Jessica - I have tremendous respect for your writing, deep research, anctivism, and commitment. Which is why I’m a paid subscriber (and purchaser of that amazing merch). So wanted to flag that the abortion ad from that hack group, Progress for Action may be fun to watch but it’s counter to everything activists, leaders, and folks campaigning to pass the repro ballot measure in Ohio are trying to do. And it’s not even effective. They did something similar during the No on 1 effort, and as someone who saw the ad tests first hand, it’s not even effective in moving voters. It’s a stunt for them to raise money off the backs of folks on the frontlines of this fight. They don’t coordinate or work with the campaign, they’re like the Lincoln Project of repro. In it to raise money and their profile. Maybe reconsider lifting them up and validating their work. Thanks again for all you do.
That is very useful information; thank you. Voters who are less aware of what's going on might find that ad to be way over the top, so I think it would be more effective to run ads with real people's stories. Hopefully it at least doesn't backfire and hurt the campaign.
A Republican argument I've heard first-hand a couple of times now is, "but why shouldn't men have a say in whether [a fetus] is aborted?" as if men don't also want women to have abortions. Does anyone have any stats about this, in terms of the number of men who are also totally on board with the abortions they've created the circumstances for?
Good question, and yes it would really help if we would hear from men who support their partners (who I hope are still the majority) rather than only these miserable creatures who have an axe to grind with women. It would be great if men would stand up and say, these assholes don't speak for me. Which is true on any feminist issue.
No one should trust Trump. It's jaw-dropping that he has the audacity to critizice Desantis when he's the one who camaigned over and over to appoint judgets to overturn Roe. And he did just that. And he went on live TV with Chris Matthews and said the woman-- and not the man (you can find the transcript with a quick Google search) should be punished for an abortion.
Anyone who believes he will be "moderate" on the issue is crazy. CRAZY! He has no inner core. He wil do whatever he needs to to regain power. He'll lie and try to pray on people's ignorance.
Disinformation and misinformation from campaigns and issue organizations are one thing, bad enough. But when the media thinks it's their job to repeat it and amplify it that's another. Everything Republicans say should come with a warning label.
Pretty sure that's sincere but it's hard not to see the potential for sarcasm! :) I notice that women often apologize for speaking their mind, while men have trouble remembering that you don't have to say everything that comes to your mind! (Oh, the irony, Zach :)
-how many indigenous people there are in Oklahoma,
-that native women face the highest rate of rape and sexual assault,
-that Oklahoma's statutes basically force rape survivors to bear their child,
It's infuriating and proof that colonization never ended that there are indigenous pregnant people who are forced to carry their rapist's baby in Oklahoma (and in other states, for that matter).
"Reproductive Freedom For All" is a better name than "National Abortion Rights Action League" anyway, as reproductive freedom affects everyone and not just people who can become pregnant (and yes, there are men who can become pregnant. I know some.).
Texas is a right wing hellscape. My older daughter is now looking at graduate schools, and while UT Austin has a very good astrophysics department, she has ruled it out (as well as pretty much every other school in a red state).
Update: Unfortunately, one of the best astrophysics departments in the entire country is at the University of West Virginia, and that one IS still high on my daughter's list. Basically, it's too good a department for her to rule it out. It's not her number once (Northwestern, in Illinois, remains her top pick), but it's probably number two or three. :-/
Also, the attacks on higher ed there and tenure are going to prevent growth. I work in eduational publishing. Quite a few professors i work with have expressed deep dismay at the state's move to eliminatie tenure. Texas is awful.
When states pass laws to mandate cruelty and stupidity, how long does it take to show up in the data? These states need to suffer the consequences; something has to put pressure on them.
Good. Things like this will add pressure to the Texas legislature (not that higher education is all that critical to them). Make sure that UT knows the reason she is going elsewhere. Also, imagine the terrible potential consequences of the laws of Texas. I would never want a woman of childbearing age to go to Texas for any reason.
