The Flaw in Bernie Sanders' 'Unity' Plan: Making Pro-Choice Politics Optional

Sady Doyle
Updated
Photo credit: Getty
Photo credit: Getty

From ELLE

The Democrats, as per Bernie Sanders, are "extremely weak and incapable of organizing;" they are beholden to all the wrong people (liberal elites, high-powered donors, party insiders) and answerable to none of the right ones (the white working class, millennials, Bernie Sanders).

Bernie has come to cast the money-lenders out of the temple: "Our job," he has said, "is to organize and educate people around a progressive agenda that demands Congress represent us, not just the one percent." He's argued that this agenda must become the official platform of the Democratic party: "It has got to be that those ideas are allowed to become the dominant theme of the Democratic Party, and that's the choice that Democrats are going to have to make."

It's an appealing proposition. There's just one catch: One of the ways Bernie Sanders is re-defining "progressivism" is to make pro-choice politics optional.

The issue of Sanders and choice came to a head this week, when he endorsed Omaha mayoral candidate Heath Mello. As a state senator, Mello famously co-sponsored a 2009 co-sponsored a bill requiring doctors to offer ultrasounds to abortion patients. That's not the worst of it: As per Imani Gandy at Rewire, Mello also sponsored a 20-week term limit on abortion in 2010; he voted in favor of stripping abortion coverage from insurance plans in the state of Nebraska; he voted to ban telemedicine abortion care, thereby making abortion less accessible to rural women; and, for his service, Mello was endorsed by Nebraska Right to Life in 2010. This week, as his record came under fire, Mello released a statement that "as Mayor I would never do anything to restrict access to reproductive health care"-but, for many reproductive justice advocates, the question of whether to trust Mello's PR department or his track record has a pretty clear answer.

Sanders was slammed, immediately, for neglecting to realize that abortion is one of the key "economic" issues in many women's lives-hardly something that a populist politician should be neglecting. Seventy-five percent of all abortion patients in the United States are poor or low-income; poor women are three times more likely to encounter an unintended pregnancy, due in part to a lack of contraceptive access.

"[There] IS NO economic populism [for] women WITHOUT reproductive freedom and Justice," Ilyse Hogue of NARAL Pro-Choice America Tweeted. "Most significant factor affecting women's job prospects, wages, education is pregnancy -- planned and unplanned. Even worse for WOC[.] So don't talk to me about econ v. repro [rights]. Unless you are only talking to dudes, they are the very same thing."

Yet Sanders has always maintained a certain distinction between abortion and economics. In March, Sanders agreed with Joe Scarborough that Democrats should "be open to candidates that may not be rigidly pro-choice." During the 2016 campaign, when Planned Parenthood did not endorse his Presidential campaign, he famously dismissed it as "part of the establishment" that he was "taking on." Even as he woos Democrats with the promise that he can re-enchant the white working class and bring Trump voters back into the fold, it's hard not to recall that, as early as the summer of 2015, Sanders was very specific about which issues he'd be willing to downplay or neglect in order to get converts: "Once you get off of the social issues - abortion, gay rights, guns - and into the economic issues," he told Rolling Stone, "there is a lot more agreement than the pundits understand."

Because Sanders has a solid record of voting for pro-choice policies himself, it was easy to ignore these comments, or to assume (as many supporters did) that they were merely "poorly worded" or "taken out of context." But, with the endorsement of Mello, it's become all too clear that Sanders' dismissive comments about abortion reflect his actual politics–namely, his willingness to trade away reproductive rights, when necessary, in exchange for advancing his own specific set of economic concerns. And that attitude is trickling down to his movement. At the same event where Sanders stumped for Mello, Jane Kleeb-a board member of Sanders' Our Revolution-gave an ecstatic speech, proclaiming that "the Democratic party is a broad party! We are pro-life, we are pro-choice!" When called out on this, Kleeb insisted that "we do have pro-life and pro-choice Democrats in our party and I welcome all of those folks."

