Photo: Everett/Shutterstock The aftermath of the Supreme Court’s oral arguments this week on the fate of Roe v. Wade — in which a phalanx of right-wing justices made plain their disdain for the law — has been a festival of finger-pointing and recrimination by those who were startled to have woken up in a world in which it looks very much like the right to legal abortion care will soon cease to exist at the federal level.
The overturn of Roe will not be about one failed electoral campaign or badly timed Supreme Court death or failure to retire — though as with any historical cataclysm, its timing and shape will have been determined by those factors, sure.
The Democratic Party, including its presidents over the decades, has not taken seriously enough the threat to abortion rights. It’s not that these politicians didn’t officially support the correct thing: Barack Obama opposed the Hyde Amendment but also described the “tradition, in this town, historically, of not financing abortions as part of government-funded health care.” Again, this is not about Barack Obama any more than it is about Hillary Clinton or about Bernie Sanders .
Make no mistake: Those protesters have been correct, for all the years and all the hearings. Yet Democrats have permitted an inaccurate, dishonest right-wing framework — the notion that abortion is some hot button issue on which the country is sharply divided, when in fact the protection of the right to legal abortion is one of the most popular planks in a Democratic platform even in red states — to keep them from making political fights about abortion.
I get it. It is so much easier to not have to take the reality seriously. It’s easier because the alternative — the absorption of how successful the right wing has been and will likely continue to be at turning back the clock on basic tenets of equality — would mean daily discomfort. It would mean listening to, and perhaps getting in line behind, leaders who come from vulnerable communities and not the elite climes so insulated from the realities of a terribly unjust system.
There's a lot that is messed up about this because there are so many democrats and republicans both that have the same viewpoint on this but verbalize it differently.. but they are both the ones who DO NOT show up to vote on these matters. The voters don't have life experience.
rtraister .rtraister's essay on the perilous state of abortion rights in America was featured today in One Great Story, our reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly:
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