I believe American women will save the country tomorrow

Smart men understand that when they tell a woman to do something whether they like it or not…the end result is not going to work out well for them.

Smart men know that telling a woman what to do with her body…would be even worse.

Smart men know that bragging about sexually assaulting women…could land them in jail.

Sane men know that calling for a female adversary to be shot in the face…you get the picture.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”. 

That might be the tagline for the U.S. election once the votes are counted. 

This woman believes American women, in record numbers, will turn out to show Donald Trump that he cannot, and will not be allowed to treat women like playthings. By trying to move us back to a time when men would bend women to their will, he—and he alone—has created the enormous gender gap that will likely determine who sits in the Oval Office next.

We will learn soon enough if women—Republicans, Democrats, Independents—deliver a victory to Kamala Harris. A number of my male friends believe Trump will win and right-leaning, conservative women will still vote for him. But women don’t need to be understood by men.

I believe this election will be a watershed. 

True Republicans, including compassionate conservatives, Reagan Republicans will eventually realize what Trump has done to them. The MAGA radicals in Congress will hopefully become nothing more than a footnote, and America’s democratic institutions will recover to become even stronger. 

Some men I have spoken to might not understand what the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, wiping away a woman’s constitutional right to agency over their own body, did.

It wasn’t just abortion rights. It was a much more sinister turn. It was what Margaret Atwood cautioned. Some men are simply hell bent on ruling the other half of the world.

I speak from lived experience. In 1996 I was pregnant when my youngest daughter and I were diagnosed with whooping cough. For weeks I would whoop myself into unconsciousness. At my 17-week ultrasound there was no longer a heartbeat. I was told to go home and they would schedule a D&C (dilation and curettage procedure to end the pregnancy) in two weeks with the belief my body would take care of it before that. 

It was beyond traumatizing. 

It took four days for my body to take care of it and I can say looking back that while the miscarriage itself was heartbreaking; carrying a baby I knew had no heartbeat and would not be born was so much worse for my mental health. I can’t imagine being told I would have to carry a non-viable baby full-term with no say about my own physical and mental well being. 

There is nothing like telling a woman what they can or can’t do, anytime, let alone with their bodies, to unite a country of women to come together.

It’s hard even for progressive men to understand what Dobbs did. Women live at work, in our politics, in our relationships with men with a surrounding sense of imbalance. Dobbs tipped the scales back to where they were more than 50 years ago. It wiped out every incremental gain in between.  

Yesterday, this man who wants to send America backward, told a crowd he would not be unhappy if the journalists there were shot. He knows they are present to bear witness.

He doesn’t want us to see and hear what is happening in his shrinking world.

But it’s too late. American women already know. 

And I believe they will protect the country from a man who does not want them to be protected.

Women have never needed a man to do that.

Carolynn Ioannoni is a former Niagara Falls councillor and a regular freelance contributor to The Pointer.

The Pointer thanks Mike Luckovich, the award winning editorial cartoonist for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution who allowed us to use his work.