Hard to Believe It's Only Tuesday: Do Fetuses Ride In The HOV Lane?

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

July 08, 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.

The big takeaway: President Biden finally caved to years of pressure to protect, support, or just literally acknowledge abortion rights in any way whatsoever. The result: an executive order “protecting access to reproductive health care services.” We’ll get into what that actually means … right now.

Scroll on.

The Top Headlines

The Tweets

  • Journalist Katelyn Burns delivers a devastating thread, amid ongoing attacks on trans people from both the anti-abortion right and the cis, white, feminist left, on why it’s essential to use gender-inclusive language when talking about abortion access.

  • Truthout’s Kelly Hayes has much further to say on the subject of cis women excluding trans folks from the abortion rights and access movements.

  • Texas-based abortion provider Dr. Ghazaleh Moayedi tweets a thread on how or whether Biden’s executive order will improve or protect abortion access in banned states.

  • The National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice’s Nancy Cárdenas Peña tweets a thread on the devastating loss of Whole Woman’s Health in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. Whole Woman’s was one of Texas’ most prominent independent abortion care providers, with locations in Fort Worth, McKinney, Austin, and McAllen.

  • We Testify’s Renee Bracey Sherman tweets some tips on reporting on abortion: “Reporters: Please be thoughtful about who you interview on abortion. I’ve been sent a lot of PR pitch emails from people/orgs I’ve never heard of in my decade of abortion activism claiming to be experts and when I check in, they and their orgs don’t provide abortions. Never did.”

The Takes

  • Sociologist Gretchen Sisson, an expert on the intersections of adoption and abortion, in the Washington Post re: the Supreme Court’s ‘domestic supply of infants’ feint: “Just as the court ignores the needs of people seeking abortions, through this language of supply and demand, it ignores the power inequities upon which adoption is premised. The demand for infants comes from those with more power, the supply comes from those with less. The adoption market in the United States historically has adapted to accommodate the needs of those with more power, while failing to address the needs of vulnerable women forced to birth and relinquish infants.”

  • Genuinely do not know where else to put this, but it’s too fucking weird to leave out of any self-respecting abortion news roundup: a pregnant woman from the Dallas suburb of Plano is contesting an HOV lane ticket she got while pregnant — i.e., if a fetus is a person, shouldn’t it count as a second passenger? Dallas Morning News columnist Dave Lieber thought to ask the anti-abortion lobby group Texas alliance for life about the situation: “I asked Amy O’Donnell, spokeswoman for Texas Alliance for Life, an anti-abortion group, what she thought of this unusual situation. She replied, ‘While the penal code in Texas recognizes an unborn child as a person in our state, the Texas Transportation Code does not specify the same. And a child residing in a mother’s womb is not taking up an extra seat. And with only one occupant taking up a seat, the car did not meet the criteria needed to drive in that lane.’”

  • West Alabama Women’s Clinic Operations Director Robin Marty in Rewire on what happened inside the clinic when Roe was overturned: “This very public, very emotional, very “defining” moment looks like a flipped switch to someone on the outside. They can point to the exact moment that Roe v. Wade was overturned and abortion ended in Alabama. It is a stark division—legal abortion at 9:10 a.m. CT, legal abortion gone at 9:11. It’s burned into my brain just as clearly as it is etched into the video clip of the live interview I was giving at the time, memorializing the very second I learned about the decision, when I told the anchor Roe was gone, when I announced I had to go immediately to tell my staff.”

  • Melissa Gira Grant in The New Republic on the continuing, atmospheric rise of mainstream transphobia post-Dobbs (but certainly not only post-Dobbs) in U.S. legacy publications, to wit: Pamela Paul’s latest column in the New York Times: “What motivates the line Paul takes—as her argument is hardly new—is the moment. As much of the right was celebrating the collapse of abortion rights with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling in late June, it was also already repurposing the same tactics to attack trans people that it had used to attack women’s rights and criminalize abortion: advancing increasingly strict and inhumane legislation in statehouses across the country and scapegoating trans people with propaganda that encourages violence against them. After Dobbs, the state of Alabama borrowed the ruling’s logic, asking a federal appeals court to allow it to enforce its felony ban on providing hormone therapy or puberty blockers. The right, plainly, sees this as all the same fight. It is into this moment that certain self-proclaimed defenders of women’s rights enter with their concerns about their imaginary “erasure,” as violence directed at both LGBTQ rights and abortion rights defenders is reportedly escalating.”

  • The Black Women’s Health Imperative’s Linda Goler Blount in the Los Angeles Times: “The end of Roe will be a death sentence for many Black women.”

  • Journalist Katherine Stewart in the New York Times: “Christian Nationalists are excited about what comes next,” after the end of abortion rights.

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.