I, along with countless mothers, experienced this universal loss and gain this week when Charlie left for his sophomore year at San Diego State University. He had Tetris-packed his Forester with a saxophone, guitar, electric piano, skateboard, wetsuit, boogie board, and some clothes. He hugged Derek and me, we took a few photos, and he gave our old beagle, Margo, a squeeze. She actually looked despondent that he was leaving even though Charlie mostly harasses her.

Then he drove away.

I, too, was despondent, but decided to channel the emotional turmoil into industriousness. Before Charlie was a mile down the 101, I had already begun bagging up his childhood books on his bookshelf and replacing them with mine, which had been haphazardly stacked on the floor of my living room like leaning towers of literature for too long. However, when I grabbed Guess How Much I Love You, a book our friends the Treurs gave us two months before Derek and I became parents, a book I read hundreds of times to the boys, I could not get myself to bag it up. I almost let myself read it, but no. I would not have my productivity derailed by tears!

I have said goodbye to my sons so many times. Thousands of daily, routine farewells. I never take one for granted. You never know.

Some have been monumental.

Like Diego’s first day of kindergarten. For some reason, even though he’d gone to preschool and had survived that dropoff without an issue, this time he was in a panic, clinging to me, mammal to mammal. His teacher peeled my hysterical child off me and took him into her classroom. One of his classmate’s mother witnessed the unfolding drama and said: “I don’t know you, but I’m going to give you a hug.” That was Eileen, who, 15 years after that traumatic moment, is one of my dearest friends.

I began to leave the school, walking across the playground blacktop toward the parking lot, when I saw Diego running away from his teacher and the principal. When they caught him, my dear, sweet Diego lay on the ground and tried to kick them. I was alarmed but they told me to please just leave. Perhaps against my better judgment, I kept walking. I pulled out my cell phone and called Derek, who I thought was at home. I told him it didn’t go well. He said: “I know, I saw the whole thing—I’m hiding in the bushes!” We are not criers. But oh boy did we cry that morning.

There was the goodbye when we left Charlie in Barcelona, where he was enrolled to study for a few months. We’d bought him a used bicycle, and on our last evening before hopping on a plane to head home, he said goodbye and biked into the night towards his dorm. I thought I would sink into the ground.

On the plane the next morning, Derek was a wreck. We banked hard over the Mediterranean, Barcelona in plain view, and turned toward Newark. Neither one of us could bear the physical distance we were putting between ourselves and our 17-year-old boy. He’d finished high school two trimesters early and had convinced me to enroll him at the Universitat de Barcelona for a semester, which at first sounded amazing. But as Derek and I were punched with the reality of dropping our kid off in a foreign land and crossing the pond for home, the reality was nauseating.

These goodbyes don’t seem to get any easier.

Ah, but the empty nest!

According to Psychology Today, the concept of empty nest syndrome was proposed in 1914 “to describe the slide into depression that supposedly occurred for women after their last child left home and they were stripped of the daily meaning and structure of the motherhood role.”

After we moved Charlie into the dorm at San Diego State last year for his freshman year, I did not slide into depression. I missed my children viscerally, but there was plenty to do: I helped Derek at the office. I hiked and surfed. Derek and I cooked dinner every night like we always have. After the workday, he wrote songs and I picked away at a novel. We returned to the things we did BK. Before Kids.

As parents, we gave it our all. As any parent knows, It wasn’t always pretty or seamless, but damn if we didn’t love those boys. Our children are ridiculously precious to us—nerve-rackingly precious. That’s the rub with parenting—it’s so counter-intuitive. I’m supposed to protect you and keep you safe (because I can’t bear the thought of anything terrible happening to you); and yet I’m supposed to kick you out of the nest to grow and learn.

The precarity of it is maddening. My paternal grandmother buried three children. The third was my father, and I held her hand at his funeral. No mother should suffer that much loss. I understand deep in my genes what’s at stake.

Having the boys gone and out in the world does not erase the fear or worry; in fact, it deepens it because I really don’t have control. But they are confident young men finding their way. I couldn’t be more proud. Diego didn’t come home this summer—he stayed in Bellingham and commuted an hour to an internship in Everett, Washington. He ran his own landscaping and junk removal company all last year and is about to begin his junior year at Western Washington University. Ah, but the four of us did reunite for our annual summer trip to Ohio and Canada, and I cherish that because who knows when we’ll all do another trip together?

The “freedom” of having them gone is bittersweet. Part of the sweetness: Rather than taking two decades to finish two novels, I have drafted my latest, a psychological drama tentatively titled Mommy, in just one empty-nesting year. As a woman in my mid-50s, I finally have the experience, the confidence—and now the time—to pursue the thing I’ve always dreamed of: being a writer. Pretty sweet.

I came at motherhood reluctantly. I didn’t know if I wanted to have kids because I was unsure I’d be a good mother. We decided to try, and I became a mom at 35 when I had Diego and then had Charlie at 36. Diego was 9 months old and still nursing when I told Derek: If we conceive tonight, we can have a Virgo…. And what do you know, it worked, but that meant that the babies were 17 months and 11 days apart, gah!

I learned to be a mom along the way, in real time, and I learned that I loved motherhood. I even managed to keep my marriage intact, though it was touch-and-go when the kids were little, as I imagine it is for many married couples. It makes sense: You’re suddenly not able to do what it is you want to do. You suddenly need to adapt to being a full-time caregiver. Your office becomes your sons’ bedroom, but there’s not really any time to write anyway. It’s hard and often sucks: you’re sleep deprived, your nipples are sore, you’re overwhelmed by crying and histrionics and poop and pee and exhaustion and chaos. Your autonomy and freedom are gone.

And yet.

I come back to David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College, a speech I revisited every quarter with my Cal Poly students. These are my favorite lines:

When Diego and Charlie express gratitude for the mom I’ve been, I tell them: It has been my greatest pleasure. Because loving them gave me that kind of freedom.

Yes we sacrificed for them. Money, time, energy. Countless trips to Clovis and Stockton for water polo tournaments. Derek and I spent our 25^th wedding anniversary driving to Visalia for one. Before the game began, we ate a forgettable pho restaurant in a forgettable strip mall.

Despite our pedestrian meal, that night is etched in my memory because Derek and I were so grateful to still be together after the trials and travails of a quarter century of marriage and child rearing. Charlie, co-captain of the water polo team, was about to play his last game as a high-schooler, and we were about to launch headlong into the uncharted territory of empty nesters.

I had no idea how much I would love being a mother; I never expected so many dividends. I had no idea how much capacity for love was in me. I had no idea that my children would actually love me back. And I truly had no idea what it would feel like to say goodbye. It is quite a feat to attempt to gracefully let go of the beings you love this much.

Anyway, I have to go—Diego is calling. I’ll answer the phone all nonchalant: “Hey Diego, what’s up?”

But my heart?

My heart will be singing.

Thanks for reading.

I was traveling in the Pacific Northwest recently; it was cold—cold for me anyway—about 38 degrees. I had called for a ride to take me to the airport to fly home to San Luis Obispo. “Pablo” (not his real name) was wearing sporty wrap-around sunglasses and a baseball cap.

“Good morning,” I said, but he barely responded. I realized he might not speak English. And even though I speak Spanish, I didn’t want to make assumptions. Plus maybe he was just a quiet guy.

About a block away in the intersection of the residential neighborhood, an old man walked into the middle of the street flagging us down. Pablo put his window down.

“I am lost,” the old man said. “I not know my street. I am Greek. I am Jim.”

“Jim?” I asked him.

“Yes, I am Jim!”

Pablo was trying to ask Jim where he lived. Now I could hear his Spanish accent.

I said: “Está perdido el viejo.” The old man is lost.

“Sí,”he said. “Pobrecito.” Yes, Poor man.

Then also in Spanish, he said:” We have to figure out where he lives.”

“Jim, do you have an ID?” I asked him.

He fished it out of his wallet and Pablo and I looked at it. He put the address in his phone. Jim’s house was about 8 blocks away. I looked more closely at the ID.

“Jim, will you really be 100 this July?”

“Yes! 100!” he said, grinning.

It was getting colder. We got Jim in the front seat. He had a metal cart and a grocery bag that Pablo got into the trunk. As we headed to Jim’s, I got a text notification from the ride app asking if everything was OK since we stopped and were now veering off course. I asked Pablo if he would get in trouble for giving Jim a ride. He said he thought it would be OK—he would just have to make a report. But I realized that he was risking getting in trouble to help Jim.

Once at the house, I helped Jim out of the car. He gushed with appreciation and gave me a hug. I asked him if we should take a selfie.

“Yes!” He was beaming, as you can see.

Pablo got out and gave Jim his cart and grocery bag. Jim shook Pablo’s hand, patted him on the arm, and said: “Thank you! You are my grandson!”

We made sure Jim got in his house and resumed our drive to the airport. Now that Pablo knew I spoke Spanish, we chatted about his life.

He’s told me he was from Venezuela. I asked him about Maduro being removed.

“Maybe it was good that Trump did that because Maduro was so corrupt. But now he is deporting so many people…”

I asked him if he was worried about ICE, about deportation.

“For that reason, I drive almost exclusively at night. I have a six-year-old daughter here in the States with me. What would happen to her if I were deported?”

“Would you be sent back to Venezuela?”

“I don’t think so—I would probably be sent to El Salvador, to the prison—that’s where they are sending people.”

He was referring to CECOT, the maximum-security prison where hundreds of undocumented people have been sent without due process.

I said that sounded terrifying, and he nodded.

“But I have hope. I left Venezuela years ago. I’ve worked in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico before making my way here. My whole family is still in Venezuela, but I made a plan for my life when I was young that I would move to the United States and work hard.”

He asked me about my family, and I told him about my spouse and young adult sons. When we got to the airport a few minutes later, Pablo got my suitcase out of the trunk. We shook hands and I wished him luck. He was so calm and soft-spoken—a gentle man. He is Jim’s grandson!

Every day people are doing kind things to take care of each other. Strangers are helping strangers; neighbors are lending a hand. This kindness is interspersed with terrible, cruel acts. But the goodness, the kindness, the love will trump the cruelty.

“Look for the helpers” is what Mr. Rogers said his mom told him. “You will always find people who are helping.” I find myself circling back to this small experience of Pablo helping Jim—one human helping another. It continues to serve as an antidote to despair for me.

Thanks for reading.

I want folks to understand the chilling effect, not just on critical abortion care, but on the entirety of women’s health — all of it. There are good reasons why so many women and physicians are horrified by what’s happened since Donald Trump’s justices overturned Roe v Wade. We’re seeing women scrambling across state lines to get the care they need. Y’all, we are teetering on the edge.

And this will not just affect women, it will affect you and your sons. The devastating consequences of teen pregnancy won’t just be borne by young girls, but also by the young men who are the fathers. They, too, will have their dreams of going to college, their entire futures totally upended by an unwanted pregnancy.

I nearly had my own dream of college upended. Allow me to set the stage. No one in my family had a college degree. My mom worked graveyard at UPS during most of my elementary school years. My father struggled with both bipolar disorder and alcoholism, and after he and my mom separated when I was 8, he spent several years homeless, including stints on Skid Row. He died at 53, the age I am right now. He was dear to me.

My teenage years were quite rough. We had a two-bedroom apartment near Cal State Northridge—my brother had one room, and I shared a room and bed with my mother. At 15, I got a job at Jack in the Box to pay for my own braces. After school and on weekends, I biked through the hazy smog of the San Fernando Valley to earn $3.15 an hour. I got the braces. I was determined.

I loved learning, loved reading and writing. At 16, a sophomore, a former teacher offered to mentor me. His sister was a journalist, and I thought I’d like to be one someday too. But instead of helping me become a journalist, he helped me become pregnant.

Had I not had access to a safe and legal abortion, my life would have been totally derailed.

It was a very difficult time. I felt sullied and ashamed. My grades plummeted. It seemed that with every step forward, I fell two steps back.

My senior year of high school, my mom and I moved to an apartment in Redondo Beach, which allowed me a fresh start. I ran cross country, made friends, went to football games for the first time, dated high school boys. Still, the damage to my grade-point-average—along with a lack of funds—meant I wouldn’t be attending a four-year university. Rather, I enrolled in a community college, El Camino College. My AP English teacher, Mrs. Bourette (sp?) told me I would never get out of there—that I might as well go to beauty school. I’m certain her goal was to demean me rather than motivate me.

I worked a retail job, got my own place, and took classes—biology, physics, general chemistry, Spanish, racquetball. I cast a wide net. I loved science and math but was also drawn to language and literature. Preparing to transfer to a four-year university, I moved back in with my mom and started waiting tables, which earned more money than retail. I transferred to the University of California at Santa Barbara, kept working, paid my way through college without a cent of help from anyone, paid for a year abroad in Argentina and Chile, and graduated from UCSB with honors.

From there, I married my pen pal, moved to San Luis Obispo, went to graduate school at Cal Poly, and then started teaching at Cuesta College and Cal Poly, where I taught for 16 years. I gave birth to Diego at 35 and to Charlie at 36. Whereas I had lived in a dozen different places by the time I was 18, I raised my sons not only in the same town but the same house. Today, Diego is a freshman in college at Western Washington University. Charlie is a senior, captain of the San Luis Obispo High School water polo team; he’s graduating early to spend a semester in Barcelona, and in the fall, he’ll go to a college to study economics or architecture.

It seems like Republicans would really appreciate this arc, which I think represents grit and tenacity, a pull-yourself-up-by-your-boot-straps self-reliance that they really seem to admire. I can guarantee one thing: None of it would have happened had I given birth at 16 to my former teacher’s baby.

This summer, I was talking to a family member about J. D. Vance. I had read Hillbilly Elegy when it first came out, and appreciated how Vance had, like me, improved his life through education and sheer grit. I told the family member I was disappointed that Vance had moved so far right, that he was so anti-abortion. I’m pretty sure the family member said, “Ugh, you and the abortion thing.” Yeah, me and the abortion thing.

But I was disappointed in the fact that Vance, having come from a poor household, wasn’t taking into consideration how abortion bans or restrictions especially affect poor women, and not just because I’d been one when faced with my own unplanned pregnancy. But most people who seek abortions are not teens.

The statistics usually surprise people.

According to Forbes magazine:

•     59% of women who seek abortions are already mothers

•     49% are poor while the national poverty rate is about 12%

•     75% of women who seek abortions are low-income

•     55% of women who seek abortions report a recent disruptive life event such as the death of a close friend or family member, job loss, the termination of a relationship with a partner, or overdue rent or mortgage obligations.

And, according to Forbes, “These women also overwhelmingly lack access to paid maternity leave or to affordable childcare.” They are living at the margins, on the fringe.

Vance says he wants to be pro-family, so that women don’t feel like their only option is an abortion. But his party is the one that consistently votes against healthcare, childcare subsidies, maternity leave. And the state where he is a U.S. senator had one of the nation’s strictest abortion restrictions. Passed on April 11, 2019, the “Human Rights and Heartbeat Protection Right” was signed into law by Governor Mike DeWine. The law, which amounted to a six-week abortion ban, with no exceptions for rape, incest, or fetal viability, lasted for more than five years until it was struck down in October of this year by an Ohio judge.

I just wonder, Vice President Vance, can you imagine what your life would have been like if you had been a girl and gotten pregnant at 16? Do you think you would have been able to finish high school, enlist in the military, finished college and then law school? The thing about imagining. It requires empathy. It asks you to put yourself in her shoes.

I’m not a single-issue voter. But reproductive rights encompass much more than just the right to abortion, and the stakes are so high for girls, boys, men, women and society at large. I really don’t understand how men, if they are looking out for their daughters and granddaughters, would vote for a man who is willfully curtailing the rights of those women.

During her speech, Michelle Obama declared:  

So to the men who love us, let me just try to paint a picture of what it will feel like if America, the wealthiest nation on earth, keeps revoking basic care from its women and how it will affect every single woman in your life. Your girlfriend could be the one in legal jeopardy if she needs a pill from out of state or overseas or if she has to travel across state lines because the local clinic closed up. Your wife or mother could be the ones at higher risk of dying from undiagnosed cervical cancer because they have no access to regular gynecological care. Your daughter could be the one too terrified to call the doctor if she’s bleeding during an unexpected pregnancy. Your niece could be the one miscarrying in her bathtub after the hospital turned her away.

If you think this is an exaggeration of risks, I implore you to read this ProPublica article about an 18-year-old who died when her pregnancy, which she hoped to carry to term, took a turn for the worse. She made three visits to emergency rooms and doctors did not help her.

Michelle Obama also said:

To think that the men that we love could be either unaware or indifferent to our plight is simply heartbreaking. It is a sad statement about our value as women in this world. It is both a setback in our quest for equity and a huge blow to our country’s standing as a world leader on issues of women’s health and gender equality….We are more than just baby-making machines.

I got to decide when I was ready to make all the emotional, physical, and financial sacrifices motherhood demands, to undertake it when I was mature and calm enough to reap its rewards, which are so surprisingly plentiful and profound. I have loved—love—being a mother. It is the best thing that has ever happened to me, because I got to choose.

