I dread being asked my stance on abortion. Not because I’m scared to give an answer, but because my answer doesn’t fit neatly into a “pro-choice” or “pro-life” package.
Sometimes it seems easier just to stay silent.
American discourse sucks at nuance and the current abortion debate is so grotesque that it seems impossible to have a conversation that fully captures the complexity of reproductive rights.
If you want the short version of my view, I’m pro-choice.
If you want the long version – well, how much time do you have?
I believe in bodily autonomy (it’s why, while pro-vaccine, I am against government vaccine mandates).
But pro-choice is rarely absolute.
All but six states – Oregon, Alaska, Colorado, New Mexico, Vermont, New Jersey – and the District of Columbia restrict abortion in some manner.
Here in Washington state, abortion is legal up to fetal viability, which is defined by state law as “the point in the pregnancy when, in the judgment of the physician on the particular facts of the case before such physician, there is a reasonable likelihood of the fetus's sustained survival outside the uterus without the application of extraordinary medical measures.”
Personally, I believe in a woman’s right to choose up to 24 weeks. Longer if bringing the pregnancy to term endangers the life of the mother.
But I also believe this: abortion is not something to be celebrated, nor should it be considered a suitable alternative to widely available methods of contraception.
I believe most women who decide to have an abortion make that choice with the weight of careful consideration. But those who brag about the ease in which they decided to terminate their unborn child are only fueling a movement to take the right to choose away entirely.
I’m reminded of when actress Martha Plimpton bragged that she got her first abortion in Seattle.
“It was my best one!” she said as the crowd laughed. “If I could Yelp review it, I totally would.”
On Tuesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James told a cheering crowd about how, 20 years ago, she “walked proudly” into Planned Parenthood to get an abortion. In Baltimore, two small girls held signs at a rally with their parents that read “abortion is normal.” Photos circulated online of a woman who claimed to have had the procedure 21 times.
Even as someone who is opposed to the erosion of reproductive rights, I find casual dismissal of abortion quite alarming.
On the other end of the spectrum, I can hardly stomach the disgusting way in which some anti-abortion activists choose to voice their opinions.
On Twitter, pro-life author Lila Rose posted a graphic image of a late-term aborted baby. It came across my timeline without warning. What if a woman who lost a pregnancy saw that? Can you imagine how damaging it would be?
In D.C., as Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a speech in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, a counter-protester shouted repeatedly about her wanting to “dismember children in the womb.”
Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz made fun of protesters who were rallying against the possible reversal of Roe, calling them “over-educated, under-loved millennials who sadly return from protests to a lonely microwave dinner with their cats, and no bumble matches.”
And as if America didn’t have enough tearing us apart at the moment, Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell saw his country’s collective pain as an opportunity to entice voters.
“The Republicans won’t stop with banning abortion. They want to ban interracial marriage. Do you want to save that? Well, then you should probably vote,” he tweeted, linking to a registration site.
It is enough crazy to keep moderates from engaging in the debate altogether.
Let’s be clear: We will never have a national consensus on abortion. But if we hope to have a true national dialogue, we must learn to discuss it with the nuance, gravity, compassion, and understanding that the subject demands.
That means the most reasonable among us need to join the conversation.
Abortion is a difficult subject. But we can’t let the extremes be the only ones talking about it.
Everything you need to know about what happened this week during the legislative session in Olympia.
If there were ever an episode we’d be removed from social media over, this is it! Citizen sleuths look into Washington’s spending, and what they find is gag worthy. National civil rights complaint filed on behalf of Tumwater basketball player. Is Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell being punished for his bad basketball joke?
Prefer to listen? https://audioboom.com/posts/8656992-doge-washington-digs-up-dirty-dirty-dirt-2-20-25
Brandi Kruse and Zach Abraham dive into all things Department of Government Efficiency in this weekly series. On this episode: Elon wants to open up Fort Knox to check for gold. $4.7T in untraceable payments. Vampires getting Social Security!? Trump considering DOGE Dividends for Americans.
These remarks were delivered to the Snohomish County Lincoln Day Dinner on May 17, 2024.
The following remarks were delivered to the Whatcom County Lincoln Day Dinner on March 23, 2024, in Ferndale, Washington.
I struggled with what to talk to you about tonight.
Well, that’s not true. I didn't struggle with what to talk to you about – I struggled with whether I was brave enough to say what I wanted to say.
When I'm invited to speak to groups, I don't want to offend anyone or be too controversial. So, I reached out to a few of your fellow party members to ask whether any topics were off limits or wouldn't go over well with the crowd.
I got some good advice.
Then I decided to ignore that good advice entirely.
Too much is at stake to be polite.
As we sit here tonight, we are in the final battle of a war.
A war that has pit sanity against insanity.
Pragmatism against idealism.
A war that has sacrificed the public good, in favor of a twisted idea of progress.
It's a war that began long before I moved here 15 years ago. It started silently and it was mostly waged in the shadows.
Most of us didn't even realize that a war was being fought. We were too caught up in our own lives and our own problems. ...
