Believe Children.
What we should really be saying about Alice Munro
By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Last weekend, Canadian writer Andrea Robin Skinner wrote an intensely personal op-ed about her sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather—and about how her mother had protected the abuser. Though the violence began when Skinner was 9, she found the courage to tell her mother when she was in her twenties. But her mother “reacted exactly as I had feared she would," Skinner writes, "as if she had learned of an infidelity.” Skinner went on to report her stepfather to the police (he got two years' probation) but never reconciled with her mother before her death. It's a horrible story of sexual abuse and betrayal—but the thing that got the most attention was the name of Skinner's mother: Alice Munro, the celebrated novelist and 2013 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.
The media response thus far has been primarily about Munro's legacy, with a procession of op-eds about what to do with her books and whether her writing indicated that she was the kind of person who would ignore her daughter's pleas. We've been having these types of conversations for years—the "can we separate art from artist?" conundrum—about cultural icons from Woody Allen to R. Kelly to Picasso. And yes, that’s a mildly interesting question…which also distracts from the most important issue here: Why on god's green earth are adults still dismissing children when they tell them, with an unimaginable amount of courage, about being sexually abused?
Skinner's story is important not because of who her mother is, but because it illuminates disturbing truths about how child sexual assault is dealt with—or not—particularly when family ties seem to complicate the simple act of protecting children. "It seemed as if no one believed the truth should ever be told, that it never would be told, certainly not on a scale that matched the lie," Skinner wrote.
Skinner’s experience is devastatingly common: RAINN estimates that one in every nine girls and one in every 20 boys experiences some form of child sexual abuse before they're 18, though some studies say the statistics are even higher. The ripple effects are lifelong: Once a child experiences sexual abuse, they're much more likely to experience PTSD, depression, or develop symptoms of drug abuse, per RAINN. And ninety-three percent of these children know their abuser, whether a family member, teacher, or some other person in authority—a violation of trust which makes it that much more difficult for them to report the abuse, particularly if their abuser has made threats against other loved ones, a common grooming tactic.
When the abuser is a family member, in particular, the dynamics get even more complicated, even though they hypothetically shouldn't. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry emphasizes that when a child reports their own abuse, it's important for the adult to remain calm and refrain from making judgmental comments, and to assure them they are not to blame—two crucial kindnesses Skinner writes that she wasn't afforded. And though there aren't hard statistics available about the percentage of children who report abuse but aren't believed, judging by the amount of first-person testimonies on the internet, it's unfortunately common. Even Ellen Degeneres experienced this—she was abused by her stepfather and her mom disbelieved her. (Degeneres's mother believes her now, thankfully; in 2019, she released a statement that read, in part, "If someone in your life has the courage to speak out, please believe them.")
We know what some people say: that not every claim is true. And many remember so-called "false memory syndrome"—although that’s not a term or concept officially recognized by reputable psychiatric sources such as the DSM-IV—and the "Satanic day care" panic of the 1980s and '90s, in which children did in fact accuse daycare teachers of mass abuse. (Most saw their convictions overturned.) But the fact is that these instances were and are extremely rare; in fact, like rape, childhood sexual abuse is grossly underreported, with one study identifying that half of childhood abuse survivors never tell anyone, even after they are adults.
That makes what happens when young survivors do tell someone so crucial. “Don’t let your natural and understandable feelings of confusion and doubt override the fact that the perpetrator is always at fault,” writes the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), in its very helpful guide. “If, in the heat of your own pain and distress, you accuse your adolescent of betrayal instead of acknowledging that your child was the victim, he or she may begin to experience dangerous—and potentially damaging—self-doubt.” Reading the NCTSN’s materials, you also understand that given the frequency and prevalence of childhood sexual abuse, it's possible that the person being told has their own traumatic history with abuse, which can complicate their reaction.
Skinner wrote her piece after years of experiencing the ripple effects of being both abused and disbelieved; she began slipping in school and struggled with bulimia. But while her trauma followed her well into adulthood, as it does with many survivors, she eventually got professional help. It's never too late to do that, and there are lots of specific resources for adult survivors, including organizations, like Hidden Water, which follow a restorative justice approach to healing.
What else might help? Erin Merryn, a survivor and children's advocate, has some answers. After being abused as a child—first by a neighbor, then by a family member—she has since spent the last 15 years lobbying legislators around the country to implement Erin's Law, which requires public schools to teach prevention courses to children in school through 12th grade. (It has been adopted in 38 states, with more on the way.) Reporting abuse might be fraught, but signaling to a child that they're being protected from further harm is more important. Most crucially, the child must be believed and treated with gentle care, particularly if they're expected to develop a healthy adult life. And that matters more than any one writer's legacy.
If you or someone you know needs help, contact RAINN here or at 1-800-656-4673.
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is a writer, culture critic, and editor in NYC. Her first book, Vaquera, about growing up in Wyoming and the myth of the American West, is forthcoming for Penguin.
Voguing for Trans Liberation at New York's Most Brutal Jail
Jordyn Jay takes us inside Rikers Island for a ball
By Mik Bean
New York’s Rikers Island is one of the nation’s most notorious jails, where incarcerated trans people are treated especially inhumanely. But last Thursday, it was also the site of the second annual vogue ball for trans incarcerees. “We wanted to give our incarcerated siblings more opportunities to show their dedication to the culture and the art form that is ballroom,” says Jordyn Jay, founder of Black Trans Femmes in the Arts (BTFA), which organized the ball and has funded and supported Black trans femme artists for five years now. “We are there to celebrate them and to bring them joy in this very dark, cruel system of mass incarceration.”
I spoke with Jay about the Rikers ball and other radical acts of hope.
Mik Bean: Shows like Pose and Legendary and Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE tour have brought ballroom culture to a wider audience. But its history is one of radical celebration in the face of violent criminalization. Why was it important to bring ballroom back to Rikers?
