My daughter knows that I’ve had two abortions. It’s not something I’ve ever hidden or shied away from, because abortion is nothing to be ashamed of.
In the same way my husband and I told her about the day we met, or how babies are made, conversations in our house about abortion have always been normalized.
She knows that I ended a pregnancy right before I met her father, and that it was because I wasn’t ready to be a parent. She knows that I had an abortion when she was 3 years-old, even though I desperately wanted another child, because of the risk to my health and life. She knows that she is glad about both of those abortions because without them, she wouldn’t have the life she has now. Without them, she might not exist—or she might not have a mom.
Even now that Layla is 11 years-old, people find this upsetting—ignoring the horrific irony of believing she’s too young to know about ending a pregnancy but old enough to be forced to carry one.
So when my daughter saw me sobbing yesterday over Roe, she knew why. After offering me a hug and words wiser than most kids her age could muster, she asked a question that broke my heart: “But I’ll be okay, right?”
She knows that she lives in a state where, for now, abortion rights are protected; she knows that we have the resources to get her the care she needs, a privilege many others don’t have. She knows we have to fight for the people who live in states where abortion has become illegal.
But that doesn’t mean that she’ll always be okay, and I don’t have it in me to lie to her.
Layla now lives in a country where she will grow up with less rights than her mother and grandmother. In a place where her second-class citizenship has been enshrined by the highest court—her life deemed less important than her potential to carry a pregnancy.
And while it’s undeniable that the most marginalized among us will be the most impacted by abortion bans—exponentially so, in fact—that does not mean that everyone else is safe. No one is.
The idea that certain women will always be able to get abortions—something that’s become a common, well-meaning refrain on the left—isn’t just incorrect, but dangerous. It lulls blue state women into a false sense of security, ignores the very real possibility of a national ban, and lends credence to the Republican lie that women will mostly be fine in a post-Roe world.
We can focus our activist energy on those who need it most without claiming that some women won’t feel the effects of all this. Privilege will make things easier, but it won’t make anyone immune.
I won’t mislead my daughter about what’s ahead. She was already growing up surrounded by misogyny, in a place where people treat women as less than fully human. Yesterday, her country told her that those people are right. How can our daughters ever feel or be okay when the hatred against them has been codified?
I will tell Layla the truth about abortion today, in the same way I’ve always told her the truth about abortion. And while she may not feel comforted by how at risk we all are and how backwards this country has gone, I will also remind her of this: It is my absolute primal imperative to protect her, and there are few people more tenacious than mothers.
I will tell her that the people who think they can control her body may have won for now, but that we have determination and the moral high ground. I will tell her that young people know more and fight just as hard as my generation and her grandmother’s did. I will tell her that she has more power than she realizes.
Most of all, I will tell her to never feel alone. Because she’s not. Our daughters deserve the truth: That they should be scared, but never hopeless.
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As a dual US-NL citizen living in The Netherlands, I would like to point out that the anti-abortion/anti-civil rights agenda is alive and well here, despite the self-trumpeted reputation of the Dutch as being tolerant and supportive of human rights.
Last November, an anti-abortion advertising campaign, 'The Week of the Unborn Child' ran guilt-inducing spots thst drew a record number of complaints to the national advertising standards body, Ster. ( https://www.nporadio1.nl/nieuws/binnenland/c9ca2743-5c6a-4b9a-b3b2-10b345cc11e9/recordaantal-klachten-over-anti-abortusreclame-het-is-heel-erg-op-schuldgevoel sorry, not in English but there is a clip of the advert if you know a dutch/flemish speaker; or it might be useful to save.) The *complaints were so numerous that Ster stopped accepting them*.
For years the Dutch government has moved independent services for women under the grip of government control, then cut back the funding. So that now, any hrlp an abused woman might seek necesaarily goes through a network that effectively puts a woman's situation and narrative under the control of the government. See where this leads? If an abuser has contacts in the right places, the victim can pretty much go whistle Dixie. She might be told, by a *specialist in domestic abuse care* that she "must put it behind" her, even if the abuse is still affecting her life. Erasing a woman's knowledge of her own truth and dis misding her right to speak of it, is how women will lose every singld right to se lf agency and determination.
I don't say there aren't decent compassionate people in NL, but the fact is that country re-elected a party (VVD) that covered up horrific civil and human rights abuses (see Amnesty International's report on the racist algorithms employed by the Dutch Tax Office https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/10/xenophobic-machines-dutch-child-benefit-scandal/) that resulted in over a thousand children being forcibly removed from their parents' care, due to falsified charges of fraud by the Tax Office that targeted persons with a non-Dutch ethnic background. Many of those children are *still in foster care*- (the organisation campaigning for unborn children is not sending out adverts about that!), and the families ruined by this abuse are still pressing for agreed compensation and corrective measures to be fulfilled.
I will continue to provide some insight on the situation here as circumstances evolve. Or, as I get more pissed off, i guess i'll start up a substack page of my own, so as not to clog up JV's. 🙄
I'm 63 and have been unafraid to label myself as a feminist since I was in my early twenties, despite taking a lot of flack for it. My daughters are now in their 30s and have evolved much further in their activism and understanding of human rights than I had ever been. My granddaughter is now 8, and she is following in their footsteps. It is extremely sad for me to see that they now have far less rights than I did in 1978, when I had my first abortion. I’m angry at the men and women in this country who are pushing an extremely fundamentalist agenda and ignoring what the majority of people want. I wrote my first Substack post about my experience with abortions and feminist activism, and I will continue on this mission until the day I die.
Jessica, I've been following you on Twitter for a couple of years now, and I am so grateful for your persistence and your strong voice. Thank you!