I still think any Republican infighting is a good thing. They're almost certainly going to stay united no matter what, but our side at least doesn't need to help them do that.
I guess it's good that the Biden campaign is pissed about the media helping Republicans 🤷 but that complaint is (at least) eight years overdue. Better late than never?
This standoff over funding the government is an interesting watch. I really do think Democrats are going to let them run off this cliff, because Republicans will bear 100% of the blame for the fallout. And I think the impeachment sideshow will hurt them when coupled with this disaster. Consequences are the only thing that will wake some people up.
The NYT and WaPo are two of the worst offenders. The NYT employs some truly awful transphobes and misogynists. They are also the paper of defending the rich and powerful, thus keeping the status quo. They both published multitudinous "But her E-mails and ignored the criminal Trump in the room.
It helps, though, when I'm in a "debate" with conservative friends they start going off about the liberal media -- I then ask "who broke the Hillary email story?" silence. "Michael Schmidt of the NYTimes. Not so liberal, right? "
You are prescient, It hard me very hard because they were my favorite media, They gave us the Pentagon Papers when I was a child, (my mother explained it to me) I thought them a bit stodgy, but on the whole accurate. Since Bezos hired his choice of Exec. Editor (a crony of John Solomon's IIRC.) and the Reagan-fapping Publisher (who ran his library) they frequently lie, and publish Maga-man buzzword headlines with absurd grammar.
The shenanigans in Ohio and Missouri illustrate what I keep saying: the residents of the red states do not have the ability to free themselves from what their state governments are doing to them. It is exactly the same as the 1850s, and that means it is on the rest of us to do something. It should be obvious that they're coming for the rest of us anyway.
I honestly think the people of my state (SC) don’t want to free themselves. I don’t know what we do with that. Yes, we could fight another civil war, but in many respects, the mentality now is what was supposedly defeated then. It didn’t go away. I wish we could force people to not be assholes.
This is very true. I guess I'm thinking of women and girls of childbearing age as being like the slaves were then, trapped by a hostile state. But you're right because if a majority of the population were better than that, Republicans wouldn't win statewide elections. I do hope that growth from outsiders can eventually change some of these states. Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas. But some of them are pretty much beyond help.
I feel like the reverse will happen: Moderating influences will choose to leave these states if they can. I'm going to. I've lived in SC for 48 years, and I've had it. You're right that nowhere will be safe if 45 and R's win in 2024.
As to the other part of this conundrum, we have two sides that are convinced they are right. I'm not passing judgment here on which side is right, merely saying that both sides are convinced of their rightness. Beating each other with our senses of rightness hasn't worked, though we humans seem destined to keep repeating this cycle ad nauseam until we annihilate ourselves.
Which is why I've decided to accept that some people will be assholes. No matter how many laws we pass; no matter how many times we try to make something unacceptable; no matter what we try to do to change them, they're always going to be assholes. Our job as liberals is to give people who want to escape these situations the means to get out, not to assume that everyone in the asshole camp needs to be rescued. (To use the right's words, everyone in our camp needs to be "saved.")
I'd prefer to see blue states and reproductive freedom groups give assistance to families or people of childbearing age who don't want to live in red states: help them move to a blue state, find jobs and housing, etc. I'm not wasting another ounce of energy on people like my mother. I don't introduce her to my gay friends, because I love my gay friends and don't want to expose them to her. I haven't introduced her to my Black sister-in-law or bi-racial niece and nephew, because she believes God cursed dark-skinned people, and it's a sin for Blacks and whites to marry, and she'd likely outright say that to them. If she wants to go to that church and stuff her brain full of garbage, I'm not doing a thing to stop her. I don't argue with her anymore. But I've tried very hard to spread the word to anyone there that I am a resource if they want to get out (including burning the whole place in Newsweek.)
