People Who Have Had Abortions Are Braver Than Texas Lawmakers— Pass It On

Men having opinions on our bodies? It's more common than you think.

Sep 21, 2021

Well well well. Well well. Well.

Obviously from that intro, you can tell we’re talking about the recent SB8 heartbeat bill that went into effect in Texas at the start of the month, paving the way forward for more challenges to Roe v. Wade with many thanks to our fellow girlboss Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court. You go, girl!

Instead of regulating masks and life-saving vaccines amidst the still ongoing pandemic, lawmakers in the big TX have decided they’d much rather focus their energy on regulating uteruses. This means that the Texas state legislature thinks controlling reproduction is more important than a 2-year-long global pandemic. A bold choice, to be sure!

This week, I talked with Rebecca Loftin about the SB8 bill in Texas, abortions in real life and in pop culture, and who are most affected when reproductive rights are attacked. We also offer you all a quick fuck you moment to Texas Governor and #1 Emily For President Villain Greg Abbott.

Rebecca Loftin is a dumb (hot) LA film girl and fellow Substack hoe (please read and subscribe, by the way. Her writing is magical and may change your life). When not screeching about the state of Texas, she’s yelling at men in bars. You can watch her comedy web series here.

We have to clear up this one post-conception misconception

Let’s talk terminology: often, the two sides of the debate on abortions are labeled pro-choice and anti-abortion. Language when discussing an issue as layered and often convoluted as this is important and as such, the proper terms for the two sides are pro-choice and anti-choice.

Abortions will continue to take place regardless of what laws are on the books so those who are against abortions are really just anti-letting people have autonomy over their bodies.

In the same vein, pro-choice doesn’t always mean pro-abortion. You can personally be opposed to abortions and still be pro-choice, as you are simply acknowledging that everyone deserves the choice to determine whether or not the procedure is for them. Essentially, being pro-choice is the nirvana of minding your business which is why we’re here… because some people (read: Greg Abbott) can simply not fucking do that.

This Would Be a Great Place for a Superbass Heartbeat Joke, But Nicki is an Anti-Vaxxer…

To start: let’s talk about what SB8 is and why it is so much more nefarious than the less successful heartbeat bills of yesteryear.

SB8, like most heartbeat bills, bans abortions after 6 weeks; however, it also enforces the bans in instances of rape or incest, for which previous heartbeat bills have offered exceptions.1 The bill “was designed to avoid judicial scrutiny by barring state officials, who would typically be the target of lawsuits, from enforcing the ban. Instead, private citizens are charged with enforcing the ban by filing civil lawsuits against anyone who helps a woman get an abortion” (X). Doctors who perform abortions, anyone who offers counsel to those seeking abortions, and ride-sharing drivers requested to take people to abortion clinics can be sued for $10,000.

The bill is also, unsurprisingly, explicitly transphobic and misogynistic as it exclusively applies the statutes to women.

Like actually— Sec. 171.201.1 states that “‘Pregnancy’ means the human female reproductive condition that: (A) begins with fertilization; (B) occurs when the woman is carrying the developing human offspring; and (C) is calculated from the first day of the woman's last menstrual period.”

I know it doesn’t matter to the transphobic and misogynistic lawmakers who helped pass this bill, but how cruel is a bill that applies to bodies these officials won’t acknowledge and spells out how deep their desire to enforce the patriarchy goes? (Sidebar: it was introduced to the house by state representative Shelby Slawson, another woman who has unfortunately been devoured by said patriarchy.)

A Quick Emily For President History Lesson

While it may be hard to believe, abortions were not always a partisan issue!! Before the 1970s, Democrats and Republicans voted for and against abortion restrictions at the same rate. But

During his 1972 presidential campaign, Republican Richard Nixon began staking out anti-abortion positions as part of a strategy to appeal to Catholic voters and other social conservatives. After Nixon won the election and a majority of Catholic votes, Republican strategists began using the same tactics in Congress, as well as forging coalitions with evangelical groups around opposition to abortion.
The shift to opposing abortion rights was part of a larger effort to paint the Republican Party as pro-family in a way that would help mobilize socially conservative voters, according to Greenhouse and Siegel.

What I mean to get at by sharing this is that reproductive rights don’t have to be a partisan issue… but since they are, I asked Rebecca:

Emily: Just in case the GOP is listening, what drives a person to have an abortion? Is it something fun and enjoyable or is it a health procedure that is as unenjoyable as a root canal or a vasectomy?
Rebecca: People (not just women) can have an abortion for a vast array of reasons.
The first being that they are simply not ready for parenthood. For those who say adoption is the obvious alternative are discounting the major physical, emotional, and financial burden that comes with pregnancy. For those who work or live in communities that won’t support them, adoption isn’t really a fucking “good alternative.”
Abortion is a decision that hardly anyone takes lightly. It’s an invasive and incredibly difficult procedure, but the freedom that is given to many from abortion is worth it.

For a bill that is pitched as being helpful “for the children” (and we’ll break that one down in a bit), some of those hardest affected by the recent SB8 bill in Texas are, in fact, still children.

