Last June, shortly after associate justice Anthony Kennedy announced he’d be retiring from the Supreme Court, Minneapolis-based writer and activist Robin Marty started a thread of tweets about abortion. “FACT: There is absolutely no way that the next Trump appointee won’t vote to overturn Roe,” she tweeted. “That’s inevitable. Work from that assumption.” The thread picked up enough likes and retweets to catch the eye of an editor at the Huffington Post, who asked her to compile her thoughts into a post for the site. After her article went live, it received over 30,000 shares. Things snowballed from there and Marty found herself with a book deal for a one-of-a-kind guidebook on abortion that she’s completed and released just in time for the 46th anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, January 22nd.

In a Handbook For A Post-Roe America Marty leans on her decade of experience as a journalist covering reproductive justice—she is a SheSource expert on reproductive rights at the Women’s Media Center and spent five years as a senior political reporter at reproductive justice site Rewire News—to explain the ins and outs of the fight for reproductive freedom in America.

Abortion access in America is dwindling; there are already seven states with only one abortion provider left. “This isn’t a crisis the Trump administration caused,” Marty explains in the book. “This is only a crisis that Trump has brought to the main stage.” Through consultation with abortion providers, lawyers, cybersecurity professionals, and reproductive justice advocates, she has assembled a practical action plan for readers that explains why you should quiz your doctor, how to take advantage of existing abortion care networks, why you should be mindful of the electronic trail you’re leaving, and other invaluable lessons that will help you obtain the abortion care you need.

Last month I spoke to Marty about her new book, and about why we should be worried regardless of whether or not Roe v. Wade is actually overturned.

The book reads like a survivalist guide for an impending emergency.

One of the things that I said when I pitched it originally was that I wanted it to be the anarchists handbook of abortion. What if I want to do menstrual extraction? What if I want to try to do my own abortion with pills? What if I want to go sneak cytotec across a country line and through a checkpoint? I wanted all of that information to be available just because people are going to look for it anyway. At the very least in this way it’s all in one place, and it’s all easily accessible for everybody. In certain cases there’s also caveats to let people know that there are people who have died from using parsley to try and end a pregnancy, or there are people who have been arrested because they tried to induce their own abortions, so all of those concerns can be addressed as well.

What is it about the current climate that made you feel like we had finally reached a tipping point where abortion rights are concerned?

Oh, well, to be fair, I think that we reached that tipping point a long time ago. What’s happened now is that we’ve reached a point where the general public has noticed it. The general public is actually in the place where activists have been for years. We have reproductive justice groups that are run by people of color and women of color that have been fighting this for decades already. It’s just that with Trump getting elected and with this last Supreme Court justice coming on and making it almost certain that Roe v. Wade could be overturned, all of the privileged people who have never really had to think about how this might affect them realize now, we might be in trouble because it might be my abortion that is on the line.

A 2017 study conducted by researchers from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco found that “there appears to be more online searches for abortion in states with more restrictive abortion laws.” Can you explain your concerns about the significance of surveillance in a post-Roe America?

I think that it is something that we really have to watch out for. A really great example is in Indiana in 2015—I think it was when Purvi Patel was charged with inducing her own miscarriage. She was charged with murder and one of the things they used against her was the fact that they looked at her phone records and saw that she’d said that she was not happy about being pregnant. She said that she had researched things online. They used that and the fact that when she showed up at the hospital she appeared to not care enough about the fact that she had gone into labor as signs saying that she must’ve decided that she was definitely going to try and procure an abortion on her own. So, we have to be especially careful with what sort of research we do online, what sort of things we say over the telephone. Are our telephone systems secure? Are we using encrypted messaging to talk to each other? Are you clearing your cache when you go to look up abortion information?

All of the privileged people who have never really had to think about how this might affect them realize now we might be in trouble — now it might be *my* abortion that's on the line.
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I like the “When in doubt, print it out” motto you have at the end of the book.

Yeah, I firmly believe in that. I have an entire cabinet full of all sorts of information because I never know when it might disappear. It’s really important especially if you look at the beginning of the Trump Administration. They were redefining the definition of ‘person,’ they were going through and removing all of the language around trans rights, all these different things that they just kind of wiped clean and now there’s no backup of any of it.

You worked as a political reporter before going freelance as a writer and activist. When and why did you make that jump?

I was working for Rewire and I spent a bunch of years there basically tracking state-based legislation. I think it just became time for me to go and move into freelance because I wanted to do more than just track state abortion laws. I got interested in what was going on in the anti-abortion movement so I started spending more time looking into what’s going on with their movement, their movement leaders, actually going to abortion clinics, and going to protests and really trying to leave the legal and legislation part behind and tell the story of the people who were being affected on both sides of the divide.

Are our telephone systems secure? Are we using encrypted messaging to talk to each other? Are you clearing your cache when you go to look up abortion information?
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Time magazine named “Guardians and the War On Truth” as person of the year for 2018. Given the state of media do you think journalists have a responsibility to also be activists?

That’s a good question and it’s complicated. I’ve watched journalism and activism go back and forth. My actual background is as an activist originally. I started out doing a project called the Center for Independent Media. Really for me, coming of age and becoming a journalist was always a form of its own activism.

All the people I interview who oppose abortion, they all know exactly where I stand. They are all completely aware that I’m a pro-choice activist and in some ways they appreciate that because they know that I can’t use a bias towards them. I have to report everything accurately because people are going to be looking for my biases. They already know where I am and so I in some ways have more of an obligation to make sure all of my reporting is the truth and is accurate and reflects exactly what happened because they’re expecting it not to be—they expect that activism to show up. So in some ways, by being an activist, it actually makes me a better journalist because people know that the writing that I do has to be verified and has to be true.

A positive by-product of the advice you provide on reproductive rights activism is that you provide a framework for what white allyship should look like when it comes to activism in general, especially when it comes to performing acts of civil disobedience. Why was it important to you to include this?

I think it’s really important right now, especially in Minneapolis we have a lot of racial injustice that’s happening primarily in our community around police activity. This is happening everywhere but in Minneapolis it’s really noticeable because we are predominantly white, and so with the Black Lives Matter movement happening out here it’s become very obvious that it’s the white allies who need to step up and who need to make this change, because we are not the ones who are being targeted by the police.

We are the ones who can use our privilege without having to worry about somebody shooting us or hurting us or murdering us because of our activism. That’s something that we need to bring to a national scale and I think that’s what a lot of people are doing, but we need to recognize that there’s two parts of white allyship right now that we can really focus on.

1. We have the ability to confront police without usually getting harmed, we usually have more financial means to be able to bail ourselves out of jail, to miss work, things like that.
2. We’re also the people least likely to be suspected of breaking laws if we’re trying to do something that is outside the legal bounds. (Plus, we have an obligation to because we have been getting so many advantages from the system of systemic racism as is.)

You facilitate workshops on reproductive justice activism in red and rural states where many of the U.S.’s “abortion deserts”—regions where a person would need to travel over 100 miles to receive abortion care—can be found. What’s that like?

So, I haven’t done that work as much anymore because in complete honesty there are so many other groups that can do it so much better than I can. People ask me to speak to my own experiences about talking to members of the anti-abortion movement and all of the stuff that I do talking with pro-life people.

One of the things I do talk about with red state people is the fact that there’s this consensus that when it comes to the idea of red states being pro-life that there’s not a lot of common ground we can work on, whereas I find that there is an intense amount of common ground we can work on—maternal mortality, working on more rights for women, more rights for people who want to try to continue pregnancies or support their families.

There’s this idea that pro-life and anti-abortion are the same thing whereas in a lot of cases people who say that they’re pro-life will find themselves agreeing in many circumstances with the decision to abort a pregnancy, it’s just they don’t like the idea of it being accessible and readily available. Anytime you give an example about a woman who is ready to finally go back to work and support her five children and then she finds out that she’s pregnant again they’ll often say well ok in that circumstance I agree with it. Often when you approach them with real life situations they will find that that’s that exception that they’re willing to say in this case it’s ok but overall they still stay that they’re pro-life and against abortion.

Being an activist actually makes me a better journalist because people know that the writing that I do has to be verified and has to be true.
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It sounds like just personalizing it for people is the key to changing their mind.

Basically. There’s this saying that abortion providers have when they talk about how people who oppose abortion come in and actually get abortions—which is a pretty common phenomenon—they say that there’s this belief in the three exceptions: rape, incest, and mine.

One of the most striking facts in the book was that there’s a lack of abortion training in places where you assume it’d be a given like OB-GYN training practices. According to a 2015 piece in The Atlantic this training problem extends to American medical schools too. Should we be worried about a decrease in the number of trained abortion providers in the coming years?

Definitely, and not just because of abortion itself. Obviously abortion is something that should be part of all medical training in general because it’s another part of controlling reproductive rights, but also because so many of the abortion procedures are used in either managing a miscarriage later on, or should a person need an abortion later to save her life, which is something that happens quite frequently. You don’t want to find yourself at an emergency room at a hospital and find out that there’s no provider inside that hospital who actually knows how to do the type of procedure that you need.

The abortion conversation tends to revolve around what’s happening at the federal level but in this book you make the case that our eyes should really be on local politicians.

I’ve been yelling that from the rooftop for years now. If you look at Guttenmacher and their studies about how I think there are nearly 300 [edit:288] different abortion bans that have passed since 2010, most of those passed between 2011-2013 and that was when we needed to pay attention. We kinda missed that boat. Now they’re coming back around again which is really frightening because a lot of these abortion laws that popped up in the first place—I talked about them a lot in my first book, Crow After Roe—that were meant to overturn Roe v. Wade, now these laws are coming back because they know that they have a different configuration on the Supreme Court.

Can you explain why city councils are, in your words, “abortion clinic gatekeepers”?

I think that in a lot of cases city councils have the biggest influence when it comes to the right to an abortion. A lot of times it’s because if you look at red and rural states they have a very anti-abortion legislature. They’ll do everything they can to make abortions hard to get, but the cities themselves are usually fairly progressive. In a lot of cases even if there’s multiple clinics in a state, there’s only one or two cities that actually have abortion clinics. So if you can be a gatekeeper that is on city council you can pass noise ordinances, make sure that building codes and variances are allowed that will keep these buildings open or allow new clinics to open within your cities — in that way you can gave a huge impact on the access your state has even though you’re just working on a city level.

There’s this belief in the three exceptions for pro-life abortions: rape, incest, and mine.
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St. Louis is a really good example of this because St. Louis is fairly progressive. Their city council tried to pass a general nondiscrimination act and one of the things they said was that you cannot be discriminated against because of race, gender, orientation, but also reproductive health care choices. The idea was that you could not fire somebody or refuse to hire them, or refuse to let them into a shelter, or refuse to give them services, based on the fact that they had had an abortion or worked for a place that offered abortions, worked for a place that offered birth control, that they were using birth control and they weren’t married, any of that.

That passed and I can’t remember—it was like the Catholic Council of something or other [edit: the Archdiocese of St.Louis]—challenged it because it said that it would force them to give up their religious beliefs. It was never about that. Missouri is obviously not—in any way shape or form—a progressive state, but the city was trying to take action to at least protect where they could and part of  it had to do with the abortion clinic because St. Louis has the only one in the state. So, work on your city. Use your city to try and keep abortion accessible, keep people from being attacked over their beliefs and over their sexual health care and basically hope you don’t get sued because man they sue a lot.

According to the polling numbers the majority of Americans don’t want the Roe v. Wade ruling overturned. Do you think that’s enough to keep Roe intact or is its overturn an inevitability?

I honestly don’t believe that Roe is going to be overturned. I think that on the Right it’s way too easy to organize, to get voters in, to do fundraising—all of their activism basically revolves around this idea of abortion being made illegal. If you make abortion illegal that would take so much momentum off the table for them for preparing for elections. I just can’t see that happening, it’s way too easy of a tool for them to use.

What I do see happening is the Supreme Court either choosing not to take up any abortion bills or deciding that as long as abortion is technically legal it doesn’t matter what kind of restrictions you pass on it. So, for instance, in Iowa—where the heartbeat ban is being debated again because it went up to the state supreme court—I could see the Supreme Court saying, ‘Ok we believe that you can pass a heartbeat ban because you are not technically making abortion illegal in your state.’ [edit: the Iowa fetal heartbeat abortion restriction was declared unconstitutional.] There’s still legal abortion even though it’s almost impossible to get one before six weeks.

