Everywhere You Look, Anti-Abortion Bad Faith Is Being Rejected

She was supposed to go by the tired, old script. 

Jack Posobiec, far-right online provocateur of Pizzagate fame and avowed Trumpist, interviewed folks on Monday outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, doing his troll bit, his Pepe the frog bullshit, bringing the are-you-triggered edgelord aesthetic to the Democratic Party’s big get together. 

Posobiec interviewed a couple young women outside the convention and hit them with a question designed to provoke a very particular response: “How many abortions have you had?”

This question, brimming with judgment and presumption, was asked with the assumption that the DNC attendee would shrink and go on defense (the question also wrongly assumes that only women who vote for Democrats would seek abortion care). Posobiec asked the question not because he was curious about this woman’s reproductive health care history, but because he very much wanted to shame her in front of his online audience. 

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She was supposed to play the game the way it has been played for generations. Women are supposed to shrink from all public conversations about abortion rights and reproductive care. They are supposed to feed the stigma carefully created by Republicans (and Democrats) over generations of anti-abortion discourse that has heavily influenced American culture, and, of course, politics. 

This young lady did not play Posobiec’s game. 

“I’m being paid by George Soros to have an abortion on stage,” she said deadpan, staring into Posobiec's beady little eyes. 

It was the perfect reply – a reply created in a lab to effectively counter the right’s anti-abortion bad faith. In one instant, with one jokey response to a rude question from a menace of a man, this woman deflated Posobiec’s best laid plans. She took the shame he planned to heap onto her and threw it right back in his fucking face. It was a beautiful thing to behold. 

The interviewee, fearless and determined to shame the shameless Posobiec, went on to berate him for having no understanding of abortion care and how it works. She explained the difference between medication abortion and surgical abortion in the most demeaning way possible. It was brutal and glorious and exactly what Posobiec deserved for trying to troll someone about receiving reproductive health care. His bad-faith attack fizzled into nothingness.

In an almost perverse way, the right wing’s clarity around abortion rights – eviscerating them, jailing women and doctors, monitoring menstrual cycles, monstrous things of that nature – has helped nudge the left toward dispatching with the harmful stigma that has been attached to abortion for decades and decades. That stigma has most clearly been seen in how Democratic lawmakers have talked about abortion rights, using tortured euphemisms to avoid the a-word at all costs. 

I’m old enough to remember when the DNC was filled with speakers who would not say “abortion” on stage. They would say “choice” and “reproductive health” and other focus group-tested terms designed not to alienate some small, possibly nonexistent sliver of independent voters. It was this refusal to be honest and forthright about abortion that put Democrats on constant defense in the war over what sort of health care services women could have in the United States. 

The first night of this year’s DNC was a stark departure from all that. In a gut-wrenching presentation illustrating how Republican abortion bans have endangered every single pregnancy in the US, women shared their deeply personal stories about needing the medical procedure that has been turned into a political weapon over the past half century. These women talked clearly and bravely about how the end of Roe v. Wade – made possible by a Supreme Court majority willing to validate bad-faith arguments against abortion rights – had affected them since the constitutional right was ripped from Americans. 

Read more Bad Faith Times analysis of the anti-abortion movement here

Watching these women tell their stories at the DNC, I cried along with my wife, who has worked as an abortion clinic escort and has demonstrated a principled support of bodily autonomy that inspired me to work for years at Rewire.news, a publication that documented the coordinated, well-funded destruction of abortion rights and access across the US. I cried for all the needless pain and torment people have endured since six far-right judges shredded a basic right that had part of our constitutional fabric. I cried because I was angry. I cried for the tragedy of it all. I cried because I know what is possible if Democrats keep the White House and claim congressional majorities in November. 

Abortion rights is now, in this nightmarish post-Roe world, a Democratic weapon against Republicans. The right’s bad-faith argument that abortion rights should be a state issue has backfired big time over the past two years. Pro-choice ballot measures have won in states red, blue, and purple since SCOTUS went rogue, and with abortion-related measures on the ballot in 11 states this November – including Florida, Nevada, and Arizona – a continued surge of post-Roe backlash could easily deliver a governing trifecta to Democrats in Washington (Florida likely remains unwinnable for Democrats in a normal political environment, but with the right to abortion hanging in the balance, I wouldn't be surprised if young folks and women deliver the state to Harris).

Whatever comes after Roe must be stronger than Roe. With a trifecta, Democrats can and should ram through a law that establishes a constitutional right to abortion care that cannot be fucked with on the state level. An outright rejection of the bad faith inherent in the states' rights movement is necessary if we're going to safeguard abortion access against rabidly anti-abortion state lawmakers who watch the Handmaids Tale not as a fictional cautionary tale, but as a guidebook to utopia.

This groundswell of support for abortion rights and access was fostered by activists who had shouted from the rooftops during the Obama era that the procedure had essentially been outlawed in Republican-controlled states. Roe had failed to create a real, unalienable right to abortion. State-level Republican majorities had used bad-faith legal tactics to rip it to shreds by the time John Roberts and his fellow far-right activists in black robes wiped away what remained of the landmark 1973 Court ruling. That groundswell of activism included the crucial Shout Your Abortion initiative, aimed to crushing the stigma of abortion care. This led to lawmakers telling the stories of their abortions on statehouse floors – a brave and commendable action that helped Democrats stop using euphemisms to describe a safe medical procedure.

Democrats have come a long way from the Clintonian approach to discussing abortion: "Our vision should be of an America where abortion is safe and legal, but rare," Bill Clinton said in 1993. While one of the nation's two major political parties used the most inflammatory rhetoric to describe people who receive abortion care and doctors who provide that care, the other party used careful wording not in defense of the right to abortion, but in hopes they would not alienate the media voters. It begs the question: What does it mean to be a centrist on abortion rights? Maybe it means you think women should sometimes have bodily autonomy, but not always. Maybe it means you believe women can end a pregnancy if they meet your personal standards for when an abortion is necessary. Whatever it means, this view should be rejected out of hand by Democrats.

The DNC's opening night showed the party is no long hiding from the a-word. It is the first and most crucial step in going on offense against anti-abortion conservatives and re-establishing abortion rights in the US.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @cdcarter13.bsky.social and on Threads at @CDCarter13.