This Week in Abortion, Personal Story #2
This Week in Abortion, Personal Story #2
A collection of good reads, events from the week, and policy insights.
Welcome back to your weekly roundup of good reads, legal updates, and legislative tracking on abortion. This week, Rachel is sharing her personal story about infertility, pregnancy, and how it all connects to abortion.
We are also excited to announce that you can now follow us on social media! We are slowly adding content but make sure to check us out on Instagram and Twitter!
Good Reads
NPR has a story this week about the pilots who volunteer to take women across state lines for abortions. Keep their organization contact information (Elevated Access) handy or share it with friends located in areas with limited access.
For our data and policy wonk readers, a good (long) account of how abortion researchers are gathering data in real-time through #wecount to assess the impact of the Dobbs decision.
The most expensive judicial race in American history is concluding on Tuesday. Politico will be tracking the results. Meanwhile, Washington Post’s Ed Board and the Guardian ask if it even makes sense to elect judges in the first place.
Illinois has become a beacon of access for the entire mid-southern region of the US, adding demands to the limited resources in Southern Illinois. Some tensions are brewing between local communities, as seen by protests in Danville, IL, this week against a proposed new abortion clinic that would sit on the border of Indiana. In the same week, WBEZ highlighted a bill that attempts to tackle crisis pregnancy centers. Even as it easily passed through committee to the IL Senate floor, the bill had more than three times as many individuals and groups registering their opposition to it as those supporting it, and protestors even showed up in person. It’s a great reminder of how good the anti-access movement is at getting people to turn out, even in a pro-access state like IL.
Events of the Week
One Senator is holding up 160 to 180+ routine military promotions because DOD says it will help service members with travel costs related to abortion. The Senator from Alabama says DOD is ignoring the Hyde Amendment. We haven’t covered this, because we did not want to be part of the Senator’s cry for attention. But, things may be coming to a head. This week Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the delay is, “hurting military service members and their families.” It seems likely that the entire Senate will have to vote on each individual promotion, we are really curious to see how Republicans come down if that ends up being the case. By the way, it’s worth getting familiar with the Hyde Amendment, which has been in every budget since 1976. Biden’s proposed budget for 2024 does not include it, so that’s another fight to look forward to in Congress this year.
Idaho failed to expand Medicaid coverage to a full year postpartum AND sunsetted their Maternal Mortality Review Committee. This bucks a trend among anti-access states, which have been expanding non-abortion-related women’s health options. For example, Wisconsin, looks likely to expand postpartum Medicaid as their bill now has more than half the legislators as co-sponsors.
Idaho also became the first state to create the crime of "abortion trafficking," helping a minor get an abortion by, say, driving them over the state’s border. If accused of the crime, parental consent could be used as a defense in court, but you’d still be arrested and charged.
Connecticut introduced a bill that bans state contracts or payments to any business that declines to dispense reproductive healthcare medication in any state unless CT’s Attorney General reviews and approves the business’s legal reasoning for doing so. This is likely to pass and, while some may rightly point out that this is not currently an issue for Connecticut, in our opinion the right time to pass things is often when it is not yet an issue or emergency.
Maryland voters will be able to add abortion rights to the state constitution by ballot measure next year after the legislature approved the bill allowing the question to be added. Voters in the pro-access state will likely approve it.
In a move similar to the recent Governors’ Reproductive Freedom Alliance, Lieutenant Governors from 22 states launched their own Reproductive Freedom Coalition. In some states, Lieutenant Governors are elected separately from the Governor, and encouraging this type of collaboration is helpful in the policymaking process.
Florida’s Senate could approve a six-week heartbeat bill next week that explicitly bans the mailing of abortifacients, and also provides millions in additional funding to crisis pregnancy centers. The restrictions will only become effective once the Supreme Court takes action on existing challenges to Florida’s 15-week ban, but that seems inevitable given its current makeup. In committee, one Republican joined Democrats in opposition to the bill Sen. Alexis Calatayud said she is pro-life but “promised voters she would support the state’s current 15-week ban.”
Legal Updates
A federal judge in Texas (yes, they all seem to be there!) ruled that certain preventive care services do not need to be covered by health insurance. This specifically includes prenatal care, cancer screenings, and HIV prevention. This decision is expected to be appealed. If you’re wondering who wouldn’t want to provide STD screenings for their employees, maybe avoid TX’s Kelley Orthodontics.
Kansas court upholds abortion rights, despite the state General Solicitor arguing otherwise.
A man was charged with throwing two Molotov cocktails at an anti-abortion lobbying group in Wisconsin, in a rare case of pro-access advocates turning to violence.
A Personal Story About Infertility and Pregnancy
I have not had an abortion. I had not shared my story because, in that sense, it’s unremarkable. But, over the course of the last few months I’ve come around on that. Sex, reproduction, fertility, infertility, abortion - all of this is something we don’t talk about enough. All of this is a core part of all our lives. So I’m sharing a part of mine. - Rachel
My story is about labor - the labor of not getting pregnant, the labor of actually getting pregnant, and the physical labor of birth. Abortion policy is vital for me because it has always been a critical safety net. As many readers will appreciate, the simple fact that I have a uterus means that the abortion club is one I could someday join.
Like most people, pregnancy is something I carefully avoided most of my life. I took lots of precautions. I got emergency contraceptives when needed. I spent plenty of energy worrying about what could happen. It’s actually funny. Something I was taught to fear my whole life was suddenly very difficult to do once I was ready. (I think that’s called irony. But, I don’t have tickets to Jagged Little Pill so I’ll never know.)
It wasn’t until I wanted to get pregnant that I learned all that fear was probably for nothing, that it was never going to be easy. Two years of steroids, emotional exhaustion, therapy, and one failed round of IUI later, I finally got pregnant. (If you are lucky, you’ll hear my rant about the fertility industry one day.)
After all that work, I was constantly scared that doomsday was around the corner. It helped that Mollie and I were pregnant at the same time. I had someone to go through it all with. So when she told me what the doctors had found, I went home and cried both for her loss and because I was utterly wrapped up in my own fears. The emotional journey of pregnancy is a labor of its own.
Thankfully my pregnancy was uneventful - right up until my water broke. At the height of lockdowns, I spent over a day in physical and emotional whiplash. My blood pressure would jump, my daughter’s heart rate would drop, I’d take drugs to start labor, drugs to stop labor, yo-yo-ing back and forth. At 8 centimeters, nauseous and in pain, I went for the epidural. Finally, we hit that 24-hour mark and they cut me open. I had the most supportive partner that one could hope for. I mean, the man wiped my butt in those early days. Still, it took not weeks, but months and months and months to recover. It was six months before I could talk about it without tearing up.
Pregnancy and birth are major medical events. If everything goes great, and the fetus is healthy and the mother feels awesome, wonderful. I am so happy for women who get that lucky. Still, as nice as it is to think of having a child as this harmonious thing, there is so much that can go wrong. We cannot predict it. Despite childbearing being something millions of people do regularly, our bodies are not elastic. Even the most “beautiful” pregnancy involves some level of distress. If anything, being pregnant made me more determined not to see that trauma forced on others.
I’m incredibly grateful that abortion is available to me. Because even with my fertility issues, I know I could still join that club. I’ve recently started to think about a second child. Going through it all again, four years older, with the drugs and the hoping and the fear…just considering it is exhausting. But at least I know that if I go through all that and then need to terminate the pregnancy, I won’t be left suffering through nausea, pain, and grief. I won’t have to face the physical trauma of labor as well as the emotional one. Having that reassurance makes everything else just a little easier to get through.