To the editor:

My grandmother was a republican, a republican who raised me to be pro-choice. She remembered vividly friends lost to unviable pregnancies and women who had committed suicide when they were unable to receive an abortion. I’m 45, I don’t remember a time when women did not have access to this basic health care as a constitutional right. Congresswoman Michelle Fischbach has spent her career promoting extremism, and her husband has turned controlling women’s bodies into a cottage industry. The vast majority of Minnesotans do not want women to be prosecuted for having a miscarriage, the vast majority do not want women to die from ectopic pregnancies, the vast majority do not want to force women and girls who are pregnant from rape or incest to have a forced pregnancy.

No one in their right mind wants a 12-year-old whose body has not yet developed to be destroyed due to rape or incest. No one wants to go back to the days when women having a miscarriage were accused of having a home abortion and jailed. No one wants to see women die from ectopic pregnancies. Yet, Fischbach and her extremist allies want just that, and today, that is what they received from our activist Supreme Court. I cried today for sisters and nieces whose lives are now endangered by this law, I cried for the women who will die and those who will be jailed.

Clarence Thomas said in his concurring opinion that “We should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents.” Rest assured, this extremist court and Michelle Fischbach will not stop at Roe. As a moderate, I am asking our silent majority to stand against this extremism. This was never about being pro-life, it was about control and forced birth — under any circumstances. Who we marry and when and how we chose to have our families are our own personal choices, not Michelle Fischbach’s.

Jennifer Cronin

Pipestone County

Jennifer Cronin is Congressional District 7 DFL Chair