At 16, I was not ready.

you allowed yourself to get weird 
if you felt sufficiently confident 
if you weren't worried about judgment 
if you just let yourself feel everything 
if you let yourself play? 

How much would it delight you? 
How good would it feel? 

What's stopping us? 

You have an image in your mind
You have an idea that intrigues you 
You've been thinking about it for a while. 
Right now, in the beginning, in this imagining phase, the distance between the idea and the finished thing feels too great, like a chasm. 
So we don't even start because 

because why? 
are we going to disappoint ourselves? 

I have always loved painting even though...
even though I'm not very good at it. 
(What does that even mean?) 
I have abandoned paintings, destroyed paintings, donated canvases 
when that chasm felt too great. 

It is OK to abandon a project. 

It is not OK to give up trying, not OK to ignore your imagination and ideas. 

That deep place of concentration, of the seemingly incongruent state of dreamy focus...that's where we want to be sometimes, isn't it? Isn't it fun there? Sometimes? 

Haruki Murakami goes there. He goes there regularly. He relishes it. 
Throughout history, people have gone there. 

Let's go and stay awhile and see how it feels. 
Let's see what happens. 
Let's see what we make. 
We might delight the world or just ourselves. 
Doesn't matter. 
Let's go.

“I hadn’t realized how much emphasis I had put on suffering in my own practice. I had focused on coming to terms with the unpleasant, unacceptable, embarrassing, and painful things that I do. In the process, I had very subtly forgotten about joy.”

I could feel those words as they related so often to my own experience of life—and to writing.

If you are a maker—of songs, soups, paintings, drawings, stories, jewelry, knitted items—presumably you find some joy in the act. I find that with writing, joy can be elusive. Perhaps it’s in part because, in order to write something, the stars need to align to gift me both time and confidence. Usually I’m short on one and lacking the other.

So I’ve been trying to get better at carving out the only thing in that duo I have any real control over: Time. I can make time. I can clear my schedule. I can give myself two hours. I can’t necessarily conjure confidence the way the magician conjures the bunny out of her hat. But if I make time and just start, I will find myself writing, confidence or no confidence. Writing begets more writing, and if I’m really lucky, it will just flow without my force. So I just keep showing up because it’s a miracle when that happens.

There is a lot of talk in the writing world about quieting the inner-critic during first drafts when you’re just trying to get the story down. As I’ve been working on my latest book whose working title is Let the Dog Sing, I’ve been re-reading Stephen Koch’s book Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction. In the chapter on memoir writing called “The Story of the Self,” he writes about taking the first steps toward your story: 

“Depending on your openness and your talent, you will be crowded with scrappy narrative possibilities. You may cringe at some of them, and if, like me, you have a strongly critical temperament, it will be easy to find a nasty label for almost anything that comes into your mind: This is cliched, this is sentimental, the other is embarrassing, stupid, overdone, boring, unoriginal. These are the killer words, and what they kill is creativity.”

These words will crowd your mind, pretending to be friends, guardians, “proof of your discernment,” he writes. In the early stages of anything, we’re so vulnerable. This is why we don’t enthusiastically dive into projects when inspiration hits. We’re afraid to let ourselves begin—or if we do begin, we may tell ourselves how lame and pedestrian the work is. We might talk ourselves out of a project even after we’ve spent years on it.

A big part of my writing journey has been to be brave enough to allow more heart in. For Let the Dog Sing, I already have hundreds of pages from notes, interviews, and research. But there are stories I need to include, stories from my childhood that are integral to the book and that I knew would be hard to write. I write in a journal every day when I do my morning stretching, and so I decided to approach these stories in the same way—freely and handwritten. My son Charlie had bought me a beautiful journal for Mother’s Day and to his dismay, I hadn’t started using it yet (it was because it seemed too beautiful and precious to me!) so I decided to use it to write the first draft of these childhood stories for Let the Dog Sing.

I sat down, grabbed a pen I like, opened the journal, and started writing. Was I worried that it wouldn’t be good? Of course. But I told myself: It will be a draft, a perfect ‘shitty first draft’ (a phrase coined by the brilliant writer Anne Lammot in her inspirational best-selling book on writing Bird by Bird). We have to allow ourselves that shitty first draft, which will give us something to work with. The author James Michener once said: “I’m not a very good writer but I’m an excellent rewriter.” We just need to get the words down.

I recently listened to an interview with Neil Gaiman on the Tim Ferris Show, my go-to podcast. Gaiman told Ferris that he usually writes his first drafts of a story in a journal by hand and with a fountain pen. Then, after the entire draft is written down, he begins typing it into a word document, editing as he goes. That’s his second draft. No one sees the first draft; no one has to. Gaiman trusts the process. Dare I say, he might even have fun with it. I mean, he’s written almost 50 books for adults and children.

How are we going to blossom into our fullest creative selves if we don’t trust the process, if we don’t find some joy in it? Even and especially with our shitty first draft? Where could our imaginations take us if we allowed ourselves to be as cerebral or emotional or weird or dainty as we dared? What could we create?

Above my desk is a cut out from the New York Times book review of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.

In his book Novelist as a Vocation, he talks about his writing process:

“I wake up early, brew fresh coffee in the kitchen, pour some in a big mug, sit down at my desk….Then I muse about what to write that day. Such moments are pure bliss.”

But Murakami wasn’t always so confident with his own writing. His first attempt at writing a novel resulted in a boring book, he tells us. He had been trying too hard to sound writerly, to sound like a novelist, which is the death knell for a writer—to write not in your own voice but the way you think you’re supposed to sound. Nevertheless, that’s perhaps a necessary step for figuring out – and coming to trust – your own voice. Here’s how it went for Murakami—the advice that he finally gave himself:

“Why not forget all those prescriptive feelings about ‘the novel’ and ‘literature’ and set down your own feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in a way that you like?”

Yesterday in the afternoon after finishing work and my domestic duties, I went to a coffee shop, got a latte, sat in a chair, and opened my journal. Do I have to force myself to do this? I have to force myself to stop doing all the other things I could continue doing and carve out this time, even if I’m afraid nothing might come of it. I started writing. It was somewhat painstaking at first. I was a little tired, a little weary, which again, I attribute to a slight lack of confidence coupled with the question of whether I really deserve to be there in a café writing. Then over the course of the next hour, I “locked in,” as my son Charlie puts it. Pretty soon I was writing line after line after line. I would pause and stare at the ground or at the wall or at the back of a patron’s head without seeing any of it. I was all in, thinking, feeling, remembering, rendering. My energy picked up (the latte helped), and momentum coming from and pouring into the act of writing was, dare I say, joyful.  

Is any of it worth keeping? Will any of it make the final cut? I’m not worried about that for now. I’m attempting to foster creativity, not kill it. I’ll invite the critic later—and then my spouse Derek and his ruthless red pen. And the work will be all the better for it. But right now, I’m just going to keep trying to make time, a little every day whether I feel up to the task or not.

“You can do it,” Pema Chödrön tells us, echoing the masters Rinpoche and Thich Nhat Hanh. “You can connect with your joyfulness. You could start right now.”

Thanks for reading.

Are you—the Dog—too?

I have always loved writing letters. And one of the beautiful things about letter writing, especially putting pen to paper, is not knowing everything you are going to say, not really knowing where the writing itself will take you. With this newsletter, I’m not sure where the writing will go. I’m going to let it take me. Hence the title “let” the dog sing.

For the past few years, I’ve been thinking about what it means to find your voice. Finding your voice means so much: overcoming self-doubt; trusting you have something meaningful to say; and, finally, putting your words out there. For me, it’s not like I’ve gotten to step three and I just write whatever comes to mind with confidence. Rather, the entire neurotic process seems to play out every time I write, every time I create something and share it. But I’ve made some strides:

First, I started The Quickening newsletter in 2021 about abortion rights. Then I started literally putting my voice out into the world by making audio stories for our local NPR affiliate, KCBX, which necessitated overcoming the fear that I sound like a frog. Then I published a historical novel I’d worked on for more than a decade. Putting my voice out into the world was both exhilarating and terrifying. Vulnerability had never been my forte. I don’t know if my writing is improving through with these efforts, but my ability to be vulnerable is.

And the feelings of nervousness and trepidation I get from pivoting the subject of my newsletter from abortion rights to, well, other things, tells me that I’m moving in the right direction. I long to talk about so many other personal things that matter to me.

As some of you know, at a recent crossroads in my life, I took some chances that at the time felt radical. The physical, mental, and emotional changes that have resulted from my mid-life explorations have, in hindsight, made taking those chances worthwhile, though at the time I had no idea how everything would work out. Everything I did felt like a blind leap into the unknown, leaps of faith for the then-faithless.

To find myself I had to lose my footing. There is nothing so unique or profoundly original about that, and it is perhaps even a little cliché that the compulsion to take these risks arrived along with my 50^th birthday.

I left the university where I’d taught as an adjunct lecturer for 16+ years.

Yes, a motorcycle was involved.

A motorcycle, a life coach, art classes, dozens of books, psychedelic therapy. I cast a wide net.

I wrote this while in the thick of it:

Could I break the cycle, I wondered, of self-limiting behaviors?

Could I just choose WELL?  

Maybe you are past middle age. Maybe you’re in your twilight years. Maybe you’re in your twenties or late teens, just getting started on your life. No matter. Recently I found myself lamenting that I had not gotten HERE sooner. But how could I have?Santosha is the yoga concept that where you are right now is exactly where you need to be. The path is the path. Hence, how could I regret anything that happened in the past if it all got me to where I am now?

And where is that? A better place in so many ways. A less stuck place.

For so many years one of the worst things I could imagine was being misunderstood—and not  having the opportunity to fully explain myself or make myself understood. I have cared what people thought. Most of us do. But I have been a serious people-pleaser. I didn’t want anyone to know the things that made me feel shame and embarrassment. If I truly shared who I was and the things I’d gone through or what I wanted, I was worried I’d be judged. Of course, people will judge—we are evaluative by nature. The problem wasn’t people judging; the problem was my caring about it.

I had to let it go, that craving for approval.

I’ve been through a lot, and I’ve gained some knowledge and perspective over the years. I began to think: If I could find my voice, believe in myself, maybe I could be useful to someone. I’ve had to let go of the fear of that sounding presumptuous. After all, I don’t have it all figured out. I’m humbled every day by one thing or another. I’m still learning, still emerging, and will be, I hope, until this body is through with me. But maybe my experiences—my triumphs and travails as I bumble through this existence—could inspire someone else.

Eventually, I’ll share the story of the dog from the title. Because, of course, I am the dog. And maybe you are too. (Pardon my bastardization of the brilliant Emily Dickinson.) 

There’s so much I want to tell you, and a hugely important part of this voice-finding means writing more letters to you. So thank you for being here and being part of this journey. And if you don’t want to be here, that’s OK too. 

All my best,

Mel

To pivot, according to dictionary.com, means “to modify (a policy, opinion, product, etc.) while retaining some continuity with its previous version.” I’ve been ready to pivot for some time, to write about topics other than reproductive rights, even though I sometimes feel like it’s the only truly worthy topic. Nevertheless, here I am, pivoting!

If you know me personally or just read my intermittent newsletter, you know that I joined the Great Resignation and left Cal Poly in 2021 at 50 years old. This mid-life reckoning has been an interesting time, occasionally fraught with existential angst, other times with celestial bliss. I read so many books during this time; I learned to ride a motorcycle and then bought one and eventually sold it; I enrolled in art classes; I met with a life coach, who I thought would help me revamp my resume and change careers but instead gave me tools for integrating my head, heart, and gut; I participated in a clinical trial for psilocybin, which cured my atheism and fear of death and healed some childhood wounds; I started and sustained a daily yoga practice; I mothered two beautiful, always-hungry teenage sons; I addressed some self-limiting habits, behaviors and attitudes; and I stopped feeling shame or regret about my past. I was forgiven and forgave.

My desire to shift away from writing only about female reproductive rights has caused me some handwringing. Maybe I am afraid people might think I’ve said all I have to say about abortion and abortion rights or that I don’t care about the subject anymore. No way. It’s one of the most important, in my mind, fundamental issues of our time, a clear indicator of how women will be treated and valued in our society. And if there’s one thing that pisses me off, it’s injustice toward women and girls, meted out primarily by men. Our bodies are still battlegrounds.

But as I’ve said in a past letter, there are many people writing about abortion rights (including here on Substack)  who are keeping up with the attacks and the resistance. Still, I want you to know that with this pivot, I’m not turning away. In fact, in 2023, I received a fellowship from USC’s Center for Health Journalism to do a series of three audio stories for KCBX, our local public radio station and NPR affiliate, about domestic violence in our county. For several months I interviewed women in our county who have either survived intimate partner violence or who work to help survivors—or both. The last interview I conducted was with an undocumented woman, Lulu (her pseudonym ), a resident of San Luis Obispo who emigrated here from Mexico two decades ago. We spoke for four hours in Spanish, and her story is one I will never forget. One of the most difficult jobs I’ve ever had was distilling that hours-long interview into a meaningful 5-minute story for radio. Lulu’s harrowing tale made me understand why domestic survivors are referred to as such. The three-part series “Behind Closed Doors” can be heard here.

I’m working on a non-fiction book, a kind of memoir about my mid-life crisis, Let The Dog Sing: A Human Quest for Transcendence at the Middle of Life. Still working on the subtitle :)

I’m in the process of building a personal website, a home for my books and audio work. I’ll be moving my newsletter there eventually, but for now, I’ll continue to occasionally post on Substack. Hopefully more than occasionally, as there are so many things I am eager to write about and share. That said, if you’re like, Hey, I signed up for a newsletter about abortion rights, not whatever this newsletter’s becoming! and you decide to bow out, I understand. No hard feelings, I promise. However, if you want to stay along for the ride and see where this journey leads, lovely!

So here’s the pivot. I considered changing the name of my newsletter, but after looking up quickening to understand it in a broader context (besides pregnancy) it still feels right—for now.

I was one of the slowest runners on my high school cross-country team and used to cheer runners on as they passed me, which happened frequently. Doing great! Keep it up! Looking good! I’d yell as runners overtook me, even members of the opposing teams. At our end-of-season banquet, I was given an award for “Most Inspirational.” I cherished that accolade. I didn’t care too much  about winning; I just wanted to cheer people on.

So while I can’t promise the newsletter will be electrifying, thrilling, hair-raising, and spine-tingling, I’ll try to at least make it inspirational and invigorating. After all, I’m rooting for YOU.

Hope you’re taking care. Thanks for being here.

In between Mendoza and Cal Poly were substitute teaching gigs, including a stint for the San Luis Obispo school district where I tutored students who were not well enough to attend school or who had been expelled. One of the “unwell” students attended SLO High; I think she was a sophomore or junior. I was her tutor because she’d been drugged and raped at a party, and when she came to, she was pregnant with twins. I’m not sure if she began staying home from school when her pregnancy progressed to a certain point because she could not sit comfortably at the classroom desks anymore—her belly was quite large by the time I started tutoring her—or if she just wanted to remain out of sight until she gave birth. I think of the Spanish word for pregnant, embarazada, which sounds like “embarrassed.” Looking up the word in the Spanish/English dictionary my pal Al gave me when I lived in Argentina, I see the that the word for pregnancy, embarazo, is first translated as “obstacle, impediment, difficulty, interference, obstruction”—and only secondly as pregnancy. The third translation is “shyness, bashfulness, embarrassment, awkwardness.” How awkward to be pregnant with twins in high school.

She lived with her very religious grandmother—I think her mother also lived there, but I can’t remember. There were crosses of various sizes and styles hanging in the hallway and in the dining room where we sat for lessons. She said they had figured out who the perpetrator was but didn’t press charges. I pride myself on being a good teacher—I strive to make my students comfortable, to make them laugh, to make them feel heard and understood. This girl, she made herself impenetrable. I had never spent so much time with someone so visibly angry. She did her work without speaking or replied only in monosyllables. The last time I saw her was after she’d given birth. She showed me a photo of her in the hospital, her newborn twin girls in her arms. They were adopted to a very stoked local couple. She smiled when she showed me photograph—the only time I saw her smile—a mix of pride and what must have been relief. I never saw her again, though I always wondered what happened to her. I may have even written about her before here—I’m not sure. She’s often crosses my mind.

I hope it isn’t a breach of privacy to talk about her; that’s certainly not my intention. I just think that to be a girl, to be a woman, has its own unique vulnerabilities. Women are incredible, what we can endure. But we don’t always prevail. I wonder: Did the girl prevail?

In my book group—a group I’ve been lucky to be part of for many years—we recently discussed my picks, two 96-page books by Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022: A Man’s Place, about Ernaux’s father, and Happening, about the author’s illegal abortion in France in the 1960s. Happening was made into a film I reviewed here. I hadn’t read the book when I saw the film. Sometimes seeing a film first can ruin the book or vice versa. Not so in this case.

Instead of a writing a review or synopsis, I’m putting down my favorite passages from the book here in chronological order. To me, these excerpts provide something more than a summary; they almost feel like a narrative poem. There was some debate among my book group whether this was memoir or fiction and whether it matters. The back of my paperback copy says it is memoir, but inside on the copyright page, it is listed as fiction. I think it’s interesting how how our expectations change depending on the genre. For one of the book group members, this worked as a memoir but not necessarily as a novel, for instance. For me, it just worked. A friend in my book group texted me this photo and message when she finished the book: “This book wrecked me.”