If they do that, then all the states that want to can pass heartbeat bans, abortion is almost illegal in the state—it’s technically still legal—but Roe was never actually overturned. I see some scenario like that happening where maybe in Mississippi they will finally allow the admitting privileges law to go into effect—no doctors in Mississippi can get admitting privileges who are working at abortion clinics, the clinic closes down and ok, technically abortion is still legal in Mississippi, you just can’t get one anywhere in the state.

I see that sort of thing happening in all of these red states without Roe ever being overturned and then that way the Right still has the ability to politicize Roe and to do their activism around it, but they also get the added benefit of abortion being made inaccessible in a lot of states.

If you make abortion illegal that would take so much momentum off the table for the Right preparing for elections.
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And you think that loophole behavior of not overturning it but still creating a de facto ban is going to escalate in the next few years?

I would be highly surprised if we don’t have a state where abortion is either illegal after six weeks or there’s no clinic. Honestly, I think the first thing that’s going to happen is we’re going to have a clinic-free state within the next twelve months. If I were going to put money on it I’d say it’s Missouri.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

When Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination was confirmed in October of 2018, many of my acquaintances speculated Americans would soon be traveling to Canada for their abortion care.

Progressive pundits have pointed out that Roe. V. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal in America, is in danger of being overturned by the court’s conservative majority. Given Kavanaugh’s track record of blocking women from terminating their pregnancies, I understand where the prediction that American women could end up crossing the border for abortions comes from. Many Americans view Canada as a liberal haven, the refrain of “Well, time to move to Canada” likely passing through every Democrat’s mind every time more conservative legislation is enacted. But is the idea of Canada as a hypothetical abortion tourism destination a realistic one? If you’re a feminist activist living in Canada, you know the answer is probably not.

Soon after Kavanaugh’s confirmation, my friend Kaley wrote on Facebook, “Now everyone will know Canada’s secret shame.” That secret shame being abortion isn’t so easily accessible here.

In Canada, abortion is theoretically considered “an essential healthcare service.” It is available at a mix of publicly funded hospitals and private clinics. However, each province has its own limitations, and in many parts of the country, hospitals will not provide abortions of any kind past the 12-week mark in many parts of the country. And, much like in America, access to terminations is uneven, with major urban areas enjoying the best resources. Frederique Chabot, the Director of Health Promotion for Action Canada For Sexual Health and Rights, explains Canada’s abortion access problem like this: “In the US, there are more regulatory policies to delay access or close down clinics. But when it comes to vast geography and being able to access that service in a timely manner, Canada is in a similar situation.”

Women in the Northern regions of the country typically must drive long distances – or sometimes fly – to have their procedures. For example, a woman living in Moosonee, a city in the far North of the province of Ontario, could find herself taking a 7.5 hour bus ride to the nearest provider. She’ll also be on the hook for travel expenses and hotel accommodations, which makes abortion a privilege only some can afford. A similar situation plagues people living in the Northern parts of other Canadian provinces, such as Manitoba, Quebec, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.

In Ontario, the most populous province, there are a mere 11 abortion clinics for approximately 14 million residents. That’s not even one facility for every million people! To make matters worse, all but one of these clinics is located in the two largest cities, Toronto and Ottawa. For a breakdown of abortion access by province, please see this chart. It does not paint a progressive picture.

Much like in America, access to terminations is uneven, with major urban areas enjoying the best resources.
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In 2015, medical abortion (the abortion pill) was finally approved by Health Canada after a long, drawn out process. At the time, it was touted as a way to help women in isolated communities take control of their reproductive destinies. However, the provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan still refuse to cover the cost of the drug. Add to this the issue that some doctors refuse to prescribe the it for religious reasons, and the fact it can only be used within the first ten weeks of pregnancy. Combined with the gestational limits, this is yet another hurdle for rural women who do not live in close proximity to the hospitals where the procedure is available. The abortion drug has not been a magic pill.

While I am lucky enough to live in Ontario, there are areas where abortions at private clinics are never reimbursed. In 2013, my friend Lily sought an abortion at a private clinic in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Already a mother of one, Lily and her husband conceived a second pregnancy by accident. They did not have the time or the money to devote to another child. While publicly funded abortions were in theory available to her at a local hospital, Lily discovered she would have to wait at least a month for the procedure. This was a scary prospect, because abortions in New Brunswick are only available for the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Waiting for a free abortion would mean cutting the process down to the wire.

These long wait times at hospitals are common. In Nova Scotia, where the abortion pill is not provided by provincial healthcare, wait times for surgical abortions can easily be more than six weeks. This presents a significant obstacle, because the province does not provide abortions after the 15-week mark. Once an individual discovers they are pregnant, they have little time to weigh the options before scheduling a hospital abortion. And God help the person who doesn’t discover they’re pregnant until a couple months along!

Instead of waiting, Lily turned to a private clinic. However, the price of the procedure was around $700, a huge sum for Lily, who was paid per hour to work a part-time gig in publishing; her husband earned close to minimum wage as a day laborer. The nearest clinic only provided abortions one day a week, so Lily would be forced to take time off work. To make matters worse, it was Christmas time, and the couple did not want their young son to be deprived of presents. Remembering her experience, Lily told me, “It was a lot of money to pay, but I knew I couldn’t stay pregnant.” Fortunately, Lily’s father agreed to foot the bill her province would not pay.

The idea of Canada as a feminist utopia where getting an abortion is as easy as buying milk is a misconception built on good press and the belief that our country is cool. You know, because our Prime Minister donates money to Trevor Noah on Twitter.

As a Canadian feminist, it’s disconcerting—through admittedly flattering—when our neighbors to the South speculate my country has solved sexism, but we haven’t. Abortion access is not the only example of how Canada has failed women and non-binary people. For example, I could spill boundless ink discussing the crisis regarding missing and murdered indigenous women. Abortion access is one of many problems with which we’re still grappling.

It’s easy to see why people outside of Canada may be taken aback to hear we aren’t an abortion care paradise. In 2014, Justin Trudeau declared each candidate fielded by his political party was required to be pro-choice. Per his decree, Anti-choicers would be kicked out of his caucus and barred from running as Liberal candidates. At the time, Trudeau was a year away from becoming prime minister. Trudeau’s policy of zero tolerance for anti-choice politics was a splashy statement, one that set a feminist tone for his election campaign.

Trudeau’s declaration shocked many of our American cousins. On Fox and Friends, Jeanne Mancini, who organized the March for Life, contended Mr. Trudeau was “out of touch with mainstream America” (as if the Canadian PM should be primarily concerned with what Americans think). And despite pearl-clutching on the part of right-wing US pundits, you might be surprised to learn Trudeau talked the talk of promoting abortion rights without walking the walk.

Over three years after Trudeau became Canada’s self-identified “feminist prime minister,” women in much of Canada still do not have meaningful access to abortion. At present, we have no hope of becoming a reliable safe haven for Americans seeking abortion care. After all, we’re already failing people who live North of the 49th parallel.

When Prime Minister Trudeau was elected, I hoped no Canadian women would ever have the stressful abortion experience my friend Lily had again. It’s now been five years—and one federal election—since she had her abortion, and regrettably little has changed. There’s still only one abortion clinic in Fredericton, clinic 554. They are only allowed to provide terminations until the 15-week mark. And patients are still not reimbursed for the cost of their procedures.

Over three years after Trudeau became Canada’s self-identified 'feminist prime minister,' women in much of Canada still do not have meaningful access to abortion.
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So why, in a supposedly feminist country like Canada, do women and non-binary folks have wildly different access to reproductive healthcare depending on where they live? In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada threw out the country’s laws criminalizing abortions in a landmark decision called R. v. Morgentaler. In accordance with this decision, the Federal government has no power to prevent a woman from obtaining an abortion at any point during her pregnancy. However, since healthcare is provided to Canadians by our provincial governments, those seeking terminations are at the mercy of the sort of care their provincial healthcare system offers. Most provinces do not provide this access past the 15-week mark.

Because tourists do not typically have access to pregnancy terminations in Canadian hospitals, hypothetical abortion tourists would be forced to use our private facilities. On average, over 650,000 abortions occur in the United States each year. It’s unlikely Canada, with a total of 55 clinics, could make a significant dent in that number, but it would increase wait times for people living in Canada. Next, there’s the matter of cost. In the province of Ontario, documented residents who have provincial health insurance will have the cost of their procedures covered by the government. Those who lack such documentation will pay anywhere from 450 to 900 Canadian dollars. However, out-of-country patients would likely have to pay around $2,000 for the procedure. That’s on top of the plane or bus ticket American patients would already be purchasing to get here, and we must not forget that those with criminal records and precarious immigration statuses would sadly not permitted to enter our country.

In 2019, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be up for reelection. There are certainly things he could do to improve abortion access across the country. He could provide additional funding to the provinces, funding that is earmarked specifically for reproductive healthcare. To bridge the access gap, he could also establish federal funding for women who do not live near abortion providers to travel for such treatment. It is time for our feminist prime minister to walk the feminist walk he talks so well.

My mother and I came for the salted caramel budino. That, and I like that the restaurant uses one big ice cube for their Old Fashioned. It’s the type of place that requires an Open Table reservation two months in advance. My mother and I entered the narrow space on a whim, with the knowledge that we’d likely turn around and go to a less popular, less packed restaurant with no salted caramel budino and no good ice, but there they were: two vacant bar stools. It was one of those gifts from the universe, like having just enough milk or just enough toilet paper or just enough gas or just enough of really anything.

As we waited for our dessert – layers of Oreo cookies, caramel pudding, crème fraiche whipped cream, and sea salt served in a trendy mason jar – my mother said she had something to tell me. Shoulders back and glint in her eye, she looked like a child moments away from blurting out a big secret. 

And here it was: My mother, who had recently begun working at a prominent city hospital, had officially signed the paperwork exempting her from assisting on abortion procedures. She was so proud of her decision. I sat staring into my Old Fashioned.

In theory, I support my mother’s right to religious freedom and her right to refuse participating in any activity opposing her religious beliefs. In theory, I believe no nurse should assist in abortion operations if they are morally opposed to the procedure. But in practice it’s so much more complicated when my mother and I are on two different sides of an issue, especially when she delivers the news with this expectant expression, as if we’d high five over it. As if I’d ever said anything that would have given her that impression. 

In theory, I believe no nurse should assist in abortion operations if they are morally opposed to the procedure. But in practice it’s so much more complicated.
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My mother is anti-choice and I’m pro-choice, and both of our stances are unlikely to ever change. I know that because we’ve spent years trying to sway the other. Debates, mostly in the cramped spaces of different cars throughout the years, usually ended the same: I’m mean and condescending and she’s narrow-minded and too religious. Nothing ever changes, except maybe the car.

Since the setting, this particular time, was the popular restaurant with the good ice cubes, I tried to avoid being mean or condescending. I didn’t ask what the point of signing such a document was, since she worked as an ENT nurse and abortions weren’t normally performed via ear, nose, or throat. I didn’t even launch into a speech about stigmatizing abortion because yes, yes, religious freedom. I reminded myself that my mother has a right to religious freedom, but I still felt betrayed by her decision.

Instead, I asked my mother if the paperwork was limited to women who had chosen to terminate their pregnancy for personal reasons or if it included women who were terminating their pregnancy for medical reasons. My mother told me she was excused from all abortions. Even those performed when the fetus has no chance of survival. Even those performed to save the life of the mother.

No, My Right To Abortion Did Not Cost Hillary The Election
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So logically, I asked my mother if she thought women who had abortions at the direction of a medical professional were, in fact, sinning. Because that’s what her religious disapproval comes down to—that it’s a sin—right? My mother is an intelligent, practical woman. She graduated first in her nursing class and supported our family while putting herself through nursing school. I thought this woman must know that it definitely isn’t a sin to terminate a pregnancy when a doctor tells you that you’ll likely suffer medical complications otherwise.

As I write this, I’m aware that my mother may sometimes apply a similar rationale to me. She must think of how I’m the same law-abiding girl who wouldn’t even sneak candy into movie theaters. She must think that I’m the sweet girl who she sent to Catholic school for twelve years. And that girl, my mother may think, must logically know that it’s always a sin to have an abortion, no matter what. Or perhaps, it’s the opposite. Perhaps my mother hears my pro-choice arguments and secretly knows I’ve been evil ever since that one time in the third grade when I found out Mary is the Queen of Heaven. I was eight years old and I wanted to be the Queen of Heaven when I died, so I said I hated Mary. My mother told me to say ten Hail Marys to repent, but I never did.

My mother and I are of the same blood and flesh, yet separated by this issue, and also our religious faith, and also our brands of logic. We’re two different radio stations playing the same exact song just a few beats off. We are so much of the same, but we are never the same.

