If elected, I will unequivocally support women’s reproductive freedom and I will not attempt to limit women’s access to reproductive healthcare within the first trimester, or at any point during the pregnancy if the mother’s life is in danger, or in cases of rape or incest.
Nevertheless, our campaign acknowledges The Catholic Church, The Church of Latter Day Saints, and other worldwide religious organizations for their admirable work to (a) reduce the need for abortion by improving the economic conditions that tend to increase its frequency, (b) educate the public about the economic forces that tend to produce the desperation and human exploitation that result in women feeling forced to make hard choices like aborting a pregnancy. We are grateful for this precious humanitarian work.
We also acknowledge the racist history of Margaret Sanger’s 1939 Negro Project.
We also acknowledge that killing a human foetus in the womb is a violent act that distresses many thoughtful, informed Californians.
However, our campaign does not agree that it is a satisfactory solution to hold American women to a standard to which we are too afraid or too apathetic hold the rest of American society. For example, it would seem inconsistent to zealously oppose abortion rights for American women while happily buying household goods manufactured in PRC, which has a terrible human rights record. Also, it would seem inconsistent to zealously oppose abortion rights for American women while showing less zeal in opposing American foreign policies of violent regime change, like 2011’s United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, the 2011 US military intervention in Libya, the unmitigated disaster of what happened in Libya in 2011 and the subsequent Second Libyan Civil War (2014—2020). It also seems inconsistent to zealously oppose abortion rights for American women while gleefully enjoying ultra-realistic simulations of violence in entertainment, especially ultra-realistic depictions of murder (as covered excellently by Bill Maher June 10 on HBO, “Hollywood’s Culture of Violence” and July 8 on “Hotboxin’ with Mike Tyson”).
While we all work to improve the wholesomeness of our society, we’ve still got a long way to go. We would not expect American women to listen receptively to moralizing that itself originates from a shaky moral foundation. In the mean time, reproductive freedom should not be sanctimoniously removed.