I took that to mean it worked for her too.

As someone who’s written both fiction and memoir, I appreciate the crossover. Ernaux wrote this book 40 years after the “event,” drawing from memory, which she knows is sometimes unreliable, and diary entries. She doesn’t try to adorn her prose; she’s not trying to entertain the reader; in fact, in A Man’s Place, she wrote: “Naturally I experience no joy in writing this book,” a sentiment—or lack of sentiment—that likely applied to the writing of Happening too. And yet, she’s compelled to tell these stories, to find meaning yet not infuse meaning. In other words, her work is very French!

To give some context: Basically, the narrator (Ernaux herself) is a first generation college student. She’s a young woman from a working class family who is attending university and studying literature in hopes of becoming a teacher. She becomes pregnant and wants to have an abortion, but abortion is illegal. Her desperation to have the abortion is palpable throughout the slim, fraught book. I’ve shortened some of the excerpts with ellipses. The parentheses are hers.

The law was everywhere….In the sheer impossibility of ever imagining that one day women might be able to abort freely. As was often the case, you couldn’t tell whether abortion was banned because it was wrong or wrong because it was banned. People judged according to the law, they didn’t judge the law (35)

Now these “intellectual heavens” were out of reach: I was wallowing down below, my body overcome by nausea….In a strange way, my inability to write my thesis was far more alarming than my need to abort. It was the unmistakable sign of my silent downfall. (My diary read: “I can’t write. I can’t work. Is there any way out of this mess?”) I had stopped being an “intellectual.” I don’t know whether this feeling is widespread. It causes indescribable pain (38).

(I realize that this account may exasperate or repel some readers; it may also be branded as distasteful. I believe that any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled. There is no such thing as a lesser truth. Moreover, if I failed to go through with this undertaking, I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy) (44).

I was the sort of girl who went with the flow (55)

I was convinced I had to push back my own limits and reach the top of the mountain to get rid of it. I wore myself out trying to kill it under me (55).

(…I have no idea which words will come to me. I have no idea where my writing will take me. I would like to stall this moment and remain in a state of expectancy. Maybe I’m afraid that the act of writing will shatter this vision, just like sexual fantasies fade as soon as we have climaxed) (57).

I was standing by the bed, facing a woman with a swollen complexion, who spoke fast, with quick, jumpy movements. This was the woman to whom I would surrender my insides, this was where it would all happen (59).

(To experience anew the emotions I felt back then is quite impossible. The closest I can get to the state of terror thrust upon me that week is to pick out any hostile, harsh-looking woman in her sixties waiting in line at the supermarket or the post office and to imagine that she is going to rummage around in my loins with some foreign object) (61).

I feel that the woman who is busying herself between my legs, inserting the speculum, is giving birth to me. At that point I killed my own mother inside me (63).

When Jean T, LB and JB all came to see me together, I told them about the hemorrhage and my grueling reception at the hospital. A light-hearted narrative which they thoroughly enjoyed and which carefully omitted the details they were to haunt me thereafter (83).

I would listen to Bach’s Passion According to St John in my room. When the Evangelical’s solo voice rang out in German to celebrate the Passion of Christ, I felt the ordeal I had suffered between October and January was being re-counted in an unknown language… the probe and all the blood all became engulfed in the misery of the world and eternal death. I felt saved (87).

On another afternoon I entered Saint Patrice’s Church just off the Boulevard de la Marne to tell a priest that I’d had an abortion. I immediately realized this was a mistake. I felt bathed in a halo of light and for him I was a criminal. Leaving the church, I realized that I was through with religion (88).

Now I know this ordeal and this sacrifice were necessary for me to want to have children. To accept the turmoil of reproduction inside my body and, in turn, to let the coming generations pass through me (91).

Happening ends with these words:

Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people (91-92).

The things that made this so relevant and real for me: Her drive to escape a childhood of working class poverty; her passion for literature and writing; her sexuality, for which she doesn’t apologize. Like Ernaux, I’ve kept diaries since my girlhood. And, also like Ernaux, I aborted, was the first in my family to finish college, became a teacher, and eventually, a writer and mother.

Thank you, Annie Ernaux. Your existence certainly merged into my life and my head.

And thank you for reading.

P.S. My editor is on “sabbatical” (working his job by day and laying back patio pavers at night or practicing music) ; the tangents and typos are all mine!

It was also a monumental year for me personally. You may know that I left teaching last year after more than two decades, which included teaching in Mendoza, Argentina, for a year, substitute teaching for the San Luis Obispo school district, teaching as a graduate student at Cal Poly and then getting hired at Cuesta College and then at Cal Poly, where I taught as adjunct lecturer for 16 years. After I left in September 2021, I gave myself the sabbatical I never got as an adjunct. I enrolled in drawing and painting classes, bought a motorcycle, met with a life coach, read, wrote, stretched, started this newsletter and got back into audio journalism. I participated in a government-sponsored clinical trial for psilocybin that cured me of some self-limiting behaviors as well as my atheism. I’m ending the year physically and psychically lighter and healthier, and more appreciative than ever of trees and birds.

Not to worry, though: I’m not so blissed out that I’ve lost touch with the world and its troubles. If anything, I’m feeling more than I have in a long time. When I attended my first session with the life coach, I thought we would work on a resume, revamp my Linked In, and launch me into a new career path. Instead, he asked me where in my body I felt the frustration I was speaking about. I almost responded: “What are these things you speak of? These things you call feelings?” I was a little out of touch.

When I read about abortion or listen to stories about people being denied abortions or about those risking their lives to provide them, I feel the full gamut of emotion. Like when I read this week about G, a girl whom the journalist Lizzie Presser wrote about in the New York Times Magazine.

G’s father had been accused of molesting her when she was little and had given up parental rights. Her mother had a succession of boyfriends and, financially unstable, moved G from place to place. She wouldn’t or couldn’t pay for G’s braces. G finally moved out to live on her own when she was 16. She worked and tried to go to school and support herself. And then she got pregnant, with twins.

This is the story of her trying to navigate parental-involvement laws that are enforced in 36 states, where minors have to notify or get consent from one or both parents to obtain an abortion. It’s also a story that effectively conveys the complexity of pregnancy for a young girl. Abortion, adoption, motherhood—all of these options are complicated, difficult, heart-breaking, potentially life-breaking.

I have too much in common with G. Her childhood reminded me of my own and the moves from place to place, so many that often when I woke in the middle of the night, I would not know my way to the bathroom. I too was subjected to my mother’s boyfriends. I too had a single mother who could not afford braces or even regular dental care. My teeth were a mess—my front teeth were chipped and crooked; I had cavities and would need fillings and crowns and root canals. At 15 years old, I got a job at Jack in the Box to pay for my own braces. I made $3.15 an hour and worked after school and for eight hours a day on weekends and I saved. I paid for my braces. I also got porcelain crowns for my front teeth. Things fell apart anyway, despite these efforts, just as things fell apart for G. I’m through it, but G is still in the thick of it. G, my heart goes out to you. I can give 10 articles as gifts as a subscriber to the New York Times. Here’s this one.

It is very difficult to not see those you disagree with as wrong, as ignorant, as mean, or, at the very least, misguided. A friend turned me on to a Substack newsletter called Abortion, Every Day, written by Jessica Valenti, who really does write about abortion EVERY DAY (I joked with my friend that my newsletter could be called Abortion Every Trimester). Valenti writes:

“There is no ‘debating’ a person who wants to force a 10 year-old into childbirth; there’s no discussion to be had with a legislator who wants to fine-tune just how close a woman needs to be to death before she qualifies for an abortion. This will never be time well-spent or energy well-used. Instead, it will be exactly what it feels like: An exercise in degradation. Because every time we engage in a conversation about the morality of abortion, we are accepting a premise that says our humanity is up for debate. By showing up, we have already lost.”

And it’s true, if we debate smug pundits, we are only humiliating ourselves. But there are many people who have nuanced views about abortion, who are open-minded enough to be swayed depending on what they hear. However, what may drive an open mind to the anti-abortion camp is being ridiculed or criticized or shamed by someone staunchly pro-choice.

In October and November, I served on a jury for a civil case for more than a month. I enjoyed getting to know my fellow jurors, bantering with them as we went through the metal detector and waited for the bailiff to allow us into the courtroom. When it finally came for the 12 of us to deliberate, we were given a packet of questions to answer. In order to progress from one question to the next, we needed at least nine jurors to agree.

Well, we soon reached an impasse with a vote of 8-4. The more the eight of us tried to convince the four, the more they dug in their heels. The more evidence we provided and testimony we read, the more entrenched they became in their rightness. I felt myself becoming angry and frustrated; I felt myself beginning to demonize these four holdouts as ignorant, pig-headed, blinded by their own biases. We took a 10-minute break. I nearly physically avoided them—almost walked in the opposite direction. Instead, I went to sit with one of them. We talked about the weather and coming storm. We gazed at the clouds and talked about Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. He told me about the rotunda in the U.S. Capitol building, the Apotheosis of Washington, painted in 1865 by Constantino Brumidi. Then we went back inside and resumed.

I spoke first and told the four that I imagined they were arguing and basing their vote on their principles. Nods. I told them I admired this, that I saw them as principled, moral people. I asked them about their positions, and what ensued was a discussion rather than a debate. I asked them if compromising on the vote felt like compromising their principles. They all agreed that it did. But we ended up listening to each other, and in the end, the eight of us compromised on a few questions and the four compromised on others. We all gave a little, and a deliberation that began that morning by feeling like it might take weeks ended up taking just one full day. Five minutes before the we were supposed to finish for the day, we had a verdict to present to the judge, one we all felt good about. The final vote was 11-1.

When we all left for the day, the presiding juror came up to me in front of everyone and said, “I know your super power—it’s listening, like, really listening, and making people feel heard.” Another juror came up and hugged me and whispered “thank you” in my ear. I was so happy and relieved, I started to think I should go into mediation. Of course, this was the Carl Rogers approach to argument I taught about at Cal Poly for so long and have written about in this newsletter, but I’d never had an opportunity to put it to use in such a high-stakes setting. It worked.

How does that apply to abortion? Is there a way to shift from debate to discussion? Of course there are unwavering zealots whose goal is to eliminate and criminalize abortion. But most people are reasonable; most people want abortion to be legal and accessible, especially in the first trimester. I’ve always been passionate about this issue, but so passionate that I could barely talk about it with people I didn’t see eye to eye with. I’ll never forget the debate about abortion I had with a guy at a barbecue in Springfield, Missouri, more than two decades ago. I lost badly. And I learned something about myself in that moment: I have neither the skill nor the desire to debate people about abortion. I realized that as I was hiding in the bushes, crying tears of frustration into my Coors Light.

I have a friend, Amritamurti, who traveled back and forth to India a couple of times several years ago and ended up staying for 10 years in an ashram. She returned to the United States last year to take care of her older brother who’d had a stroke. She was experiencing culture shock in a sense, having been gone for a decade. She was shocked, for instance, when I told her about gun deaths and school shootings. In the ashram, you live very simply. You have a job—hers was cleaning bathrooms and writing the ashram’s newsletter. Her head was shaved. She chanted. The food is vegetarian. Her small room was basic. We now talk on the phone with some regularity. The other day she texted me this:  

Look at your mind.

Be curious.

Welcome groundlessness.

Lighten up and relax.

Offer chaos a cup of tea.

Let go of 'us and them'.

Don't turn away.

Everything you do and think affects everyone on the planet.

Let the pain of the world touch you and cause your compassion to blossom.

Never give up on yourself.

This was a rare didactic text from her, though a timely one I appreciated, as I had been ruminating for some time on the concept of us versus them, of the need to create an enemy. We’ve seen this scapegoating throughout history and in the present coming from political leaders; it’s the ever-growing polarization we’re enveloped in. Is this newsletter just contributing to that? What would it mean to not live in such a way, of perceiving the world as us versus them, of defining ourselves in opposition to others? Of course, we are not amoeba, floating through existence. We have opinions and beliefs and morals and things we are passionate about and want to fight for, may even be willing to risk our lives for. What would it mean to work toward a vision of justice and equality without vilifying others? Is it possible?

Yes, the fight is real. Even if I’m having my own Kumbaya moment, I am not Siddhartha sitting by the river. And anyway, Siddhartha didn’t have to worry about access to abortion and didn’t even know about his own son until his son was an adult, and even then, they fought soon after meeting and were again estranged. Then Siddhartha achieved enlightenment—without having to change a diaper.

There are still laws being passed and enforced that deny women and girls the right to make decisions for themselves. There are women and girls, who, rather than be able to live their lives as autonomous, equal, free beings, find themselves in fear, frustration, and peril. Fearful of not just being denied the healthcare that is abortion, but also of being harshly judged for their desire or need for one. Still, I’m willing to listen, even to strive to be more Buddha-like.

Roe might have been overturned in 2022, but we’ve also seen a tremendous number  of people rise up, speak out, vote, run for office, and proudly, unabashedly declare and show support abortion, which makes me in turn, happy, hopeful, and proud. I’ll also continue to speak my mind, share my views, tell my stories, and fight for what I believe. I learned some things this year about God and beauty and love and understanding and compassion and strength. I’ll try to put them to good use. I’ll feel it all. Frustration, after all, can fuel change. Fury can be useful and clarifying. But I’m ending this year feeling self-possessed, joyful, and unafraid.

Hope you are too.

Happy new year!

Was anyone else holding their breath for the week preceding Tuesday, November 8?

Even though I’m an optimist by trade, I had worst-case scenarios running through my mind. I tried to write a Quickening letter, but this is all I could conjure: “It feels like the soul of the nation is hanging in the balance.” I asked Derek, my spouse and editor, about the phrasing. He said it sounded too melodramatic. “Even though it’s true,” he added.

Well, I’m relieved to report, we did not sell our soul as a nation. The red wave didn’t drown us. In part, this is probably due to all the younger people who came out to vote. I don’t remember voting in midterms in my twenties. Thank you, young people.

I’ve never much respected single-issue voters. Many are anti-abortion, and many of those supported a vile candidate in 2016 because he promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe V. Wade, and he delivered for them. This year, Democrats used the abortion issue to their own advantage. I want to say thank you to everyone who turned out to cast votes for abortion rights.

There is still a Senate run-off in Georgia on December 6, between Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican candidate Herschel Walker, since neither received more than 50 percent of the vote. You might be familiar with Herschel’s scandals—early in his campaign he supported a nationwide ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest, but later he softened, perhaps as a result of two women coming forward claiming that he’d gotten them pregnant and paid for their abortions. (Herschel now backs the current abortion restriction in Georgia, where abortion is banned as soon as a heartbeat is detected—around six weeks; the ban is being challenged in court right now). Apparently the very powerful pro-life group Susan B.  Anthony, whose president is Marjorie Dannenfelser, is spending at least $1 million to get Walker elected December 6.

FINGERS CROSSED WARNOCK WINS.

If the overturning of Roe v. Wade was supposed to send abortion rights back to the states, the people are speaking when given an opportunity to. Propositions to formally include abortion rights in state constitutions passed in California and Vermont—no surprise as abortion is legal there, but still encouraging. Voters in Kentucky and Montana rejected ballot initiatives that would have more formally banned abortions there. (Kentucky banned abortion with few exceptions after Roe v. Wade was overturned, though the ban is facing judicial review; abortion is still legal in Montana where legal restrictions are currently enjoined.)

One of the biggest and best abortion-rights wins for me happened in Michigan, where Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer was reelected, and where a measure passed to maintain access to abortion. Had it not passed, had the Republican gubernatorial candidate won, Michigan was on course to reenact an abortion ban dating from 1931, which would have been the strictest in the nation. I let out the breath I’d been holding when I heard the results.

The other great outcome was the Senate race in Pennsylvania, where John Fetterman defeated Mehmet Oz, who famously said in their sole debate that the decision to have an abortion should only be between a woman and her doctor—and local political leaders. Abortion in Pennsylvania is allowed up to 23 weeks or longer if the health or life of the pregnant person is at risk.

Ironically, the race I was most worried about was the one Michelle Goldberg wrote about in the New York Times, in an awesome article titled “The Midterm Race That Has It All.” The battle was taking place in Washington State’s 3rd Congressional District between Joe Kent, a ruggedly handsome former Green Beret running on the Republican ticket (Goldberg refers to him as “a burgeoning MAGA-world star”) and Democratic candidate Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a working mother in her early thirties who runs an auto shop with her husband (Goldberg refers to her as a “rural working-class Democrat who is emphasizing abortion rights”).

While Kent believes life begins at conception and supports a national ban on abortion, during her campaign, Gluesenkamp Perez ran an ad about how she had to have an abortion immediately following a miscarriage. What was interesting about this race was that these two were running to replace House Representative Jaime Herrera-Beutler, one of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump.

In his speeches, Kent talked about how he would “impeach Biden on day one”—and then Vice President Kamala Harris. Kent said that he would hold Anthony Fauci accountable for the “scam that is Covid.” When Goldberg asked him what that meant, he told her he would hold Fauci accountable for criminal charges. Pushed further on what those charges would entail, Kent told her he would have Fauci charged with murder. “As if it were the most obvious answer in the world,” she wrote.

