Current state law allows abortion up to 20 weeks of pregnancy, and North Carolina has become a haven for women in surrounding states where the procedure has been banned. In the months surrounding the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that ended federal abortion protections, the state saw a 37% increase in the abortion rate, the highest in the nation.
None of this is really about being “pro-life.” It’s not about reducing the number of abortions. That’s already happened; the abortion rate in the U.S. has been falling steadily for decades.
That’s because, as a new analysis has found, “It’s becoming less common for women to get pregnant when they don’t want to be.” The New York Times reported on the study originally published in the journal Demography, looking at abortion rates between 2009 and 2015. The study showed that an increasing majority of people were choosing to get pregnant and choosing the timing of their pregnancies.
Simply put, we’re not having an abortion crisis that demands these restrictions. If passed, the North Carolina law isn’t going to fundamentally change how abortion happens in that state. From a supposedly “pro-life” perspective, it’s absolutely unnecessary. This isn’t about saving unborn lives: It’s about controlling women’s bodies.
That’s the kind of freedom that Republicans don’t want women to have. Incidentally, the laws don’t just impact women: Plenty of male autonomy is being curtailed too. When to grow a family is an economic decision, one now being forced on men as well as women. The difference is that men get to keep control of their own bodies.
Dimitri of WarTranslated has been doing the essential work of translating hours of Russian and Ukrainian video and audio during the invasion of Ukraine. He joins Markos and Kerry from London to talk about how he began this work by sifting through various sources. He is one of the only people translating information for English-speaking audiences. Dimitri’s followed the war since the beginning and has watched the evolution of the language and dispatches as the war has progressed.
