Among the most common questions I get from voters is “Where do you stand on abortion?”
I always fall back on the adage that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. Safe and legal because abortion is sometimes medically necessary. Rare because we know it’s possible to make it rare without banning abortion.
The main reason women seek abortion is because they didn’t intend to get pregnant and they can’t afford to raise another child. (Yes, “another” child. Most women who seek abortions are already mothers.) The best way to reduce the number of abortions is through robust investment in pregnancy prevention and in support services that would make it easier for someone with limited means to raise an unplanned child.
Tennessee didn’t make those investments; it went straight to the most extreme, inhumane option, an abortion ban. So our state leaders have the immediate responsibility to ensure the law isn’t endangering the lives of pregnant people. A better time to do that would have been before they passed it, but here we are.
Someone experiencing miscarriage should be able to have it managed quickly and compassionately without government interference. A pregnant victim of rape or incest—which would, by definition, include all pregnant children—shouldn’t be forced to endure the physical and emotional trauma of carrying to term.
It’s hard to imagine anyone arguing against these basic protections for pregnant people. Yet over the past couple of weeks, I’ve heard some doozies from folks who did:
When I told one man that my oldest daughter—a doctor who lives out of state—said she won’t move back to Tennessee until she’s finished having children, because it’s now too dangerous to be pregnant here, he said, “We’ll have to agree to disagree.”
Another man described his various orthopedic surgeries, then unironically insisted that women medically endangered by pregnancy should “leave it in God’s hands.”
Yet another man maintained that he’d literally, physically experienced miscarriage because he and his wife “share a body.” (I gave him a chance to take it back. He didn’t.)
What do all these men have in common? They’ll be voting in November. So I have a challenge for you:
Between now and then, find four new voters to cancel out their votes. One each for the first two guys, and two for the last guy, because he’s bananas.
Allison
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