The Arizona Tipping Point
There's a reason this specific ban put Americans over the edge
Sometimes it’s hard to know which bit of abortion news will take off and infuriate the country. When Kate Cox’s story sparked national outrage, for example, I wondered why the dozens of other women with similar experiences didn’t garner the same attention. This week, it’s the Arizona Supreme Court decision enforcing an 1864 ban that’s getting wall-to-wall coverage in spite of other, similar, rulings.
So why this ban, why this story? After all, there’s a new horror to choose from daily.
In the same week that Arizona’s Supreme Court came down with their ruling, the Tennessee Senate passed a bill that makes it illegal to give a teenager information about abortion, Virginia’s governor vetoed legislation that would have prevented the extradition of abortion providers and patients, and the Supreme Court geared up for a case that will determine whether or not states can deny women life-saving abortions.
We’re living in a country where it’s now business as usual for pilots to secretly fly women out of state, so they can get the care that they need, and for abortion advocates to risk years in prison to make sure that women and children aren’t forced into pregnancy.
Multiple states are advancing bills that require public schools to include anti-abortion videos in science classes—indoctrination meant to put a dent in young people’s overwhelming support for abortion rights—while Republicans across the country try to kill ballot measure efforts so voters can’t have a direct say on the issue.
And in case you thought that was the worst of it: doctors are now being forced to perform c-sections on women with life-threatening pregnancies, a nightmare that anti-abortion groups are calling “medically standard.”
All of which is to say, we are not low on outrages.
Obviously, a lot of what ends up driving public discourse and anger is the media; how much attention publications and television outlets decide to give something determines the national debate, for better and worse. And they’ve been hitting on the Arizona story hard—which makes sense, given its proximity to similar rulings in Florida and Donald Trump’s abortion ‘announcement’.
But there’s something else happening too. Americans have been furious about the end of Roe since it happened, with pro-choice sentiment growing by the day. Voters have spent the last two years hearing horror story after horror story—whether it’s cancer patients and child rape victims being denied care, or women going septic. The anger has been there, simmering away.
So why did Arizona become a national tipping point? It’s the misogyny, stupid.
Yes, all attacks on abortion rights are driven by a disdain for women. But what put Americans over the edge is the downright offensive and explicit misogyny it takes to enact a ban from 1864.
This is a law adopted before women had a right to vote, and in a time when the man leading the legislature had a penchant for marrying little girls—one 12-year-old, one 14-year-old, and one 15-year-old, to be exact. Can you imagine a starker reminder of what this issue is really about?
It’s like they’re rubbing our noses in it.
Gone is the pretense that Republicans want to pass abortion bans to protect women’s health, or that they’re enacting laws in service of some grand morality. With this ruling, the GOP made clear what their end goal is: forcing women back to a time when we weren’t full citizens, and when we could be married off as children to any 50-year-old lech who decided he wanted us.
To endure that insult, after two years of watching stories about little girls forced into childbirth and women mandated to deliver dead babies, is too much for anyone to take. Especially women.
And that’s the thing that Democrats would do well to remember as we close in on November: The danger abortion bans pose to women’s health and lives makes us afraid, but what makes us furious is the affront to our humanity.
It’s that anger that politicians campaigning on abortion rights need to tap into. The foremost feeling driving American women on abortion rights isn’t fear—it’s humiliation. It is demeaning, incredibly so, to watch as statehouses full of men decide that women were better off in a time when we had no choices, about anything.
If Democrats want to motivate women, they should talk less about how dangerous abortion bans are, and more about what that danger means: that to Republicans, our lives don’t matter. Instead of talking about how women are losing their rights, remind voters why that is: because Republicans don’t want women to have any.
If we learn anything from the Arizona tipping point, let it be that.
My "favorite" thing about this ban is how THEY JUST HAD THE FUCKING OPPORTUNITY TO REPEAL IT and Republicans were like, "NAH. We good. Sad for you tho. 😢" I hate them all so much and I am SO ANGRY pretty much ALL THE TIME.
Excellent way to spell out the humiliation these draconian measures produce. The humanity part is not, however, just in abortion for the MAGA, pro-fetus, white men caucus with the women enablers.
Humanity is being threatened, with the prospect of Trump returning to the WH and never leaving. No matter what issue, from reduction or elimination of SSI/Medicare/Medicaid/SNAP/all social net programs, to general healthcare repeal with no replace, climate change, the border disinformation, the non-stop attacks on the VRA, especially since Trump, causing devastating issues in November, the COMPROMISED SCOTUS actually hearing Trump's immunity case and possibly waiting to determine if voters, go to the polls, not having Trump in one or both of Smith's cases get to trial, to vote as jurists.
These white men want Jim Crow to push the extremes to levels they term actual reverse racism, which is humiliation and suppression of our original sin.
Everything, every day, scares the heck out of me, as a woman who has had an abortion and was ectopic to think that I wouldn't be here if these were the laws 25 years ago. I was enraged the decision in AL, on IVF, actually quoted the Bible, as if the decision wasn't awful enough. People do not understand that GOD wasn't mentioned in the Constitution once and why that was.
Project 2025 is no joke and I really fear people disengage because they know some of the issues, kind of, but not what those issues will actually do to them personally. Why worry about this or that when you will have no rights at all. Or money. But Eggs....
Many do not know of the background of the Trump indictments and what he's done over 5-6 decades to warrant the decisions handed down and the severity of his "ID" over the country's needs. He doesn't care. Hearing authoritarianism isn't enough. Trump will play Hitler with his trial commencing on Monday. He doesn't have to be in prison, writing Mein Kampf, to understand he's covered those bases. Bannon certainly has.
We are facing a crisis we never knew we'd succumb to and the media talks as if he's already in office again. With no democracy, even our flawed one, they risk their careers, the entire judicial does as well. WHAT ARE THEY THINKING, IF ANYTHING?
For the SCOTUS to hear the Mifepristone case baffles me to my core. No cause of action, no damages. Just future speculation.
Thank you for all you do. Humanity depends on people like you.