We Can Do This

Anti-abortion lawmakers can run all they want, but our outrage will catch them.

It’s finally here. We have the opportunity to elect the first woman president and stave off further abortion rights disaster. I woke up feeling uncharacteristically good—and ready. I truly believe that we will win tonight, and that it will be abortion rights that puts Kamala Harris in the White House.(My family keeps telling me to stop jinxing it, but I think of it as manifesting!)

The truth is that we’ve been preparing for this every day since Roe was overturned: Every time we shared a story about a woman denied care, every time we expressed outrage or sadness, every time we donated to an abortion fund, or called on friends and family to do something. We’ve been fighting for this moment for over two years, and we have got this.

American women are furious, rightly so. We’ve watched victimized little girls forced into pregnancy, women turned into walking coffins’ for dead and dying fetuses, and Republicans claim their laws are just fine even as they quite literally kill women. 

As women’s anger has taken hold in election after election, these same men have rushed to scrub their campaign websites of any mention of abortion and adopted new and ridiculous language to trick voters into believing that they’re moderate or ‘softening’ on the issue. They’ve talked about ‘exceptions,’ ‘standards’ and finding a ‘consensus.’ Anything to avoid our fury at the polls and the ballot box. 

But their moral cowardice can’t save them. Anti-abortion lawmakers can run all they want, but our outrage will catch them.

Because something has fundamentally shifted in this country.

American women have always known that these men hate us—we’ve grown up with their disdain and learned to dodge misogyny as a survival skill. But there is a difference between the sexism we’ve always lived with and what women have experienced since Roe was overturned. We’ve seen Republicans fight for the right to deny women life-saving care in emergency rooms and arrest women for miscarriages. We’ve watched as they test out travel restrictions on teenagers and dig into our medical records.

Most outrageously, they’ve tried to make us feel stupid about caring about it all. Our distress over losing a fundamental right and watching women die has been dismissed as women being hysterical ‘single issue voters.’ As if the ‘single issue’ wasn’t our lives!

It’s that gaslighting, I think, that will put women—and the country—over the edge to elect Harris.

If you think I’m overly optimistic, that may be true. There’s part of me that worries I’m setting myself up for disappointment—the kind of shock and horror we all experienced in 2016. But I don’t want Republicans to rob me of my joy should Harris win. We deserve to feel happiness, not just relief.

And here’s the thing: Should the worst happen, we won’t be learning anything we didn’t already know. We’ve been well-aware since Donald Trump was first elected just how deeply this country hates women. We’ve known, for years, just how many people are willing to overlook—or embrace!—the fact that he’s a serial rapist and sociopathic misogynist. We know his profound hatred of women is actually what makes him so appealing to so many Americans.

None of this will be news to us if he wins. That doesn’t change the material reality of what a Trump presidency would mean for us all, but at least we can try to put aside the existential hurt that comes with the realization that much of the country doesn’t see us as full human beings.

I accept that many, many Americans hate women. Fuck them. We’re going to win anyway.

And if we don’t, we’ll be ready.