None of Your Business

Trump and his misogynistic ghouls must be kept out of the uteruses of America

Mom and me in downtown Chicago, January 21, 2017

WARNING: Political post dead ahead. If you’re already burned out on reading such things, I completely understand; come back on Monday for something less potentially incendiary. I’ve also turned off the comments below in advance, because I’m not interested in debating anyone about what I have to say here. But with just a few days to go until Election Day, I feel like I need to say this…

The above photo was taken of my mother and me nearly eight years ago, when we were both participating in the Chicago chapter of the 2017 Women’s March. The march drew an estimated 3.3 to 4.6 million marchers nationwide, making it the largest single-day protest in U.S. history. (Though those numbers would be surpassed by 2020’s George Floyd protests.) My mom has been politically active since I was a little kid — I first marched beside her in the early 1970s at a demonstration on the University of Michigan “Diag” to protest the Vietnam War — and it was an honor and a joy for me to join her in the streets of downtown Chicago in 2017.

I have learned a lot of good things from my mom over the years. Some of them, like the importance of healthy eating, I was initially quite resistant to; then again, if you’d experienced the gritty horrors of the lentil soup and the “natural” peanut butter and whole wheat sandwiches we shared at Ann Arbor’s Indian Summer restaurant circa 1972, you’d completely understand my stubborn reluctance to embrace the concept of “health food”.

One concept my mom taught me that I never had any difficulty embracing, however, was the idea that women should be given the same rights and treated with the same respect as men. This has always seemed pretty damn basic and self-evident to me, though the Equal Rights Amendment’s failure to receive congressional ratification in the late 1970s alerted me to the fact that a whole lot of my fellow Americans did not feel the same way.

Flash forward to the Women’s March in January 2017, a proactive protest which was partly intended to send the message that millions of Americans were not going to stand idly by and watch the incoming Trump administration strip women of their abortion and reproductive healthcare rights.

In some ways, 2017 feels like several lifetimes ago; and yet, I still vividly remember the derision these protests triggered from people who told us we were being overly dramatic, who made fun of the marchers’ “pussy hats” and insisted that Roe v. Wade would never actually be overturned.

Of course, that’s exactly what did happen. In a June 2022 ruling that abandoned nearly 50 years of precedent, the U.S. Supreme Court — in a ruling supported by Trump appointees Neil Gorsuch, Bret Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — overturned Roe v. Wade. For the first time in history, SCOTUS actually rescinded a constitutional right enjoyed by Americans.

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen several people on various friends’ social media threads claiming that the overturning of Roe v. Wade is a non-issue, because “you can still get an abortion in any state if you really need one.” Well, maybe an illegal, unsafe abortion — because now that the SCOTUS ruling has allowed individual states to decide their own abortion policies, 13 states have gone ahead and enacted a total abortion ban, and eight states have banned abortion at or before 18 weeks.

Donald Trump has proudly taken credit for ending Roe v. Wade, erroneously claiming that “everybody wanted it terminated,” and has called the states enacting of individual abortion laws “a beautiful thing to watch.” J.D. Vance — the man who would assume the presidency if a re-elected Trump passes away before 2028 — has opined that there should be a “Federal response” to block women from leaving their home state to have an abortion; this would presumably entail them taking a pregnancy test and handing over the results to a government official before allowed to travel across state lines. And Project 2025, while not explicitly calling for a nationwide abortion ban as some have claimed, does include numerous proposals in its 900 pages that would further curtail access to both abortion and birth control.

But of course we were overreacting, right?

I firmly believe that women should be trusted with their own healthcare and reproductive choices, just as men are. I firmly believe that women should be allowed to make the difficult decision of whether or not to have an abortion without any direct or indirect interference from the government. (To paraphrase Tim Walz, it’s none of our goddamn business.) I firmly believe that no woman should have to suffer or even die because draconian state abortion laws have made doctors gun-shy about administering emergency treatment during a miscarriage.

If you believe this as well, there’s really only one way to vote in this election — not just for Kamala Harris, but blue all the way down the ballot. I mean, there are at least a hundred other reasons I voted that way… but reopening the White House to Trump, the self-proclaimed “protector” of women (“Whether they like it or not,” as he recently put it) and the misogynistic ghouls he surrounds himself with, will only further relegate women in this country to what essentially amounts to second-class citizenship. And my mama taught me better than to be at all okay with that.

We are not going back.