108. ABORTION: Family Meeting on Four Things to Do Next

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I walked through fire, I came out the other side.

Hello, family.

This is Amanda.

I'm coming to you in our collective time of mourning and rage to do the only thing that we can do in this moment, just to see each other and hear each other and take an inventory of where we are and to build community around a shared commitment

and relentless resolve to fight forward and to take tender care of each other as we do.

In today's podcast, we're going to talk about where we are, where we're going,

and to give ourselves four real concrete steps we can take to turn all this rage into action.

Before we get there, I want to acknowledge how shocking it actually was, even though we knew it was coming, to see in black and white our constitutional right to bodily autonomy eviscerated by the stroke of a pen.

The first person I saw after hearing the decision over ruling Roe was a friend.

When we saw each other, we silently hugged and cried.

And I was so pissed by our tears.

These two strong, resilient women, furious that they held that power over us and abused it, and that it was now ours to carry.

So I meet you in this dizzying time, vacillating between feeling defeated, enraged, despondent, renewed, resolved,

and defiant.

I feel real fucking defiant.

Today on We Can Do Hard Things,

it's clear that community, connected and shared purpose and care, is as important as it's ever been.

We're going to use this community and we're going to be there for each other.

I want you to know that two weeks ago, we had invited and scheduled the incomparable Monica Ray Simpson here to the pod.

She's the executive director of Sister Song, a Southern-based black, queer-led, intersectional reproductive justice advocacy and training movement.

She's incredible.

We were scheduled to talk to her today, but as we all know, her time and expertise is invaluable to the world in this moment.

And so we're going to wait patiently until she can join us and continue this conversation.

So, today,

it's me and you.

Glenn and Abby are at a soccer tournament, as they do, and they don't have any equipment.

So I'm here

for you, for me, for them.

And let's just get into it.

Let's start with what the hell happened.

For nearly 50 years, Roe has been the law of the land.

And what happened in Roe is that the court classified the right to abortion as fundamental.

So it said that the states could not pass laws restricting that right to have an abortion before the viability of the fetus.

Viability, most experts think, is about 24 weeks.

So that's been the working law of the land.

States, y'all can do what you want, but you can't touch a woman's right to abortion before

viability, which has been interpreted as 24 weeks.

In Mississippi, they passed a law, which we'll get back to in a second, that made most abortions illegal after 15 weeks.

So two months earlier than Roe had prohibited.

That law was challenged, went up to the Supreme Court, and on Friday in Dobbs v.

Jackson Women's Health, the Supreme Court

upheld the Mississippi abortion law and overturned 50 years of precedent of Roe v.

Wade,

stripping away the fundamental right to abortion, no longer a right, and leaving it so that states can do whatever the hell they want with respect to abortion restrictions.

Because of that, and because of trigger bans, which ban abortion under most circumstances and go into effect with the fall of Roe,

many states had passed these trigger bans in the anticipation that Roe would fall.

And as soon as Roe fell, the trigger bans were set to go into effect.

So, because of those trigger bans and because of pre-Roe bans, which are old laws that were invalidated by Roe,

but that are still on the books so they can be enforced, abortion is now illegal or heavily restricted in at least 11 states.

And 12 other states have laws in place that pave the way to quickly ban or severely limit access to them.

And there are several additional states that appear likely to pass new laws.

So we're in a historic moment.

A lot of folks in this country are going to face severe restrictions on what had been a fundamental right for decades, for many of us for our whole lifetimes.

I think it's important because this is so historic to just

level set a little bit.

Roe was decided in 1973.

It was a seven to two opinion on the Supreme Court.

Five of the seven who signed on to the Roe opinion were Republican appointed, just as Blackman, who actually wrote the opinion, was put on the court by Richard Nixon.

I'm saying all this because I think it's important to understand that this has not been

a centuries, decades battle of extremism that it is today.

In fact, George H.W.

Bush was known as Rubber's Bush when he was a congressman because he was so devoted to family planning.

His dad

was the treasurer of Planned Parenthood.

Reagan, as a governor of California, signed into a law one of the most liberal abortion laws in the nation.

This is new, y'all.

In fact,

it's very new in one respect.

The court has overturned precedent before.

So most famously, Plessy v.

Ferguson.

So in Plessy in 1896, they said racial segregation is fine as long as it's separate but equal.

58 years later, they had a direct turnabout in Brown v.

