More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Across the board, Democratic candidates and progressive ballot measures far outperformed expectations set by the pundits, who had all but declared that abortion no longer was the driving factor in voters’ decisions.
“It was abortion that made a huge difference in race after race,” said Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research Partners. “In well over half the races, it was the issue of abortion that increased turnout of Democrats and younger voters.”
Apparently, women aren’t likely to forget their loss of control over their own fertility; not during the midterms and not anytime soon. In fact, voter turnout and voter rage around abortion could pave the way forward in the effort to hold onto democracy itself in the future.
This election season saw six ballot measures on abortion across the U.S.—and in all of them, the pro-abortion rights position passed decisively.
The high margin of passage or failure, respectively, for each ballot measure—even in conservative states—shows how central the issue of abortion access is to women voters, especially young women.
This year, young people make up one in three of all eligible U.S. voters. And voter mobilization groups are helping to channel their concerns into votes, especially in the battleground states.
As women from Tehran to Texas continue to fight fearlessly for basic respect and human rights, men have a choice to make: Do you stand with those women? Or do you sit this one out?
Will you go out and vote as an act of solidarity with the women you love and have always claimed to respect and support?
Twenty-six states already have state-level Equal Rights Amendments. Advocates are fighting to make Nevada the 27th state by passing the most comprehensive ERA in the country.
If passed, the Nevada ERA would be the first time that an equal rights amendment explicitly protects people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender expression.
Ahead of the midterms, feminist and civil rights groups are urging Michiganders to vote yes to Proposal 3, a ballot measure that would add an amendment to the state constitution explicitly establishing the right to abortion, as well as a broad range of other reproductive healthcare, including prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, miscarriage management and infertility.
The ballot measure will determine whether the state’s 1931-era abortion ban can remain on the books—a law prohibiting abortions without exceptions for rape, incest or health of the pregnant woman. (It only allows abortions that “preserve the life” of a patient.)
Millions of American women—including the remarkable wave of women voters who registering for the first time—are currently at risk of being prevented from casting a ballot that counts. The reason? Voter ID laws that create additional barriers and cause confusion and uncertainty about people’s ability to vote.
Making sure that women know the precise documents they’ll need on Election Day will ensure they can have their votes counted with minimal bureaucratic hurdles.
A significant portion of young women are already making plans about where they are willing to live and work based on whether abortion is protected or banned in states, according to new Ms. magazine and Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) polling by Lake Research Partners across the nine battleground states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in in this biweekly round-up.
This week: National children’s health organizations urge Biden to issue a National Emergency Declaration; pregnant cancer patients struggle to start chemotherapy without abortion access; Biden issues mass pardons for federal marijuana possession; Cardi B is first woman rapper to have two 11x platinum singles; 36 percent of U.S. counties are “maternity care deserts”; and more.
