Ilyse HogueCompte certifié

No one works harder than reproductive freedom & justice advocates to make sure people who want to prevent pregnancy have the information & resources to try to do so. We work for greater contraception access, better sex ed, and more while the right fights all of those efforts.

Still, life happens & for different reasons, unintended pregnancies occur. Always have & always will. There will always be a person who needs to end a pregnancy. Talking about making abortion "rare" casts judgment on someone else's life choices without walking in their shoes.

Most people don't want to sit in judgement of their neighbors, nor do they want politicians to. Most Americans want to give women the tools to try to live their best reproductive lives and trust us to make decisions with the people we love and trust - without politicians.

In fact, support for Roe is at an all time high and most Americans see the assaults for what they are - reproductive oppression designed to vilify and control women - lower-income women and women of color especially.

Meanwhile on the Right and in the anti-choice movement, they work to deny women birth control and accurate sex ed; refuse to take on rape culture, and then shame and stigmatize women who get pregnant when they don't want to. Tulsi parroted these folks.

These same anti-choice zealots do everything in their power to make abortion difficult—if not impossible—to get early in pregnancy: clinic closures, funding bans, waiting periods, and more; pushing women who want to terminate early into later and later procedures.

Then, they scream about later abortion when they set up the conditions that required more women to a) get pregnant when they didn't want to and b) have to wait longer to end those pregnancies. It's almost as if their goals are not what they say they are.

...needing to save money, travel, get childcare, etc...--and also for diagnoses that come at or after twenty weeks. All of these reasons are valid and all of these women deserve care. In fact, when people hear the individual stories of women seeking abortions later in pregnancy,

they have compassion and understand that life is hard and complicated and that politicians who have no knowledge of the life circumstances of individuals are the LAST people you want making arbitrary decisions. Women with those they love and trust should be.

By singling out later abortion, Tulsi played into right wing misinformation that's grounded in the completely misogynistic idea that there are lots of women out there who cannot behave morally or responsibly w/o government intervention. This is a false and dangerous claim.

Conceding on right wing frames or right wing policy does not make you more moderate, it means you are willing to give up some people's freedom, agency, rights, and lives to appease another side that will never be appeased. It makes you complicit.

Some people don't want to think about these situations, but it's real life. Those who would outlaw abortion & criminalize women thrive in platitudes & hypotheticals. The pathway forward is to provide people w/ information—not play into fear-based misinformation that hurts people.

If you want to know more, follow @heyitscalla, @RHAVote, @DrDGrossman or any of the other folks who have actual experience with the subject. Remember that at the end of the day, voters only answer one question: Who decides what's best for you and your family? Politicians or you?

And seriously just stop with the "only 13% support later abortion." Hypotheticals means nothing. People are swayed by real stories. That's why the ONLY 20 week ban that was put on a ballot lost bad. That's why during the Zika scare in 2015, people opinions swung wildly.