Now Is the Time for Kamala Harris to Flip the Script and Win Big on Abortion

The Democrats have a chance to become the party that wants to grant you the freedom to terminate a pregnancy and the freedom to raise the children you want.

Amy Littlefield
Aug 21, 2024

Something unexpected happened to me while I was watching the Democratic National Convention on Monday night. I was sitting in my pajamas listening to Hillary Clinton’s speech when I started sobbing. Did Hillary Clinton just make me cry? I thought, horrified, afraid I might be having a sudden-onset midlife crisis. This was the woman I had protested in college over her support for the Iraq War. In 2016, I was a Bernie girl, and today, in 2024, I’m so outraged over Democrats’ support for the Israeli war on Gaza that I expected to watch the entire convention with my jaw clenched. But then Clinton invoked the legacy of Shirley Chishom. “In 1972, a fearless Black congresswoman named Shirley Chisholm, she ran for president, and her determination let me and millions of others dream bigger,” Clinton said. “Not just because of who she was, but because of who she fought for: working parents, poor children, the last, the least, and the lost.” Suddenly, I could see a portal between Chisholm’s “unbought and unbossed” feminism and this moment, and it dawned on me that the fall of Roe v. Wade had cracked that portal open.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/kamala-harris-abortion-reproductive-justice/

21.08.2024

Commentary

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Planned Parenthood v. Casey

USA – Abortion Wins Elections for Democrats. What Should Advocates Demand in Return?

How can this popularity translate into political power for a movement that is not accustomed to making bold demands of its political leaders?

AMY LITTLEFIELD
Nov 20, 2023

If abortion were a 2024 presidential candidate, it would wipe the floor with Donald Trump. On November 7, abortion helped Democrats take back the Virginia House, keep the Kentucky governorship, and secure a Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat. In Ohio, 57 percent of voters approved enshrining abortion access in the state Constitution; it was the seventh time abortion has faced a direct vote since Dobbs and the seventh time it’s won.

Abortion wins. Abortion rights activists have known this. Voters have often chosen to defend abortion when they get a direct vote, including in red states. What’s changed is that Democrats have finally started treating abortion like an issue they can win on—and in the wake of Dobbs, they’re doing just that.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/abortion-democrats-elections/

“The Message They’ve Received Is That You Don’t Deserve to Be Cared For”: Life on the Abortion Borderland

Patients seeking abortions are flooding across state lines—while anti-abortion activists try to shut clinics down.

June 23, 2023
AMY LITTLEFIELD

One day each week, the Rev. Erika Ferguson puts on leggings and a sweatshirt, pulls her hair back under a baseball cap, and heads to a North Texas airport to meet a group of people who need abortions. She shepherds the strangers through security and onto a short flight to Albuquerque, N.M. There, the group spends the day at an abortion clinic, and later they watch rom-coms in an office packed with cots, tea, and homemade cookies. The women Ferguson has accompanied represent a cross section of Texans—Black, Latina, Asian, and white. There have been rape victims and teenagers. There have been moms with teenage children at home. “I’ve taken women from all walks of life, from all ages,” Ferguson told me.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/abortion-clinics-dobbs-texas/

From Abortion Bans to Anti-Trans Laws, a Christian Legal Army is Waging War on America

Democracy Now!
Dec 3, 2021
Video: 19 mins – with transcript

As the Supreme Court looks poised to uphold Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban and possibly overturn Roe v. Wade we speak to The Nation’s Amy Littlefield about her investigation into the Christian legal army behind the Mississippi law as well as anti-trans laws across the country. She also critiques the mainstream pro-choice movement’s failure to center the poor and people of color. “There is a change coming within the movement because of its reckoning with these past missteps including, frankly, the failure to adequately protect Black women and to stand up for the safety of the people whose rights were eroded first,” says Littlefield.

Continued: https://www.democracynow.org/2021/12/3/thinking_beyond_roe_amy_littlefield_abortion

The Politics of Abortion Is Entering a New Era

The Politics of Abortion Is Entering a New Era
The Supreme Court won’t protect abortion access anymore. But thousands of activists will.

By Emily Douglas
Dec 3, 2019

America is a country that telegraphs profoundly conflicting ideas of how women should live their lives. There are five female candidates for president. Women are fully integrated into the paid labor force: Almost half of workers are women. Seventy percent of mothers with children work outside the home; the vast majority working full-time. Across income groups, but especially among low-income families, the wages women earn increasingly represent half—or more—of what their families live on. America depends on women’s labor, paid and unpaid, and expects women to dream big, just as men do.

And yet in 2019 alone, state after state has passed laws that, if enforced, would completely undermine the United States’ notion of itself as a country that embraces gender equality. These laws ban abortion, and they’re banning it as early as six weeks, before many women even know they’re pregnant. Alabama has banned abortion altogether, with only the narrowest exceptions. So far all these laws have been blocked by federal judges, but they will work their way up to the Supreme Court, where an anti-choice majority now holds sway.

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/abortion-bans-access-movement/

03.12.2019