i do not want to be asked how i feel or what to say today because there is no way to feel, nothing to say. this is about me as much as it is about every single one of us, and until you lie on your back with your legs spread and choose to get it vacuumed out of you, too, you can’t really understand that. what they want to take from you isn’t your right to bodily autonomy or your right to choose or your right to your uterus or whatever cute thing people write on posters. it’s your life. it’s your whole life.
the minute you walk into the appleton planned parenthood and they tell you it’s legal for a man to hold a megaphone in your face, to trail you with the scope of his rifle because he’s standing on his own property, you see the way this country views all people who seek life-affirming care. that’s what abortion is - it’s life-affirming care. it is a medical procedure that saves your life. not life in the sense of the breathing and the heart beating and the brain functioning. life in the sense of getting up every day and deciding to do it again. life in the sense of deciding what you want and being able to do it. life in the sense of surviving.
the only thing i hate more than the term “abortion story” is the idea of the “life of the mother.” without abortion there is no life. that’s what they’re trying to take from you. it’s too simple to say that they want to control your body. they’re coming for your life. they want that moment, when you’re staring at the ceiling and they’re telling you it’s over and you barely even realize it started, when you realize that something they told you would ruin you barely registers as a moment in your day. when you understand that now you are free to have the life you’ve imagined, that no one can tell you when it ends or when it starts. they want the moment when you realize that you are the one who decides. it’s the same moment when you understand that you are the one with the right to life. until you have that moment, you don’t fully realize that they aren’t just coming for you. they’re coming for everyone who wants to decide.
i work in advertising now because i was able to get two abortions and many people would tell you that probably wasn’t worth it. i don’t have much to say about that but i can tell you that i’ve learned a little about the names we give to things and why that matters. the popular conception of who is fighting for the “right to life” is the best marketing scam going right now. the only people who fight for the right to any kind of life in this pathetic excuse for a country are the people who fight for our right to receive life-affirming care. the people who fight for free, dignified healthcare for everyone - no matter their gender or their race or the economic status or whether they’re pregnant when they simply would rather not be. the only right to life is ours. the idea that anyone who would deny anyone else any kind of medical care is “pro-life” is the kind of absurdity i would write into a satire on another planet and have to edit out because it was too obvious.
that’s why the term “abortion story,” is another one i hate. because calling the way we discover we deserve to live too an “abortion story” doesn’t do anything to solve the fact that we keep making this whole fucking thing about a baby who will never exist. that’s what they want - all of them. joe biden and the democrats and the people at planned parenthood, a lot of the time, and everyone else too. they want you to tell that abortion story like it was a moment in your life that passed because they don’t want you to understand that it is your whole life. they don’t want you to understand that you deserve it. you deserve to live, not for a moment, not if you’re good enough, not if you’re sorry enough, but always.
so, no. there is no story of my abortion, there’s only the story of my life, and that was the beginning, not the end. but the woman who gave me both of my abortions was the same - she traveled between appleton and chicago because there weren’t enough people in the area trained to do them. the second time i saw her i could have been mortified, i guess, to appear as a slut a second time in front of a medical professional. but when i reminded her that i’d seen her before, she said, “do you think that makes you special?”
it doesn’t. it doesn’t make any one of us special and that’s the point. every time we work to affirm our own lives - our own right to this life we’ve bravely decided to keep living - they want to make us feel like we’re special, like we’re outliers, like we’re daring to do some extraordinary thing for which we must offer sufficient proof that we have the right - that we’re only worthy if we display significant emotional justification and adequate shame. you’ll hear a lot of that today and in the coming weeks and all of it is a way to make you seem less human in a public way, in front of the people who will never believe you should exist, no matter what you say. a life without agency is a kind of death. that is what america is asking of trans people, of pregnant people, of black people, of immigrants. and the only story of the way we must affirm our own right to life over and over and over is that there should never have to be one.
there is no story of my abortions but there is the story of that woman who saved my life not once but twice, who made me realize that i had a right to my own stupid, meaninglessness, mess of a life.
her name is mindy and if there’s a me in some other universe who decided to have that daughter, i hope that’s what she named her.
one last thing, and then let’s all go have our weekends, if we can. i see many people comparing this ruling to the concealed carry ruling. they are the same. when people tell you that american conservatism, that evangelicalism, is a death drive, this is what they mean. to live in america is to live in a life-denying nation. we see this over and over, when there is funding for fascist police and military buildup and never for education or healthcare. i’m not shaming or saying i told anyone so because it’s very upsetting to acknowledge that you live in a society that would welcome your death before fighting for your life. but please understand that the rationale for these rulings is the same - you, as a living, breathing, dissenting human, do not have the right to your life. america has showed you its priorities. believe it.