Jordyn Jay: So I want to be clear that the idea [for the ball] came from the folks detained and incarcerated at Rikers Island, and that is in line with the history of ballroom. Vogue began in Rikers Island from folks who were incarcerated there, referencing images that they saw in magazines. That was the only connection they had—not only to the outside world, but to their femininity, through expressing themselves by mimicking the models’ lines and shapes.
Modern ballroom culture as we know it was started [in the 1970s] by Crystal LaBeija, as a Black trans woman’s dream for what society could be. She created an ecosystem in which trans beauty and bodies were celebrated. We are grateful to the people who’ve taken ballroom to a global stage, but there are also consequences when you open up a safe and sacred place to the world. A lot of the femme queens—which is how we refer to trans women in the ballroom scene—have noticed that there’s been [little] appreciation for us as individuals despite the fact that we are, historically and currently, what people come to see.
So many ballroom legends and icons have passed through Rikers Island because of the criminalization of trans bodies and what trans people have to do to survive. It’s especially amazing that we’re able to bring formerly incarcerated trans women to work with currently incarcerated trans women and celebrate ballroom culture in this space during Pride—and to do so with an abolitionist lens.
Can you explain what you mean by an “abolitionist lens”?
It’s so important that this ball is happening during Pride Month because pride and carcerality have a linked history. There would be no Pride Month without police brutality—without mass incarceration.
Rikers is a global symbol of the oppression of America’s mass incarceration and policing systems. So when we bring the arts and bring pride into that space, it is in itself a protest. We are hoping that by bringing the arts into Rikers…that this revolutionary, transformative energy of the arts is able to carry [incarcerated people] forward.
Can you describe the feeling of being at the Rikers ball?
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the darkness that we feel as we travel onto the island, as we navigate security, as we walk down the halls and folks are forced to stop and put their heads against the wall and their hands behind their back. It is a stomach-sinking feeling. But once we enter that room and see the faces of the folks who we came to support, there is so much empathy and so much joy.
It almost feels wrong to say that our visit to Rikers was fab, but truly, that’s the best way I can describe it. I think we came in with the intention of bringing joy and excitement to the women who were detained. We got just as much excitement as I hope that we gave them. The energy—the femme queen energy in particular—was just so palpable in the room. There was so much joy from the moment that we walked in.
Being trans is itself an act of creation. Can you share more about how you see that link in your own work?
So many of the organizing bodies that center around Black trans folks are geared towards houselessness, HIV/AIDS, and fighting [anti-trans] legislation. These things are really crucial, but [they] aren’t focused around joy. It’s a lot of talk of loss and trauma, and that really took a toll on me in the early days of my transition.
So I wanted there to be a space where we could not only come together and center joy, but also express ourselves through the arts and have the resources to do that. [Through grantmaking and production support, BTFA fosters the careers of artists like Kiyan Williams, recently celebrated for their work in the Whitney Biennial.] There are so many of us that have never had someone to sit down and touch our hand and say: “You can do this. I believe in you. I want to see your art in the world. I want to hear your voice in the world.”
Trans people have to create ourselves in a world that tells us that we shouldn’t exist, and that is the ultimate artistic expression. We’ve already broken this gender binary and this understanding of how people are able to exist in the world, so there’s really an endless flow of possibility. As I was moving through my transness and meeting new trans people, every one of them was an artist in their own way. When people engage with art created by Black trans femmes, it allows them to understand us as human beings—and to see themselves in trans people.
What is the future you envision for Black trans femmes artists?
BTFA’s vision statement is that we envision a world where Black trans femmes can create without limitations. The headline is always “Black trans femme artists,” and I think that’s wonderful for representation’s sake. But my question is: At what point do we as artistic scholars challenge ourselves to view this art as art and critique it as such? When we start to engage with the actual work, there’s so many more important conversations that can be had.
It’s just a pleasure to be able to watch this program expand. It’s in line with all that being a femme queen is: We break barriers down and we disrupt systems. Our form of protest in this space is joy, is laughter, is cheering. We hope that they all felt the power and energy behind this too-brief but very beautiful moment that we got to share.
Updated 6/19/2024: A previous version of this story incorrectly referred to Rikers Island as a prison. Rikers is a jail facility, however, the island where it is located is a "prison island." We have amended our language and regret the error.
Mik Beanis a social media strategist with a master’s degree in journalism. A former advisor and content producer for organizations including The Washington Post, Instagram, and AIDS Healthcare Foundation, Mik specializes in political science and gender theory.
Have We Been Thinking About Ambition All Wrong?
Samhita Mukhopadhyay charts a new alternative for work life (beyond the girlboss or tradwife)
BY CINDI LEIVE
Samhita Mukhopadhyay has spent her career doing two things brilliantly: being a serious boss (she helped run the newsroom at Mic and served as the executive editor for Teen Vogue), and being a serious feminist (she was a founding editor at the late-'00s site Feministing). Those dual experiences—sometimes, but not always aligned—make her the perfect person to answer the question: What does, and what should, the future look like for women in the workplace? And can you be a boss and a feminist at the same time?
Those aren’t simple questions; work, after all, is a place with its own needs, bottom line, and occasional drudgery. (There’s that old expression: If work were that pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves.) I’ve written and talked about the subject of women and work plenty, and I still don’t have answers.
But Samhita’s new book, The Myth of Making It: A Workplace Reckoning, does. Full disclosure, Samhita is a friend and colleague: We both worked at the media company Condé Nast, although we didn’t know each other there; now, we work together at the ever-so-slightly-less-glossy outlet you’re reading right now. (We think of it as The Devil Wears Sweatpants.)
She began writing this book during the pandemic, which was—you might remember?—a stressful time for working women. We started there.
Cindi Leive: When you started to write this book, there was a lot of gleeful dancing on the grave of the girlboss. Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, which had been a bible of early ’10s feminism, suddenly seemed very outdated—women were realizing that if you’re underpaid, overworked, and don’t have child care, no amount of leaning in was going to fix that. But you also didn’t want to chuck the whole idea of ambition. What was the problem you were trying to solve?
