Before Our Eyes

For some, reproductive freedom is threatened. For others, it never existed.

Protest marches were church for progressives during the Trump era. I'm not a big protest person because I hate crowds, but even I attended my share of them; it was better to hang out in a large open space with energized and positive like-minded people carrying clever signs than it was to have a panic attack in a small Manhattan apartment that received no direct sunlight.

Everybody at the marches was in the mood to talk. On that heavy grey day after Trump's inauguration, I attended the Women's March in Washington, where I met some older women with signs declaring themselves "grannies for choice." (They were more hardcore than either of my grandmothers, rest their souls.) A couple of the march grannies were eager to tell me about the illegal abortions they had in the 1960's, how they had to go see a special doctor they learned about through word of mouth, how they had to pay in cash, how expensive it was. One of them had to take a train up to New York from Virginia. She was 17. The grannies said they were at the march because they could not go back.

And now, here we are, with our one way ticket back to 1972. It didn't even take a decade.

I've been writing about the politics around reproductive health for my entire career. I have forgotten more about state-level abortion politicking like Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" comment and the time Ohio tried to have a 9-week-old fetus "testify" before a legislative committee than most people have ever needed to know. I hoped, producing this newsletter about pregnancy and motherhood/parenthood, I could avoid the politics of it all as much as possible-- but, I should have known that wasn't in the cards. Having female reproductive organs and making choices involving said organs is inherently political, whether I want it to be or not. There is no taking a break from it, there is no turning it off.

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Whole Women's Health, the case that could overturn--or, in more likelihood, seriously undermine-- 1973's Roe v. Wade. When the court's ruling is handed down next June, women in 26 states could see their access to reproductive health care immediately curtailed.

I've been avoiding the news because I've been taking care of my daughter, who is now four weeks old experiencing what my WonderWeeks ap calls a "leap" in development, which, for me, means she yells for milk every 90 minutes and I'm sleeping even less than I was before (but at least she's learning to appreciate high contrast images!). I'm also still recovering, both physically and mentally, from her birth, and so if I'm being honest, I didn't have the emotional bandwidth to handle watching a bunch of people who have aged out of their fertile years debating women's bodily autonomy. But the hot stove of the news called to the naked fingers of my brain, and I couldn't help but reach out and burn myself.

If you want my professional opinion on what is going to happen: Roe is toast. It's just a matter of how toasty the eventual majority conservative opinion will be. Something wild could happen, like Chief Justice Roberts somehow convincing Justice Kavanaugh to vote against preserving the Mississippi law at the center of the case, just this once, and be the hero who Saves Roe. Kavanaugh would go from shrieking, beer-loving enemy of women to Hero With Complicated Legacy in one day. Brett Kavanaugh, if you're reading this: think about it. Choose the path of chaotic good.

Many have pointed out that the people who will suffer the most from more abortion restrictions are those who already exist on the margins and already have difficulty accessing abortion care-- the poor, indigenous women, the nonwhite, the undocumented, the abused. Abortion was never accessible, affordable, or anything less than an undue burden on the marginalized.

But let's not pretend that the Supreme Court-- an unelected body of nine, five of whom were appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote-- is about to start America on a path toward reproductive dystopia. America is hostile to just about every reproductive choice a woman could make.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, ask. Ask a woman if she's ever been overruled on issues related to her own reproduction.

Ask a woman who never wants children how her doctors handle that information. Ask someone who has tried to get sterilized. Ask her how many doctors she had to see before one would do it. Many doctors will require the permission of a woman's husband before they'll do the procedure, if they'll do it at all. Doctors sometimes refuse to sterilize women who, in their judgment, are too young, or might want more children one day, even if they're not married. Ask her if she would have gotten the same treatment if she were a man seeking a vasectomy.

Ask one of the living relatives of tens of thousands of women who were forcibly sterilized well into the 21st century because they were deemed to display signs of mental illness, disability, or promiscuity. Ask a law nerd about Buck v. Bell, the 1927 Supreme Court case that ruled that the state did indeed have the right to forcibly sterilize people they deemed "feeble-minded." That case still stands and has yet to be overturned.

Ask one of the women who did not have children because they could not afford them, not because they didn't want them. Ask somebody who put off getting pregnant until they could afford it, only to discover that it was no longer possible for them to get pregnant.

Ask a woman who had more children than she could afford. Ask an impoverished mother who lost her children to the foster care system and lacked the support she needed to make the changes necessary to get them back. Ask a woman sentenced to probation because she left her kids alone to go to a job interview.

Ask a woman jailed for having a miscarriage.

Now, as we face down the end of Roe, the question isn't "how did we get here," it's "how long have we been here?" As far as I can tell, American women have never been trusted to make their own reproductive decisions, especially the poor or otherwise disenfranchised.

The grannies were right; we can't go back. But we can't stay here, either.

Image via Shutterstock