Tomorrow morning, I'm facilitating the first Take Back the Speculum so far this spring. I'm simultaneously so glad to be doing something that feels useful and deeply angry that we are required to focus, again, on defending ourselves from the same tired ass threat.
We're now 2+ weeks out from the leak of the SCOTUS draft outlining the conservative majority arguments for overturning Roe vs Wade, collapsing the established federal judicial precedent protecting abortion access and leaving a person's right to decide whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy to be determined by the legal and political machinations regarding abortion access in their state.
These weeks have been harrowing, to say the least, for all of us who are clear that abortion is and has always been an essential aspect of healthcare and therefore a basic human right. In an already overwhelming period of time, there is a lot of work to do.
It’s somehow incredibly shocking and entirely predictable at the same time.
For me, the moment of clarity was when Trump chose Mike Pence as his VP in order to align himself with evangelicals and more broadly with the Christian right vote, following a strategy that has been successful since Reagan's first campaign. My friend and mentor Carol, who is pushing 90 and has been actively fighting this shit since the late sixties, has been expecting this particular shoe to drop for much, much longer than that.
The day of the leak, I had been leaping around in a mountain stream with my kid in a canyon without cell reception, and emerged with her, damp and giggling and thinking about dinner, to a phone exploding with text messages from friends and colleagues all saying something along the lines of FUCKITY FUCK FUCK and linking to the Politico piece that had broken the leaked SCOTUS draft. I read it with my heart in my mouth by the side of the road and immediately called Carol.
"Well," she said. "This is very bad. A lot of people are going to suffer. That's absolutely real. But I know what it was like before Roe, and life will go on after it falls. We knew all along this was likely, and we're as ready for it as we can be."
She is, of course, absolutely right.
Consider the overwhelming number of places in this country where, for all practical purposes, it’s as if the Roe decision never happened - most of them the same places where abortion is imminently expected to become illegal. Where there is maybe one clinic in the entire state. Where visiting a clinic as a patient requires running a gauntlet of violent anti-abortion protestors. Where clinic workers have been assaulted and killed by anti-abortion protestors. Where people have unknowingly gone to "crisis pregnancy centers" and wasted valuable time or been terrified by the propaganda foisted upon them there. Where people trying to end a pregnancy have to jump through the hoops of waiting periods, parental approval, or other time-consuming obstructions to access, or who can't afford the procedure, or who are simply unable to trust the medical system for any number of completely logical reasons.
There are and have always been plenty of people here in the US who can't ever assume that the state, or the licensed clinicians who answer to it, would protect them or care for them because of their ethnicity, gender, background, body size, disability or income level.
In order to support those folks, national and local networks of community care, organized channels of funding and mutual aid groups have evolved over time, some of which have been in place for decades. And those are the organizations and networks that deserve our attention right now. Because for them, it isn't suddenly a "post-Roe world". It's a world untouched by Roe.
There are a few key things to take note of here:
1) We need to take a big collective breath and regulate ourselves in the ways we know work best for us. The opposition wants us exhausted, confused, scared, fighting amongst ourselves, unable to organize or act effectively, overly reactive and impulsive. We can't make good decisions when we're in the full-blown urgency of fight/flight/freeze. So we need to handle ourselves and care for each other in basic ways: hug our loved ones and hydrate and pet our beasts and get enough sleep and get outside and self-regulate around our neurologically understandable but unhelpful tendency to doom-scroll and linger over the news.
It's spring. It's beautiful. And that is also important and true.
Despite all of this chaos, our joy is right here. And we must collect ourselves where we are and have our wits about us in order to do what needs doing together.
2) Nobody needs to reinvent the wheel.
The existing frameworks for help, support, and care are based on years of organization, vetting and relationship-building. If you feel compelled to get involved in this fight, there are a LOT of really solid ways to do that without starting something new - and if you're new to all of this, you're far more likely to actually be able to help if you show up *with courtesy* to the party that's already happening rather than dissipating energy and trying to start from scratch. There is incredible education and activism around all aspects of abortion access, and I recommend connecting with those offering that to learn more about what's needed before deciding unilaterally that Something Must Be Done and scrambling into unpredecented action. If something new is actually needed in your area, far better to do it with the guidance and support and solidarity of people who already know the ropes.
Some of the relevant things to read up on and find out more about re activism in this space are: abortion funds, reproductive rights and those who defend them, abortion or full spectrum doula trainings, local clinic escorting, and how best to support the campaigns of people who are running against GOP candidates or anybody running on an anti-abortion platform in key places throughout the US and most especially where you are. If you're on FB, my colleague Mychal is at the helm of a large group called Pro-Choice Health Workers, Allies & Activists, and it's a good place to start connecting with other people to whom these issues are important. There is a place for everybody in this fight and WE NEED YOU.
