First, some housekeeping (Book stuff! Interviews! Links! Job News!):
—I feel so seen by
and so moved by this lifting up of my book in Culture Study. And one of the comments (I think you’ll see which!) has clarified (again!) for me, that this was all worth it. It one person finds a new window, a new angle, a new path they can walk or a new way to walk it so they can show up for people who are having abortions? The self-promotion (yuck), the packaging and selling of myself and my words as a commodity (YUCK), the sharp stings and dull aches and head-pounding exhaustion, the hateful emails. The pain that was wrung from writing and publishing this book, I remember when I read this comment, has all been worth it.—I spoke with the brilliant Rainesford Stauffer about writing a book without claiming “writer” as a full-time job, about the ways in which writing fits—and doesn’t—into the little cracks of my daily life, squeezed between my “real” jobs and parenting and showing up in & for my communities. And then she wrote this incredible piece for Esquire! I’m so excited for Rainesford’s book about ambition, All the Gold Stars, which you should (obviously) preorder.
—Tomorrow I start my new job with Partners in Abortion Care! You may remember this name from the book, or from the inimitable Mariame Kaba’s leadership in crowdfunding Partners’ opening (and now funding the Online Abortion Resource Squad—kick them some $$$!), or from this profile I wrote of the clinic’s two founders, who are mothers and providers and kind, hilarious, whip-smart superhumans, and also the first women to own and run an all-trimester abortion clinic. I’m…really, really excited. And scared. And resisting an urge to get an impulsive tattoo of the clinic’s perfect logo. And also maybe not resisting that urge.
Stay tuned for more, from The New Yorker, to my Instagram stories, to any conversation you may find yourself trapped in with me at any party or playground this summer (sorry!)—you’ll be hearing about Partners in Abortion Care.
Second: George and Peggy.
Dr. George Tiller, who called himself a “woman-educated doctor,” was murdered 14 years ago today by an anti-abortion terrorist. He was shot dead in the foyer of his church, where he served as an usher, on a Sunday morning in Wichita, Kansas.
I don’t have much to say that others haven’t already said today, and much better, but every May 31st seems to be heavier and heavier with grief for me, as the years pass. Maybe it’s because I’m witnessing the current long-brewing escalation of anti-abortion violence and extremism, or feeling more of it touch my own work and life, creeping into the edges of my peripheral vision and my DMs and my comment sections and my inbox. Maybe it’s because 2009 was so very long ago, now, and I didn’t know any Kansans in the movement, or any Kansans at all, actually, then.
In 2009, when Dr. Tiller was murdered, The Kansas Abortion Fund, started by a handful of friends as a phone tree to help people in their community in 1996, was still called The Peggy Bowman Second Chance Fund, “after an iconic Kansas woman who led the reproductive rights movement in Wichita for decades,” according to KAF. Peggy Bowman has passed away, too, now, another loss that feels impossible to metabolize.
According to her barn-burner of an obituary in The Wichita Eagle, the condition which caused Bowman’s death “was undoubtedly aggravated by the catastrophe known as Sam Brownback and Kris Kobach.”
Today, let’s mourn our dead, and fight like hell for our living—who the Brownbacks and Kobachs of the world try and try and try to kill.
George Tiller and Peggy Bowman won’t wake up to fight another day tomorrow. But Sam Brownback and Kris Kobach will. So we must, too.
See you in the morning.