Breaking the Overton Window

Can we stop calling feminists 'hysterical' now?

A week after my daughter was born, I had to walk out of the hospital without her. Three months before my due date, I developed a dangerous pregnancy complication and needed an emergency c-section to save my life. Born too early and too small, Layla would need to stay in the hospital for months before being discharged. 

The moment I stepped out of the hospital lobby into midtown Manhattan, I remember being struck at how strange it was to see people walking around going about their daily lives. 

Didn’t they know that the world had just ended?

I feel like that a lot these days. I don’t understand how some people are able to block out what’s happening in this country as if the sky isn’t falling. 

I’ve been writing about abortion every day for over a year, and all things considered I thought I was holding up pretty well. Until this week.

Something about the news that a fourth Texas county passed an anti-abortion travel ban put me over the edge. It was the straw that broke this feminist’s back. (And I mean that literally: my shoulders live somewhere near my ears these days.)

In truth, it wasn’t the news of the travel ban itself—after all, I’ve been writing about those for months. What did me in was the absolute mundanity with which that news was reported. Just another article in just another paper. It didn’t even warrant front-page coverage!

As if women being prevented from leaving their state is just another story. As if this was a normal occurrence. 

The problem, of course, is that it is. What was once unthinkable is now commonplace—the Overton Window shattered in thousands of pieces beneath the feet of Republicans and anti-abortion activists. 

It wasn’t so long ago that feminists were called ‘hysterical’ by political experts and pundits for warning that Roe could be overturned. Now we’re watching as doctors are forced to deny dying women care and city councils casually make it illegal to help a woman leave her state.

Just as incredible: As raped children are forced into childbirth and women are literally being torn apart—losing uteruses and fallopian tubes—we’re still being told that we’re overreacting. 

As city after city passes these once-inconceivable ordinances, anti-abortion activists and politicians are downright contemptuous of those calling them travel bans. They claim that because the laws don’t criminalize women themselves—instead allowing citizens to sue anyone who helps women leave—that it’s not actually a restriction on travel.

Women can leave the state whenever they want, they say. We just have to be willing to ruin the lives of any friends or family members who might give us a ride. (Or gas money, or even a text with the url for an out-state-clinic.)

Republicans are systematically chipping away at pregnant people’s ability to leave their states, and then have the audacity to insist that they are not, in any way, trapping them there. 

Anyone who believes this stops with women’s friends and families is not paying nearly enough attention. 

There’s a reason, for example, that anti-abortion activists are calling these ordinances ‘anti-trafficking’ laws. In part, it’s the same paternalistic rhetoric of protection central to many Republican abortion policies. Just as ultrasound mandates became “Women’s Right to Know” laws, ‘anti-trafficking’ is meant to make travel bans seem like a protection for those coerced into ending their pregnancies. 

But the law applies to anyone traveling out-of-state. So who is being ‘trafficked’ when a woman simply wants to leave Texas to get an abortion? According to Mark Lee Dickson, the anti-abortion activist behind the ordinances, the answer is simple: “The unborn child is always taken against their will.” 

And there it is. 

If a fetus is a person and abortion is murder, of course Republicans are going to criminally outlaw women from ‘trafficking’ their pregnancies out-of-state to end them! Last month, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall laid the groundwork to do just that—arguing in a legal filing that the state has a right to forbid women from traveling for abortion in the same way they can prevent sex offenders from leaving the state.

Can you imagine the outcry if a law restricted men’s ability to leave their state? If their leaders compared healthcare that 1 in 4 of them received to rape?

Insult after insult, one unimaginable revocation of rights after another. It took less than two years for Republicans to sprint from the end of Roe to publicly planning how to trap women in states where they’re not seen as full human beings. Less than two years.

And yet we’re still meant to get up every day as if everything is normal. What horror, I wonder, will America think is ordinary two years from today?

---

To read more columns like this one and support independent feminist media, consider signing up for a paid subscription: