Democratic candidates are perfectly welcome to refrain from terminating their own pregnancies. But to be anti-choice on a policy level is absolutely indefensible from an economic justice, racial justice, gender justice and human rights standpoint. And if the Democratic Party does not stand for any of those things, then what on earth is it?

It’s true that the left will have to choose (and soon) between absolute ideological purity and the huge numbers required to seize the rudder of the nation and avert global catastrophe. But abortion is not valid fodder for such compromise, nor is racism, nor is L.G.B.T.Q. equality, nor is any issue that puts people’s fundamental humanity up for debate. Abortion is not a fringe issue. Abortion is liberty.

I hear from some people on the left that Donald Trump’s victory was at least partially the fault of “identity politics” — of feminists pushing too hard, of Black Lives Matter being too aggressive, of trans people needing to go to the bathroom — as though the violent suppression of a movement points more toward its irrelevance than its necessity. What the Democrats need to do, I often hear, is to move away from issues of “identity” and toward purer, broader issues of economic equality.

But there is no model of economic equality that does not reckon with “identity politics.” There is no economic equality without the ability to terminate a pregnancy. There is no economic equality without the overthrow of white supremacy. What good is an economic opportunity if large swaths of the population can’t access it? Telling minority groups that it’s their responsibility to sit back and wait, to subordinate their needs for the good of the party — that implies that “the party” is not theirs as much as everyone else’s. And it sounds a lot like the people we’re trying to defeat.

Abortion is normal. Abortion is common, necessary and happening every day across party lines, economic lines and religious lines. Abortion is also legal and, contrary to what the pundit economy would have you believe, not particularly controversial. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly 70 percent of all Americans oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, while 75 percent of Democrats believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. These are not numbers that indicate controversy.