Deborah Tannen

Because plunging women back into the netherworld of coerced birth is a crime against humanity

Abortion alone is a staggeringly urgent reason to vote for Kamala Harris. Giving birth to a child transforms the lives of the pregnant woman, her parents, her siblings, her other children—born or hoped for—the father, his family, and the society they all constitute.

When I was in college, abortion was illegal. The terror of accidental pregnancy was a permanently looming specter. I was fortunate to avoid that fate. Less fortunate were a friend who stood on a street corner in New York waiting to be picked up and driven by a stranger to an unsavory location and a nightmarish procedure; the girl who invited her friends and friends’ friends to keep her company while she waited to hemorrhage, a nurse having packed her womb in hopes of causing that to happen, though she could not predict how soon; my mother’s sister who, overwhelmed by caring for a grievously injured child, lay on her kitchen table to undergo without anesthetic an abortion that left her unable to have other children.

If we could have put an end to that universe of fear, suffering, mangled wombs and lives, by casting a vote, we would have pitched tents outside the polls to make sure we’d be there when they opened. 

Plunging women, men, and families back into the netherworld of coerced birth is a crime against humanity. You can fight against that crime by voting for Kamala Harris.

Deborah Tannen is a #1 New York Times best-selling author and distinguished university professor at Georgetown University.