My mother sidestepped the question. She said she didn’t want to aid in abortions, period. I could have asked hypothetical questions, like what if my mother was the only nurse in the whole hospital who could help, and the patient was going to die unless she terminated her pregnancy? Wouldn’t God think letting a woman die was just as serious an offense as an abortion?

But instead of the hypothetical questions, I ordered another Old Fashioned with a big ice cube and thought about my abortion.

I’ve never written about having an abortion before because I feared becoming “that girl who wrote about her abortion that one time.” I feared the story would become the first thing that popped up when someone Googled me and it would become all of me. I feared what someone from my biology or algebra or world history class would think if they read that essay. Or what about all the boys I had ever kissed, what would they think if they read that essay? I feared that my experience would be discussed and ridiculed and dissected on Twitter and Reddit and conservative websites. I feared Donald Trump and Kevin Williamson and Retribution. I feared, so I never wrote. But there are worse things to be in the world than the girl who wrote about the abortion she had one time.

But instead of the hypothetical questions, I ordered another Old Fashioned with a big ice cube and thought about my abortion.
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 My abortion story isn’t very special or different or significant. I had sex with a boy, and we were both irresponsible. The pregnancy test was positive, but I was in college and had taken out student loans and graduating was important to me. After a predictable chain of events and one awkward phone call later, I sat in stirrups much like I had done during my run of the mill trips to the gynecologist, only it was in the basement of Planned Parenthood, and before entering I was patted down by a security guard with a visible gun on his hip.

I had been called back several times: the psychological exam, the payment, and the ultrasound which I asked to see, partially out of curiosity and partially out of a sense of responsibility. If I was going to have an abortion, I was going to look at what I was aborting. I reasoned that I owed that much to whatever it was inside of me. And it was something—a blob, a ball of cells, a dark splotch in the ultrasound version of my body. It wasn’t a baby with a foot with toes I would one day call little piggies. But there was a distinct matter in my body. Seeing this made me feel both better and worse. It didn’t have little piggies, but it was also there and it soon wouldn’t be.

Finally, I was called back and given a gown. The nurse knocked, waited for the customary okay from me, and entered the room. She managed to achieve the ideal tone,neither cheery nor somber nor cold. She was professional, yet also personal. More than anything else, she seemed to understand that I was a real person in a less than desirable situation. I was making a choice I would have rather not have had to make, and this medical procedure may be something difficult for me. But she also made no assumptions in the matter. She was perfect. She told me that the doctor was male and she’d be in the room the entire time. She also told me the doctor usually narrates the procedure so his patients know what he’s doing to them while he’s doing it, would I like that? I nodded.

I Had An Abortion Because I Love My Son
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When the doctor entered, he was already wearing a surgical mask, so I never actually saw his face. For so long, this felt like a personal slight—it’s only now, as I type this, that I realize this man may have simply not wanted the risk. He provided my autonomy, but he demanded his anonymity. Years later, I’m okay with that. But sitting in stirrups that day, I wanted to see that he was a person, too.

The doctor didn’t make eye contact with me. He simply sat in the stool and asked if he could begin. I said yes and spiraled with the certainty that he was judging me as he parted my legs wider and disappeared into the tent of my hospital gown. I didn’t take into consideration that this was his job, which was likely exhausting and largely thankless and demonized by a whole group of citizens. And maybe he was sick of the cold weather we were having, I don’t know. There were so many possible reasons for his curt bedside manner, none of which had to do with me, but I took it personally. It was my abortion; I was taking everything personally. And why wasn’t he saying what he was doing to me? 

My face must have lit up with all these thoughts because the nurse stepped into the space next to me, held my hand, and narrated the procedure as the doctor silently worked. She explained every detail with language I can’t distinctly remember now, but I do remember her voice was calm and even. And she didn’t complain when I squeezed her hand from the pain. 

When the doctor needed assistance, the nurse politely asked if she could let go of my hand. It wasn’t a question, not really, but the fact that she phrased it that way was especially kind. We unlaced our fingers and I lost her to my lower hemisphere, but she kept narrating what was being done to my body and asking if I felt okay. That nurse’s compassion was the only bright spot of the procedure. 

I could get into the pain of the procedure, the tears my dog licked off my cheeks later that night, and the months of getting drunk and, one by one, telling my close girlfriends, some of which confessed their abortions to me, too. But, it’s all really pretty standard. 

I thought of telling my mother on several occasions, including over our fancy dessert. But if I told her in that crowded restaurant with people to either side of us, she would have likely had thoughts about my posture and my expression. She would have to remind herself that I have a right to reproductive freedom, but she’d still feel betrayed by my decision, as I did hers. And we’d both sit there in our betrayal, and the big ice cubes, dessert in the mason jar, and good fortune of those two open seats would be all for naught.

For a long time, I felt like I owed my mother an admission of my abortion because, if nothing else, she had gotten pregnant once, hadn’t had an abortion, and ta-da here I am. But there are also so many things that mothers and daughters don’t tell each other. I once went into the bathroom after my mother had showered and found that she had left behind a vibrator. I never told her I knew what she did during her showers and she never told me she liked to masturbate after shampooing. My sophomore year of high school, my mother had to pick me up from school because I bled through my tampon, through my underwear, and through my uniform. She knew the reason the school nurse had called her and she cleaned the large butterfly-shaped bloodstain from my skirt, but we never spoke of it.

She would have to remind herself that I have a right to reproductive freedom, but she'd still feel betrayed by my decision, as I did hers.
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And there were those quiet morning drives to school, during which we passed an abortion clinic. Even before 8 am, protestors would be outside with their chants and their signs and their rosaries. I’d wordlessly watch them from the window while my mother stared ahead. She was too tired from last night’s restaurant shift to discuss the protest, or maybe too tired to even notice.

Pregnancies seem to be marked by food. Women can recall with such specificity what they craved, what they missed eating, and what made them sick. My abortion, too, is marked by food. There was the sushi dinner I threw up, which was, in retrospect, likely the first sign of my pregnancy. There was the pizza I ate after my abortion, which went on to become my favorite pizza in the city. But every time I’ve ever eaten a slice, I remembered the first time I had this pizza was when I was wearing a jumbo pad and watching Rosemary’s Baby (an admittedly strange choice for post-abortion entertainment).

The salted caramel budino, too, has gone on to mark a moment in my story about my abortion. Between my mother and me were our vaginas we don’t talk about, religious freedom and reproductive freedom, decisions to or to not become mothers, and the nurse who never signed a paper exempting her from my abortion and who held my hand when I needed to hold someone’s hand. Between us there were no answers to be found, but there was dessert. And we split it. 

The Trump administration is engaged in an all-out war against abortion rights—and pregnant immigrants are on the front lines.

Joey Thompson/Unsplash

Since 1973, the Constitution has prohibited the government from imposing an “undue burden” on a person’s right to choose what’s best for their reproductive health. Immigrants to the United States, authorized or otherwise, have never been excluded from that constitutional right — until now.

Currently, the Trump administration is engaged in several simultaneous battles that constitute what is an all-out war against women and gender-nonconforming people’s reproductive rights. Forty-five years after Roe v. Wade ensured the right to abortion, the Trump administration is trying its best to slowly chip away at the precedent set by the landmark Supreme Court ruling, and they’re starting with a population that is one of the most vulnerable in Trump’s America — pregnant undocumented immigrants.

“They come to our country and find themselves pregnant and under the control of the state in a way that is so profound it is hard to overstate,” says Michelle Oberman, professor of law and author of Her Body, Our Laws.

“They’re young and far away from caring adults, many have been victims of sexual violence, and now they find themselves pregnant and in custody. To watch these cases play out is to understand how fully a government might assert control over a person’s reproductive autonomy.”

Since last October, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a subsidiary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has operated with complete disregard for Roe v. Wade protections, as well. Under the leadership of ORR Director Scott Lloyd, the federally funded office has attempted to block at least four undocumented minors — the Janes Doe, Poe, Roe and, most recently, Moe — from obtaining abortions, the most recent of which occurred in late January.

‘To watch these cases play out is to understand how fully a government might assert control over a person’s reproductive autonomy.’

The Constitution does not withhold any inalienable rights from immigrants. The Fourteenth Amendment, which ensures that no state entity can deprive a person of their life, liberty, or property without due process, or deny any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the law, is particularly relevant—and oft-challenged—in immigration law proceedings. But with so many different government entities overseeing various aspects of the immigration process, pockets of grey area have emerged and allowed the Trump administration to show its hand with regard to their plans for longterm abortion rights reform.

“I just have not seen anything quite this brazen from a federal or state government before,” says Brigitte Amiri, Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

“They have, in each brief, doubled down on going further in their quest to coerce young women to carry their pregnancies to term by forcing them to go to religiously-affiliated crisis pregnancy centers, telling parents in their home countries about the abortion decisions—even if that means harm potentially to the minor or other family members—and that’s all a coercion tactic to try to force the young woman to carry her pregnancy to term. And if those tactics fail, they basically say, ‘We’re not going to let you access abortion.’ They hold them hostage to prevent them from accessing an abortion—just when I think it can’t get any more extreme, it does.”

In their initial filing concerning Jane Doe last October, the ACLU positioned their case as a class action lawsuit “on behalf of a class of similarly situated pregnant unaccompanied immigrant minors in the legal custody of the federal government.”

I Had An Abortion Because I Love My Son

According to the ACLU’s court documentation, the federal government reported that in Fiscal Year 2016, 59,692 unaccompanied minors were referred to the ORR. “The class is so numerous that joinder is impracticable,” asserted the documentation, meaning that it is impossible to calculate exactly how many undocumented immigrant minors would be affected by the outcome of the class action lawsuit. “In any given year, there are hundreds of pregnant unaccompanied minors in defendants’ custody.”

And the Trump administration has not limited their attacks to solely undocumented minors, either.

In the appendix of Trump’s 2019 budget request, which he sent to Congress in early February, there is language that would give any employee working under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the right to refuse to facilitate the procurement of an abortion for any immigrant woman—whether the federal government is paying for the procedure or not.

ICE has never been allowed to use federal funds for abortion services unless the life of the person carrying is at risk, or the pregnancy is a result of rape and/or incest, but detainees who wanted an abortion outside those circumstances were still allowed to procure one if they came up with the funds themselves.

Now, under the proposed stipulations of Trump’s 2019 budget recommendation, ICE officials and employees who are morally or philosophically opposed to abortion wouldn’t have to aid in the facilitation of the services, a contentious caveat to Roe v. Wade eerily reminiscent of the birth control rollback mandate made late last year (which was ultimately blocked at the district court level in December).

In a vacuum, this proposed facilitative change wouldn’t be quite such a cause for alarm — Trump’s proposal is just that, a proposal — but this is not an isolated circumstance.

Between January and April of last year, ICE detained nearly 300 pregnant women, often in breach of the organization’s own protocol for dealing with expectant immigrant mothers. This led the ACLU to filed an administrative complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Office of Inspector General in September 2017. They called upon the governing bodies to investigate ICE’s treatment of pregnant people in its custody.

Then, as recently as Thursday, according to a report from The Daily Beast, the Trump administration released an executive order unequivocally ending an Obama-era policy that limited the detainment of pregnant women in ICE custody to only “extraordinary circumstances.”

As for the Janes, the ACLU has thus far been successful at securing their abortions. U.S. district court judge Tanya S. Chutkan is the presiding judge who’s ordered the Trump administration to allow the Janes to get their abortions on a case by case basis thus far. Yesterday, she ruled that the ACLU will be able to proceed with their class action suit, effectively blocking the ORR from preventing undocumented minors in their charge from seeking an abortion in the meantime.

But no permanent change or established protections for pregnant undocumented minors will occur until the courts determine whether the ORR has the jurisdiction to circumvent constitutional precedent on the basis of its leader’s religious beliefs and questionably revised operational protocol.

How U.S. Policies Shape Abortion Rights Around The World

In March of last year, according to ACLU court documentation, the ORR quietly revised its policies not only in flagrant disregard of Roe v. Wade’s constitutional precedent, but in conflict with its own ORR-specific protocol set forth in 1997 by the Flores v. Reno Settlement Agreement.

The Flores Agreement, more than 20 years old, legally obligates the ORR to provide care to the young people under its jurisdiction—specifically including family planning services and reproductive health care. The revisions to these provisions last March effectively prohibited all federally funded shelters from taking any action that facilitates abortion access for unaccompanied minors in their care without direction and approval from the ORR.

It bears noting that Lloyd, the current director of the ORR, is vehemently anti-choice. Under his jurisdiction, young people fleeing violent home lives in other countries are doubly suffering due to his unyieldingly “pro-life” stance.