Samhita Mukhopadhyay: Woman after woman in my life who were extremely ambitious in their careers were starting to question that ambition because they weren't living the life that they thought they were going to live. They weren't finding the happiness or the meaning or the purpose, and they were struggling in their personal lives.
But it felt very easy [for society] to say, “Women's ambition is dead. We should have never let you have that education and have that career. Because look what it's done to you now. You're burned out; you're tired; you're a bad mother.”
It felt like there was no space for us to be like, I'm actually in between all of these narratives. Like, I'm not going to become a tradwife, but the way we’ve been taught about ambition—pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work as hard as possible, girlboss your way to the top—that narrative is also not working for me. I'm going to do something more impactful. And I wanted to explore that.
You just referred to the kind of other side of the spectrum from the girlboss—the tradwife. Can you define that term?
There has been a trend of [female] influencers declaring that they are no longer going to pursue career ambitions and they're more focused on their family and their husbands. It's a trend that's hard to actually quantify—it gets a lot of press coverage because anything that's critical of women's ambition gets a lot of press coverage. All the women in my life have to work! But I think we are fascinated with the idea of putting women back in their place.
That's where this question of limited narratives comes in, because wanting a soft life or embracing more balance in your life should not come at the cost of women's progress. A happy life with dignity should not come at the cost of you being able to pay your bills, right? We should be able to do all of that.
But work has become so inhumane, and we conflate a rejection of capitalist hustle culture with rejecting the progress of feminism. The problem isn't that women are ambitious and they want to work. The problem is that we have a society and workplaces that can't support [those ambitions]. Especially for mothers.
One of my favorite lines in the book is when you say that girlboss culture sold the idea that capitalism and feminism could have a totally functional baby. Do you see those things as totally at odds? Is there no place in feminism for trailblazers like Ursula Burns [the former CEO of Xerox] or Indra Nooyi [of Pepsi]—or even what you were doing at Teen Vogue?
I think the connection is not as…fluid as we had hoped. [laughs] Ursula Burns and Indra Nooyi, while they are groundbreaking, they are exceptions, right? They're often peddled to us as “You could do this, too!” And the reality is, most of us actually can't do that. It's impossible for one person to fix [the system]. It's collective action that's going to bring change. It's not necessarily that having women in these roles isn't valuable. I just don't think it's been as successful as it’s been sold to us.
You say that you don't have all the answers—you write that “this is not a how-to book.” But I’m going to push you for a little advice anyway. What’s the best way to be a better—and maybe more feminist—boss? You’re really good at it.
One of the things that I always think about is: What does it look like to have my ambition be connected to the ambitions of the people that work for me? So that I am a unit with them, and that no matter how I move forward in the workplace, my moving forward is connected to their moving forward. The research is showing that women are actually better at doing that, too: They're better at creating inclusive work environments where people feel seen. So what does it look like to shift the focus and say I will do everything I can to support my employees? Within reason, I mean; at the end of the day, we all have to get our jobs done. In some environments, profit’s gonna matter, productivity is going to matter. But I do think that as managers we can say to our employees, I will always advocate for the biggest raise for you. I will always advocate for you to get the training that you want. And for you to be able to take care of your family and to take care of yourself.
You also say that bosses need to be better about admitting mistakes. You tell a really vivid story in the book about being called the wrong name in a past role…
I was sitting in a high-level meeting and the person leading the meeting called me by the wrong name—the name of another South Asian executive at the company. It was a complicated moment: Technically, I wasn't supposed to be in that meeting; I was there in lieu of my boss. The other executive was supposed to be in the meeting, and she was not there, so it was the perfect storm for a mix-up. In the moment I was like, that couldn't possibly have just happened. But the person next to me was like, “No, that happened.”
The way you write about it, it sounds as if it was upsetting to be called the wrong name. But equally upsetting was the way it was handled, where nobody actually admitted to having done what they had done.
I did feel upset that it had happened. I already felt so uncomfortable in that room around all of these senior people. And that kind of confirmed for me that I really shouldn't be there. But—let people make mistakes, right? I use the wrong pronouns sometimes; things like that happen. I don’t think that it means that the person [making the mistake] is vicious or angry or inherently racist.
But everybody made a big deal about it, and I noticed that the focus was much more on this mistake rather than all of the forces that create a mistake like that: lack of representation for women of color in leadership roles, or lack of effective diversity and inclusion programs that actually address unconscious bias. There’s research on this: They call it the same-race effect or same-race bias; when you have not been exposed to a variety of people in another race, you tend to confuse them for each other. There's also a power dynamic here: People in management positions tend to do it more often than employees, because employees have to be very aware of the identity of the people that are managing them. And most managers are predominantly white, so you can see how that plays out. It was the conflation of all of those things in that moment. But we focus so much on the question of, “Oh, is that person racist or not racist?” And then that becomes the question, rather than how we create a situation where people of color can work with dignity.
So if someone does make a mistake like that, what is a better way of trying to deal with it?
First and foremost, by acknowledging the mistake and saying, “I am so sorry. I'm so embarrassed. Of course I know who you are. My mistake.” If you realize in the moment, do it in the moment. I’ve had to do that: “I’m sorry, I know that's not your gender pronoun, let me do that again.” It's a little awkward, but it goes a long way toward making the person feel seen and heard. And if you don't realize in the moment, admit that it happened and that you are committing to do better next time. I don't think people realize how far those apologies actually go! I really felt like I did something wrong, like, Oh my God, how dare I be here, and be Indian! So an apology helps.
There is this huge opportunity right now for leaders to really take seriously the question of how to make everybody feel included or confident or empowered at work. If you’re truly invested in diversity and inclusion, you can get to know every single person that works for you. And treat everyone with the recognition of: We know who you are, and we know what brings you here.
