“I think just a few years ago, before Roe was overturned, it was unimaginable for people to tell their stories about traumatic pregnancy loss and about abortions without the fear of public stigma,” Molly Duane of the Center for Reproductive Rights told NPR.
For people to tell their stories? Avoiding something?
Now, it’s different. “Women and pregnant people in this country are so angry and so shocked at the treatment that they are receiving at the hands of the state that they have been compelled to tell their stories,” she says.
Go to hell, NPR. There are no pregnant men in this or any other country; we don’t need you erasing us in the very act of reporting on a drastic curtailment of women’s rights.
Across the country, dozens of women use their full names in high-profile court cases, not just in Texas but also in Idaho and Tennessee, detailing extremely intimate experiences in legal filings, writing op-eds, doing interviews, and having their photographs in the news.
Women. Yes. Hold that thought.
But then NPR skips up to pretend it’s a men’s issue too.
The geography of abortion access is dramatically different [from] before Dobbs. The data show that abortions zeroed out in states including Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Missouri, while the number shot up in other states, including Illinois, North Carolina and New Mexico. In states with bans,
peopleWOMEN who are seeking abortions and have the means, travel to states where it’s legal.But why did the overall number increase? Upadhyay suggests there may be an increased demand for abortion because of the economy, or because of reduced stigma as more
peopleWOMEN talk about their experiences with miscarriage and abortion.
They do it four more times before the story ends.
Comments
8 responses to “People and pregnancy”
I wonder if one of the reasons for the ‘overall increase’ is that women in states where abortion has been banned are being more proactive in seeking an abortion they might have delayed (or even ultimately forgone), going across the border to a more permissive state before any nosy neighbors can tell they’re pregnant.
This is false. Many women have shared such stories over the years (Ursula Le Guin for one.)
Of course if they’re going to erase women, they might as well erase the history of feminism while they’re at it. Really they have to, because Second Wave feminism stressed freedom from gender conformity, and so was incompatible with Brave New Genderworld.
Just because there has never in all history been a pregnant man or pregnant male anything doesn’t mean there can’t ever be one. For all we know, there could be unicorns galloping all over the far side of the Moon.
Apart from that: What has them folks at NPR been drinking.?
The organization Shout Your Abortion has been in existence since 2015. It was born at a time when women were being encouraged to tell of their experiences with abortion, to fight the stigma. Recent, but well before Dobbs.
Lady Mondegreen, it also appears that Duane has never heard of Tracey Emin, whose first of many artworks about her own abortions was produced in 1995.
If These Walls Could Talk was first shown on HBO in 1996. But there were stories and movies and articles about the deaths due to coat-hanger back-alley abortions long before then. Not sure who produced this story, but the research is shoddy. I remember women talking about this in the 1960’s when I was a kid, and my mom and sisters being pissed off at the Pope for refusing to consider women before fetuses.
There is also “The Only Moral Abortion Is My Abortion” – a great collection of stories from the perspective of medical workers treating pro-life women.
https://joycearthur.com/abortion/the-only-moral-abortion-is-my-abortion/
I suspect part of this is simply that prior to Dobbs, NPR and other media outlets weren’t even paying attention to the stories women who’d had abortions were willing to tell. After all, at that point, it wouldn’t have been considered newsworthy, because of the complacency surrounding Roe as ‘settled law’.