Are women really being “coerced” into abortions?

Greetings, Meteor readers,

It is bitter cold in much of the U.S. due to an Arctic blast, which seems like an appropriate way for Mother Nature to celebrate the first anniversary of Trump 2.0. Keep your fam and friends close this week (and for the next three years), because it’s near-uninhabitable out there.

Today, we’re teaming up with Jessica Valenti—friend of The Meteor and founder of Abortion, Every Day—on a fresh series of videos demystifying anti-abortion speak. Plus, a history-making governorship begins, and a little bit of justice for Tylenol.

Choosing coziness,

Nona Willis Aronowitz

WHAT’S GOING ON

Who’s coercing whom?: How does the term “coerced abortions” make you feel? Sounds horrible, right? Perhaps something an abusive parent or boyfriend would perpetrate against a vulnerable woman? The phrase—crafted to elicit this precise reaction—is the latest bit of lingo anti-abortion extremists are using to make Americans think that abortion hurts women. If it sounds familiar, you may have encountered it in Republican talking points, lawsuits and state laws—or heard conservatives like Sen. Bill Cassidy (R.-La.) and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill mention it just last week during a Senate hearing meant to discredit abortion pills. The pills, Cassidy claimed, go “straight to [an abuser’s] mailbox, no questions asked, and then they coerce the woman to take it … Think of the women, the girls in abusive relationships, being trafficked whose voice is being silent.”

OME ANTI-CHOICE PROTESTERS IN 2022 WIELDING THE LANGUAGE OF COERCION. (CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES)

Again: Sounds awful. But in a new edition of our series Anti-Abortion Glossary—in which Abortion, Every Day’s Jessica Valenti unpacks the misleading, misogynist terms used by the anti-abortion movement—Valenti explains that this kind of rhetoric is being specifically used to target doctors who provide abortion medication, or, as in one Louisiana case, a mother who helped her teenage daughter obtain abortion care.

To be clear, some abusers absolutely do force their partners to end a pregnancy. But in a post-Roe world, it is vastly more common that women will be coerced into continuing a pregnancy—either by an abusive partner, or, in the case of abortion bans, by the state itself. In fact, a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that abortion bans worsen intimate partner violence by as much as 10 percent. And sometimes, the government helps: in one case out of Texas, police used 83,000 cameras to track down an abortion patient because her abuser turned her in.

So why are conservatives so obsessed with “abortion coercion” when forced pregnancy is a far greater problem? Valenti’s reporting found that in 2023, anti-abortion leaders pinpointed “coercion” as their most effective tool to justify abortion bans—which, after all, are deeply unpopular with most Americans. “The new Republican message must be clear. No woman should ever be subjected to an unwanted abortion,” advised David Reardon of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America in an opinion piece for The Hill. Valenti sees right through this strategy. “They figured that pretending to care about coercion might make it seem like their laws are protecting women,” Valenti says. “They’re not.”

New episodes of Anti-Abortion Glossary will be dropping every Tuesday on Instagram. Watch here:

• Speaking of Arctic blasts: Thousands of Greenlanders (a number that constitutes a major chunk of the country’s population) marched in the streets on Saturday to protest Trump’s threat of invading the country. Among the protesters was Tillie Martinussen, a former member of parliament, who’s called the U.S. “greedy” and accused Trump of surrounding himself with “white power people.” The American government “started out as sort of touting themselves as [Greenland’s] friends and allies,” she told EuroNews at the protest. “And now they’re just plain out threatening us.”

• Speaking of Arctic blasts: Thousands of Greenlanders (a number that constitutes a major chunk of the country’s population) marched in the streets on Saturday to protest Trump’s threat of invading the country. Among the protesters was Tillie Martinussen, a former member of parliament, who’s called the U.S. “greedy” and accused Trump of surrounding himself with “white power people.” The American government “started out as sort of touting themselves as [Greenland’s] friends and allies,” she told EuroNews at the protest. “And now they’re just plain out threatening us.”
• Virginia’s first woman governor, Democrat and former CIA officer Abigail Spanberger, was sworn in on Saturday, and she made it her first order of business to repeal her predecessor’s order to cooperate with ICE. “We will focus on the security and safety of all our neighbors,” she promised in her inauguration speech. “And in Virginia, our hardworking, law abiding immigrant neighbors will know that…we mean them, too.” Also sworn in: Ghazala Hashmi, Spanberger’s lieutenant governor, who’s the first Muslim woman ever elected to state office.
• A new scientific study published in the medical journal The Lancet should reassure pregnant women that they need not “tough it out,” as our esteemed president and maternal health expert Trump recently advised: In a review of more than three dozen studies, the researchers found no link between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and autism.
• There’s no such thing as too much Magic Mike, as New Yorkers will soon discover.
• Heads up: a new epithet is spreading on the far-right to describe Renee Good and those close to her. Think we’ll take “organized gangs of wine moms,” please and thank you.

• Still pissed? Allow us to suggest a rage room.
• Prefer to be anesthetized instead? Subscribe to Collier Meyerson’s new Substack, Soothe Operator, a place to “look away from the sun, briefly,” because “it’s important to go soft in order to go even harder.”