Finding Hope in the Room
Finding Hope in the Room
How to keep going, two years after Dobbs
I want to talk to you about some of the rooms I’ve been in lately.
Over the last two years, I’ve spoken to a room of a thousand people dressed to the nines at a gala in San Diego, listened to Florida activists in a ballot measure war room, and visited university auditoriums and classrooms across the country. In January, I spoke in a Senate briefing room about the horrors of post-Roe America; and this weekend I was in a community center in rural Wyoming, speaking at a reproductive freedom summit with activists and legislators.
The room I think about most often, though, is one at the back of an independent abortion clinic I visited a few months ago. There, in a small, dimly-lit space, I watched about a dozen young women fielding phone call after phone call. They were helping people leave the state to get abortions—booking bus tickets, finding funding and coordinating child care. One abortion navigator sent emotional support texts to a woman who had never been on a plane before.
I got choked up the moment I walked in. It reminded me that in spite of the suffering we’ve witnessed and the challenges ahead, there are roomfuls of women in every state, working every single day, to keep each other safe. Shout Your Abortion says it best: We will save us.
I’m not telling you this story to sugarcoat the nightmare of the last two years—there’s no getting around how awful it’s been or how many people have been harmed. But it’s precisely because this moment is so difficult that we need to focus on how powerful we really are.
Here’s something I told the amazing Wyoming activists I met this weekend: We are the majority. America supports abortion and has for decades. Most incredibly, it turns out that even polls showing that majority are likely undercounting just how strong support for abortion rights really is.
We didn’t need a poll to tell us that, though. We see how much people care about this issue any time there’s an election—whether abortion is directly on the ballot or folks are voting for their next state Supreme Court justice.
That’s why anti-abortion politicians and lobbyists are running scared. They’ve gone from pretending they have the moral high ground to (falsely) promising that they’re softening on the issue. Anti-abortion messaging is suddenly hyper-focused on so-called exceptions, ‘compassion’ and ‘consensus.’ They won’t even use the word ‘ban’ anymore.
Republicans are scrubbing their campaign websites of any mention of abortion, doing an about-face on their public support for a national ban, and toying with losing the moniker ‘pro-life’ altogether. Conservative lawmakers and activists are so aware Americans support abortion that they’re launching ballot measures of their own—amendments with pro-choice-sounding names meant to trick people into voting for restrictions.
All of which is to say: they know that they’re losing. And we’re winning. Not every day, and not enough to stop all the harm bans have caused—but our power has never been clearer. I’m not just talking about elections and polls, though we’re winning those too!
The reason 8,000 people a month are getting abortion medication despite living in states with bans is because there are rooms full of doctors and activists shoving pills into envelopes. The fact that 171,000 women last year had to travel out-of-state for abortion is awful, but it also means that abortion funds helped them get the care they needed.
The reason those ridiculous anti-abortion ‘studies’ were retracted is because credible researchers and scientists, without funding and in their spare time, did the work to make it happen. The protests held, the lawsuits filed, the donations raised—they’re all the result of individual people refusing to accept this nightmare conservatives want for us.
That gives me hope. And it makes me capable of passing that hope on.
A few weeks ago, a 15 year-old messaged me on TikTok; she told me how afraid she was. She wrote about feeling overwhelmed, and not knowing what to do. I told her that her fear made sense—it was totally reasonable. But I also told her that she shouldn’t too afraid, because there are rooms full of women who are working their asses off every day to make sure that she’ll be safe. That even if she lives in an anti-abortion state, there’s undoubtedly a group there dedicated to making sure she’ll be okay.
That’s the thing: we’re living in a brutal time, and it is hard to know what to do. And while I don’t know what the answer is, I do know it lives somewhere in these rooms.
I think of Abortion, Every Day as a ‘room’ of sorts, too. With the help of you all, we’ve created a community where we can commiserate and support each other, share information and activate change. And we have! Over the next few days, I’ll send emails outlining what we’ve accomplished in the two years since Dobbs, and what we should be looking towards next.
In the meantime, help me get some more people in the room. I’m dedicated to getting as many young people reading the newsletter and joining the conversation as possible. So if you’re under 25 years-old and want a free upgraded subscription, just message me and it’s yours. For other readers, consider sponsoring a subscription for a young activist!
Dobbs donations
There are so many incredible organizations working to restore and protect abortion rights. You can find a round-up of groups I love here, or check out this incredible thread where AED community members shared their favorite organizations. You can also never go wrong by donating to your local abortion fund or independent clinic.
Thank you for this. Something that occurred to me, in reading the New York Times coverage today, was that for all the short-term horror, in the long run, SCOTUS may have turned out to do us a favor in making the Dobbs ruling. Like prohibition, which took 12 years to overturn, Americans are seeing the folly and harm of trying to make abortion illegal. I predict we will get Roe, or something better than Roe, enshrined in legislation or the Constitution out of this. We may even get the ERA! Maybe not in my lifetime, but in my daughter’s lifetime, and/or that of my 3 granddaughters. Meanwhile, I just donated 2 subscriptions. i can’t express enough gratitude for the work you all are doing.
While returning to Roe would be better, far better, than the status quo, we really need to do better than Roe.
There were many humiliating (and expensive) hurdles to overcome under Roe. That is, if you were lucky enough to live in a state that really implemented Roe. What’s written on paper doesn’t work unless the people governed by the law understand it and believe in it. It’s essential to have the those enforcing the law uphold it, not subvert it.
We can and should do better than Roe. No woman should ever be second guessed when she wants to end her pregnancy, especially when her fetus has no chance of survival. A woman who knows she is pregnant and wants to be pregnant doesn’t stay pregnant for months on end and then have an abortion on a whim.
No doctor should have to practice under the threat of prosecution when providing quality medical services to the patient under his/her care. No lawyer should be writing laws to prevent women from receiving medical care when those lawyers have never had medical training and never met the women and in writing those laws have ignored the warnings and advice of medical experts.
The forced birth crowd have had their chance to pass sensible laws. They’ve failed women. Miserably. Having seen their failure, they fail us again by not fixing the mess they’ve created. The forced birth crowd can tell themselves whatever lies they choose to believe, but those lies cannot be the basis for limiting women’s reproductive rights.
Abortion on demand and without apology. It just works.