Well, sweet peas. You know what’s happened. I certainly don’t need to break any news here in your email inbox. You know that on Friday, June 24th, 2022, at 10:20 AM Eastern Time — as doctors, midwives, nurses, doulas, and clinic staff scrambled to outrun it for one last abortion, one last miscarriage management or fetal diagnosis or pregnancy options counseling appointment, one last patient — something ended, and something else began.
What ended, in that moment: legal abortion in many of the U.S. states where it was already, for so many of the people who have needed it most, virtually inaccessible. A cascade of trigger bans and pre-1973 laws designed, with meticulousness and malice, by those most removed from the processes and realities of a marginalized pregnant body to inflict the greatest possible volume of pain and suffering and violence upon those inhabiting such a body in 2022.
What began: This. Now. The new struggle. Constantly shifting rules and fears and questions and considerations. Clinics closing, moving across state lines, re-opening, finding new ways forward for their communities and their patients. Doulas mobilizing, together (if you’d like to hear more about the webs of practical support being woven under abortion-seekers all over this country, feel free to reach out to me or to your local Reproductive Justice organizations)! People having abortions, still. Always. People having abortions forever.
If you’re pregnant and afraid, I love you. If you have had abortions, I love you. If you are just now waking up to your place in the revolution—aiding and abetting abortions to ensure that people and families and communities are safe from this violence and violation, I really, really love you.
Abortion love letters will resume soon. Until then, give and work and rest and grieve and share and listen and read. Be curious—about the work ahead of you personally, about your responsibility to the humans who walk the earth with you, about the process of abortion which is older than the law and the country, older than the Bible and the Torah and any gods we know. Use your imagination when you think about where we go from here. Feel it all. And have, or support, the abortions that will create your and your loved ones’ futures, and protect their health and safety and joy, as needed. Have and support them forever.
Love,
Hannah