If there were ever an episode we’d be removed from social media over, this is it! Citizen sleuths look into Washington’s spending, and what they find is gag worthy. National civil rights complaint filed on behalf of Tumwater basketball player. Is Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell being punished for his bad basketball joke?
[Video] Only students designated as females at birth can participate in girls competitions, WIAA says
Source: News8000com WKBT News 8
https://share.newsbreak.com/bm02e0qe
Silent Majority Foundation sues to challenge the validity of a masking rule that led to charges against election observers. Teachers’ union deletes post targeted at female athlete. Happy Aromantic Sexual Awareness Week! Seattle animal shelter gets political.
When I first started dating my husband in 2018, I avoided asking who he voted for in the 2016 presidential election. Part of me already knew the answer, but I wanted to bury the uncomfortable truth: he’d voted for Donald J. Trump.
If I’d asked him the question then, I’m not sure we’d be where we are today: happily married and head-over-heels in love.
When we met in the fall of 2018, I was a political reporter at the local FOX-TV affiliate in Seattle and President Trump was less than two years into his first term. While I’ve always been right of Seattle’s hard-left politics – it was difficult to break free from the groupthink of a newsroom. Especially a newsroom in one of the bluest cities in America.
Donald Trump had declared the “fake news” media the enemy of the American people and, in turn, we waged war against him, too.
To be clear, not all our coverage was unfair. It’s the media’s job to hold politicians accountable and there’s no doubt, when it came to Trump, the Fourth Estate took that job seriously. The problem, as I’ve come to realize, was they took it less seriously when it came to Democrats. They still do.
During my years at FOX 13 News, I like to think I did my best to hold Washington state progressives accountable for their failures on homelessness, crime, and the anti-business policies that were driving companies like Amazon to move jobs elsewhere. But, in truth, I spent far too much time as a local news reporter covering the White House. I even convinced my bosses to send me to the border in 2019 to cover the so-called family separation crisis – an unusual expense for a local newsroom to agree to. It’s worth noting that local FOX affiliates are different from the network and don’t necessarily share the same conservative bias. Ours certainly did not.
My family and friends knew I was vehemently anti-Trump. I voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and often chided my older brother for flying a Trump flag outside his home in Minnesota. By 2019, I’d moved in with my then-boyfriend – but still avoided talking to him about Trump and left the room when he’d turn on his favorite network news show.
In hindsight, I had what the right calls Trump Derangement Syndrome. And my diagnosis had the potential to be terminal.
But things started to turn at a most unexpected time.
The January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol had a different effect on me than you might expect. Rather than deepen my disdain for Donald Trump, it opened my eyes to disturbing depths of hypocrisy that I cannot unsee.
I’d just spent six months covering acts of leftwing political violence in Seattle that followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
I watched as cop cars were torched in the streets downtown. My security guard disarmed rioters of stolen police rifles. Stores were looted to the studs – bare manikins left strewn in the streets. Officers were assaulted and hit with improvised explosive devices. My crew was mobbed in what later became known as the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHOP) – six square blocks surrounding a police precinct that were taken over by armed anti-police extremists. A few days into the occupation, rioters tried to light the precinct on fire after putting quick-drying cement on a door to lock officers in.
Those are just a few examples of what unfolded in Seattle during the racial justice movement of 2020. Our mayor at the time, Jenny Durkan, famously referred to it as a “Summer of Love.” The acts of that summer were ignored and even supported by many in our city’s Democratic leadership. Then-Councilwoman Tammy Morales scolded anyone who questioned the behavior of criminal demonstrators.
“What I don’t want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told that looting doesn’t solve anything,” she said during the unrest.
Our state’s chief law enforcer at the time, Attorney General Bob Fergson, stayed mostly silent about the destruction happening on our streets. He had by then made a national name for himself by suing the Trump administration dozens of times and had his eye on the governor’s office (which he went on to win in 2024). There was no way he’d risk angering his base by condemning leftwing extremism. Instead, he issued a short statement focused on criminal justice reform.
The media downplayed the violence, too. Even my own station took great pains to excuse or ignore criminal acts and play up non-criminal elements of the protests.
No such pains were taken with J6ers.
That hypocrisy was the beginning of my yearslong red pilling.
In 2021, frustrated by new management and our coverage of both the riots and the pandemic, I quit my job in news to launch an independent show.
The biggest supporter of me walking away from my $185,000/year dream job?
My sweet, Trump-voting boyfriend.
I married him in the fall of 2023, five years after I almost let his support for Donald Trump steal the joy we now share. There’s little doubt that had I asked him in the early days of our relationship who he’d voted for in the 2016 election, I would have ended things.
Typing that now makes my heart hurt.
This past November, I voted for Donald. J Trump for the first time. And yes, my husband did too.
Today, more than any other emotion, I am full of hope and optimism for our country – finally free from the echo chamber that once soured me on Trump and his agenda. But I am also battling a tinge of guilt. Guilt for the viewers I let down in those early days of the Trump administration. Guilt over the wonderful life I almost cost myself.
For that, I offer a sincere apology to our 47th President (and my husband, for that matter). And I offer this advice to anyone upset by a second term of Donald J. Trump: Never let politics stand in the way of your happiness. And never be too stubborn to change your mind.
