Abortion rights, gun safety linked in the struggle for justice | Opinion

It's been a year since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade and stripped away the right to an abortion from millions of people across the country.

Abortion is banned in Tennessee with narrow exceptions, and if you’ve followed this issue, you know countless pregnant people have had to leave the Volunteer State, often in secret, just to get life-saving health care. Some have had their lives irrevocably changed and now may not be able to start or expand their families as they’d hoped due to substandard medical care.

What is Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi without the right to an abortion in our state?

The simple answer is that we’re everything we were before. If you call us, we make sure you have what you need to access abortion care. We’re still the leading provider of comprehensive sex education, and we provide preventive care, contraceptives and gender-affirming care.

Approach to advocacy shifting

But in terms of advocacy, we’ve radically shifted our approach. It’s no coincidence that the same politicians passing abortion bans are refusing to take action on gun safety. They care only about controlling our bodies, our lives or our futures. They have shown us time and time again that they value guns more than the lives of our children.

The hypocrisy around guns and abortion as public health issues is deadly. Whether you want to restore abortion rights or pass common-sense gun laws, you are fighting for freedom itself against the same extremists. The reproductive freedom and gun safety movements are fundamentally linked. As our reproductive justice partners have said for decades, there is no reproductive freedom without the ability to raise our children in safe, healthy environments, free from gun violence and free from harm at the hands of law enforcement. Just like abortion bans, gun violence disproportionately affects Black, Latino and Indigenous people because of our country’s history of systemic racism and discrimination.

Addressing the disconnect between what people say they want and how they vote

When Roe fell last year, we took advocacy work from lobbying the state legislature to speaking more directly to the people of Tennessee. Francie Hunt, executive director of Tennessee Advocates for Planned Parenthood, took this literally, leading the Walk for Our Lives from Memphis to Mountain City, talking with regular Tennesseans along the way. That brought her face to face with the disconnect between what people say they want to see from their elected officials and how they vote. You’ve probably noticed this disconnect in your own life — friends and family who express pro-gun or anti-abortion views, but are ultimately in disagreement with the legislature’s extreme policies on both.

That’s a tough hill to climb, but we’re extremely proud of what our advocacy team has done this year, identifying 10,922 new supporters, including patient storytellers, new activists and deeper relationships in Black and immigrant communities across the state. We’ve also made an impact at the ballot box, investing in independent expenditure campaigns that helped elect pro-bodily autonomy candidates in close races.

This was all well underway when the "Tennessee Three" became the national face of a decades-long struggle for justice in the South. The plea for common-sense gun laws, as we know, was met with the nasty and petty expulsion of Reps. Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, both of whom are Black. Gloria Johnson, who is white, survived by just one vote. The entire country saw how extreme Tennessee’s state government has become.

The country also saw how remarkable Tennesseans can be. After the Covenant School shooting that killed six in Nashville on March 27, we mourned together, supported one another and united to demand action. Our advocates, along with others from the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition, the Equity Alliance, Inclusion Tennessee, and the Metropolitan Nashville Education Association, offered collective logistical muscle to lift up local voices affected by the tragedy.

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We’re encouraged to see so many new advocates in the greater struggle for justice, and we hope to keep this coalition alive. When we all fight for justice together, we all make progress.

So as we mark the anniversary of Dobbs, we’re really looking ahead to the next battle in the fight for justice: the Aug. 21 Tennessee General Assembly special session called by Gov. Bill Lee on potential gun reform legislation. We’ll stand together and work for policies that protect our communities from gun violence. We are all engaged in one struggle for justice, one we can only wage together.

Kristal Knight is a native Tennessean and serves as board chair for Planned Parenthood of Tennessee and North Mississippi.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Opinion: Abortion rights, gun safety linked in struggle for justice