No one has made the case for women's health and reproductive rights better than Michelle Obama.
The following is excerpted from Mrs. Obama’s speech on Saturday at a Kamala Harris rally in Kalamazoo, Mich.
I want you to think about which presidential candidate could possibly care more about our reproductive health.
I just want to take a moment with this particular question, because there is so much that gets lost in the conversation about women’s reproductive rights. I want the men in the arena to bear with me on this. Because there’s more at stake than just protecting a woman’s choice to give birth.
Sadly, we as women and girls have not been socialized to talk openly about our reproductive health. We’ve been taught instead to feel shame and to hide how our bodies work. Some young girls enter puberty not knowing what to expect. Too many of us suffer with severe cramps and nausea for several days every single month.
Then on the other end of the reproductive timeline, too many women my age have no idea what’s going on with our bodies as we battle through menopause and debilitating hot flashes and depression.
See, fellas, most of us women, we suck up our pain and deal with it alone. We don’t share our experiences with anyone, not with our partners, our friends or even our doctors.
Look, a woman’s body is complicated business, y’all. Yes, it brings life, and that’s a beautiful thing, but even when we are not bearing children, there is so much that can go wrong at any moment.
Every woman here knows what I’m talking about: an unexpected lump, an abnormal pap smear or mammogram, an infection, a blockage, all of which could be early signs of a variety of life-threatening cancers.
In those terrifying moments when something goes wrong, y’all, which will happen at some point to the vast majority of women in this country, let me tell you, it feels like the floor falls out from under us.
Look, I don’t expect any man to fully grasp how vulnerable this makes us feel, to understand the complexities of our reproductive health experiences. In all honesty, most of us as women don’t fully understand the breadth and depth of our own reproductive lives.
That’s because our experiences are often neglected by science. There’s a huge disparity in research funding for women’s health. If you happen to look like me and report pain, you’re more likely to be ignored, even by your own doctors, studies show.
So let me take a minute to help folks, especially the men in our lives, get a better sense of what could happen if we keep dismantling parts of our reproductive care system piece by piece, as I fear Donald Trump will do. I want folks to understand the chilling effect, not just on critical abortion care, but on the entirety of women’s health, all of it.
There are good reasons why so many women and physicians are horrified by what’s happened since Donald Trump’s justices overturned Roe v. Wade. We’re seeing women scrambling across state lines to get the care they need. Just this week, a major medical journal reported that after Roe was overturned, infant mortality in this country rose. One woman spent 22 days in jail on murder charges after she miscarried in her own bathroom.
We are seeing doctors unsure if they can treat ectopic pregnancies, doctors being told that they can’t treat a woman until she becomes so close to death that only a “life of the mother” exception will allow them to act.
Just imagine the profound effects for all of us if Donald Trump wins the election.
In states that are already putting abortion bans into effect, his F.D.A. could further outlaw patchwork systems of telehealth appointments and mail-order pills, thereby eliminating the last remaining protections for women in those states.
He could take actions that effectively ban abortion nationwide, which would put all of us in danger, no matter what state we live in.
We will see more doctors hesitating or shying away from providing lifesaving treatments because they are worried about being arrested; more medical students reconsidering even pursuing women’s health at all; more clinics without enough doctors to meet demand, closing their doors, leaving untold numbers of women in communities throughout the country without a place to go for basic gynecological care, which in turn will leave millions of women at risk of undiagnosed medical issues like cervical and uterine cancers. This is real.
Do you think Donald Trump is thinking about the consequences for the millions of women who will be living in medical deserts? Does anyone think he has the emotional maturity and foresight to come up with a plan to protect us?
Y’all, we are teetering on the edge.
Even before these state bans, America was already lagging behind every other wealthy nation on measures like maternal mortality and paid leave.
We could be right back to the days before Roe, which many young people don’t even remember, the days when abortion wasn’t as safe as it is today, the days when the number of mothers of color dying in childbirth was higher.
So to the men who love us, let me just try to paint a picture of what it will feel like if America, the wealthiest nation on Earth, keeps revoking basic care from its women, and how it will affect every single woman in your life.
Your girlfriend could be the one in legal jeopardy if she needs a pill from out-of-state or overseas, or if she has to travel across state lines because the local clinic closed up.
Your wife and mother could be the ones at higher risk of dying from undiagnosed cervical cancer because they have no access to regular gynecological care.
Your daughter could be the one too terrified to call the doctor if she’s bleeding during an unexpected pregnancy.
Your niece could be the one miscarrying in her bathtub after the hospital turned her away.
This will not just affect women. It will affect you and your sons. The devastating consequences of teen pregnancies won’t just be borne by young girls, but also by the young men who are the fathers. They, too, will have their dreams of going to college, their entire futures totally upended by an unwanted pregnancy.
If you and your partner are expecting a child, you’ll be right by her side at the checkups, terrified if her blood pressure is too high, or if there’s an issue with the placenta, or if the ultrasound shows that an embryo has implanted in the wrong place, and the doctors aren’t sure that they can intervene to keep her safe.
If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late. You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.
Then there is the tragic but very real possibility that in the worst-case scenario, you just might be the one holding flowers at the funeral. You might be the one left to raise your children alone.
See, these are just some of the ways women die during childbirth. I don’t want to be a downer, y’all, but in many cases, there is no warning, and things can go bad very quickly. When it happens, every second of hesitation or delay can lead to devastating outcomes.
I am asking you, from the core of my being, to take our lives seriously. Please do not put our lives in the hands of politicians, mostly men, who have no clue or do not care about what we as women are going through, who don’t fully grasp the broad-reaching health implications that their misguided policies will have on our health outcomes.
The only people who have standing to make these decisions are women with the advice of their doctors. We are the ones with the knowledge and experience to know what we need.
So please, please do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown a deep contempt for us. Because a vote for him is a vote against us, against our health, against our worth.
Let me tell you all to think that the men that we love could be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this world. It is both a setback in our quest for equity and a huge blow to our country’s standing as a world leader on issues of women’s health and gender equity.
So fellas, before you cast your vote, ask yourselves: What side of history do you want to be on?