Republican Right is Forcing the Birth of the Society it Wants (and Most Americans Don't)

Last night, I was having dinner at the home of a couple I know, both socialists, when our phones started blowing up. The one of us who is a man and had cooked the dinner, in case you are wondering today if feminism has achieved anything, finally looked down at his screen. He said: “They are overturning Roe. The Supreme Court is overturning Roe. Someone leaked the decision.”

What I will never forget about this moment is the face of the woman across the table from me, whose jaw dropped and froze. I am pretty sure that I looked the same. I knew it was the moment to say something meaningful, and I seemed to have lost access to my vocabulary and the capacity to feel anything.

Memo to radical conservative activists: despite your wettest fantasies, “libs” don’t cry at moments like this. We get angry, really angry. And we fight. Although we have had many reasons to come for you in the past five years, you just united us for the midterms.

Congratulations, boy-os: the gloves are off.

Let’s look at the facts here. When this decision becomes final, and it will become final, as Oriana Gonzalez writes at Axios, “Abortion would immediately become illegal in at least 13 states…and more would likely follow suit quickly.” Currently, 18 states explicitly protect the right to choose, legislation that has been hustled through Democratic legislatures in the last eight months, while 19 neither ban nor protect the procedure. Five of these neutral states, including Florida, are in the Deep South, and all except, perhaps, North Carolina are likely to flip to Texas-style bans to drive turnout in the fall.

Let’s be clear about something else. Outlawing abortion is the outcome of a radical conservative minority. The success of this minority has been entirely driven by megadonors and organizations that create voter turnout through disinformation and motivating extremists. The notion that a cluster of cells that cannot survive outside a human host, one that has no heart, functioning organs, or nervous system, is a “baby” and an “innocent child” that feels pain is a lie. In many ways, it is the modern GOP’s original disinformation campaign.