Hard to Believe It's Only Tuesday: When Abortion Ban Exceptions Aren't

Here's what happened in abortion news + takes this week.

July 15, 2022

Here’s another edition of Hard to Believe It’s Only Tuesday, a weekly roundup of the top headlines, tweets, takes, and more in abortion news.

This week’s big takeaway: news reports from around the country show that so-called “exceptions” to abortion bans are not, in practice, treated as such, and there are major systemic issues with hospitals and other large medical entities playing CYA with their legal teams instead of allowing their employees to provide the care they know is best.

Abortion bans create a culture of fear and intimidation deliberately meant to terrorize medical professionals out of providing the best, and best-indicated, care to pregnant people, and to terrorize pregnant people out of seeking medical care. (Some of you will notice I’m not linking to the story out of Indiana; this is deliberate, as I find even the ~ correct ~ takes exploitative by now. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, good.)

The Top Headlines

The Tweets

  • ANSIRH director and abortion provider Dr. Daniel Grossman tweets a thread on the ridiculousness of the New York Times hosting an anti-abortion “bioethicist from England lecture us about abortion & pregnancy-related mortality in the US.”

  • Watch what Rep. Ayanna Pressley called a “masterclass” testimony from Berkeley law professor and anthropologist Khiara Bridges, who refused to entertain Josh Hawley’s transphobia during a Senate hearing on abortion.

The Takes

  • Academic and abortion funder Derek P. Siegel in Rewire on how abortion bans impact trans and nonbinary folks, and the importance of shared struggle: “As the Supreme Court threatens to overturn Roe v. Wade, exacerbating current barriers to abortion, activists must consider how restrictions impact different social groups, including trans men and nonbinary individuals. Anti-abortion and anti-trans legislation reinforce one another and extend the reach of the state in its effort to regulate disadvantaged families. By acknowledging and organizing around this intersection, activists create opportunities for coalition building and resistance. We are stronger when we work together.”

  • Regina Mahone in The Nation: “Self-managed abortion isn’t the only solution in this post-Roe environment. Clinics are essential to communities, and there are cases in which an in-clinic abortion is the only option for a patient, including for those facing incomplete miscarriages, as we saw in Malta recently. But it’s clear that not enough people are aware of the safety of medication abortion, which now accounts for more than half of all abortions in the United States, where the majority of abortions occur within the FDA-approved window for abortion-inducing drugs (up to 70 days of pregnancy). So while we donate to abortion funds and support clinics, we must also defend self-managed abortion, both the principle and the practice.”

  • Rebecca Traister in The Cut: “A Politico story published on Monday suggests that the administration’s timidity stems from fears that acting aggressively will draw lawsuits from the right and ultimately end in defeat in the hands of courts. Well … yes. That is, as they say, the point. A fascistic opposition party has seized control of the institutions and gone all in on supporting an armed insurrection in order to ensure minority rule. That’s how they’re fighting, and the right’s willingness to keep at it, even in periods in which they were losing, is how we landed here. The fact that Biden can’t seem to discern this, in the context of the appallingly flaccid response to Dobbs, has prompted me to think a lot about the writer Jia Tolentino’s dawning suspicion, for the first time in her life, ‘that, actually, the Democrats are not interested at all in protecting the right to abortion.’”

  • Ex-vangelical Diane Bolme in Jezebel: “Today, I’m 33 years old, and I know there are situations in which, were I to fall pregnant, I would get an abortion.I’ve feared to speak on this issue because I have often existed in a liminal space that opens one up to criticism on either side. I can imagine what some who knew me when I was younger might think as they read this: “What a shame that she’s become ‘of this world’ by rejecting God.” “She’s too tempted by sex outside of marriage and so is now anti-life to make that feasible.” “She’s alright with babies being murdered!” “She’s just ‘going with the crowd’ of the woke liberals she surrounds herself with.” Or, somehow worst of all, “I’m praying for you that you’ll see the light.” This is something I have constantly feared—am I just participating in self-delusion, a sort of internal preference falsification to fit in? The messages that punished me for questioning and making my own determinations still have a sting.”

The Fuck Are We Supposed to Do About It?

That’s all for this week. I’m sure I’ve missed something you’d like to see featured in this roundup, for I am but one woman with a computer and an abortion-news-induced drinking problem. Holler at me — [email protected], or DM me on Twitter, and I’ll try to add follow-ups as I’m able.