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Hard to Believe It's Only Tuesday: GOP Flailing from Coast to Coast on Abortion Messaging

Here's what happened in abortion news, tweets, toks, and takes this week — plus action items.

October 07, 2022

Here’s another edition of Hard to Believe It’s Only Tuesday, a weekly roundup of the top headlines, tweets, toks, takes, and more in abortion news. Remember: you can always email me ([email protected]) or @/DM me on twitter or instagram with action items — rallies, trainings, fundraisers, block-walks, petitions, etc. — to include in the The Fuck Are We Supposed To Do About It? section!

The big takeaway: Republicans all over the country are having a rough time talking about abortion right now. Ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the GOP has struggled on the issue; many candidates have tried to walk back or obfuscate their support for abortion bans. But this week was a particularly bad one. In Maine, Republican former Governor Paul LePage had a mini-meltdown during debate questioning over his support for new abortion restrictions; in Arizona, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is backpedaling after a talk radio interview wherein she (horror of horrors!) said that abortion should be legal. And then there’s this whole Herschel Walker deal, wherein the Georgia Republican — who believes abortion should be wholly banned and criminalized — denied reports that he had once paid for his girlfriend’s abortion, then denied even knowing who the woman, then said that even if a person paid for her or anyone’s abortion it’s “nothing to be ashamed of,” but then had to admit that in fact he did know who she was because he has a child with her. My goodness.

The Top Headlines

The Tweets

The Takes

  • A new study from Ibis Reproductive Health and Mexico City’s Fondo MARIA shows that when people are offered support during their abortion experience, they have more positive feelings and fewer negative emotions, especially those “related to abortion stigma such as guilt and shame.” From the highlights: “Accompaniment's focus on person-centered support, self-determination, and autonomy may enable people seeking abortion to view their decision as one that is valid and legitimate, and resist the predominant stigmatizing narratives framing abortion as something that is transgressive.”

  • Rewire News is back with a new season of the Boom! Lawyered podcast hosted by Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo. The latest episode is a preview of the upcoming SCOTUS term, and there is bad news ahead. Here’s Gandy: “By the end of summer 2023, we could be looking at a world where LGBTQ people will have no public accommodation protections whatsoever. And that means business owners will have the unfettered right to discriminate against them. We will also be looking at a world where the ICWA, the Indian Child Welfare Act, will be overturned, sparking what could be the greatest period of Indigenous children being removed from their families since, and get this, the federal government used to pay organizations to remove Native children from their homes. So this is going to be a huge destruction of tribal sovereignty. We're also looking at a world where affirmative action will be unconstitutional as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause because it discriminates against white people. And that is going to ensure that white people will always have a leg up on everybody else in society, including the Asian American students that this case is supposed to be benefiting. And finally, Black and Brown voters are going to be even more voter-suppressed than they already are. It is going to be a truly bad, terrible term.”

  • In the latest newsletter from The Meteor, Scarlett Harris looks at abortion onscreen. On Netflix’s new rom-com Look Both Ways, Harris writes: “the entertainment industry has an opportunity to grapple with the many ways people experience unplanned pregnancies and not doing so is downright irresponsible. Instead, Look Both Ways normalizes a post-Roe world, in which the only result of an unplanned pregnancy is a birth. Netflix and absolutely not chill.” 

  • Repro legal scholar Mary Ziegler is in The Atlantic: “The anti-abortion movement now is fragmented, as groups that traditionally dictated strategy are falling out of favor and new, more absolutist organizations such as Students for Life (which condemns chemical contraceptives and rape and incest exceptions, and contends that exceptions for the health of the mother can be interpreted too loosely) are vying for supremacy. Nowadays, those bidding for control of the movement don’t talk much about creating a popular majority. True, some anti-abortion leaders still say that it’s morally acceptable to allow for some abortions when a patient is dying, or even to vote for abortion bans that stop short of criminalizing every procedure because “lawmaking is the art of the possible.” But now, democracy is either an obstacle that the movement has to live with or, for others, an inconvenience that they no longer can afford.”

  • Writer/illustrator Aubrey Hirsch is in The Audacity with an illustrated guide to “what tech companies are and are not doing to support bodily autonomy.”

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.