We All Lost the Abortion War—It’s Time to Start Over
There is no political crisis for Lizelle Herrera. It is only days after the 26-year-old Texan was arrested on murder charges for her January miscarriage, and the national Democratic machine is silent. There’s no rapid response team churning out talking points; there’s no deluge of coverage on cable news; there’s no announcement or statement from the president of the United States on his disgust and dismay at the criminalization of this basic human experience and constitutionally protected right. Instead, for reproductive rights and abortion advocacy in particular, the politics of this moment feels like the beginning of the end.
For almost 50 years, the momentous Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade (1973) has affirmed that people have the right to end a pregnancy, not merely for their own health or safety, but because they don’t want to be pregnant. Though history will likely note the end of this era is ahead of us, with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health in June, it is actually already months behind us.
In September of 2021, conservative justices flexed their majority on what has come to be known as the “shadow docket.” Without a full briefing or signed opinion, five justices allowed a Texas anti-abortion law to continue without a stay despite putting an extraordinary burden on people seeking abortion health care. And with the dam broached, there has been a flood.
Idaho, Alabama, Oklahoma, Florida, and Kentucky—red state legislatures—have moved with unprecedented speed to curtail the autonomy of pregnant people and inhibit even limited opportunities to get an abortion. Occasionally, Democratic governors or fellow legislators have stymied these efforts with a well-placed veto or procedural wizardry. But where Republican trifectas dominate, the consequences have been dire. In many states, approximately half of the population now has fewer rights alive than dead.
As Republicans and anti-abortion forces have battered away at the infrastructure protecting the right to an abortion with a gargantuan war chest; charged, emotional arguments; and relentless fervor, Democrats have backed away from its defense, trying to put distance between themselves and the issue with stigmatizing rhetoric, dismissive framing, and strategic silence.
“[Anti-choice politicians] don’t aim for nuance or negotiation like pro-choice politicians do, because they have the money to back up bad policies,” says Mohini Lal, a Texas lawyer who has spent years working on reproductive rights with groups like If/When/How and the Texas Equal Access Fund. “It’s a lot simpler when your starting point is an absolute of, ‘This should be illegal with no caveats,’ while pro-choice politicians refuse to embrace the starting point of, ‘This should be legal with no caveats.’ They’re generally willing to compromise on abortion rights for some perceived gain elsewhere.”
The result has been a bitter contradiction: Significant political majorities support abortion access even as it rapidly dwindles in a real and dangerous way for millions of people. For decades, those fighting for autonomy have had to gather under the banner of “safe, legal, and rare” or gently demur to personal denunciations of abortion from visible Democratic politicians, rather than counter the narratives of shame and reproach with vehement support. And with all those retreats, Democrats have left the country teetering at the edge of a cliff, nearing a catastrophic loss for bodily autonomy and abortion rights, with no victory in sight on the issues that the party has rushed to treat as more important.
Defeat is imminent; disaster looms. The abortion war, as we knew it, is over. Nobody won, and it is time to start another.
Acknowledging the failure of milquetoast defenses of abortion rights provides a rare opportunity in politics: a chance to erase completely, and reset. Democrats can abandon their backpedaling in the face of false assertions and emotional pleas, and instead challenge anti-choice operations with the actual consequences of state intervention in every pregnancy. They can stop pretending that abortion lives apart from the issues that shape citizens’ lives, and instead expand and explore the ways in which reproductive freedom supports a whole society. And rather than act like abortion happens to no one, nowhere, Democrats can emphasize that it is a choice made by real people, everywhere.
This chance to change is not merely an opportunity, it is a necessity. Because it is paired with a brutal reality that will cost so many people, especially women, the possibilities of making their own decisions and living lives they can sustain. It will force people into pregnancy, childbirth, and trauma, and bring lives into the world that will be subjected to unfathomable cruelty and abuse because their circumstances are the product of the very same. Democrats did not do enough to prevent the damage, and so now, they are responsible for avenging it.
We deserve better. This is what the pandemic has taught us, as it set back working mothers and sent childcare skyrocketing. This is what we have learned from distressingly high maternal death rates in a country where we have distressingly inaccessible and inefficient health care and no paid parental leave. This is the reality of treating the people who get abortions as abstractions and not people, because the work of recognizing the burden placed on parents and caregivers—feminized labor—runs counter to centuries of the illusion that it costs nothing.
The myth that choosing life means choosing childbirth has erased and obscured the value of the lives lived in its absence. Abortion has given untold millions the space to choose ourselves, to invest time and energy into our futures and dreams and families without the fear of coercion at the point of an ultrasound. We have earned a politics that uplifts the alternatives that abortion represents—and the people, like me, who are the product of it.
My mother had an abortion a few years before I was born, under circumstances that are both unique and familiar. There was an unwilling potential co-parent, a new and fragile job, and a lifetime of Catholic guilt to contend with. It would take her three tries to get an abortion at the clinic: initially dissuaded by protests, then by her own hesitation, and finally convinced by the inexorable truth of the calendar and the approach of the second trimester.
With all the doubt, I asked her when she knew that she had made the right decision. “When I had you in my arms,” she said. “Abortion gave me the option to have the family I wanted.”
This is the essence of choice, the purpose of autonomy, the opportunity that a fair and equitable society preserves for all its citizens. It is what we have tried to give the United States for the last 50 years, and it is what the conservatives on the Supreme Court are threatening to unravel. This is our crisis; it is time we met it fearlessly.
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