molting

I’m heading to residency next Monday, so this Substack will be on hiatus for a minute, unless there’s breaking news. In the meantime, June 24th will mark the fourth anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that dismantled the federal constitutional right to abortion and overturned Roe V. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, placing the regulation of abortion in the hands of individual states. I’m thinking about ritual around this, something that feels like mourning but not like giving up.

This week - change. (Below a view of humid Central Park.)

In the depths of my encyclopedic knowledge of reality tv about pregnant and parenting teens, I have a very clearly memory of this scene from Teen Mom 2 where Barbara asks her daughter, Jenelle, why she would want to have a baby with her current boyfriend after she recently had an abortion. This whole situation turns out so badly and has consequences that reverberate to this day, and also, the abortion in question was had after Jenelle learned she was pregnant via her violent, heroin-addicted estranged husband, a pregnancy that happened while she was also addicted to heroin.

I remembered this scene because I saw a TikTok (at this point, me mentioning things I saw on Tiktok should be part of a drinking game) by Hey Jane, about the anti-choice idea that having an abortion results in infertility (it doesn’t), as though abortion is something worthy of punishment, and that punishment is visited upon people who want to have children in the future. (Watch it here.)

Abortion exists as part of the reproductive health continuum - the same person might use birth control, have an abortion, carry a pregnancy to term, have another abortion, use emergency contraception, have a miscarriage, undergo fertility treatments, and carry another pregnancy. Her abortion could happen at 25, her pregnancy at 26. Every abortion is different, or, says Marie Louise, the midwife interviewed in this clip, “Each abortion is its own separate medical event.”

And if each abortion is different, then we are making decisions to have abortions as the person we are in that moment, armed with the information we have at the time. You can have an abortion at 32 because you don’t want to parent with your current partner, and then decide four months later that you do want to parent with another partner. It’s abortion stigma at work to believe that someone who had an abortion doesn’t deserve to make decisions based on what’s right for them under different circumstances, and that if we have abortions, we should be made to suffer, but rather, love and respect ourselves for choosing what is best for ourselves and our futures.

Action item(s): Consider how you might mark the anniversary of the Dobbs decision - post about it on social media, bring it up in a real life conversation, create a ritual. Also, think about the reality of abortion on a single reproductive timeline. Do you feel uncomfortable about the fact that a person could have an abortion and then a wanted pregnancy in a short amount of time? Where does that discomfort originate?