That quotation (from Shirley Chisholm circa 1969) is the lead to Rebecca Traister's cover story ("Abortion Wins Elections") in the current issue of New York. The subhead describes the point at issue: The fight to make reproductive rights the centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s 2024 agenda.
I've written repeatedly that MAGA Republicans are invoking a twisted, constrained view of freedom that masks an authoritarian project on behalf of the GOP's white evangelical base. I recommend "Abortion Wins Elections," which offers a Democratic alternative.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who leads a state party that has placed women front and center, a model for Democrats nationally, promotes abortion "as both a practical, voter-friendly issue and an inalienable human right at the center of a galaxy of related concerns." Says she, "If you don’t think abortion is an economic issue, you probably don’t have a uterus.”
The concerns of women (and men who embrace equality) are key to the Democratic challenge to a backwards-looking Republican Party. A handful of quotations from Traister's piece are suggestive:
- … Dobbs also catalyzed a revolution in the politics of abortion. And now it’s not just some loud activists and marginalized lady pols telling Democrats to move quickly and assertively to figure out how to make abortion available again across the country: It’s voters.
- Often mocked as being part of the pussy-hat-wearing hashtag resistance, a new generation of politicians and voters is in the midst of correcting one of the Democratic Party’s signature failures of the Roe era: its lack of investment in state government.
- Spending time with Michigan’s newly elected governing majority is a little like landing on a planet where no white men are in charge.
- [Dana] Nessel has told the story of an early meeting of executive leadership in 2019 at which she’d gotten her period unexpectedly; when she asked if anyone had a tampon, Whitmer replied, “Madame Attorney General, everyone here has a tampon.”
Although the article focuses on Michigan and the U.S., democracy and women's rights are under siege the world over, so small-d democrats everywhere are pushing back:
Lawmakers and activists around the world have focused not simply on privacy or individual decision-making (a matter between a woman and her doctor, as Democrats often said in the days of Roe) but on abortion as a human right strongly tied to democracy reform, resistance to authoritarianism, and violence against women.