In a recent NPR interview, Rosann Mariapurram —the executive director of Jane's Due Process which is a grassroots organization in Texas that helps people under 18 access abortion care— stated that

For the teens we work with, if someone in their family knew they were pregnant, they might get kicked out of their home. They might be forced to continue a pregnancy against their will. So the young people we work with are in really challenging circumstances.

NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro then asked about the psychological toll the bill has taken on Rosann’s patients, to which she replied:

The young people we work with are incredibly resilient, but it is heartbreaking, I think, for them to know that they had made a decision. They know what's best for them, but they cannot end the pregnancy, and so they might be forced to parent against their will…
For the majority of people who come to us, they're over six weeks. There are a handful of youth who find out they're pregnant before six weeks. And in those instances, we're trying to move as quickly as possible. But... the judicial bypass process— it inherently causes about two weeks, sometimes three weeks of delay… even if we can help someone get a bypass, they still might be past six weeks by the time they get that permission from the court.

Statements like this not only make you wonder who restrictive bills like SB8 really help2, but they also lead us to the inverse question: who do restrictive bills like SB8 actively harm?

I asked Rebecca:

Emily: Why is the fight for reproductive rights not simply a women's rights issue? Who is most affected by bills like SB8 in Texas?
Rebecca: Those saying it is a women’s rights issue are primarily cisgender, heterosexual white women who feel attacked under the law and feel marginalized within their limited, homogenous communities.
Don’t get me wrong: microaggressions and the perceived policing of your bodily autonomy from Kyle down the street fucking blows. But that is completely discounting all of the Black and brown women and trans folks whose freedoms and basic rights are being threatened every day, ESPECIALLY when it comes to healthcare.
As a dumb bitch from Texas, it’s hard to not take these laws personally but when we examine how greatly this will affect the people of Texas, able-bodied, upper-middle-class white girls like me were never in danger of losing the right to an abortion. And we weren’t meant to.
This, like voting restrictions, is an insidious method of increasing the financial and emotional burdens of already marginalized groups.

Rebecca’s response segues us perfectly into the next necessary conversation (thank you, Rebecca) which is how laws restricting and criminalizing abortions were originally intended to preserve a white majority population.

What?? Did you think this whole conversation wouldn’t get more fucked up???

Too Much Racist History, Too Little Time

I asked Rebecca:

Emily: Why do you think so many of the same people that say the government should not be able to mandate masks or vaccines to combat Covid-19 also believe that abortions should be criminalized?
Rebecca: It comes down to white supremacy (whoops, I’ve done it now).
The groups against mandated masks and anti-choice are overwhelmingly white people. I do not think it is an accident that these policies disproportionately harm BIPOC populations.
The contradiction of the “right to choose” seems to apply exclusively when it impedes the autonomy of white bodies but never Black and brown ones.

In early 2020, The Nation reported on how “the anti-abortion movement in the United States has long been complicit with white supremacy.”

With large families, due to Roman Catholic Church prohibitions on contraception and abortion, Catholic immigration in the mid-1800s through 1900s sparked white Anglo-Saxon Protestant fears of being overtaken demographically that fueled opposition to abortion as a means of increasing birthrates among white Protestant women. At the time, Roman Catholic immigrants from countries like Ireland and Italy who would be considered white today were among the targets of white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Remember the E4P history lesson from earlier? In the 1970s, following the incorporation of Catholic and socially conservative voters into the Republican party (which required another group to become the other), “substantial immigration from Latin America and Asia posed a new threat to white numerical superiority, Catholics from European countries became culturally accepted as part of the white race, a readjusting of boundaries that maintain demographic control.”

Prior to the Civil War, cis women had previously been in control of their reproductive rights. But these anti-immigration sentiments were then coupled with the competition white male OB/GYNs felt from Black midwives. This unholy union led not just to the criminalization of abortions, but to the undermining of midwifery and the far more disturbing developments made in modern gynecology through the torturous treatment of enslaved Black women.3

Reproductive freedom has always been a target to control bodies of color and preserve white supremacist mentalities.

Which was why Rebecca’s response was so troubling when I asked:

Emily: Have the portrayal of abortions in pop culture throughout history helped or hindered the case for legal abortions?
Rebecca: While there has been in the last five years a push to normalize abortions in media, especially television, the portrayals have been almost exclusively regarding white women.
The delicacy and care I have seen have been heartening and documenting a shift in the cultural mindset, but that mindset remains limited by the gaze of white women. Obvious Child, Scenes From a Marriage, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and Euphoria have all shown compelling portraits of it. But when we talk about reproductive rights, these depictions are mind-blowingly limited.
And, however unintentionally, it reinforces the narrative that this is a woman’s issue, and a white woman’s at that.

Not a Fetus Asking For Your Help

The thing that is so unbearable about anti-choice arguments and protests against reproductive freedom is how it neglects to consider care for parents that have been forced to carry fetuses to full-time, as well as the babies born as a result.

