Other Papers Say: Reproductive freedom at stake

The following editorial originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times:

‘Our bodies are on the ballot!”

Alexis McGill Johnson, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, got it right during her speech at the Democratic National Convention.

There’s no question that the right to control your own body should be on the minds of every voter in the November election. Kamala Harris has made the aggressive defense of reproductive rights a main goal of her vice presidency, and Donald Trump’s three anti-abortion appointments to the Supreme Court helped overturn Roe vs. Wade.

But abortion access has been making its way onto state ballots ever since the Supreme Court took away the constitutional guarantee to that right in its 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. And in every case, voters have supported ballot measures guaranteeing abortion rights while defeating measures that would have outlawed it, even in conservative-leaning states. Voters understand the danger of repressive state bans that intimidate health care providers into not performing emergency abortions until women are critically ill.

This year, there are 10 states with abortion rights measures on their ballots. And some of those measures are desperately needed. There are 14 states that ban abortion with limited exceptions. Eight other states ban the procedure somewhere between six weeks of gestation (when women usually don’t even know they are pregnant) and 18 weeks.

At both state and national levels, support for abortion rights is only getting more forceful and unapologetic. As well it should. A Pew Research Center poll says most adults — 63 percent — in the United States believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That number goes up to 86 percent for religiously unaffiliated Americans. Even 59 percent of Catholics think it should be legal.

It’s also encouraging that reproductive rights figured so prominently at the Democratic National Convention. In front of millions of Americans, women told their stories of struggling to get an abortion when they desperately needed one. Oprah Winfrey reminded the audience that if you do not have control over how and when you have children, “there is no American dream.”

And Harris talked of hearing women’s stories of miscarrying in parking lots, developing sepsis and losing the ability to have children again because restrictions on when emergency abortions are permitted make doctors “afraid they may go to jail for caring for their patients.” She noted that “America cannot truly be prosperous unless Americans are fully able to make their own decisions about their own lives.” We agree.

Reproductive freedom is about having the power to make choices. And that is something that we must vigilantly work for and protect at all levels of government.