> What if Kamala Harris embraced a message like this one on Thursday, tying a promise of universal healthcare, child tax credits, and affordable daycare to reproductive freedom? She could use a framework that already exists—the one outlined by Black wo...
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> What if Kamala Harris embraced a message like this one on Thursday, tying a promise of universal healthcare, child tax credits, and affordable daycare to reproductive freedom? She could use a framework that already exists—the one outlined by Black women who gathered on the sidelines of a conference in 1994 after the Clinton administration announced that it would exclude reproductive health care from its health care reform plan.
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> Outraged, the women set out a framework that defined reproductive justice as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”
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> As we all now know, this way of treating abortion as a private issue and stigmatizing those who have them has failed to prevent the very criminalization he feared. It has also obscured the wider economic context in which this decision is often made—one that depends, in large part, not just on private thoughts but on public policy.
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ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)replied to ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) on last edited by
> This year, as polls show abortion is more popular than any top-of-the-ticket candidate, it’s Republicans who are running scared from the issue. Trump, who has often liked to brag about overturning Roe, didn’t mention abortion once at the Republican National Convention in July.
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> Nor did JD “Childless Cat Ladies” Vance, a man who once declared that abortion was the first political issue he ever cared about, and who has mused about how a nationwide abortion ban could be used to stop patients from traveling out of state.
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> But at the Democratic National Convention, reproductive rights are having their moment. On the opening night Monday, two women who became severely ill after being denied treatment for doomed pregnancies and a third who became pregnant from rape when she was 12 told their stories one after the other under spotlights on the stage.
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ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)replied to ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) on last edited by
> These heartbreaking accounts of almost-dead women and child rape victims are enraging and effective, and the crowd was appropriately aghast at their stories. But they do not tell the whole story. They leave out the more mundane horrors of our moment, like how most people are living paycheck to paycheck, so what happens when they face an unintended pregnancy in a state where abortion is banned?
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> We must hear these stories too, as well as the stories of people who just don’t want to have a kid right now. Harris can acknowledge these realities by channeling Chisholm, who was far ahead of her time in 1969 when she declared: “The majority of women who seek abortions do so not because they have been raped, exposed to German measles or have serious heart or liver ailments…They seek abortions because they find themselves with unwelcome or unwanted pregnancies.”
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ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)replied to ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) on last edited by
> Already, Harris has proven to be far more compelling on the issue than Biden, who was 468 days into his presidency when he finally said the word “abortion” for the first time, according to the website didbidensayabortionyet.org. Biden did utter “abortion” during his speech at the convention Monday when he said Trump would institute a nationwide abortion ban; then he called on voters to “elect a Senate and a House to restore Roe v. Wade.”
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ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)replied to ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) on last edited by
> A new and encouraging phase in the Democratic Party’s relationship with reproductive rights is emerging. The next step is to point out that reproductive freedom includes economic freedom—healthcare, safe housing, access to nutritious food, and robust investment in public schools—and, of course, to avoid falling back into the same stigmatizing, tired old rhetoric.