And we all know by now how much we stand to lose that our democracy rests on a knife's edge until Tuesday.

But in this last bit of Sunday morning real estate before the final ballots are cast,

I want to focus on one issue that represents both the life and death stakes of this election

and the potential upset of a great deal of political common wisdom about American politics.

And that issue is abortion rights. The constitutionally protected right to abortion was stripped

away in an instant with the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022.

And the upheaval of women's health care, including a gruesome parade of first-person

medical horror stories that has followed, has reshaped the politics of the abortion fight

in ways that could be game-changing in this election. And if there's one person in the country

who can help us understand what's happening with abortion rights, who can sort the truth from the

political spin, who knows the history and has been reporting on it for decades. It's my friend and

colleague, Rachel Maddo. After the 2009 assassination of the Kansas abortion doctor, George

Tiller, Rachel produced a documentary about it that included crucial context about the violent fringe of the anti-abortion movement.

After that, Rachel continued to follow the threat of violence against abortion providers.

In the 2010s, when Republicans swept state house majorities and began passing unprecedented new abortion restrictions,

she was one of the very few journalists in the country

to pay constant and unrelenting attention to these efforts to chip away at the rights that

were at the time guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. When Roe turned 40 in 2013, the inside of an abortion

clinic was rarely ever seen on television.

And her show visited five of them in embattled states where abortion had already nearly been eliminated

by a combination of hostile state governments, harassment, and threats of violence.

And in 2019, when Donald Trump's reshaping of the Supreme Court was in progress, she hosted a special hour full of original reporting and historical context that served as a flashing red light of what was to come in 2022.

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