More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Two weeks ago, Texas passed a law banning access to abortion, with the Supreme Court’s failure to block the legislation signaling a dark future for Roe v Wade. One viral Twitter thread gave a number of powerful examples of people who had sought abortions.
But what is often missing in discourse about reproductive rights are the “average” abortion stories—those in which people tell of their choices to exercise reproductive rights simply because right now was not the right time.
We spoke with Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey about Texas’s extreme six-week abortion ban (S.B. 8), its impact and what state attorneys general plan to do in response.
“The amount of anger and outrage I’ve heard from women and men around the country that I’ve spoken with in recent days is something I haven’t seen before. I think providers and reproductive rights organizations anticipated this, but I’m not sure that it was on the radar of the American public. Now it is. I think everybody is waking up.”
On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit blocked two Tennessee laws—one banning abortion after approximately six weeks of pregnancy and another banning abortion for certain reasons, including race, gender or genetic anomaly.
“The court of appeals today rightly respected nearly 50 years of precedent by blocking these dangerous laws,” said Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project. “With all eyes on the devastating effect of the Texas abortion ban, this is a welcome news for Tennesseans and the rule of law.”
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: It’s no coincidence Mexico legalized reproductive rights *after* women have reached gender parity in Congress; when it comes to women’s representation worldwide, India ranks 148th and Japan ranks 166th; September 8, 2021, was Native Women’s Equal Pay Day; British teen tennis phenoms Emma Raducanu and Leylah Fernandez have qualified for the U.S. Open; and more.
Brenda Berkman understands better than most the years-long fight it took to ensure women could even join the fire service and secure their spots among the first responders who served on 9/11 at ground zero.
“Abortion migration” is when pregnant people travel long distances and cross internal and national borders to access abortion care. While the news out of Texas is extraordinarily alarming, both Texas women and pregnant people across the globe have long been traveling to places like Albuquerque to legally terminate pregnancies. Various forms of state and state-sanctioned power combine to coerce our movement in ways that threaten our dignity and equal standing.
I refuse to feel hopeless about the fact that Texas has, for now, successfully banned abortion in that state. Already, the Department of Justice has sued Texas over its restrictive new abortion law, saying the state legislature enacted the statute “in open defiance of the Constitution.”
I do not predict another civil war, but I do know there will be a reckoning. Sometimes a loss opens the door to something better in the future. Before then, though, there will be enormous suffering. But, as we have seen before, no prohibition and no amount of pain or fear will ever stop a movement for fundamental human rights.
There continues to be a visible, troubling disconnect in our collective literacy of the menstrual cycle—especially vis-à-vis the way we frame early pregnancy and abortion. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott spoke to the press about S.B. 8, the new law that all but obliterates the right to abortion in the state, saying, “[O]bviously it provides at least six weeks for a person to be able to get an abortion.” He is 100 percent wrong.
At grave risks to their lives, Afghan women have held protests for days to stand against the new all-male Taliban government. The Taliban are responding violently.
Wednesday, Sept. 8, marks Native Women’s Equal Pay Day—the day it takes Native women in America to earn what non-Hispanic white men finished making on December 31 of last year.
As two women elected to Congress, we’re proud to fight alongside Native women for just wages and safe working conditions.