You’re talking about the importance of a feeling of belonging at work. And one of the most moving stories in the book is when you get a bad performance review and you go out to sob on a bench outside. You're in your 30s and you feel ashamed of being so upset, and you later realize that it’s because the review taps into this preexisting feeling that maybe you never belonged in that workplace to begin with. Is belonging a fundamental thing for us to think about as we redefine ambition?
Absolutely. The statistics around how lonely people feel at work are quite devastating, right? It's especially true for women and people of color, who often feel very alienated in the workplace. When we're taught that we don't belong somewhere, it's very hard to do your best work or to even show up. In my own case, my own struggles in early schooling—and bad grades—really impacted what I thought was possible for myself. And so I always felt like I was faking it, like I actually didn’t deserve [success]. I think that a lot of people struggle with that at work. And I think that working from home has caused more alienation, especially for young women, because so much of what I learned at work was being mentored by older women. And that piece is really missing right now: the feeling that someone’s invested in your career and working to help you feel included. That’s one reason people are quiet-quitting; they're not feeling like they're part of something bigger.
I want to ask you how all this ties into social change. A fascinating study just came out showing that those “lean In” messages can actually lower women's motivation to protest gender inequalities at work. Did that surprise you?
It did! I could see that individual-style “workplace feminism” has not been effective, but we still need it. I mean, I'm not going to stop telling young women that they should ask for more money!…But what I found so interesting is the finding that when you internalize the idea that your success is dependent on your behavior alone, that disconnects you from a broader story about gender justice. That research is a missing link: We have isolated women with this attitude of “to have it all, you have to do it all.” And then that internalization has blinded us to the way structural realities are impacting us.
The alternative to what we’ve been doing is that we actually come together and rise up—rise up together.
“What We Do in the Streets Is a Way of Grieving”
On the fourth anniversary of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, author Prentis Hemphill offers a new way of looking at things, and what's next.
BY REBECCA CARROLL
Four years after George Floyd’s murder, I realized that I simply do not have it in me to write another piece about Black pain, patterns and cycles of violent racism, and the endless trauma that continues to course through our bodies and bloodlines. I’ve literally written hundreds of them. I’m tired. And it feels like nothing ever changes.
But years ago, I asked the late civil rights activist Julian Bond how he managed to stay hopeful in the face of what often feels like little progress. He said, “There are enough victories to keep hope alive, and that’s what activism is.” And so I keep looking for the victories, which lately has meant having conversations with folks, particularly younger folks, who are deep in the work with fresh eyes, bright minds, and open hearts. Prentis Hemphill is one of those folks, one who, right on time, has a new book out called What it Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World. The author, therapist, and organizer spoke with me about the power of collective grief, finding the small openings of possibility, and the necessity of visual longing.
Rebecca Carroll: Your book begins, “When Trayvon Martin was killed, I had just started working at a community mental health clinic in Los Angeles, one of three Black therapists on a staff of nearly fifty.” How do you hold the grace to write about the fact of yet another Black body being killed?
Prentis Hemphill: The only way is by being in community that can feel, and grieve, and strategize, and celebrate. That’s the only thing that actually sustains me. I can only face things because I’m held, and because I’m also holding. Every time someone in our community is killed in this way, it reverberates. We have memories of people in our communities that were killed that way, people in our families that were killed that way. The ongoing violence against Black people, it reverberates through all of our grief and all of our pain. Even though we as a people have made it this far because we reach for each other, I think we also try to—and have to—shoulder more than is ours to bear.
I was just having a conversation with a dear friend and organizer, Malkia Devich-Cyril, about how our grief has been criminalized and that part of what we do in the streets is a way of grieving. But because of what is projected onto us as Black people, our actions are never read as grief rituals; they are often labeled as violent, disruptive, inconvenient.
By “what we do in the streets,” I take that to mean being collectively loud, actively creating movement culture, and just being Black—does it matter whether we know that we are simultaneously grieving?
That’s a great question. Having been at a lot of protests and on the ground in so many different places over the last 15 years, I think a lot of people know that their grief is present. But there’s the connective piece—the collectivizing of the experience of “I feel this pain”—that we don’t talk about. We know it’s our grief, but we also narrow it, because that’s what we’ve had to do to get by. I am interested in starting to unlock how [our grief] can be bigger, because that’s the truth of what we’re holding.
You wrote about not being able to know how Harriet Tubman learned to trust her dreams. How did you learn to trust your dreams?
I always felt entitled to my life, to an authentic life. I always felt like, if God made me, then I’m all right. I can see the way that human beings create rankings and structures to take you away from the truth of it all, but there was always something in me that wasn’t confused. I would like to say I was just born with that, but I can feel my grandmother in it, I can feel my great-grandmother in it—[this notion] that the world is telling one story, and I feel something truer. I think it means a lonely path for a lot of people who refuse to dim their light. Sometimes, we have to dim our lights for the sake of safety, but for the most part, I cultivate that light in me. I think life wants to express itself.
There’s this one really striking line from the book: “It’s hard to heal when you're still being hurt.” How do we lead our way through healing while we’re still being hurt in all ways?
When we get hurt or experience trauma, when we don’t have space to process it, some part of us gets locked in that moment, and we’re replaying and responding to it all the time. When I work with people, [what makes a difference is] the recognition that in each moment, there is a choice. It may not be an ideal choice, but when our stories hold us captive, we’re no longer able to perceive the choices in this moment. It’s the work of finding the very small openings where something else might be possible. That’s a part of healing. That’s what Harriet Tubman was able to do. She was like, “You have me in this world, but now, I can see that there’s a little opening here. I can see a friend here. I can see a path here.”
It feels like we’re talking about trauma on a national level in ways that we haven’t before—what do you think is on the other side of that conversation?
I’m curious about trauma as a human phenomenon—and knowing this, how then do we structure our societies, our communities? What would we do if we knew that healing was important? I bet we would construct the world in a different way, and it wouldn’t be based as much on exploitative and violent tendencies which we’ve normalized at this point. I’d rather we normalize something else.
