We have to work under the assumption that the things that we fought hard for to protect women will be under assault, and we have to bring all our creativity and our energy to bear to preserve those things, no matter who is in the White House.
If you're making abortion illegal and undermining the various things that will allow the prevention of that need, it can only be a situation that goes from bad to worse.
There's a saying that you can't awaken somebody who's pretending to be asleep.
I just want to remind people that the task of those who support reproductive rights and reproductive justice didn't change based on who is in the White House. We have leadership that is not supportive of what we're trying to do, but the demand for justice shouldn't be modulated.
The US government is like an ocean liner, not like a speed boat. It's harder to turn around than people might think.
The worst thing we can do is to assume that the Electoral College [voting] resulting in the election of Donald Trump represents a mandate. It does not. He did not get the majority of the popular vote; that went to Hillary Clinton. That means those votes represent the consciousness of the nation, which is that abortion should be legal, that contraception and family planning are health issues and prevention, that a woman's right to reproductive privacy is the law of the land and should remain such.
There's a willful ignorance. We indulge people who are willfully misrepresenting the facts. I don't think those [anti-choice] congresspeople are as much benignly misguided as they are intentionally and willfully ignorant of the facts of reproduction. That lends itself very well to them being ideologically driven and carrying out agendas that, if they were to be really honest about the facts, would be a tougher sell.
Donald Trump has every intention to repeal the Affordable Care Act, as much because it's known as Obamacare [as because he wants] to try and deconstruct the legacy of President Obama. But that has implications that mean women who were accessing family planning and contraception as a preventative service with no co-pay will lose access to that coverage. We [will] only see an exacerbation of the things we were engaged in trying to prevent - like unplanned pregnancy and the need for abortion, which creates a societal dilemma.
Most of us have to think worst-case scenario.
I'm full of clichés - I was raised by a Southern black woman and they had a saying for everything.
Certainly, my friends and the common narrative is people are trying to shore up their own lives with regards to family planning and reproduction.
There's also really no way of knowing what Donald Trump is going to do - he's been sufficiently vague in his policy positions.
We can take that as a notion that we don't know exactly what [Trump] is going to do, but we can't afford to take a position of waiting around to see.
