Portents
Abortion rights advocates won major victories Tuesday as voters in conservative-leaning Ohio decisively passed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion, while those in ruby-red Kentucky reelected a Democratic governor who aggressively attacked his opponent for supporting the state’s near-total ban on the procedure.
In Virginia, a battleground state where Republicans pushed a proposal to outlaw most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, Democrats were projected to take control of the state legislature after campaigning heavily on preserving access.
Women push back.
I’m hoping that taking away the right to have an abortion is like Prohibition, in that even people who aren’t particularly interested in the issue are pissed off at the government stepping in and saying “you can’t do that anymore.” It’s one thing if it’s always been forbidden, but something about taking away what’s been allowed seems to push psychological buttons.
Yes, women fight back. But if they’re joined by Joe 6-Pack and his pals, that’s more power.
Now if they can get the Democratic Party to fuck off with the support of trans bullshit….
I wonder if these victories might be teaching the Democrats the wrong lesson. The Democratic Party may feel (rightly or not) that women won’t vote Republican in protest over its surrender on issues of trans “rights,” given the Republican predilection to ban abortion as soon after male ejaculation as they can manage. If the party feels it has a lock on women’s votes over abortion access, they might not feel the need to ease up on banging the trans drum, not wanting to piss off voters who identify as “progressive” on this issue. When the margins of victory are narrow, every vote counts, and you might not really care who’s voting for you and why.
If there was more subtlety and nuance in American politics (or Canadian for that matter)* left-leaning party(ies) could disentangle trans demands from their progressive platforms and save themselves from potentially losing votes to right-leaning parties who just happen to know (in the broken clock, sky is blue sort of way) the definition of “woman.” They’ll treat women like shit of course, but they know what a woman is. Picking “None of the above” by not voting, or spoiling your ballot might be the only alternative between voting for a party that’s out to get women, and a party that thinks that some non-zero percentage of women have penises, and that pandering to people who believe this is a good idea.
For some reason, supposedly progressive parties are deathly afraid of saying that men can’t be women, and are happy to drive actual women away (and at the same time put men on women’s sports teams, in women’s prisons and women’s rape shelters), if they can avoid having to confess this terrifying fact of material reality. If they only knew that there is a world beyond social media, beyond the amplified voices of disproportionately influential and powerful trans “rights” activists sharing the same poorly evidences claims, phony statistics, charts, memes, and talking points.
*And honest, factual reporting, too.
Sastra,
I think that for a long time, pro-choice advocates were regarded as the boy who cried wolf. “You keep saying that Roe will be overturned, but it never is, and all these abortion laws mostly get struck down by the courts and the abortion clinics survive the ones that aren’t anyways. I’m not pro-life, but I’m gonna vote GOP because [taxes etc.]”
And indeed for a long time, there was a school of Savvy Punditry that insisted that Republicans didn’t want Roe overturned anyway, and that’s why it would never happen. (My take is that the first part of that was largely true — there were definitely a lot of GOP strategists who liked having the issue to rally voters but didn’t care about it and certainly didn’t want to deal with a post-Roe backlash — but the second part was wrong because when you appoint and confirm anti-choice justices, they don’t care that you had your fingers crossed when you did it.)
Anyway, all those voters who are pro-choice but didn’t vote on it because they took Roe for granted have now had a rude awakening. And having seen Republicans pass all sorts of draconian laws and abortion clinics shut down, they’re not likely to buy the new focus-group-tested GOP spin that they just want “reasonable restrictions” on “late-term abortions” and certainly don’t want bans no why would you say that such a crazy thought never mind what our party platform says and what most of our elected officials said up until two months ago.
It’s not a great consolation for losing Roe, of course. But at least there’s some consequences.
@YNNB:
What I’ve seen is progressives linking abortion & trans identities to a Right to Autonomy, particularly body autonomy. The story is that Far Right Conservatives want to control other people’s bodies. Women can’t choose for themselves whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term; trans people can’t choose for themselves whether they’re a man or woman. Not to mention that gay people can’t choose who to love.
No, the authoritarians know what you should do better than YOU do. They want to dominate and oppress. It’s all a unified piece.
Trying to separate the elements of the narrative and argue that one of these things is not like the others means you’re silly against the Right to Personal Autonomy, full stop.
Ah yes, I’d seen footage of pro choice rallies that were side-tracked and hijacked by the centering of trans, as well as putative “women’s organizations” watering down the message by replacing “women” with “pregnant people” to placate those snowflakes who don’t want to be reminded that they’re still women, along with those who don’t want to be reminded that they never will be women.
Good old forced teaming!
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I take the view that bodily autonomy is all well and good, but other people shouldn’t be harming themselves by helping you bodily autonomize… i.e. physicians violating their oaths.
Sastra, that’s so right on the nose. So many people don’t see that one issue can be progressive, while another that someone chooses to link to it might not. When T grafted itself to the LGB, everyone assumed that supporting T was part of supporting LGB. Now they are glomming on to every issue – women’s rights, abortion rights, anti-racism, etc. Too many people can’t see that the teaming is an artificial one, and a danger to some of the groups they are insisting center them. (And if insisting you be the center of anything doesn’t prove they are entitled males, I don’t know what will!)
It makes it harder for those of us who are Democrats to address transgender issues when groups like Moms for Liberty take them up, along with anti-vax, anti-critical race theory, anti-grooming, etc. Even just sticking to issues like transwomen in women’s sport gets one guilted by association with everything else the far-right fringe goes on about. Of course for TRAs groups like Moms for Liberty are a gift that helps them to bash those on the left who do want to sincerely discuss these issues. Oh well.
I like to think of this as the people declaring loud and clear that this shouldn’t be a partisan issue beholden to the politics of left and right. No idea if that’s true, though.