As conservative Kansas just showed, most voters simply don’t want politicians making personal medical decisions for them.

ENEWSPF – Curated Commentary
By MITCHELL ZIMMERMAN

Our country may be divided on the issue of abortion. But when it comes down to it, most Americans believe that it’s a pregnant person’s right to decide for themselves whether to continue a pregnancy.

That’s not only a blue-state attitude—it’s just as true in conservative states like Kansas.

By a margin of nearly 20 percentage points in an election with record turnout, Kansas voters just overwhelmingly rejected Republican efforts to cancel the state’s constitutional right to personal bodily autonomy, even after the U.S. Supreme Court deleted that right at the federal level.

Abortion rights loom front and center as a major political issue this fall. But anti-abortion forces are trying to deflect responsibility for the reversal of Roe v. Wade by claiming that Democrats are using “scare tactics” about abortion bans.

Scare tactics?

Yes, voters are scared—and they should be. Voters are scared about the horrific, real-world human consequences we’ve seen with our own eyes since states started banning abortion.

Forcing teenagers to drop out of college so they can care for a baby they don’t wish to have is scary. Forcing married women to bear a second child when they don’t have the resources to raise the child they already have is scary. Forcing children who are rape or incest victims to continue a pregnancy is scary.

Forcing women to continue a pregnancy they very much wanted after they learn that their fetus has a heartbeat—but a fatal brain ailment—is scary.

Endangering the lives of women by forcing doctors to delay treatment until serious pregnancy complications worsen and they’re approaching death is scary. Making doctors fear that they will be prosecuted for providing appropriate medical care during a miscarriage is scary.

Thanks to tireless organizers and plain old common sense, Kansas voters staved off these scary prospects for now. But no matter where you live, voters have our work cut out for us. Many states are rushing bans through, and Republican politicians have openly floated passing a federal abortion ban for the whole country if they take control of Congress.

Voters of both parties need to think hard about the possibility that they or someone they love might need medical care that will be seriously compromised if this happens.

Voters of both parties need to think hard about the possibility that they or someone they love might want to make their own decision about how their life will unfold—whether they go to college, whether they pursue a career, whether they have the child they want on their own time table. Few voters want extremist politicians or religious leaders they don’t follow to make these choices for them.

Republican leaders spent decades manipulating the selection of Supreme Court justices so extremist judges could strip Americans of a right they’ve had for half a century. So they can’t claim it’s a “scare tactic” to warn that other fundamental rights, like the right to use contraception or marry a partner of their choice, could fall. Especially not when far-right Justice Clarence Thomas has promised to attack those very rights, too.

Many of the political issues being debated in this election season may seem abstract to voters. But nothing can be less abstract than control over one’s own body. This fall’s election will be as personal as it gets.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller “Mississippi Reckoning” (2019).

By ROBERT DODGE – ENEWSPF – Curated Commentary

Nuclear weapons do not make us safe and have not prevented war but rather have brought us closer to realizing the catastrophic outcome of nuclear war either by intent, miscalculation, or accident.

77 years ago the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945 and three days later, Nagasaki, resulted in immediate deaths of approximately 120,000 majority civilians and by year’s end over 210,000. This legacy continues to this day in large part through the voices of the hibakusha, atomic blast survivors, and through having planted the seeds of the first man-made existential threat, nuclear war.

The global response to the end of World War II and the nuclear bombings was the formation of the United Nations in 1945. From the outset it’s mission was to work to maintain international peace and security, give humanitarian assistance to those in need, protect human rights, and uphold international law. In recent years, the UN has established sustainable development goals for 2030, noting the added and connected existential threat of climate change with its disproportionate burden on poor and island nations.

Simultaneously, the United States and Russia began the nuclear arms race, currently in its second iteration, with 12,700 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the nine nuclear nations with the U.S. and Russia possessing 90%. These weapons threaten our very survival as a species, and indeed all living things every moment of every day.

This global threat to which the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists kept their Doomsday Clock setting at 100 seconds to midnight in January was heightened this year with the invasion of Ukraine on February 24 by nuclear-armed Russia in its war of aggression and acquisition. This conflict has brought us closer to nuclear war than at any point in the nuclear age. Hardly a day goes by without one side reminding us of their nuclear capabilities and the potential for nuclear war. Nuclear weapons do not make us safe and have not prevented war but rather have brought us closer to realizing the catastrophic outcome of nuclear war either by intent, miscalculation or accident. The fact that this has not happened to date boils down to pure luck and luck is not a security policy.

Incredulously, the nuclear states have continued their magical thinking of deterrence, modernizing, rebuilding and enlarging their nuclear arsenals. They remain oblivious to, or ignorant of, the prevailing scientific evidence demonstrating the catastrophic global effects of even a limited regional nuclear conflict, such as one that might occur between India and Pakistan using less than 1/2 of 1% of the global arsenals ultimate resulting in 2 billion deaths from the nuclear famine that would follow such a conflict. Upcoming reports will show that this risk too is actually even greater.

Currently the UN is convening the 10th Review Conference of the 1970 Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) which has been considered to be the cornerstone of nuclear disarmament. Expectations for this review conference are not high as none of the original five nuclear states have shown any intention of meeting their legal obligations to “Negotiate in good faith the elimination of their arsenals” called for under Article Vi of the treaty. Rather, they are using their participation as cover and a charade to rebuild and enhance their arsenals.

Frustrated by the lack of serious intent and refusing to be bullied any longer the non-nuclear nations have come together since 2010 with the assistance of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear weapons (ICAN) to develop and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which entered into force on January 22, 2021. This treaty declares nuclear weapons and the threat of their use illegal, just as each of the other weapons of mass destruction have been declared illegal. It sets forth the legal framework for nations to abolish their nuclear weapons in a verifiable, enforceable time-bound manner.

In the United States there is a rapidly growing coalition working to move back from the brink of nuclear war. This coalition, Back from the Brink, calls on the United States to change its nuclear policy and to take a leadership role in the work to eliminate nuclear weapons. Supporting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons with the immediate precautionary measures, the campaign calls for the U.S. to take a leadership role by:

• Actively pursuing a verifiable agreement among nuclear- armed states to eliminate their nuclear arsenals,
• Renouncing the option of using nuclear weapons first
• Ending the sole, unchecked authority of any U.S.  President to launch a nuclear attack
• Taking U.S. nuclear weapons off hair- trigger alert
• Canceling the plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons

This campaign has been endorsed by 329 local, state and nationally elected officials, 60 municipalities and 7 state legislative bodies along with 415 organizations including every major religious, health, environmental and peace organization. As an individual reading this now, you can be an endorser of this campaign. You can demand that your local, state and federal elected officials do so. You can encourage organizations you belong to that have not yet endorsed this campaign to do so. Taking action is within your power.

This moment in history is indeed a teachable moment. We know what devastation can occur. We know how to prevent it. The science is clear and so there is hope. The world we hope to leave to our children’s children demands that we take these actions now and learn from the past,  thus preventing us from being doomed to repeat it. Each of us can and must play a role in this effort for our future.

This work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely. Republished from Commondreams.org.

Robert Dodge, a frequent Common Dreams contributor, writes as a family physician practicing in Ventura, California. He is the Co-Chair of the Security Committee of National Physicians for Social Responsibility and also serves as the President of Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles.