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.
Click To Tweet

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?
Click To Tweet

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.
Click To Tweet

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.
Click To Tweet

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.
Click To Tweet

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.

Many doctors are denying birth control to those who won’t take cervical screenings — even though it’s not medically necessary.

Monik Markus/flickr

Every tin foil pocket in my month’s supply of Mylan birth control pills had blossomed open, punctured and empty. I was ready to puncture the face of the pharmacist who wouldn’t refill my birth control prescription, two days since my last pill.

“Sorry, we can’t refill your prescription until your doctor gives authorization. We haven’t been able to get a hold of her,” she said.

“Can’t you just refill it while I settle whatever is going on with my doctor? My insurance covers it, and I’ve been taking this prescription daily for the past 10 months,” I pushed.

Her voice hardened, as if I had asked her to spot me an extra supply of oxycontin.

“No. We can’t just give you any prescription. We can’t do anything until a doctor signs for authorization.”

I’ve always been sensitive to hormonal changes. A pimple emerged on my chin and a burnt sienna stain greeted me on my underwear the next morning, both signs that my body was weaning itself off the birth control hormones and settling into the rhythm of its natural menstrual cycle. I hadn’t had a period in 10 months, and its unexpected arrival wasn’t helping my rage.

The Strange Sad Tale Of The Death Of The Diaphragm

When I finally got through to my doctor’s office the next day, a nurse informed me that the prescription couldn’t be refilled because of how long it had been since my check-up.

I balked. My last doctor’s appointment had been less than a year ago, and no one had contacted me to say I needed to come in or else say goodbye to my birth control.

Apparently, the doctor decided I needed a pelvic exam and pap smear before she, the gatekeeper to my contraceptives, would give her coveted signature. To be fair, I’d long considered the duo of a pap smear and pelvic exam another necessary burden of womanhood, and made peace with the fact that I needed to be an adult and grit my teeth through all the poking and scraping like my mother had before me. It would be a dreaded annual ceremony, cringingly tolerated so I could keep taking my birth control.

But my last pap smear was a year and a half ago and came back completely normal, and as a woman with the same sexual partner for the last six years, I was not a high-risk patient for a sexually-transmitted infection. There was no medical reason that I needed to get this cervical screening before getting my birth control. This barricade, built by doctors between people with vulvas and their contraceptives, isn’t uncommon. Around one-third of doctors always require a pelvic exam before prescribing or refilling oral contraceptives, despite the lack of connection between birth control and pelvic exams.

Around one-third of doctors always require before prescribing or refilling oral contraceptives.

Requiring people with internal reproductive systems to take annual pap smears can actually do more harm than good. In 2015 the Journal of Research in Medical Science published an article that followed 334 women for two years after receiving an abnormal pap smear. The women received biannual pap smears and annual colposcopy and biopsy exams. Twenty-four months after the abnormal pap result, 308 women had a normal pap smear, leading the authors to conclude that abnormal lesions can spontaneously and naturally regress, and annual pap smears are linked to a high rate of false positives.

That false positive comes at a cost to the patient, who must endure more speculum-spreading interventions.

The U.S. Preventive Screening Task Force, along with the American Cancer Society, considered the high false positive rate when they recommended pap smears occur at an interval of three to five years for asymptomatic women aged 21 to 65. As they wrote in the Annals of Medicine in 2012, “Treatment of lesions that would otherwise resolve on their own is harmful because it can lead to procedures with unwanted side effects, including the potential for cervical incompetence and preterm labor.”

The debate surrounding the benefits of the pelvic exam is a more tempestuous discussion. The American College of Obstetrics recommends a pelvic exam once a year for all people with internal reproductive systems 21 and older. In rebuttal, the American College of Physicians argues against a pelvic exam unless a someone has symptoms of a disease or infection, because more frequent intervention can cause more harm to their health than good. And in the neutral corner, the U.S. Preventive Screening Task Force decided to stay out of the debate completely, citing a lack of evidence necessary to form an opinion for or against pelvic exams.

As recently as 2002 and for decades before then, the American Cancer Society recommended that pelvic exams and pap smears occur at an annual rate to effectively catch cancer. But once a deluge of evidence showed that a majority of HPV infections resolve on their own, they changed their official recommendation in 2012 to a pap smear every three to five years and stopped recommending the pelvic exam altogether.

