Three Things You Should Know Right Now

The race to suppress women's votes; picture of a world without abortion access; and Elon Musk's veiled rape threat of Taylor Swift

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

The SAVE Act will block women from voting

Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson desperately tried to get the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, passed, threatening to shut down the government if it didn’t. They didn’t succeed this time but they’re not done trying.

Trump and Johnson claim the SAVE Act is necessary to prevent people who aren’t citizens from voting. Yet there is no proof that “any meaningful number of noncitizens have ever illegally voted in any American election.”

It just doesn’t happen. Illegal voting can mean years in prison, and it's one of the easiest crimes to detect. You’d literally be creating a government record of your crime. And for what payoff? I promise, no one is getting rich off casting a single ballot.

So what’s the real reason behind Trump’s desperation to get this passed before the November election? WOMEN. Most women vote Democratic. And 90% of women still change their last names when they marry.

The SAVE act requires your current ID to exactly match the name on your birth certificate. But many women never officially change their name in court when they get married. They simply take their husband’s last name and use it on their current forms of ID. So unless they have a passport (or other proof of citizenship with their married names)—and many, many US citizens do not—they could be blocked from voting. The National Organization for Women estimates that more than one in three women could be disenfranchised due to mismatched documents. For those who did legally change their names, finding the paperwork decades later would be hard to do just weeks before the election due to fires, moves, and, ya know, everything else women must keep track of. When voting is difficult, people don’t bother.

Not only would the SAVE Act help elect Trump as the next President, but it is just one more tactic to put women in their so-called place. Please share so everyone understands what’s at stake.

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What does a post-abortion access world look like? (Hint: exactly what a pre-Roe world looked like)

Picture of Savita Halappanavar in Ireland with the words: “She had a heartbeat too.” Savita died of sepsis after being denied an abortion because the fetus she was miscarrying still had a detectable heartbeat

When women are denied abortions, many more pregnant women die. To wit, Texas enacted a near-total abortion ban and maternal deaths in the state increased by a staggering 56% from 2019 to 2022. Compare that to an 11% increase Nationwide.

Last week ProPublica published two stories of women killed by Georgia’s abortion ban.

Candi Miller was warned by her doctors that having another baby could kill her. When she accidentally got pregnant, she felt she had no choice but to manage her abortion alone, as Georgia, the state she lived in, had just made performing an abortion a felony.

She languished for days in terrible pain while her son looked on helplessly. Her husband found her unresponsive with her three year old by her side. After taking abortion pills, she’d encountered a rare complication; she had not expelled all of the fetal tissue from her body and developed sepsis.

Similarly, Amber Nicole Thurman, an otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, and mother of a six-year-old — took abortion pills and developed an infection. But Thurman did seek help. She showed up at Piedmont Henry Hospital in need of a routine procedure to clear remaining fetal tissue her uterus, called a dilation and curettage, or D&C. But any doctor who violated the Georgia law could be prosecuted and face up to a decade in prison.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. But it was too late.

Not surprisingly, conservatives are blaming abortion medication, which every credible study shows is safe. Serious complications can arise with any medication (in this case, they occur in less than 0.3% of patients) which is why it's essential that doctors can practice without the fear of losing their licenses or freedom.

Vice President Kamala Harris said about Amber Nicole Thurman, “This young mother should be alive, raising her son and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school. This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down.” Indeed.

As abortion journalist,

Jessica Valenti

, tells us, “…the people who created these laws knew women would die. Not only that, they expected it. They planned for it, polled and messaged it—they strategized their talking points! Everything they say now is the result of decades of work preparing for this moment.”

They say they care about children but as a psychologist, I can tell you her son will never be the same.

Valenti urges people to share these stories, and make sure people in your life know that for every story we hear, there hundreds more that will never be told.

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Elon Musk’s veiled rape threat

You probably know that after the presidential debate on September 10th, Taylor Swift swiftly (get it?) endorsed Kamala Harris for President and signed the Instagram post, “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady” —conjuring up the offensive comments made by Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance, characterizing the Democrats as a party of “childless cat ladies.”

In response, the brilliant but widely reported as ethically compromised Elon Musk tweeted “Fine Taylor, you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.” In one sentence, he threatened to impregnate someone against their will and conjured up the debunked anti-immigrant rumor of Haitians eating pets.

Yes, he’s a big Trump supporter. And yes, this father of 12 has made it clear he believes his progeny are necessary for the survival of our species.

Swift smartly ignored the inane tweet. But I was happy to hear that Hillary Clinton addressed the “joke” calling Musk’s tweet “rotten and creepy,” and “kind of another way of saying rape I think.”

As a good friend texted me, “The assumptions underlying Musk’s comments are horrid, not just the rape suggestion, but that she ‘wins’ by his unwelcome impregnation. It justifies rape as good for the victim. And that despite her success and stature, she ‘loses’ without a man impregnating her.”

Musk is among many conservative men out there making it clear that even the most powerful women do not have a right to their own body.