Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently made headlines for all the wrong reasons. In a meeting with President Trump and his Cabinet, he once again claimed, without evidence, that Tylenol causes autism. During the meeting, Kennedy referenced a TikTok in which he saw a woman with a “baby in her placenta… gobbling Tylenol.”
This might’ve been funny, if it weren’t so terrifying. The same man confusing placentas for uteruses, something I learned in 9th grade science class, is now being urged by 51 Republican senators to “reevaluate” whether mifepristone, one of the safest, most common, and widely studied medications in the world, should remain on the market. As one of my favorite delegates in Virginia once put it, “People who probably couldn’t find the uterus with a map” have no business making decisions about women’s health care.
Watching politicians stumble through conversations about reproductive health makes me think about the women who have always stepped up to care for one another, long before abortion was legal, and long after politicians tried to stop them.
A few years ago, on a random Tuesday night Facetime call, my grandmother shared a story she had never told me before. I thought I’d heard all her stories, several times over. To my surprise, she told me that she worked at an abortion clinic in New York in the 1970s. She didn’t offer this as some great revelation. In fact, she was far too casual for my liking. I just stared at her, half shocked, half amused that I’d spent years working as a reproductive justice advocate without realizing she’d done it first. My grandmother didn’t and still doesn’t think of herself as radical. To her, it was simple: she was a nurse who cared for women who needed abortions. It was what needed to be done, so she did it. This was just another one of her many jobs in a decades-long career as an operating room nurse.
When my grandmother recounted her time at the abortion clinic, she remembered one patient in particular: her neighbor’s daughter. Terrified to see her family friend in the waiting room, my grandmother took her hand and stayed with her throughout the procedure. She cried telling me this story, heartbroken that my generation faces the erosion of rights she once quietly protected.
Right-wing and extremist politicians here in the US want us to believe that banning abortion will make it disappear. The data proves otherwise. Over the past 30 years, more than 60 countries and territories have expanded their abortion rights, while the US has joined a small group of only four countries to roll them back.
In countries where abortion is illegal, such as El Salvador and Nicaragua, people still end pregnancies, only under dangerous conditions that cause injury and death. Access to abortion has been shown to reduce maternal mortality, improve educational and career outcomes, and long-term wellbeing. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has unequivocally stated: abortion is healthcare.
Some view abortion as a matter of morality. I acknowledge that. But morality should not be legislated by those who will never experience pregnancy. On issues of reproductive health, from abortion to preterm-birth and maternal mortality, politicians should center the voices of those most impacted: Black, Indigenous, and Latina women. But our government doesn’t reflect that reality. While women make up a little over 50% of the US population, they hold less than 30% of seats in Congress. State legislatures mirror that imbalance.
When those least affected by pregnancy hold the most power, their personal beliefs about “life” become policy. And ironically, their compassion often ends at birth. The Pro-Life Caucus, made up of 39 Senators and 56 Representatives, includes politicians who have repeatedly voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, cut social safety nets that support low-income families, and are in favor of the Trump administration’s brutal mass deportation regime. If protecting life were truly their goal, we’d see investments in policies proven to prevent unintended pregnancies, strengthen families, and allow people to raise their children in safe, healthy communities. Even Pope Leo XIV, a Chicago native, has criticized politicians who claim to be pro-life while supporting the death penalty and cruel treatment of immigrants.
Religion has become a political weapon, used not to protect life, but to police it. However, most people of faith reject this extremism: 59% of Catholics and 56% of Muslims in the US believe that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. A study from 2014 found that 90% of Unitarian Universalists and 83% of Jews supported abortion. Overwhelmingly, people agree that religion should not dictate private, personal healthcare decisions.
Banning abortion is nothing short of a human rights violation, and a reflection of the same violent systems of control and dehumanization that have defined this country since its founding. Agendas like Project 2025 outline a plan to ban nationwide abortion, restrict contraception, and roll back protections for LGBTQ+ and immigrant communities; an effort rooted in revitalizing a narrow Christian Nationalist view of “traditional” marriage and family.
Within just ten months, 12 of the 31 reproductive health priorities listed in Project 2025 have been completed. And just in the past month, South Carolina considered one of the most extreme abortion bans to date, Texas expanded its “bounty hunter” law, and Louisiana closed its remaining Planned Parenthood clinics while issuing an arrest warrant for a California doctor.
The truth is that abortion has always existed and always will. Across centuries, cultures, and continents, people have ended pregnancies for personal, economic, medical, and deeply human reasons. The earliest known references to abortion appear in the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus (1150 BCE), which describes herbal remedies and suppositories. In ancient Greece and Rome, abortion was viewed as a woman’s right. In the US, Indigenous communities have long relied on medicinal plants to support reproductive health at every stage; to them, abortion is both a cultural and religious right. During slavery, Black midwives, often regarded as spiritual healers, provided prenatal, birth and postpartum care, including abortions, as a form of resistance against the forced reproduction of enslaved people. In recent years, “Green Wave” activists in Latin America have led a transnational grassroots movement fighting for safe, legal abortion access in Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia; and successfully reframed restrictions as a form of gender-based violence.
Whether she knows it or not, my grandmother is a part of this long legacy of care and resistance. This year, she turned 95. But when she was my age she immigrated to the US from Chile, leaving a conservative, Catholic country to build a new life in New York. For my grandmother, caring for someone in their most vulnerable moment was an act of love, but it was also a challenge to the systems that have sought to control our bodies. Nearly half a century later, I live in the same city, working in reproductive justice, carrying a torch I had no idea she once held. Her story is a reminder that progress isn’t linear, and each generation carries the fight in its own way. As Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote, “They can cut all the flowers, but they cannot stop the spring.”
Gabriella G. Watson is a fellow of the OpEd Project with the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice and the Every Page Foundation.
