This recent case is but one illuminating snapshot of the state of abortion rights in the United States today. The broader picture — a detailed examination of which can be found in the webpages of the Guttmacher Institute — will have to be summarized: “Since 2010, the US abortion landscape has grown increasingly restrictive as more states become hostile to abortion rights. Between 2010 and 2016, states enacted 338 new abortion restrictions, which account for nearly 30 percent of the 1,142 abortion restrictions enacted by states since the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade.” Even this doesn’t capture the nearly two hundred abortion providers that have closed their doors since 2011. Let alone the countless other stories just as horrifying, or worse, as that of the anonymous twelve-year-old girl from Alabama. [...]
In fact, the strategy of opening the doors to anti-choice Democrats in order to “fit the district” is actually rooted in a profoundly elitist notion that people in certain parts of the country couldn’t be swayed by left-wing arguments around abortion — despite the fact that women all over the country and from all religious backgrounds need and try to get them. [...]
Parker makes it clear that if a woman cannot be trusted to make decisions about her reproduction, she has no control over her life and future. While Democrats — and organizations who support and even provide abortion care — have continuously ceded ground to the notion that there is something morally objectionable about abortions or abortion care, the Left needs to argue that what is truly immoral and cruel is forcing women, trans men, and girls to stay pregnant even a moment longer than they want to be or, worse, forcing them to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. Any argument to the contrary amounts to the policing of and punishment for a person’s sexual activity — a violation of one’s bodily autonomy.
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