I'm not giving up on everyone being equal. But I cannot force someone to not be an asshole. I can't. I want to help everyone who wants to leave these environments, and the rest can destroy themselves for all I care. I know this probably isn't a popular view. I don't think the North should've allowed the South to continue to enslave Black people. Yes, fighting a war over it freed enslaved people, but we're still fighting the same fight today. People merely switched tactics to keep up the oppression. It never really stopped. The bloodiest war in our history didn't kill this assholery.
Your mother is a ghoul! :) (but you know that). It's hard because you can only do so much to help people living under an oppressive state, whether it's South Carolina or Russia. So many are going to continue to suffer. As for whether the states can change, I was just thinking of how population growth seems to have at least changed the balance in some of these places, such that for example Georgia voted for Biden and has two Democratic u.s. senators even as Republicans still have a solid hold on the state. So if Atlanta keeps getting newcomers who are at least not the hardcore rural conservatives that still hold power, at some point can they outvote them? The population keeps changing in Texas too, just not enough to make it winnable for Democrats in any race yet. The Carolinas are both growing, and again it's a question of whether the newcomers are more moderate than the state's existing culture. Whereas yes states like Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, etc. are basically fucked. It's a question of what we're willing to tolerate in the same country, (and I guess that's their calculation too). Does allowing the disparity to get better relieve tension or increase tension? Idk, somehow it probably does both.
With so much gerrymandering, I don’t know how many sane people will have to move into a state like SC or TX to make them true democracies. (And hell, SC has always been whacked so I don’t think it votes the way it does by gerrymander.) And yes, Charleston (my city) is a blue dot, but I can drive 30 minutes and feel like I’m in another country. This isn’t just a manner of red-versus-blue states coexisting. It’s the red-and-blue portions of each state. The true red portions aren’t going to change much. When people move to TX, they’re largely moving to cities. Same with GA and SC. If you’ve never driven around the Deep South, it’s no mystery why they want to take things back in time. Many of the places are stuck there. Like you’d question what decade you were in if you didn’t know. So the population growth keeps fueling this urban-v-rural resentment. It might change the makeup of governing bodies, but it’s not solving the underlying problem of these two competing value systems that are irreconcilable in my view.
So true. It's about the two value systems: one, rural and provincial and conservative, and the other, urban, cosmopolitan and liberal and/or progressive. Not all that long ago, the regional divide was probably more important: North vs South, red state vs blue state. But the smaller city and rural areas of Northern states are now voting more like their counterparts in the South, and the large urban areas in the South are starting to vote more like those in the North. Both of those shifts may still have room to run, so the divide will only get more pronounced. As you say, it's now about red vs blue within the same state.
The optimistic view would be that the rural populations aren't really growing, but the metropolitan populations, who tend to be less narrow minded if not necessarily exactly cosmopolitan and liberal, are where the growth is. And also that growth itself is more liberalizing, in that it involves more change, whereas to your point the smaller areas remain frozen in time.
So yes if Texas or the Carolinas are to 'flip', it's going to be because of growth in the large metros. And yes, the combination of geography and gerrymandering means that it's much easier for Democrats to win statewide elections than to win legislatures. That's where it has to start. Democrats will win the governor's races in Georgia or Texas long before they get close in the legislatures. The path in North Carolina is to start winning statewide elections and eventually regain their supreme court, which can curb gerrymandering. South Carolina is the toughest nut of the states I've mentioned, but it's growing more than many other states with similar profiles, and it seemed to me it belongs more with Texas and the Atlantic states than with the inland red states.
And of course the way it will actually work is that once Texas gets close enough that Democrats can actually compete there, the Republican party will be forced to shift. The same thing would happen to Democrats if Republicans were competitive in California or New York. It would make sense that that would be the way the demographics and the generational divide actually effect change, by turning the Republican party into something less repulsive, rather than by turning everything blue. Although the other way is possible if Republicans start losing but refuse to change; there are lots of landslides in American political history, as impossible as that seems to imagine now.
