The Tennessee legislature almost did something extraordinary this month—and not in a good way. A bill that would have treated abortion as criminal homicide, potentially exposing women to the death penalty, failed not because it was unthinkable, but because no one would move it forward. No motion. No vote. Just a quiet acknowledgment that even in a state with one of the strictest abortion bans in the country, there are still lines that, for now, cannot be crossed.

That matters. But it should not reassure us.

The fact that such a bill was introduced at all tells us something important about where we are. And the fact that it failed quietly, procedurally, without a broader reckoning, tells us something about how easy it would be for a future version—slightly different, slightly more palatable—to advance.

Women’s civil rights—and the reproductive freedom that makes those rights real—cannot be treated as a side issue in our democracy. They are not peripheral. They are foundational.

A democratic system rests on a simple premise: that people have the ability to shape their own lives and participate fully in public life. That promise collapses if half the population has no control over whether and when to have children. The ability to make decisions about reproduction affects everything—education, employment, financial stability, health, and the capacity to engage in civic life. It determines whether a person can plan a future or must simply accept one imposed on them.

For that reason, reproductive freedom is not just a policy question. It is a civil rights issue. It is about equality in its most practical form. When that freedom expands, women gain leverage—in their families, in their workplaces, and in their communities. When it contracts, so too does their ability to participate as full and equal citizens. The current debate over reproductive rights is, at its core,  a struggle over power and autonomy.

History makes that clear. Periods of expanding rights are almost always followed by backlash. When long-standing social roles shift, institutions have to adjust. And the people who benefited from the old arrangements rarely give them up quietly. What we are living through now is not an aberration—it is a pattern.

That is why so many people have had the same disorienting thought in recent years: I cannot believe we are here again.

But we are here because what once felt settled was never permanent. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization made that unmistakably clear. For decades, reproductive rights were treated as stable law. In reality, they were contingent—dependent on a set of political and legal conditions that could change. And when those conditions shifted, the rights went with them.

But the risk lies not just in sweeping decisions, but in the quieter, more incremental ways rights are narrowed over time. Sometimes that happens through new legislation. Sometimes, through regulatory changes. And sometimes through the revival of laws that most people assume are long dead.

Take the Comstock Act of 1873. It was originally passed to prohibit the mailing of “obscene” materials—a category that was interpreted broadly enough to include information about contraception and abortion. Over time, courts narrowed its reach, and it faded into the background. Most people stopped thinking about it altogether. But it was never repealed. And in recent years, legal arguments have emerged in litigation suggesting it could be used to restrict¹ the mailing of abortion medication nationwide. Not as a relic, but as an active legal tool.

Rights can erode through neglect, through reinterpretation, through the quiet reactivation of laws that never fully went away. That is why the Tennessee bill matters, even in failure. It is part of a broader pattern—testing boundaries, shifting norms, seeing what will stick. It underscores a deeper point: rights are not self-sustaining.

Living in Birmingham, Alabama makes that impossible to ignore. The city is a constant reminder that civil rights were not inevitable. They were built—deliberately, persistently—by people who understood that progress required more than moral clarity. The Civil Rights Movement is often remembered through its most visible moments—marches, speeches, landmark legislation. But those moments rested on years of quieter work, organizing voter registration drives, raising money for legal challenges, building networks that could translate outrage into action. But progress often provokes resistance.

The success of the movement did not come from avoiding that backlash, but from anticipating it—and continuing the work anyway. That is the framework we need now to protect women and their families. Protecting reproductive autonomy requires engagement with the democratic process itself. Most of this work will not feel dramatic. It will not always produce immediate results. It will look like voting, and organizing, and paying attention to local races that rarely make headlines. It will involve supporting institutions that are doing the slow, often unglamorous work of holding systems accountable. That may not feel satisfying in the moment. But history shows it is how change actually happens. The people who fought for civil rights in earlier generations did not know which legal case would succeed, or which election would shift the balance. But they acted anyway because disengagement would only preserve the status quo.

The future of democracy will not be determined in a single moment. It will be shaped by a series of decisions, some visible, others not, and perhaps most importantly, by whether people stay engaged when it is so easy to look away.

¹ Although the current federal interpretation of the Comstock Act is that it does not prohibit the mailing of abortion medications where the sender lacks intent that they be used unlawfully, that interpretation is subject to change. It does not bind the courts, and a future administration could adopt a different reading and enforcement policy.