Roe No: The Abortion Debate and What We're Fighting For

A little over a month ago the right to reproductive freedom was obliterated by the Supreme Court, a barely legitimized group of nine individuals nominated for life, three of whom were nominated by a barely legitimized President who was impeached twice and actively tried to overthrow the government. 

Photo courtesy of Emma Guliani

I’ve been grappling with what to write about this for weeks, as every time I start I just get unfathomably angry. When only 8% of people believe that abortion should be illegal in all cases, how are we living in a country where in so much of the country it’s no longer legal? So I sat down to really pull it apart and understand why this feels like a robbery. I’m going to spend a few newsletters on this, pulling apart what we’re fighting for, what they’re fighting for, and where we go next.

I’ll start with my story. I’ll try not to be long-winded or dramatic, although it felt dramatic, or harrowing, as it felt harrowing, because I am very fortunate. 

My story is actually pretty mundane.

It happened in a state that has always protected the right to choice. And I grew up middle class, with means and access, in a progressive household, and with a strong sense of what my future should hold--and even at a young age, I was certain it should hold education and opportunity. My story happened the first week of college, across the country from my family and everyone I knew. All my friends, including my dumb high school ex-boyfriend, were scattered to their prospective colleges and universities, on the precipice of the next stage of life. 

So when I found out I was pregnant, I relied on a network of freshmen girls, all out of their element and thrown together for the first time, and school counselors, all overwhelmed with the influx of other students with other problems, to help me navigate the world of finding an abortion in a small California town. I called my ex to talk about it, and he, weepy and wide-eyed, imagined for one moment what it would be like for us to be parents. I almost laughed in his overly romantic face, and he finally agreed I should get an abortion, and he would pay for half. So we scrounged what felt like a whole lot of money together, and I went to the clinic, and handed an unempathetic doctor the money, and in a whoosh, it all happened, and my life was my own again. Except it wasn’t. The next day I started hemorrhaging, and went to the emergency room, and they fixed it up.  It was when I got the bill for the emergency room that I reached out to my parents, ashamed, to tell them what happened and that I needed some money, or insurance, or whatever adults did when confronted with bills. They were understanding and kind, got our insurance to cover emergency room costs, and we rarely spoke of it again after that. 

It was a pretty awful start to my college career. 
But it was also glorious.

I had a choice to pursue my future. I needed no one’s permission--not my parent’s, or my partner’s, or the state’s. I did not have to wait, or watch a video of an abortion, or an ultrasound, or talk about “options.” I did not have to live in fear of an arbitrary cut-off date like the 6-week bans.  I was probably 8 weeks or so along; I had missed a period, but I was young and flighty and in a major transition, and my pregnancy did not even register until I started throwing up on my walks to class. I did not have to worry that the women--girls, really--who helped me would be criminally implicated in my choice. And when something went wrong I did not have to fear going to the hospital and being caught in a criminal act. 

Instead I got a procedure done close to my college campus. Dealt with the physical and emotional repercussions without the added worry of illegality or potential criminality. And continued to live my life.

This is why I bring up my story. Like many women, I want to share it to normalize it and to demonstrate why abortion access is so important to women being able to access a future. About 57% of people getting abortions are 20-29, prime college, career, and family building time. That’s a lot of people who might otherwise leave school, lose careers, or even miss out on taking the best care of their families, as 60% of people getting abortions have already given birth to one child. 

So what are we fighting for?

Is it access to this medical procedure that saves futures, and even saves lives? The answer is yes--but it’s something more. It ladders up to something much bigger, which is why on June 24, the day Roe was overturned, so many of us felt a massive collective grief and loss.

There are so many dimensions to the abortion issue. The legality has gotten impossibly complex as a patchwork of states gleefully implement bans and let their citizens sort through a maze of yet-to-be-defined legal implications. The access was already brutal, with one clinic in Mississippi which shut down, and is now worse, with swaths of multiple states where abortion is illegal. The criminalization of abortion care makes criminals out of doctors, patients, and those who help them.

On top of all that there is a sense of loss around a freedom that anyone born after 1973 has always known. A sense of equality born of access to a future. And so my brain wants to do more than mourn the loss. Or tell my story. Or funnel money to abortion funds to protect people who are now starved of access. It’s to understand the full gamut of what this has done.

To help break down we’re fighting for, I used a benefit ladder to apply some thought to the language used. Thank you, brand building skills!

Safe abortion is the crux of it. Access to a procedure or more commonly now medicine. It’s so simple that midwives could do it, and now a pack of pills can do it.

Beyond that it is about the right, the legality. This has been the language of the movement for a very long time: pro-choice, reproductive rights, fighting for the law that protected us for so long.

Then activists recognized that it wasn’t just about the legal right to make your own reproductive choices, but around a whole series of structural and systemic access points and shifted to reproductive justice. This was broader, about the system of how we build families.

But to me it ladders up to freedom: a transformative space where people who give birth go from second class citizens subject to biological handcuffs to full and equal citizens, able to chart their own paths forward.

 And because this version of the benefits ladder does not just see the transformational benefit for the individual, but the true benefit for society. There are so many benefits: more loving families, less crime and poverty, more access to education and careers. But the ultimate benefit is one of equality. Where a person isn’t doomed to a certain fate because of their biology. Where anyone born a woman has as much control over their body and their future as anyone born a man.

So that’s what I’m fighting for. Pretty basic stuff. But we’re up against a lot—people who believe as deeply in something quite opposite. And it’s hard to navigate how to make change happen. in my next few posts I’ll explore all of that.

In the meanwhile, my team over at Ladies Who Strategize developed this one-pager of resources to help you figure out how to donate, share, support, protest, walk out, and of course, get access to freedom.

Lws Action & Support One Pager

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You’ve just read Framing, a regular newsletter about what’s good culture, marketing, and business by Anita Schillhorn van Veen. I’m Director of Strategy at McKinney, on the lead team of Ladies Who Strategize, and a writer over at my other favorite Substack Why Is This Interesting.

I write this newsletter and distribute it freely because I enjoy writing and thinking through problems—if you appreciated this, donate to the National Network of Abortion Funds or subscribe below.