Hi james,
Like most Americans, you’re probably exhausted by the Republican Party’s relentless war on reproductive rights. It seems that hardly a week goes by without GOP lawmakers resurrecting some horrific centuries-old abortion ban or ramming through some brand new one. It has grown into the defining issue of the 2024 political landscape and if current polling continues it could cost Republicans the election.
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Two weeks ago we saw the Florida Supreme Court uphold a six week abortion ban. Last week, Arizona’s highest court green-lit the reinstitution of a ban from 1864 that carries a penalty of up to five years in prison for those who help procure an abortion. Reactionary politics are always, by definition, animated by a desire to return to an earlier time period. Under the banner of MAGA, that desire has reached a new level of perverse absurdity. Republicans don’t just want to turn the clock back a few decades. They want to turn it back to before the invention of the light bulb.
Not surprisingly, the Republican Party’s radicalization into a full-blown Christian Nationalist movement isn’t winning them over a lot of converts from the moderate voting bloc. The optics of all of this anti-abortion legislation are terrible for the GOP’s electoral prospects and they know it.
Reject Trump's national abortion ban!
The optics are so bad in fact, that Donald Trump himself — the man who unleashed all of this reproductive chaos by stacking the Supreme Court with radicals who then overturned Roe v. Wade — is trying to pretend that he’s a principled centrist when it comes to abortion. Out of one side of his mouth he insists that the issue should be left up to the states. Out of the other side he boasts about how he repealed Roe while playing footsie with the Evangelicals who want a national ban implemented. If he manages to win, he’ll drop the former rhetoric and fully embrace the latter.
Beyond simply lying about their abortion policies like Trump, the only real option Republicans have is muddying the discourse. They rant about how Democrats want to enable abortions into the ninth month of pregnancy. In reality, 99% of abortions happen before twenty-one weeks. The remaining 1% occur later, usually due to fetal anomalies or because there’s a serious health risk to the mother. Despite what the GOP wants you to believe, women are not getting late-term abortions because they think that they’re fun or because the Devil told them to. They’re getting them out of necessity.
Thankfully, Americans are not nearly as stupid as the Republicans think they are. Conservatives are losing this war and you need look no further than the ballot box to see it. In the six states where abortion referendums were put on the ballot, Republicans lost every time. Recent special elections have been a nightmare for the GOP. Americans are showing up to vote for Democrats because abortion rights are under attack.
Voters can see through the lying, past the culture war distractions, and beyond the religious posturing. They see that their rights are being stripped away and they know that only they have the power to stop it. Come November, they will.
Stay focused, stay energized.
Brian
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