“Jessica Valenti has been the chronicler, the microphone, the billboard, and the warrior … of the bottom-feeder morality of those who would take our freedoms and our lives and abuse the legal system—and democracy itself—to do it.”
Editor’s note: Karen Thompson originally delivered this essay as remarks at an event at The Birnbaum Women’s Leadership Center at NYU Law on Monday, Oct. 7. The event was co-hosted by Pregnancy Justice and the NYU Law chapter of If/When/How Lawyering for Reproductive Justice.
Jessica Valenti came to speak to the staff at Pregnancy Justice this summer, and one of the first questions I asked her is: “How do you keep doing this?” Her answer echoed the one she wrote in the introduction to Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies and The Truths We Use to Win: You just do, albeit with fury and rage.
At that talk, I called Valenti “a Cassandra.” For those of you who aren’t Greek myth nerds, Cassandra was a priestess fated by Apollo to utter true prophecies and never be believed. What is less discussed—recognizing that these are myths, not life … but when things resonate, they resonate—is that Apollo wanted Cassandra, and so, to “entice” her to hook up, he gave her the gift of prophecy. It was only when she had the audacity to say no to his advances that he cursed his gift to her of foresight with the failure to be believed for her foresight. But today, publicly, I want to take that back.
Valenti is no Cassandra.
While she details the future, her gift is not prophecy, but clarity of facts.
She is clear that the question of abortion access is a question of personal autonomy.
She is clear that conservatives are carefully crafting a world where women who have the audacity to want sex on their own terms must be punished by a pregnancy.
She is clear that conservatives want to take personhood from a person with a uterus and assign it to the embryo or fetus within it.
Putting it all together; meticulously, scrupulously unearthing these foundations, allows her to know what is coming—because those who would end abortion and criminalize pregnancy in these United States in this year of our lord 2024 aren’t leaving crumbs about what future they would like to make real. They are paving the road to that future with baguettes.
While she details the future, her gift is not prophecy, but clarity of facts.
In 1963, in an interview with public radio, James Baldwin said:
“There are days … when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. How, precisely, are you going to reconcile yourself to your situation here and how you are going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here. I’m terrified at the moral apathy, the death of the heart, which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long that they really don’t think I’m human. And I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become in themselves moral monsters.”
While Baldwin’s words describe the American racial dynamics in which we all swim, his observations extend our particular racial history and reality into other spaces; to wars and systems of apartheid beyond our borders. To the criminal legal system that murdered Marcellus Khalifah Williams in the name of legal finality. To the battle for reproductive justice and freedom at this moment.
Valenti’s work has been to make the actions of moral monsters spoken and visible, to point out and inform us of where the moral high ground does, in fact, lie and how bottomless the moral low ground is of those who fight to undermine abortion as healthcare and as a choice across this country. As Valenti writes, it is those who would “force children to give birth… make devastated women carry dead and dying fetuses, and make women raped by men prove their attacks really happened before receiving health care” that are the problem.
No, Valenti is not a Cassandra.
Let’s be clear: This conduct, of moral monsters blithely leading a marching band of hideous reproductive horrors through our courts, through police and prosecutors, and through incel-informed ex-husbands and boyfriends, is violence. And Valenti’s work arms us to face that violence with, as she writes “both the facts and the fury.” And in so doing, she forces us to remember ourselves. She reminds us that feminism is not a kumbaya around the campfire imploring people to be nice, but a rising sun of liberation theology for the people of women that frees everyone else as it rises.
This conduct, of moral monsters blithely leading a marching band of hideous reproductive horrors through our courts, through police and prosecutors, and through incel-informed ex-husbands and boyfriends, is violence. And Valenti’s work arms us to face that violence.
Valenti understands why a woman was charged for murder for having the audacity to survive a nearly life-ending labor resulting in a stillbirth.
Valenti called it that a woman would be tortured to death as her organs slowly failed because doctors were too afraid to provide her with the abortion that would have saved her life.
Valenti knew for a long time that a state would argue that it wasn’t enough for a pregnant woman smoking weed to have a medical marijuana license to do so, but that her fetus should have one too.
She has been the chronicler, the microphone, the billboard, and the warrior around these things and of the bottom-feeder morality of those who would take our freedoms and our lives and abuse the legal system—and democracy itself—to do it.
As Toni Morrison famously noted:
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
What Jessica Valenti is, is undistracted. Put another way? She is the one more thing for the moral monsters. She stands, focused behind and in front of her, looking side to side, turning ignorance into stone. Valenti stands, with a sword of truth, engraved with, “They will never believe us” to beg us to believe in ourselves, and to follow her refusal to surrender. Valenti’s superpower is her no.
May her no live on our own lips.
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