Board and said racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional even if it's otherwise equal.

So that's the kind of overturning of precedent that we've seen before.

In fact, the Supreme Court has never ever overturned a prior case which extended a constitutional right.

So never before

has the court overturned a direct precedent to remove a right that people had.

What they have done before is they have

overruled precedent to expand the constitutional rights of the American people, but never to pull it back.

This is new, and we're going to talk about some hard truths here.

And I think the thing that feels

most important to me is that I keep thinking, it keeps going over and over in my mind.

And what I keep hearing from myself is that what got us here

is not going to take us from here.

We cannot do what we've been doing for 50 years.

We got to do things differently.

If we are going to do this very hard thing of fighting for to secure bodily autonomy for ourselves and for future generations, we're going to need to see the fight differently

because what got us here is not going to take us from here.

I think for a lot of us,

it felt like the bodily autonomy we had under Roe as a constitutional right

to decide what our internal organs

would do

felt like the roof over our heads.

It was the security that made our lives run

and felt like a really primary indicia of our status as equal citizens.

And now the roof is caved in.

It's caved in on our heads and we are standing in the rubble shocked.

But a roof can only stand if the walls holding it up are sturdy.

And we have, as a pro-choice movement, focused on the state of the roof

because that was what affected us the most.

And we have stood by as the walls beneath that roof crumbled.

The walls are the bedrocks of democracy that we didn't think affected us as white feminists.

Fighting voter ID laws, voter suppression, gerrymandering, those are the walls that hold up the roof we love.

Those are the bedrocks of democracy that make it possible to have a representative democracy, to have folks in power who represent the will of the people.

and are accountable to it.

But we neglected them because those bills didn't get our attention, either because they didn't seem to affect us or they weren't sexy enough to fight for.

So as shocking as all of this feels, it is not, in fact, shocking.

When walls crumble, roofs fall.

And if we are ever going to have a roof over our heads again, it'll be because we've decided to come together to rebuild those walls on which a roof can stand.

This might sound symbolic or indirect,

or like I'm really poorly trying to make an artsy metaphor, but it's not.

The myopic way that we've been fighting for choice has a straight, direct line to last week's decision overturning Roe.

Here's how.

In 2011, in Mississippi, there were two referenda on the ballot to amend the state constitution.

There was a personhood referendum, and that would have enshrined the definition of person in the state constitution to include even a fertilized egg.

So it would have theoretically banned all abortions.

And there was also a voter ID bill.

That referendum would have dramatically disenfranchised predominantly voters of color.

The black and brown activists in the South, including Ms.

Simpson and her intersectional movement, knew that killing both of these bills was vital to the reproductive justice fight.

But what happened?

The pro-choice movement, dollars, and publicity went all in on fighting the personhood bill and ignored the voter ID bill.

Thankfully, the personhood bill failed with 58% rejection, but the voter ID bill passed with 62% of the vote.

How does that relate to the roof caving in?

The passage of the voter ID bill, which solidified Mississippi as one of the most restrictive voting states in the country, led to the election of Attorney General Lynn Fitch,

the first Republican to hold that office since Reconstruction, who was hell-bent on overturning Roe.

And it led to the Republican-dominated Mississippi legislature that passed the 2018 Mississippi Gestational Age Act,

the precise law on which the Supreme Court overturned Roe.

The Mississippi voting rights referendum was a wall, and the pro-choice movement celebrated the personhood victory while it crumbled.

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Black and brown intersectional feminists have been telling us for decades, since women of African descent for reproductive justice invented the concept of reproductive justice in 1994, that reproductive freedom cannot be boiled down to single issues.

Their lived experience proves, as Audre Lorde said, there is no such thing as single-issue struggles because we do not live single-issue lives.

And we need to know, we in this moment need to know that there is no fighting for the right that we hold most dear without fighting relentlessly for the rights that hold it up.

That's what intersectionality is.

It's not having some black and brown women at the table.

It's knowing that when someone is attacking their lives and freedoms, they are in no uncertain terms attacking yours.

And it is not an act of goodness to stand in the fight with them.

It's an act of self-preservation.

We have to expand what we think about when we think about the fight for choice.

We are all fired up about defending choice.

We want to be the karate kid in the ring, kicking ass and breaking boards.

But I am here to beg us to know that there is no kicking ass without years of wax on, wax off.

