A 5 AM Flight to Fargo
And a love letter to a room, a state, an ecosystem of people I don't know.
First things first: Writing stuff.
I wrote a little parenting roundup over at The Guardian. The headline they gave it, combined with my underestimation of angry boomers who read The Guardian, has produced a comment section largely dedicated to calling me a horrible mother. This isn’t new, obviously, because I am a mom who writes about abortion and sex and queerness and all the other stuff that triggers a primal fight-or-flight shame response deep in the bodies of the least curious and community-minded of us, which then rushes out of their mouths and fingers in a desperate attempt to expel their icky feelings of discomfort and fear. But damn. These people are not picking up what I’m putting down.
At least my book won a 2024 American Library Association award! It was named by the ALA as one of this year’s Feminist Rise Book Project titles. This list is especially for younger readers, and I’ve been thinking about this incredible honor as a gift to my 16-year-old self, who knew nothing and felt everything, stumbling through the world at a calorie deficit and an information deficit.
Anyway, teens rule. Books rule. The ALA rules. Abortion rules.
Second things whenever:
Last week I flew to Fargo, North Dakota, a place I’ve never been before. I was a guest of the Prairie Abortion Fund, and damn were they good hosts.
North Dakota is a place where abortion is now illegal*, as I wrote about last spring for Salon. It is a place of vast, snowy plains. Of beautiful blonde people and beautiful blonde farmland, and BOMB Swiss chocolate milk, a shared border with Canada, and of the geographical center of North America.
It is also home to an abortion fund with some of the best merch of all time.
My first night in Fargo was spent at one of the coolest indie bookstores I’ve ever visited, Zandbroz Variety. To see my book out living its little life in different places always feels like a strange miracle but this one really hit.
The next day, I got my hair and makeup done and put on a jumpsuit that doesn’t quite fit. For the next few hours, I scrutinized my stomach, hips, thighs, shoulders, and face in the mirror while sweating and practicing my speech for Choice Desserts, the Prairie Abortion Fund’s annual gala fundraiser.
My body may be the biggest it’s ever been. It has also, two pregnancies and years of insulin and strange COVID rhythms later, completely changed its shape. My face looks different, the distribution of fat and muscle alien to me and likely to shift even more as I hurtle toward my late(?) 30s. There are days I recognize this for the unspeakably beautiful gift it is—to have survived, to have literally grown—and days I want to crawl beneath the sheets of a hotel bed with my glass of chardonnay (a contributor to both the body changes and the emotional intensity with which I receive those changes, to be sure) and never be perceived by a stranger.
I think the heightened awareness of my body in space—along with the sleep deprivation, and the being away from home, and the tax-dollars-funding-a-horrifying-genocide-as-the-planet-burns-and-we-all-struggle-to-pay-our-bills-and-raise-children-and-survive of it all—is what most led to my surge of nerves. Impulses toward those old forms of self-violence (dieting, measuring and counting and checking, photo-shopping myself, cropping half my body out of photos) are especially powerful, after all, in times of crisis and chaos. Times when one most needs to feel a sense of control over something, anything, amidst the chaos.
Plus, as Cher Horowitz says, my party clothes are so…binding.
I was also nervous because the people who keep abortion funds running are celebrities to me. Not just because I’m bad with money, or because I have been on the receiving end of the kind of phone calls they are fielding each and every day with boundless grace and humanity, but also because of what I owe each and every one of them.
When I finally got on the stage, and looked out over the inland sea of warm and loving Prairie Abortion Fund faces smiling up at me in the dark, here’s what I said.
This is my first time in Fargo, North Dakota, and in the region served by PAF. And, just like everyone told me I would, I have fallen in love with this place.
I am from Maine, which is similar to North Dakota in many ways. We are both known for our winters, for having more trees than people, for our fun accents. And neither of us is allowed the position of Main Character of our respective regions of the country, just because we don’t have “major cities” or “the population to support a professional sports team.” Massachusetts and Minnesota steal our valor again and again.
And Maine and North Dakota, despite the wide gulf in our states’ legislative positions on abortion access, are both places where networks of community abortion care have deep roots and strong, abundant, resilient limbs and branches, expanding across our landscapes beyond what we can see from any vantage point—no matter how big the sky or mountains from where we stand.
What the Prairie Abortion Fund is doing, and what all of you are doing, is borderless, time-zone-less, and nothing short of miraculous.
Abortion funds are like our home states. Not always thought of for our glamour or our magic, or for the breathtaking beauty that we see, and know intimately, but that isn’t always the centerpiece of national perceptions of who we are and what we do. But every person in this room is a celebrity, a star, a powerful public figure to me.
