On the morning after the U.S. election, the first text I received was from my 27-year-old daughter who couldn’t fathom what had just happened.
“What is going on with these people?” she asked about Donald Trump’s supporters. The second text was from my 59-year-old brother, an avid viewer of Fox News and someone who is regularly anxious about Armageddon. “I hope you’re perfecting your Nazi salute,” he wrote.
I could sense the glee in his words. The wider world is divided, and so is my family. Maybe yours is too.
The political fight in America has been painted as a gender war. Mad men on one side, frightened women on the other. Of course, women are running scared and have every right to be.
Consider that there have been 65,000 rape-related pregnancies in 13 states where Roe v. Wade was overturned since 2022, the vast majority likely leading to births because these women didn’t have access to abortion in their state. Consider that women are dying because physicians in states with abortion bans are afraid to provide them with the medical care they need.
(Forty per cent of ob/gyns say they face constraints on their treatment of women with pregnancy-related emergencies in states where abortion is banned, according to a national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation.) Forcing women who are raped to give birth and allowing women to bleed out because they can’t receive obstetrical care shows how much Trump and his ilk hate women. Supporters react as Democratic presid.