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A Social Worker’s Guide on How to (Mostly) End Abortion
Limiting women’s reproductive freedom is not the answer
This election cycle, my hope was the engine behind my grave miscalculation. I believed that, against all odds, we would vote to protect the most vulnerable of us. What naïve audacity.
In the words of a close friend, my relative youth makes me deeply idealistic. Woefully so. In the wake of a resounding democratic defeat, I am licking my wounds and preparing for what will surely be terrifying years for many of my loved ones.
In the days leading up to this year’s election, I inquired of the many minority Trump supporters surrounding me why they felt so strongly about a candidate who would sooner spit in all of our faces than advocate for our civil rights.
The answer, while unsurprising, was overwhelming in its consistency. Trump, I was repeatedly informed, would end abortion. And the end of abortion was worth gambling away the guarantee of just about all other civil rights.
The fact that Trump did not, in fact, guarantee an end to abortion is, for the purposes of this article, flatly irrelevant. The people — on both sides — heard promises made and voted accordingly.