Just days after Jennifer Lawrence’s October cover of Vogue was released, she has written an urgent plea to Americans to “save our democracy.” Her op-ed begins with one question: “What is happening to our country?”
Lawrence made waves with the interview that accompanied the Vogue cover. She talked about new motherhood, politics, and exactly what she thinks of J.D. Vance, the venture capitalist and author of Hillbilly Elegy, who is the current Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Ohio. On new motherhood, Lawrence said, “The morning after I gave birth, I felt like my whole life had started over.” On politics, she shared that she has no patience for people who aren’t engaged politically: “You have to be political. It’s too dire.” On J.D. Vance – well, Lawrence called him a “rich tw*t” before going on to say she’s also a rich tw*t, but she’s not running for office pretending she’s not.
In her plea, published in Vogue, Lawrence said she’s deeply troubled by the overturning of Roe v. Wade “because history has shown that banning abortion doesn’t stop abortions; it stops safe abortions.” She cited polls that show about 85% of Americans think abortion should be legal in some or all circumstances. “It’s scary that a nine-person court could rescind a right that most Americans support,” Lawrence wrote.
Lawrence said she’s heartened by the Kansas referendum, in which voters overwhelmingly chose not to remove the right to abortion from the state’s Constitution. “The resounding victory for abortion rights in a historically conservative state suggests that the political divide in this country is not always as wide as many of our politicians want us to think,” she wrote. “The Kansas vote also shows what’s possible when Americans wield their ballot power.”
Lawrence, who is from Kentucky, said most of her family still lives there and most of them vote for Republican candidates. Despite “the cultural differences between blue and red states,” she wrote, she remains convinced that the majority of Americans largely share common interests — though politicians aren’t fighting for those shared goals. “We want to choose whether or not we have children. We want our children to not get slaughtered at school. We want and need our government to do everything it can to slow climate change, and to help us prepare for, and recover from, the extreme weather events we are already experiencing.”
Lawrence shone a spotlight on her home state, which was recently hit with a “thousand-year flood,” where half the state is “literally drowning.” She takes to task Senator Mitch McConnell, who has long represented her home state in Congress, for his and his fellow Republican lawmakers’ supposed belief that “big government is always bad. The deadly floods in Kentucky show why that argument is flawed. The argument is also applied selectively, by the way. We must leave big coal alone to ravage the environment, but the government can force a woman to have a baby? Sure, that makes sense.”
“Democracy seats power in the will of the people,” Lawrence concluded. “But that only works if the people assert their will. In the coming midterm elections, let’s all follow the lead of Kansas voters and take a hard look at who and what is on the ballot in our states. Then, let’s vote.”