Welcome to The Quickening
A newsletter about abortion rights
Thanks for coming by to my very first post of The Quickening, where I’ll be writing weekly about abortion rights in the United States—the history, the current challenges, and the future outlook. My aim is to provide well-researched and reasoned information and analysis on what I consider to be a fascinating topic. I’m launching this newsletter in large part out of concern over the curtailing of the right to abortion as guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court case that legalized abortion in all 50 states.
On May 19, 2021, when Governor Abbott of Texas signed the abortion ban at six weeks into law—Senate Bill 8 (or SB8), also known as the Texas Heartbeat Law —I watched the video of him surrounded by lawmakers and supporters (mostly men) and felt my heart sink. Of course many states have passed laws that attempted to limit or abolish or criminalize abortion, but the courts have prevented most of those laws from going into effect. However, in a truly sinister manner, the Texas law attempts to escape that judicial review by making the law enforceable not by a state official, but by ordinary citizens: Texas has essentially deputized them, authorizing and even providing financial incentive for them to sue anyone who “aids and abets” the person seeking an abortion after six weeks. The citizen can sue this “aiding and abetting” individual for $10,000—whether it’s a boyfriend, spouse, family member, friend, receptionist at the clinic, the medical assistant, the nurse, the doctor—even anyone who provides transportation.
The law was cleverly written to resist a challenge in the Supreme Court and proved successful when, in a 5-4 majority (which included three of Trump’s appointees—Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett), the court allowed the law to stand. When the law went into effect September 1, the fearmongering worked: Providers in Texas immediately stopped providing abortions after six weeks and began turning women and girls away. The law makes no exception for rape or incest.
Just a day ago, on October 18, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to temporarily block the Texas law and to consider adding it to the docket of cases the court will hear this year, which already include a case concerning a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks.
We’re on shaky, dangerous ground, and all those who find themselves more than six weeks pregnant in Texas will find that in addition to all the emotions involved with the decision to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, that they can’t access a provider who will perform the abortion. It was Texas that brought us Roe v. Wade in 1971, the year I was born. When it was decided in 1973 by a 7-2 majority, the court stated that, “In the first trimester of pregnancy, the state may not regulate the abortion decision; only the pregnant woman and her attending physician can make that decision.” The Texas law is completely unconstitutional, and everyone knows it.
Six weeks is nothing. Six weeks barely allows a girl or woman to realize she’s pregnant. The Texas law turns a fraught time into a panicked one. I worry what desperate girls and women will do, especially those who do not have the means to travel to another state, to get transportation and lodging, to take off work, to find childcare for their other children. Irin Carmon, in a 2012 article in Salon titled “Can You Change Her Choice?”: wrote, “The easiest way to prevent women from choosing to have an abortion, if not to eliminate abortions entirely, is to make it as hard as possible to access….As usual, this will fall disproportionately on low-income women.” When you restrict abortion, you’re especially restricting it for people with fewer resources.
If you want to hear some real stories about the challenge of having to travel to another state for an abortion, listen to this episode of The Daily, “They Don’t Understand That We’re Real People” about women in Texas who had to seek out their abortions in Oklahoma.It was one of the best episodes I’ve heard from any podcast.
There is a lot going on—a lot to pay attention to.
Thank you for reading.