Lloyd’s personal beliefs, and the Trump administration’s unveiled aversion to a person’s right to determine their own reproductive future, have dually contributed to a cultural climate in which it is not unreasonable to fear a future in which Roe v. Wade has no constitutional tack at all.

According to the New York Times, “It was unclear late Friday whether the Trump administration would appeal the ruling.”

Under Scott Lloyd’s jurisdiction, young people fleeing violent home lives in other countries are doubly suffering due to his unyieldingly ‘pro-life’ stance.

The possibility that they will is quite plausible, seeing as the administration has challenged several rulings related to the Janes since the first case occurred last October.

As the Trump administration continues to operate with little regard for the constitutional precedent that should govern all of its subsidiaries, this outcome of this class action could be monumental.

“The unique time that we are in is where a federal appointee, a Trump appointee, is setting policy that is blocking young women from being able to obtain an abortion — shaming and stigmatizing them on top of everything they’ve already been through — and (is) being supported in his decision,” says Amiri.

“This isn’t a rogue government employee. This is a Trump appointee who has the backing of clearly much higher-ups. The Department of Justice is defending Scott Lloyd’s action to the full degree. I think that’s also what’s surprising, is that there isn’t anyone in federal government at the higher level saying, ‘What you’re doing is not only blatantly unconstitutional under well-established Supreme Court precedent, but it is also just downright cruel, the treatment of these young women.’

I think that’s what’s really scary to me. There is no check on Scott Lloyd’s ideologically-driven attempts to coerce and block young women from accessing abortion despite the fact that it’s blatantly unconstitutional. I think that signals what’s going on in our federal government in general. We know we have a president who has vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices that would overturn Roe v. Wade.”

So, what’s next?

“We are relieved that the court issued an order preventing the administration from continuing this practice while our case proceeds,” says Amiri. “With yesterday’s rulings, we are one step closer to ending this extreme policy once and for all and securing justice for all of these young women.”

Amiri says the ACLU will now push forward in the district court, seeking documents from the government and asking for depositions of Scott Lloyd and others. When that is completed in several months, the case will be decided finally with a trial or briefs—and, one hopes, the decision will align with justice.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/how-trump-is-working-to-destroy-the-reproductive-rights-of-immigrants-7c8c00983d59/ Sat, 31 Mar 2018 17:51:39 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1569 Read more]]> The Trump administration is engaged in an all-out war against abortion rights—and pregnant immigrants are on the front lines.

Since 1973, the Constitution has prohibited the government from imposing an “undue burden” on a person’s right to choose what’s best for their reproductive health. Immigrants to the United States, authorized or otherwise, have never been excluded from that constitutional right — until now.

Currently, the Trump administration is engaged in several simultaneous battles that constitute what is an all-out war against women and gender-nonconforming people’s reproductive rights. Forty-five years after Roe v. Wadeensured the right to abortion, the Trump administration is trying its best to slowly chip away at the precedent set by the landmark Supreme Court ruling, and they’re starting with a population that is one of the most vulnerable in Trump’s America — pregnant undocumented immigrants.

“They come to our country and find themselves pregnant and under the control of the state in a way that is so profound it is hard to overstate,” says Michelle Oberman, professor of law and author of Her Body, Our Laws.

“They’re young and far away from caring adults, many have been victims of sexual violence, and now they find themselves pregnant and in custody. To watch these cases play out is to understand how fully a government might assert control over a person’s reproductive autonomy.”

Since last October, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a subsidiary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has operated with complete disregard for Roe v. Wade protections, as well. Under the leadership of ORR Director Scott Lloyd, the federally funded office has attempted to block at least four undocumented minors — the Janes Doe, Poe, Roe and, most recently, Moe — from obtaining abortions, the most recent of which occurred in late January.

‘To watch these cases play out is to understand how fully a government might assert control over a person’s reproductive autonomy.’
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The Constitution does not withhold any inalienable rights from immigrants. The Fourteenth Amendment, which ensures that no state entity can deprive a person of their life, liberty, or property without due process, or deny any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the law, is particularly relevant—and oft-challenged—in immigration law proceedings. But with so many different government entities overseeing various aspects of the immigration process, pockets of grey area have emerged and allowed the Trump administration to show its hand with regard to their plans for longterm abortion rights reform.

“I just have not seen anything quite this brazen from a federal or state government before,” says Brigitte Amiri, Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

“They have, in each brief, doubled down on going further in their quest to coerce young women to carry their pregnancies to term by forcing them to go to religiously-affiliated crisis pregnancy centers, telling parents in their home countries about the abortion decisions—even if that means harm potentially to the minor or other family members—and that’s all a coercion tactic to try to force the young woman to carry her pregnancy to term. And if those tactics fail, they basically say, ‘We’re not going to let you access abortion.’ They hold them hostage to prevent them from accessing an abortion—just when I think it can’t get any more extreme, it does.”

In their initial filing concerning Jane Doe last October, the ACLU positioned their case as a class action lawsuit “on behalf of a class of similarly situated pregnant unaccompanied immigrant minors in the legal custody of the federal government.”

I Had An Abortion Because I Love My Son
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According to the ACLU’s court documentation, the federal government reported that in Fiscal Year 2016, 59,692 unaccompanied minors were referred to the ORR. “The class is so numerous that joinder is impracticable,” asserted the documentation, meaning that it is impossible to calculate exactly how many undocumented immigrant minors would be affected by the outcome of the class action lawsuit. “In any given year, there are hundreds of pregnant unaccompanied minors in defendants’ custody.”

And the Trump administration has not limited their attacks to solely undocumented minors, either.

In the appendix of Trump’s 2019 budget request, which he sent to Congress in early February, there is language that would give any employee working under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the right to refuse to facilitate the procurement of an abortion for any immigrant woman—whether the federal government is paying for the procedure or not.

ICE has never been allowed to use federal funds for abortion services unless the life of the person carrying is at risk, or the pregnancy is a result of rape and/or incest, but detainees who wanted an abortion outside those circumstances were still allowed to procure one if they came up with the funds themselves.

Now, under the proposed stipulations of Trump’s 2019 budget recommendation, ICE officials and employees who are morally or philosophically opposed to abortion wouldn’t have to aid in the facilitation of the services, a contentious caveat to Roe v. Wade eerily reminiscent of the birth control rollback mandate made late last year (which was ultimately blocked at the district court level in December).

In a vacuum, this proposed facilitative change wouldn’t be quite such a cause for alarm — Trump’s proposal is just that, a proposal — but this is not an isolated circumstance.

Between January and April of last year, ICE detained nearly 300 pregnant women, often in breach of the organization’s own protocol for dealing with expectant immigrant mothers. This led the ACLU to filed an administrative complaint with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and the Office of Inspector General in September 2017. They called upon the governing bodies to investigate ICE’s treatment of pregnant people in its custody.

Then, as recently as Thursday, according to a report from The Daily Beast, the Trump administration released an executive order unequivocally ending an Obama-era policy that limited the detainment of pregnant women in ICE custody to only “extraordinary circumstances.”

As for the Janes, the ACLU has thus far been successful at securing their abortions. U.S. district court judge Tanya S. Chutkan is the presiding judge who’s ordered the Trump administration to allow the Janes to get their abortions on a case by case basis thus far. Yesterday, she ruled that the ACLU will be able to proceed with their class action suit, effectively blocking the ORR from preventing undocumented minors in their charge from seeking an abortion in the meantime.

But no permanent change or established protections for pregnant undocumented minors will occur until the courts determine whether the ORR has the jurisdiction to circumvent constitutional precedent on the basis of its leader’s religious beliefs and questionably revised operational protocol.

How U.S. Policies Shape Abortion Rights Around The World
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In March of last year, according to ACLU court documentation, the ORR quietly revised its policies not only in flagrant disregard of Roe v. Wade’s constitutional precedent, but in conflict with its own ORR-specific protocol set forth in 1997 by the Flores v. Reno Settlement Agreement.

The Flores Agreement, more than 20 years old, legally obligates the ORR to provide care to the young people under its jurisdiction—specifically including family planning services and reproductive health care. The revisions to these provisions last March effectively prohibited all federally funded shelters from taking any action that facilitates abortion access for unaccompanied minors in their care without direction and approval from the ORR.

It bears noting that Lloyd, the current director of the ORR, is vehemently anti-choice. Under his jurisdiction, young people fleeing violent home lives in other countries are doubly suffering due to his unyieldingly “pro-life” stance.

Lloyd’s personal beliefs, and the Trump administration’s unveiled aversion to a person’s right to determine their own reproductive future, have dually contributed to a cultural climate in which it is not unreasonable to fear a future in which Roe v. Wade has no constitutional tack at all.

According to the New York Times, “It was unclear late Friday whether the Trump administration would appeal the ruling.”

Under Scott Lloyd’s jurisdiction, young people fleeing violent home lives in other countries are doubly suffering due to his unyieldingly ‘pro-life’ stance.
Click To Tweet

The possibility that they will is quite plausible, seeing as the administration has challenged several rulings related to the Janes since the first case occurred last October.

As the Trump administration continues to operate with little regard for the constitutional precedent that should govern all of its subsidiaries, this outcome of this class action could be monumental.

“The unique time that we are in is where a federal appointee, a Trump appointee, is setting policy that is blocking young women from being able to obtain an abortion — shaming and stigmatizing them on top of everything they’ve already been through — and (is) being supported in his decision,” says Amiri.

“This isn’t a rogue government employee. This is a Trump appointee who has the backing of clearly much higher-ups. The Department of Justice is defending Scott Lloyd’s action to the full degree. I think that’s also what’s surprising, is that there isn’t anyone in federal government at the higher level saying, ‘What you’re doing is not only blatantly unconstitutional under well-established Supreme Court precedent, but it is also just downright cruel, the treatment of these young women.’

I think that’s what’s really scary to me. There is no check on Scott Lloyd’s ideologically-driven attempts to coerce and block young women from accessing abortion despite the fact that it’s blatantly unconstitutional. I think that signals what’s going on in our federal government in general. We know we have a president who has vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices that would overturn Roe v. Wade.”

So, what’s next?

“We are relieved that the court issued an order preventing the administration from continuing this practice while our case proceeds,” says Amiri. “With yesterday’s rulings, we are one step closer to ending this extreme policy once and for all and securing justice for all of these young women.”

Amiri says the ACLU will now push forward in the district court, seeking documents from the government and asking for depositions of Scott Lloyd and others. When that is completed in several months, the case will be decided finally with a trial or briefs—and, one hopes, the decision will align with justice.

I n the wake of the GOP’s recent and unflagging attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act — an unpopular move by multiple measures — a handful of Democrats are fighting back with a push in the opposite direction. Rather than try to tape the ACA back together, candidates and lawmakers are pushing for a health-care revolution in the form of a single-payer system. Last week, the idea got its most high-profile boost yet, when Sanders unveiled a Medicare-for-All bill with a record 15 Democratic co-sponsors in the Senate.

The legislation, of course, doesn’t stand a chance of passing in the current GOP-controlled political climate (Trump has even gone so far as to call the plan, ludicrously, a “a curse”) — but there’s reason to believe it has potential, especially if Democrats soon take back political power. A recent Pew poll, for instance, found that support for single-payer health care has grown 12 points since 2014.

This push for universal or single-payer health care — which aren’t exactly the same, but are similar enough that they’re largely used interchangeably — is undoubtedly promising. But there is also good reason to believe that a single-payer plan could potentially leave many pregnant people without a way to pay for a necessary medical procedure that hundreds of thousands seek each year.

A recent Pew poll found that support for single-payer health care has grown 12 points since 2014.

That’s because in the United States — a country where erectile dysfunction medication, cosmetic surgery, and numerous other pills and procedures are covered by insurance — abortion has largely been funded out of the pockets of the people who pursue it. Since the 1970s, Medicaid funds have been barred from paying for abortion services, and Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws have restricted the ways in which even private insurance can pay for the procedure and aftercare. If restrictions like these aren’t expressly confronted and dismantled in a single-payer health-care plan, many reproductive-rights organizations believe that universal health care will not expand access to coverage for pregnant people in need, and could even further hinder access.

At a time when basic abortion services are in peril — when states are rolling back abortion rights with little resistance, and when Democratic organizations and lawmakers have made it clear that abortion is an area of potential compromise — how can we be sure that any attempt at single-payer health care will hold strong and ensure that everyone truly is covered?

Even as we fight back against the GOP’s latest last-gasp effort to get rid of Obamacare — and it’s crucial that we do — it’s also important that we open up a pro-choice dialogue around single-payer. Because no plan can be universal if it doesn’t support those seeking reproductive care.