In the book, you wrote that visions are rooted in longing—can you say more about that?
I’m not a real churchy person, but “faith without works is dead” is something my grandmother would say all the time. We get sold visions for our lives, sold visions for who we are supposed to be. It’s necessary for us to reactivate that kind of looking around that, again, Harriet Tubman was able to do—looking through the cracks, looking underneath, and activating our own strangeness. No matter what happens tomorrow, we are facing compounding, complex crises. I hope that [my book] is a tool, something that accompanies people through the changes and challenges I think we're all facing.
My name is Prentis, which means student. I feel like my role is to tenderly offer the questions that I feel need to be posed in this moment. I don’t position myself as an authority. I position myself as someone who is learning, someone whose role in community is to pose questions—and to keep us close as we try to answer them.
"They Don't Look at Us as Human Beings"
Lead plaintiff Amanda Zurawski on the Texas Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a ban that almost killed her—and why she’s planning to run for office herself
BY CINDI LEIVE
We’ve grown accustomed to courts acting coldly, but last Friday’s Texas Supreme Court decision seemed especially and brutally devoid of compassion. In Zurawski v. State of Texas, the court had heard from 20 women who had been denied abortion care when experiencing pregnancy complications—women who had hemorrhaged, been forced to carry babies without skulls, and nearly died. And yet, the justices still ruled not to change or amend Texas’s abortion ban, which has forced doctors to deny patients vital medical care out of fear of prosecution. (What this says about the state’s regard for the vastly greater number of people who need abortions for less “medically necessary” reasons—such as, you know, not wanting to be pregnant anymore—is a story for another time.)
Over the weekend, I called Amanda Zurawski, the woman who lent her name—and the last year and a half of her life—to the lawsuit. I first met Amanda in the fall of 2022 when a doctor whispered to one of my Meteor colleagues that there was a woman in Austin who’d been through hell and might be willing to share her story. She did, detailing her harrowing experience for the world, but then went on to do much more, testifying before Congress, speaking up for other patients—and taking on her own state’s government.
Cindi Leive: This decision felt like a punch in the face to so many women—but for those of you who testified, and your families, it was so personal. What measure of justice were you and [your husband] Josh expecting? How much was this a surprise to you?
Amanda Zurawski: It wasn't a huge surprise because we know that the Texas Supreme Court is full of conservative Republicans—[all] nine of [the justices] are conservative Republicans. And then, after the ruling in the Kate Cox case [in which the court denied the December 2023 abortion request of a Texas woman whose fetus had no chance of survival], that was a signal of how our case was going to go. So we had time to prepare for a loss.
What we weren't expecting, and what we were really surprised by, was the way that they wrote the decision—that they literally wrote out most of the plaintiffs by not even using their name. [Only three patients and two doctors were referred to by name in the ruling.] And that felt unnecessarily cruel and offensive…To me, it means they don't care about us and they don't look at us as human beings. They don't care about our trauma, our grief, our loss. They don't want to acknowledge us. Because as long as they can ignore us and pretend like we don't exist—just like my Senators [Ted Cruz and John Cornyn] did when I testified in front of Congress—they can pretend like the problem isn't real.
We did a press call right after the ruling came out, and there were 11 plaintiffs that could join. And seeing their faces and hearing their voices and how heartbroken they were—that was really gutting.
You said that that was the hardest part for you. Why?
I want to acknowledge my name was used in the Supreme Court's decision. They did acknowledge what happened to me personally, and they didn't for anyone else. And that feels very unfair and very unjust. And I also feel a little bit like…people were counting on me, I think, because I was the first one to file, because it was my name on the suit…I do feel a little bit like people were depending on me, and I feel a little bit like I let them down.
You said on Friday, “We will continue to fight.” Tell me how.
Well, I don't think our lawsuit can do much more. People keep asking me if it's going to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, and I want to make it very clear that…likely, this is the end. But we can keep fighting in other ways. Personally, I will continue to campaign to get people to vote for pro-choice candidates. We can continue to share our own stories and to share other people's stories. We can donate our time and our money to abortion providers and organizations.
And did you say that some of the Texas Supreme Court justices are up for reelection?
Yes! There are three up for reelection [Jimmy Blacklock, John Devine, and Jane Bland]. I think we know now very clearly how they feel about…a woman's right to choose, so I'm really hoping that we can get the word out before November and not get them reelected. It feels really good to be able to say that so clearly, because for a year and a half I couldn't, because we had an ongoing lawsuit. [Now] I'm like, let's light some fires.
I’ve been thinking about what’s happened in Texas since you first filed your lawsuit. You were the first [plaintiff], and then there were five women, and then 20. And I don't know if you saw this thread, but just two weeks ago, Ryan Hamilton, a musician and DJ, tweeted that his wife, who had been pregnant with their second child, was denied abortion care in a very similar situation to yours. Despite the baby no longer having a heartbeat, she was repeatedly sent home. She lost so much blood that he found her unconscious on the bathroom floor. She almost died. This happened in Texas two weeks ago. How does it feel knowing that while the Supreme Court is making this decision, claiming that doctors are able to do the right thing [under existing Texas law], the number of women who have been exactly where you were continues to climb?
That story makes me sick to my stomach. And it's going to keep happening, because lawmakers aren't doing anything to fix it. It's infuriating that the Supreme Court of Texas had the opportunity to fix this—had the opportunity to make things better—and they did nothing. And when the Supreme Court says, “Doctors can practice medicine, this isn't a problem, the law is clear”—clearly that's not the case! Listen to our stories. Listen to what's happening to us. Listen to doctors. They refuse to hear us, and I don't know what it's going to take for them to wake up and realize that people are dying because of this. Or if they haven't yet, they're going to.
There's an enormous amount of suffering happening in Texas and similar states, and they need to fix it.
Three months ago, when the Alabama Supreme Court was deeming embryos people, you said that you worried that Texas was going to do the same, and that you were going to move your embryos out of state. The irony is incredible: You need IVF because the state's laws impacted your fertility, and now the state is making that path to having a family more difficult. How has that process felt?
