Watching the fallout from Tennessee’s abortion ban

I was standing at the south end of the Walnut Street Bridge last week when a young man walked up to me and asked, “Can we talk?”

I recognized him from the rallies. “Sure,” I said.

He said he’d been misled and misinformed. He’d changed his position. He apologized.

“It’s OK,” I said. “You were doing what you believed was right.”

As Hamilton County’s sole Democratic challenger for State House in 2022, I became one of the few local faces of Tennessee’s pro-choice majority when Roe was overturned and our abortion ban went into effect. Over the next couple of years, I was invited to speak at several women’s rallies. 

Most people in Tennessee’s anti-choice minority express their position by voting or volunteering. A tiny few show up at women’s rallies and other public places, as this young man did, to shout outrageous things and wave gruesome signs. One person burned Knoxville’s Planned Parenthood clinic to the ground.

Evangelical Christians once held moderate views on abortion. Now I’m talking to voters who believe it’s immoral under any circumstances. That’s a radical view. Unfortunately, all Tennesseans are living in their world.

In the land of the free, no state should force women and girls to risk dying in childbirth.

And it’s a real risk. Tennessee has the sixth-highest maternal mortality rate in the US, just after Georgia. The US has the highest maternal mortality rate of any developed country, and it’s the only developed country whose maternal mortality rate is rising.

There’s already been an abortion-ban death in Georgia. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened in Tennessee. Nine women are currently suing the state because of injuries caused by the ban.

My opponent hasn’t expressed concern about the ban or its collateral damage. His stated position, “I believe in defending the defenseless human being even if he or she is inside of another human being,” gives off big women-are-vessels energy.

That’s what his website said until fairly recently. Now it’s been scrubbed—not just that sentence, but the whole pro-life plank that was central to his political identity. He replaced it with a plank about immigration.

Has he changed his stance on our abortion ban? I doubt it. There’s strong political pressure on Tennessee’s Republican legislators to toe that line.

I guess he just realized it isn’t a winning position.