Felicia Kornbluh: State-by-state fights for abortion rights are exhausting and expensive - VTDigger

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

55% : The outcome of this election is particularly remarkable because the anti-abortion forces and Republicans in state governmental power did everything they could to rig the system.
55% : In those years, anti-abortion legislators began to use every parliamentary device they could to advance their agenda, and officials of conservative religious organizations, such as lobbyists for the Catholic hierarchy, threatened legislators with their political careers if they voted their consciences or in line with their constituents' majority preferences on this issue.
51% : This is the latest evidence that bypassing state legislatures that are tilted against abortion rights with direct-to-the-people referendums is a winning strategy for preserving or enhancing reproductive freedom.
50% : Imagine what anti-hunger charities or anti-poverty lobbyists could do in our state with $26 million!
49% : This new constitutional language allows the state government to forbid abortion after so-called "fetal viability," the point in a pregnancy at which medical science largely concurs in thinking the fetus could survive outside the uterus with available medical intervention.
47% : Victories for reproductive rights like the ones in Vermont and Ohio resemble the victories state-level advocates won in the 1960s and 1970s as public opinion was changing from majority opposition to legal abortion access to majority support and state legislatures were slow to reflect that change in the majority's preferences.
45% : But the Ohio case, even more than what happened here in Vermont, also indicates that state-by-state battles are wearying, expensive, and perhaps unsustainable.
41% : State legislatures that are gerrymandered to tilt toward populations that are religiously conservative, and on average older and more likely to be white -- and away from populations that are younger, nonwhite, and religiously and socially liberal -- deny the people's will.

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