At the DNC, Women Took the Night

And they made one thing clear: GOP abortion bans are deadly.

On Monday, Democrats kicked off their convention, and wow was it a sharp contrast to what Republicans put on display. It felt like a celebration, not a slog of resentment and anger. And the stand-out speakers were the women.

There was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the Democratic Party’s most promising young talents, who speaks about class, inequality, and work in incredibly compelling terms — without adopting the right-wing framing of the “working class” being male and white, and who has very effectively pushed the Democratic Party to the left. There was Hillary Clinton, who should be winding down her second term, who gave a barn-burner of a speech making the historical salience of this moment clear. And, most stunningly, there were three women who spoke to the necessity of safe, legal abortion: Two who found their lives threatened by abortion bans brought about by Trump’s Supreme Court, and one who had an abortion after being impregnated by her step father when she was just 12.

Amanda Zurawski and her husband Josh took the stage to tell the story of their much-wanted daughter Willow, who was conceived after fertility treatments. Zurawski was 18 weeks pregnant when her water broke and doctors told her Willow would not survive. But because the fetus still had a heartbeat, and because Zurawski lived in Texas which has a strict abortion ban, doctors couldn’t do anything to help her. They sent her home and told her to come back when she was closer to death — then they could take extraordinary measures and hopefully save her life. She waited three days before she was so feverish and ill with sepsis, a life-threatening infection, that doctors would finally terminate her pregnancy.

Kaitlyn Joshua lived in Louisiana was told by a physician’s group in Baton Rouge that they wouldn’t even book her in for basic prenatal care until she was at least 12 weeks along — because they didn’t want to be investigated or potentially liable if a woman in their care miscarried. When she was 11 weeks pregnant, she started bleeding. She was turned away from two emergency rooms, and health workers wouldn’t even tell her if she was miscarrying or not. Despite severe pain and heavy bleeding, Joshua was repeatedly sent home and refused the kind of miscarriage management — abortion — that would have been offered to her in any state where abortion wasn’t criminalized.

Hadley Duvall spoke last. She had an abortion before the Supreme Court overturned Roe, and it was, she says, a life-saver — and the first time she heard that she had options. She was impregnated by her rapist stepfather when she was just 12. Being able to end that pregnancy gave her the rest of her life back, and she’s dedicated much of it to speaking out in favor of abortion rights, even though that means telling an incredibly painful and deeply stigmatized story. Donald Trump, Duvall said, calls abortion bans “a beautiful thing.” And Duvall asked: “What is so beautiful about a child having to carry her parent’s child?”

I’m totally in awe of these three women who stood up and spoke out about some of the worst and scariest moments of their lives. I am also furious that they had to be on that stage.

These women and their stories are, to borrow from JD Vance, inconvenient for Republicans who continue to insist that abortion bans don’t put women’s lives at risk. But the truth is that most of the abortion bans on the books right now do not include exceptions for rape and incest — they would force raped little girls like Hadley Duvall carry dangerous pregnancies to term, and birth their rapists’ babies. They give rapists more rights than the women and girls they attack, and they adopt the same logic as those rapists: Women’s bodies don’t belong to women.

These are the stakes: To borrow from Duvall, do we want to make a child carry her parent’s child? Do we want to make women wait until they’re septic before they’re allowed to end doomed pregnancies? Do we want women, any women, to be forced to become mothers against their will?

The demise of abortion rights and the GOP’s embrace of harsh, misogynist pro-natalist rhetoric that mocks and demeans women without children while also suggesting that women with children are meant for little more than childbearing and childrearing is having the interesting effect of pushing Democrats to more overtly embrace not just abortion rights, but a host of reproductive choices. Several speakers at the DNC tonight, including Hillary Clinton and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, spoke about reproductive rights in terms of choosing to have children and choosing not to — a subtle nod to the “childless cat ladies” so maligned by JD Vance. Deciding not to have children was placed on the same moral plane as deciding to have them, and that is certainly not the usual thing you hear from mainstream Democratic politicians.

The two women who spoke about their horrific treatment under GOP abortion bans were carrying very wanted pregnancies, and it’s impossible to not feel your heart break for them. Hadley Duvall’s horrific circumstances should sicken and appall anyone, and I think you’d have to be pretty monstrous to argue that she should have been forced, again, to use her young body in the service of someone else’s desires (which is exactly what the anti-abortion movement does argue).

Absent from the stage were women who have abortions for the reason most women have abortions: Not because of tragedy or medical emergency, but because they simply do not want to be pregnant — because they can’t afford another child, or because they don’t want their life derailed, or for a host of other reasons. It makes sense that the DNC gave the mic to women whose experiences illustrate just how extreme and dangerous abortion bans are for every American; these stories are compelling for a reason. But I was also glad to hear a little whisper of support for women who make the decision not to become mothers. No matter what JD Vance says, these women have a stake in the country’s future too. And they’ve been alternately ignored or condemned for far too long.

It was nice to see the DNC standing up for women who are mothers, women who nearly died because they wanted to be mothers, women who want to become mothers, and women who choose not to become mothers, especially in contrast to a GOP that sees women as little more than incubators, helpmeets, and caregivers. We are, after all, so much more than our capacity to reproduce.

xx Jill