to remain legal includes the squishy pro-choicers! That’s why Bill Clinton’s safe/legal/rare framing in the 1990s was so potent; he got right to the essence of what people cared about and that’s why he won 370 and 379 electoral votes in 1992 and 1996 respectively. This excerpt is from his 1992 speech at the Democratic National Convention, and he’s the only Democratic candidate before or since, including his wife, to mention abortion in his DNC speech!
If I have to read any more screeds about how white women’s bodily autonomy has never been challenged in the United States, I’ll start screaming and never stop. How many of the writers of these stupid rants can give me a thorough summary of the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell? Hint: A white woman's bodily autonomy was utterly annihilated! When Roe is overturned, middle-class white women won’t be safe and people need to stop claiming they will be.
Also, when people yell that conservative men would get abortions for their wives/daughters in states where abortion is illegal, I'm just like, do you realize the societal woman hating starts at home or nah? These families are deeply patriarchal! They don't want women to have bodily autonomy!! They want women to remain barefoot and pregnant, to permanently remain under the jurisdiction of men! SARAH PALIN wanted her daughter, Bristol, to have an abortion in 2008 and to keep it quiet, but her husband, Todd Palin, refused and his word was law despite Sarah being the governor of Alaska. Basically none of these right-wing men are faking it, they're just vehemently anti-choice with no exceptions, not even women they purportedly love. The venn diagram of men who would force their mistress to get an abortion even if she wanted the child and men who would force their wife or daughter to carry to term against her will is a literal circle since it’s first and foremost about controlling women.
Quite frankly, the pendulum has swung from “only white women deserve bodily autonomy” to “everybody but white women deserves bodily autonomy” when in actuality, abortion is morally neutral and everyone deserves the right to bodily autonomy and abortion.
However, in terms of messaging, Dems need to focus on people who had abortions that are deemed worthy of sympathy to the median voter. This means like, married women with malignant and non-viable pregnancies, victims of rape and incest, pregnant teenagers who became very successful adults etc. and not like, poor women of color who already have kids and can’t afford another kid. I’m sorry to be blunt about this but racializing abortion rights is only going to make the issue less popular! The welfare queen stereotype stuck and if your argument is that Black and brown women are going to be more impacted by a lack of abortion access, even though it’s true in many cases, it’s going to make the issue more unpopular and polarizing. Look at what happened with COVID-19! When it came out that Black and Latino people were dying at higher rates, white people including the federal government stopped caring as much.
But yes, the simple reality is that abortion gives women the freedom to be autonomous independent beings, to not live under the financial and interpersonal control of men. If women aren’t in the workforce, and banning abortion in half the country WILL reduce the amount of women in the workforce, the general economic productivity of the country will go down! Janet Yellen gets it!
In somewhat lighter news, this is me @ every liberal woman sleeping with a conservative man.
"...and not like, poor women of color who already have kids and can’t afford another kid. "
Actually, this unfortunately would be a selling point to conservative white racists. They want to see white women having more kids and women of color having less.
Anyway, abortion stats have been steadily declining for years, Gen Z isn't interested in having kids, these draconian laws are only going to serve to turn women off from men and sex even more than they already are. And yet conservatives are crying about "population decline" and "sexless men" and can't connect their politics to any of it. Let them eat cake!