It was pretty upsetting, because moving embryos is, as you can imagine, incredibly complicated. It is very expensive. And from my understanding, things don't go wrong very often, but if they do, it's catastrophic—you lose your embryos. As we [were] going through it, I'm like, this is terrifying, because I feel like we're on a ticking clock, because Texas [could] make this decision [to criminalize IVF] any day. By the way, there now is a case about embryonic personhood that the Texas Supreme Court is deciding whether or not to hear…[and] depending on how they rule, it could do the exact same thing that happened in Alabama and threaten IVF access. Fortunately, our [embryos] are now safe, but if Trump is reelected, we're scared that it won't matter where your embryos are, because he'll institute national bans or laws that are going to affect their safety. It's just a really troubling, scary time right now to be trying to plan a family.
Last question—what gives you hope right now? Is there anything?
You know, in our press call, my fellow plaintiff, Dr. Austin Dennard, said that she likes to think that people are good. And I agree with her. I think that most people at their core want to do the right thing. And when we're speaking out about what happened to us, we do see a lot of goodness in most people. And I see the people who are fighting in their communities. I see people who are running for office because they're trying to protect women. And I think there's a lot to be hopeful about. I do think we're going to fix this. It's going to take a lot of work, but we can do it.
You mentioned women running for office. I can't get off the phone without asking you the same question that America Ferrera asked you onstage at our event a year and a half ago. Any further thoughts about you running for office?
Oh, yeah… That is probably going to happen. I've started trying to figure out what office might be a good fit for me. I’ve talked to a lot of different organizations; I’ve talked to a lot of different individuals. I think the next step would be fundraising. But Zurawski ‘26 is probably something you’ll see.
Zurawski 2026. Amazing. We’ll leave it there.
The plaintiffs in the case are: Patients Amanda Zurawski, Lauren Miller, Lauren Hall, Anna Zargarian, Ashley Brandt, Kylie Beaton, Jessica Bernardo, Samantha Casiano, Austin Dennard, D.O., Taylor Edwards, Kiersten Hogan, Lauren Van Vleet, Elizabeth Weller, Kristen Anaya, Kaitlyn Kash, D. Aylen, Kimberly Manzano, Danielle Mathisen, M.D., Cristina Nuñez, and Amy Coronado; and health care providers Damla Karsan, M.D. and Judy Levison, M.D., M.P.H. Read their stories on Center for Reproductive Rights' site.
Everyone is Having Fun Talking About Drake and Kendrick Lamar
A long-time music critic tackles a darker truth at the core of their beef: the expendability of women’s trauma
By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Kendrick Lamar and Drake have spent the better part of the past month in a rap beef, which you might already know if you spend time on social media, where they've been trending for days. The origin of their acrimony is vague—the former collaborators turned on each other around 2013—but this recent round was kicked off in late March with a song called "Like That" from Future and Metro Boomin's latest album, We Don't Trust You, on which Kendrick, guest-rapping, essentially called Drake a poseur and a chicken. That provoked some peripheral fallout, including a Drake diss by Rick Ross coming from the sidelines and a very weak response track by J. Cole, which he later walked back, apologizing to a stadium full of his own fans.
Confused? There is a lot of minutiae here and even more menergy; all of this feels like a desperate display of testosterone in an era when women rappers are finally flourishing. But there are larger issues here that go beyond which rapper has the better flow, and it might not surprise you that women have ended up as collateral damage.
Rap beef is rooted in the Dozens, a traditionally African American game of insults. The Dozens, in turn, influenced the freestyle battles that have flourished since hip-hop's inception, in which two rappers diss each other to flex their superior lyrical talents, not unlike a verbal boxing match. In the Drake versus Kendrick battle, Kendrick is obviously superior; he has a better grasp of the language overall—a skill for which he once won a Pulitzer—and is more capable of varying his writing style. There is a comfortable consensus, too, that he's winning the battle due to how deeply his insults cut, to the point that I keep imagining him as the X-Men character Psylocke, wielding a particularly sharpened psychic knife.
But as far as rap beefs go, this one feels increasingly gnarly. When Kendrick first asserted on "Like That" that respect is better than money or power, implying that Drake had the latter but not the former, it was fairly standard fare. Drake responded with "Push Ups," which dissed Kendrick's star power, and also with "Taylor Made Freestyle," which claimed that Kendrick's releases were being controlled by Taylor Swift. The idea that a man is in servitude to a woman is a pretty standard insult—but in retrospect, it was also an indicator of where this was all going.
Over the course of four more Kendrick songs and two more Drake songs, all released in the short span of seven days, the rappers hit one another with an escalating series of basically criminal accusations. (On Monday evening, a security guard outside Drake's Toronto mansion was shot, though authorities are currently investigating.) Drake accused Kendrick of hiring "a crisis management team to clean up the fact that you beat up your queen." My stomach fell upon hearing it—it's a shocking accusation, especially when it’s brought up so lightly in a rhyme.
But even worse was the fact that Kendrick's response was released only 30 minutes later, and so the accusation of violence barely seemed to register. Besides, Kendrick's barbs were just as nasty: that Drake is a pedophile, has a sick interest in underage girls, and that his record label might, in fact, be a ring of pedophiles. Kendrick suggested that Drake should be locked up alongside Harvey Weinstein, who at this moment is awaiting a new trial after a New York court overturned his rape conviction. Obviously, rapping it doesn’t make it true: As a written art form, a lot of rap lyrics are fantasy or narrative construction—that's part of why it's an infringement of First Amendment rights when those lyrics are used as evidence in trials. But does assuming that these allegations are simply lyrical shivs make them any better? Actually, the idea that women and girls are simply pawns in a brawl implies that neither artist cares too much about their well-being—unless they can be used as a weapon.