Kent made the rounds on conservative and far-right media platforms; according to Goldberg, he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and on Steve Bannon’s podcast. He was backed by Trump. I wondered if a Democrat could beat him, a Democrat who is also a woman who openly supports abortion. She seemed practical and down to earth. She said she brought her 13-month old son to the auto shop she runs with her husband and put baby noise-protecting headphones on him because she hadn’t yet been able to get daycare. At a rally she said: “If you think you can spend 15K a year on daycare, per kid, and save for retirement, and save up for a mortgage, you’re living in a really different economy than me and most of the people that I know.”

I could relate. When Diego and Charlie were little and I was teaching, having both of them in preschool ate up about 80 percent of my paycheck. I kept working because I liked my job and it provided health insurance. But financially, it barely made sense, and if I were a single mother, it would have been awful. So many women though, my own mother included, have faced and today face, that near-impossible challenge of juggling work and unaffordable childcare. With strict abortion laws, it will only get worse.

Ohio was a disappointment: J.D. Vance, who once despised Trump but now supports him, beat moderate Democrat Tim Ryan for Senate. I read Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy, years ago. It wasn’t a great book, but it did make me think that maybe he would have some empathy for working class people. He did start out criticizing Trump, but soon started to kiss Trump’s ass, as Trump himself put it when he mocked Vance at a rally. A University of Cincinnati political science professor chalked up the disappointing outcome of the Ohio midterms to this: “Ohio is whiter than the nation, older than the nation and less educated than the nation. And that combination almost exclusively excludes Democratic success.”

The incumbent Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine won, as did Greg Abbot in Texas and Brian Kemp in Georgia. Republicans overall were banking on a message of inflation, crime, and immigration. But there are other things concerning the nation, apparently, like climate change and the massive overstep of the Supreme Court in overturning Roe. The people are speaking and voting. Hopefully even more people will vote for abortion rights in coming elections. According to Pew Research, 61 percent of Americans think abortion should be legal in most cases. Even 56 percent of Catholics think so.

I’m so heartened by the turnout of voters and protesters and abortion rights supporters. People are being bold, speaking loudly and bravely; this makes me proud to be American and gives me hope. Like Alan Guttmacher, the obstetrician/gynecologist and president of Planned Parenthood in the 1960s—and the namesake of the Guttmacher Institute—I believe that abortion rights advocates and anti-abortion advocates have the same goal in mind: they both want to see fewer abortions. But instead of limiting access or banning access or shaming those who seek to terminate their pregnancies or threatening doctors and healthcare providers with prison, abortion rights advocates would like to see an expansion of access to comprehensive sex education and contraception—including emergency contraception—as a means to reduce the number of abortions, while keeping—always keeping—access to safe, legal abortion.

It appears that when abortion is put to voters directly, as happened in Kansas in August and with the midterms in Montana, Kentucky, Vermont, California, and Michigan, people come out in support of abortion rights. Here in California, voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 1, which will amend the California State Constitution to include this language:

“The state shall not deny or interfere with an individual’s reproductive freedom in their most intimate decisions, which include their fundamental right to choose to have an abortion and their fundamental right to choose or refuse contraceptives.”

Maybe those of us in California should get out of our blue bubble and move to Texas or Ohio or, as my beloved good friends from San Luis Obispo did, to Georgia, to work on Stacey Abrams campaign. Thank you, friends!

UPDATE:

As of this morning, Sunday, November 13, 2022, I’m happy to report that the Arizona and Nevada senate races have been called for the Democrats! And—rejoice! Marie Gluesenkamp Perez beat Joe Kent in the Washington House race!!!!! She won by fewer than 5,000 votes.

It’s also my 23rd wedding anniversary.

As my grandmother Grace Wolf used to say, HAPPY DAY.

It’s been a while. I hope you’re all well.

Last month, I sat down with my friend Ann at a coffee shop and, with her permission, recorded our conversation. I’ve known her a long time but just recently learned that she worked as a director for two Planned Parenthood clinics, and I wanted to ask her about it.

When Bryan, her third child, got badly burned at 10 months old, she took him to the ER where Dr. Ping Tsao, a plastic surgeon, treated him and did skin grafts. She said with self-deprecation that she realized her children could get hurt with her around, so she’d better go to work. At a follow-up visit for her son, she said she’d like to work there, and Tsao called her. She started as a receptionist but was soon trained in the operating room. She wasn’t sure she would be able to handle it, but she could, and she found she loved it. She especially loved the surgery part— it was her favorite job. It made her feel good about herself.

Later she went to work for another plastic surgeon, Jim Thornton. As a plastic surgeon, he did cosmetic surgeries, but he also volunteered twice a year for the Flying Samaritans, a group that sends doctors down to a rural clinic in Baja, Mexico every month. The volunteer pilots use their own planes to fly down the doctors and other volunteers. I went once before my children were born to volunteer as a translator; I will never forget flying down there with Clifford Clark (of the Clark Center, the performance art center in Arroyo Grande), just the two of us in his little plane. But in 2010, the small plane Thornton was flying down in crashed. The Tribune wrote that Thornton had treated people during these trips for cleft palates, serious burns, and clubbed hands. “He never missed a clinic in his 25 years of service,” the article stated. All four people on board, including the pilot, a friend of my in-laws, tragically died in the crash.

Before this, while Ann was working for Thornton, she saw a job advertisement for a healthcare director that caught her eye. She applied for it and got the job as director of the San Luis Obispo Planned Parenthood. She said she was shocked she got the job. She justified the move like this: She’d been taking care of people for cosmetic stuff (not all but a good portion), and now she was going to do something on the other end of the spectrum. She’d help those whom a lot of people don’t want to help.

I’d personally gone to Planned Parenthood for healthcare as a youth and young woman: I’d gotten annual checkups and birth control there over the years; I’d also gone there for an abortion.

Ann knew about Planned Parenthood’s services, but had never used them. What happened to her was this: She got pregnant at 15 and had a baby at 16.

“He’s my funny one—so quick-witted.” She said it wasn’t the right time to have kids and that there’s so many things she wants to apologize for—and sometimes does. But “life is what it is,” Ann said. “I would not change it for anything.” Having an abortion did not cross her mind—and she also wanted to get out of her house, she said. “That’s how smart you are when you’re 15—this is how I can get away from my mother!” She had the baby and she and her boyfriend got married.

At the time of her getting the director job, Planned Parenthood California Central Coast had four clinics: San Luis Obispo, Santa Maria, Ventura, and Santa Barbara, where the headquarters were. (Now there are six clinics, including the recently-opened Oxnard, and Thousand Oaks.) She went down to Santa Barbara and trained for three weeks. She said it was supposed to be an all-administrative position.

“But it was such a small clinic, that I often found myself in the back on abortion days,” she said. They would do abortions one day a week. “It’s hard….I mean, it really is.” She said she tried to avoid working in the back but almost always ended up helping. The reality and gravity of what’s happening, she said, “is undeniable.” Although the clinic did not offer abortions beyond 10 weeks, it still hit home in a visceral way. And yet, despite it being difficult, Ann said she was—and remains—fully supportive of abortion rights. She said that she found the overturning of Roe v. Wade “just shocking.”

“It breaks my heart,” she said.

Ann eventually also took over as director of the Santa Maria clinic as well. While San Luis Obispo had more middle-class women or college students, Ann felt particularly bad for the women in Santa Maria, many of whom were Hispanic and incredibly poor. Ann saw their desperation, especially the women who, as fieldworkers, worked long, physically exhausting hours. She said it seemed that most of their husbands didn’t believe in birth control, that some of the women would come in without telling their husbands.  

“Where’s their access?” she asked, echoing something I learned long ago: Wealthy people will always have access to birth control and abortion; when you restrict access, it’s really poor people who are hurt. “For me, that was quite an eye opener,” she said, when she really experienced the differences between the two clinics.

Most of the Santa Maria staff spoke Spanish, and Ann found it difficult to show the compassion she felt for the patients since she didn’t speak their language. In SLO, connecting was easier since there was rarely a language barrier, and she even knew some of the girls who came in. “But I’ll never forget those ladies in Santa Maria.” Most of the women who came in, she said, already had kids. That’s a fact about abortion: The majority of women who seek an abortion have already had at least one child.

“It was an education for me,” Ann said.

Even though she was working for Planned Parenthood and supported abortion rights, I asked her if she felt judgmental toward people who opted for abortion since she herself had gone through with a pregnancy and had—and raised—a baby as a teenager. “No,” she said. “I never felt that way. I just felt like, if you’re not ready and you don’t want to have a child, absolutely make this choice. I’m 100 percent behind that.”

She worked for Planned Parenthood for about four years. She said she burned out because she tried to be director of two clinics—no director had ever run both. It was a mistake on her part, she said, to think she could do it. The Santa Maria clinic was bigger and had “so much more need.” Not that the need in SLO is not justified, she clarified, adding, “Again, everyone should have that right without anybody having any input.”

We talked about how political Planned Parenthood is. Politicians on the right are always demonizing the organization and trying to defund it. “So many things are political that shouldn’t be,” she said.

“Like climate change,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “Or like Covid.”

But, she said, abortion has always been political. Always.

She said they used to have interns, usually Cal Poly psychology majors, who would counsel patients at the clinic. The women and girls wouldn’t be able to just make an appointment, come in and have an abortion; they had to speak with the counselors, who would let them know all their options, let them know they had choices. “We covered all the bases. We weren’t pushing abortion,” Ann said.

She told me about talking with her second ex-husband, who said he didn’t understand what the big deal was about Roe v. Wade being overturned. She said to him, “You don’t get the big deal?” She explained that 50 years ago, Roe v. Wade had made abortion legal in the whole country, but that now with Roe overturned, many states were severely restricting or banning abortion. He responded the way so many people do who don’t understand: “Well, the women can just go to another state.” She said, “If you’re a teenager and you have no money, how are you going to get to that other state?”

“Well, I know why we’re not still married,” she said, and laughed.

We talked about how states banning or restricting abortion often border or are surrounded by other states with Draconian abortion laws. (The Guttmacher Institute has the most up-to-date interactive map showing this.) Many states require two visits to a clinic and have waiting periods, some 24 hours, some 72. “And where do you stay—a hotel?” Ann asked with exasperation. “And how do you get all that time off work? And if you have other children, who takes care of them while you’re gone?” All this organizing, if it is even feasible, takes money and time—and meanwhile, the pregnancy is advancing….

And, according to the Guttmacher Institute, if you live in Idaho, South Dakota, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee, or West Virginia, “Abortion is completely banned with very limited exceptions.”

“No one has the right to tell me what is right for me to do,” Ann said. “I mean, whatever decision I make, I have to live with it. You don’t—I do. And you think about all these babies we’re going to have. What? They go into foster care?” She wondered whether the people against abortions are going to step up and give more money to foster care or adopt the children themselves.

I asked her whether she had always had strong pro-choice views or if those feelings intensified after her time at Planned Parenthood. She said she had always held those views. “But it definitely made me more vocal,” she said.

We talked about the 10-year-old Ohio girl who had to go to Indiana for an abortion because she was six weeks and three days pregnant—and Ohio had banned abortion beyond six weeks. (In August the governor of Indiana signed a bill into law that would ban abortion from conception on with few exceptions for incest or rape, but a judge halted it, so for now, abortion remains legal in Indiana up to 20 weeks.)

“I’m just shocked that this is where we are,” Ann said. “It scares me. We’re going backwards, frighteningly—not just with women’s rights, but in so many ways. We’re going backwards. When did that start happening?”

We talked about how she gave birth at 16. That she was so “fortunate” that her boyfriend married her, and gave her, she said laughing, “time to let my brain develop!” She was grateful too that she was able to stay home with her son. Soon, they had another baby. Eventually though, she said, her husband’s brain developed too, and “he fell in love with someone.” After 10 years of marriage, they divorced.

I told her that I had Diego and Charlie at 35 and 36. That even though I had a master’s degree, a job, health insurance, a spouse, and a house, it was still challenging. “I continue to be astounded,” I said to Ann, “at how much time, energy, resources, and patience is required—"

She finished my sentence: “To be a mom!”

My gratitude goes out to Ann for our conversation.

Just a couple more things before I let you go: I’m so excited to share that the French writer Annie Ernaux, whose novel L'évènement was the basis for the movie “Happening” that I wrote about here, has won the 2022 Nobel Prize for literature!!!!!!! Here’s a list of her books with reviews from Publishers Weekly.

This is part of a speech she gave upon winning the Nobel Prize; it was posted on The Guardian, translated from French:

“The Nobel it hasn’t sunk in yet. But it’s true I have a new responsibility. The responsibility is about carrying on the fight against injustice, whatever it is. I use the term ‘injustice,’ but it has different levels. Everything that is a form of injustice towards women, towards those I call the dominated ones. I can tell you I will fight until my last breath so that women be able to choose to become mothers or to choose not to. It’s a fundamental right. Contraception and the right to abortion are the core of women’s freedom.”

Over the last two months, I’ve been taking a figure drawing class at Cuesta, our local community college (I taught there many years ago; now I’m back as a student). This drawing was of Elle. We’d had a couple young models, and then Elle came into the classroom. Hers is a mature body, a beautiful, voluptuous female body. It harbors secrets about which the tattoos of words and images on her skin only offered hints. My teacher reminds us: You’re learning how to draw; you’re not making art—yet.  And since I’m just starting to learn, it was a challenge to draw her, but also an honor. A body is a powerful, sacred, autonomous thing. Model, lover, mother—a woman should get to choose when and how she shares it.

Thanks for reading!

In several states, abortion providers face felony charges with prison sentences ranging from up to one year in prison to 10 to 15 years, depending on the state. Texas, whose SB-8 law banned abortion after six weeks and went into effect September 1, 2021—the very impetus for me beginning this newsletter—has now, one year later, passed a total ban on abortion, with a felony charge and up to life in prison for the doctor if the abortion was successful, which, for Texas legislators, means the “unborn child” has died. The idea of charging doctors and healthcare workers feels unconscionable to me, unthinkable, and totally anathema to the way society—and healthcare—are supposed to work.

Charging women or girls for their abortions, however, has been rare. Anti-abortion groups have suggested that while doctors should perhaps be charged or face some penalty for providing abortions, women who get abortions should be considered victims. But the crack in the door might be widening to allow women to be charged too. Some people would like to see it happen.

The incendiary language of saying abortion is murder turns potentially reasonable people into unwavering zealots. It’s a message repeated again and again by pastors and priests. The Archdiocese of Baltimore, for instance, published this on their website:

“No matter how one looks at it, abortion is murder….The DNA of an embryo indicates that the embryo is a person. To aid a person who engages in abortion or promotes abortion makes one an accessory to murder.

Our faith teaches us that murder is a grave sin and that one who approves of anyone’s murder and promotes murder also commits a grave sin. We now have politicians who approve of and support abortion, the murder of the defenseless child. How can we say that voting for such politicians is not grave sin?

We need to keep all this in mind when we come to vote in November.”

That seemingly timely post wasn’t recent. It was from a decade ago.

No, the rhetoric isn’t new, but the wide-scale adoption of this hardcore position is. Recently, states that have banned abortion as soon as six weeks—or even entirely from conception—are including “personhood” language in their abortion laws. The embryo is a person, the Church argue, and as states adopt personhood language into their laws that ban or restrict abortion, the argument that abortion is murder becomes more tenable, opening the door even more for more punitive measures or even a national ban on abortion.

I would have scoffed at that notion a few years ago. But imagine THIS Supreme Court hearing the case that would determine whether states that still provide safe and legal abortions could continue to do so if embryos and fetuses have gained personhood status. The fertilized egg could be protected under the Fourteenth Amendment—the same amendment that protected a woman’s right to abortion for 50 years. I mean, would this current Supreme Court continue to allow murder in New Mexico even though it had been banned in Texas?

Herein lies the problem: The abortion-is-murder claim mutes all attempts at finding a reasonable compromise; it creates an all-or-nothing, either-or situation. You cannot protect both the woman and the fetus, the claim announces. You have to choose.

And if you make the claim that abortion is murder, you need to follow through in your logic to the logical conclusion. What do we do to murderers? We accuse them, convict them, imprison them for a long time, sometimes give them the death penalty. My friend’s son, whom I’ve watched grow up and adore, carried an Abortion is Murder sign as a counter-protester at the abortion rights protest at our high school, something I’ve mentioned before in my newsletter. Now I want to ask him: What does it mean for you when you say abortion is murder? He’s a smart kid. I want to ask him if he knows that one in four women will have an abortion in their lifetimes. I want to tell him that that means he knows many, many women who have had abortions, whether he realizes it or not. I want to tell him that I am one of them. I want to know what he would think of these women, these murderers, and what he thinks should happen to them—to me. Would it be enough for us to repent? To ask forgiveness? To confess? Or would he say that we should have to pay—more than we already have?

And if so, what would that look like?

