Threats
to abortion rights like the Comstock Act don’t fit the narrative the Biden
campaign has rolled out, one in which abortion is a winning issue, as shown by multiple
states passing ballot initiatives to protect abortion access. “Since Roe
was overturned, every time reproductive freedom has been on the ballot, the
people of America have voted for freedom,” Kamala Harris declared in Wisconsin this week.
These
ballot initiatives, as successful as they have been, may be repeating some of
the mistakes in Roe, by failing to affirm a much broader right to abortion.
Some reproductive rights advocates want to do exactly that: establish a right to abortion that is not contingent on
unnecessary or unjust restrictions, and to ensure meaningful access. They want
to protect the right to later abortion, specifically, and instead are faced
with ballot initiatives with viability limits, like those supported by some
Planned Parenthood and ACLU affiliates, as Susan Rinkunas reported
at The Guardian this week. They are pushing back on the notion that it’s
not strategic to seek more
than Roe. As Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, vice-president of communications at
the National Institute for Reproductive Health, said, “There is an enormous amount of
pressure being put on leaders across states to run ballots whether they are good
or bad.”
As
much as the Biden campaign wants to use the fear of our present post-Roe
reality to turn out voters—leveraging
enraging stories of abortion denied—it neglects the basic reality that Roe
was never enough. Codifying Roe is not enough. You can’t run on
defending Roe the way Democrats ran on defending Roe for decades,
ultimately failing to keep this promise. The more these current slogans are
repeated, the more it becomes clear that Joe Biden isn’t running on Roe—he’s
running on “Donald Trump ended Roe v. Wade.” There is a difference.