In Sarah Sentille’s memoir Stranger Care, she noted that in the foster care system, once children are returned to their birth parents, all of the supports the Department of Health and Welfare had given the parents are removed. “The minute they returned [their] child and closed the case, [the parents were] on their own.” It’s almost exactly the same with undesired pregnancies.

Anti-choice activists fight for the unborn but the second the child is born, those same people support cutting government funding for welfare programs, villainize those dealing with addiction, and campaign against raising state and federal minimum wages.

Rebecca spoke to this when she said:

Emily: Bills like SB8 often restrict conversations around reproductive rights to just abortions. How is that damaging to the fight for reproductive autonomy, and how does that shape the perception of what reproductive rights are necessary for?
Rebecca: What often gets lost in the conversation in the fight for reproductive health for all is that it is not just about the ability to NOT have a child, but the ability to have a child without undue stress.
The policies of America place so much financial burden on the parents (usually the mother) on providing basic needs to a child. The litany of shit needed to raise a child is astounding: formula, diapers, maternity leave, and child care are just the tip of the iceberg of basic resources needed to raise a child. Juggling all this while holding down a job that pays minimum wage becomes an essentially impossible task.
At this point, it is nearly impossible to raise a child in the “correct” way with little to no resources provided by the state. And then, for the state to turn around and blame parents doing their best for not providing enough, often ripping children out of their homes and blaming parental negligence when the task was impossible in the first place.
Frankly, it makes my blood fucking boil.

Getting Mad & Getting Even

Is your blood fucking boiling, too? Welcome to the Action Step Section of this week’s newsletter!! Yes, the Justice Department just sued Texas, which is fun, and the unconstitutionality of SB8 is going to be put to the test in the Braid case. But until then, real people need real help.

Despite all of the obstacles, Jane's Due Process still has hotlines set up to help teens figure out their options as quickly as possible, and clinics are still trying to see patients while adhering to the laws as best as they can. NeedAbortion.org has a specific tab for those in Texas, and information about Plan C abortion pills is becoming more widely discussed.

What can everyone else do in the meantime to help protect those who may have to make life-threatening decisions?

Support any of the above organizations or share information about them with those who made need more resources.
Donate to these 11 local organizations in Texas supporting abortion access and safety!!!!!
Learn more about the National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda and get involved with the organization here.
Calling your representatives might not feel like it’s working, but they are more disposed to appeasing their constituents (allegedly) so if you organize a phone blitz with all your friends in your area who just so happen to keep checking in to tell your elected officials why your state’s reproductive rights either need to change or stay the same, you could lead a fantastic lil revolution!!!!
This one’s important: white women— decenter!

In FX’s Mrs. America, Gloria Steinem was furious when an amendment for reproductive freedom was rejected at the 1972 Democratic National Convention when Democratic candidate George McGovern’s campaign sabotages the vote. When she talks to Shirley Chisolm about joining McGovern’s ticket as Vice President (and mind you, Shirley had only recently dropped out of the race running for president herself), “Chisholm says she isn't interested in a symbolic position—only true political power. She tells Steinem, ‘Power concedes nothing. If we don’t demand true equality, we are always going to be begging men for a few crumbs from the pie, trading women for an empty promise.’”

Historically, white (cishet) women have not demanded true equality so much as begged for their own crumbs. Yet, we still often center ourselves and stories in the narratives of oppression.

john mulaney out of context on Twitter: "… "

But when we stop doing that and look around at the glorious pie of people who are not straight white cisgender men (sorry, Dad), that’s when we truly begin to assist in the fight for true equality instead of hindering it by accepting crumbs. Read about how restricting reproductive rights harms already oppressed communities and get more fucking mad!!!!

And yes, the metaphor got murky because then I put us into the pie… but you all get it, right?

In Summary and Summation

Emily: Why do you think it is that cishet men tend to have the most opinions on things that actively do not apply to them?
Rebecca: Whether unconsciously or not, the people who hold power will do everything they can to retain it. And it’s incredibly disheartening to see how no matter how many “hearts and minds” we attempt to change— institutional oppression remains the crux of the problem.
It doesn’t really matter if the majority of Texas disagrees with it if the small subset of those in power push for it. It’s a messy, complicated system that regularly rolls back hard-won human rights. Cis white people live in ignorance because they can.
A huge aspect of privilege is blissful ignorance. If institutions favor you, there’s no urgency to change them. I don’t think it’s an accident that at a time when Texas’ population is shifting to a non-white majority, gerrymandering has only gotten worse and human rights violations are on the rise. When power shifts away from those who have traditionally held it, there’s a scramble to create laws that will long outlive the people making them.
White men are on the decline and they feel it. Politically, they’re a lost cause which is why so much of the discourse and responsibility has to be placed on other groups in power. White women— I’m looking at you.4 It’s only when those below the very top tier (lower/middle-class white people & cis women) activate against them that policy can shift.
PS FUCK YOU GREG ABBOTT.

Thank you so much to Rebecca for answering these and for being so creative and fantastic!!! I met Rebecca when we were 15 and have been in awe of her since, so this is my pitch for always keeping your camp friends close!!!

This is also such a huge and wildly personal topic, and I just hope we did the conversation enough justice. 💛✨