Waking up to the threat of an anti-woman government

Sen. Tammy Baldwin at a roundtable discussion on the second anniversary of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision | Photo via Tammy Baldwin Facebook page

This week marked the second anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision ending federally protected abortion rights — a huge step backwards for women for which Donald Trump proudly takes the credit . Democrats fanned out across our swing state to highlight what’s at stake if he and other Republicans are elected.

At a Monday roundtable discussion in a supporter’s backyard on the east side of Madison, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin and a group of Democratic state lawmakers and women’s health advocates gathered around a picnic table, watched by a gaggle of reporters, to discuss Dobbs’ fallout.

“Both in Wisconsin and nationally, the impact has been devastating,” said Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin President Tanya Atkinson. For a year and a half, Planned Parenthood ceased providing abortion services in Wisconsin, after a zombie 1849 law that was widely interpreted as an abortion ban suddenly went back into effect. Planned Parenthood staff and volunteers scrambled to help women travel across state lines. Some of those women faced devastating diagnoses of doomed pregnancies and their suffering was made worse by the uncertainty and lack of safe, local medical care.

Women at the backyard roundtable talked about their sense of disbelief at losing a right that was taken for granted for half a century. Even in red states, Baldwin pointed out, voters have recoiled at the loss of options for women suffering from health crises late in pregnancy, seeking emergency contraception in the very early days of an unwanted pregnancy, or planning fertility treatments only to find out that in vitro fertilization is unavailable in their states.

Ballot measures across the country codifying abortion rights and beating back abortion bans underscore the power of the issue.

“We don’t have a referendum process here the way other states do, but we did have a Supreme Court race that I can view as a proxy,”  Baldwin said, referring to the election of Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz, who stomped her anti-abortion opponent and ushered in a new, liberal majority on the Court. People are making it very clear that “you want your rights and freedoms back,” Baldwin added, “and we have to connect with that.”

Meanwhile Republicans, in the post-Dobbs era, are running away from their own anti-abortion extremism.

“As the election draws nearer, all of a sudden they’re trying to dance around their previous stance — do not let anyone fall for it,” Baldwin said, calling out her opponent, Trump-backed California bank owner Eric Hovde, who said during his 2012 campaign that he is “ totally opposed ” to abortion, but now says he’s not in favor of a national abortion ban — something Baldwin dismisses.

A national ban, passed by a Republican Congress and signed by Trump, who has said he supports it, would render all those grassroots statewide referendum efforts protecting abortion rights obsolete, Baldwin pointed out.

Democrats are right to take the issue of abortion rights to the hoop.

“It’s an incredibly motivating issue for lots of people,” state Rep. Lisa Subeck (D-Madison), a longtime reproductive rights advocate, said during the backyard roundtable. For years, Subeck tried to get Wisconsin’s 1849 law overturned in the state Legislature, to no avail. On the one hand it’s frustrating that people didn’t see the risk sooner, she said. On the other hand, the issue is “motivating a whole new group of voters” — including a lot of voters who describe themselves as independents and moderates. “I think that does bode well for our future,” Subeck said, “both here in the state and federally.”

When we all woke up two years ago to a country in which women had lost control over our bodily autonomy, it triggered a massive backlash.

And make no mistake, the same issue is also what the current election is all about. Along with Trump’s scary threats to form an authoritarian government staffed with yes-men and cronies, to weaponize the Justice Department to punish his political enemies, to rip apart immigrant families and herd undocumented workers into camps, much of his appeal is rank misogyny. From his first campaign against Hillary Clinton, he has been running on a promise to put women in their place that resonates with angry, insecure men.

Who can forget the 2016 Trump-Clinton debate , when both candidates were asked about their positions on abortion. Clinton defended Roe v. Wade and putting the lives and health of women first when it came to regulating late-term abortion. Trump responded with a Trump-style lie that earned him the enduring affection of anti-abortion activists: “ Based on what she’s saying … you can take the baby and rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, on the final day. ”

Trump went on to win and made good on his promise to appoint anti-abortion Supreme Court justices.

Writing for the majority in the Dobbs decision, Justice Samuel Alito reasoned that

because the framers didn’t view women as having the right to control their own fertility, “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. ”

“On the contrary,” he added, “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

In a much-derided tangent, Alito cited “English cases dating all the way back to the 13th century” to justify his opinion that abortion was traditionally viewed as a crime.

In a scorching dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan wrote, “When the majority says that we must read our foundational charter as viewed at the time of ratification (except that we may also check it against the Dark Ages), it consigns women to second-class citizenship.”

The legal theory that the constitution cannot protect women’s reproductive freedom because the framers — all men, who didn’t see women as deserving of full citizenship — didn’t intend it that way consigns us to a world where women have no rights.

There’s no better antidote to voter apathy than a whole lot of pissed off women who are determined not to live in that world.

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