Gloria Totten is the president of the Public Leadership Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy and leadership center that hosts the largest network of progressive lawmakers in the nation. At Common Dreams, she writes—What's different about the Roe anniversary this year is the newly proactive abortion rights movement:
What’s different about the Roe anniversary this year is the newly proactive abortion rights movement.
Today, lawmakers from 25 states and 3 localities join together to announce they will introduce legislation to affirmatively protect women’s fundamental right to abortion. This nationwide demonstration of resolve is just the beginning for 2018. Importantly, it’s part of a larger movement-wide effort to take the offense on abortion rights.
In 2016, there were 81 proactive abortion rights measures introduced in 25 states. Last year, that increased to 133 measures in 33 states and four localities. This year, the Public Leadership Institute is pushing to increase the number of proactive bills and resolutions to 200 in nearly 40 different states.
Part of the reason for this increase is the distribution of the Public Leadership Institute’s Playbook for Abortion Rights—the great majority of the policies introduced are similar to model bills published in that book. And part is the energy generated by the Women’s March and subsequent organizing for women’s rights. [...]
Many of the bills announced today are similar to the new Delaware law. They would “codify” Roe, meaning they would write the constitutional right to abortion into state statutes. This is because the Supreme Court is just one justice’s death or retirement away from reversing Roe.
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~Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada (2015)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2008—Wall Street’s Wild, Wild Ride:
Wall Street jitters continued at midday after the market opened with a 465-point dive, then began recovering most of that loss in the wake of an emergency rate cut by the Fed from 4.25% to 3.5%—a cut deeper than any since 1984, according to U.S. News & World Report.
"The tepid reaction of investors to the surprise cut may be due to a sense that the Fed senses the economy is in worse shape than it originally thought," according to USA Today. Imagine that: years of happy talk, denial, deregulation and creating one’s own reality ultimately have consequences. Who’d have thought?