Stay Mad

Don't let them normalize post-Roe horrors

I do my best to stay positive. Despair isn’t an option when you’ve settled into a long-haul fight like the one we have in front of us for abortion rights. But I must admit, there are times when keeping my head up is harder than others. 

This week, I did back-to-back events in Michigan and Florida—going from speaking to a roomful of college students in Grand Rapids to an audience of women in their 60s, 70s and 80s at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser in Palm Beach. All of the women I spoke to were furious, energized, and, frankly, in disbelief. 

Older women, who raged at the eradication of a right they fought so hard to secure, were terrified for their daughters and granddaughters. After all, they remember what it was like before Roe. Younger women, in shock over stories like Brittany Watts’ and Kate Cox’s, were desperate for advice on how to help stop the nightmare. 

And while their well-justified anger and energy reinvigorated me—as in-person events always do—I also found myself at a loss. Because the question that came up again and again, regardless of generation, was why are they doing this to us? 

10 year-olds mandated to give birth. Miscarriage patients being arrested. Women forced to carry doomed pregnancies to term, turned into ‘walking coffins’. 

Why do they hate us so fucking much?

They expect doctors to watch patients deteriorate into sepsis, and pregnant cancer patients to forgo radiation. They’re passing laws that have women losing fallopian tubes and uteruses, while directing OBGYNs to give patients with life-threatening pregnancies c-sections rather than a ten minute abortion.

There’s no talking point that can explain away that cruelty, no political stance to make sense of the horror. They want us to suffer, and they don’t care if we die. But accepting that very evident truth is harder than you’d think. 

Because despite story after story showing the savagery of these laws, we’re still watching women’s lives be debated in the most ordinary, everyday way. Whether it's in state houses, op-eds or college classrooms, whether we live or die has been reduced to a bullet point or some tweaked language in a bill. As if we were just another issue for discussion, rather than living, breathing, feeling human beings. 

It’s that mundanity that scares me the most. We may be winning at the polls, but when it comes to the normalization of women’s suffering and oppression—we’re losing, badly. 

How is it possible, for example, that politicians want to hold women hostage in anti-choice states and it’s not on the front page of every newspaper? Instead, we get placid articles about ‘anti-trafficking’ laws and ordinances—as if it’s absolutely normal for the government to prevent pregnant people from traveling.

How did small children being forced into pregnancy become something controversial rather than unthinkable? The average 10 year-old girl is just over 4 feet tall—too small to ride some roller coasters, yet big enough for a grown man to demand she risk pelvic fractures and fistulas so that he can keep his A+ rating with a local ‘pro-life’ organization. 

For some things, there are no ‘both sides’—just a clear moral truth that we choose to see or ignore. 

It’s true, women’s oppression has always been woven into the fabric of this country, but that doesn’t mean we let our suffering become business as usual. It is not normal to live like this. 

There is nothing usual about doctors trading middle-of-the-night texts on how to legally justify saving a woman’s life, or pilots surreptitiously flying patients out of anti-choice states so they can get the care they need. 

Legislators knowing that their bans will make women suicidal is not normal, nor is a room full of men debating whether hemorrhaging counts as a medical emergency. 

We know how easily this country is fooled into accepting women’s suffering. We’ve watched it happen for decades with sexual violence: that women and girls are regularly raped has become an expected fact of life. It’s just the way things are. Boys will be boys. 

If we’re not careful, women dying while surrounded by doctors legally prohibited from helping them will suffer the same resigned fate. 

The war against women is brazen and cruel, but it’s the terror of the ordinary we need to watch out for.

Anti-abortion lawmakers and activists are counting on us being too overwhelmed to stop them from normalizing this madness. They know that being sad, angry and exhausted all the time is difficult—if not impossible—to keep up. They figure if they can keep hitting us with horror after horror, the next time we read a story of a woman going septic we’ll respond with a resigned head-shake rather than energized outrage. 

Talking to women this week, from teenagers to octogenarians, I can see we’re on the precipice. This moment is so hard, for all of us. The truth, though, is that it will need to stay that way. 

We must keep treating these violations as just that—outrageous indignities that we will not put up with. There’s no such thing as overreacting, not anymore. 

I was asked quite a lot this week how I do this work every day without crashing and burning. How can we all—given how difficult this is—possibly keep it up? My only answer is: you just do. 

I truly wish I had a response that didn’t ask so much of us all. But there’s no magic solution. The moment requires sustained outrage. We just keep going. Because the alternative—that this nightmare becomes tolerable—means we’ve conceded. And that’s simply not an option.

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