The Power Of Hyde

It would be easy to assume that pro-choice advocates and single-payer advocates are one in the same — they are united in their interest in expanding health-care access, and both tend to come from more progressive camps. However, many reproductive-health organizers are skeptical that single-payer plans will truly be inclusive, while single-payer supporters view pro-choice groups as being too incremental.

The schism lies partially — but not entirely — in concerns over the budget appropriation known as the Hyde amendment, which bars most public money from paying for abortion services. Because of Hyde, for the 17% of non-elderly adult women who are on Medicaid (many of whom are members of marginalized populations), abortion services — which can run up to $1,500 — must be paid out of pocket except in very specific instances. That’s in addition to the cost of traveling over state lines and potential hotel stays in states that require 24-hour waiting periods, which only increase the chance that an unwanted pregnancy becomes financially ruinous.

Hillary Takes Crucial Stand Against Anti-Choice Hyde Amendment

However, there’s little political will to change the rule; since its passage in 1976, the Hyde amendment has been renewed every single year. And support has come not just from conservatives — but, in more subtle ways, from pro-choice organizations like Planned Parenthood.

This isn’t because Planned Parenthood is against reproductive justice for the less privileged, of course. But as the organization has clawed its way to remain funded in the wake of relentless GOP attacks, it’s often distanced itself rhetorically from abortion services. As a result, as Kylie Cheung wrote for Mediaite in July:

“Instead of fighting the Hyde amendment, which prevents thousands of low-income women from being able to access safe and legal abortion, [Planned Parenthood] routinely affirms the Hyde amendment’s legitimacy by reminding conservatives that they don’t use federal funding to pay for abortion.”

Still, there’s reason to be hopeful that getting rid of Hyde could be part of a push for universal health care. Despite Planned Parenthood’s rhetoric, the organization has in action fought the Hyde amendment in some key ways — it lobbied aggressively against HR 7 in January, which would have made Hyde permanent, and has supported numerous candidates who have listed rescinding Hyde as a major campaign promise. The organization also recently hosted a rally with Sanders, patron saint of single-payer, who has himself strongly backed repealing Hyde.

Rescinding Hyde as part of the push for single-payer is possible, then — but there’s also reason to believe it could be entirely ignored. And this would ensure many pregnant people would continue to struggle to access abortion services, even in the wake of “universal” care.

The Power Of State Control

Hyde isn’t the only thing standing in the way of universal health care covering abortion services. The United States prizes its ability to let states govern themselves in many ways, including how they distribute grant money and when and where they allow their medical professionals to practice. Without express federal protections for abortion that actively require states to expand access and coverage, the question remains: Even if we pass comprehensive universal health care, could it be whittled away by states looking to curb coverage and access?

There’s an example of precisely that just north. In Canada — where many in the United States look to see a shining example of single-payer at work — there’s a clear example of what happens when reproductive health is not at the center of the health-care conversation. In spite of the country’s reputation for progressive values, abortion rights have been whittled away, one province at a time.

Writing for Jacobin, Gerard Di Trolio explains what’s happening.

“Though there is no law regulating abortion in Canada, all provinces have varying restrictions on government-funded abortions. Women seeking an abortion have to meet a particularly high bar in New Brunswick. There, abortions are only covered when: performed before the 16-week mark, carried out by an obstetrician or gynecologist in a hospital, and after two doctors have signed off on the procedure.

Prince Edward Island (PEI) is even worse. The province doesn’t have a single medical facility that can perform abortions. This has led to instances in which women have harmed themselves because they didn’t have abortion access. Pro-choice activists have long argued these regional variations violate the Canada Health Act. Still, PEI Premier Robert Ghiz said this spring, ‘I believe the status quo is working.’ He can get away with such comments and policy positions because the federal government has never intervened to ensure equitable access.”

To see how state regulations could complicate abortion access under a single-payer system, one need look no further than Colorado. In 2016, voters from the state rejected a bill that would have achieved universal health care. And from the beginning, reproductive-rights organizations expressed concerns about one very specific legal hurdle: a state amendment passed in 1984 which prohibited public funds from being used to fund abortion services.

Even states like California — where health care access is greater than many others and abortion services are potentially more in-reach — still present significant barriers to accessing abortion. For instance, Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, has a massive access problem; a 2011 report found that 45% of California counties don’t have a Medi-Cal abortion provider. Which means that even if the state were to pass a single-payer plan (without additional stipulations to provide more clinics or locations which offer abortion service), the coverage would still be just as limited, if not more so.

Sans federally mandated abortion protections within a single-payer plan, it’s easy to see how states could severely limit access to reproductive services.

The Power Of The Democratic Party

Perhaps the biggest threat to abortion services, though, is the current ideology of the Democratic party. Regardless of a person’s moral beliefs about abortion, there is an inalienable case to be made that abortion on demand is an economic imperative. Yet the party has made it clear in recent months that it views abortion services as an optional or superfluous part of the left’s agenda.

As such, the most important way to move forward on single-payer is to make this message crystal-clear: Interjecting mentions about Hyde and abortion and reproductive care into conversations about single-payer is not derailing — it is essential.

It’s possible to do, too — and when it’s done correctly, the desired effect of fewer abortions can be achieved. In Massachusetts, where statewide health care was used as a model (kind of) for the ACA, abortion rates declined significantly “despite public and private funding of abortion that is substantially more liberal than the provisions of the federal legislation currently under consideration by Congress,” according to a 2010 article by Patrick Whelan, M.D., Ph.D. in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Perhaps the biggest threat to abortion services is the current ideology of the Democratic party.

However, in the current climate, where the GOP seems more certain than ever that the only way to preserve their legacy to repeal the ACA, it seems exceedingly difficult to imagine that, as a nation, we could both a.) build and implement a functional universal health care system that truly works for everyone and b.) repeal the numerous state and federal bans on public dollars for abortions.

In the United States, where the GOP is so passionate about states’ rights, it’s easy to see how a situation like the one in Canada could unfold. States like Texas and Missouri are already attempting to reduce access at every turn. What happens if we do push so hard for single-payer that we forget how many in the country still desperately want to not only strengthen Hyde, but repeal Roe v. Wade?

What happens if we stop bringing up the existing barriers to abortion and as a result, they are never removed when new health-care policies are put into place?

What happens if the fervor for single-payer becomes so great that compromising on abortion becomes fair game?

There is a surging current of support for universal health care in some ways — perhaps even universal Medicaid or Medicare, as the Dem-backed new bill is pushing for. But if access to necessary medical procedures and reproductive health care aren’t part of the policy (if clinics aren’t added, waiting periods aren’t repealed, and requirements that trans-vaginal ultrasounds aren’t removed), it will necessarily be a half-measure achieved at the expense of millions.

What if the fervor for single-payer becomes so great that compromising on abortion becomes fair game?

Even if Hyde is repealed and universal health insurance can pay for abortions, if there’s nowhere to go, it’s not really a right.

Supporters of single-payer ought to be on the front lawn, in the streets, and on the phones with their representatives. They must be turning out at the ballots and holding town halls and pressing their lawmakers. But they also must do so with an eye on the very real, very scary potential that single-payer which doesn’t cover abortion is nowhere near universal.

Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, has a 0% rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America.

A year after a domestic terrorist killed three people in a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood, the case is a damn mess — a mess that’s highlighting why the incoming administration, the most anti-abortion in history, could be dangerous not just for patients, but for providers.

The shooter, Robert Lewis Dear Jr., has three separate times now been found not legally competent to stand trial on 179 criminal counts, including murder and attempted murder. Dear’s defense team has asserted an insanity defense against his wishes; Dear himself has stated openly and proudly that he hopes to stand trial because his attack was justified, calling himself a “warrior for the babies.” Defense experts have testified that his belief that the federal government is targeting Christians, and him specifically, is delusional and proof that he cannot fully assist his lawyers.

Justifiable homicide was the defense Scott Roeder used unsuccessfully after shooting Dr. George Tiller to death in 2009. Tiller was the 11th known abortion provider to be killed in the United States for their work. Dr. Warren Hern — one of a handful of providers who still performs late-term abortions after Tiller’s assassination — told ABC News in 2009:

Just 100 miles away from the Colorado Springs clinic, in Boulder, Colorado, Hern fears for his life again — this time because he has denied a request by the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, an anti-choice witch-hunt, for access to confidential patient information. In a scathing five-page letter to panel Chair Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Hern writes:

“You and your Republican party are vigorously allied with a violent terrorist movement that threatens the lives of women, their families, and health care workers. … Your ‘investigation’ is legislative harassment that endangers our lives. The blood of any of us who are assassinated is on your hands.”

Hern has reason to be concerned. As a longtime clinic escort, co-founder of an escort group in Englewood, New Jersey, and founding board member of the Clinic Vest Project, which has provided free vests and other resources to more than 100 clinics in over 30 states just in the past three years, I’m concerned too. The incoming administration openly plans to make life less safe for women overall, and there’s little question that it will embolden, excuse, and even tacitly encourage anti-abortion terrorism.

When an abortion provider is threatened, it is routinely the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service that respond. Both are federal agencies overseen by appointees chosen by the president and his administration. It’s not hard to imagine what effect having hostile men in those positions and as attorney general could have on the safety of those who perform abortions, as well as their staff, their patients, and even neighboring businesses and residents.

The Trump-Pence administration’s appointees thus far show cause for concern, especially since the general public and law enforcement are already disastrously under-educated about anti-abortion extremists’ tactics and history of success.

Last year, Dr. Leah Torres, a Salt Lake City-based OB-GYN specializing in reproductive health, told me that rampant anti-abortion violence — including 11 murders, 26 attempted murders, 42 bombings, and 185 arsons since 1977 — hasn’t been taken seriously enough. “I’m scared for my colleagues, I’m scared for my patients,” Torres said. “This violence continues to be excused because Planned Parenthood provides health care.” If anything, that’s likely to get worse.

The threat to women’s and health care workers’ lives goes all the way to the highest law enforcement position. Anti-choice publication Life News is celebrating the appointment of Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to attorney general, due to his 0% rating from NARAL Pro-Choice America.

“We are incredibly concerned about Jeff Sessions becoming the attorney general,” NARAL National Communications Director Kaylie Hanson Long told me. “The last person women and families need in this job is someone who has repeatedly given a pass to individuals who commit acts of violence against abortion clinics, doesn’t take sexual assault seriously, and was determined to be too racist by a GOP-led Senate to become a federal judge. But that’s who Jeff Sessions is.”

Sessions’ legislative track record is a cornucopia of abortion restrictions; he has introduced or supported essentially every attack on access. Here’s the not-even-comprehensive list from On the Issues:

• Voted YES on defining unborn child as eligible for SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program)
• Voted YES on prohibiting minors crossing state lines for abortion
• Voted YES on barring HHS (Health & Human Services) grants to organizations that perform abortions
• Voted NO on expanding research to more embryonic stem cell lines (because the embryos are “babies”)
• Voted NO on $100M to reduce teen pregnancy by education & contraceptives (I find demonizing teen parents to be abhorrent, but this points out some hypocrisy)
• Voted YES on banning partial birth abortions except for maternal life (reminder: “partial birth abortion” is not a thing)
• Voted YES on maintaining ban on Military Base Abortions

Sessions isn’t just bad on abortion; he’s atrocious on all manner of human rights. “His record of misogyny and racism makes him unfit to be the country’s top lawyer,” Hanson Long said. “The American people deserve far better, but with Donald Trump at the helm, we know we won’t get it.”

The GOP also has a demonstrated commitment to closing abortion clinics, which not only strips women of access to a legal, protected medical procedure but also makes life easier for domestic terrorists — fewer targets mean easier targeting. There’s no reason to believe this will change under Trump, says Hanson Long: “Instead, we fully expect their priority will be to do everything in their power to restrict a woman’s ability to get health care, including abortion care. Their track records suggest nothing less.”

Clinics have had to brace for increased violence since the doctored tapes targeting Planned Parenthood last summer that painted it as a fetus-fueled capitalist empire. Even clinics that hadn’t previously experienced harassment or hadn’t had picketers for a period of time were forced to create or expand programs to counteract a surge of harassment on their sidewalks and around their parking lots.

Volunteer clinic escort groups are the most visible protection for patients; escorts wear neon vests labeling them as an extension of the clinic and use non-violent non-engagement to create a buffer between picketers and patients. Benita Ulisano is the founder of the Clinic Vest Project and has been involved in escort training and organizing since before the federal policy prohibiting the blockade of doors — the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) Act — was signed in 1994.

