FM Weekly 4.11

9 April 2023

content notice: abortion restrictions, anti-fat legislation, racist postpartum & newborn care, anti-trans pregnancy language

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If you’d like to attend one or two virtual talks I’m giving this week about my work on scripting, consent, chaperones, ethics, trauma-informed care, check out the flyer below and RSVP here!

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This is part-ramble, part-hope, part-secret sharing.

Last spring when the Dobbs decision was leaked, I felt deeply, deeply sad. There are not enough words to describe how you know something is coming but are still completely devastated when it actually happens. Folks within sexual and reproductive health and rights clinical and advocacy movements would have been (and still are) the first to tell you that Roe was not ideal, that it was already fractured within states, and yet when it fell, the outrage was palpable in my inner circles. The shockwaves hit again when the final decision was announced.

That’s how the Texas mifepristone decision felt on Friday. We’ve been on hold for weeks, knowing what was to come given that the judge was overtly anti-abortion and religious and unabashedly stepping out of bounds to make such a decision. In about a million ways, we knew. And yet, when the first news came out, my heart fell. My wife had just started to make dinner when I heard her yell out to me. Suddenly, MSNBC was telling me about the decision. The rush to read the documents and interpret what was happening, alongside news out of Washington state that already conflicted with the Texas decision, was immediate. And it continues.

Part of the reason why I feel both sadness and outrage lies in (what should have been) unnecessary new work ahead, the grief in losing an approach to work that had been cultivated for years, and a regret that perhaps something different could have happened to change the outcome. The tireless work of so many for so long has somehow still lead us to this point is a confusing thing to reconcile. And we all know why, right? Because the work for rights and freedom are done by the marginalized and the oppressed, and those in power, the white cis able-bodied capitalist racist misogynist colonialist few, still operate the systems, and within systems, designed by and form them, meant to benefit only them. So again, while these changes have been heartbreaking, they are predictable as well as shocking, because it is proof that the system continues to work as designed. And that these systems are against all of us, in the end.