By D’Anne Witkowski
Happy New Year friends, foes, and frenemies! If you’re reading this then at least two things are true: you can read and you survived 2022! Congratulations on both!
What can I say about 2022? It was a wild year, but it didn’t suck nearly as much as 2021 or 2020. True, the bar is very low, but I’ll take it, damn it.
It felt like the holidays came early when Democrats finally took the trifecta on Election Day – a majority in the Michigan House, Senate, and a Democratic governor. For the first time in decades, Democratic legislators are in control and the policy goals they’ve championed for so long are in reach. So what’s on our wish list for our leaders this term? We’re asking for gifts that keep on giving, like…
This lets state governments ban abortion without exceptions for rape, incest, or the birthing person’s health. It allows them to criminalize those who seek or perform abortions, to cast suspicions on even “spontaneous” miscarriages, to make anyone who can carry a child fear their own bodies, fear being sexually active, fear–even more than usual–the possibility of rape, lest they end up pregnant when they don’t want to be. The conservative justices who placated the public during their nominations with words like “precedent,” “nonpartisan,” and “law of the land” decided that no precedent exists after all, no inalienable right to one’s own body, to one’s most intimate bodily functions, to self-determination, or the pursuit of happiness. Today, justices representing the religious and social views of a minority of Americans made a decision that will affect all of us. This is an assault on the personal liberties of women and other people with uteruses in this country, and we must fight back.