Millions of American women know exactly where they were, and what they were doing, when news broke that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority planned to overturn Roe v. Wade in May of 2022.
I remember vividly because it marked the end of our constitutional right to autonomous control over our own bodies, and with it, our own futures.
Perhaps it takes being a woman to appreciate the incandescent rage that comes from having the government claim dominion over your body. That rage does not simply go away. Women will never “get over” being made half-citizens by the Republican Party’s extremist abortion regime.
Reproductive freedom for women was our pathway from the kitchen to the boardroom, at long last resolving what feminist author Betty Friedan called “the problem that has no name.”
Only it did have a name: the law.
Laws against contraceptives and abortion up until 1973 left women at the mercy of their own bodies. Women’s economic liberty, something that barely existed until the Supreme Court’s Griswold, Roe, and Casey decisions, finally liberated American women from their kitchens.
Women’s liberation begins and ends with reproductive control.
But Republican leaders, who spent decades building the Supreme Court conservative majority needed to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2023, don’t care about women’s economic freedom. Regardless of what they claim, Trump and his Republican friends plan a national Life at Conception law that will leave American women with nowhere to hide.
Control women’s reproductive freedom and you control women. The loss of our bodily autonomy — our very freedom — is not something women will just “get over.” It’s not something we will forget because of post-pandemic inflation.
No, Roe Rage slow-burns inside each of us. It’s a torch of anger that can only be snuffed by kicking abortion-banning Republicans out of office and replacing them with Democrats who believe American women have more to offer society than serving as baby incubators.
Channeling Roe Rage into the Democratic Party’s messaging strategy allowed us to blunt the Republican Party’s “Red Wave” in 2022, and it can save American democracy from Donald Trump in 2024.
Roe Rage strategy has now worked dozens of times, in multiple states, and across multiple election cycles post-Dobbs. Most recently, it helped Democrat Marilyn Lands turn a state house district that broke for Donald Trump by 8 points in 2022 in deep red Alabama into an astounding 25 point victory.
Democrats are finally learning the Art of Electoral War when it comes to the long game of modern electioneering. Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans can run from their barbaric abortion bans, but we won’t let them hide from them.
Roevember is coming. Again.
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Written by Dr. Rachel Bitcofer, Rachel Bitecofer is a national analyst, pollster, and political strategist. Cross-posted from her Substack.
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