[There is something happening with angry women voting on abortion.
Male politicians don’t seem to have noticed. ]
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MALE POLITICIANS ARE IGNORING ANGRY WOMEN VOTERS  
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Dahlia Lithwick
August 28, 2022
Slate
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_ There is something happening with angry women voting on abortion.
Male politicians don’t seem to have noticed. _

Matt Gaetz, Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

Long after the time had passed for male GOP officials to stop, to
just _stop,_ pretending they know or understand anything about
female anatomy, reproductive organs, medical emergencies and basic
preventative health care, they have continued to talk. They have
continued to talk and talk and talk even when the massive blowback
after the Dobbs decision proved it was an error; Kansas proved it was
an error
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and after the surprise election of Pat Ryan in a New York special
election proved it was an error
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Every time a Republican man opens his mouth to talk about women’s
bodies, ten new female voters get their wings. Yet somehow, they
cannot seem to stop themselves!

It is surely the very textbook definition of “privilege” to find
yourself unbothered by protests, polling numbers, and voter
registration data
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Justice Samuel Alito actually laughed in the face of outraged females
who called out the bad history, bad economics, and bad medicine in his
leaked draft opinion—their complaints were numerous and
well-founded, yet he didn’t change a thing. Instead, he smugly told
women that if they didn’t like the outcome in Dobbs, they could just
“seek to affect the legislative process by influencing public
opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office” and
that “women are not without electoral or political power.”
The court’s newest approval ratings
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the same, though I don’t think Justice Alito likes that kind of
political power very much at all.

Because, Happy Women’s Equality Day, women are taking him up on the
offer. One analysis of the Kansas’ voter registration list showed
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in the week after _Dobbs_, more than 70 percent of newly registered
voters in that state were women. Those numbers, according to an Upshot
analysis of 10 states with available voter registration data, show
consistently higher registration for women after the _Dobbs_ leak in
May. As Jennifer Rubin recently noted
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Philadelphia Inquirer 
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that, “62 percent of women registering since _Dobbs _registered as
Democrats, 15 percent as Republicans and that 54 percent were younger
than 25.” And a Pew Research Center poll indicates
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“a majority of registered voters (56 percent) say the issue of
abortion will be very important in their midterm vote, up from 43
percent in March.” Tom Bonier, CEO Of TargetSmart recently posted
on Twitter [[link removed]]:
“We are seeing early signs of what could lead to a huge increase in
women voting in November. …This surge is young and female.” Both
Mitch McConnell and RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel are panicking
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the GOP’s odds in Congress, directly connected to fundraising around
abortion.

I have a lot of theories about why nobody should be surprised that
women are friggin’ furious right now, which include, as Mark Joseph
Stern has been arguing
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summer, the increasingly horrifying tales of women, disproportionately
on teenagers and victims of violence, left to suffer from sepsis
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prescriptions
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treatment for ectopic pregnancies
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and ever more horrors. And yet, the forced birth Republicans continue
to insist that none of this is happening, or that journalists
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making it all up.

If you’ve ever suffered a miscarriage, sought emergency
contraception, needed cancer drugs that were available to you in May
and unavailable today, or lost a much-wanted pregnancy and then had to
litigate the repercussions with hospital attorneys and wild-eyed state
prosecutors, you are afraid and anxious right now. That is
happening. There are a lot of us
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And as President Biden warned this week, Democrats losing Congress
will mean that abortion is in peril everywhere.

Yet the men, they just keep on talking. Some examples:

·     In June Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio told CNN’s Pamela
Brown
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in response to a question about his state law that contains no rape
exceptions: “You don’t know you were raped for two months? …
It’s hard to conceive of somebody who doesn’t know they were raped
for two months.”

·      In July Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.,
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a gathering of like-minded misogynists
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you watched these pro-abortion, pro-murder rallies?…  The people
are just disgusting. But why is it that the women with the least
likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having
abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb.”

·      Last month during debate over a near-total abortion ban
in West Virginia, Republican Del. Chris Pritt said on the floor of
the legislature that
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child support requirements bad because if a man gets a woman pregnant,
he would force her to have an abortion to avoid paying child support
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abortion is bad.

·      When Indiana lawmakers approved a near-total ban on
abortion
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this month, Rep. John Jacob (R) announced that he voted in support
because “the body inside of the mom’s body is not her body. Let me
repeat that: The body inside of the mom’s body is not her body. Not
her body, not her choice.”

It actually never ends. And the harder these guys try to seem
sensitive and caring, the worse it goes for them.

Case in point: Viral video last week showed South Carolina state Rep.
Neal Collins (R) describing the excruciating hurdles faced by a
19-year-old
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to anti-abortion legislation he himself had supported. But Collins,
fighting back tears while telling that story, didn’t actually change
his vote: He just abstained, while his colleagues advanced one of the
most restrictive bans in the nation
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(His statement also bizarrely focused on his own sleepless suffering
rather than that of the victim). These guys sure do like to keep on
talking.

I don’t understand what some of these legislators are thinking. Do
they forget that women have the vote? (Happy Women’s Equality Day.)
Do they think women don’t have ears? Or cannot read words? Or that
women are just kidding when they take to the streets, register to
vote, and flip elections?

Even the politicians who are changing their tune are doing so in a
matter that is frankly confusing: Arizona Republican Senate candidate
Blake Masters 
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scrubbed his website’s abortion policy restrictions
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week, rewriting or erasing five of his six previous hardline
positions, including earlier support for a “a federal personhood
law.” He then released a gaslight-hued new ad posted 
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recasting his abortion views as “commonsense.” And then there are
those who have simply stopped talking altogether. Pennsylvania’s
Gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano
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for example, has gone from a position in which he had championed a
six-week ban, opposed exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the
mother, and favored criminal penalties for doctors and nurses who
perform abortions to essentially being a mime
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OK, this one I actually do get: It’s cowardice, but at least it’s
strategic.

The notion that your words have no impact, change nothing, and reveal
no truth
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been so baked into public political life these past years that it’s
no wonder a good many elected officials seem to really believe it. But
it a non-trivial number of voters _do_ listen carefully to their
elected officials and candidates for high office when they speak. They
do absorb the gist of the sentiments offered and the cruelty that
underlies it. And they also vote. It says so much about where we are
just now that this simple connection must be explained as if it were
string theory.

It’s not mere coincidence that new polling shows that “threats to
democracy”
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suddenly ranked as the number one issue for registered voters
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It rolled in at 21 percent, this week, overtaking the economy, crime,
and abortion. When you are repeatedly being told by those in power
that your preferences don’t matter and when those in power believe
that saying the quiet parts out loud is electorally costless, they
aren’t just saying that women don’t matter. They’re saying
democracy doesn’t matter either. But it turns out they don’t get
to decide that. You do

* women voters
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* Reproductive rights
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* Dobbs v. Jackson
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* Republican Party
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