As always in presidential election years, a ferocious Republican attack on Democrats as “the party of death,” “baby-killers” and worse is well underway, kicked off by the president’s focus on late-term abortion in his State of the Union address and continued by Mitch McConnell’s decision this week to force Senate votes on two anti-abortion bills, one banning the procedure after 20 weeks and the other the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.”
This year, these attacks will reach levels of vitriol never seen before. They will roll out in a cascade of ads, speeches and social media messages targeting evangelical and Catholic voters in swing states.
Democratic candidates at all levels need to respond by aggressively reframing the debate as one about how the two parties’ overall policies impact women. Bluntly put, Democratic policies aim to increase financial security and health access for working Americans. Republican policies deepen the financial pressures on middle-class families, put their health coverage at risk, and add to pressures that drive many to abortions.
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The contrast could hardly be more stark.
Virtually all Democrats, for example, favor access for all Americans to sex education in the public schools and to free or low-cost contraception which, studies show, can avoid unwanted pregnancies and lower abortion rates by 60 to 80 percent. Democrats back access for all Americans to free or low cost health coverage, including prenatal, pregnancy and pediatric care. We support the creation of low-cost daycare programs for working families and robust tax credits for families with children. We champion equal pay for equal work, paid family leave, a higher minimum wage, strong union rights and an increase in Earned Income Tax Credits.
With few exceptions, national Republicans oppose these goals. All of them. Instead, they drive an agenda that relentlessly increases financial and health insecurity for working families. Here are just a few examples:
Besides seeking to make access to abortion difficult or impossible, the GOP has for many years resisted higher minimum wages or expansion of Earned Income Tax Credits, opposed union rights, blocked any public health care option, frustrated efforts to expand public daycare and preschool programs, and fiercely resisted equal pay laws and paid family leave.
Republicans have fought tirelessly to roll back even the limited health reforms achieved by President Obama. States dominated by Republican governors and legislatures have consistently refused to expand Medicaid coverage. And right now, with the Trump administration’s enthusiastic support, Republican state attorneys general are pressing a lawsuit in the Supreme Court that could obliterate Obamacare and expose millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions to financial disaster.
Does this sound like the family-loving party of life?
That’s why Democrats should urge voters—including independents and moderate Republicans—to look well beyond the two parties’ ostensible “top-line” stances on abortion. The plain fact is that the two parties’ contrasting policy stances have profoundly different impacts on the financial anxieties that drive many women to terminate pregnancies.
The Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for abortion rights, once found that 73 percent of women cite inability to afford a baby as a major element of their decisions to abort. Guttmacher further shows that 75 percent of abortion patients in 2014 were poor or low income. Forty-nine percent of them had incomes less than the federal poverty level for a family of two ($15,730). A fact sheet from the anti-abortion group CareNet reports that “African American women were substantially over-represented, accounting for 35.6% of abortions, even though they are only 13.3% of the population.”
There’s little doubt that robust public policy to raise families’ incomes and secure health-care access and family leave would lead to a substantial fall in both the number of unwanted pregnancies and the number of abortions in America.
Of course, Democrats will absolutely defend a woman’s freedom to decide her own life, including ending a pregnancy. That’s a key part of our inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
But we can also argue that Democratic policies offer millions of women the choice to bring to life a child she fears she can’t afford today. Republican policies, by contrast, lock low- and moderate-income women in a straitjacket of deepening financial and health anxiety.
As Democrats brace for what will likely be the most vicious campaign of our lives, let’s take the Republicans’ claims to care for the unborn child—and for families—head-on. Let’s vow to lift the financial and health pressures that coerce so many women’s decisions.
Let’s make it crystal clear: Democrats are not only the party of choice. We’re also the party of life.
Lenny Glynn, a Boston-based journalist, served as a speechwriter for Governor Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.