The Archdiocese of Baltimore is of course, like all Catholic dioceses, an arbiter of morality. They tell us how to live moral lives. They tell us which of our actions constitute sin. Certainly, the cycle of abuse from Catholic priests sexually abusing children should not take away from their message about abortion. In researching the Baltimore Archdiocese after I found the abortion condemnation, I came across a Wikipedia page about a priest, Anthony Joseph Maskell, who served as a counselor there from 1965 to 1994—nearly 30 years—and who was “removed from the ministry because of sexual abuse toward female students at Archbishop Keough High School between 1969 and 1975.” A Netflix documentary about him suggests he may have been guilty of far more than sexual abuse. (I don’t watch much TV and have not seen this, but the 1,000+ comments on the trailer speak to its brilliance, darkness, emotion, i.e., “This one of the most touching, well made, pieces of media created by Netflix. The amount of research and care put into this is jaw dropping.”) But I don’t want resort to red herring or ad hominem—I’m not trying to divert attention away from the argument; I’m just noting the hypocrisy. The terrible, blatant, damning hypocrisy from these paragons of righteousness.

Sin is one thing: After all, if you believe in sin, you would agree that we all sin. But the accusation of murder connotes more than sin, so much so that, if you also believe the Bible’s recommendation of an eye for an eye, then you might say that a woman who has an abortion should lose her freedom—that she should serve a substantial prison term. But an eye for an eye might mean more for you; it might mean that, by having an abortion and thus murdering an innocent child, she might deserve the death penalty.

That’s crazy, right?

That would never happen, right?

A bill in Louisiana that would have subjected women to homicide charges for having abortions failed this past May. The vote was 65-26. But that means that 26 legislators were willing to move forward with the bill.

In a recent podcast from The Daily, “The Effort to Punish Women for Having Abortions,” reporter Elizabeth Dias explains the faction of the anti-abortion movement called “abolitionists”: “They say that if life begins at conception, and abortion is murder, then that is how it should be seen in the law. So they want to categorize abortion from conception, literally, as homicide, under the law.”

She interviews an abortion abolitionist man named Jeff Durbin, an ex-drug addict who got clean with Christianity. He started a church, Apologia Church in Arizona, which has a congregation of about 700 people; he also started an organization called End Abortion Now and runs a production studio with online abolitionist programming. Dias also interviews a woman named Christine who works for Durbin’s church. Christine tells Dias that she had an abortion and disagrees with what she calls the “pro-life industry” that refers to women who have abortions as victims:

Christine: I am not a victim. Like, who is it who has told a female I’m a victim? I’m not a victim. I would say my sin. We can call it what it is to be very true about it — I was a sinner. You know? Sexual immorality, you know, sex outside of marriage, murder.

Elizabeth Dias: Murder?

Christine: Murder. Well, if you’re killing a baby, get an abortion, then the murder. So, but… it haunts you. It changes you. And I wish I could go back but I can’t. But I will do anything I can now just, yeah. And I, you know, I saw my sin. I’m so sorry. It’s something that will never ever leave you. And you can’t take it. You can’t lie in those moments. You think, I can’t do this. I can’t do this, you know, have a baby and you do choose death. You choose to murder. You don’t think of it as murder, but it is. It is. It’s a life and you just push it under the ground. And it will never leave you and it will come up.

For me — and I’ll only speak for me — it was a baby. And that’s the part of me that I can never go back that I chose to kill. So that’s why it haunts. It’s I did wrong, that was — Yeah.

Dias: Well, is it — what do you make of the punishment for a woman? And what punishment should this state give out?

Christine: What — give out? You’re asking me?

Dias: Yeah.

Christine: Well, how do I feel about it? I feel it is extremely just and it’s biblical and it’s fair. It’s an equal measure. I took a life. I should give my life. If they were to come back and I would, right now, absolutely, would go to court and say, yeah, I’m a sinner. I did it. And if that was my punishment, I would take it. If that was my punishment, I would take it.

Christine has convinced herself that not only has she sinned by having an abortion, but that, if called to—if forced by law, she would be willing to have her own life taken for that sin. She would submit to the death penalty. She would deserve it for what she had done.

It’s not just words. Words lead to action, sometimes punitive action. Donald Trump suggested there should be some punishment for women who have abortions (and then put three justices on the Supreme Court who would solidify the overturning of Roe). Former Idaho Senator Bob Nonino, who ran for lieutenant governor of Idaho in 2018 and lost, said during his campaign that abortion was murder and suggested that giving women the death penalty might deter them from getting abortions. The other Republican candidates in that election agreed with Nonino that abortion is murder but wouldn’t go so far on as to support a murder charge. One of them—Janice McGeachin—became lieutenant governor. Now Idaho, just a few days ago, joined 10 other states that ban abortion from conception. In May, according to ABC News, McGeachin, who is running for governor, “demanded that Republican Gov. Brad Little call a special legislative session to eliminate rape and incest as legal exceptions to Idaho’s abortion law.” McGeachin, who is endorsed former President Trump, said:

“It is shameful that Idaho’s abortion laws are not the most pro-life in our country. No child should ever be murdered because of the circumstances surrounding his or her conception.”

I hear in her words the door creaking open just a little more. Sounds like her position might be shifting toward that murder charge. The rhetoric is ramping up.

It’s hard to backtrack from making the claim that abortion is murder. What potential is there for a person to soften their views after that? Reason is out the door. Any chance of finding common ground or compromise is lost. Civility disappears. Basically, all meaningful, intellectual, philosophical, and yes, ethical debate disappears into the ether when you simply parrot that abortion is murder.

Some people who once leaned more toward a pro-choice stance are adopting the abortion-is-murder rhetoric. Mehmet Oz, aka Dr. Oz, is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania. He, “as recently as 2019…said he was really worried about the harmful consequences for women’s health if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.” Now he claims that life starts at conception and that abortion is murder—at any stage of the pregnancy.

One of the most interesting articles I’ve read about the history of abortion is murder argument comes from Neelam Patel, writing for the Georgetown Journal of Gender and Law. Her article, “The Insidious Origins of the “Moral” Argument Against Abortion Rights” outlines the history of abortion in the United States and discusses how abortion and birth went from being something women helped other women with to being something reserved solely for physicians, who in the 1800s were all men.

As Patel points out, in England and the United States until the mid-1800s, common law regarded abortion legal until, ahem, THE QUICKENING, which refers to the first time the mother feels fetal movement, typically around four months). But in 1847, the American Medical Association—the AMA—was founded, and “became staunchly and publicly opposed to abortion rights” with Horatio Storer, leading the charge. Storer, a physician, wrote an essay titled “Why Not? A Book for Every Woman,” which the AMA rewarded a prize for the “best short and comprehensive tract” for females, “designed to enlighten them upon the criminality and physical evils of forced abortion.” Storer, Patel tells us, became one of the most “prominent advocates for making abortion completely illegal, citing the inherent moral failing of the women he claimed were ‘murdering their children by thousands.’”

The American Medical Association, unlike the Horatio Storers of the world, eventually made a full about-face. In fact, on June 24, 2022, the president of the AMA released this powerful statement:

“The American Medical Association is deeply disturbed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn nearly a half century of precedent protecting patients’ right to critical reproductive health care—representing an egregious allowance of government intrusion into the medical examination room, a direct attack on the practice of medicine and the patient-physician relationship, and a brazen violation of patients’ rights to evidence-based reproductive health services. States that end legal abortion will not end abortion—they will end safe abortion, risking devastating consequences, including patients’ lives.

Today’s opinion shifting reproductive health decision-making to lawmakers opens a deep political rift between states over access to reproductive health services that places sound medical practice and the health of patients at risk. State restrictions that intrude on the practice of medicine and interfere with the patient-physician relationship leave millions with little or no access to reproductive health services while criminalizing medical care.

Access to legal reproductive care will be limited to those with the sufficient resources, circumstances, and financial means to do so—exacerbating health inequities by placing the heaviest burden on patients from Black, Latinx, Indigenous, low-income, rural, and other historically disadvantaged communities who already face numerous structural and systemic barriers to accessing health care….

As the health of millions of patients hangs in the balance, this is a fight we will not give up.”

On the day Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was so angry and upset that I recorded a video about an abortion I had at 16, a video I have yet to rewatch. In it, I talk about a former teacher who offered to mentor me, and how instead I became pregnant by him. He had not wanted me to have an abortion, and yet knew we knew I had to have one. He was Catholic, and though we did not go to church together or go out in public very much, one day he took me to a beautiful church in downtown Los Angeles, which I think was Cathedral of our Lady of Angels.

We went in and sat down in one of the pews. I was not Catholic, but had some understanding of the rituals of mass from the five terrible years we’d lived with my mom’s Catholic boyfriend. But on this particular day, instead of the priest giving mass, he introduced a speaker. This person stood at the pulpit and for more than an hour—indeed, it felt like eternity—spoke of abortion as murder.

I remember being baffled. What an incredible coincidence, I thought, as I had just had an abortion. I was too naïve to realize my former teacher had taken me there intentionally, to punish us both, though really, it was my mostly my punishment, as it was my body and my abortion. But was I a murderer? I was the age of my son Diego and in the grade—10th—of my son Charlie. My grades plummeted so badly through the rest of 10th grade and throughout 11th grade that I would not be able to attend a four-year university straight out of high school. However, had I not had the abortion, I’m not sure I would have survived high school at all. I suppose you could say I sacrificed a life—or the potential for life—to save my own.

This summer I took my mother and son Charlie to my brother’s house in La Quinta to celebrate my mom’s 76th birthday. My brother’s two college-aged sons were there too. We all went to a drag show—my brother’s idea—and my mom loved it; we all did.

Afterward, my brother and I hung out in the pool drinking Coors Light till midnight. We were telling stories about our childhood, so vastly different than the upbringing we’d been able to offer our own kids. Our boys were listening as we reminisced. The conversation turned to the teacher, my pregnancy, and the abortion. My brother converted to Catholicism in his early twenties and had raised his sons as Catholics.

In an earlier newsletter titled Civil War, I’d written about my frustration with my brother for things he posted on social media after Roe v. Wade was overturned—stuff meant to taunt. But sitting in that pool with him and our boys late at night, the air temp still registering more than 100 degrees, he looked at me and said,

“Do you remember who took you to the clinic?”

Oddly, I could not. I racked my brain. Was it the teacher? My mother?

“It was me,” my brother said. “I drove you there, I waited, and then I drove you home.”

It turned out my brother was there for me at a moment when I’d really needed him. It had been many, many years, but I finally got to officially thank him. His boys had heard everything. They didn’t treat me any differently the next day, and we haven’t talked about it, but they heard.

As I thought about it, I realized that instead of taking me to the clinic, my former teacher took me to a place that espouses a certain morality whilst being notorious for sheltering clergymen who take sexual advantage of children, and that there they had told me that it was I who committed a great sin, that by having an abortion, I had committed murder.

And yet I did not regret my abortion; I was, in fact, grateful beyond belief for it and the nurses and doctor who provided it. As journalist Irin Carmon points out in her article “Can You Change Her Choice” (a Salon.com article we used to read in my argument class):  

“What's striking in all of this is how the moral argument against abortion alone—that it is murder of an innocent life—made by a highly organized movement for decades, including in ever-proliferating crisis pregnancy centers, has failed to persuade so many women.”

Women and girls will have abortions. They will have abortions whether the procedure is legal or illegal, safe or unsafe. They will find ways to end their pregnancies whether they are called murderers or not.

Church leaders, parishioners, and legislators in some states, taking this an extreme, radical, uncompromising, and controlling position, have gone so far as to say that there should be no exceptions for rape or incest—a position I consider patriarchal, sexist, misogynistic, and cruel. Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Missouri have all banned abortion with no exception for rape or incest. Mississippi has banned abortion with exceptions for rape but not incest. Oklahoma has banned abortion from fertilization. Idaho, Tennessee, and Texas have adopted near-total bans. More bans are coming—some are held up in court.

The frightening thing is that the abortion-is-murder argument is no longer solely a moral one; it’s blurring the lines between separation of church and state and criminalizing a procedure that was legal for 50 years. Where will we draw the line? Or is the line also disappearing?

Anti-abortion groups are celebrating. Abolitionists want even more. The door swings wider still.

I’m not a fearful person; but I find myself fearing for the future—a future that for some is already here.

Thanks for reading.

I spent last week in Toledo, Ohio, visiting family. Those who ingest the news du jour are probably aware that a 10-year-old had recently been raped in Ohio by her mother’s boyfriend, that she had become pregnant, and that because of Ohio’s ban on abortion after six weeks, the 10-year-old victim could not obtain an abortion there since she was six weeks and three days pregnant. Ohio’s law, the “Human Rights and Heartbeat Protection Act,” was signed into law by Republican Governor Mike DeWine in 2019, but enforcement of it was blocked until Roe v. Wade was overturned in June. So the girl, a fourth grader by my math, had to travel across state lines to Indiana where obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Caitlin Bernard gave her an abortion.

I don’t want to spend too much time on the shitstorm that followed, how right-wing media tried to deny the truth of the story, how the attorneys general of Indiana and Ohio grandstanded by attempting to turn the doctor who provided the abortion into a pariah. In Indiana, at the time the doctor gave the child the abortion, state law allowed abortion until 22 weeks. But Indiana legislators five hours ago today (August 6—I’ve had to revise this post since I began it) passed legislation banning all abortion from conception with exceptions for rape and incest or to save the health of the mother, which means that rape victims may still be able to get an abortion, to a point. How kind. Still, Indiana has joined a few other states with the strictest abortion laws. On Twitter, Dr. Bernard responded to the law:

“Indiana banned abortion in our state. I am devastated for the state I call home and for the countless people who will be harmed by this. How many girls and women will be hurt before they realize this must be reversed? I will continue to fight for them with every fiber of my being”

I asked one Ohio family member about her take. She’s involved with her church, Rotary, and other service organizations and is quite social. I broached the subject with her in part to hear what her peers are saying, as she has a lot of different female friend groups but also told me that none of them is talking about Roe v. Wade being overturned. It’s frankly shocking to me that groups of older women are getting together and that no one is bringing it up—is willing to bring it up. But yes, it’s polarizing. And to bring up abortion is to bring up politics—that seems inevitable. And maybe people going out to lunch together are just looking for common ground. I told her I would love to join one of her luncheons and ask questions. That’s all I would do—inquire. Because everyone—everyone—has at least some experience or thought or opinion about this heated topic. It’s not like people aren’t thinking about it. But it seems that at least the very people who could or should be talking about it—women!—aren’t. “Not many women are that open about it,” she told me.  We could rabble rouse together!

I asked my husband’s sister Lindsey Hickey, who has worked as a women’s health nurse practitioner for the last 17 years, including many years in Chicago, if she knew of a health practitioner affected by Roe’s overturn whom I could interview while I was in Ohio.

“Interview me!” she exclaimed over text.

I told her I was hoping she would say that, as she’s someone I’ve always genuinely liked, and I’ve always admired that she works in women’s health. Once I got to Ohio, we talked at the pool while our kids swam. She was of course horrified about the 10-year-old girl and very distressed about Roe v. Wade being overturned. She said her patients, most of whom are under 21, are very worried about their health and reproductive futures. Would they be able to get birth control, including IUDs? Would they be able to have an abortion if they found themselves needing one? We talked quite a bit but then she asked me to email her some questions so that she would have time to think and write out her answers.

Lindsey is a registered nurse—an RN, MSN, B-CNP. She’s been in women’s health for the last 17 years, including 10 as a labor and delivery nurse. Growing up in Toledo, she watched her mother, Joan Durgin, care and guide young pregnant teens through their pregnancies. Joan began her career working in Toledo public schools where she found her calling and developed a love for her students. When Lindsey was 13-years-old, her mother opened a school called Polly Fox Academy. The school, which provided a complete academic program and comprehensive social services, was dedicated to pregnant and parenting teenage girls in grades 7-12. Lindsey spent many days shadowing her mother at the school, watching her devote her time and knowledge to care for the young girls. Lindsey wrote:

“My mother’s impact on the girls and their children was truly what guided me to want to dedicate myself to a career in women’s health.”

Lindsey graduated from nursing school in 1996 and started her career as a labor and delivery nurse at St. Joseph Hospital in downtown Chicago. For the next 10 years, she was a floor nurse caring for women during their “antepartum, intrapartum, and postpartum phases of labor”—before delivery, during delivery, and after delivery of a baby. She went on to receive her Master of Nursing degree and also earned a degree as a Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner. She spent the next 13 years working in the inner city for a federally-funded healthcare facility caring for women in underserved communities. The patients received well-women exams, prenatal care, prescriptions, and healthcare counseling. She explained:

“I truly enjoyed my role in the clinic as my patients’ primary caregiver. I was able to counsel many of my patients, especially the younger ones, on the importance of their right to choose how they how they care for themselves and the decisions that they made about their healthcare. It was very rewarding to be an active role model for these young women.”

Lindsey clarified that she is not pro-abortion but rather pro-choice. I asked her if her friends and family know her position—and if she could voice it to most people she knows. She wrote:

“The majority of people who know me know the position I take with a women’s right to choose. I feel very strongly about advocating for the legal right to obtain an abortion. Taking the right to choose away from a woman is unprecedented and concerns me greatly for the future of women’s rights in this country. When I heard that Roe v. Wade had been overturned, I was utterly appalled. My first thought was having to counsel my patients and help guide them to make appropriate choices regarding their fertility rights.”

