Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said that abortion is essential for the “functioning of our democracy.”
In an interview with Teen Vogue — an outlet marketed as “the young person’s guide to conquering (and saving) the world” — Warren argued that opposing election reform bills and killing preborn children are intertwined.
“Do you feel like voting rights and abortion rights are really the key issues to making sure that the freedoms of voters and people in this country are protected?” asked Teen Vogue.
“Both voting and access to abortion are basic. They’re about the functioning of our democracy and about the protection of personal autonomy,” Warren replied. “Protection of the vote means your voice gets heard in government. Protection of access to basic health care means your autonomy as a human being is fully respected by the law. That you will make the decisions about yourself.”
“To me, that’s part of the heart of what all of this is about. This is where the two big fights are shaping up right now,” she continued. “And each intersects with the other. Both from the perspective of respect for the individual, and also from a political point of view. The right-wing extremists know that if they can keep people from voting, they’ve got a better chance to impose their views about abortion on an unwilling nation.”
Warren justified her argument by pointing to a 2018 poll showing that 71% of Americans support the Supreme Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade — the 1973 case in which the Court claimed that abortion is protected under the Fourteenth Amendment.
“It is a small but intensely focused group of people who want to impose their will on the majority of this nation,” she added. “This is a Republican Party that now openly admits that their only chance to hang on to power is to keep a substantial number of American citizens from voting. And why is that so? Because what they want to do is not popular with Democrats or Republicans.”
Warren has a long history of vocally promoting abortion. At President Trump’s 2017 inauguration, for example, she wore a pink scarf to signal support of Planned Parenthood — an organization that carried out over 354,000 abortions last year.
Warren’s comments emerge as several anti-abortion groups file amicus briefs — documents that tell the Supreme Court about matters not yet brought to its attention — encouraging the overturning of Roe v. Wade through the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, which deals with a Mississippi statute that bans abortion after a baby reaches fifteen weeks’ gestation.