3) Consider the narrative and the language being used.
First: please don't refer to anti-abortion opiners as "pro-life". Don't give them that. "Pro-life" is a very specific marketing strategy attempting to seize the moral high ground (please see here for more details on that) and the antis have proven themselves to be wholly unconcerned with lives, given their willingness to sacrifice the bodies of birthing people to uphold overtly religious belief systems at the expense of their fundamental human rights. Let's call them what they are: anti-abortion and anti-choice. I don't personally feel that "forced birth" is inaccurate or too strong in most contexts.
More subtly, the dominant storyline in this country, thanks to the ubiquitous PR of organizations like Planned Parenthood, is that it's either the clinic or the coathanger. It's used to create a boogeyman around self-managed abortions (SMA) or any care outside of the purview of a licensed and therefore state-controlled medical provider. And it is a major untruth by omission.
The reality is that people had safe abortions outside of clinics before Roe, and during Roe, and will continue to have them long after Roe is gone.
I say this not to diminish the importance of clinical abortion access - it will always be a necessary part of the mosaic of care for many, and essential to fight for - or deny that people without access or options have done dangerous things when taking matters into their own hands, but rather to urge all of us to examine the narrative at work and how it is meant to affect us in a world where the greater danger by far is not the actual risks and consequences of SMA, which are statistically predictable and easily managed, but the legal and community consequences should one get caught or reported to law enforcement in the wrong place.
To understand this better and arm yourself with clear and actionable knowledge, I really recommend looking up self-managed abortion and getting familiar with what that has meant historically and what it means in 2022.
This is also an excellent article about the landscape of abortion care in a post-Roe scenario focused on SMA.
4) Learn about digital security and internet privacy.
The most basic things help a whole lot to keep your calls and correspondence private, and this is a very, very big deal in the current climate. It’s fundamental to your freedom in the most classic American sense of that word. Nor is it hard to do.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a course on this which I strongly recommend.
At the very least, switch over texting to Signal (set a timer if your communications require privacy) and email to Protonmail - both are end to end encrypted. Don’t be a sitting duck.
Facebook and all social media *are not* a safe place to communicate about anything beyond making connections and sharing information, including DMs.
5) Educate yourself about your body as a direct means of amplifying and informing your bodily autonomy.
Seriously. Learn your body.
This is the place closest to home, and it’s where we begin.
Get shoulder to shoulder with others & learn together.
Normalize it.
Learn your own anatomy, your options around fertility and contraception, your resources for support for all outcomes. Take charge of this aspect of your life.
Quit outsourcing authority over your body to other people whose licensure and conditioning has taught them to gatekeep rather than to educate and empower you, and whose capacity to first do no harm is being obstructed by things like trigger laws.
Your body belongs to you, and the more you know about it, the less anybody can tell you what to do. The more power you hold. The less enthralled you are by scare tactics. The more you understand what needs doing and how to do it.
There are MANY extraordinary resources for reproductive & sexual health education that I recommend wholeheartedly: Autonomous Pelvic Care, Holistic Abortions, Carol Downer, Molly Dutton-Kenny, Sister Song, Mychal Shifrah, Samantha Zipporah, The Red Door Collective, Sister Zeus, and Vienna Farlow are a handful of my faves.
And me :)) I am one of my faves.
Which brings me to Take Back the Speculum.
If you have had enough of waiting on others to determine your fate and feel ready to start getting a handle on this for yourself, please consider yourself invited to class this Saturday morning. TBTS will blow your mind and settle your system and equip you for a more informed conversation about your body, your options, and your authority to do the thing that is right for you.
Over the course of 3 hours, we will cover:
- an empowered, gender inclusive overview of the full spectrum of healthy sexual anatomy (& the demolition of the misogynist, racist bs materials most commonly used to educate us - and our providers)
- an invitation to participate in the Gallery that Destroys All Shame
- a demonstration of a easy, simple DIY cervical self exam
- an opportunity for all participants to examine themselves with guidance (and, if desired and permitted, observe others)
TBTS is open to & appropriate for all human beings with internal sexual anatomy. This is a 10000000% queer and trans-inclusive joint.
Donation based. NO ONE EVER TURNED AWAY FOR LACK OF FUNDS.
All $ this month goes straight to red state abortion funds.
Bring your people.
That's it. I love you.
Take heart. We can do this. We were *made* to do this.
Remember: this world can be a paradise. IT ALREADY IS A PARADISE.
Keep your sights set on joy, connection, laughter, feasting, and centering the fullness & truth of yourself - it's your birthright and what the world truly needs most. I need you by my side, exactly as you are.
Please write back with any questions or if you just want to say hi.
XOXOXOXOXOXO
pcws