Dear Pam Bondi:
You played a small role in a big decision, and I've never thanked you properly
Your face appeared on the TV in my office this morning, sucking up to Donald Trump like a North Korean news anchor.
I wouldn’t choose to watch Fox News of my own volition, because it’s the news-entertainment equivalent of taking rohypnol while burning to death. But I watch a lot of it because it’s often on at my office.
And– because you’re on Fox News a lot– my mind drifted, as it always does when I see your face, to an abortion I had over a decade ago, and how glad I am that you helped me make the decision that I did.
I first encountered you at the first political convention I covered: the 2012 Republican convention in Tampa, Florida. It was boring by today’s standards– the GOP had nominated human cable knit vest Mitt Romney to be their candidate over the loud albeit more interesting protests of Ron Paul fans– who, at the time, were considered the crazy ones.
I was writing for the website Jezebel, on the politics and pro-choice beat, and I had no idea what I was doing. I had a press pass to the convention, but no sourcing network, no stringers, no idea what I was even going to write. I didn’t know much about Tampa except that I hated it. Tampa is a sunburned sandy ass-crack. Tampa is sweat dripping into an infected rugburn. Tampa feels designed around the concept of fleeing child support. Tampa is where widowers go to find girlfriends named Shayna. The best thing about Tampa was the film Magic Mike.
I’m sorry about all the dunking on your hometown. I hope you understand, being from Florida. Disliking Florida by default part of my culture, kind of like how pretending to be blonde is part of yours.
My publication had been too late to make hotel reservations in a desirable neighborhood, and so I was staying in an entirely different part of the Tampa area from the convention events, at a motel along a stretch of commercial boulevard lined with car dealerships, chain restaurants, the stadium where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers played, and foreboding, grassy ditches. The part of Tampa where one might consider dumping a dead body on a time crunch.
Here’s something you can make fun of me for: I had no car and could not rent one; I had let my drivers license expire because I’d dove head first into the sort of new-to-New York City provincialism that leads a person to believe that no destination worth going to requires a car to get around. And so, to get everywhere, I relied on the cabs of Tampa, which I remember as dented-up minivans with 813 area codes stenciled on the side. Stupid, right?
All this is to just paint a picture for you: I was not exactly on top of things at that point in my life. I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor in a Cobble Hill spare room that was actually just a dining room blocked off by a bookshelf, in the condo of one of my partner’s friends who, as far as I could tell, did not have a job (his parents had bought him the condo).
My partner at the time was a 38-year-old man who had told me excitedly when we first moved to New York City that he was not going to look for work right away, instead, he was going to take a month to work on his novel (I’ll give you one guess about where that novel is, and if we ever meet in person, I’ll tell you what he did instead). It had been less than a year ago that I’d quit working at a bank to pursue a writing career; I was making $45,000 per year. I had just turned 29 years old.
From the moment I got off the plane in Florida, I felt like shit. I chalked this up to the fact that Tampa is a city with incredibly bad vibes (especially in August), and Republican conventions are cursed events. I was feeling particularly bad one day, so I left the convention to get some space and air at a nearby Hooters restaurant, where I sat at the bar by myself and ate a basket of fried pickles.
I was pregnant, but didn’t know it. The fried pickles should have tipped me off. If not that, the fact that I started crying during the montage of Mitt Romney playing with his children and grandchildren that played before his wife’s speech on night two of the convention. (“I’ll never vote for him but he seems like such a good dad! Wahhh!”) Or the fact that I was in a terrible mood, and exhausted, and my boobs hurt and I was constantly the smallest bit nauseous. But, again, all of those things could be the product of spending time around Republican voting delegates. Or the Tampa of it all.
On the last day of the convention, I dragged my exhausted, sweaty carcass out of my murder hotel and to a “pro life women’s luncheon” sponsored by Susan B. Anthony’s List– an organization that funds and promotes anti-abortion candidates for public office, including you, Pam.
Half the attendees were journalists on the “women’s issues” beat, the other half were “pro-life” women. Scattered among the crowd were elected officials in gleaming gold crosses and flesh-colored pumps, their hair in what we now call “Utah curls” or flatironed to within an inch of its life.
There’s a specific type of perfume Republican women wear that hasn’t changed much in the last 13 years– a cloying, aggressive floral that interferes with the taste of wine. There’s also a specific annoying way that small-time assholes act when they’re the most important people in a room. Like they’re making their way to the stage to accept an academy award.
You were one of those assholes. Although you were the least well-known of the speakers— Michele Bachmann was there, fresh off her failed and short-lived presidential bid, beautiful and crazy-eyed in person, and unlike the other flower-bombs in attendance, smelling like freshly baked cookies— you moved through the crowd with the confidence of a great white shark, flitting between such anti-choice heavy hitters as Virginia Foxx, Michelle Fischbach, and Michele Bachmann’s weird little husband Marcus.
The moment you took the stage, a wave of nausea hit me and I had to lean against a wall to steady myself. You know how sometimes dogs just hate certain people? That’s how I felt. It was reflexive. You were like if the RNC in Tampa Bay were a person– blonde, sneering, self-important yet aggressively tacky, and also a little sweaty.
Your speech wasn’t any different than the other speeches— you started out by thanking your husband for allowing you to be there, Phylis Schlafly-style. Then you prattled on about how abortion is basically the moral equivalent of strangling a toddler to death, and how God wants everybody to stay pregnant, or whatever. I never understood this, Pam. If God is all-powerful, then why can’t He make abortion-resistant fetuses?
Then you made a fist-pounding promises to make abortion history by taking down Roe v. Wade. I rolled my eyes. Yeah, right you’ll overturn Roe v. Wade. That’s like 40 years of precedent, dumbass.
That’s another thing you can make fun of, Pam. I knew a lot of people were gunning for Roe, but in 2012, I don’t think most people thought it would actually happen.
You were trying very hard to be the most anti abortion speaker on the slate. Harder than anybody else, really. In Michele Bachmann’s Minnesota, they’d say it was “a little much.” But you weren’t convincing. I could tell you didn’t fully believe what you were saying that day. It was so obvious that you didn’t care about “babies” or mothers facing unexpected pregnancy. It was so clearly an act. You didn’t care about anybody but yourself. You still don’t.
I left the luncheon feeling dizzy.
When I got back to New York the next day, I looked at my calendar and realized that my period was late. I bought a test from a Rite Aid on Smith St. with the half-burned out sign that spelled RITA at night. The test was positive.
I’d just spent hours with a roomful of powerful or ascendant conservative women who were determined to convince people like me that the right move would have been to keep the pregnancy. But the fresh-in-my-mind pro-life schtick was so unbelievable and hollow that I didn’t hesitate for a second. Your speech was the loudest, so it was the one I thought of first. I thought about how, if I were to have a baby, people like you would be working overtime to make sure that my life was as hard as possible. I thought about how your party was willing to use other women’s pregnancies as rungs in a ladder to the apex of the Republican Party. I thought about the inherent creepiness of being obsessed with other people giving birth or not.
I instantly knew that I was going to have an abortion. I probably would have made the same decision if I hadn’t just gotten back from the RNC, but you made it a lot easier by being so gross that day. Frankly, Pam, it’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. And you played a small but important role.
So, while I disagree with almost everything you’ve done in your career before and since the last days of August in 2012, I have to send a little thank you your way. Thanks for making what could have been a very difficult decision easier for me. And good luck with whatever your end game is.