And if these accusations have even a kernel of truth to them, they reflect the way the entertainment industry keeps secrets to protect its own (and the way the #MeToo movement barely touched the music industry.) I keep thinking about Megan Thee Stallion, one of the most talented rappers in the U.S., who spent two full years being excoriated by male musicians and internet trolls after she accused Tory Lanez of shooting her in the foot; she was in a desperate enough place that she later rapped about her thoughts of suicide. Before Lanez was convicted in December 2022, even 50 Cent was forced to apologize for his ill-treatment of Megan.
But throughout the case, Drake was one of the worst offenders against Megan, rapping, "This bitch lie 'bout gettin' shots but she still a stallion," one line in a trilogy of Drake albums that seemed to trace his further descent in the darkest crevices of misogyny. (His latest, For All the Dogs, seems at times to just be a list of grievances against women.) As Vulture's Craig Jenkins wrote in a wide-ranging piece about the violence and sex trafficking allegations against superproducer Diddy, "We can’t keep picking and choosing whose abuse we’re willing to buy, turning support for survivors into a contest of whose abusers made the most beloved songs. We can’t let wealthy men treat everyone in the vicinity like chattel."
Megan eventually was able to bite back—her January 2024 diss track "Hiss," which in part takes aim at Drake, is the most listenable of all the songs in this rap beef—but the scars are right there on her album, called Traumazine. The unnamed women in Drake and Kendrick Lamar's beef tracks surely have their own scars, too. While hip-hop battles can sometimes feel like a sport, this one has become increasingly nihilistic. One wonders if either of these men is invested in what they’re saying or can even fathom what’s at stake for the lives of the people they are talking about, real or fictional.
They Waved Her Underwear in Front of a Jury and Called Her a "Slut Puppy"
THEY WAVED HER UNDERWEAR IN FRONT OF A JURY AND CALLED HER A "SLUT PUPPY"
Now Brenda Andrew is on death row, and the Supreme Court could weigh in
BY NEDA TOLOUI-SEMNANI
The U.S. Supreme Court will decide this Friday if it will hear the case of Brenda Andrew, the only woman currently on death row in Oklahoma. The Andrew case is the second Oklahoma capital punishment case vying for the court’s attention this term, and it has potentially far-reaching ramifications—not just for the state, but for the rights of women and queer people everywhere.
The background on the case is this: Andrew, along with James Pavatt, her former partner, were found guilty of first-degree murder in the 2001 shooting death of Andrew’s estranged husband, Rob, but the jury rejected the state’s charge that Andrew would be a “continuing threat to society.” Nonetheless, both Andrew and Pavatt were sentenced to death. Throughout Andrew’s 2004 trial, her sexuality, her dress, her demeanor, and, ultimately, her behavior as a wife, mother, and Christian were dissected and condemned. In an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court, a former federal judge, 17 law professors, and four domestic violence advocates argue that the Andrew case was rife with gender bias that unfairly prejudiced the jury against her.
“At a time when women’s rights generally are on the chopping block—also the rights of queer people and civil rights of minority communities—we’ve got a case that’s at the extreme end of what it means when we dehumanize these communities when we strip people of their humanity,” says Nathalie Greenfield, a lawyer with the non-profit firm Phillips Black, which filed the writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court on Andrew’s behalf. She argues that if the Supreme Court does not review the case, the justices would sanction using “assumptions, stereotypes, and tropes about people who dare to transgress perceived norms,” especially when it comes to gender, race, and identity.
The trial transcript, for example, reveals that witnesses were encouraged to describe Andrew’s appearance in detail, from her dresses (“very tight, very short, with a lot of cleavage,” said one) to her make-up choices (“gothic”), and also to say whether they thought those choices were appropriate. Prosecutors also waved Andrew’s underwear in front of the jury and called her a “slut puppy,” one of the last things members of the jury heard before they began to deliberate.
“There [were] just so many recorded instances of gendered evidence being presented every single day [of the Andrew trial],” says Greenfield. “And a lot of this was about her appearance and her extramarital affairs. The focus was on the fact that this was a woman who was transgressing gender norms by not being this chaste Christian wife.”
Oklahoma is a particularly deadly state: It has executed 124 people since 1976, when the U.S. lifted its moratorium on capital punishment. (Only Texas has killed more people.) Of these, just three were women—two of whom were prosecuted by district attorney Bob Macy, who is considered the second deadliest prosecutor in United States history. He’s responsible for 54 death sentences—more than any other prosecutor who was practicing law between 1980 and 2001. He resigned in 2001 after evidence of prosecutorial misconduct was found in 18 of those 54 cases, resulting in three exonerations.
However, his shadow still stretches over Oklahoma’s justice system—and Macy’s assistant district attorney and protege, Fern Smith, was a prosecutor in the Andrew case. According to transcripts, Smith repeatedly asked witnesses to describe Andrew’s dress, opine over Andrew’s behavior, and state whether or not Andrew was, in Smith’s words, a “good mother.”
This isn’t the first time a case Smith has prosecuted has been challenged. She has been repeatedly accused of failing to disclose exculpatory evidence—evidence that could be favorable to the defendant—and even of destroying evidence. In fact, she was accused of prosecutorial misconduct by name in the case of Richard Glossip, the other Oklahoma capital punishment case that will be in front of the U.S. Supreme Court this year.
At a time when women’s rights generally are on the chopping block—also the rights of queer people and civil rights of minority communities—we’ve got a case that’s at the extreme end of what it means when we dehumanize these communities when we strip people of their humanity.
The Supreme Court has already delayed deciding whether to hear Andrew’s case twice. Tomorrow, they could do one of three things: agree to hear it, decline to hear it, or “vacate and remand,” which means the Supreme Court could return her case to the appellate court to reconsider without hearing an oral argument.
Since Andrew was sentenced, she has been the sole woman on death row; consequently, she has served the majority of her sentence—more than 16 years—in solitary confinement. According to the United Nations, prolonged solitary confinement, or more than 15 days without meaningful human contact, is defined as torture.
