Texas Anti-Abortion Creep Aims to Make It Illegal to Drive to an Abortion Clinic

Plus: A guilty verdict for the anti-abortion protester who hoarded fetuses in her freezer

September 01, 2023

Here’s another edition of Hard to Believe It’s Only Tuesday, a weekly roundup of the top headlines, tweets (for now!), toks, takes, and more in abortion news. You can always email me ([email protected]) or DM me on instagram with action items, takes, and news clips. This post is probably too long for email, so click on the links up there ^ above the headline to open in your browser or the Substack app. You don’t want to miss this week’s Good Night and Good Dunk!

PROGRAMMING NOTE: This is the last week I’ll be conducting this survey!

Here’s a short, five-question, multiple-choice-answer survey for HTBIOT readers about content and frequency! I’d love for y’all to let me know how you feel about these roundups and how I can make them better and more useful for you. Literally this will take like 90 seconds, max.

The big takeaway: Couple of good deep-dives published this week. First up is this Rewire data-driven report following the money behind anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers, which provide almost zero-to-nil health care and exist solely to shame people out of accessing abortion care. And don’t miss this WaPo report from Llano, Texas on the latest tomfoolery from the Alliance Defending Freedom, the anti-abortion legal operation behind attacks on medication abortion. Now, they’re trying to make it illegal to drive while pregnant if you’re seeking abortion.

The Top Headlines

The Takes

  • It’s me for MSNBC on the disconnect between Republican messaging on abortion and Republican actions on abortion (they have them, just like the rest of us). If I may quote myself: “In practice, Americans have never agreed with the Republican Party on abortion — especially not when it comes to the personal, real-life decisions they make for themselves and their own families. This is the tension at the heart of the growing conflict since the fall of Roe v. Wade among voters, Republican politicians, and the many factions of the anti-abortion movement (who fund candidates and who have as a result historically driven anti-abortion policy and messaging).”

The Tweets/Toks/Grams

Summer Abortion Reads Giveaway

Publisher’s Weekly calls Jezebel writer Kylie Cheung’s Survivor Injustice “an important contribution to the struggle for women’s rights,” and The Appeal recently ran an excerpt. In an interview with HTBIOT frequent flyer Becca Andrews at Reckon, Cheung described the book thusly: “The book is really about drawing the connections between state violence and interpersonal domestic violence. I look at how the policies and the conditions created by our government and by capitalist and carceral systems really create the optimal conditions for abuse and gender-based abuse. That’s the abortion bans that prevent people from getting the care that they need, which also, as we’ve seen from studies, increased abortion seekers’ vulnerability to domestic violence. (Of course, we also have to understand abortion bans as gender-based violence in and of itself.)”

As we’re approaching fall in spirit (if not in temperature), this will be the last summer abortion reads giveaway of the year. I’ll draw a winner’s name from my subscriber list at random next week. Stay tuned!

The Fuck Are We Supposed to Do About It?

Goodnight and good dunk — From the “with friends like these” desk, ANSIRH’s Andréa Becker offers a strong rebuttal to Man Who Had A Thought Once:

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 Instagram, and I’ll try to add follow-ups as I’m able.