UPDATE The Big Deal About Abortion: Senator Warren Gets It Right / Biden Backtracks
On Wednesday we got a good look at the difference between the old and the new ways of campaigning in the Democratic party. In this instance it was Senator Elizabeth Warren differentiating herself from former Vice President Joe Biden.
The old way involves triangulating: using poll data (and voodoo) to create a position seemingly transcending partisan politics. It’s a little of this and a dash of that, followed by cutting a big check to a political consultant.
The new way involves making factual declarations re-enforced by enough moral certainty to make even those who disagree respect the candidate’s integrity.
This all began when former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign “clarified” comments made by their candidate, saying he was still a supporter of the Hyde Amendment, the ban passed three years after Roe v Wade prohibiting the use of federal funds for certain abortion services.
The campaign was walking back a statement made in South Carolina last month, saying Biden misunderstood the question posed by an ACLU volunteer.
The spokesman added “if recent efforts to restrict abortion access — including near-total bans on abortion in Louisiana, Ohio, Alabama, and elsewhere — succeed, Biden would be open to repealing Hyde.”
UPDATE: On Thursday afternoon Biden announced he was now in favor of abolishing the Hyde amendment. Must have seen some bad polling, IMO.
https://twitter.com/LeftStandingUp/status/1136786618122153984
Senator Elizabeth Warren was asked about Biden’s position on Hyde at a MSNBC Town Hall in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Warren told the audience she views the Hyde Amendment as fundamentally about inequality, telling the audience “What this is about is health care, about reproductive freedom, about economic freedom and equal opportunity for all women. This is not about politics.”
From Vox.com:
“Understand this, women of means will still have access to abortions,” Warren said. “Who won’t will be poor women. It will be working women and women who can’t afford to take off three days from work, and very young women. It will be women who have been raped and women who have been molested by someone in their own family. We do not pass laws that take away that freedom from the women who are most vulnerable.”
Pressed by MSNBC host Chris Hayes on polling showing most American oppose federal financing of abortions, she responded:
“Look, the way I see this, this is what leadership is about,” Warren said. “You start with what you believe is right and then you get out there and fight for it.”
Her forceful response reverberated on social media, with one observer noting “Elizabeth Warren proves that you don’t need balls to fight for what’s right, you need a spine.”
https://twitter.com/adamcbest/status/1136428519117004800
Going beyond the belief systems (Biden has traditionally been a soft vote on abortion question), the Senator from Massachusetts was taking on the right wing abortion trope with an uncompromising stance.
I should note here that Senators Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris -among others- have been clear in speaking out against the Hyde Amendment. Warren’s advocacy on display yesterday inspired me to write this piece.
Abortion is set to be a major issue in the 2020 elections. Three in 10 people say they would only vote for candidates who agrees with them on the issue.
Republican dominated legislatures around the country appear to be staging a competition over who can pass the most extreme bans, with an Ohio law going so far as to say insurance companies should not be allowed to fund most forms of birth control.
The Trump administration has gone out of its way to implement anti-abortion policies favored by its right wing evangelist supporters. During the 2016 campaign then-candidate Trump said there should be “some sort of punishment” for women who seek abortion if it were outlawed.
On Wednesday, the government announced it was cutting off funding for research using fetal tissue.
The Washington Post reported:
“The change represents a victory for antiabortion advocates, who immediately lauded the change, and a major disappointment to scientists who say the tissue collected from elective abortions has been instrumental to unlocking the secrets of diseases that range from AIDS to cancers to Zika, as well as to developing vaccines and treatments for illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease.”
Harvard Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen, writing in The New Yorker, says a recent opinion by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas combined with the increasing emphasis of lawmakers of establishing personhood for the fetus points to an especially ugly future:
When Republican lawmakers consider the fact of rape or incest irrelevant to a decision to terminate a pregnancy, and when Thomas invokes the spectre of discrimination against a fetus, they are making the same point—that every “unborn child” is entitled to the same dignity as you or me. And, if fetuses are thought to have basic rights as persons do, then a future ruling might reach beyond overturning Roe. It might hold that it is unconstitutional for any state to allow abortions at all. This position—the constitutionalization of abortion abolition—would go far beyond what either liberals and conservatives have imagined possible, but it is where the ambitions of fetal personhood now entering the legal mainstream are headed.
What Elizabeth Warren did on MSNBC was to say “No” the so-called compromise position on women’s health care.
The Hyde Amendment allows the government to pick and choose which people get which health-care services based on how much money they have and how they’re insured.
The politicians saying “Taxpayer dollars are not used for abortion!” as a defense against the propaganda spewed by anti abortion forces are normalizing the idea that taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used for a health care procedure unique to anybody with a uterus.
Because the truth of the matter is, there should be public funding for abortion care. And if we really want to do "something" about abortions, then access to birth control should be free and universal.
The state of Colorado's long-acting reversible contraceptive (LARC) funding initiative led to a 40% drop in unintended pregnancy, a 42% drop in abortions, and millions of dollars in healthcare savings among those who participated in the program.
The anti-abortion movement is, as many people before me have pointed out, a smokescreen for restoring the rights of men to rule the world. Lately these folks have been promoting the falsehood of late term abortions being common or desirable.
They’re certainly not pro-life, as this snip from an essay by gender scholar Monica Casper shows:
Since the 1980s, when I came of age intellectually, the Right has been particularly effective at controlling the discourse of abortion, which paints women as selfish, promiscuous cows who like nothing better than to pop in for an abortion, then grab a latte on the way home. Such discourse blossomed under Ronald Reagan and has become even more entrenched. In the maternal-fetal dyad, for conservatives, especially the Christian Right, there is just one viable person: the fetus. Women are dehumanized, treated merely as vessels for delivering new life. Only fetuses and corporations get to be people in this brave new world.
Conservatives have successfully deployed the term “pro-life” to cloak the underlying misogyny of anti-abortion legislation. We hear a great deal about their care for the fetus, but evidence shows that once a child is born, conservatives lose interest. States passing anti-abortion legislation have among the highest infant mortality rates in the country. In 2017, Alabama’s infant mortality rate was 7.4 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, twice that of Massachusetts, which had the fewest deaths.
I have argued for Big Ideas as antidote to cynicism and the fire hose of lies the right uses to restrain the desires of people far sighted enough to see solving problems as a “we” as opposed to a “me” proposition.
Saying that women have a right to control their healthcare is as big an idea as saying the country needs a universal healthcare solution.
Although I haven’t decided on a favorite candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Warren’s fierce advocacy in the area is a Big Deal for me.
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Finally…
https://twitter.com/shahselbe/status/1136307111262949376
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Lead image: Women in Chicago protesting during the Kavanaugh hearings via Wikimedia