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Indivisible Unpacked

Countering Republican Talking Points on Abortion

Conservative activists spent almost 50 years focused on one goal above all others: overturning Roe v. Wade, and making forced birth the law of the land. To achieve that goal, they waged a decades-long campaign to pack the federal judiciary with hundreds of far-right extremist judges, and it worked: three radical SCOTUS judges, appointed by a president who lost the popular vote, overturned Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Now, over ⅓ of Americans no longer have local access to reproductive care.

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  • What You Need to Know

    • What You Need to Know

    1. Abortion is essential healthcare. When it’s denied, people die. The decades-long pursuit of abortion bans by Republicans is a violation of human rights and a death sentence for millions of Americans. It’s not hyperbole to say plainly that the MAGA assault on choice is threatening the lives of pregnant people.
    2. The Dobbs decision was just the first step in Republicans’ plans to institute a total ban on abortion. The situation is dire. Nearly half of states had “trigger laws” that banned or limited abortion immediately after Roe was overturned, and large areas of the country no longer have abortion access. And many of these laws DON’T include an exception for rape, incest, or the health of the parent. But forced-birth advocates don’t want to stop there: their ultimate goal is a nationwide abortion ban.
    3. “Leave it to the states to decide” was a lie. MAGA Republicans claimed that they were just returning decisions about abortion law to the states, and that the federal government shouldn’t play a role in social issues. But it took them only a few months to introduce a bill banning abortion nationwide in Congress.
    4. The right-wing agenda has made pregnancy dangerous and expensive—there’s nothing pro-life about it. Decades of Republican attacks on safety-net programs have left childbearing Americans uniquely unprotected. The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate in the wealthy world, and with no mandated sick leave for those experiencing pregnancy-related health issues, no guarantee of pre- and post-natal healthcare, and no national childcare programs, Republicans are forcing births while punishing the child and parent.
    5. The Republican position on abortion is deeply unpopular. Legal abortion is supported by 80% of the American public, and voters oppose the overturn of Roe by a whopping 30-point margin. Voter registrations by women have skyrocketed, and the first ballot measures that would have limited abortion all failed, even in states like Kansas.  This is both a moral issue and a winning issue—and we will win.
  • Who’s Impacted

    • Who’s Impacted

    The Republican attack on abortion is impacting all of us—even if you’re in a blue state. As more Republican legislatures enact total bans, clinics in other states are stretched thin, leaving patients seeking any kind of reproductive care at risk and in need. 

    Abortion bans don’t stop abortions from happening – wealthier, whiter communities have always found a way to get abortion care when needed. Poor and rural communities and communities of color are less likely to have private insurance and healthcare, and less likely to have the resources to travel to receive care. Instead, they’re more often forced into traumatic, unsafe situations that can cause lasting damage.

    We can already look to states like Texas to see the impact of these laws – and it’s gruesome and tragic. Pregnant people experiencing major healthcare crises haven’t been able to receive treatment because doctors and hospitals are so afraid of facing retaliation, harassment, and ruinous lawsuits. 

    In one particularly cruel and horrifying example, a 10 year-old girl was raped, and then forced to travel to another state to receive abortion care – and both the child and the doctor who took care of her were then targeted for public harassment by heartless MAGA Republicans bent on scoring political points, even at the expense of a traumatized child.

  • What’s Behind the Scenes

    • What’s Behind the Scenes

    For five decades, right wing forces have coordinated across factional lines to build this moment. Archconservatives, elite think tanks, and cynical politicians worked in concert to raise money, electoralize bodily autonomy, and reshape the courts into their primary tool in executing their ideological agenda. Finally, modern MAGA Republicans won the ultimate prize by stealing the Supreme Court and setting us on a path to overturn Roe.

    • The core conservative base of the party kept the issue alive for fifty years. After Roe and Casey, the Republicans recognized abortion as a wedge issue they could use to generate outrage and fundraising. It became a core identity issue for the right and a litmus test for Republican candidates. Grassroots and astroturf movements relied on disinformation about abortion and exercised aggressive political pressure to keep their politicians closely aligned. 
    • Elite D.C. think tanks funneled money to anti-abortion candidates and promoted lawyers and judges with an ideological mission to unravel reproductive freedom. At the expense of democratic norms and institutional safeguards, groups like the Heritage Foundation worked with Republican leadership to break the Senate and the Supreme Court in order to stack the judicial branch with right-wing ideologues. These unelected judges were willing to lie to members of Congress during their confirmation hearings in order to steal a majority on the highest court in the nation. Why? Because they knew that, if left up to voters, abortion would be protected as a right.
    • Cynical politicians and MAGA extremists used Roe as a wedge to drive fundraising and base enthusiasm. In the years after Roe, conservative power players aligned with evangelical groups like the Moral Majority to gain control in Republican politics. Even as the nation as a whole was—and is—solidly pro-choice, they moved to enact a strict anti-abortion agenda as part of a broader culture war strategy. Party leaders benefited from abortion scare tactics that turned out an energized base and enticed millions in campaign donations. Now, MAGA Republicans are rushing to outdo one another in passing draconian laws that will kill pregnant people.
  • Why It’s Important

    • Why It’s Important

    The loss of Roe, and with it constitutional protections for our bodily autonomy, is a paradigm-shifting moment in American politics. There’s no right more fundamental than control of your own body, and the Republican Supreme Court obliterated it amidst a broader rollback of rights for Americans. 

    This moment is both a culmination of a decades-long fight, and just the beginning. In the coming months and years, we will see Republican efforts to ban  birth control and restrict access to contraceptives. The endgame is clear: a small, extremist minority imposing their will on the majority, and the end of reproductive freedom.

    In the long term, Republicans are already talking about what’s next, and it’s shocking. It’s not just about contraception: trans rights, “don’t say gay” laws, same-sex relationships—even the nationwide right to interracial marriage is now under attack, using the same backwards legal reasoning that Justice Alito has used to throw out the half-century of precedent enshrined in Roe. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

  • How We Talk About It

    • How We Talk About It

    1. Reproductive freedom is non-negotiable. The freedom to make our own healthcare choices is a bedrock American value, and no politician has the right to interfere in decisions that should be between a patient and their doctor.
    2. If Republicans win Congress in November, they will pass a national abortion ban. With only two months left until the mid-terms, Lindsey Graham said it himself: “If we take back the House and the Senate, I can assure you we’ll have a vote on our bill.” This extreme position isn’t about restoring states’ rights—it’s about denying our rights.
    3. The loss of Roe is an unprecedented, radical decision made by a hijacked Supreme Court. Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump installed three MAGA loyalists onto the highest court in the land for lifetime appointments, and each of them misled the Senate on the question of abortion. In order to repair this damage, we must rebalance the Court by expanding it.
    4. The Supreme Court did not act alone. Republican politicians at every level of government have been working toward this moment for years, and are now cheering on the passage of abortion bans at the state and national level. Many of them are on the ballot this November.
    5. MAGA Republicans are using this ruling to unravel more rights. In his concurrence in the Dobbs decision, Justice Clarence Thomas explicitly called for the court to revisit the right to contraception, same-sex marriage, and even same-sex relationships. Republicans have put it all on the chopping block.
    6. Freedom of speech and the right to travel? Not if it’s about abortion. Forced-birth advocates are throwing the First Amendment out the window, proposing criminal penalties for anyone who provides information over the phone or online about abortion care, or even maintains a website that advocates for choice. And their MAGA Republican supporters in Congress are helping them, refusing to pass crucial legislation safeguarding our personal freedoms.
  • What Else Can We Do?

    • What Else Can We Do?

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