Last year, abortion rights were torn from the U.S. Constitution by a right-wing Supreme Court packed with religious fundamentalists by former President Donald Trump.
Months later, however, Michigan progressives won a major battle against the extremists when they passed an amendment — Proposal 3 — to the state constitution to guarantee a woman’s right to choose.
But, this year, additional abortion rights in Michigan are threatened by those opposing the “Reproductive Health Act,” a package of 11 bills in the state legislature. These foes seek to maintain unnecessary regulations designed to discourage choice.
Nevertheless, on the national level, the Michigan momentum for abortion rights through voting is rippling through other states, including neighbors like Ohio and Wisconsin.
In local elections this fall and in the national election in 2024, Republicans may learn that their short-term, pyrrhic judicial “victory” in the Dobbs decision of 2022 has become a long-term burden to their electoral success.
“Since the Dobbs decision, people are motivated to vote for abortion rights without interference from politicians,” said Dr. Sarah Wallett, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of Michigan, in a telephone interview with Metro Times. “I do think that that’s going to continue.”
Perhaps. But, also continuing is the stiff-necked and propaganda-packed opposition that uses scare tactics as weapons. For instance: A recent editorial in the Detroit News offered a headline that barked: “Bills Would Make Michigan Abortion Haven.”
The editorial said, in part: “The legislation would irresponsibly repeal requirements that doctors report abortions and any complications or deaths resulting from the procedure to the state.”
This is not quite true, Dr. Wallett said.
“This is intentionally misleading and it is politically motivating disinformation,” she said, adding that deaths during abortions — they are rare — would continue to be reported to Michigan’s Maternal Mortality Surveillance Program.
Current reporting rules, Dr. Wallett said, “scrutinize and stigmatize abortion care” in order “to shame abortion care.” That’s what must be changed, she said.
She got backing from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer who recently called the Reproductive Health Act “common-sense legislation to repeal politically motivated, medically unnecessary restrictions on abortion.”
But a fellow female Michigan Democrat could kill the bill. She is State Rep. Karen Whitsett of Detroit, who objects to — among other things — using Medicaid funds for abortions instead of for low-income seniors, she said.
To think like this, Rep. Whitsett must accept the weak logic of a false choice. Pregnant women and poor seniors both deserve health care; it should not be just one or the other. Her party holds a narrow, two-vote margin in both houses in Lansing thanks in part to voter turnout supporting abortion rights in 2022.
In an interview with CBS Detroit (Channel 62), Whitsett projected a pleasant and reasonable mien. She said she underwent an abortion herself after a rape “so I’m not trying to put undue obstacles there for anyone.” However, she said 24 hours is a reasonable time to make a victim wait.
Whitsett added that she is one of seven Democrats in the state house against the proposal as it stands. She added, however, “I’m willing to compromise. I’m in support of the package. I’m not opposed to anything.”
Trump expressed similar sentiments — only louder — while campaigning in Iowa.
He keeps telling anti-abortion supporters they are in a good negotiating position and urges Republicans to compromise on what he calls abortion “exceptions” for rape, incest, or life of the mother as well as for an unspecified number of weeks into the pregnancy.
“Without the exceptions, it is very difficult to win elections,” Trump said. “We would probably lose the majorities in 2024 . . . and, perhaps, the presidency itself.”
He won’t name a number, but Trump has said Florida’s harsh limit of six weeks is a “terrible mistake.” This has angered the hard-core right-wingers.
In one of the few honest things Trump has ever said, he promised in his successful 2016 campaign for president to appoint Supreme Court justices who would eliminate the right to abortion decided almost a half-century before in Roe v. Wade.
With the connivance of Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, Trump got his three picks for the nine-chair panel. His evangelical supporters rejoiced when they swung the Court against a woman’s constitutional right to choose.
But the zealots are skeptical now that Trump is urging a compromise. They fear he just doesn’t get it. After years of negotiating for gambling casinos that go bankrupt and for a “Trump University” that was a financial scam, Trump thinks everyone has a price point.
He now seems sincerely surprised at the steadfastness of his own supporters, who don’t believe in negotiating with Satan’s murderous sinners. They must be punished on behalf of God’s holy wrath!
Trump’s demagogic, hot-button rhetoric still offers to his mob his red-meat verbal spurts like “ripping the fetus from the womb and killing the baby after birth.”
But you can tell his heart isn’t in it. He knows this issue drives voters — especially women — away from him and Republicans and conservatives and toward Democrats and liberals and President Joe Biden.
Sensing this, Biden last week said: “Let’s be clear: Donald Trump is responsible for ending Roe v. Wade. And if you vote for him, he’ll go even further.”
And in a piece titled “Could Abortion Rights Become More Secure After the Fall of Roe?” the New York Times Magazine drew insight regarding the electoral breeze from Steven Mitchell, a veteran Republican pollster in Michigan.
“The pro-life side had it easy when abortion was legal,” Mitchell told the Times. “But things went crazy when people saw that was taken away . . . Proposal 3 drove the entire election.”
He implied the issue drives the young vote, which skews to the left and is a difficult demographic to cultivate and motivate.
“Think about who gets abortions,” Mitchell said.
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