Abortion is health care, of course. But attempting to depoliticize abortion or insist that the procedure is categorically identical to other health care procedures downplays the implications of abortion in a way that removes it from any honest analysis of its political salience. Because the anti-abortion movement has long dominated the conversation with the assertion that abortion is murder, the impulse to remove abortion from a murky moral debate and frame it as a simple matter of health is understandable. But it is not simply a medical choice with no repercussions beyond the realm of the personal; abortion affects everyone. One in four women will have at least one abortion in their lives. Our communities have been shaped in a million invisible ways by people having abortions—abortions that allowed them to build their lives and careers and families with intention. Abortion has shaped families who live comfortably at the top, and lack of access to abortion has denied many poor families the ability to shape their own futures. Deciding whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is a personal choice. But suggesting that abortion is a private matter between doctor and patient mistakenly characterizes it as an individual issue, as opposed to a fundamental human rights issue and a matter of justice. Abortion bans are one of many strategies the right is employing in a much larger project to disenfranchise poor people and people of color. This is also about controlling women and their bodies, of course, though ultimately wealthy women will always be able to buy their freedom. The question of when life begins is deeply personal, and there will never be anything approaching consensus on the matter. But the abortion debate isn’t about when life begins: It’s about how much money a pregnant person needs in order to purchase their own self-determination, and about who our society deems worthy of freedom. The people fighting to ban abortion aren’t trying to eliminate abortion—if they were, they’d be advocating for medically accurate sex education, insurance plans that cover birth control, and widely accessible emergency contraception. If abortion opponents truly believed that abortions become increasingly evil as pregnancy progresses, they wouldn’t be trying to ban abortions at six weeks and implement waiting periods designed to make it impossible for those without means to terminate their pregnancies as soon as possible. The most compelling argument that abortion is health care is the fact that the lack of abortion access is a rapidly escalating public health crisis, one that will only continue to deepen existing contours of inequality. Maternal mortality rates in the U.S. are the highest in the developed world, and in some places that rate is four times higher for black women. Abortion is health care, but we do not live in a country that frames health care as an inalienable human right. The fight for abortion rights is a structural power struggle, with clear winners and losers.

We can no longer tolerate the way “both sides” are given equal weight in the media or the lukewarm reactions of check-the-box “pro-choice” candidates. There is a real war going on, a battle for access to basic health care—to a procedure that one in three people who can get pregnant will need in their lifetimes. One side is willing to arm themselves and to murder not just doctors, but bystanders.