That poor woman's pregnancy story. Even with all the related stories out there the anti's can't grow a heart. Makes the grinch seem good in comparison.
When I talk to anti-abortion people, a lot of them believe exceptions are real. Or they don’t have a grasp of their state’s laws. Or they don’t understand the reproductive process. Or all three. The whole exceptions discussion lets them check out of the minutiae. “Oh, these women have exceptions, so that will save the ones who need them. And I don’t have to think about this anymore.” Which is why the horror stories are so so so important.
I have a sister that is brilliant, that I enjoy conversing with, and one that is... well, educationally adverse. She never could do research properly, and doesn't understand the need to use facts. She got secondhand poisoning from decades of her husband listening to Fox Propaganda Channel. Every time I see her I spend my whole visit deprogramming her, only for it to dissipate with my exit. She cannot retain any facts. It is a lot of effort to distill complicated facts into a simplified version she can understand, and it simply doesn't take.
On the other hand, the kids are better than ever, so there is hope.
They have their own "educational" alternate universe. Nothing will move people like my mother (and there are a lot of people on the right like her.) People in the middle are harder because like you said in another comment, they don't pay attention to politics...until the political impacts them directly. I'm hopeful these harder-hitting pro-choice ads and messaging will reach a few of those people, along with the horror stories.
Jessica - I have tremendous respect for your writing, deep research, anctivism, and commitment. Which is why I’m a paid subscriber (and purchaser of that amazing merch). So wanted to flag that the abortion ad from that hack group, Progress for Action may be fun to watch but it’s counter to everything activists, leaders, and folks campaigning to pass the repro ballot measure in Ohio are trying to do. And it’s not even effective. They did something similar during the No on 1 effort, and as someone who saw the ad tests first hand, it’s not even effective in moving voters. It’s a stunt for them to raise money off the backs of folks on the frontlines of this fight. They don’t coordinate or work with the campaign, they’re like the Lincoln Project of repro. In it to raise money and their profile. Maybe reconsider lifting them up and validating their work. Thanks again for all you do.
That is very useful information; thank you. Voters who are less aware of what's going on might find that ad to be way over the top, so I think it would be more effective to run ads with real people's stories. Hopefully it at least doesn't backfire and hurt the campaign.
A Republican argument I've heard first-hand a couple of times now is, "but why shouldn't men have a say in whether [a fetus] is aborted?" as if men don't also want women to have abortions. Does anyone have any stats about this, in terms of the number of men who are also totally on board with the abortions they've created the circumstances for?
Good question, and yes it would really help if we would hear from men who support their partners (who I hope are still the majority) rather than only these miserable creatures who have an axe to grind with women. It would be great if men would stand up and say, these assholes don't speak for me. Which is true on any feminist issue.
No one should trust Trump. It's jaw-dropping that he has the audacity to critizice Desantis when he's the one who camaigned over and over to appoint judgets to overturn Roe. And he did just that. And he went on live TV with Chris Matthews and said the woman-- and not the man (you can find the transcript with a quick Google search) should be punished for an abortion.
Anyone who believes he will be "moderate" on the issue is crazy. CRAZY! He has no inner core. He wil do whatever he needs to to regain power. He'll lie and try to pray on people's ignorance.
It incenses me that anyone gives 45 a platform. All he does is lie. It’s such a joke. Nobody can interview him.
Disinformation and misinformation from campaigns and issue organizations are one thing, bad enough. But when the media thinks it's their job to repeat it and amplify it that's another. Everything Republicans say should come with a warning label.
Considering he wanted Marla Maples to abort Tiffany back in the day, yes.
Am I the only female chiming in tonight? So good to see a comments list made of male voices!