“There has been a dramatic increase in vest requests since the Planned Parenthood anti-choice videos were released,” Ulisano told me. “Clinics that did not need vest support or clinic escorts for the longest time now needed our help — and in larger quantities. We have also seen our current client base of escort teams need more vests as well. We have sent vests to over 100 clinic in the past three years, with a dramatic increase in 2015–2016.”

Ulisano is particularly concerned about federal appointments because, essentially, federal law trumps state law. In her city of Chicago, the Pro Life Action League — the group that created “sidewalk counseling” (i.e. harassing patients as they try to enter a clinic) — is suing for the right to get all the way into patients’ faces. If they win, patients will still be protected by the federal FACE act — but not if it’s overturned by the new administration. Ulisano worries about “the blockades happening again like they did in the late 80’s, 90’s when hundreds of anti-choice protesters would show up at a location and literally block entrances and people from going in. It was so, so scary.”

While the threat level started spiking before the election thanks to the videos, Ulisano says clinics are — again — bracing for an increase in harassment.

“The clinic escort group I co-organize for the Illinois Choice Action Team hopes to have an emergency response plan worked out with our clinics,” she said. “It’s an effort we will be working on beginning in 2017. I am aware of other groups doing the same as well.”

As with any policy hindering access to safe, legal abortion, independent providers face the bulk of the obstacles. Independent clinics provide between 60 and 80% of abortions annually, with far less name recognition-boosting fundraising dollars than an organization like Planned Parenthood. It’s vital that our independent clinics have the resources they need ahead of January 20th.

Nikki Madsen, executive director of the Abortion Care Network — the national association for independent community-based, abortion care providers and their allies — stresses that the threat of violence, though it may get worse under the new administration, is nothing clinics aren’t prepared for.

“Abortion care providers care deeply about their staff and patients, so no matter who is in office, Abortion Care Network providers are always thinking about safety and security,” said Madsen. “While we’ve certainly seen some opponents of abortion access emboldened by the recent election, anti-choice harassment and threats are, unfortunately, nothing new.”

What Madsen has seen is an increase in awareness about clinic violence and people signing up to help.

“Our member clinics have seen an increase in the number of people interested in volunteering as clinic escorts since the election,” she said. “It does seem that anticipation of an administration hostile to reproductive rights has mobilized members of our community who are invested in their local clinics and willing to show up to defend patients’ right to access care.”

The interest in helping is welcome. Madsen says that “it’s crucial that allies and community members get to know and support their local clinics.” This is an area where people can do very hands on work providing support; we have a lot of power at the local level.

“There are many ways that those committed to reproductive freedom can help,” Madsen said. “Donate directly to their local clinic, volunteer as an escort, support local and state buffer-zone ordinances, and oppose state funding for deceptive, so-called ‘Crisis Pregnancy Centers.’ Because independent abortion care providers are deeply rooted in their communities and every community is faced with different challenges, we recommend connecting with your local clinic directly.”

We can’t know exactly what’s going to happen and how fast. But having the most aggressively anti-abortion administration in our country’s history at the helm means that anti-choice extremists and their supporters have been validated. The combination of validation and perceived oppression (the primarily white, middle-class, Christian picketers are oppressed, don’tcha know!) can be combustive.

Now is the time to get involved in supporting your local clinics. When you’re preparing for an all-out assault on bodily autonomy and self determination, there’s no such thing as too much help.

You can send a message of support to Dr. Hern through NARAL with THIS LINK, find your local independent clinic HERE, and contact the Clinic Vest Project to be connected to a volunteer escort group in your area HERE.

‘The Congress Planned Parenthood Massacre’

FADE IN.

INT. BREAK ROOM, GOVERNMENT BUILDING — EARLY EVENING

Cecile Richards begins to regain consciousness, stirring in the chair to which she is bound. For a few blissful seconds, she is able to believe that the past few hours were nothing but a bad dream — that her idyllic fall afternoon drive through Washington D.C. went off without a hitch, that she was never captured and dragged back to the hulking government building in which she now sits, trapped and terrified. Her eyes snap open — Cecile is forced to confront her reality. Her captors pore over book-length documents and argue. Cecile screams. The captors scream back.

CECILE
Why are you screaming at me?! I’m the one tied up here!

DESICCATED OLD MAN
Oh, that’s just what we do! We protect innocent baby lives by screaming at scared women outside of clinics. You know, calling them murderers and whores and stuff. Classic good guy behavior. Besides, we’re men and our voices should be heard over a woman’s at all times.

Cecile glances around the room and screams again.

CECILE
What are those?! What is wrong with you?!

She motions with her head to a pile of posters and signs covered with graphic pictures of dead fetuses.

ANOTHER DESICCATED OLD MAN
Those are our protesting placards. We use them to stop all you evil women from aborting.

CECILE
So you collect and surround yourself with gruesome high-resolution pictures of dead fetuses and somehow women who get abortions are the evil ones? . . . That’s not even what an aborted fetus looks like!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #1
Shut your mouth! What do you know?! You’re just a dumb woman. Now quit yer screaming — you’re distracting us from our important work.

‘Those are our protesting placards. We use them to stop all you evil women from aborting.’

CECILE
What work!? What are you going to do to me?! Let me go!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #2
Well, we’ve downloaded some new fonts that make words look like they were written in dripping blood, and then we wrote a pro-life parody of Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance” called “Bad Abortion (Abortion Is Bad).”

He makes a deliberate check mark on his clipboard.

Now we’re onto the next task on our agenda — we’re coming up with new ways to restrict abortions.

CECILE
But abortion is legal! Whether or not a woman aborts shouldn’t be up to you — the decision should be made solely by the woman whose body is in question, not lobbyists or politicians!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #1
(disregarding Cecile)
Remember when we talked about “legitimate rape” and how females’ bodies can shut down pregnancies if they want to?

CECILE
Oh god, please, no! Don’t say “females!” Please! Please! Anything but that!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #2
(ignoring Cecile)
This is a graph my kids helped me create on Excel. See, there are numbers and lines — which means it’s science, which means it’s basically fact which means . . . we’re right. That line going up is the number of abortions . . . I think. I don’t know — I got caught up in choosing the right colors for my graph lines and forgot to label the axes.

CECILE
What gives you the right to weigh in on women’s reproductive healthcare?!
You’re all just a bunch of cisgender old men!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #2
Cisgender old men with a lot of money, baby!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #1
Who better to determine what a woman can do with her body?

DESICCATED OLD MAN #2
Don’t you understand — we have to protect human life, so we cut funding for food stamps and Medicaid in order to pay for more investigations into legitimate medical organizations like Planned Parenthood! How doesn’t that make sense?

DESICCATED OLD MAN #1
Speaking of . . .

Off-camera, a grinding mechanical sound grows louder and closer. Cecile fights against her restraints and spasms with terror when the source of the noise is revealed to be a maniacal hulk of a man wielding a chainsaw in one hand and a reel of footage in the other. As Cecile screams, the man guides his weapon through the film, unabashedly splitting scenes.

DESICCATED OLD MAN #1
Yes! With that video, we will surely rile everyone up and come close to defunding Planned Parenthood! Good work, Fetaltissueface! . . . You know, we should probably work on your name. It’s not exactly catchy. Kinda sounds a bit foreign too, which you know the family doesn’t like.

CECILE
That footage is blatantly manipulated! You’ll waste millions of dollars probing into claims that have been proven false time and time again!

DESICCATED OLD MAN #2
Yeah, pretty scary, isn’t it? Just be thankful that we’re not talking about your emails. Now back to this graph — do you think the red I chose for the word “abortions” needs to be redder? Should I use the new blood-dripping font?

‘The Village Pharmacy’

FADE IN.

EXT. HIGHWAY — AFTERNOON

A girl in a dirty 19th-century-style dress emerges from a thick forest. Her hands and face are covered in fine scratches and leaves are tangled in her disheveled hair. She boldly steps forward into the middle of the highway, forcing a SUV to quickly swerve left to avoid hitting her. The truck comes to an abrupt stop mere feet from the girl, who appears confused but not entirely fearful. After a few moments, we hear the truck’s door open.

DRIVER
Are you okay?

GIRL
I’m not hurt. But please — bring me to the town. I seek tools of medicine.

GUY IN BACKSEAT OF SUV
(sticks head out of his window)
Uh, if she gets in the car, that makes this an UberPool, not an Uber — I’m gonna need the charges to reflect that. Also, not to be a dick, but I think I should be dropped off first since I got in first and happy hour ends soon and I’m not paying $12 for a whiskey ginger, you know?

INT. WALMART — LATE AFTERNOON

The girl stands before the store’s pharmacy counter, bewildered and blinking rapidly in the florescent light.

PHARMACIST
Can I help you?

GIRL
(hushed voice)
Please, tell me — I heard whispers in my village, in the meeting hall, amongst the women. They spoke of a certain medicine that —
(her voice drops to a hoarse whisper)
— that stops a woman from being with child. I thought it was surely a farce but . . .

Her voice trails off but she continues to lean eagerly over the counter, eyes locked on the pharmacist, and hopeful.

PHARMACIST
Oh. You mean birth control?

GIRL
Yes. Yes, please. One of that. One birth control for me.

PHARMACIST
I’m sorry, ma’am, but I cannot give that to you.

The girl’s face falls and her voice takes on a trembling quality.

GIRL
But please! I must have it!

PHARMACIST
I’m sorry, ma’am, but first of all, you do not have a valid prescription from your doctor for any sort of birth control. Second of all, even if you did, I wouldn’t be able to give that to you. It’s against my religion.
(in a deliberate whisper)
You see, birth control encourages sexual activity.

GIRL
But my village doesn’t carry this medicine and I have been encouraged to be sexually active! Do you know what really encourages sexual activity? Being locked in a tiny meeting hall with the village’s eldest boys after they have returned from a day’s work in the fields, their chests glistening with sweat, faces flushed with hot blood, breath forceful and uneven like that of a stallion mounting the broodmare, and —

The girl breaks out of her fantasy and notices that the pharmacist is holding something shiny and sleek in her palm.

GIRL
What is that?

PHARMACIST
My cell phone. I was just taking some notes for my fanfiction, don’t worry about it.

GIRL
Cell phone? Fanfiction?

PHARMACIST
Never mind. Ma’am, I appreciate your story but there is nothing I can do for you.

GIRL
But what of the hideous pain that comes with my monthly bleeding? Or the fact that the bleeding is irregular and unusually heavy? Doesn’t this medicine also treat those issues?

PHARMACIST
Well, yeah . . . but the sex stuff, like I said before, it’s bad. Thanks to conscience clauses, I don’t have to give you this pill, so I won’t. Now if you’ll excuse me . . . Ugh, god.

The pharmacist begins to pull and tug at her shirt, leaning forward and shifting it around, clearly trying to alleviate some pain.

‘Thanks to conscience clauses, I don’t have to give you this pill, so I won’t.’

GIRL
What’s wrong?

PHARMACIST
Nothing, it’s just my bra; the underwire broke so it’s poking into my side.

GIRL
You know, the whole point of this movie is the shocking plot twist at the end when it’s revealed that I actually live in the 21st century and that my village is just some strange secluded social experiment. But this interaction kinda has me questioning that whole premise. Like, it’s not the 1850s, but women still struggle to easily obtain low-cost and long-acting birth control? A woman’s sexuality is still a source of shame, condemnation, and criminality? And through some black magic, you have the power to write words on this “cell phone” without a dip pen and paper, and yet you people still haven’t invented a way to hold up a woman’s breasts that doesn’t involve sharp metal shards that eventually poke out and impale the very bosom they are supposed to be protecting?

PHARMACIST
Uh . . . yes? Wait — no? I don’t . . . what was the question?

GIRL
Forget it. My Elders also wanted me to procure some firearms, but surely there’s no way that a device created to take life is easier to obtain than some pill —

PHARMACIST
Aisle 11. Unless you want youth rifles, then that’s Aisle 15, next to the Minions toys.

‘The Sexistorcist’

FADE IN

INT. MEEGAN’S BEDROOM — NIGHT

Barely concealing his revulsion, Father Yesallmen enters slowly, picking his way across a floor littered with crusty tights, underpants, and empty jars of Nutella. His eyes flit across the dimly-lit room, then widen in horror. Arms held down by a double set of restraining straps, Meegan appears barely alive. Her hair is tangled and thickly matted — and we’re not talking about in a cute beach waves or Kylie-Jenner-culturally-appropriative-Teen-Vogue-spread kind of way. Her shoulders are shrunken and festooned with sheets stained with either human blood or red wine, depending on whether murder or squandered alcohol scares you more. A laptop sits on her withered lap; we can’t see the screen, but from the noises we know she’s watching the Entourage movie. Clearly something is wrong. Meegan lolls her head toward Yesallmen, who struggles to maintain some semblance of control.

