Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock has a saying: “A vote is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children.”
He said it in 2022, after defeating Republican challenger Herschel Walker in a runoff election. He said it in Chicago during his speech at this year’s Democratic National Convention. He has posted it on his social accounts.
It’s worth repeating. It’s a good line and a good directive, and I thought of it when I read what Bernie Moreno, Ohio’s Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, said about suburban women voters.
“You know, the left has a lot of single-issue voters,” Moreno told a crowd gathered at a Warren County town hall on Sept. 20. “Sadly, by the way, there’s a lot of suburban women, a lot of suburban women that are like, ‘Listen, abortion is it. If I can’t have an abortion in this country whenever I want, I will vote for anybody else.’”
I have been alive for 49 years. I have never heard a suburban woman, or any woman, say this.
Anyway, Moreno, who’s running against incumbent Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, wasn’t done.
“It’s a little crazy by the way,” he continued. “But — especially for women that are, like, past 50 — I’m thinking to myself, ‘I don’t think that’s an issue for you.’”
Meaning, I suppose, our baby-making years are behind us by then, so what do we care if abortion is legal?
First, some context.
Abortion is not even in the top five in a list of issues voters care most about in the 2024 presidential election. According to data from the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, voters are concerned about the economy, health care, Supreme Court appointments, foreign policy, violent crime, immigration and gun policy, in that order. Then abortion.
Now, abortion has risen in importance since 2020, Pew reports, when fewer than half of voters (40%) said abortion was a “very important issue.” At the time, 46% of Trump voters and 35% of Biden voters said it mattered a great deal. Those numbers shifted after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. According to Pew, 67% of Harris supporters and 35% of Trump supporters now call the issue “very important.”
But I think it’s important to push back against the callous, clueless framing Moreno is trying to place around the issue.
For women that are, like, past 50, the issue of abortion is about far more than whether or not they can access one whenever they want.
For women of any age, the issue of abortion is about far more than whether or not they can access one whenever they want.
For women who wouldn’t choose an abortion for themselves. For women who have never been and will never be pregnant. For men. For anyone who desires a world for themselves and their children where medical decisions are trusted to individuals and their medical providers, abortion is about far more than whether or not they can access one whenever they want.
It’s about Amari Marsh, a South Carolina woman charged with murder/homicide by child abuse three months after she lost her pregnancy in 2023. A grand jury cleared her, but her trauma is indelible.
It’s about Hadley Duvall, a 22-year-old woman who was raped and impregnated by her stepfather when she was 12. Duvall has become an abortion rights activist because she had options under Roe v. Wade that no longer exist in some states. (Ten of the 21 states with abortion bans or gestational limits don’t allow exceptions for sexual assault, according to health policy research site KFF.)
It’s about Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old mother with a 6-year-old son. Thurman died when she couldn’t access legal abortion care. Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee ruled her death preventable.
It’s about guarding against the slow and steady rollback of reproductive rights that started taking place as soon as Roe was overturned — rollbacks like the criminalization of in vitro fertilization procedures.
“I think you’ll see the anti-abortion movement making a gradual case that the more state courts — the more state laws — recognize a fetus or embryo as a person for different circumstances and reasons, the more compelling they can say is the case for fetal personhood under the Constitution,” ” UC Davis law professor Mary Ziegler told NPR after an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos have the same status as children in wrongful death lawsuits.
It’s about countless situations and decisions and complications and challenges and traumas that make abortion an extremely complex, highly personal decision that women should be entrusted to make for themselves.
That’s why voters care about abortion. Not so they can go around casually having them. So they can protect the rights of people who need them.
A vote, Warnock says, is a kind of prayer for the world we desire for ourselves and for our children.
It’s also a value system. It’s a recognition that we’re part of something bigger than ourselves and we’re obliged to take care of more than just ourselves. It’s hope in action. It’s purpose. It’s power.
And we get to use it.
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