Pretty sure that's sincere but it's hard not to see the potential for sarcasm! :) I notice that women often apologize for speaking their mind, while men have trouble remembering that you don't have to say everything that comes to your mind! (Oh, the irony, Zach :)
I would also like to state that considering:
-how many indigenous people there are in Oklahoma,
-that native women face the highest rate of rape and sexual assault,
-that Oklahoma's statutes basically force rape survivors to bear their child,
It's infuriating and proof that colonization never ended that there are indigenous pregnant people who are forced to carry their rapist's baby in Oklahoma (and in other states, for that matter).
"Reproductive Freedom For All" is a better name than "National Abortion Rights Action League" anyway, as reproductive freedom affects everyone and not just people who can become pregnant (and yes, there are men who can become pregnant. I know some.).
Texas is a right wing hellscape. My older daughter is now looking at graduate schools, and while UT Austin has a very good astrophysics department, she has ruled it out (as well as pretty much every other school in a red state).
Update: Unfortunately, one of the best astrophysics departments in the entire country is at the University of West Virginia, and that one IS still high on my daughter's list. Basically, it's too good a department for her to rule it out. It's not her number once (Northwestern, in Illinois, remains her top pick), but it's probably number two or three. :-/
Here’s to your daughter getting into the blue state astrophysics program of her dreams.
Also, the attacks on higher ed there and tenure are going to prevent growth. I work in eduational publishing. Quite a few professors i work with have expressed deep dismay at the state's move to eliminatie tenure. Texas is awful.
When states pass laws to mandate cruelty and stupidity, how long does it take to show up in the data? These states need to suffer the consequences; something has to put pressure on them.
Good. Things like this will add pressure to the Texas legislature (not that higher education is all that critical to them). Make sure that UT knows the reason she is going elsewhere. Also, imagine the terrible potential consequences of the laws of Texas. I would never want a woman of childbearing age to go to Texas for any reason.
I still think any Republican infighting is a good thing. They're almost certainly going to stay united no matter what, but our side at least doesn't need to help them do that.
I guess it's good that the Biden campaign is pissed about the media helping Republicans 🤷 but that complaint is (at least) eight years overdue. Better late than never?
This standoff over funding the government is an interesting watch. I really do think Democrats are going to let them run off this cliff, because Republicans will bear 100% of the blame for the fallout. And I think the impeachment sideshow will hurt them when coupled with this disaster. Consequences are the only thing that will wake some people up.
That's how it -should- play out. But considering how the last eight years have gone I'm always leery about getting the expected outcome from events.
The NYT and WaPo are two of the worst offenders. The NYT employs some truly awful transphobes and misogynists. They are also the paper of defending the rich and powerful, thus keeping the status quo. They both published multitudinous "But her E-mails and ignored the criminal Trump in the room.
It helps, though, when I'm in a "debate" with conservative friends they start going off about the liberal media -- I then ask "who broke the Hillary email story?" silence. "Michael Schmidt of the NYTimes. Not so liberal, right? "
I don’t read the NYT anymore, and I never read WaPo because I deplore its owner.
You are prescient, It hard me very hard because they were my favorite media, They gave us the Pentagon Papers when I was a child, (my mother explained it to me) I thought them a bit stodgy, but on the whole accurate. Since Bezos hired his choice of Exec. Editor (a crony of John Solomon's IIRC.) and the Reagan-fapping Publisher (who ran his library) they frequently lie, and publish Maga-man buzzword headlines with absurd grammar.
And the other side thinks those papers are super liberal 🙄
"Liberal" is printing or saying anything with which they don't 100% agree.
Ah yes, them playing the refs, on the "liberal media"! But if you are to the right of Attila the Hun, I guess it might look that way to them.
The shenanigans in Ohio and Missouri illustrate what I keep saying: the residents of the red states do not have the ability to free themselves from what their state governments are doing to them. It is exactly the same as the 1850s, and that means it is on the rest of us to do something. It should be obvious that they're coming for the rest of us anyway.
