Abortion Stories

[BoSoxGal]

Everything I’m reading and the polling I’m hearing about on the programs I watch seem to indicate that there will be a massive showing of pussy hat types at the polls in November - largely driven by the Hobbs decision and the consequent draconian abortion ban trigger laws going into effect, and also by the threat of MAGA fascism settling in if those motherfuckers get control of Congress again. I guess McConnell and his buddies shouldn’t have celebrated Hobbs by saying out loud that they’d love to see a federal abortion ban. Women and decent men were listening you pricks!

I dunno I have been feeling a little bit hopeful in recent days - I feel like it’s really truly possible that abortion will save America. Very fucking ironic considering the last 40+ years of right wing evangelical manufactured strife over the issue, but it turns out that when the nitty meets the gritty, America is pro-choice.

Please and thank all the 300,004,200 gods! And my fellow Americans, who I hope will get their butts to the polls!

[Burning Petard]

OK I just went over to Amazon and bought the first listed pink pussy hat. Less than 10 dollars. I am gonna wear it for the Delaware primary September 13, and if I can get away with it, for the general election in November. Delaware rules say no buttons or attire advocating a particular political position when voting.

snailgate

[Jarlaxle]

Rental van reserved for election day.

[MGMcAnick]

If you haven't already read your allotted NYT freebies for the month, or you subscribe, you might enjoy this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/03/opin ... e-roe.html

Heartland Author Sarah Smarsh (They were very economical in letter usage for her name.) grew up a few miles down the road, and 30 years, from me. I didn't know her immediate family, but I think one of her father's older brothers rode the same school bus I did one or two years. Hers was a truly dysfunctional poor family.

[BoSoxGal]

This good news deserves to be seen even by those past the article limit:

Women Are So Fired Up to Vote, I’ve Never Seen Anything Like It

Sept. 3, 2022

By Tom Bonier

Mr. Bonier is a Democratic political strategist and the C.E.O. of TargetSmart, a data and polling firm.

I’ve watched Americans in recent years acclimate to some very grim realities. Especially since the ascension of Donald Trump, numerous tragedies and extreme policies have been met with little political consequence: schools targeted by mass murderers, immigrants treated as subhuman and autocratic regimes around the globe affirmed as allies. While Mr. Trump did fail in his re-election bid, a swing of just over 20,000 votes in the three states with the narrowest margins would have produced a win for him, and Democrats hold razor-thin majorities in the House and the Senate.

In the weeks following the leak of a draft ruling in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, which all but guaranteed the end of abortion protections under Roe v. Wade, it initially seemed this pattern would hold. About three weeks after the leak, a CNN analyst claimed that “the Republican wave is building fast” heading into the midterm elections. In late May, the highly respected election analysts at the Cook Political Report increased their estimate of how many House seats the G.O.P. would gain. The discussion was not focused on whether the November general election would be a “red wave” but rather just how big of a wave it would be.

But once the actual Dobbs decision came down, everything changed. For many Americans, confronting the loss of abortion rights was different from anticipating it. In my 28 years analyzing elections, I’ve never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics: Women are registering to vote in numbers I’ve never witnessed. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is, especially in light of the cycles of tragedy and eventual resignation of recent years. This is a moment to throw old political assumptions out the window and to consider that Democrats could buck historic trends this cycle.

One of the first big signs that things had changed came from Kansas. After voters there defeated a constitutional amendment that would have removed abortion protections in the state in a landslide, I sought to understand how activists could have accomplished such an astounding upset. While it takes several weeks for state election officials to produce full reports on who voted in any given election, there was an immediate clue. I looked at new voter registrants in the state since the June 24 Dobbs decision. As shocking as the election result was to me, what I found was more striking than any single election statistic I can recall discovering throughout my career. Sixty-nine percent of those new registrants were women. In the six months before Dobbs, women outnumbered men by a three-point margin among new voter registrations. After Dobbs, that gender gap skyrocketed to 40 points. Women were engaged politically in a way that lacked any known precedent.

Repeating the Kansas analysis across several other states, a clear pattern emerged. Nowhere were the results as stark as they were there, but no other state was facing the issue with the immediacy of an August vote on a constitutional amendment. What my team and I did find was large surges in women registering to vote relative to men, when comparing the period before June 24 and after.

The pattern was clearest in states where abortion access was most at risk, and where the electoral stakes for abortion rights this November were the highest. The states with the biggest surges in women registering post-Dobbs were deep red Kansas and Idaho, with Louisiana emerging among the top five states. Key battleground states also showed large increases, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio, which are all facing statewide races in which the fate of abortion access could be decided in November.

