A Win in Texas for Advocates Behind San Antonio's 'Repro Justice' Fund

Plus: Demanding visibility and accountability for disabled folks who have abortions

September 17, 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: I’m looking for new photos to illustrate this newsletter, as the font of Creative Commons options on Flickr is not endlessly self-renewing. Have you taken photos at a public pro-abortion protest or other fun feminist event that you’d be willing to let me publish? I’ll credit folks, of course, and am happy to make a small donation to a cause of the photographer’s choosing if I end up using a pic. So! Send photos my way — andrea dot grimes at gmail com — or tag me wherever your images already exist online, assuming it’s clear you have ownership/permission to share.

The big takeaway: Three different progressive, non-profit news outlets published three different very high quality, reported pieces on different aspects of ongoing, and often contentious, conversations within the repro health, rights, and justice movements. Read Kelsey Rhodes on disability and abortion bans in Rewire, and two takes on expanding abortion access beyond Roe, from Amy Littlefield in The Nation and Madison Pauly for Mother Jones.

The Top Headlines

The Takes

  • Jezebel’s Caitlin Cruz watched ‘The Morning Show’ and reports back on a self-managed abortion storyline that doesn’t suck.

  • UnRestrict Minnesota’s Abena Abraham is in Prism with some well-earned cheerleading for their efforts to improve abortion access, and encouragement to others to keep up the fight: “As we celebrate our successes in the legislature, we’re calling on Minnesotans—and people across the country—to use this moment as an opportunity to share their support for abortion care with their communities. Starting the conversation is the biggest step—because more likely than not, your loved ones already support reproductive freedom. We cannot claim victory and walk away—even the significant progress our movement has achieved cannot be where our efforts end. The work has to continue.”

  • Reckon’s Becca Andrews’ critique of comments Vice President Kamala Harris made on Face the Nation last weekend resonated with me: “Essentially, despite a lot of follow-up questions from Margaret Brennan, Harris wouldn’t budge from the talking point that the way forward is to reinstate Roe (which never had adequate protections for the most vulnerable among us). What was especially frustrating was the vice president’s repeated sidestep of the point that the votes simply do not exist in Congress for such as the Women’s Health Protection Act to pass.”

  • Journalist Patrick Adams is in the New York Times with a preview of potential horrors to come in the arena of testing for medication abortion: “The researchers, one of whom identifies as pro-choice, wrote that they developed these tests in part out of concern that the availability of abortion pills on the black market poses a public health threat. But it is difficult to see how this form of testing has medical or public health value, given the well-documented safety and efficacy of abortion pills. In effect, it seems strictly punitive — to harass and intimidate people who self-manage their abortions and to collect evidence about anyone who helped them get pills.”

The Tweets/Toks/Grams

The Fuck Are We Supposed to Do About It?

Goodnight and good dunk — Happy to have @gracieminabox speak for me personally!!!

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.