Reading · Brooke Teegarden

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For the anniversary of Roe’s fall, I want to bring back a post I wrote to the “moderate” women who insisted they were neither pro-choice nor pro-forced birth.

After everything we have seen, there is no respectable middle. Silence is choosing. Complacency is choosing. If you can watch women lose their rights, and their lives, and still call yourself neutral, you have already picked a side.

Sometimes I’m overly optimistic, but I like to dream that if moderate women were just told what is truly at stake, that perhaps they will join the fight for reproductive freedom.

As always, I would appreciate you heart reacting this post for me. More engagement means more people might see my work. ♥️

I found six women who said they did not care about politics and did not align with any political party. Four of the women were from Missouri and two were from Idaho. I asked if they would be willing to take a quiz guessing whether quotes about reproduction came from the 19th century or now.

To convince them to spend time talking to me, I told them I was doing it for a class.

It’s you. You’re my class.

I did not choose any women who already said they would vote yes to legalize abortion with limits. I was looking for the women who were undecided, unsure if they would vote at all, or already planning to vote no. These conversations happened just before the 2024 election, so Kamala Harris and Donald Trump both come up as well.

Here is how the six women were split:

My hope was that by the end of these conversations, I might be able to add a yes row to the polls and move more of the votes to Kamala Harris.

Know Your Century: 1800s or the 2000s?

A few notes:

For each question, I will show answers from only a few of the women, but all six women were asked every question. I’ll separate the answers from multiple women with a divider.

For clarity, when I refer to myself as right-wing in these conversations, that is an act.

A) Abortion “lessens the population of a state or country, to an appalling degree. The ratio of births over deaths of all kinds, is rapidly decreasing. Only among the foreign population are the births increasing. At this rate, if the ratio of total deaths over birth goes on increasing, it will not be long before the Americans left on American soil, will be few and far between.”

B) Abortion is bad because it causes states to have less population. It causes “injuries from the loss of fetal life and potential births, leading to a resulting reduction in the actual or potential population of each state.”

A) “Pregnancy is not a disease”

B) “Pregnancy is a natural condition”

A) “A young woman falls victim to the false promises of a man. She loses her virginity. A pregnancy follows and she is left alone with her great shame.” She gets an abortion.

B) Abortion is “depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers.” This is bad because “a loss of potential population causes further injuries,” like “diminishment of political representation and loss of federal funds.”

A) Doctors do abortions in the “ninth month.” They “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month, on the final day.”

B) Women are having abortions “in the last month [of pregnancy] much more frequently than even in the first or second.”

A) A bill passed in which an adult who helps a minor get an abortion will face two to five years in prison, and the minor’s parents and siblings can sue, as can the person who impregnated the minor and children of the minor. Even in cases of rape, someone who helps a minor obtain an abortion can be charged.

B) “Shouldn’t the father, husband, relative or friend be punished in some manner, for keeping the abortion hidden from the authorities? Shouldn’t the doctor or nurse also be punished?”

A) People want abortion legal “so that kids can get abortions. A 1 year old could get an abortion.”

B) A woman who has an ectopic pregnancy (a nonviable pregnancy that will not result in the birth of a child but could kill the mother) should be imprisoned a minimum of 10 years.

A) “If you want to go after the rapist, let’s give him the death penalty. Absolutely, let’s do it, but not the innocent person caught in-between that, by God’s grace, may even be the greatest healing agent you need in which to recover from such an atrocity.”

B) “Even the best doctors can’t look at a victim of rape without feeling sympathy. That they have performed abortions is not surprising, but doctors need to remember ‘thou shalt not kill,’ is as binding here as elsewhere.”

A) “I would hope that when a woman goes into a physician, with a rape issue, that that physician will indeed ask her about perhaps her marriage, was this pregnancy caused by normal relations in a marriage, or was it truly caused by a rape."

B) We should “issue [doctor’s] licenses” based on “proof of moral standing.” Only doctors that won’t perform abortions should be allowed.

A) Pro-choice advocates support abortion after birth. “The baby will be born, and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we’ll execute the baby.”

B) “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways of shutting that whole thing down.”

A) “In natural, healthy childbirth, there is little or no actual pain. Painless relaxation and childbirth, with no suffering, is a perfectly normal labor. Abortion, on the other hand, always causes a great amount of suffering.”

B) A staggering increase of 56% of maternal deaths, women dying from their pregnancies, was reported.

A) A bill is signed that will allow private parties to sue abortion providers after 6 weeks of pregnancy.

B) “The doctor who neglects to notify the partners of the probability of miscarriage” who “allows the miscarriage to occur, becomes, to a certain extent, a criminal and should be punished.”

A) “I know women who chose to keep the baby and are very satisfied with their child of rape.”

B) “You know how to stop abortion? Require that each one occur with a gun.”

A) All the criminals in cases of abortion should be prosecuted, and the law doesn’t need to “require it to be proved that the death of the child was intended.”

B) A bill was filed that would treat fetuses as human beings, which would allow criminal charged to be filed, including charges of murder and manslaughter, against anyone who gets an abortion, helps someone get an abortion or provides abortion care.

A) A woman was forced to carry her dead fetus for two weeks after a miscarriage when doctors feared they would be prosecuted.

B) “A perfectly humane law, framed for the purpose of preventing the destruction of the unborn child, should be so framed as to prohibit marriage in certain cases, and also to make it obligatory on the part of the husband and wife to prevent conception [or else face punishment.]”

C) Maternal death rates in areas where abortion is restricted are 62% higher than states with abortion access.

D) A woman who miscarried in her home was arrested.

E) A woman was at risk of losing her uterus while carrying a non-viable fetus, but doctors still couldn’t help her because they feared they would be prosecuted.

A) An 1873 act against the mailing of obscene matter could be used against the mailing of anything that produces an abortion even where abortion is permitted.

A) States should track “comparisons between live births and abortion.” They would be forced to report “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders, at what gestational age of the child, for what reason, the mother’s state of residence, and by what method.”

B) The menstrual periods of patients at a medical center were kept track of by the health department without the patients’ knowledge.

C) We should have a “board of registration and examination in every county and large city of the United States” to monitor that abortion is not happening.

A) If a woman has an abortion “from the date of conception to the end of the third month” she should be punished with “not less than seven years.”

B) It should be up to the states whether to prosecute women for abortions or whether to monitor women’s pregnancies.

A) “A life for a life.” Abortion should be punished by death.

B) The woman should be punished if she has more than one abortion. Doctors should be imprisoned.

C) “After the first abortion, women should be sterilized so no more babies can be conceived and murdered.”

D) “There has to be some form of punishment [for abortion]” for women. “I have not determined what the punishment would be.” The guy that gets her pregnant should not be punished.

E) “Murder is murder. Punishment should fit the crime.” “Death Penalty.”

F) We should imprison doctors and Planned Parenthood’s top executives should be given the death penalty.

(In case you missed it at the beginning. I am not a conservative in any way.)

The moment of truth: did anything change?

After the quiz, I asked them the same questions again.

Amazingly…

The no vote moved to undecided. One undecided woman stayed where she was, and the other four moved to yes.

Here too, one no vote moved to unsure, and everyone else moved to yes.

Continuing the trend, the Trump vote moved to undecided. One undecided woman stayed the same, and everyone else moved to Kamala Harris.

This is a small sample, and I do not know how to replicate it on a larger scale. But I do think there are women out there who truly are not paying attention to politics.

And while they look away, other people are very busy deciding their futures for them.

How do we reach them?

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