The surge in women registering and voting helped the Democrat Pat Ryan prevail over Marc Molinaro — one of the more credible Republican recruits this cycle — in New York’s fiercely contested 19th Congressional District last month. This is not the type of performance you would see in a red wave election. Among the mail and early votes cast in the district, women outnumbered men by an 18-point margin, despite accounting for about 52 percent of registered voters.

With over two months until Election Day, uncertainty abounds. Election prognostication relies heavily on past precedent. Yet there is no precedent for an election centered around the removal of a constitutional right affirmed a half-century before. Every poll we consume over the closing weeks of this election will rely on a likely voter model for which we have no benchmark.

The stakes are high. Going into the midterms this fall, the G.O.P. need only gain six seats in the House and one seat in the Senate to retake control of those chambers, thwarting any hope of advancing federal abortion protections or any number of other liberal priorities.

Already, several Republicans seem to be sensing that they’re in trouble. In Arizona, the Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, an ardent abortion opponent, recently wiped language advocating extreme abortion restrictions from his website.

Whether the coming elections will be viewed as a red wave, a Roe wave or something in between will be decided by the actions of millions of Americans — especially, it seems, American women. As Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority decision in Dobbs: “Women are not without electoral or political power.” He was right about that. Republicans might soon find out just how much political power they have.

Tom Bonier is a Democratic political strategist and the C.E.O. of TargetSmart, a data and polling firm. He teaches political science at Howard University and is a member of S.E.I.U. Local 500.

[Bicycle Bill]

While it's nice to see all these new voter registrations, it does leave me with a couple questions, the first of which is why weren't they already registered to vote prior to this?   (In contrast, I registered to vote as soon as I turned 18 in late November 1972 — if I remember correctly, I did it right after stopping at the Post Office to register with Selective Services — even though the next significant election I'd be able to vote in wouldn't be until the spring primaries in April 1974, over a year away)   Although better late than never, I suppose.

Secondly, if the writer's assessment is correct, these new registrants appear to be people who are motivated by the actions taken since Roe v. Wade was struck down — single-issue voters, in other words.  So what will happen to all these new voters when and if the Republican Taliban is defeated, Roe v. Wade is reinstated, and this particular issue is resolved?  Will they remain involved and active, or will we see a new wave of disinterested, apathetic citizens, and a return to elections where a turnout of maybe 20% of all eligible voters is considered outstanding?

-"BB"-

[Big RR]

Post Office Bill? I recall around the same time having to go to the Draft Board Office to register; I think registration ended around 74-75, and the Post Office started up in the 80s. Was the draft board in the post office building?

[ex-khobar Andy]

Just make sure you don't have to wait on the Group W bench.

[Bicycle Bill]

Post Office Bill? I recall around the same time having to go to the Draft Board Office to register; I think registration ended around 74-75, and the Post Office started up in the 80s. Was the draft board in the post office building?

Yes, it was.  At that time the SSA office for my community was in a second floor office inside the 1880s-era "Federal Building", as it was originally designated (although as I was growing up, just about everyone in town referred to it as "The Post Office") — along with all the recruitment offices for the various branches of the Armed Services, now that I stop to think of it.  It was the first building I ever saw that had revolving doors, although I don't know if those were part of the original design or not.


(this picture is from the mid-1970s, shortly before its demolition ... a corner of the building constructed to replace it is just visible at the right-hand edge of the photo)

Incidentally, the tower was designed to be functional as well as decorative.  Originally it housed offices of the Signal Service, an early branch of the US Army that later became the National Weather Bureau.  Measurements of the weather were made from the roof of the building and flags communicated the information to the townspeople and the river boats (then as now, the riverfront was less than a half-mile away to the west, or left, of the building) that passed the city.

Unfortunately, the building was torn down in 1976 after construction of a newer, more modern Post Office building, but its loss, coming as it did so soon after the demolition of several other buildings dating back to the 1880s, including the original Public Library building, County Courthouse, and City Hall, inspired the formation of a Historic Preservation Society within our city that is still active yet today.

-"BB"-

[Big RR]

Interesting Bill; our draft board was in in something like a nondescript professional building, with two very surly receptionists (I guess they probably did get a lot of shit then) and a guy in the back office who I did not see. They took the information and gave me a deferment form (but, as the draft/war was winding down then, I didn't use it--actually I got a 1 D status due to enrollment in ROTC). Not sure when it closed, but I think there were several years when registration was not required, and then there was the mail in registration beginning in the 80s.