Let me start at the beginning, in order to explain why I am starstruck in this room.
Another commonality that I suspect some of you might share with me is that I come from Nordic ancestry, and I also come from Lutherans. My grandfather was a Lutheran writer and pastor, and my grandmother once told my father that the first time she saved up enough money to buy a new dress for herself, she put it on, looked in the mirror, felt pretty, and then immediately put it away and fell to her knees to pray for God’s forgiveness of her “vanity, materialism and pride.”
All of this to say: we are a people who don’t necessarily feel—or even believe—that we are deserving of comfort, pleasure, nice things. Of care.
Now, when I had my abortion, I had already been in therapy for years, of course, in regular attempts to counteract this lineage. Pain is passed down through generations until someone is ready to feel it, so many people my age have spent our lives trying to do just that. And I had also been working at a reproductive health care clinic, and as a doula, for years. I talked a big game about everyone’s inherent value, worth, and deserving of ease and joy and support of all kinds. I talked a big game—to my patients, to the abortion providers and the nurses in my life, in my writing—about self-forgiveness, self-permission, self-love.
And yet. When I realized that I was pregnant, and when I remembered the bills I hadn’t yet paid and our nearly-empty family savings account and the pile of medical debt incurred from my recent hospital birth…when I realized that I could not afford the $555 upfront payment required by my clinic, and that I would have to rely on an abortion fund, on the contributions of so many people like each of you?
Ooh, the Lutheran grandmother jumped out.
I could list for you, now, some of the countless reasons I felt that I didn’t deserve to lean on an abortion fund in the same way that nearly all of my patients and doula clients do.
But those reasons, just like everyone else’s, don’t actually change the fact that I did—and do—deserve the abortion care (and the prenatal and postpartum care, and the mental health care, and all the other forms of care) I needed. So they don’t actually matter.
What matters is that, at one of the moments of my life when I felt the most alone, I wasn’t. You were all there with me in that procedure room, like you are with me in this room tonight.
In that room, then, there sat not only my midwife, my husband, the friend who held my hand and kissed my forehead and managed my pain meds. With me, also, were the 5 or 20 or 100 (I’ll never know) strangers and community members who had given $5, $20, $100 to the abortion fund which paid for my care. With me, also, were all of you.
And you kept me company for much longer than that 15-minute procedure.
Even if you have only given money to an abortion fund once in your life, or volunteered or spread the word or contributed in any other way that you might consider small or insignificant, you are part of an ecosystem that continues to nourish my family and create my post-abortion life. You touch every part of my existence—every word of the book I wrote, every toy my now-3-year-old opened on Christmas morning (so basically, you’re Santa), every bill my family is able to pay, every minute of time we are able to spend pouring our love into each other and into our communities.
And I know that so many Yous have done this for so many Mes, that so many of us have done this for each other, for people whose names we will never know and whose faces we will never see, for people with whom we will never share a room or a state.
It’s easy to feel helpless, or like you can’t do enough (or can’t do anything, some days) against the high tides of bad news and human suffering and systemic violence that never seem to recede.
But even if you have only funded one abortion, one cab ride, one heating pad or dose of Tylenol, you have helped to create not only the recipient’s future, but also the futures of so many other people in that recipient’s life. You are now and forever a part of so many books that will be written, so many paintings and sculptures and pieces of music that do not yet exist.
You are part of a family surviving and thriving. You are part of someone finishing school, someone starting a movement, someone falling in love.
You are why I’m standing here today, and why so many other Mes are sleeping safely in their beds, and playing high school soccer games, and hiking the Appalachian trail, and buying their first new dresses, and preaching at the pulpits of Lutheran churches.
You’re there with all of them just as much as you are here with me tonight.
It is now my honor to introduce Destini Spaeth, the President of the Prairie Abortion Fund.
After I spoke, Destini came on stage and stunned us all with her moving speech about PAF’s work and what it looks and feels like to be operating in North Dakota after Dobbs. She brought the house down, of course. (She is also, it should be said, extremely funny and hot and just…a hero).
We spent the rest of the night drinking and talking and crying and laughing, and trying to game the silent auction (for lack of bidding power).
The next morning, I flew home.
I flew home to the same chaos, the same depression and anxiety and stress and unfolded laundry and unwashed dishes and—most daunting at all—to preparations for an anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision spent squaring up against anti-abortion activists at the Maine State House (more on that another time).
But I had been somewhere new, and somewhere beautiful.
I had gained a newsletter’s worth of personal reasons you should give Prairie Abortion Fund, or your local abortion fund, some money.
And I had thanked a couple hundred of the people who I’ve been meaning to thank. I’ll be trying to thank the rest of you as long as I have words and speech and breath to do it.