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Excluding miscarriages, nearly one in five American pregnancies ends in abortion, and one American woman in four will terminate a pregnancy during her lifetime. What if those women and their children and their partners… mobilized?

Published: Jun 26, 2022
Category: editor's letter

When a government run by white men for the benefit of a white minority and white-owned business wants even more power, it begins by declaring war on women. This is what the SCOTUS ruling that ends 50 years of a federally guaranteed right to abortion is ultimately about — it turns the clock back to a time when women were second-class citizens who were essentially the property of men. What’s next? Right-wing and religious groups will tee up cases that SCOTUS can use to gut federal protection for same-sex marriage, contraception, and LGBT rights. At some point, SCOTUS will welcome a case that would eliminate the power of federal agencies to regulate food, health, education, manufacturing, the environment, and more— by shrinking the federal government, it would create a permanent overclass while making every American suffer. America would be unrecognizable — as someone tweeted, “a third-world nation with a Gucci belt.”

This is not inevitable. If this week’s rulings on guns and abortion made you feel defeated and hopeless, that’s just what the patriarchy wanted. But their triumph is far from inevitable. Donald Trump privately feared the SCOTUS ruling would infuriate suburban woman and “hurt Republicans.” And not just suburban women.

There is just enough time for an effective campaign to deliver stunning results in the midterm elections… and beyond.

Here’s the key reason why I think this: Abortion is one of the most common medical procedures in America. The Times reports: “Excluding miscarriages, nearly one in five American pregnancies ends in abortion, and one American woman in four will terminate a pregnancy during her lifetime.” That’s huge: Add women with daughters at risk and sons who love their sisters, and sympathetic partners, and gay friends, and you have an army. Yes, Democrats traditionally have trouble finding an effective message and running a disciplined campaign — but desperate times can inspire innovative solutions. Leadership from Washington? Don’t wait for it. Smart writers and organizations are already stepping up to empower each of us to do something. Like this…

GIVE MONEY

There are two approaches. One is local, individual, and completely sensible. An activist writes:

With so many systems in place to tap into already, the issue isn’t so much finding a way to help — it’s about maximizing impact. One person calling a local lawmaker 200 times might be considered harassment. But 200 people calling that legislator once is impossible to ignore. Likewise, a single $100 donation does immediate good, but a recurring $10 monthly donation — especially if a friend or 20 will join you — can provide ongoing funding that an organization can rely on. One national march of a million people makes headlines for a time. But small, ongoing actions — sit-ins, vigils, an abortion rights supporter always stationed in front of the state house or courthouse — are tactics that grow more powerful the longer they last.

The opposite approach is just as sensible, Andrew Tobias was treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, from 1999 until 2017:

Most people give way too late, and — with best of intentions — directly to candidates, a lot of whose cash goes to TV. But TV does little to persuade people to switch tribes. The way we elected Georgia’s first Black and first Jewish Senator in 2020 was through massive organizing and registration. It’s best to give early to fund the DNC and other organizations to do the same thing NATIONWIDE — to hire the organizers who recruit and train the volunteers, who have time to recruit and inspire OTHER volunteers, who all have time to organize massive voter turn-out. It’s a snowball: if it starts rolling near the top of the hill — NOW — it grows huge. And if we can get our folks to the polls, they don’t NEED to have seen TV ads for each individual candidate. Most will just vote Democrat up and down the ticket. And that’s how we win. (Don’t worry that, by following this strategy, candidates will be starved of the cash they need. Realistically, very few people WILL follow this strategy. Most will give directly to candidates.)

The celebrity appeal can also be powerful. Here’s Julia Louis-Dreyfus:

The fight for reproductive freedom is now in the hands of state legislatures. I’m matching $10K in donations to these 11 candidates in key states where abortion is on the line. Please donate here to get matched & let me know when you do:

HELP PREGNANT WOMEN

Here’s a list of clinics in each state and ways to donate:

The Times has a useful guide:
In that guide, this was exceptional:

AidAccess, based in Austria, can mail abortion-inducing medication. The site even offers advance provision of abortion pills for anyone who may want to have the medicine on hand before an unwanted pregnancy occurs — for themselves or for someone they know. Simply: It doesn’t matter where you live; if you can get a letter in the mail, you can get an abortion.