I asked her to what she thought the repercussions of Roe being overturned would be. She answered:

“It is my belief that restricting abortion access has negative consequences for pregnant people, who are at increased risk of physical and mental-health issues when they are denied an abortion, and for infant health.”

She also worried about people trying to end their pregnancies without clinical supervision:

“Some are likely to do this with abortion medications, but the problem is that many people don’t know much about abortion medication and how much to take to successfully terminate a pregnancy which could lead to potential physical and harmful outcomes.”

I asked her what she thought of Ohio’s law, which bans abortion past six weeks and makes no exception for rape or incest. She said she was “sickened” by the law. She wrote:

“I can’t understand Amy Coney Barrett and her radical vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. She is a mother of four girls. What would she think if one of her daughters was raped and sadly got pregnant?”

Although Lindsey was not trained to do abortions and does not perform them, she feels strongly about reproductive rights:

“A woman’s mental and physical health, she said, is greatly affected by her not having the right to choose the decisions about her own body.”

She worried that her office would no longer be able to prescribe misoprostol, a drug that can be used to induce labor by initiating contractions and that can help a pregnant person achieve vaginal delivery within 24 to 48 hours. It’s a useful drug for inserting an IUD; anyone whose had something go in or out of their cervix knows how excruciating it can be, and misoprostol can “soften, efface, or dilate the cervix,” thus making the process more manageable. But misoprostol is also used for early abortion—hence, the potential for no longer being able to prescribe it. (Medical abortion usually involves a two-step process: mifepristone, which stops the growth of the fetus, followed by misoprostol, which causes cramping and contractions). Lindsey wrote:

“A spontaneous miscarriage occurs on its own; however, often we prescribe misoprostol to help move the miscarriage along so a women can move past this trying time at a quicker pace. If misoprostol is banned, it may complicate and prolong the miscarriage process.”

When Lindsey has a patient who needs an abortion, she sends them to Michigan, because her office is near the border. I remember her telling me a year into Covid that people from Michigan were coming to Ohio to get their dogs groomed due to stronger Covid restrictions in Michigan, and people from Ohio were going to Michigan to get abortions, due to stronger abortion restrictions in Ohio. The number of abortion clinics in Ohio has been declining in recent years, going from 83 in 1982 to 70 in 1992 to 20 in 2014, and according to Pro-choice Ohio, today there are only six full-service, ambulatory surgical abortion clinics left in Ohio and three additional clinics that offer medical abortion.

When I asked Lindsey if I could use her full name, she said absolutely. I appreciated the boldness. We’re seeing more of that boldness—and risk—from people who support abortion rights and from those who provide women with healthcare. Dr. Bernard said in an interview with the Times:

“Physicians who provide abortion have been harassed, they have been murdered. And for too long, I think, because of that, they’ve had to be silent to protect their families, and it’s created an idea that we’re doing something wrong or something illegal. And we’re not. And I feel compelled to say that.”

I imagine most doctors want to do their work without being put in the spotlight or on the chopping block. But many people—doctors, nurses, protesters, musicians, politicians, and people from all walks of life—are being compelled to speak up, because to sit by and watch what is happening is unacceptable. So I am grateful to Lindsey for speaking so openly to me.

You know, I remember every single time a woman has opened up to me about her abortion—including the first time one of my dearest friends told me about hers. I listened in awe at her honesty and boldness, and yet didn’t tell her about mine. I’m sorry to say that happened more than once. I was afraid of judgment. But really, I was still judging myself. Judgment and shame and stigma must end. Abortion is commonplace normal. Abortion is healthcare. Access to safe and affordable abortion should be a legal right. You may not know it, but odds are quite good that someone you know and love has had an abortion.

In response to the raped and impregnated 10-year-old, abortion opponents doubled down. Republican legislator Wendi Stearman who brought forth Oklahoma’s restrictive abortion law, apparently said “It’s horrific what happened there, but even more horrific is taking the life of another child.”

A reader from that article commented:

“This article made me feel physically sick. Republicans are now flip flopping on what is considered a medically necessary abortion all over Twitter. Political actions have consequences. How they cannot have bothered to fathom or care for the potential outcome of child rape boggles the mind. Oh wait, many individuals in this article don't care about the children and families whose lives will be touched by sexual violence. This country is a failure.”

But maybe it’s not.

On Tuesday, August 2, voters in Kansas—a conservative state that went handily for Trump in the last two presidential elections—voted overwhelmingly against removing the right to abortion from the State Constitution, which allows abortion up to 22 weeks. According to the New York Times:

“Supporters of abortion rights won a huge and surprising victory on Tuesday in one of the most conservative states in the country, with Kansas voters resoundingly rejecting a constitutional amendment that would have let state legislators ban or significantly restrict abortion.”

And it wasn’t just voters in the major cities: “Abortion opponents underperformed even in conservative areas.” The article and the accompanying video of celebration brought tears to my eyes. If the referendum had allowed the constitutional amendment to be overturned, conservative legislators (of which only 27 percent of 165 seats are women) likely have banned abortion outright in Kansas. The Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade said it should go back to the states—to the people and their elected legislators. But in Kansas, the people spoke and sent a clear message to their state lawmakers:

Don’t ban abortion.

What if every state that banned or severely restricted abortion in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned also put forth a referendum for their constituents? What would the people say? In the aftermath of the Kansas vote, Zack Gingrich-Gaylord, a spokesperson for Trust Women, stated in an interview with Vanity Fair:

“I think that people are kind of getting in touch with how they actually feel about abortion rights in this state and that it is something that they value, and that it is something that most people view as a public good that they want meaningful local access to, even if they never intend to use it.”

I think—I truly hope—he is right.

In the absence of more referendums, we’ll just have to till the midterms and gubernatorial races in November to see. And they should prove interesting. In Ohio, for instance, Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, will be running against Democratic candidate Nan Whaley, currently Dayton’s mayor. She’s endorsed by Emily’s List:

“With dangerous abortion restrictions moving through the Ohio legislature, it has never been more important to elect a Democratic pro-choice woman as governor of Ohio.”

Today, when someone offered me reward money for diving into a lake to fish out a kayak chair they had lost the day before (not joking), I told the person to send my reward money to her campaign.

I want to thank the voters in Kansas who put a stop to the Draconian anti-women’s healthcare measures their MOSTLY MALE legislators wanted to enact. And I really want to thank the people who have boldly made it their life’s work to support pregnant women and girls, the Lindsey Hickeys, Joan Durgins, and Dr. Caitlyn Bernards of the world. You give me hope.

Thanks for reading.

The first was an episode on July 7 from the New York Times podcast The Daily titled “An Anti-Abortion Campaigner on the Movement’s Historic Win” in which Sabrina Tavernise interviewed James Bopp. He was the lawyer who brought the famous Citizens United case to the Supreme Court, which made it easier for wealthy donors and corporations to donate to political campaigns and which ushered in the era of Super PACs, but his real focus throughout his long career—he’s in his 70s—has been to overturn Roe v. Wade.

As a young lawyer, he joined forces with the National Right to Life Committee, which had formed in 1968 and is now the “nation's oldest and largest pro-life organization,” according to the organization’s website. Bopp made it his life’s work to craft legislation to challenge Roe. Over the years, the Supreme Court took on several of his cases, and little by little, he and other anti-abortion lawyers and lawmakers were able to whittle away at abortion rights, finding any loophole that would weaken it. The laws he helped enact ran the gamut from requiring women or girls to get consent from their spouses or parents; moving abortion procedures from hospitals to special clinics; preventing federal money—like Medicaid—from funding procedures; making women endure waiting periods from 24 to 72 hours.

When people—including me—ask, "HOW DID WE GET HERE?” you realize while listening to Bopp that there was a very intentional, calculated, determined, organized, and relentless legal effort to overturn Roe v. Wade from the moment the decision was handed down in 1973. He explained:  

Part of the strategy is the recognition that you’ve got to have the Court deal with this repeatedly. This is not a one-shot deal. You’ve got to keep presenting them cases, have them take up cases, because that gives them the opportunity to question, distinguish, undermine, or as you’ve already heard, change the right to abortion.

So it’s like at each stop, you get a rewrite of the right to abortion, which undermines it, inherently undermines it, because it demonstrates what so many people said when Roe v. Wade was handed down — it’s just not grounded in the Constitution, and it’s built on sand. Well, every time you get a decision, you have these shifting sands, and that undermines the precedent.

Every time the Supreme Court revisited a challenge to abortion rights, the sands shifted again, and then, finally, with the nomination of three conservative justices by President Trump—Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—the stars aligned. Bopp referred to the 6-3 Dobbs decision as the most “consequential decision of the Supreme Court in my lifetime.” He said:

One of the most radical doctrines ever accepted in the history of the world is the Judeo-Christian idea that every individual human life has inherent value and is sacred…. Roe v. Wade was an assault on that. It was a direct assault because it treated human lives, because of their location in the womb, as not having the same value and protection that all human lives have been entitled to. Hopefully, we are now taking a turn to be able to put that in the past.

That language, “Judeo-Christian” has been popping up everywhere lately. A relative of mine recently commented to me about the United States being a “Judeo-Christian nation,” and then had the audacity to suggest that Muslims might not be able to assimilate and live peacefully here because our cultures and religion are so different. Huh? Until that moment, I had never heard that relative use the phrase “Judeo-Christian.” Apparently it’s been a Fox News mantra for years—first from Bill O’Reilly and now Mark Levin:

We have to—we need to celebrate our culture. We need to celebrate Americanism, we need to celebrate the Judeo-Christian principles that went into the founding of this nation. And if you're not Jewish, you're not Christian, there’s no reason to take offense. You came here, a family member came here because of the nature of the country. You fled. You don't have to be Jewish or Christian but facts are facts. It was founded on a Judeo-Christian belief system which embraces Western civilization and the Renaissance, the Reformation, and all these things.

Facts are facts?

Back to Bopp. Because his work is not done here. In fact, he’s working harder than ever now that Roe has been overturned. But why? As Sabrina Tavernise pointed out, most of those red states have already passed abortion bans or restrictions, to which Bopp explained that the model legislation they’re writing is for any of the 50 states who now have the opportunity to pass substantial restrictions on abortion to “protect the unborn.” Maybe there are 30 states doing that right now, Bopp explained, but…

If things go well in the midterms, there’ll probably be 35. Because you could see, if things go well, Democrat governors that are standing in the way in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina could very well be defeated. You just don’t know. But if that happens, you’d add them because they have overwhelming Republican legislatures.

To Bopp’s chagrin, there are sanctuary states and even cities within red states whose prosecutors are refusing to criminalize abortion, like in Indiana, where the Berrien County prosecutor is taking a stance that he will not enforce abortion laws.  Bopp doesn’t hold back his frustration with these rogue prosecutors:

So you’ve got to do something else to get around these lawless, radical Democrat prosecutors that are taking their discretion up to a much higher level, where they’re now going to be the little king of their county and decide what laws are going to be applicable in their county. I mean, that’s the job of the legislature, not them.

The ultimate goal, according to Bopp?

An abortion-free America, except where justified by the life of the mother. And the law is a tool for that. And we just haven’t had that tool because of Roe v. Wade, until now. Well, now, we have that tool. So as far as the movement is concerned, we’re half done.

But don’t worry. Bopp assures us that “obviously, reaching our goal of abortion-free America except to save the life of the mother would only occur if there was consensus, not conflict.”

No conflict at all. We can rest easy. Nothing will be forced upon us.

I wonder if Bopp ever passed an eight-pound baby through a dilated vaginal opening after nine months of pregnancy, suffered a vaginal tear—which is very common—that required stitches that would take six weeks to heal and burned like hell every time he had to pee. If, for several days, maybe weeks, it was painful for him to even sit down. If he had a good supply of giant pads to absorb the bleeding that kept up for several days after the birth. If he took stool softeners so that he didn’t tear out his vaginal stitches while having a bowel movement. If he breastfed his baby every couple of hours or pumped if he was going to work. If he continued to take loving care of his other children while recuperating. If he found reliable and affordable childcare in case there was no maternity or paternity leave guaranteed with his job. If he was able to pay the hospital bill rendered after giving birth, likely at a cost of several thousands of dollars.

I had a friend who had a third-degree tear from her vagina to her anus that required dozens of stitches; the birth was so traumatic that she decided she would never have another child.  

Bopp, you are just another man influencing edicts made by other men in positions of absolute power that solely affect women. This patriarchal hubris is sickening. These men simply have NO IDEA.

The second fraught yet fascinating audio piece I listened to in the last week was on Fresh Air. Terry Gross interviewed Adam Liptak—a reporter from the New York Times who has been covering the Supreme Court for 14 years. Here’s the Apple podcast link, and here it is on Spotify.

Liptak discussed the major cases the Supreme Court decided this term—which ran the gamut from environmental protection (the Court limited the EPA’s ability to regulate power plant emissions), gun control (the Court struck down a New York law limiting who could carry firearms in public), prayer during high school football games (the Court ruled that a public school football coach could openly pray after games on the fifty-yard line), and of course Dobbs (the Court overturned a 50-year precedent and returned the oversight of abortion regulations to the states, many of which immediately banned or severely restricted it).

I love Adam Liptak. He’s very measured and clear-thinking and well-spoken, even as he’s expressing his own personal shock; and Terry Gross—always calm and collected (unless she’s interviewing Gene Simmons from KISS)—nearly came unglued at certain points during her conversation with Liptak. I always told my argument students at Cal Poly that the Supreme Court was more important than the presidency in shaping the course of the country. You probably already have a sense of how the Supreme Court’s recent decisions will impact life in the United States, but Liptak provides a succinct and worrisome synopsis.

But here’s a little overview. First, it’s important to know that constitutional logic used to argue Roe in 1973 was found in the Fourteenth Amendment:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

That very special amendment has been used to argue for many rights not found in the original Constitution. But if the Fourteenth Amendment no longer protects a woman’s right to privacy and bodily autonomy, some people fear that same logic may be applied to overturn other civil rights cases, such Obergefell, which made gay marriage legal. Terry Gross and Adam Liptak touch on that with a very interesting exchange:

GROSS: Justice Alito, in his majority opinion, wrote that nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion. What's the logic behind limiting such a profound precedent to just abortion?

LIPTAK: You know, that's like a sentence. That's an assertion that cuts against the logic of the opinion. The logic of the opinion would suggest that the right to same-sex marriage is at risk, the right not to have criminal laws against gay intimacy at risk. The right to contraception could be at risk. The right to interracial marriage could be at risk. And it's very nice that Justice Alito will write his sentences, don't worry. Nothing to see here. But as the dissenters point out in the abortion case, the law is about logic, not about assertions.

And in a concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas, part of the majority, said, let's go. It's time for us to reconsider and overrule the same-sex marriage case, the gay sex case, and the contraception case. So I wouldn't feel a lot of comfort from the bland assurance by Justice Alito, who has written very bitterly about Obergefell, the same-sex marriage case, that the court is, as a matter of principle, going to stop here. Now, they may not have the votes, and I don't know that they have the votes of the chief justice and Justice Kavanaugh. They may not get to five on these issues. But, you know, it's very nice to write a sentence. But future courts are going to look at the logic of the decision not to promise that it stops here.

GROSS: Yeah. And Clarence Thomas, in the concurrence that you referred to, called the decision on marriage equality, sexual relations that aren't heterosexual relations and contraception, he called those decisions demonstrably erroneous decisions. How are they demonstrably erroneous in Thomas' point of view?

LIPTAK: In precisely the same way he thinks a right to abortion is not contained in the Constitution or inferable from the 14th Amendment and what the drafters and ratifiers of the 14th Amendment meant in 1868. He says, just as they didn't think about a right to abortion, they didn't think about a right to same-sex marriage. And they didn't, right? They didn't think about a right to be free from being prosecuted for gay intimacy. They didn't think about a right to contraception. You know, credit where credit is due - at least Clarence Thomas is transparent and frank about where the logic of the abortion decision leads.

I just want to interject something here. My mother’s partner is a woman named Claire. Here they are:

Claire just turned 75 this month and my mother turns 76 on Monday, July 18. Claire was born in California, but her family is from Louisiana. For a few years, my mom and Claire moved back to Minden, near Shreveport, to live in the hundred-year-old farmhouse that belonged to Claire’s mother. I visited them when they were living there and got to meet some of Claire’s family members. (Now Claire and my mom are back in Los Angeles.) I’ve talked to Claire quite a bit over the years about her family history, and lately, she’s been urging me to write about it. Here’s a hard-to-hear piece of the story.

Claire’s mother was born in Louisiana in the 1920s and had 11 siblings. At 12-years old, she was raped and became pregnant. Forced to go live with the rapist’s family, she gave birth to his daughter at 13. After she bore him two more children, he divorced her and took sole custody of the children, basically making her a de facto handmaid. Claire herself did not come into the world until years later in 1947 when her mother, then in her 20s, moved to California and met Claire’s father.

