The Cut - Abortion Wins Elections

“The question,” New York representative Shirley Chisholm declared in 1969, “is not: can we justify abortions, but can we justify compulsory pregnancy?”

The first Black woman elected to the United States Congress, Chisholm had recently been named the first honorary co-president of NARAL. She was both frank and morally assured in the remarks she delivered to the Republican Task Force on Earth Resources and Population, asking pointedly, “What is more immoral, granting an abortion or forcing a young girl … to assume the responsibilities of an adult while she is still a child?”

Chisholm was speaking during the last period in this country’s history in which American lawmakers were facing the open and urgent question of how to expand access to abortion care via legislative means, though at the time it was not clear which party was going to lead the charge. Chisholm’s 1969 remarks survive in part because they so impressed the chair of the committee, Texas representative George H.W. Bush, that he made the unusual move of entering them into the Congressional Record, explaining that they “deserve widespread attention.”

We were sorry to hear that the picture of Pope Francis wearing a white puffer was, in fact, fake. In the age of Ozempic, why work out? All movies should be 90 minutes. Amazon takes its delivery guarantees very seriously, it seems. Some Floridians are under the impression Michelangelo was a pornographer. France could make it mandatory for influencers to note if their content is retouched or filtered. And you can see Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus, and Mars line up near the moon this week if you know where to look.

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