Michelle Obama on Saturday issued an impassioned plea to American voters — and, in particular, American men — anchored in a searing and intimate depiction of women’s bodies and reproductive health, and what she described as the life-or-death stakes of returning former President Donald Trump to power.

In the former first lady’s first appearance on the campaign trail during this election, Obama, long reluctant to engage in the political arena, described the far-reaching consequences of the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, in the terms of personal tragedy.

“If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating room table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood, or some unforeseen infection spreads and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late,” Obama said. “You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.”

And although she acknowledged the anger that many Americans feel about the “slow pace of change” in the country, she warned: “If we don’t get this election right, your wife, your daughter, your mother, we as women, will become collateral damage to your rage.”

Obama’s words — at a rally where she introduced Vice President Kamala Harris — amounted to an extraordinary centering of women’s bodies and their private experiences in a presidential election. She discussed menstrual cramps and hot flashes, describing the shame and uncertainty girls and women feel about their bodies.

She castigated the media and many voters for holding Harris to a higher standard than her opponent, for “choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence, while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn.”

But it was her remarks on women’s health that most captivated the audience. Obama told her audience that Trump would further damage women’s health care, while Harris has vowed to enshrine the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal law.

Obama’s message was, in part, a counterpoint to the argument her husband, former President Barack Obama, made to Black men this month, when he suggested that sexism might be preventing them from voting for a woman. Perhaps, Michelle Obama seemed to say, men could instead be persuaded to vote for the women in their lives.

“I am asking you, from the very core of my being: Please, take our lives seriously,” she said.

(New York Times News Service)