My mom and Claire have been together for more than 30 years. They take each other to the doctor, go to Costco, have a favorite booth at their local Olive Garden. They have helped raise grandchildren and survived many difficult times. Claire and I text at least once a week—she sends blessings and love to my family and updates on my mom. Oftentimes she sends me something like this:

So I’m thinking about Claire, thinking about my mother, thinking about gay marriage and intimacy, thinking about abortion bans, including those with no exception for incest or rape. State abortion laws are in flux and changing so incredibly rapidly, it’s hard to keep track. Last week, a Louisiana judge upheld a trigger law that went into effect that bans abortion from conception with no exception for rape or incest. In the hour during which I was first drafting this, the Louisiana abortion ban was blocked and abortion was made legal again in the state—at least temporarily. This ping-ponging is insanity. Imagine being a pregnant woman or a health care provider who literally needs to be looking at real time updates in regard to the shifting legal sands on which you stand prior to making crucial healthcare decisions. Yes, insanity. You can find current, reliable updates on each state here.

I have a question for Clarence Thomas regarding Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled that laws against interracial marriage violated the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Thomas, will you make an exception for that ruling as you seek to dismantle more precedents? I mean, by your logic, your own marriage may no longer be constitutionally protected either. That’s one hell of a way to get out of a marriage.

Thanks for reading.

Perhaps you were overjoyed by the fall of Roe v. Wade. Perhaps, like me, you were devastated, even after seeing the Supreme Court’s leaked draft from May 2 that foreshadowed Roe’s doomed fate. Still, I was overwhelmed. If you’re a subscriber to this newsletter, you’re probably not indifferent. Most Americans are moderate on abortion—they want it legal with some restrictions. But most people are not indifferent to Roe v. Wade being overturned. According to a CBS News poll, 59 percent of Americans disapprove of the Supreme Court overturning the 1973 decision that made abortion legal in all 50 states, including 67 percent of women. Fifty-two percent consider it a step backward for America; and 56 percent say it will make women’s lives worse. Fifty-eight percent support a federal law that would make abortion legal. Of those women disapproving of Roe being overturned, 81 percent felt upset, 75 percent angry, and 67 percent scared. So it seems I was not alone in my reaction, shaking as I was with anger and sadness upon hearing the awful news.

I made a stream-of-consciousness video the morning Roe was overturned, uploaded it to Youtube, and shared it on this newsletter. Later that day I realized I had to tell my sons that a video I had made in which I discussed an abortion I’d had at 16 was now public. So much for my being a role model for my kids about how not to over-share on social media. Oh well. Desperate times call for desperate measures. When Charlie got home from water polo practice I told him that I had I posted a video on my Substack. I told him he could watch it or not watch it, but that it was out there. He decided to watch it.

Waiting for him to emerge from his room might have been the longest 10 minutes of my life. When he finally did, he came right up to me and gave me a great hug. He said he was sorry about what I went through. He said thank you. He started asking me questions and we talked for an hour, only stopping because Diego got home. But Charlie and I had had a beautiful conversation. Diego watched the video later. He was more reticent, which did not surprise me as reticence is on par with his personality: In general, he’s a man of few words unless we are talking about interesting jobs, investing money, or crazy adventures. He gave me a sweet hug and it was more than I could ask for. My kids’ response was the only one I was truly concerned about. If anyone else decided they didn’t like the video—or me—because of my disclosure, that was OK.

I also told Charlie that one of the most fraught moments of my life was when Derek and I were engaged and he was visiting me—we didn’t live together before we got married, and I was living in Santa Barbara and he was living in SLO. One night, I told him there were some things I needed to let him know about my life. I explained to Charlie that I told Derek as-yet undisclosed details, including my abortion, and held my breath. It didn’t matter, Derek said. I told him I wasn’t sure if I wanted kids. He didn’t flinch. We would figure it out together, he said. Despite everything that had happened, your dad believed in me, I told Charlie, even though I was a diamond in the rough, to which Charlie replied, Yeah, you were basically a piece of coal. (He knows how to make me laugh.)

I told Charlie that I didn’t regret anything that had happened to me—even the worst things. That they made me the person I am, made me more compassionate, a little more empathetic, a little less judgy. And I was a stronger person because of all of it. And when I finally did decide to have kids, it was because I really, really wanted them.

I sent a link of my newsletter video to my brother and his girlfriend. I was feeling a little angry, as both of them had voted twice for “the person responsible for this.” My brother responded via text:

“That was very brave of you to put that out there Mel. I will ALWAYS love, respect and appreciate you. You are the strongest woman I know, and when the shock wears off and it becomes time to get to work, the Pro Choice movement could not have a better, more intelligent person on their side. The fact that you have the time now is a gift from the universe. I love you.”

It was a thoughtful response.

However, at the time of his response, this was his Facebook profile picture, which he had changed shortly after Roe V. Wade was overturned:

If you don’t know what that is, it’s a mockery of RBG—Ruth Bader Ginsberg—the Supreme Court Justice who fought for women’s rights on the court her entire career and who was so popular, she was referred to as the Notorious RBG, which was also the name of a biography by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik. This version, the Notorious ACB, is of course Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee and the sole woman on the Supreme Court who joined five other conservative male justices to overturn Roe v. Wade. Writing for Slate.com, Dahlia Lithwick responded with this:

“Amid all of this grief, we are now subject to a turn to parody that is also cruelty. The White House rollout of Judge Amy Coney Barrett as candidate for the seat has gone beyond erasing Ginsburg’s legacy—they are stealing the trappings of that legacy and stripping it for parts….This comedic implication—that Barrett is the natural inheritor of Ginsburg’s legacy—is depraved.”

I felt sick to my stomach when I saw the callous meme, much like I did when my brother, giddy to show me his gun arsenal, placed an AR-15 in my hands and stated: “This is the same kind of gun that was used in Sandy Hook.” He likes to “trigger the liberal” as they say.  He wakes up, and, according to his girlfriend, watches three hours of news, bouncing between Fox and CNN, and then he goes online and trolls people who have “liberal”views. He claims to be OK with abortion up to 15 weeks, but then goes on Facebook to agitate the left. He will say that it’s intellectual sparring. I think it’s intellectually lazy and spiritually abject.

I was supposed to take my sons camping with my brother and his girlfriend and her daughters over July 4th weekend, and it felt like a Civil War was breaking out in my heart, brother against sister. We have a small family—it’s just my mom, me, my brother, one beloved cousin who lives in New Jersey, and a couple of uncles in York, Pennsylvania. These are my few blood relatives, my brood. I don’t surround myself with an echo chamber—I have dear friends and plenty of family on my husband’s side who hold different political views from me. But as far as I know, they’re not petty or mean online. They haven’t, like my brother, been temporarily suspended from Twitter for inappropriate tweets.

My brother is a self-made man. Despite our myriad childhood difficulties, he rose above the ashes  of our youth and has been gainfully employed for years. He makes good money and supports his family. He works really hard. He has two adult sons I care for deeply just as he cares deeply for my sons, who adore him. We have almost always disagreed on politics. I have at times been furious with him, but I have also tried to keep him close. I’ve dropped everything and in a moment’s notice and driven several hours to be with him when he needed me (he claims I saved his life). We suffered the same hardships as children, under the same conditions, with the exception that, unlike him, I became pregnant at sixteen.

Could I go camping with him when my blood is boiling, when we are literally facing the revocation of our reproductive rights, a moment my brother sees as no more than another golden opportunity to be a bootlicking lackey of the Right Wing Male Talking Head Douchebag Industrial Complex?

I didn’t want to back out of camping because of politics. But is it just political? Or is it a human rights issue? This court decision will cause untold suffering, and it will NOT lead to some fantastical utopia. Women and girls will go to desperate measure to obtain an abortion. Some will die. They will drive ungodly miles to escape states that are currently passing laws intended to prosecute them if they escape said states to have an abortion. They will have to borrow money. Who will take care of their children they need to leave for several days? Will their bosses understand if they need the time off? Where will they get lodging? How will they pay for it? If they get medical abortions and something goes wrong, will a doctor treat them? Will the women be punished? Will they go to jail?  Am I really asking these questions in America in the 21st century?  

Eventually, I spoke with my brother on the phone for more than an hour. He’s going through a tough divorce, he’s tired, emotional, worn out. We didn’t talk about Roe being overturned. And in the end I took my boys camping with their uncle. They had a great time. He was loving and affectionate. We held our tongues. We looked for ways to share common ground—he and I cooked dinner every night for everyone, for instance. We broke bread together. But  the revocation of abortion rights was on my mind. This is a watercolor I painted while camping.

I remember a student in my argument class at Cal Poly comparing the abortion debate with the gun control debate. I was talking, as I often naively did in that class, about the need for civil debate, for finding common ground, for making concessions. She said that neither the abortion rights activists nor the gun rights people wanted to give an inch to the other side, because they were afraid that the goal of the other side was not compromise but rather to take away all guns, to eliminate abortion completely.

At the time of writing this, there have been more than 300 mass shootings in the United States since the beginning of 2022. The AR-15 and other high-capacity rifles like it are the mass shooters go-to. The Supreme Court, just before it shot down Roe, also shot down a New York state law that required gun owners to reasonably explain why they should be allowed to open carry. Individual states cannot impede gun owners right to open carry, the Court decided. It’s constitutionally protected under the Second Amendment. Yet another victory for guns.

But abortion is no longer constitutionally protected; each state gets to set their own terms regarding abortion. Without missing a beat, many states immediately banned abortion or severely restricted it. Some states made abortion a felony; some don’t have exceptions for incest or rape. Clinics closed. According to the politicians on the right, this is a good thing: They feel the people in each individual state  should decide, but we know their goal is that they want to revoke your ability to decide. They want to ensure that there is no choice in the matter. I think the individual should decide.

Abortion is now prohibited in Alabama, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin, and West Virginia. Arizona, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Utah also banned abortion, but the bans are temporarily blocked in the courts. Idaho, Mississippi, North Dakota, Tennessee, and Wyoming will be banning abortion soon. It has been restricted in Ohio and South Carolina (six weeks); Georgia also has a six-week ban, but it’s been temporarily blocked. Florida is banning abortion after 15 weeks, which now sounds almost liberal. Some other states are uncertain for now. Women have lost.

Abortion is legal and will likely remain legal in Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, Maine, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. These states, for now, are keeping abortion legal and expanding abortion rights: California, Connecticut, D.C., Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.

As we all know, and as they have made explicitly clear, the goal of the anti-abortion movement is a nationwide ban on abortion.

Dystopian days.

I’m not naïve anymore about reaching across the aisle. The extremists are making the rules and they are dragging bystanders like my brother into the fray. I’m not sure I or you or anyone could persuade anyone who is wholly against abortion to soften their views. This is another issue that will divide us, terribly, if we let it. But I agree with the majority of those polled by CBS: this moves us backward as a country.  

Do our right-wing politicians really think so little of us and so highly of themselves that they feel they must be the ultimate arbiters of our most personal decisions? The hubris is astounding. This is how Derek puts it:

Imagine the millions of people who are having sex right now, at this very moment, under all different circumstances. Some people are making passionate love in order to conceive. Some women are having sex with abusive boyfriends in order to avoid further abuse. Some women are being raped. Some people are just fucking for fun because fucking is fucking fun. Some pregnancies will result, either by design or by accident. Each resulting pregnancy will lead to entirely unique circumstances for each pregnant woman.

Imagine having the audacity, the self-importance, the pomposity, to think that YOU know what is best in each and every one of these millions and billions of permutations despite not having any knowledge whatsoever of ANY of the specifics of each situation, despite not even knowing the individuals themselves. On top of that, add the fact that men, who will NEVER be pregnant and therefore will NEVER have to face the circumstances of the laws being enacted, are the pompous, self-important blowhards making the laws outlawing abortion. THIS. IS. ONE. THOUSAND. PERCENT. BULLSHIT.

That said, don’t despair. Well, maybe despair a little. But find joy where you can. Stay strong. Vote and encourage others to vote. Tell your story if you can (you could even tell it to me if you’re compelled; I could share it with your name or keep it anonymous). Give money if you’ve got it to give. (I put Planned Parenthood in my will years ago. Last week, I gave money to Just the Pill.) Get some exercise to keep the endorphins flowing. Last night, Diego asked me to go surfing with him this morning at 5:30, and we went, drove out to the beach together as the sun was rising, suited up, and paddled out. When stuff like that happens, I want to pinch myself at my luck—luck that is in part due to the fact that I was able to access safe, relatively affordable, and legal healthcare as a youth when I most needed it, so that my life wasn’t derailed when it had hardly begun.

Here’s the last and hardest piece of advice I’m giving and trying to follow myself:

Try to love people, even—and perhaps especially—when you disagree with them.

Why I had it—and what it meant for the rest of my life.

In the interview, Derek tells us about how the song, which originated 16 years ago, morphed into its final state. (There’s even a little audio footage from our former band The Wedding Industrial Complex!) He also discusses a flowchart that’s useful for anyone who may have an opinion about reproductive rights.

“Texas Legislators” was released last Friday, June 3, as part of Derek’s latest album, The Big Five-0. You can listen to the song below—or hear the song and whole album on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music or wherever you stream. The full album is available for physical purchase from his website dereksenn.com or Boo Boo Records in San Luis Obispo, California. You can also buy the physical or digital album on Bandcamp. This is the blurb I wrote for his album at the listening station at BooBoos:

For his fourth release, The Big Five-0, San Luis Obispo singer-songwriter Derek Senn took the opportunity, while turning 50 during a global pandemic, to write an eclectic mix of groovy, unforgettable songs. Topics include quarantining, viruses, war repercussions, Texas’ anti-woman legislation, a vasectomy, and being OK with getting used (a downtempo cover of Bill Withers’ classic “Use Me.”)  Lucky for us, Derek again joined forces with the talented musician and producer Damon Castillo to record the album. There are slow dirges, fierce rockers, and all stops in between, a surprise around every corner. In one song, Derek tells us with self-deprecating irony that he’s “Big in Britain,” before informing us that “a dozen people filled” the little pub he played. Funny, whip-smart, occasionally political, and often surprisingly tender, he takes chances as different narrators; in one he plays the part of a sequoia tree: “I am a bellwether for whether man can hold it together…in the age of man versus man.” The title track about turning 50 starts off, “My colonoscopy is in the books; I worry worry is wrinkling my looks; the hair on my head has relocated south to my back, my nutsack.” Sometimes sophomoric, sometimes earnest, sometimes angry, sometimes hilarious, sometimes introspective, but always compelling, these fourteen songs run the gamut. Quite a listen—you’ll want it on repeat.

I do.

Last week I went to see Happening at The Palm, our local art house movie theater. Based on the autobiographical book published in 2000 by Annie Ernaux, the film, directed by Audrey Diwan, takes place in France during the mid-1960s when abortion was illegal (it was legalized there in 1975). I’m going to talk about the film, which has won many awards, including the Gold Lion, the highest prize at the Venice International Film Festival, so, spoiler alert.

But not much of a spoiler here, really. After all, you know going into a film like this what’s going to happen, just as I was able to assume, if only from the title, what the main plot event would be when I went to see “4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days” about a college student in the 1980s in Romania who becomes pregnant and seeks out an illegal abortion (abortion has been legal there since 1990). In these true-to-life HARROWING films, you’re just waiting for IT, for the MAIN TORTUOUS EVENT.

It’s not much different than going to see 127 Hours, the 2010 film in which Aron Ralston, played by James Franco, falls and becomes wedged between boulders on a solitary climbing excursion in the Utah wilderness. To extricate himself from the situation, to have any hope of survival, he must cut off his own arm. You know what’s going to happen, what you are going to have to endure in your plush reclining seat, and yet you go anyway. The main difference is that upon surviving his endeavor, Ralston was hailed for his bravery and invited on talk shows. He wrote a bestselling book and became a sought-out motivational speaker. That’s the opposite of what happens to the young women who survive illegal abortions. They, in contrast, remain reticent, out of fear of reprisal, both social and legal. But there are exceptions. If you’re like Annie Ernaux, you’ll eventually write a book about it that will be made into an award-winning film.  

In Happening, the main character, Anne Duchesne, is a college student living in a dorm with other young women. She’s studying literature and determined to pass her exams so she can continue and advance her studies. She has decent and supportive working-class parents who want a better future for her. Anne is determined to have that for herself too, and she’s capable of earning it. She’s smart and loves college and literature. She wants to be a writer. She even wants to have a child someday. The problem is, Anne is about to discover she’s pregnant now.

We don’t see how or by whom at first, but the circumstances are eventually revealed. She was not raped or even coerced. She met a charming young man and their tryst left her pregnant. The male has long since returned to his town where he has continued his studies in political science, oblivious that Anne is eagerly waiting for a menstrual period that won’t come.

Finally, her doctor confirms her fear. She begs him for help, but he adamantly says he cannot help her—that they could both go to jail. Determined to end her pregnancy, she seeks out another doctor who refuses to help her initially but then gives her a prescription, which he says, will “induce menstruation,” an injection she administers into her own thigh with a syringe, plunging the needle deep into her thigh. It doesn’t work, and days later, she desperately tries to give herself an abortion using an impossibly long knitting needle. She braces herself, struggles through the pain as she tries to be thorough. She winces. She bleeds.