So why do doctors persist in pushing for annual exams? Sometimes the medical community is slow to accept new findings that change a decades-old process. Some have spent the majority of their professional lives administering annual cervical screenings, and are hesitant to change the habit.

Less altruistically, there’s a monetary gain that may entice doctors to ignore the new recommendations. It would be easier on the doctor to just prescribe and refill birth control prescriptions for their patients. But requiring every birth-control-taking person to come into the office and have their feet in the stirrups guarantees an annual check from each one, either out-of-pocket or from the insurance company.

Why Do We Doubt And Police Those Seeking Permanent Contraception?

Even if the intent is not malicious, keeping individuals from their birth control for no other reason than to enforce a screening is inherently coercive, since the two aren’t at all connected.

Withholding birth control harms a person’s reproductive health and stigmatizes the practice of taking oral contraceptives. As Drs. Felicia Stewart, Cynthia Harper, and Charlotte Ellertson explain in a 2001 article published in the Journal of American Medicine, requiring these exams “may reduce access to highly effective contraceptive methods, and may therefore increase women’s overall health risks. These unnecessary requirements also involve ethical considerations and unwittingly reinforce the widely held but incorrect perception that hormonal contraceptive methods are dangerous.”

Suspending a person’s access to their birth control for any reason, beside it being harmful to their health, is backward. The World Health Organization and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists agree that hormonal oral contraception can be prescribed safely without a pelvic exam. Dr. Anita Nelson, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, calls the practice of only provisioning birth control after cervical screenings “a tragic leftover of the past.”

I don’t want to compromise my control over the reproductive hormones that go into my body, no matter how beneficial and ‘for my own good’ the test is.

The point is not to abolish pap smears or tell people to stop getting pelvic exams. In the past 50 years cervical cancer deaths have diminished by 60%, due in large part to the early detection from pap smears. Cervical cancer used to be the number one cancer killer of people assigned female at birth; now it’s 14th.

But whether it’s a screening test for cancer, a swab for sexually transmitted diseases, or my annual dental cleaning, I don’t want to compromise my control over the reproductive hormones that go into my body, no matter how beneficial and “for my own good” the test is.

If you want to complete a pelvic exam every time you sneeze funny, then I encourage you to, and want people with vulvas to have that choice. But tying the screenings to birth control is unethical and scientifically unfounded. It’s the equivalent to requiring a cis man to undergo a urethra swab and prostate exam prior to buying condoms. It also takes away the ability for those with internal reproductive systems to make decisions about their own health and body.

That’s why I canceled my pap and pelvic exam appointment with my doctor. I couldn’t spread my body open for procedures that were being performed at a frequency unsupported by the science and medical authorities, and fundamentally, I couldn’t support a doctor who would use birth control as a coercive measure for any reason. So I left my doctor permanently. I’m not interested in begging, negotiating, or bargaining with my health care provider in order to obtain my birth control.

What You Need To Know About Reproductive Coercion

I was off birth control for a month as I searched for a doctor that would both accept my health insurance and was OK with committing to a cervical screening once every three to five years. Then I found a better alternative. As the issue of “doctors holding birth control hostage” gains more attention, people are finding ways around the in-person doctor visit to obtain prescriptions.

Lemonaid is a virtual doctor visit. It costs $25 out-of-pocket for an online assessment, then a doctor can prescribe your birth control to be mailed directly to you or picked up at your local pharmacy. Lemonaid only operates in 18 states right now, but hopefully more are to come. Similar resources include Nurx, Virtuwell, and Pandia Health.

The pioneer of the pill and Planned Parenthood clinics Margaret Sanger once said, “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.” As long as birth control is “given,” “prescribed,” and “permitted” to us, that sovereignty over our bodies, free from obstruction and coercion, is still on the horizon.

Two days after I signed up with LemonAid, answered a questionnaire, and messaged with a doctor about my medical history, I received a package in the mail. It was three months of birth control, delivered directly to my mailbox. I’d never been so excited to take my daily pill.

