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Friends -

This week, the Arizona Supreme Court reinstated an 1864 abortion ban, wiping out nearly all abortion access in the state. Arizona didn’t even become a state until 1912, but women in the state are now living under a 160-year-old ban with no exceptions for rape and incest.

In light of the news out of Arizona, as well as a ruling out of Florida that will allow a 6-week ban to go into effect on May 1, I wanted to write at some length about the Republican assault on reproductive rights and the specific strategy that they employed after they successfully overturned Roe vs. Wade in 2022.

When I am done, I hope you'll consider making a donation to my campaign for Senate, because you have the power to make a difference in the outcome of this race.

The truth is, Republicans have not stopped attacking anything in the family of reproductive health issues over the past 18 months. I think about these threats in four major categories, and in each area, Republicans are threatening women's freedom to make decisions about their bodies.

Let's review the bidding.

Number one is continued threats to abortion medication. Recently, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a case that threatens mifepristone, a safe and legal drug that is used in more than 50% abortions. The ruling is expected to come down this summer, and if the drug is banned, women in all states would have a hard time accessing abortion care due to a shortage of available medication – even in states like Michigan, where voters enshrined access to abortion in their state constitutions. It would be the first time in history we have judges overturning an FDA decision that a drug is safe.

Number two is threats to safe and legal life-saving care for pregnant women. In states that have severely restricted abortion, women who are in the midst of a miscarriage, in the early stages of sepsis, are told to wait in the parking lot of the hospital until they become sick enough that doctors are confident they can provide care without fear of breaking state laws. That grisly reality is happening right now in America. What’s more, a handful of states are criminalizing anyone who helps a patient leave the state to access abortion care. There is even a federal bill that would deny women in the military who were assigned to states with abortion bans the time off to go travel to another state to get an abortion.

Number three is threats to information about abortion and family planning. In the past year in Congress, I voted on over a dozen bills that were meant to ban certain institutions from talking about abortion as an option. That means threatening federal dollars for organizations like universities if their health clinic on campus counsels young women that abortion is an option among many.

And number four is threats to family planning, most recently IVF. You saw the IVF clinics in Alabama that were closed, preventing families who desperately want children from going through IVF — and some of those treatments were canceled mid-cycle. Some of you know how disturbing that is. The Alabama case, or a similar one, could reach the U.S. Supreme Court. The underlying ideology behind the case would threaten not only IVF, but perhaps also the morning-after pill and certain types of contraception.

In Michigan, we made our decision on this. People here voted that we wanted to enshrine Roe into our state Constitution. But these four threats still loom in Michigan and across the country.

And those are some of the stakes in this election. Control of the U.S. Senate is on the line. So we're talking about not just legislation that Republicans might pass, but also the judges they'd vote to confirm.

Big stuff.

Republicans know it too, and that's one of the reasons anti-choice groups will be active in trying to defeat us. But if we're in this together, we can win this race. So I am asking:

Can you please use this link to contribute directly to my campaign for U.S. Senate in Michigan? I would not ask if these donations were not so important to our success.

CONTRIBUTE: [link removed]

Thank you,

Elissa Slotkin
 


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