On post-Roe rhetoric
Content warning: rape, sexual assault, abortion, forced pregnancy, and miscarriage
God has my heart been heavy, my head fuzzy, and my body tense since Roe v. Wade was overturned last week. (It’s extremely difficult to remember it’s ONLY been a week because when you live in Texas, Roe was actually overturned by the shadow docket in 10 months ago.) I don’t have the clarity of words to explain how I feel or what the ramifications of this will be. The vastness of my rage and despair and fear is incalculable. This blog post won’t be bringing anything meaningful to the wider chatter about this topic. But I’ve found something under the umbrella of the Roe situation to ramble on about for a moment.
Now that the repeal of Roe is real-real, the rhetoric buzzing around about abortion is at an all time high. I've been thinking about a couple of things I've read recently and I'm just going to write a little bit to process what I'm thinking about.
There have been 3 main things I've read that are floating around that have made me want to respond with some of my personal values about discussing Roe:
My goal isn't to make everyone else become "pro abortion;" it's to make abortion easily ACCESSIBLE: I already wrote about this the other day, but the gist is that personally, I am VERY "pro abortion" for anyone who needs it, but that said, I'm not sure that I need or want the outcome of this fight to be that more and more people become pro abortion. What I would really like is for abortion to be recast as what it is: an apolitical health service that people sometimes need and should be able to get. Anti choicers and Christian supremacists politicized this topic—if it had always been allowed, there wouldn’t even be a need for pro choice politics. I deeply wish I didn’t have to even worry or think about abortion so much. It's only because it has been unjustly legislated and restricted and now unprotected by law that I even NEED to care about it. I want to have the same opinion of an abortion that I have about an appendectomy……..I want to feel neutral about it but grateful I can access that HEALTHCARE PROCEDURE if/when I need it. It’s so simple.
I feel that sometimes, we actually HAVE to tell the abortion stories that are most upsetting or extreme: One big talking point that didn't land just quite right for me was on Twitter the other day (and unfortunately I can't find the exact Tweet to source now, otherwise, I would) but the gist was suggesting, "Pro choicers are doing no one favors when we defend abortion by only talking about the most upsetting and extreme examples of why abortions are needed." The idea behind this concept I truly agree with...it's that if we constantly talk about a 12 year old forced to carry her rapist's baby OR the very much wanted baby that became unviable well into the 3rd trimester that we continue to stigmatize the everyday abortion of someone who isn't so easy to cast as "innocent." Focusing exclusively on this type of story runs the risk of framing abortion as something that only "good women" should be able to get.
This concern is valid. If we did focus ONLY on "good reasons to get an abortion" we'd be doing a huge disservice to everyone in the long run and that has happened too often. THAT SAID, right now, we're in a crisis. In said crisis, we need to give voice to every possible abortion story as important and valid, and that means that YES we will be talking about a 12 year old rape victim who is being forced to carry her rapists baby to term. We must talk about it because the situation is real...it's not a strawman designed to shock people; it's the actual state of what the law requires right now.
The vast majority of people in the US fall somewhere "in the middle" on this topic; favoring legal abortion but with some restrictions. If sharing the story of a tragic miscarriage that results in a D&E opens someone's eyes to the idea that "late term abortion" must not be banned, that's a win. Some people are going to need the extreme stories to speak to their emotions which will allow their brains to better hear and understand why we CANNOT make abortion illegal. On this note...
We need to be looking at ALL of the tools in our toolkits right now: The final rhetoric I've seen lately that felt counter productive was leftist criticism of support for the DA's (like mine in Austin) who are pledging not to prosecute any abortion "crimes." The pushback is cautioning against the act of partnering with extensions of the law and policing. That cautioning is valid; but what the DAs are doing is still a win for anyone who cares about managing this situation right now. This is one of those times where I think we cannot let the perfect get in the way of the good. There are always tensions between ideological purity vs. day-to-day survival. Right now we're in a huge crisis; survival mode requires a whole other level of examination of the metaphorical tools in our tool kit.
Of course, we have a gaping wound here and this is one tiny little band-aid. If I can belabor the metaphor, we've got to slap that little band-aid on to stop what bleeding it can while we try to find a ride, drive to the hospital, get a good a surgeon, take away the weapon from the attacker., etc., etc. We don't decline the band-aid in the moment because it's not enough--we use the band-aid to do what little it can to help while we need it. If DAs stand as one small line of defense to save someone from the criminalization of a healthcare procedure, that fail safe has GOT to happen. Of course it's not enough. Of course we have to change the whole fucking system and perhaps burn it down. Of course we can trust cops. Of course the DAs won’t save us. Of course this is not ideal, but it’s something we have at the moment.
I want to also make this more clear--as I walk through these 3 points, I’m talking about chatter that will reach and hopefully persuade or motivate more of the general population to understand how dire things are. I am NOT speaking to rhetoric that I am saying should be used within lefty organizing groups or at reproductive justice organizations or to better advance social justice. And of course, I'm also not talking about content that I think will work with the furthest of anti abortion fundies. (They’re a lost cause on this issue.) I'm not speaking to talking points that I would advocate for in a situation where we are not battling the BASIC LEGALITY of abortion.
But right now, we have backslid in a way more dramatic than I can properly discuss. From that space, as we’re trying to reclaim ground toward the simple legality of abortion, I do think we have to meet the average person where they are. I’m not usually for softening messages, but I think that there’s a lot to be done to humanize the rhetoric. I can’t help be feel that we must appeal to the vast majority of reasonable people and help them remember why this issue matters…maybe with that, we can achieve a critical mass of voices necessary to push us back to where we need to be.