Abortion Activists Rail Against CiscoMAGA and Republican Extremists

By Sylvia Gonzalez Andersh of Tucson, who is a mother and an Air Force Veteran. First published in the Arizona Star.

I came of age in the 1970s, when the right to legal abortion was first protected by the Supreme Court with the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. The ruling recognized that the decision to continue or end a pregnancy belongs to the individual and ultimately allowed me to make the best decision for my life when just five years later, I found myself pregnant, alone, and scared. As we commemorate what would have been the 51st anniversary of Roe this month, I’m forced to reckon with the grave reality that now my daughter has fewer rights than I did at her age.

As a first-generation Mexican immigrant, I was finding my way in the world. I joined the Air Force and started building a life for myself. While on active duty in 1978, I suddenly realized my period was late. At the clinic, my worst fears were confirmed: I was pregnant. I burst into tears, saying out loud, “I cannot do this right now. I cannot be pregnant.” I saw the life I was working toward fall to pieces in front of me.

But because of the Roe ruling just five years earlier, I had the freedom to decide my future. I made the decision to have an abortion — a freedom I’ve lived to see both granted and taken away.

Forced pregnancy

Anti-abortion Republicans want to take us back to a time of forced pregnancy, often at the cost of our lives. Without access to safe abortion or contraception, my mother’s generation did not have the freedom to make decisions about their families.

When I was young, I asked my mother why she decided to have five children. She paused her housework, turned to me, and asked, “Do you think I had a choice?” At one of the most difficult times of my life, when I learned I was pregnant as a young service member, I truly understood what my mother meant those many years prior.

I had the power to decide my future when she never could. Her world was smaller than mine, and now, extremist Republicans, like my congressman Juan Ciscomani, are fighting to shrink my daughter’s world.

My daughter’s freedom has been stripped away, putting her in the same position her grandmother was born into. Without the freedom to control her body and her future, she has said she will never come back to Arizona, where she went to college and where she would be close to her family.

Anti-abortion extremists

Republicans in Arizona have been waging a decades-long war against abortion access, and in the wake of the reversal of Roe, which Rep. Juan Ciscomani applauded, they’re finding victories. After Roe fell, nearly all clinics in Arizona stopped providing abortion services. Currently, only seven clinics remain in the state and operate at a reduced capacity under former Republican Governor Doug Ducey’s extreme abortion ban. Now, we are forced to again await the future of abortion in Arizona as the state Supreme Court considers reinstating a near-total ban from 1864, before Arizona was even a state.

At the same time, attacks on our reproductive freedom are escalating at the national level. Republicans, including Rep. Juan Ciscomani, voted to elect anti-abortion extremist Mike Johnson to be Speaker of the House and second in line to the presidency.

And later this year, the same Supreme Court that overturned Roe will hear a case that would make it much more difficult to access medication abortion, a safe and effective way of ending an early pregnancy, causing millions more to lose access to abortion care. This will be the most consequential case related to abortion since the reversal of Roe, and is the next step in conservatives’ plans to ban abortion nationwide.

The status of abortion rights in America since the fall of Roe reflects the stories of three generations of women: one who had no choice, one who had the power to decide, and one whose right to control her own future is being ripped away, ultimately keeping her from returning to her family in Arizona.

If extreme Republicans get their way, my daughter will completely lose her right to make the same choices I had the freedom to make, just like my mother before her. I’ll always fight for our freedoms and for my daughter, but it will take all of us standing together against those who seek to dissolve the rights we fought for so long to gain and that are under threat once again.