I honestly think the people of my state (SC) don’t want to free themselves. I don’t know what we do with that. Yes, we could fight another civil war, but in many respects, the mentality now is what was supposedly defeated then. It didn’t go away. I wish we could force people to not be assholes.
This is very true. I guess I'm thinking of women and girls of childbearing age as being like the slaves were then, trapped by a hostile state. But you're right because if a majority of the population were better than that, Republicans wouldn't win statewide elections. I do hope that growth from outsiders can eventually change some of these states. Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas. But some of them are pretty much beyond help.
I feel like the reverse will happen: Moderating influences will choose to leave these states if they can. I'm going to. I've lived in SC for 48 years, and I've had it. You're right that nowhere will be safe if 45 and R's win in 2024.
As to the other part of this conundrum, we have two sides that are convinced they are right. I'm not passing judgment here on which side is right, merely saying that both sides are convinced of their rightness. Beating each other with our senses of rightness hasn't worked, though we humans seem destined to keep repeating this cycle ad nauseam until we annihilate ourselves.
Which is why I've decided to accept that some people will be assholes. No matter how many laws we pass; no matter how many times we try to make something unacceptable; no matter what we try to do to change them, they're always going to be assholes. Our job as liberals is to give people who want to escape these situations the means to get out, not to assume that everyone in the asshole camp needs to be rescued. (To use the right's words, everyone in our camp needs to be "saved.")
I'd prefer to see blue states and reproductive freedom groups give assistance to families or people of childbearing age who don't want to live in red states: help them move to a blue state, find jobs and housing, etc. I'm not wasting another ounce of energy on people like my mother. I don't introduce her to my gay friends, because I love my gay friends and don't want to expose them to her. I haven't introduced her to my Black sister-in-law or bi-racial niece and nephew, because she believes God cursed dark-skinned people, and it's a sin for Blacks and whites to marry, and she'd likely outright say that to them. If she wants to go to that church and stuff her brain full of garbage, I'm not doing a thing to stop her. I don't argue with her anymore. But I've tried very hard to spread the word to anyone there that I am a resource if they want to get out (including burning the whole place in Newsweek.)
I'm not giving up on everyone being equal. But I cannot force someone to not be an asshole. I can't. I want to help everyone who wants to leave these environments, and the rest can destroy themselves for all I care. I know this probably isn't a popular view. I don't think the North should've allowed the South to continue to enslave Black people. Yes, fighting a war over it freed enslaved people, but we're still fighting the same fight today. People merely switched tactics to keep up the oppression. It never really stopped. The bloodiest war in our history didn't kill this assholery.
Your mother is a ghoul! :) (but you know that). It's hard because you can only do so much to help people living under an oppressive state, whether it's South Carolina or Russia. So many are going to continue to suffer. As for whether the states can change, I was just thinking of how population growth seems to have at least changed the balance in some of these places, such that for example Georgia voted for Biden and has two Democratic u.s. senators even as Republicans still have a solid hold on the state. So if Atlanta keeps getting newcomers who are at least not the hardcore rural conservatives that still hold power, at some point can they outvote them? The population keeps changing in Texas too, just not enough to make it winnable for Democrats in any race yet. The Carolinas are both growing, and again it's a question of whether the newcomers are more moderate than the state's existing culture. Whereas yes states like Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, etc. are basically fucked. It's a question of what we're willing to tolerate in the same country, (and I guess that's their calculation too). Does allowing the disparity to get better relieve tension or increase tension? Idk, somehow it probably does both.
With so much gerrymandering, I don’t know how many sane people will have to move into a state like SC or TX to make them true democracies. (And hell, SC has always been whacked so I don’t think it votes the way it does by gerrymander.) And yes, Charleston (my city) is a blue dot, but I can drive 30 minutes and feel like I’m in another country. This isn’t just a manner of red-versus-blue states coexisting. It’s the red-and-blue portions of each state. The true red portions aren’t going to change much. When people move to TX, they’re largely moving to cities. Same with GA and SC. If you’ve never driven around the Deep South, it’s no mystery why they want to take things back in time. Many of the places are stuck there. Like you’d question what decade you were in if you didn’t know. So the population growth keeps fueling this urban-v-rural resentment. It might change the makeup of governing bodies, but it’s not solving the underlying problem of these two competing value systems that are irreconcilable in my view.
