Ten years ago, as Michigan’s Republican-led Legislature was on the verge of passing one of the nation’s most restrictive anti-abortion laws at the time, a 42-year-old state senator from East Lansing took to the Senate floor to speak out against what she knew was about to happen.
Minutes into her speech, Democrat Gretchen Whitmer tossed aside her prepared remarks and revealed for the first time publicly that she had been raped while attending college. Had she become pregnant, Whitmer said, she would not have been able to afford an abortion under the proposed law.
The bill, which Whitmer had derisively called “rape insurance” because it required women to declare when buying health insurance whether they expected to receive an abortion, passed anyway. But Whitmer, now in her second term as Michigan’s governor after winning reelection by nearly 11 percentage points in 2022, this week removed the requirement from state law with the stroke of a pen after Michigan’s Democratic-controlled Legislature sent her a bill tossing it aside.
“It’s kind of a stunning full-circle moment where it does reinforce that these fights are worth having and they’re winnable, even if sometimes it takes a little longer than it should,” Whitmer said Monday in an interview with The Associated Press.
I know people who live in rural Michigan and you’d think she was the literal devil by the way some talk about her. They never usually elaborate after saying ‘this place has gone to shit because of her’.
She seems like an upgrade to the old senile dudes running my state.
I once worked with a guy who was from Michigan. He had no shortage of things to say about those “facking yoopers.”