A patient tells her story, and an abortion doula explains her role Forward to a Friend    REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE WITH BECCA ANDREWS  May 23, 2023 Hey y’all, Right now, I’m keeping an eye on South Carolina’s proposed six-week ban on abortion, which is making its way back through the state senate. If it passes, Republican Gov. Henry McMaster has indicated that he will sign it into law. In North Carolina, a ban on abortions past 12 weeks was approved last week and will go into effect on July 1, further depleting access in the Southeastern United States. There is, of course, more news. So let’s get into it. Repro Rundown The good: Illinois is being proactive about the threat of abortion patients’ privacy becoming compromised, bless them. Friday night, the Illinois Senate approved a bill that would prohibit local police from sharing data collected by license plate readers with out-of-state law enforcement departments that seek to use it in abortion-related investigations.  The fair-to-middlin’: Sarah McCammon over at NPR has a good piece looking into Democrats’ efforts to expand birth control access post-Dobbs. McCammon reports that US Sen. Patty Murray has “re-introduced legislation on Thursday that would require insurance companies to cover over-the-counter birth control pills as soon as they become available without a prescription, as recently recommended unanimously by a Food and Drug Administration panel.” It is, of course, beyond time to get this done. As Jessica Valenti points out in her newsletter, Abortion Every Day, “conservatives aren’t planning to go after birth control in the future—we’re already well into a years-long attack on nearly all forms of contraception.”  The damn ugly: In Nebraska, Gov. Pillen signed into law an absolutely abhorrent bill that restricts access to abortion care and gender-affirming health care for transgender youth. It’s not a surprise that these issues are being bundled together. As Irin Carmon pointed out in New York back in April, the two movements have overlapping members and strategies. If you didn’t read this when I linked to it then, you should definitely take a look now.  THE POWER OF ABORTION STORYTELLING Here’s what it’s like to self-manage your abortion in a state that’s seeking to severely curb access to mifepristone. This week, Reckon partnered with We Testify, an incredible abortion storytelling advocacy group, to tell the story of M, who self-managed her most recent abortion in Texas. In this essay, as told to Reckon, she explains how her abortions have given her much-needed power and agency toward the life she wanted for herself and her family. Here’s a little excerpt of it, but trust me, you’re going to want to read the whole thing over at reckon.news.  My most recent abortion was a self-managed abortion using the Food and Drug Administration-approved regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol. Although abortion is illegal in Texas, where I live, I was able to safely get the pills through an organization that sends out medication through the mail. Honestly, I didn’t feel scared to do it. I would have been more scared to go through the pregnancy. I struggle with depression and panic attacks, and was recently suicidal. I am not mentally ready to have a child. With mifepristone, I was able to have the abortion in the comfort of my own home, a safe space. In a state where abortion is illegal, people need to understand that the pills are lifesaving care. Continue reading here. A WORD FROM THE WISE Meet Hannah Matthews, an abortion doula and author of You or Someone You Love. Last week, I got to talk to Hannah about her book (which I devoured last weekend) and her work as a writer and an abortion doula. I fell deeply in love with Hannah’s prose and her emotional, nuanced reporting for this book. As readers of this newsletter, you probably feel like you know what there is to know about reproductive justice and abortion rights; even so, this book will feel fresh to you. I highly recommend it. Bonus: 100 percent of Matthews’ royalties will be donated to abortion funds, and she donated half her book advance to funds as well. BA: I wanted to talk to you especially about the prose. It is so beautifully written. I think at some point you call it a love letter, and that sensibility is clear throughout the book. What informed your decision to write it as a love letter? HM:  I really struggled with kind of my place in the movement writing this book, because I'm just a care worker, I’m just clinic staff who makes no money. I'm not in a position of authority. I'm not an activist. I'm not speaking on CNN, I'm not leading rallies. That is not my place in the revolution. My place in the revolution is just being with someone who's having an abortion holding their hand. I don't mean to minimize that, but I think I felt like the only way I could write this book is if I had permission in the form of someone asking me to write it, which is what happened. And then, if I wrote it as if I were just speaking to the people that I speak to every day, and who I live for, basically, that felt more right to me.  My first form of writing was letter writing. That's actually how I became a writer—I was writing love letters to someone who then said to me, you really should be a writer. And again, receiving that permission from someone else is kind of what flipped a switch for me. I still struggled with feeling like, “Well, who am I to publish a book?” But being able to say, “Okay, well, this might be useful or beautiful to one person, and that's all that matters” was an important perspective shift. BA: I really resonate with that feeling of needing permission to do something big and ambitious. HM: It’s so gendered. And there were some people who were like, “I really don't think, as this white lady in a high access state, you’re the person writes this book right now.” And I completely agree. There were so many times that I felt like, “I am not the person to be doing this, I should keep this in my journal.” It's also the legacy that lives in our movement. As you know, there are long histories of white women just stepping in front of everyone else, speaking over everyone else, extracting labor, and co-opting language. I'm sure you felt this too, like, especially as a white person asking people to give us their time and energy for free at this moment was not great. BA: Absolutely.  