So true. It's about the two value systems: one, rural and provincial and conservative, and the other, urban, cosmopolitan and liberal and/or progressive. Not all that long ago, the regional divide was probably more important: North vs South, red state vs blue state. But the smaller city and rural areas of Northern states are now voting more like their counterparts in the South, and the large urban areas in the South are starting to vote more like those in the North. Both of those shifts may still have room to run, so the divide will only get more pronounced. As you say, it's now about red vs blue within the same state.
The optimistic view would be that the rural populations aren't really growing, but the metropolitan populations, who tend to be less narrow minded if not necessarily exactly cosmopolitan and liberal, are where the growth is. And also that growth itself is more liberalizing, in that it involves more change, whereas to your point the smaller areas remain frozen in time.
So yes if Texas or the Carolinas are to 'flip', it's going to be because of growth in the large metros. And yes, the combination of geography and gerrymandering means that it's much easier for Democrats to win statewide elections than to win legislatures. That's where it has to start. Democrats will win the governor's races in Georgia or Texas long before they get close in the legislatures. The path in North Carolina is to start winning statewide elections and eventually regain their supreme court, which can curb gerrymandering. South Carolina is the toughest nut of the states I've mentioned, but it's growing more than many other states with similar profiles, and it seemed to me it belongs more with Texas and the Atlantic states than with the inland red states.
And of course the way it will actually work is that once Texas gets close enough that Democrats can actually compete there, the Republican party will be forced to shift. The same thing would happen to Democrats if Republicans were competitive in California or New York. It would make sense that that would be the way the demographics and the generational divide actually effect change, by turning the Republican party into something less repulsive, rather than by turning everything blue. Although the other way is possible if Republicans start losing but refuse to change; there are lots of landslides in American political history, as impossible as that seems to imagine now.
it should say disparity to get bigger, not better
Needed that laugh!
If only!
Daniel Cameron is a fucking dark shit.
That poor woman's pregnancy story. Even with all the related stories out there the anti's can't grow a heart. Makes the grinch seem good in comparison.
Misogyny will do that to you, even from the women, who were not allowed to abort, they hate other women and want to punish them.
When I talk to anti-abortion people, a lot of them believe exceptions are real. Or they don’t have a grasp of their state’s laws. Or they don’t understand the reproductive process. Or all three. The whole exceptions discussion lets them check out of the minutiae. “Oh, these women have exceptions, so that will save the ones who need them. And I don’t have to think about this anymore.” Which is why the horror stories are so so so important.
I feel like we have so much room to grow and gain if we could just educate people. Maybe that's too optimistic, idk.
I have a sister that is brilliant, that I enjoy conversing with, and one that is... well, educationally adverse. She never could do research properly, and doesn't understand the need to use facts. She got secondhand poisoning from decades of her husband listening to Fox Propaganda Channel. Every time I see her I spend my whole visit deprogramming her, only for it to dissipate with my exit. She cannot retain any facts. It is a lot of effort to distill complicated facts into a simplified version she can understand, and it simply doesn't take.
On the other hand, the kids are better than ever, so there is hope.
They have their own "educational" alternate universe. Nothing will move people like my mother (and there are a lot of people on the right like her.) People in the middle are harder because like you said in another comment, they don't pay attention to politics...until the political impacts them directly. I'm hopeful these harder-hitting pro-choice ads and messaging will reach a few of those people, along with the horror stories.
The more women we can help come forward, the better. It's harder to dismiss it as hyperbole when there are names and faces.
Yet it is exactly what those behind it want to happen. Those people denying it live in an alternative universe.