Kamala Was Not One for Women

‘T he sisterhood did not stand up.’’

In the wake of this year’s presidential election, women were described as being in a state of shock that one of their own, Kamala Harris, had not been elected president of the United States.

‘’Liberal women, in particular, have spent recent days practically stunned,’’ an above-the-fold front-page New York Times story explained, ‘’stewing over how other women could have rejected Kamala Harris, who would have been the first woman to lead the nation in its nearly 250-year history.” It continued: “Instead, they chose a candidate who spews misogyny seemingly with glee. For the second time.’’

The voter from Maine who scolded the sisterhood clearly thought, as the Times writer explained, that some women believe that other women had voted ‘’against their own self-interest.’’ But some of us women don’t vote for any women at any cost. And one does not have to be a fan of Donald Trump to consider that women — especially vulnerable young women and girls — might be safer under a Trump administration, even knowing what we know about his personal life and past.

I once mentioned poverty efforts by the Heritage Foundation at a forum at Georgetown University, and much of the audience hissed. Heritage is not often a welcome broker on the left. But anyone of any ideological stripe who considers themselves someone who cares about women ought to look at a new research paper Heritage has published about the impact of your local CVS or other retail drugstore chain dispensing mifepristone, known as the abortion pill. In South Carolina, New Jersey, and Arkansas, emergency-room visits because of abortion pill use have increased since pregnant women no longer must make in-office visits for the drug.

Even if the increase wasn’t happening, just think about it: Whatever your views on abortion are, ending your pregnancy ends a life. You say it’s a blob of cells, or you say it is a baby: It’s going to be a bloody mess either way. The movie Unplanned, released a few years before Covid, was about Abby Johnson, a Planned Parenthood director turned pro-life activist. A critical contribution to her conversion was her recruitment to assist in an ultrasound-guided abortion, in which nothing is left to the imagination. And that movie was rated “R” because of the bloody mess that occurred in the woman’s bathroom when she had a chemical abortion. We leave women and girls on their own to deal with the bloody remains of their developing child, now dead. And, however she votes (if she is even old enough to), there is a psychological reality to seeing what she is seeing, to be flushed down a toilet. Sorry to be so graphic, but this is what the reality of abandoning women is. Is it kind for the sisterhood to not only allow this but enthusiastically support it?

The Heritage Foundation is recommending that the Federal Food and Drug Administration “reinstate the mandatory in-person dispensing requirement for the abortion pill and reverse its decision allowing pharmacies to dispense the drug.” That’s not in the least misogynistic. To the contrary. A man authored the study, so call it chivalry. It’s also a matter of basic humanity.

In the report, Jonathan Abbamonte points out that because women are not necessarily meeting in person with a provider before obtaining the abortion pill, it becomes “difficult or impossible for prescribers of the pill to effectively screen women for possible underlying health risk factors and contraindications.” He explains: “Some contraindications of mifepristone are potentially life-threatening, such as an ectopic pregnancy, which can only be effectively screened for with an ultrasound. Mifepristone cannot be used to treat ectopic pregnancy.’’

I interned for and worked briefly at the Heritage Foundation many moons ago and have collaborated with scholars there many times over the years. Abbamonte works for the Center for Data Analysis there. If you think of Heritage as the hotbed of the so-called culture wars,’ no one in the conservative movement near Heritage ever thought of the data analysis center that way. We should take to heart their analysis about what we are doing to women.

And it’s the most vulnerable who suffer the most. I think of a black 17-year-old high school student I met outside the flagship Planned Parenthood clinic in Manhattan in the spring of 2021. She didn’t want an abortion, but her mother was insisting. She had already started the chemical-abortion process, on the way to picking up her little brother from daycare. There’s a way to reverse the process with hormones once it has begun. She was interested, but her mother hung up the phone when she was talking with women who knew a doctor who could help her. Maybe, at least, her mother held her as she saw the remains of the unborn child in their bathroom.

Not long later, that same girl was pregnant again, by the same boyfriend who, she was certain, wanted to be a father. She went to those women, the Sisters of Life, Catholic “nuns” who care for pregnant women (and post-abortive women). She has a little one now, because she knew what she wanted and whom to go to. Where is the sisterhood for her? Where would Kamala Harris have been for her?

The Democratic convention this summer was about delusions that abortion on demand and abortion pills at Duane Reade are the only ways to be good to women and for us to be free. That’s a lie. And there are data to look at if you can get yourself to realize that even data dorks at the Heritage Foundation might have something to offer the sisterhood in the best interests of those women and girls most scared and vulnerable and in need of resources and good public policy. And of the kind the Kamala Harris administration would not have provided.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.