#paau

Lauren Handy and others she has been working with in their own words, describing the Rescue that led to the arrests, how Lauren and Terrisa came to be in possession of 115 aborted babies (including the 5 late-term, possibly born alive babies), and what comes next for them.

Warning: the video briefly shows the bodies of a couple of the babies, but there is clear warning before those images are shown, and if you don’t want to see them you can skip from the warning to time stamp 23:34.

Powerful words from Lauren:

“Am I willing to give up 11 years so someone else can have their full 70?”

Please pray for Lauren and her fellow activists.

It’s a troll, and there ain’t shit “progressive” about them. Their founder, Terrisa Bukovinac, was also the founder and president of Pro-Life San Francisco. So we’ve seen this weaponized identity politics playbook before, right? Using young, non-white, women’s faces to front for the most regressive, racist, sexist, anti-abortion messaging.

They’re using the same old, conservative, misogynistic, talking points that have been around since wayyy before I was born. They’ve just repackaged their messaging in slick, millennial, hipsterism. It’s another polished turd, a Lincoln Project piece of theater. Tbh, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that James O’Keefe was behind it. I’m surprised I haven’t seen Fox News pushing them more.

That said, I wouldn’t take them too, too lightly. Not because their pro-forced-birth arguments are compelling (they aren’t), but it’s the timing that worries me. The midterms are right around the corner, and Democrats are probably going to get slaughtered (this is me simply acknowledging the cyclical nature of politics when the winning party is in the White House; not me rooting for Republicans). I don’t believe Democrats will hold the Senate or the House. Now factor in the fact that the Federalist Society controlled SCOTUS isn’t finished dismantling Roe yet. And also keep in mind that Joe Biden did not stop supporting the Hyde Amendment until June of 2019, mere months before the primaries really started, and he actively worked to undercut the contraception mandate in the ACA, so we will definitely NOT have an ally in the White House. (Oh sure, he’ll publicly say all the right things, but if it comes down to a real fight, he’ll fold like a cheap lawn chair, and then blame the Senate parliamentarian or some such fuckery.) So what I’m really saying is, all the necessary and sufficient pieces for a rightward policy shift are already there, and I’m concerned that with juuust the right push, at just the right moment, PAAU might become the equivalent of the Tea Party. The Tea Party is largely forgotten now, or remembered as something of a joke, but they were a deadly useful tool for conservatism, and Republican politicians of the time were genuinely terrified of them.

Even though the Tea Party was an astroturf “movement” funded by billionaires, much like PAAU appears to be, they were instrumental in paving the road for Trump and his acolytes. So even though I don’t think they’re a genuine grassroots movement on the right, I fear that they could be utilized as tools for a regressive, evangelical lurch further rightward. And without radically transforming DNC leadership, I absolutely positively do not expect the Democrats to effectively counter a PAAU movement if it should catch fire on the right. You can expect Democrats to be about as effective as they were against the Tea Party—which is not at all.

Look, as far as fighting to protect Roe goes, if they really wanted to, the Democratic Party could have protected that right a looong time ago. They had at least 5 previous opportunities to ensconce Roe into law. Long before their two favorite scapegoats—Bernie Sanders and Susan Sarandon—entered the 2016 primaries. But they didn’t.

It’s not like me to be so pessimistic, but you asked the question, anon. As far as reproductive rights are concerned, we don’t have an ally in the Supreme Court, both houses of Congress are probably about to fall to conservatives, and the current president has a very, very, VERY long history of fighting against abortion rights. So I’m understandably concerned about the future.