The ACLU is really leaning into this Erase Women campaign. It has a page for Abortion is Essential: Stories of Liberation, which continues the Delete Women program.

The ability to decide whether and when to have children is essential to allowing people to control their own lives and futures. For many, having access to affordable abortion care opens the door to fulfilling educational and career goals, better parenting, staying true to gender identities, and other critical parts of life that everyone should have the ability to choose for themselves.

Freedom to decide whether and when to have children is important to men too of course, but not in the up close inside your body way it is to women. And “staying true to gender identities” is just the usual boring jargon, thrown in to nag us about not forgetting that which we are never allowed to forget.

This month, we’re launching a storytelling series in partnership with We Testify, an organization devoted to uplifting the voices of people who have had abortions.

And ignoring and insulting the half of humanity who needs them.

There are five stories. Of course one of them is by a woman who identifies as a man.

There’s a page on how to talk about abortion at the dinner table. Spoiler: by not mentioning women.

When it comes to discussing abortion access, the focus should remain centered on the people who need, or will need, this critical care — and the direct harm forced pregnancy places on lives.

Women, they mean; women’s lives, they mean.

Is there any other oppressed / disadvantaged / subordinated group being systematically and deliberately erased this way? Hidden among “people” and “lives” instead of being named? I sure as hell don’t know of any. It’s intensely insulting, so human rights groups and the like know better than to do it…except, now, when it comes to women. Suddenly half of humanity, the source of all humanity, doesn’t get to have even a word for itself.

Despite how anti-abortion politicians may frame it, forced pregnancy is not some political talking point: Forced pregnancy is taking away a person’s constitutional and human right to control their body and their future.

A woman’s. It’s not just a person’s in general, it’s a woman’s in particular. This is something that can’t be done to men – it’s an injustice done to women. Name us. I don’t care what Chase Strangio says; name us.

Denying someone abortion care has devastating and lasting consequences for the pregnant person — it can jeopardize their health, economic well-being and ability to determine their own future, for not only themselves but their family.

Six. Six times in that one sentence they erase women from the very role that has made them subordinate.

It goes on and on and on the same way, all down the page. It’s a massive betrayal.