And we, women and men both, don’t believe that women’s fundamental rights should be nibbled away around the edges. We believe that abortion is healthcare, a fundamental human right that the majority of Americans, regardless of party affiliation, support, and that the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed.

When the Democrats unveiled their “Better Deal” last week, they focused on economic policies related to job creation, wages, and income inequality. That’s all well and good, but they left abortion rights off the table, and what is abortion if not an economic issue? Women know this, especially poor ones. And, in the state of Texas, which has the highest maternal mortality rate in the industrialized world, access to healthcare—and yes, to abortion—can be the difference between life and death.

We recognize that different candidates have different beliefs, not just on abortion, but on a huge range of issues. Still, a statement from one of our most powerful party leaders serves as a proxy statement of our values. Wishy-washy equivocations—and not just on abortion, but on immigration, on civil rights, on income inequality—weaken all of us. I always think of an old saying: If voters are given the choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican, they’ll choose the real Republican every time.

I refuse to believe that most Americans (or even most Republicans) can look at today’s GOP and see their own values reflected in its erratic leader. But even though, as we Democrats are fond of repeating, our values are the values of the majority of Americans, Trump won because so many people stayed home. And why did they stay home? Because they didn’t really believe that we believed what we said we believed. And why should they, when we keep compromising and hedging?

Let’s not forget who the most reliable Democratic voters are—women of color, who are most likely to suffer the consequences of Democrats “compromising” on reproductive rights. Texas Latinas are twice as likely to be uninsured and lack healthcare access as white women in Texas, and nationwide, black women are four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications as white women. And one more thing: Who has powered the resistance against Trump, and who will inevitably be the most motivated voters in the next election? Women. I was initially shocked to discover that my own resistance group, Daily Action, was 86 percent female, but it’s consistent with all the other data about the postelection landscape. We are the ones showing up and marching and placing calls and fighting to take back our country while our party heads fiddle.

It’s a truism to say that my state, Texas, isn’t a red state: It’s a nonvoting state. We consistently rank in the bottom five states in the country in voter turnout. Perhaps Texans, especially the Democrats among us, stay at home because they don’t have any clear sense of what we stand for. I have one idea of how to get more Democratic women to polling stations: Stand up for them. Let’s cut out the whimpering and stop reducing us to an “interest group.”

We are the base of the Democratic party, so let’s start talking about what happens in states like mine where reproductive rights have been attacked and eroded over and over and over again, and let’s start defending women’s rights to make their own decisions about their health and families. And let’s extend the principle of treating people decently—regardless of their sex, religion, race, or sexuality—and start talking to them like adults. It’s about time we had some of those in Washington.