Today is the day where, once again, women's reproductive rights are tested in the voting booth. The polls predict a close vote on this off-year election day.

And everyone will have cast their ballots by the time Frontline airs tonight with "The Last Abortion Clinic."

What's at stake?

Moiv, who works in a reproductive clinic and knows some of the people involved in this Frontline documentary, posted on Our Word an insightful breakdown of the issue:

The last abortion-providing clinic in Mississippi is the Jackson Women’s Health Organization. PBS producer Raney Aronson and a team from Frontline spent two months finding out how that has happened, and how your own state could be next. Wherever you are, it’s comforting to think “it can’t happen here,� but I can virtually promise you that at some level, it already has begun.

Yet there's quite a bit of complacency about what's happening, largely because people simply are not aware of it.

And many simply cannot believe it.

There’s a lot of talk these days about what might happen if Roe falls, and most opinion seems to be roughly divided into two camps. A sizable contingent feels confident that the Republicans need Roe more than Democrats do, both because it’s the most reliable way of energizing their base, and because they fear the voter backlash that would surely follow its loss. Almost as many people seem to believe that Democrats should shut up about the issue of abortion and let it go, because all it’s good for is losing elections. Their reasoning goes that even if Roe was struck, abortion rights would revert to the states and because -- as some preciously naive poster commented a few days ago –- “Americans are liberal and pro-choice,� women would still keep access to safe and legal abortion care.

Both those opinions are wrong –- for some women, even today, literally dead wrong.

It's important to realize that our Congressional representatives are much more conservative than we as Americans are. While most of us want Roe to stand, while most of us support women's reproductive rights, our elected officials have turned their backs on women.

Now, in 2005, even with Roe still nominally alive, a mounting wave of TRAP legislation is making compulsion our national norm. This year’s state-level legislative sessions produced a near-record number of laws imposing new restrictions on a woman's access to abortion or contraception.

So what about "reasonable limits" like parental notification, you ask? What's the big deal?

Moiv tells us what happens in her state of Texas, which already has strict notification laws:

And the teenagers who can't tell their parents are a whole 'nother story. They think that they can drink bleach to have a miscarriage. They pay their best friend's boyfriend to punch them in the stomach every day after school for days on end. They get on the internet and read about how abortions are performed, and call to find out what kind of tube they can use at home. Jane's Due Process literally saves lives in this state, but I live in fear of the day that I can't keep one of those kids on the line long enough to make her believe that there's a safe way out. And I can virtually promise you that when one of them carries out her pitiful, desperate plan and ends up in an ER, nobody talks about it. Only a few weeks ago, an OB/GYN resident at a major Dallas hospital told me about the women who come bleeding into their ER, but she won't tell anybody else, and it's hard to blame her. I can't imagine a quicker road to professional perdition for a hospital physician in Dallas, Texas in 2005 than stirring up a public ruckus about abortion -- unless it's getting caught performing one.

And so, on this election day, and with more elections to come -- and with a prospective new Justice who seems more interested in "husband's interest" than in a woman's rights over her own body -- the time is now to wake up and smell the coffee.

This isn’t some specter of a future horror that might or might not ever come to pass. This is the United States of America right now, and repressive state-level laws “regulating� abortion are already compelling women –- as always, primarily poor women of color and teenage girls -- to resort to the same dangerous and sometimes deadly methods of illegal abortion that kill thousands of women in the Third World every year.

If you aren’t already horrified, there’s no hope for you. Don’t even try to imagine how much worse it would be if Roe fell. And maybe no one could hold up to the reality of it, or would -- if they knew. But until Frontline went to Mississippi and Louisiana, nobody except people like us was talking about what already has been going on for some time.

And where’s that guaranteed political backlash? It’s nowhere, the same place it would be without Roe. If nobody is talking about it now, in this time and space of relative freedom, who will dare to make a public issue of nonexistent abortion rights in places where abortion has become a crime?

Read the whole thing.

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