If you’re pregnant in the United States, Abortion Funds can help. So can AidAcessUSA and Plancpills.

Gifts to Planned Parenthood before June 30 will be matched $1 to $1.

LOBBY YOUR EMPLOYER
Some of America’s biggest companies announced that they will cover travel costs for ALL red state employees who seek legal abortions in a blue state. The list includes Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, Apple, Meta, Yelp, Disney, Uber, Netflix, Bumble, Levi Strauss, Comcast, Conde Nast, Starbucks, Nike, Goldman Sachs, and Zillow. Is your company on the list? Start an in-house petition, then lobby for your company to take a stand.

Does your company donate to Republicans in red states or who claim Trump won? Organize a petition to stop that funding. Reason to be optimistic: It’s not likely your company cares about women, but it’s very likely it cares about losing female talent.

YOUR PERSONAL RESONSIBILITY
Timothy Snyder’s books on the Holocaust are eye-openers. In Bloodlands I learned that the murder of 6 million Jews wasn’t the 20th century’s worst story of mass execution. Between 1930 and 1947 in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Belarus, Ukraine, and western Russia, Hitler and Stalin killed 14 million people. Not one was a soldier in uniform. Most never saw a concentration camp — they were starved, beaten, shot, and gassed to death.

In On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century — an inexpensive, pocket-sized paperback that should be in every home — Snyder explains why Poland was crucial for Hitler. For Germany to kill Jews, Hitler had to make Jews unconnected to states. In Germany, that was a slow, legal process. So the Germans started elsewhere, in places where they could destroy the state. Snyder:

We have spent the last 25 years forgetting the history that we once thought vital to the preservation of our own institutions, convincing ourselves that our institutions will thrive on their own. Institutions don’t stand up by themselves.

Snyder gives direct, practical, often painful advice for good citizenship in dark times:

Practice corporeal politics… Make new friends and march with them…. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.

USEFUL ONLINE NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Charles Pierce in Esquire
Talking Points Memo
Heather Cox Richardson
Lucian Truscott

PERSPECTIVE: IT’S NOT JUST TRUMP’S JUDGES

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, in the Senate, on July 27, 2021, explaining the campaign to buy a hardcore conservative majority on the Supreme Court:

You may recall that dark money emperor Charles Koch made waves when he told his right-wing network he could support neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump in 2016. But the house of Koch and the house of Trump soon reached an accommodation. The house of Koch decided on a grand Trump gesture for their scheme donors — let their operative, Leonard Leo, handpick a list of Supreme Court nominees for Trump to announce early in the general campaign.

For the price of known, scheme-approved Supreme Court prospects, peace might be acquired between house of Koch and house of Trump. Trump announced the list. For what it is worth, I think the rest of the accommodation was for house of Trump to turn over all energy and environmental positions in government to climate change deniers approved by house of Koch, and at the end of the day, it was probably a lot of the same dark money behind both of those accommodations…

…Leo and the Federalist Society’s control ran deep. In Leo, the donors controlled an agent to orchestrate every aspect of Supreme Court judicial battles, and they provisioned him with dark money beyond imagining, and with a devious structure of front groups to hide behind while effectuating their scheme.

A 2019 Washington Post expose painted a remarkable picture: a vast network of Leo-affiliated front groups; shell entities with no employees and vague connections to Leo cutouts; shared post office boxes; common contractors and officers across nominally separate entities, even some sharing Presidents; dark money funders, anonymous advertising, and enormous pay packages for operatives. It has the earmarks of a covert operation of the sort that is run by hostile countries in the intelligence arena. But this covert operation was run in America against America by Americans. By the Post’s reckoning, $250 million in dark money flowed through this apparatus. Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Courts Subcommittee, which I chair, has since updated that number to $400 million.