YESALLMEN
Hello, Meegan.
(dragging a chair to her bedside)
I was told you wished to see me. How can I help you?

Meegan’s features recompose into a horrific demonic visage. Her throat swells and a nightmarish growl shudders through her body. Yesallmen remains silent, observing uneasily, until life returns to the girl’s face. It is the old Meegan once more, except her countenance is twisted with embarrassment and pain, a suggestion of an apology.

MEEGAN
(whispering)
I think it’s clear, Father — I need an exorcism.

YESALLMEN
An exorcism?

Yesallmen gathers one of Meegan’s hands in his own, careful to not pull on the restraining straps.

YESALLMEN
You want to get rid of this demon, this life, growing inside of you?

MEEGAN
Well, Father, I —

Sweat dots Meegan’s brow and some sort of wild electricity causes her frail body to seize. A foreign voice — thick, rasping, and filled with hate — passes through her lips.

‘You want to get rid of this demon, this life, growing inside of you?’

MEEGAN
Foolish man! She is ours! There is no god! Your world is scum! Beyoncé is overrated and her last album only had three decent tracks!

Meegan regains control. Her voice returns, frayed and tired.

MEEGAN
Yes, yes, I’m sure. Please cast this wretched monster out, Father.

YESALLMEN
Oooh, yeah, I don’t know if I can do that for you, Meegan.

MEEGAN
(baffled)
What?

YESALLMEN
This is a living demon that can feel pain. It probably has 12 long, poison-tipped demon fingernails already. You want me to cast something with fingernails out?

MEEGAN
Yes, I do — it keeps scratching “666” and “DEMON WUZ HERE” with a poor facsimile of the nail painting emoji into my chest. Besides, I’ve only been possessed for a few weeks. I can still talk to you as myself, so clearly the demon isn’t that strong.

YESALLMEN
Life begins at possession, Meegan. Besides, you engaged in the risky behavior; you should’ve been ready to accept the consequences.

MEEGAN
I got possessed by mistake! The Ouija board is produced by the Parker Brothers — how was I supposed to know that the creators of Monopoly unlocked a portal to hell?! I thought I was being safe; I mean, I only touched the tip of the planchette. I even faked it for awhile so it would end faster!

YESALLMEN
Meegan, I urge you to rethink your possession. This is a gift —

As YESALLMEN talks, a stream of thick greenish vomit shoots from Meegan’s mouth, soaking the bedding and the Father’s robe.

YESALLMEN
 — from God. You have to make the best out of a bad situation.

MEEGAN
How am I supposed to support myself? My savings are pretty much drained; I keep having to buy new beds to replace the ones I break after levitating.

YESALLMEN
Life is a miracle, Meegan.

MEEGAN
Considering that my flesh burns whenever I come into contact with holy water, I think this might be the exact opposite of a miracle. Father, please listen, this is my body. I alone should have autonomy over it. It is my right to decide what I want to do with it.

(dramatic pause)
And I want an exorcism.

Unable to reign back his disdain, Yesallmen glowers at Meegan. He lets go of her sweating hand and leans back in his chair, contemplating the girl’s case.

YESALLMEN
I suppose this is what you really want, Meegan. Before I can perform the exorcism, there are a few things I’m required to do by law. Firstly, I’m going to need your parents’ signatures on a consent form . . .

Meegan attempts to roll her eyes, but they go all the way into her head, leaving only the whites exposed.

MEEGAN
(hoarsely)
My parents are currently in the hospital. They were inadvertently crushed by a piece of furniture that I sent flying around my room with the new telekinetic powers I developed after a demon possessed me.

YESALLMEN
Hm, well, possessed women are known to be moody, heh heh. Hormones and all. I’d like you to look at this sonogram of the demon.

(Types on the laptop and turns it so the screen faces Meegan.)

Footage from the 1995 film “Casper” plays on the laptop screen. The bed begins to buck and fall as the Father snuggles up with Meegan in order to watch the movie.

YESALLMEN
Look at how adorable that spirit is! Do you really want to exorcise a spirit like that? Ugh, this is my favorite part — “Can I keep you?” I get the chills every time!

Yesallmen turns to Meegan for solidarity but she is motionless, the whites of her eyes glowing eerily in the dark room.

YESALLMEN
Ah, yes. Well. One last thing: just listen to the demon’s heart.

Yesallmen pulls a stethoscope out of his pocket and presses the diaphragm to Meegan’s stomach. A deafening hellish noise screeches from the ear tips, filling the whole room. The sound is unlike any other; it is multitudinous and deep, as if every soul in hell were howling for help. It is the aural equivalent of loneliness and fear and blinding rage and stubbing your toe on the corner of a desk while simultaneously biting your tongue and shattering your iPhone screen. The cacophony ruptures Yesallmen’s eardrums and he tumbles off the bed, pulling the stethoscope with him. As quickly as the noise exploded, it stops. After a few minutes of silence, Yesallmen pulls himself up to his feet. Blood trickles from both ears and his body noticeably trembles.

YESALLMEN
(shouting)
So, is adoption out of the question?

When they donned the “pro-life” label in the 1970s, anti-abortion activists and politicians planted their flag in the moral high ground. After all, what could be more moral than protecting the sanctity of life?

Despite their singular focus on forcing any pregnant person to give birth without regard for what happens after the baby takes its first breath, and despite not offering any public advocacy for prenatal care or tackling our country’s horrific maternal mortality and child hunger rates, those opposed to abortion continue to claim that they are righteous.

It’s an incredible act of alchemy really; their rhetoric handily transforms anyone opposed to them into immoralists. (Linking pro-choice demands to morality has rarely been done on the left outside of typically sidelined reproductive justice groups and organizing efforts — like the highly intersectional 2013 Moral Monday protests.)

More than 40 years after the passage of the Hyde Amendment — which prohibits the federal budget from covering abortion care and remains the only medical procedure ever banned from Medicaid — it’s clear that the majority of Americans don’t believe in the rigid structure created by those opposed to abortion. A full 74% of voters — including 62% of Republicans — not only think abortion should be legal, but that “as long as abortion is legal, the amount of money a woman has or does not have should not prevent her from being able to have an abortion.”

With public opinion firmly on the side of bodily autonomy, perhaps it’s time for pro-choicers to snatch back the morality flag and fly it high themselves.

“[T]here is a moral case for abortion. More importantly, there is a moral case to empower a woman to decide whether to have an abortion on the basis of her own moral reasoning,” writes Ann Furedi, chief executive of the UK’s leading abortion provider British Pregnancy Advisory Service and author of a new book, The Moral Case for Abortion.

Furedi argues that empowering people with the right and ability to access abortion — whether or not they exercise that right during their lifetime — is a moral good all its own.

“When we prevent a woman from making her own moral choices about her pregnancy, we undermine her humanity by taking away that ability to exercise her agency,” she says.

The most prominent abortion provider in the country agrees. Dr. Willie Parker, OB/Gyn and board chair of Physicians for Reproductive Health, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times titled simply, “Why I Provide Abortions.” He described his change of heart — having once seen abortion as “morally wrong.” The more patients who came to him for help, however, the harder it was to see denying them care as the moral position:

“I want for women what I want for myself: a life of dignity, health, self-determination and the opportunity to excel and contribute. We know that when women have access to abortion, contraception and medically accurate sex education, they thrive. We who provide abortions do so because our patients need us, and that’s what we are supposed to do: respond to our patients’ needs. It is the deepest level of love that you can have for another person, that you can have compassion for their suffering and you can act to relieve it. That, simply put, is why I provide abortion care.”

The public debate over abortion as it’s covered in the corporate media has little room for this narrative. Abortion polling is done to make it seem as though Americans are divided, that the battle for hearts and minds is up for grabs. News outlets — even on the “left” — and elected officials whose voting records are given high marks by reproductive rights groups perpetuate this by shying away from being bold and unapologetic in their support of abortion care. In January, for example, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) — the highest ranking democrat in the House as well as the former Speaker — told the nonpartisan politics/election coverage site Roll Call: “I don’t believe in abortion on demand.”

When we prevent a woman from making her own moral choices about her pregnancy, we undermine her humanity by taking away that ability to exercise her agency.
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Furedi addresses this couched support (to put it nicely) for abortion in both the U.K. and the U.S. in her book, writing:

“Liberal thinking no longer tries to define what is ‘right’ by appealing to deontological [i.e. moral] principles. Instead it looks to find what is ‘acceptable,’ what is ‘reasonable,’ or what ‘works.’ In polite liberal circles, expressions of belief in values, and opinion about rightness and wrongness come across as rather old-fashioned and judgmental.”

Anyone who’s ever been on the wrong side of a Thanksgiving dinner debate has experienced this. Somehow, the conservative viewpoint is always given deference; the impetus to change hearts and minds is on the person speaking from a liberal perspective. Why? Because of the conservative claim on morality — a claim that has been largely conceded over the years by their opponents. Furedi posits that this has left the liberal viewpoint vulnerable:

“A further problem with the liberal estrangement from moral principles is that is has left the moral high ground free for occupation by a small, but loud, minority of those who are fundamentally against reproductive choice for reasons based on faith and doctrine. A moral case as it relates to abortion is assumed to be a case against it, not an argument, as made in these pages, that morally defends its choice.”

This concession of morality has allowed stigma to flourish around a procedure that has existed as long as pregnancy, has a less than 1% complication rate, and will be utilized by one-in-three people who experience pregnancy in their lifetimes.

Much of the work being done by reproductive justice groups is to — at least in part — reduce the stigma around abortion care. Those leading this work overtly challenge unfortunate and persistent tropes like “safe, legal, and rare” by proudly declaring abortion a public good. They’re here to take back that moral high ground once and for all.

“Abortion is absolutely a moral and public good in and of itself,” Pamela Merritt, co-director of the reproductive rights direct action group ReproAction, told The Establishment. “That’s why the current state of abortion access in America is a degrading, man-made humanitarian crisis.”

ReproAction has gone hard at liberal favorites like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and President Obama for being wishy-washy on abortion, often avoiding referencing it — even with euphemisms. Merritt and her co-founder Erin Matson are looking for champions and demanding even those “on our side” to be proactive. As Rebecca Traister so concisely wrote in her latest book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation, women in the democratic party were told to put their needs aside for the good of the country for decades as anti-choice democrats were strategically run and elected. The result of the party priorities? Anti-abortion restrictions have been introduced and passed at a historic rate.

Merritt is here for a trend reversal:

“To deny . . . people who experience pregnancy access to abortion is to deny access to a needed and safe healthcare option. It’s ridiculous that so many people have the right to abortion in name only because of closed clinics, financial barriers, insulting hurdles, baseless religious exemptions, and terrorism against providers. ReproAction celebrates legal, accessible, and funded abortion as a great thing. We know women must be able to have sex and become parents on their own terms if they are ever to enjoy political, social, and economic equality.”

Steph Herold, co-director of The Sea Change Program, which is dedicated to the study and reduction of stigma surrounding abortion and other reproductive experiences, is also unapologetically celebratory about the role abortion plays in our lives.

“Abortion is more than a public good; it’s a five-minute procedure that often gives people control back over their lives,” Herold told The Establishment. “When people are able to choose their own futures and decide if and when they’re ready to start a family, that’s better for them and for society as a whole.”

To deny people who experience pregnancy access to abortion is to deny access to a needed and safe healthcare option.
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Herold is frustrated at the way polling is often done on abortion; it assumes a binary that simply doesn’t exist. People’s views on abortion change with circumstances and questions from polling firms are sorely inadequate.

“Unfortunately, the majority of polling data we have about how the American public thinks about abortion is pretty flawed, because it turns out people have complex views about this issue,” she says. “For example, a standard Gallup question they’ve asked for decades is, ‘With respect to the abortion issue, do you consider yourself pro-choice or pro-life?’ What that question doesn’t tell you is how that person would treat a friend or family member who’s had an abortion or how they think an abortion experience should be.”

Citing newer polling data with questions that respect the complexity with which people approach abortion, Herold was hopeful.

I Had An Abortion Because I Love My Son

“Of the people they polled, most want abortion to be available in their communities,” she says. “They want people who have abortions to feel supported and be able to access abortion without burdens. To me, this signals that the way people label themselves related to abortion views doesn’t necessarily map on to how they feel interpersonally about abortion. We need to figure out how to help those folks see how they can help manifest that desire for compassionate abortion care in their communities into action.”

