Editor’s note: This commentary is by Judith Levine, a writer and activist from Hardwick.
[T]he photo of Bernie Sanders at a campaign rally beside Heath Mello, Omaha, Nebraska’s anti-choice Democratic mayoral candidate, says it all. In four decades of political life, Sanders has voted consistently for reproductive rights. Yet he has never understood, and has once again demonstrated that he intends never to understand, that the possession of a uterus may never be grounds for second-class citizenship. Women’s bodily autonomy is not, as Sanders characterized it, just “one issue” that can be strategically sidelined for political gain.
NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue said it eloquently and succinctly last week: Access to safe, legal, affordable, universally accessible abortion “is not a ‘single issue’ or a ‘social issue.’ It is a proxy for women to have control over our lives, our family’s lives, our economic well-being, our dignity, and human rights.”
Criticism in advance of the rally did not move Sanders to change his plans to appear with Mello as part of a national unity sweep for the Democratic Party. Instead, he and party leaders doubled down on their unnecessary decision to get behind a flawed local candidate. These apologists noted that in spite of personal opposition to abortion, Mello has pledged to uphold the law protecting women’s access to abortion if elected. But when Mello was in elected office and as a legislator had the opportunity to uphold the law, he voted to change it in order to make abortion more onerous to obtain.
A week later, in The Nation, D.D. Guttenplan provided a more nuanced picture of Mello’s role in Nebraskan reproductive politics, interviewing some pro-choice activists in the state who argued, essentially, that it was more pro-choice than outside critics had made it look. But before the rally, neither Bernie nor the Democrats had even thought to look into the issue. Having failed to look, they then refused to retract their endorsements once they got wind of Mello’s numerous radical anti-abortion bills and votes. And, having relegated women’s rights to an afterthought, they exacerbated the oversight by turning it into political principle.
Sanders, both as candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee and now as its de facto progressive torchbearer, has distinguished economic equality from “social issues,” including abortion rights — the former a set of principles from which no party member, particularly no progressive, may diverge, and the later from which they may. While granting wide latitude to Mello, Sanders recently dismissed Jon Ossoff — the Democrat who nearly flipped former Republican Rep. Tom Price’s Georgia district — as “not a progressive,” in part because he didn’t talk about single-payer health care.
The Democrats must cease demanding that women compromise our economic, social, sexual — and existential — equality in the name of party unity.
The party has largely done the same. In response to the Mello dustup, even House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi reiterated that while the Democrats are officially pro-choice, they welcome members who are anti. Arguably, granting its imprimatur to anti-choice Democrats is as damaging as Republicans’ straight-out attack on abortion, because it makes opposition to choice look like a widely held, bipartisan position. In fact, a recent Pew study found that a majority of Americans support Roe v Wade, including 84 percent of Democrats. Meanwhile, according to Gallup, only 73 percent of Democrats support a federally funded single-payer health care system, one of Sanders’ apparent criteria for progressivism.
In fact, for women there’s no distinction between reproductive freedom and economic equality; a “large and growing body of literature” confirms the link between the ability to determine whether and when to have children and educational, social, and economic benefits for women. Access to abortion affects poor women disproportionately. As Sejal Singh wrote in an excellent piece on Feministing:
“Nearly 70 percent of women who obtain abortions live below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, often because they cannot afford to care for a (or another) child. . . . The landmark “Turnaway Study” tracked women across 21 states who sought but were denied abortion care; researchers found that “women who carried an unwanted pregnancy to term are three times more likely than women who receive an abortion to be below the poverty level two years later.”
Forcing women to have babies against their will was one of the vilest aspects of America’s foundational crime, slavery. And just as mass incarceration is a modern iteration of legal racial subjugation, the slow re-criminalization of abortion is the 21st century form of the sanctioned violation of women’s bodily integrity. In 2015, 32-year-old Purvi Patel (not incidentally, a woman of color) was sentenced in Indiana to 20 years in prison for killing her baby in a self-induced late-term abortion. A judge overturned the “feticide” conviction but upheld a charge of felony neglect of a dependent; she deemed Patel’s 18 months already served as appropriate punishment.
The Democrats must cease demanding that women compromise our economic, social, sexual — and existential — equality in the name of party unity. And no one, not even St. Bernie, should be credited with the mantle of “progressive” if he does not defend women’s reproductive freedom as an inviolable pillar of his or her values.