When I opened the package the familiar yellow containers fell out, followed by two Starburst candies, and a thank you note. After my excitement settled, I realized that this is how easy it’s supposed to be. The “control” in birth control should be possessed solely by the individual taking it. Their contraceptives should never be a bargaining chip.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/how-trump-is-working-to-destroy-the-reproductive-rights-of-immigrants-7c8c00983d59-2/ Sun, 01 Apr 2018 05:47:54 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2530 Read more]]>

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.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]> 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.’
Click To Tweet

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
theestablishment.co

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
theestablishment.co

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.

When we talk about birth control, we need to remember that cis straight women aren’t the only stakeholders.

Vimeo

By Neesha Powell

Originally published on Everyday Feminism.

I ’ve been on and off different types of birth control for the past 15 years. Last year, I got Mirena, an IUD that’s 99 percent effective in preventing pregnancy and lasts up to 6 years.

While dating cisgender straight men in the past, I used birth control to prevent pregnancy. And although I can’t get pregnant by my current sexual partner, my IUD is still a lifesaver because my periods have become lighter, shorter and less painful.

Queer and trans people of color, like myself, however, are almost never reflected in the visible fight for birth control rights. The poster child of the mainstream reproductive rights movement is usually a middle-class, cis, heterosexual white woman — everything that I’m not.

In the resistance against Pres. Donald Trump’s war on reproductive rights, stories like mine aren’t centered due to myths that LGBTQ+ folks don’t use birth control, get abortions, or have kids. In reality, we do all of these things, and we desperately need better access to them.

Queer and trans people of color, like myself, however, are almost never reflected in the visible fight for birth control rights.

Trans, gender nonbinary,and queer folks experience barriers to culturally-competent reproductive healthcare because most doctors don’t understand our bodies or our sex lives. Legislative attacks on birth control make it even harder for us to get the good care we deserve.

One of Trump’s most recent attacks on reproductive healthcare happened on Oct. 6, when the Department of Health and Human Services issued new rules that allow employers to opt out of covering birth control on their health insurance plans based on moral or religious reasons.

This is a part of Trump’s plan to dismantle Obamacare, which made contraception a preventative service and required employers to pay for it. These new rules open the door for future laws that allow discrimination against LGBTQ+ people based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

When we talk about birth control, we need to remember that cis straight women aren’t the only stakeholders. As a pansexual nonbinary woman, birth control changed my life for the better, yet narratives like mine are missing from the media.

The erasure of LGBTQ+ folks from conversations about birth control is harmful, for a number of reasons. Here’s why trans and queer voices must be centered in the fight for just access to birth control:

1. We need birth control for the same reasons as straight folks: to prevent pregnancy and to treat medical conditions.

This may be a surprise to some, but trans and queer people have the ability to procreate and to engage in sex that results in pregnancy. It’s frustrating that birth control is only marketed to cis straight women when LGBTQ+ folks need it just as much.

Evana Enabulele, a Black queer parks and recreation worker living in Seattle, uses a birth control implant called Nexplanon for both pregnancy prevention and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), which causes irregular periods that are abnormally heavy and long.

She enjoys telling others about her birth control implant because many people think their only option is taking pills. It takes as little as 10 minutes to insert the tiny rod into the upper arm and is more than 99 percent effective in preventing pregnancy.

What To Know About That New Study Linking Birth Control To Depression

Being on birth control makes Enabulele’s life more stress-free, not only because she can’t get pregnant, but also because she now gets a regular period. When her PCOS was untreated, she worried about not ever being able to conceive because her periods were so irregular.

Enabulele feels personally attacked by the Trump administration’s new rules allowing employers to deny covering birth control.

ChiChi Madu is a Black queer LA resident working in the startup industry who got an IUD for free at Planned Parenthood 6 years ago when she was low-income. She’s also appalled by Trump’s actions.

“I think it’s downright evil to take away someone’s ability to access healthcare,” says Madu, who got on birth control to prevent pregnancy when she had cis male sexual partners, as well as to regulate her mood and decrease the flow and frequency of her period.

Although she now gets health insurance through an employer that holds progressive beliefs, she knows that other LGBTQ+ people aren’t so lucky.