HM: I really struggled with that. I didn't want folks to feel like I was really coming in in this transactional way and trying to get their stories. I wanted to make it known to everyone and anyone that I was a person they could come speak with or tell their story to, and that they could get involved in the book if they wanted to. So it was kind of doing that dance the whole time. And I did it clumsily.  BA: I don’t know if I believe that. You are so intentional about honestly examining that power dynamic in the book. I am curious to hear how you reconcile that feeling of being another cis white lady writing a book about abortion? Because I really wrestled with that too—I still do. HM: It came down to that idea of, “If one other person finds this useful or comforting, or it brings them peace or joy, or some new piece of information, that is enough.” When I was speaking with Loretta Ross, she was really clear about her own stance that white people move white people, white women move other white women. I am hoping that white women who read my book, and especially older white women, that it maybe opens a door of curiosity for them into these histories that they have not been taught and have not been considering, that they become curious about the way they speak about abortion or the way they conceive of the fight. So I think that is where I kind of came back to every time. I also had a doula friend who would say to me all the time when I was in this place, “OK, who will be helped by you not writing the book?” That helped turn me around when I got in that headspace.  BA: I feel like, too, there hasn’t been a ton of access to mainstream knowledge about modern abortion doula work.  HM: It's so multi-faceted and complicated, and some folks, especially fellow clinic staff, sometimes bristle at the implication that abortion doulas are necessary because they feel like it implies that either they're not providing, comprehensive, affirming care, or it implies that abortion is inherently traumatic and dangerous. And obviously, it's not, although, of course, there are risks and dangers to any medical procedure. But I think increasingly, in this country, either to be pregnant or to end a pregnancy, are radical acts at this point. Both require so much community support and so much individual human support because the systems are abandoning pregnant people, regardless of their pregnancy outcomes. So I really feel like at this point, everyone can do abortion doula work, right? Like every one of us clinic workers is stressed and broke and tired and busy and raising kids of our own. Everyone can squeeze it into the cracks of our lives. And everyone should be doing it to some extent. The reality is there are people in your communities who are having abortions, and there are ways in which you can make those abortion experiences a little safer, or you can help that person protects their own joy and their own autonomy.  I think that community care work is the future. It’s the way we keep us safe, and build the families we want and raise the children we want and keep our bodies our own. BA: You also create so much space in your book to talk about the complexities of abortion and the way that human experience doesn't fit into these neat little slogans that we lob back and forth at each other. Can you talk about why that was important for you to do? HM: I think that people who are pro-abortion or would call themselves pro-choice feel so much pressure to believe in abortion as this big, flat concept that is, always straightforward, always positive, always easy, never traumatic, never complicated. To me, that only isolates us all more and makes us all more alone and more ashamed and more afraid. We have to create safe spaces for other people to tell their abortion stories regardless of what those stories entail. I think that is a huge part of how we're going to move forward and get freer.  In the same way that someone should be able to say, “I love my child, I'm so glad I am parenting my child, and my birth was horribly traumatic,” or “I was ambivalent about having my child.”. Every pregnancy is different. Every abortion should be allowed to be as complicated and whole and human as the person who is having it. BA: Yeah, totally. And I think we're not even there with birth stories, right? Because we get so caught up in the narrative of what motherhood should look like. And then you layer abortion stigma on top of that dynamic, and then you layer the political talking points that are so loaded, because, as you point out, the anti-abortion movement has weaponized people’s emotions. HM: Right. And white supremacy is baked into this sort of thinking, even for some quote, unquote, reproductive justice organizations. It’s the same kind of theory of operation that keeps secrets festering in the dark and harms all of us. We need to be able to bring everything into the sunlight if we're going to move forward and be curious and honest about what abortion care actually looks like, and if we’re going to move forward in making sure everyone has access to abortion. BA: Let’s talk about abortion as joy, which gets a chapter in your book. HM: My abortion has given me so much more than I ever imagined. Just the act of ending a pregnancy gave me so much joy that would not exist or would not have been available to me or I would not have been able to see or touch if I hadn't had my abortion.  And there's so much joy in my work. So often, I am laughing until I cry with a patient or a doula client, or we are just feeling so good together in this space that only belongs to us. And I think that people, for all kinds of reasons, don't understand that that's the case and therefore don't know that it could be possible for them. Joy is always possible. That's something that helps people to understand abortion as just another thing on this spectrum with birth with death, with, menopause and your first period and sex then your whole reproductive life—joy is always possible, grief is always possible. A birth can turn into a death in an instant. I think, again, we've made abortion such a flat word that we all think it means this one very specific thing and that we know what it means when someone says, “I had an abortion,” when we couldn’t possibly know all that is encompassed in each individual experience. It could mean 7 billion different things. See y’all next week. In love and solidarity, Becca Alternate text InstagramTwitterFacebook Reckon    |    1731 1st Avenue North    |    Birmingham, AL 35203 Email forwarded to you?  Sign up now! 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