If we want to be fighting for choice, we need to be noticing and fighting against laws that disenfranchise voters, voter ID laws, threats on voting by mail, closing polling places, disenfranchisement of people convicted of felonies, gerrymandering.

Oh, gerrymandering.

Okay, let's talk about Texas.

The outrageous gerrymandering in Texas is what made it possible for that legislature to pass a law completely contrary to the will of the people and to ensure that the will of the people had no voice to object.

That's how it works.

That's how we get a government that doesn't look like us.

We need to develop the political will to widen our lens,

to support the foundations that make representative democracy possible.

This will be hard.

We're already exhausted, which has been intentional, obviously.

We've been worn down by years of the Trump dumpster fire and constantly reacting and constantly defending, and we are weary as hell.

But this is the way.

This is the way, and we will either step into it or we will step aside and let them have our bodies and everything else they will claim.

Because

be not mistaken, abortion is not where they end.

Abortion is where they start.

They are coming for our contraception, our queer rights, our queer marriage, IVF.

All of it's on the table.

The good news about the fight being everywhere is that when we win, the win will be everywhere too.

When we radically reorient ourselves from this narrow concept of choice to the broad value of reproductive justice, we win widely.

Sister Song says reproductive justice is, quote, the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.

That's why, look around, the first major gun safety legislation passed in our nation in nearly 30 years last week is a reproductive justice win.

Because right now, the rights of Special Forces wannabe losers to their AR-15s are prioritized above our children's rights to live and go to school.

That's why police violence is a reproductive justice issue, because it cuts short the lives of babies we have, disproportionately black and brown ones.

That's why maternal mortality is a reproductive issue, because anti-choice legislation can be a death sentence, especially to black women who are three times as likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than white women.

It's why access to health care is just as important as the legal right to it, because a legal right doesn't give you what you need to get it.

So that's the good news and the bad news.

The fight is big and the fight is everywhere.

And the win is big and the win is everywhere.

When we fight for this wider goal of fundamentals of democracy, when we fight for reproductive justice, we fight for full-scale liberation,

which is the use and enjoyment of our bodies and our lives.

which is everything we talk about in this podcast.

Our pleasure in sexuality as a birthright, the time and ease that will flow to us when the structures of our lives are more equally distributed and just, the right for our children to be safe and protected, our dignity to be held and free under this sky that we hold up for everyone.

In the words of Monica Ray Simpson, we are seeking liberation,

not a right, not a law, not a piece of legislation.

We are seeking the ability to move in this world safely and do what we need to do.

We are not asking for anything anymore because it's inherently ours anyway,

because we are human beings first and foremost.

It is overwhelming to think about this fight, but it is overwhelming to think about the way that we can live.

when we do this the right way and we do it together.

Let's do four things today.

Four things.

We can do this, okay?

It's very confusing time we're living in and it's a lot.

But let's do these four things.

Number one,

let's commit to rethinking

and expanding beyond the roof and get invested in the walls.

Okay, we can become a member of Sister Song or a member of another organization that does grassroots baseline fights for enfranchisement of folks and the fundamentals of democracy.

Do that.

Find the place there that you want to get involved in in

undergirding the foundations

so that we can have a roof.

Number two.

We're going to find a piece of that liberation and we're going to dig into it.

They brought this battle to our door, and what they are going to get is a war.

Before we were asking for a choice, and now we are demanding liberation.

Our second thing we're going to do is we're going to figure out what piece of liberation we are going to work on by us for us.

Whether it's our own sexuality, whether it's fighting police brutality, whether it's getting involved in moms demand action, the fight for liberation has many roads and we need warriors on all of them.

This includes finding your people that are going to fortress you up for what's ahead.

Invest in that, okay?

Something for your own liberation, because what is the point

of

doing any of this if the use of enjoyment of our lives does not bring us joy?

Number three,

we are going to stand in

for countless women who have had

their rights pulled out from under them in a flash through state-by-state restrictions on abortion laws overnight.

We're going to be standing up for them by funding

abortion funds.

Together Rising has been intersectionally focused for a long time.

We know that black and brown women have been the canaries in the coal mine for always and fighting on the front lines of the most consequential battles forever, which is why we disproportionately invest in organizations of black, brown, and queer leadership.

We are currently collecting funds to Together Rising at togetherrising.org backslash give,

the nonprofit founded by Glennon.

And 100% of what we receive in this fundraiser is going out the door to four boots on the ground reproductive justice organizations, primarily led by black, brown, and queer women.