“I have to think about all these people who don’t have my same circumstance and so it’s aggravating and disheartening. It’s tough to think about, to be honest,” Madu says.

2. There are challenges keeping us from getting birth control when we need it — including fear of discrimination from medical providers and lack of access to health insurance — but not being able to get birth control can have harmful consequences for us.

Going to the doctor is not fun for a lot of trans and queer people, especially when we have to talk to them about the most intimate parts of our lives.

Lucia Leandro Gimeno, the director of Q/tpoc Birthwerq Project in Seattle, says that accessing reproductive healthcare can be an anxious experience for trans and queer people, especially trans and queer people of color.

The fear of being discriminated against by their medical provider is a major barrier. The fact is that most medical providers do not get adequate training in working with LGBTQIA+ folks.

“I think that if you’re white and trans, it’s not easy, but whiteness generally helps you better navigate a lot of systems, whereas if you’re a trans person of color, doctors just kind of look at you sideways,” says Gimeno, who’s an Afro-Latinx queer transmasculine femme.

Most medical providers do not get adequate training in working with LGBTQIA+ folks.

While seeking out reproductive healthcare, LGBTQ+ people are often shamed for our sex lives or treated differently because of our marginalized identities. Even well-intentioned doctors don’t know much about how we have sex and how birth control impacts our bodies.

Additionally, LGBTQ+ Americans have barriers to getting birth control because we’re almost 10 percent less likely than straight Americans to have health insurance, and 20 percent of us are living in poverty.

23-year-old Enabulele’s scared of what will happen if Obamacare’s repealed because she could be kicked off her dad’s insurance plan. Her birth control implant was only $10 under her father’s insurance and would have cost $800 without it.

When trans and queer people can’t access the reproductive healthcare we need, we’re forced to go underground to get it. Some trans women buy hormones on the black market because they can’t get them from a doctor, and they sometimes end up being toxic.

Trans and queer folks deserve access to birth control that is safe and low-cost or free. That can’t happen when we’re left out of conversations about contraception.

3. We’re excluded from the reproductive rights movement, even though we actually have the hardest time getting adequate healthcare.

Our society loves to gender things, which led to “reproductive health” becoming synonymous with “women’s health” — cis women’s health, in particular.

Cis women refuse to prioritize trans women’s reproductive rights because they’re afraid of being forgotten about. But in reality, the reproductive rights movement isn’t winning because they’re ONLY representing cis women.

When we fight for barriers to accessing reproductive healthcare to be removed for trans and queer people of color (POC), everyone benefits, even cis straight women, because they face some of the same challenges.

Doctors Must Stop Shutting Out Marginalized Groups

Furthermore, trans and queer POC are currently leading countless grassroots movements to achieve social justice for us all. It’s only right to center their health and well-being when they’re literally putting their bodies on the line.

Gimeno says that reproductive rights organizations should include trans people of color (TPOC) in leadership and decision-making bodies, build projects that center TPOC and work in coalition with TPOC without tokenizing them.

Reproductive rights organizations should also embrace the values of reproductive justice, which centers women of color, LGBTQ+ folks and other historically oppressed groups and their right to make their own decisions about their bodies and their families.

When we approach birth control access with a reproductive justice lens, we acknowledge that certain groups, including trans and queer people, have a more difficult time getting contraception than others.

Fighting for the most oppressed to have access to birth control is the only way to ensure that birth control is one day accessible to everyone who needs it.

The state of Oregon recently achieved a huge reproductive healthcare victory, passing the Reproductive Health Equity Act of 2017 that covers all reproductive health services (including birth control) at no cost to all residents, regardless of gender identity, income or citizenship status.

It’s going to take a lot of work for similar legislation to succeed in other states, but I believe it can happen if the reproductive rights movement fully embraces trans, gender nonconforming and queer people.

Birth control rights will continue being eroded if our leadership isn’t centered.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/becoming-a-mother-reinforced-why-im-pro-choice-63602256fb53/ Thu, 18 Feb 2016 16:42:31 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1731 Read more]]> I am a better parent because I chose to become a parent.

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.
Click To Tweet

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
theestablishment.co

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.
Click To Tweet

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.