The question is, then: How do we do that? How do we get to a place where society allows the standard internal moral compass supporting legal, accessible abortion to become the presiding public narrative? How do we take the private conviction that — at the very least — it isn’t our legislature’s right to dictate the course of a pregnancy and make that conviction the publicly acknowledged starting place from which laws are written and discussions of health begin?

“At the same time as being a procedure that over 1 million women have every year, we all know that abortion is a social, cultural, and political experience too,” says Herold. “That’s where I think we have some work to do — in making abortion normal, social, and a connecting instead of a dividing issue.”

Merritt, like Furedi, spreads the blame for the stigma barrier around.

“We must acknowledge that abortion stigma has been nurtured by both opponents and advocates; people have received negative messages about abortion for decades,” she says. “So, when I talk to people about abortion, they often start out repeating those negative messages — even if they support access.”

One of the biggest myths that perpetuates stigma is “abortion regret.” It’s the foundation of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s “concern” for women who have abortions. As Supreme Court expert Dahlia Lithwick wrote at Slate last year, Kennedy helped to solidify this non-occurrence into both our legal system and broader culture:

“Those of us who were incensed at Kennedy’s paternalism in Gonzales v. Carhart, his last major abortion opinion, in 2007, took issue with his odd (and scientifically unsupported) fetish around ‘post abortion syndrome,’ and his insistence that ‘it seems unexceptionable to conclude some women come to regret their choice to abort the infant life they once created and sustained.’

This kind of language sent Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself into orbit in her dissent, scathingly noting that ‘the Court invokes an anti-abortion shibboleth for which it concededly has no reliable evidence: Women who have abortions come to regret their choices, and consequently suffer from severe depression and loss of esteem.’ Ginsburg went on to quote a 2006 study showing that ‘neither the weight of the scientific evidence to date nor the observable reality of 33 years of legal abortion in the United States comports with the idea that having an abortion is any more dangerous to a woman’s long-term mental health than delivering and parenting a child that she did not intend to have.’”

Still, the myth persists.

A 2013 study at the University of California, San Francisco found that “[w]omen who are denied an abortion feel more regret and less relief one week later than women who undergo the procedure” and a 2015 study from Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) found that just having abortion available for those who can get pregnant increases positivity and the ability to make and achieve goals.

Study after study proves the emotional, fiscal, and cultural importance of abortion access, and yet far too many ascribe to Kennedy’s thinking: “Well, certainly some people regret their decision.” Sure, people regret decisions every day; this doesn’t mean we take away their right to make regrettable decisions. Even if “abortion regret” or “post-abortion syndrome” were real, it wouldn’t be legislators’ jobs or right to eliminate options. As Furedi writes, “policy makers and politicians need to accept that there is a moral component to abortion and not everything about it can, or should, be resolved by law or regulation.”

“The reality is that most people who have an abortion do not experience regret,” says Merritt. “I’m thrilled that people have started to share their stories and push back against stigma and I’m optimistic that the more we talk about the reality of abortion, who has abortions, and what their actual experiences are, the more people in America will see abortion as a moral good.”

Study after study proves the emotional, fiscal, and cultural importance of abortion access.
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Herold looks forward to a day where abortion is not just accepted, but understood as a beneficial part of society.

“Abortion is a fact of life — and I use the word ‘life’ deliberately,” she says. “People will always need abortions simply because people will always have sex. I’d like to think not so much that we’re stuck with abortion, but rather that we are in the awesome place of building a world where abortion is a visible to the public — where people who have abortions can choose to be open about that experience, where abortion is integrated into mainstream medicine, and where having an abortion fosters connection between people instead of driving them apart.”

To get there, even with the public behind abortion access individually, will take time and yet more work.

“ReproAction believes in the power of direct action, so we are excited to build on the momentum already present in the grassroots,” says Merritt. “We’re going to be doing some raucous work: holding those who stand in our way accountable, and organizing fellow rabble-rousers on the ground. Now is not the time to step back. Now is the time to march forward — and we’re ready.”

Herold is a believer in the one-on-one, person-to-person approach that empowers everyone to do their part to reduce stigma and thereby increase access to abortion.

“We all have a role to play in normalizing abortion. We can start at a place as familial and familiar as the dinner table and have genuine conversations with friends, family, colleagues, pastors, exploring how you think the experience of abortion should be in your community,” she says. “We can all evaluate where our community is at in terms of abortion access. If a friend said that they needed an abortion, would you know where to refer her for compassionate care? Would you know how to support her? Make sure you’re prepared, and then help others get there too.”

These conversations and visible showing of support like op-eds, flyers, buttons, and social media posts don’t just serve to further culture change; they also speak directly to people who might need support.

“We all know and love someone who’s had an abortion, whether we know it or not,” says Herold. “How are you going to make sure that person knows you are there for them? It really starts at that person-to-person level. Then you can build to something more: How can you show other people in your community that have had abortions that you support them? . . . There are so many ways to connect to this issue and we all have a responsibility to give people ways to plug in and take action.”

Here’s to Dr. Parker’s motivation becoming the norm for our culture:

“I found my sense of purpose and place by making the decision to provide abortions, and it is very much consistent with my core values, in regard to my spirituality and my humanity. That’s why I do this work.”

If politicians and the public could leave the doctoring to the doctors and the deciding to the pregnant person, we could be done with punishing policies like Hyde.

“We must give credit to and support the activism that resulted in the Democratic party officially opposing Hyde, and ReproAction is committed to adding our energy and voice to the call to repeal Hyde,” says Merritt. “The lack of government funding for abortion is shameful and has had devastating consequences for many women. Now is the time to push individual politicians to embrace their party’s opposition to Hyde and hold them accountable for doing the work to achieve repeal.”

Herold also credited grassroots activism for the historic stance of the Democratic party and its presidential candidate.

“The fact that the Democratic party platform now includes repealing the Hyde Amendment is a direct result of women of color and reproductive justice groups campaigning fiercely on this issue over the last decade and being unwilling to let the Democratic party — and, frankly, the pro-choice movement — throw people struggling to make ends meet under the bus,” says Herold.

“This change is also the direct result of the over 100 abortion funds across the country making visible the gap between the promise of Roe — abortion access for all — and the reality of abortion access in the US: abortion access only for the privileged.”

A right available only to the privileged is certainly not a moral position for a society. If the reproductive justice activists of today have their way, we’re moving toward a more consistent and equitable culture.

When I was eight months pregnant, I chanced upon a pro-choice rally in downtown Seattle. A small group was blocking traffic, holding signs depicting women who had died because they lacked access to safe abortion services. I was hot and grumpy and desperately craving a cupcake, but I had to stop. A few men in the crowd were hurling abuse at the demonstrators, to the tired tune of “Close your legs!” and “Abortion is murder!” I started a campaign of vigorous counter-heckling, loudly asserting my support for abortion rights. Eventually, the cops showed up. I raised my fist in solidarity, applauded, and shouted, “thank you!” to the protesters as they were being led away in handcuffs.

As I turned to go, a guy wearing a shiny purple shirt and a self-satisfied smirk looked me up and down. “Are you really pregnant?” he asked. I was too shocked for a witty comeback; an indignant “Of course!” was all I could manage. “You never know,” he replied. “You could be a plant.”

The guy was clearly a dolt, or trying to provoke me, or both. His bizarre question, however, tidily illustrates a key assumption of the anti-choice movement: that people who are pro-choice are anti-baby. But just because someone believes that people should have the right to end their pregnancies doesn’t mean they’re obliged to get an abortion if they themselves become pregnant. And falling in love with my son — and by extension, babies in general — only further cemented my conviction that abortion should be available on demand, for any reason.

My own pregnancy was unplanned. When two methods of birth control failed to prevent an embryo from taking up residence in my uterus, my life was thrown into chaos. I had a job that I loved, but the exhaustion and hormonal turmoil of early pregnancy made my work suffer. I was no longer in a relationship with the guy who got me pregnant. The long darkness of Seattle winter had set in, but the judicious self-medication that usually prevented me from succumbing to the gooey, grey tentacles of seasonal depression was suddenly unavailable to me.

When I started to think that maybe I might want a baby, and that this might be my only chance — past health issues had indicated infertility — I agonized over the moral and practical implications of continuing my pregnancy. I made an appointment to get an abortion. Then I canceled the appointment. I talked to my friends, my parents, my co-workers, and the embryo’s father. I cried a lot. In the end, despite the inauspicious timing and my prior conviction that I would never parent biological children, I decided to accept the curveball the universe had thrown me and become a mother.

As I became ever more pregnant, crushing fatigue and depression gave way to sciatica, searing heartburn, intense pelvic pain, and unremitting commentary and conjecture from friends and strangers alike. I was excited when I started to feel the gentle flutters of my fetus moving; when he grew to be the size of a house cat, kicking the shit out of my ribs and jabbing at my cervix, it wasn’t so cute. I felt ungainly and awkward and vulnerable. And despite my weirdly confident attitude toward giving birth, I was quickly disabused of the notion that my high pain tolerance and self-perceived toughness would be of help: Labor was the most excruciating experience of my life.

I made an appointment to get an abortion. Then I canceled the appointment.
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In spite of all that, experiencing pregnancy and birth enriched my life. I even look back on it (parts of it, at least) with fondness. I know my ability to weather the rigors of pregnancy and motherhood has been a direct result of the fact that abortion was a readily accessible option. I had chosen to grow a human inside of me, fully aware that my choice would result in serious discomfort and changes to my body.

Each day that I spend caring for my child rather than pursuing my pre-baby interests and dreams, wistful “what-ifs” and nascent resentments quickly evaporate when I remember that I freely chose this path. I am a better parent because I chose to become a parent. What’s more, I feel that it was a goodchoice: I have a loving family, loyal friends, and a supportive co-parent in my baby’s father. I have enough money to care for my child, stable housing, and, thanks to Medicaid, health care for me and my son. If my circumstances hadn’t been so favorable, I might have chosen differently. And had carrying a baby to term been anything other than a carefully considered act of personal agency, I suspect that the suffering would outweigh the joy.

The understanding that no one should have to undergo the pain, the loss of bodily autonomy, and the extreme change in circumstances inherent in pregnancy, birth, and parenthood against their will has always been at the basis of my pro-choice convictions. But having a baby — experiencing a love of previously unimaginable intensity — added another, very personal, dimension to my beliefs.

I Had An Abortion Because I Love My Son
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Never having been a “baby person,” I considered myself immune to the charms of what I saw as drooling, squawking poop machines, and was concerned that I wouldn’t feel a connection with mine. I needn’t have worried: When I held my son to my breast, his perfection, and my love for him, struck me with brain-scrambling force. Inextricable from this epiphany was a tremendous heaviness, a sickening awareness of his vulnerability. I saw how easy it would be to harm him, how desperately dependent he was. I recalled every baby-related horror story I’d ever heard, and my fierce drive to protect and nurture my own baby was matched by grief for all of the equally valuable little ones who aren’t so lucky. And I knew — knew — that for a baby to come into the world unwanted and uncared-for is a grievous wrong.

The preciousness of babies is a constant refrain in anti-abortion rhetoric — but the focus is almost entirely on making sure they’re born. When holding forth on the value of human life, anti-choice activists largely ignore domestic violence and child abuse, and access to health care and education. Most importantly, the staggering inequality that consigns many young people to lives drastically lacking in opportunity. The politicians who pander to this demographic by opposing safe, legal abortion are busy cutting the programs and services that help to ensure that all babies can thrive. For the anti-abortion movement, the quality of the life they purport to hold sacred is a non-issue.

The claim that an immature fetus with an extremely limited range of experience and sensation is morally equivalent to a breathing, crying, cooing human infant had always struck me as disingenuous.

The politicians who oppose safe, legal abortion are busy cutting the programs and services that help to ensure that all babies can thrive.
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But now that I have a baby, it seems nothing short of outrageous.

The idea that life must be preserved as a good in of itself, no matter what the cost — that even the greatest life suffering imaginable is preferable to death, is similarly offensive. A fetus is not a baby. And for a completely innocent being that lacks self-awareness — whose only reality is immediate sensation, and who absolutely requires constant, gentle attention — neglect and abuse is much worse than non-existence.

Of course, access to abortion does not preclude every instance of child abuse and neglect. People who want to become parents sometimes hurt their children and people who don’t want to become parents often turn out to be competent and loving caregivers. But bringing a new person into the world sensitized me to the extreme value and fragility of infants, to the incredible degree of sacrifice, patience, and work required to raise a child with the gentleness that they deserve.

I already knew that legal abortion is essential to women’s health, autonomy, and dignity. Having a baby convinced me that it can also promote the sanctity of life.