Sanders, too, has dismissed reproductive-rights advocates' concerns as petty: "The truth is that in some conservative states there will be candidates that are popular candidates who may not agree with me on every issue. I understand it. That's what politics is about," he told NPR. While pro-choice himself, he says, "I think you just can't exclude people who disagree with us on one issue."

But you can. In fact, Sanders does it all the time. During the Democratic primary, Sanders famously kicked Hillary Clinton off of Progressive Island for, among other things, engaging in conventional campaign fundraising: "I do not know any progressive who has a super-PAC and takes 15 million dollars from Wall Street. That's just not progressive," he told her at a February 4 town hall. Just this week, Sanders pushed Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff off the lifeboat in the midst of an election: "Some Democrats are progressive, and some Democrats are not," Sanders said, before clarifying that Ossoff was "not a progressive." When asked exactly what Ossoff had done to deserve all this, an anonymous aide explained that "Jon Ossoff doesn't have the word 'income inequality' on his issues page[.]"

Sanders has since walked back the condemnation of Ossoff, saying that a win "would be part of the process of reclaiming the House of Representatives for the Democrats." But the point stands: When Sanders genuinely cares about an issue, he can be so unflinching as to publicly reject someone for failing to include a two-word phrase on his home page. Yet, when it comes to reproductive rights, he'll just agree to disagree.

This is especially painful because reproductive rights advocates need Sanders on their team. It's no mistake that DNC chair Tom Perez initially backed Sanders' comments on choice (something he, too, has had to walk back after social media criticism): Abortion rights has long been a preferred way for Democrats to show off their skills at "compromising" with the GOP. Plenty of Democrats vote, every year, for the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal funding for abortion and therefore makes it inaccessible to working-class and poor women. Democrats have routinely voted for draconian anti-choice measures which would have provided rape victims seeking taxpayer-funded abortions to "prove" that they were raped "forcibly." Contraceptive coverage was one of the major compromises Barack Obama made when trying to pass Obamacare. And Democrat after Democrat-from Tim Kaine to Joe Biden to Harry Reid to, yes, the early incarnations of Hillary Clinton-has half-heartedly and inconsistently defended abortion with their votes, while making as much noise as possible about how immoral and awful it is. Much has been made of Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" – but recall, if you can stand it, dear old Uncle Joe proclaiming to the world that "abortion is always wrong."

This is the sort of unprincipled Democratic centrism that Sanders has built his brand on opposing. And this is a moment when compromise could be especially disastrous. President Trump has vowed to overturn Roe v. Wade. He has just signed a bill allowing Planned Parenthood to be defunded at the state level. His Vice-President, Mike Pence, is arguably even more deeply committed to anti-choice extremism than Trump-a man who jailed a woman for self-aborting is only a heartbeat or a breakdown away from the Oval Office. Neil Gorsuch, an anti-choice judge, has taken Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court. There are rumors that Justice Kennedy will retire within the year. We only need one or two more defections or deaths to permanently tip the court's balance away from reproductive freedom–and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, God help us, has yet to discover the secrets of immortality.

Yet, in the moment of crisis, Sanders is sticking to the same approach as always: Maintaining a fierce unwillingness to compromise on his own pet issues, while openly neglecting issues that are life and death for many women and trans people, particularly working-class and poor ones.

Bernie Sanders has set himself up as a leader-if not the leader-of the American progressive movement. He has very real power: Many, many people, particularly young people with fierce emotional attachments to Sanders, actually do define the words "progressive" or "leftist" as meaning, roughly, "whatever Bernie Sanders says." There is nothing inherently wrong with Sanders' ambition. But leaders have got to lead, and standard-bearers have to live up to their own standards. If Bernie Sanders wants to define progressivism in this country, dropping Mello and joining the rest of us in rejecting anti-choice Democratic politics is a necessary first step.

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