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It has been 250 years since the U.S. declared independence at one of the most tenuous moments in our history. We now stand at another tenuous moment. With an autocrat firmly in the White House, a sycophantic legislative branch, and a judiciary dominated by far right conservatives, it feels hard to celebrate the United States and its “democracy,” which hangs by a thin thread.

In the run-up to this anniversary, patriotic reflections have abounded, whitewashing U.S. history and seeking to erase its more sinister chapters. This pageantry has also erased any mention of a positive practice that has run throughout American history — the practice of safe abortion.

That’s right, abortion has been a part of American life since the very beginning. Despite attempts by far right extremists to eradicate it out of existence and erase its history in U.S. colonial and republican history, safe abortion has been a consistent throughline over the past 250 years and beyond.

Abortion access has been decimated in recent years. Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, Republican-dominated state legislatures successfully forced the closure of more than 160 abortion clinics from 2012 to 2019 alone. States like Alabama and Texas passed draconian early abortion bans, designed to force the Supreme Court to test and potentially end the constitutional right to an abortion. Finally, in June 2022, after Donald Trump successfully appointed three far right justices during his first term, Roe v. Wade fell in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Writing for the majority in the Dobbs ruling, Justice Samuel Alito argued that abortion is “entirely unknown in American law,” and the right to a legal abortion is “not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and tradition.” In this interpretation, Alito, as he so often finds himself, is flat-out wrong.

Battle Over Medication Abortion Threatens to Revert US Back to 19th Century

Abortion, a matter of individual liberty and personhood, isn’t just foundational based on the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, which established........

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