You can support these organizations at togetherrising.org backslash give.

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Bull market, bear market.

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Inflation, up or down.

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Together Rising has already,

thanks to the generous

gifts of more than 4,000 of you,

already collected close to $400,000.

I'm going to tell you real quick about the four organizations that that 100% of these funds are going to.

One, the Missouri Abortion Fund.

With nearly all abortions banned in Missouri, the Missouri Abortion Fund's vital work providing financial assistance to folks in Missouri who cannot afford the full costs of abortion care is more important than ever.

Despite being surrounded by states with trigger laws, the Missouri Abortion Fund will continue to help women and people access safe abortions.

They are not going anywhere.

Number two, Indigenous Women Rising is an Indigenous and queer-led reproductive justice organization that helps Indigenous women and people access safe abortion care throughout the United States.

Number three,

New Mexico Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.

By providing transportation, child care, lodging, meals, and other logistical support, New Mexico Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice is helping women and people in need of abortions overcome barriers to accessing critical health care.

Bordered by states that have trigger laws or bans that have gone into effect, this organization is helping fill a massive gap in access in the southwestern part of the United States.

And number four, we've already talked about, Sister Song.

Led by a black queer woman, Sister Song is a preeminent leader in fighting for reproductive justice.

Focused on structural change, they elevate the collective voices of Indigenous women and women of color to achieve reproductive justice by eradicating reproductive oppression and securing human rights.

Togetherrising.org backslash give.

Togetherrising.org backslash give.

Okay, that was the third thing.

The fourth thing we're going to do

is we're going to register for midterms, vote in midterms, and get your people registered and voting in midterms.

Now, y'all, this is a hard one for me right now because

let's be honest, I am cringing with rage every fundraising email I get from Dems asking me to give them money since it appears that I have a more comprehensive strategic plan for my grocery list than they have for how to move forward in protecting the rights of their electorate.

It's infuriating, okay?

I give you all of that.

They also had 50 years to codify Roe, had a majority in the House and Senate for part of that time, and it wasn't wasn't a priority when they could have made it the law of the land so that we didn't have to deal with the Supreme Court on this.

We should be angry about that.

And

yet,

right now,

Senate

and House Republicans are relying on winning at midterms because it's projected that they will.

And they are deciding who is going to chair committees, and they are deciding where to take

this next.

We need to register our frustration with our Democratic leaders, and then we need to register to vote, and we need to get out, and we need to make sure

that our people do too.

Kavanaughs are going to Kavanaugh.

Coney Barrett's are going to Coney Barrett.

That's who they are.

If

this

gets undone by the Supreme Court,

I am going to delight for the rest of my days that I was wrong.

But I do not think it's going to.

We do not wait on the Supreme Court.

We start grassroots.

We build up our walls.

We help the women who are desperate need of health care right now.

We focus on our own liberation.

We get the folks in office who we can hold most accountable to codify Roe once and for all, and we just keep at it.

That's what we do.

This is our place in history.

Lots of folks spent their whole adult lives in Jim Crow.

Lots of folks spent their whole adult lives in the Great Depression.

We

find ourselves in the great backslide.

And what are we going to do?

We're going to get into our place in the fight, and we are going to fight forward because this is where we are, and this is who we are, and we're going to do it together.

We can do hard things, and thank God we can.

Thank you for being this community.

Love your guts.

I give you Tish Melton and Brandy Carlisle.

I walked through fire, I came out the other side.

I chased desire,

I made sure I got what's mine.

And I continue

to believe

that I'm the one for me.

And because I'm mine,

I walk the line.

Cause we're adventurers and heartbreaks on map.

A final destination.

We've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives bring,

we can do a hard game.

I hit rock bottom, it felt like a brand new start.

I'm not the problem,

sometimes things fall apart.

And I continue

to believe

the best

people are free,

and it took some time.

But I'm finally fine.

Cause we're adventurers, and heartbreaks don't map

our final destination.

We lack

we've stopped asking directions

to places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find

our way back home.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do a hard

time.

We're adventurers and heartbreaks on that.

We might get lost, but we're okay with that.

We've stopped asking directions

in some places they've never been.

And to be loved, we need to be known.

We'll finally find our way back on.

And through the joy and pain

that our lives

bring,

we can do hard

things.

Yeah, we can do hard things.

Yeah, we

can do

hard

things.

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