A Determined Minority Wants To Ban Women's Choice. Needed: A Determined Majority

Severe lack of diversity in the Alabama state Senate. Notice who voted to end women's Choice?

Blue America doesn't endorse candidates because of their racial, gender, religious identities-- or any other identities. We pick them because we think they will be excellent members of Congress. That said, so far this cycle, 4 out of the 7 House candidates we have endorsed are women. Only one is a straight white male (and he's great too).

That said, there are too few women in Congress. More diversity in decision-making has been proven to lead to better outcomes. In the Alabama state Senate last week, two dozen white men decided that women in their state shouldn't be able to have abortions any longer. All of the candidates Blue America has endorsed strongly disagree with that decision. Several of them-- including the two women below have sent me letters about it.

Eva Putzova was a Flagstaff city councilmember and is now running for Congress in Arizona's vast first district. The incumbent, Tom O'Halleran, was a Republican state legislator who flipped to independent and then, when he saw an opportunity to get into Congress, flipped to Blue Dog, still as conservative as he was when he was a Republican.

A few days ago Eva explained to us that she "first came to the U.S. in 1998 to spend one year immersing myself in the culture and language. I couldn’t afford to study in the U.S., so I signed up for a year-long au-pair program. It was after the third year of my 5-year master’s program at the University of Economics (Slovakia) when I took a year off and at age of 21, boarded my very first trans-Atlantic flight."

I spent a year in Asheville, North Carolina, taking care of two little boys. And I fell in love. But my stay was soon over and I had to go back to Slovakia to finish school. My partner with whom I fell in love at the time had college loans to repay and couldn’t just move wherever to be with me. It was me, a girl from a former Eastern Bloc country, who was free-- not financially independent but without any college debt-- to go where my heart was pulling me.

My love for one person then grew into love of people and land that became my forever home-- here in Flagstaff, Arizona. For me, there’s no more stunning landscape than that of the American Southwest-- with a big blue sky, canyons, desert, and an endless ponderosa pine forest. And the people I’ve met along the way are kind, generous, thoughtful, and full of life.

Every immigration story is different and it’s this diversity that the Trump’s administration wants to take away that makes this country so very special.

My immigration experience also made me think a lot about the concept of freedom-- an idea that for a 21-year old myself was synonymous with the United States of America. When you are in your early twenties, you want to live for new adventures and to explore the world and your own potential. And I realized-- maybe not right away, but over time-- that I was truly free because I didn’t have the burden of paying back the cost of my college education. I also started to understand how that is not the case for most people going to college here today.

It's one reason why I’m running for Congress-- to give young people back the freedom they deserve. After all, their grandparents used to enjoy an affordable college experience. There’s no reason why we can’t make college debt a thing of past.

I'm sure you have heard about the abortion law in Alabama by now. It outlaws all abortions, even from rape and incest. The only exceptions are in cases where the mother’s life is at risk or the baby has a "lethal anomaly". If a provider carries out an abortion, they can be given up to a 99 year jail sentence.

I know what the outcomes of a law like this can be.

My grandmother died of a botched abortion. She was only 20 years old.

This isn't just a women's issue. It's a social, racial, and economic issue.

This law punishes low-income people and people of color. It is about power, control, and oppression.

At the same time Eva was writing that, Audrey Denney, running in the first district of California-- also huge, mostly rural and small town district like Eva's-- wrote about the abortion bill in Alabama. "This, she wrote, "is a terrifying moment in U.S. history, when 46 years of precedent for recognizing women’s right to privacy and sovereignty over their own bodies is being systematically dismantled. The policymakers who have put forward these archaic bans on safe and legal abortion claim to be doing so because they value human life."

I deeply respect the sanctity of life. I believe that life is created by God, and I believe that every woman has the right to choose whether or not she will participate in bringing life into being. No one has the right to tell her that she must. Making the decision to end a pregnancy is a difficult and tragic one-- but having the right to make that decision is foundational to protecting women’s health, privacy, and well-being.

If the people who wrote these laws truly cared for the sanctity of life, they would be working tirelessly to reduce our country’s maternal mortality rate (currently the worst among industrialized nations), but instead they are limiting or eliminating care, and more mothers are dying during childbirth. They would be investing in initiatives to improve infant and child health and access to early education and child care. They would be fighting for paid family leave, so that parents have adequate time to regain their own health and support their new child. They would be losing sleep over the 12 million children in this country who will go to bed hungry because their parents are trapped in poverty, unable to earn a living wage.

I imagine a world where fewer women face the difficult decisions surrounding ending a pregnancy. Statistics have proven since Roe v. Wade, the path to that kind of world is not through restrictive legislation around abortion. That path is achieved through policies that support women and families, and make it easier for families to thrive in our country.

The legislators who support abortion bans have failed us. They have failed their constituents. They have failed our nation. Their time is up.

See what I mean about the value of a diverse group of people making decisions. Maybe it would have been a very different decision the other day in the Alabama state Senate if women like Eva and Audrey were members. And, I'm sorry to say, that all 6 Republicans that Alabama has sent to Congress are virulently anti-Choice, even though only 31% of Alabama voters agree with the approach that passed the legislature and was signed by the governor. If you'd like to help Eva and Audrey replace two very conservative men in Congress-- one Blue Dog and one Trump-enabling Republican-- please click on the Blue America congressional thermometer on the right and contribute what you can to their campaigns. As Eric Levitz noted last week in New York Magazine, The GOP’s assault on abortion rights is tyranny of the minority. "The government of Alabama just decided that providing an abortion to a 12-year-old girl who was raped by her father is a more serious crime than raping a 12-year-old girl... Although some putatively 'moderate' Republicans like Marco Rubio believe that the state should coerce victims of rape and incest into incubating their abusers’ fetuses, the vast majority of Americans do not. A 2018 Gallup poll found that 77 percent of voters felt abortion should be legal in such circumstances during the first trimester of pregnancy (while 52 percent said it should remains so in the last three months of a pregnancy)... But the notion that a fetus with a heartbeat is a person-- and that the state should therefore treat aborting a pregnancy after six weeks as an act of murder-- is an utterly fringe notion in American life. And this is true not merely at the federal level but also in every U.S. state... [T]here is not a single state in the union where a majority of voters support making abortion illegal in all circumstances... The Alabama GOP isn’t out of step with its own voters merely on the question of fetal personhood. This past July, an NBC News–Wall Street Journal survey asked respondents, 'The Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe versus Wade decision established a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, at least in the first three months of pregnancy. Would you like to see the Supreme Court completely overturn its Roe versus Wade decision, or not?' Fifty-two percent of Republican voters chose 'not.'"

Progressives cannot beat back the GOP’s assault on reproductive rights merely by “winning the argument” over abortion; in many respects, that argument is already won. America does not lack a pro-choice consensus; the pro-choice majority lacks the power to hold Republican lawmakers accountable to that consensus. Thus the fight for reproductive rights in the United States is inextricable from the struggle against the tyrannical rule of our nation’s far-right minority.

That is exactly what electing candidates like Eva Putzova and Audrey Denney is all about. Again, please consider helping them replace the two conservative men who represent their districts in Congress.