After the procedure, she returns to her original doctor, who informs her that the pregnancy is still intact. But there was blood!—she tells him, incredulous. Merely scratches to the uterine membrane, he tells her. But the prescription the other doctor gave me—the one to induce menstruation? she asks. He’s against abortion, her doctor tells her. The medicine he gave you wasn’t meant to end the pregnancy but to strengthen the embryo.

Anne realizes there is almost no one she can turn to for help, no one she can trust. She cannot tell her mom or her dad. She can’t even tell her best friends at first, but desperate for help, finally fesses up to them. In a sad testament to the fear the State can instill in citizens with its laws, her friends recoil, afraid to help her, afraid to even discuss it. In a later scene, one of them confesses that she had a passionate affair with an older man for a month that summer, that she could have gotten pregnant, could have ended up like Anne. In one of the most telling moments of the film, Anne’s friend says that she felt ashamed but had been overcome with desire. But the mores of the 1960s suggested that although you might have that desire, you’re certainly not supposed to act on it.  

My son Charlie, 14, asked me about the movie when his dad and I got home. When I told him that the main character got pregnant he asked if she was on birth control. No, I said. I understood the subtext of the question: Well, then, wasn’t it her fault she got pregnant? In the 1960s by taking birth control—if you could even obtain it—you’d be admitting to the intention of having sex, which was severely frowned upon. Still, even today I bristle at the she-should-have-known-better argument. It’s like having no empathy for someone dying of cancer because they were once a smoker.

As the film goes on, the weeks of Anne’s pregnancy—five weeks, six weeks, seven, eight—are noted onscreen at the beginning of each segment, a menacing countdown as she faces the myriad roadblocks intended to prevent her from ending her pregnancy. In one segment, after her attempted self-induced abortion fails, she visits the strapping young man who impregnated her. She had told him previously over the phone that she did not plan to have the baby, so when she shows up for the weekend, his expectation is vastly different from hers. I need your help! she tells him. But he makes it quite clear that there is nothing he can do other than be mad at her for ruining a perfectly good weekend by showing up still pregnant. The pregnancy isn’t his problem—it’s entirely hers.

Her grades begin to plummet. Of course she can’t concentrate on school! And the clock is ticking. She implores a male friend to help her. He’s a womanizer, and so she figures he may have faced a similar predicament. She goes to his place to discuss the situation, but he’s such a dog, he tries to get her to sleep with him—after all, there’s no risk since she’s already pregnant. She leaves, furious, but later he puts her in contact with another female student who nervously (hushed, secretive, high stakes!) gives Anne the number of a woman who provides clandestine abortions. Anne calls the woman, gets the address, and sets the date. Then she goes out to a bar the night before and, with nothing to lose in the face of her pending back-alley abortion, goes home with an acquaintance with whom she has passionate sex. Judge if you will. She doesn’t need your approval.

The next morning, Anne goes to an apartment for the abortion. The middle-aged woman is tall, thin, no nonsense. The walls are thin too, and the woman tells Anne: If you make noise or yell out, I’ll stop. Anne, who has had to sell her beloved books and other belongings to pay for the procedure, hands the woman 400 francs. They enter a bedroom, and Anne lays back on the edge of the bed with her knees up. The woman begins with a speculum; if you’ve had a pap smear, you may have experienced that cold, metal contraption opening you up wide. I don’t know of a more vulnerable feeling.

Then, as the woman continues with more apparati we can’t see, Anne whimpers, grabs her own thighs, begins to shake, and finally yelps. The woman glares at her. Of course there’s no anesthesia. It seems interminable. Gentlemen, imagine a stranger placing your ball sack into a vise grip and applying increasing pressure until you think you will scream or pass out. Imagine not being able to make a sound. Imagine not knowing how long it will last, how tight the vise will go. Imagine not knowing if the pain you’re feeling is doing you real, perhaps irreversible, damage, or if you’ll even survive. Imagine selling all your worldly possessions just to pay the privilege of that experience.

Days pass.  The abortion doesn’t work. Anne goes back. The woman nearly refuses her, saying a second procedure is profoundly risky. But Anne, increasingly desperate, is willing to risk it all. They return to the bedroom. In the next scene, Anne is walking or trying to walk down the street after leaving the woman’s apartment. She’s finally beginning to miscarry. Sweating, stumbling, almost collapsing from pain, she makes it to her dorm room. In bed, she groans and doubles over with pain and finally screams. She thinks she is dying because she is. A fellow student in the dorm reluctantly helps her (helping could mean jail) as she finishes miscarrying. It’s bloody and visceral and terrible and terrifying. But she won’t stop bleeding.

She’s transported to the hospital, the very place she’s tried to avoid through the entire ordeal, the very place that’s meant to save your life but could end up ruining it. The medical staff can condemn you if they manage to keep you alive. This moment is just as important and harrowing as the abortion itself; so much hangs in the balance. Anne, barely conscious on a gurney, hears the nurse ask the attending doctor, “How should I label it?”

If he says abortion, she will go to prison, and all will be for naught.

“Miscarriage,” he says.

In the next scene, she is entering a classroom to take her final exam.

According to author Annie Ernaux’s bio, she had an illegal abortion, finished her studies and started writing. She became a teacher, which allowed her to move from working class to middle class. She married, had two sons, divorced, and retired from teaching at 60 to fully dedicate herself to writing. She’s written more than 20 books, mostly about her own life. She’s 82 now. I’d invite her on my talk show if I had one.

I knew when I saw the film posted on The Palm’s website last week that I would go see it, and I assumed I would go see it alone. Instead, my spouse, Derek, accompanied me. At The Palm we bought our tickets and entered the theater just as the previews were starting. It was completely empty, devoid of patrons, which was eerie but also good: Derek had a visceral reaction to some scenes, sometimes turning away or rocking forward, squirming in discomfort himself as he watched the protagonist suffer; other scenes he saw none of, as the aperture between his fingers allowed no daylight whatsoever. Aren’t I a fun date? I know how to show a guy a good time.

When we emerged after the film, the sky was dark, and Derek asked me, Did you rig that—did you make that happen? Did you reserve the entire theater just for us? He pointed out that there was no sign that the movie had been there, no poster advertising it, no title on the marquee. And we’d been the only ones watching. I deduced that that since it was the last night the film was showing, the Palm people had changed the marquee and posters for the films that would begin the following day, Friday. But it was as if Happening never happened.

Last week, Governor Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma signed legislation that bans all abortion, with exceptions made only to save the life of the mother or for incest  or rape that has been reported to law enforcement. The bill was copied from the Texas ban, which avoids judicial review by letting ordinary citizens file lawsuits against anyone who abets an abortion. The Oklahoma law goes farther though—because instead of a ban at six weeks, which shocked the nation, the Oklahoma ban begins at conception. It could be years before we learn of many of the ramifications of the law, and we will never fully know the consequences.

Will the exception for rape or incest mean the incident will have to be not only reported but proved? That may be a moot point, as a third abortion law heading to the governor this summer provides no exception for rape or incest.

By the end of this month, the U.S. Supreme Court will issue its decision for Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that arose from a Mississippi law that bans abortion at 15 weeks. If the leaked draft opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito gives any indication of the Court’s leanings, Roe v. Wade will likely be overturned.

A few days after asking me about whether Anne was taking birth control, Charlie asked me why the film was titled Happening. The French word is “L'événement”—literally, the event—but for our times, Happening feels dreadfully apropos.

This. Is. Happening.

Thanks for reading.

It’s one of the most moving pieces of journalism I’ve encountered on the topic of abortion, especially in light of Roe V. Wade potentially being overturned within the next forty-five days. 

Last week, Tavernise interviewed anti-abortion activists for The Daily.  You should listen to that episode too. Just as my husband used to occasionally listen to Rush Limbaugh to gain insight into what the other side is arguing, I think it’s important to  attempt  to understand the reasoning and positions of those with whom you disagree, even—and especially—when you disagree with them wholeheartedly.

Thanks for reading—and listening.

Melanie

By now, you have no doubt heard about the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion for the Dobbs vs. Women’s  Health Organization, written by Justice Samuel Alito, and published in Politico:

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision — Planned Parenthood v. Casey — that largely maintained the right.

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito writes. “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

The case, which I wrote about in December last year in a post titled “Potentially The Most Important Supreme Court Case About Abortion Rights Since 1992,” will be decided in June. It may already be decided from the looks of the draft. As a reminder, the case came to the Supreme Court after the state of Mississippi banned abortions after 15 weeks. It’s the case that could dismantle Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in all 50 states, and Casey v. Planned Parenthood from 1992, in which the Court adopted the “undue burden” standard that limits states from putting legal obstacles in place that cause an “undue burden” should a woman seek an abortion before the fetus attains viability—around 23 weeks.

But if the Court votes with Dobbs to overturn the precedent set in those cases, then there would be no legal grounds that would prevent states from banning abortion at 15 weeks, or at six weeks, as Texas did in May 2021—a law that went into effect September 1, 2021 (the very impetus for my launching this newsletter), or for banning abortion entirely, which some states are on track to do. The Guttmacher Institute has up-to-date information regarding the 26 states that are certain or likely to ban abortion or severely limit abortion if Roe falls. And many of these bans will not be subject to a cumbersome legislative process before they are enacted. Several are already on the books, set to take effect as soon as Roe is overturned; in Michigan, a 1931 law is slated to go back into effect that makes abortion a felony and makes no exception for rape or incest (Roe had nullified that law). This is not hyperbole. Just this morning, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan published an opinion piece in the New York Times in which she discussed the 1931 law and the lawsuit she filed last month that asks the Michigan Supreme Court to resolve whether the state’s constitution protects abortion rights. She writes: “Given that Michigan has a Republican-controlled legislature, I am not optimistic that I — as a pro-choice Democratic governor — can get a bill passed to overturn the 1931 Michigan law.”

I covered abortion in my argument classes for 15 years. I taught my class as a critical thinking class, a class that encouraged students to have empathy and find common ground and to at least try to consider that opponents are nonetheless people of goodwill. Abortion seemed the most challenging topic for achieving that, but now it’s feeling a little like a pending Civil War, brothers against brothers (or brother against sister in my case), families and friends at irreconcilable odds. I had lunch with a good friend this week whom I know to be anti-abortion (her then 9-year-old son said in my car in 2016 that their family supported Trump because “Hillary Clinton kills babies”). I love this friend. Despite our differences, we have found common ground, but will we be able to continue to do so?

If you are going to convict a doctor or medical care provider for providing abortions (or even sue an Uber driver who provides a ride to the clinic) or put a mother in jail for procuring abortion pills for her pregnant 16-year-old daughter, your warped values may be clouding your goodwill. I cannot find common ground with such extreme judgment and action. The people—including women—who write and pass laws that that severely limit access to and/or criminalize abortion are not on the side of women, are not on the side of girls. If women and girls cannot make decisions for themselves on such a private, personal—indeed, Roe was argued under the privacy clause of the Fourteenth Amendment—then we simply will not have equal rights. We must have options when we find ourselves pregnant, including having access to safe, legal abortion.

The best pieces I read and listened to over the last couple of weeks were the cover story in The Atlantic, “The Future of Abortion in a Post-Roe America” by Jessica Bruder and Terry Gross’s interview with Bruder on Fresh Air, where they discussed The Atlantic article and also Bruder’s book of nonfiction, Nomadland, which was made into an Oscar-winning film starring the amazing Francis McDormand. I highly recommend the article and the interview.

Bruder began her article (and interview) talking about the Del-Em, a rather simple device for ending a pregnancy that was invented by a public school teacher and activist in 1971 before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in all 50 states. People use variations of this device for ending pregnancy during the first trimester, which, according to the CDC, is when more than 90 percent of abortions happen. Pregnancies can also be terminated by using pills (mifepristone and misoprostol, which I’ve written about in my newsletter). In fact, Bruder sits in a zoom workshop with Susan Yanow, the reproductive rights advocate and project manager of SASS (Self-managed Abortion; Safe and Supported)—the same Susan Yanow I talked with over Zoom! I had been so impressed with and awed by Yanow—and here she was in Bruder’s article. This world is smaller than I thought.

During the online workshop with Yanow, Bruder learned about abortion pills and how to use them properly (they used Skittles and M&Ms to mimic the mifepristone and misoprostol combo). Yanow warned the participants of the laws prohibiting self-managed abortion care in various states.  She advised the participants to share information rather than give explicit advice, encouragement, or assistance in order to avoid legal consequences. The threat of jail time for this is real and is about to get even more real.

In both the article and the Fresh Air episode, Bruder tells about Jessica Whalen, a mother of a pregnant 16-year-old in Pennsylvania. The daughter did not want to be pregnant, and so they found abortion pills on the internet and ordered them. The pills, which induce a miscarriage, cause cramping and bleeding, but the daughter was worried that something might be wrong, so her mother took to the hospital, where she explained that her daughter had taken pills to induce an abortion. Afterward, the mother was reported to child protective services, charged, and sentenced to serve time in jail.

I found the fuller story on the New York Times. A few of the reasons Whalen and her daughter chose the abortion pills rather than going to a clinic: the nearest clinic was 75 miles away; Whalen and her husband only had one car; Pennsylvania requires a 24-hour waiting period, which meant the two would have  required lodging or to have driven back and forth twice; Whalen didn’t have health insurance for her daughter and the abortion procedure would have cost between $300 to $600 versus $45 for the pills. Undue burdens.

When I zoomed with Susan Yanow, I specifically asked about the need to seek medical help in the rare case the abortion pills caused excess bleeding or some other sign of infection, like high fever. She said that a person showing up to the hospital or clinic should let the staff know that they were bleeding—perhaps miscarrying—but not to mention the pills, that the pills were not detectable in the bloodstream. The mother and daughter in Pennsylvania did not know that, and the mother was jailed for helping her daughter and providing honest answers to a physician.

This is what I wrote in an earlier newsletter:

“What about criminal repercussions?” I asked. She [Yanow] explained that there is no blood test for abortion pills. Doctors, she said, cannot recognize the difference between a spontaneous miscarriage and a pill-induced abortion that causes miscarriage. She explained that if a person dissolves the pills in her cheek—versus her vagina—the pills cannot be detected.

That a pregnant woman may have to lie about the cause of vaginal bleeding whilst receiving medical care in this country in order to avoid a prison sentence is a sad, sad reality.

There is an abortion underground again taking root in this country. Bruder mentions The Jane Collective, a group of volunteers from Chicago, who, in the 1960 and 70s, referred women to clandestine abortion providers and then “learned to perform the procedure themselves.” Today, community providers are collecting and stockpiling abortion pills (they can be purchased over-the-counter in Mexico) and devices such as the Del-Em and vacuum aspiration kits in anticipation of Roe being overturned. The woman Bruder interviewed who showed her the Del-Em (Bruder calls her “Ellie”) referred to this underground movement as “vaginal preppers.”

Here is what Ellie told Bruder about the Del-Em, which, again, has been around for more than 50 years: “Just knowing people who came before you had other ways of managing these things, not necessarily through a doctor or condoned by a government—there’s something really powerful in that.” She was “disgusted” by what was happening in Texas with the six-week ban, and made an important statement to Bruder, the premise of which I wish everyone would consider:

“Our reproductive rights are not given to us by the government. They are not given to us by anyone. We inherently have them.”

Bruder learned about another group called Abortion Delivered, a nonprofit planning to outfit mobile abortion units. They are bullet-proofing their first van now. Then “it would be retrofitted with an ultrasound machine, and a gynecological table, so a doctor with a manual vacuum aspirator device could perform first-trimester abortions inside.” They plan to sit just outside the Texas border. But they likely won’t be able to park in Louisiana, Arkansas, or Oklahoma. The only option will be New Mexico. Or Old Mexico.

Some other sources

Gloria Steinem to Mary Louise Kelly on NPR this week:

I think there have always been efforts to control women's birth giving since women have given birth for thousands of years. I mean, I remember sitting in the Kalahari Desert talking to women who were showing me the plants that they used for abortifacients and to increase fertility. I mean, you know, this is not a new issue. And the very definition of patriarchy is trying to control women and birth giving.

The Daily podcast in which Michael Barbaro interviewed New York Times reporter Adam Liptak, whose reporting I’ve included in several of my newsletters. It provided an overview of the leaked draft and the “political firestorm” it unleashed, as well as a look at what it might mean for the country. Michael Barbaro begins by asking Liptak, “Adam, this is a very strange situation that we’re in, wouldn’t you agree?” And Liptak, who’s always very measured and professional, answers:

“It’s extraordinary. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

From Twitter:

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York’s impassioned three-minute speech

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s well-stated fury

Gillian Frank, PhD’s tweet: “I am a historian of abortion. I have written extensively on life before Roe. The undemocratic decision to rescind Roe v Wade is a disaster that will create misery and will endanger pregnant people & abortion seekers.”

On Fox News:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said it is "possible" abortion will be banned nationwide if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade this summer. During an interview with USA Today, published Friday, McConnell suggested a national abortion ban could happen but noted that such a discussion is premature.

It’s both wonderful and terrible to be back to writing The Quickening. Thanks for reading, everyone. Feel free to share the newsletter if you like. Comments, questions, corrections are welcome!