In February 2020, Andrew was moved to the general population, where, according to her lawyers, she thrived. She got a job and joined a quilting circle. In January, two days after her attorneys filed the writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court, Andrew was returned to solitary. She wasn’t given a reason.
“The gender bias is just so finely woven into the trial that you can’t extricate it,” argues Jessica Sutton, another attorney with Phillips Black. “It’s unique in that way. However, the real issue implicates the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. We have to ensure that trials are fundamentally fair. We want to make sure that, for the ultimate punishment, we have a reliable trial, a reliable process, a reliable conviction, and sentencing. What the prosecution did is undermine every aspect of the entire trial.”
Neda Toloui-Semnani is an Emmy-winning journalist and the author of They Said They Wanted Revolution: A Memoir of My Parents.
Christine Blasey Ford, In Her Own Words
  April 12, 2024 The author of a new memoir on retaliation, recovery---and the survivors who reached out to herBY CINDI LEIVEFive and a half years ago, psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford raised her right hand before the 21-person Senate Judiciary Committee and became, despite her best attempts otherwise, a public figure. Her testimony that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school—that he had covered her mouth so violently that “I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me” and laughed while doing it—riveted the country in one of those moments that felt like history even as it was happening. On one level, we all know what happened next: Kavanaugh railed angrily, protestors took to the streets, and after a brief delay, he was confirmed while the sitting president mocked Dr. Ford ruthlessly. But what happened next to the woman at the center of the hearings—and what led her to that day? Those are the questions Dr. Ford answers in her new memoir, One Way Back, an account of everything before, during, and after her testimony.  DR. FORD BEING SWORN IN FOR HER TESTIMONY. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) I’ve known Dr. Ford for a few years, and thus have had a glimpse of the dual role she plays in mid-2020s America. To me—and I’m guessing to most of you—she’s a hero, someone who respects the integrity of this country’s highest offices so much that she sacrificed her own privacy, comfort, and security for them. To the radical right, though, she’s a target—so much so that death threats (“I want to see you three feet under, six feet under…” she says) have been a constant in her life, and she’s had to hire security to protect her family. After she appeared alongside Professor Anita Hill on The Meteor’s podcast Because of Anita two years ago, I got a call from a political operative hissing ominously, “She was told to keep her mouth shut.” I’m so happy she hasn’t. Her book is full of secrets and grief and Capitol Hill betrayals, but also sun and surf and heavy metal and the voice of the actual human behind that blue suit and raised right hand. We talked by phone two weeks after her book came out. Cindi Leive: You once told me that when you thought about writing a memoir about testifying, you thought of those kids’ books that can be read two ways—like you read it in one direction, and then turn it upside down and it’s a different story. What were those two ways that you thought about your own experience? Christine Blasey Ford: I think for the first two or three years post-testimony, I was torn between two books I could write: One would be why you must do this, with all the benefits [of coming forward about assault], and the other would be why you should never do this—about all the forces that are working against you, and all of the costs. For a long time, I was in a place of experiencing the retaliation and costs. That's why I chose not to write for so long. I knew that my first attempt would not be helpful to anyone. I think it was at the five-year mark that I began to feel that it was part of history, not part of current events. For me personally, it felt like it was enough in the rearview mirror that I could try to write something that honored that, yeah, this is life-changing, and there was a cost, but there's also a bunch of benefits that you don't really see while you're making the life changes. You and I met through a project focused on the more than 100,000 letters you got after you testified. And I remember you saying at first that you thought to yourself, Why are they writing me? Didn't they see the end of the movie? Meaning—that [Kavanaugh] was confirmed anyway… The first letters I read were [written] during the week of the paused investigation between the hearing and the vote, where [the FBI] was going to supposedly look into things a little deeper and do an extended background check. And those letters were really hopeful—and I felt bad for them considering how it ended [with no extensive investigation and a swift confirmation] because their hopes had been raised. And then, with the letters that came after, I just felt like, “I bet a lot of this mail is people who are feeling sorry for me.” I felt like I had missed a game-winning field goal or made an own goal in a game. [Laughs] But then, when I really looked through the letters…yes, people felt bad for me, but that's not really why they were writing. There was an amazing benefit happening for survivors watching the testimony: They wrote that they were inspired to make more clarified decisions about whether they wanted to come forward or not about their own assault or they wanted to share it with someone else. And I grapple with the fact that all of that came because I didn’t get my way that the hearing be kept private. It was televised, and even though it turned my life upside down, it benefited so many people. Wait, pause on that. You write that you didn’t actually realize it would be televised…you thought, “Maybe it'll be on C-Span, but who the hell watches C-Span?” [Laughs] I mean, I was walking down the hallway like, “Oh, it's a work day. No one's going to watch this. My friends are all really hard workers, and they have class and they have responsibilities. I'll catch them up on it when I get back.”  MILLIONS OF PEOPLE STOPPED TO WATCH DR. FORD'S TESTIMONY. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) Cut to me sobbing in front of my television in Brooklyn, along with practically every other woman in the country. Right. During my first break, I really realized the magnitude of people who were watching it because I looked at my phone and had more text messages than I had ever collectively received. “Good job!” “You're doing great!” [Laughs] I was like, “How do they know?” But if it had gone the way you had anticipated—like, one camera for the archives somewhere in a basement—then these 100,000 people wouldn't have been able to make meaning in their own lives…And that process of “meaning-making,” I learned from you, is an actual psychological phenomenon. I didn't understand it until my student at the time—Elizabeth Michael, who's now a doctor of psychology—explained it to me: People change their emotions and cognitions based on hearing or viewing someone else's experience. And I still was in a pretty rough patch in my life, so I wasn't really understanding…so she placed it in the context of television and movies. If you're watching a TV show and you're relating to some character, there's this small shift and identification and validation that's happening about your own thoughts and feelings. It starts to open up something in your own mind to think about. I'm wondering if you want to share a couple of the specific letters that moved you… All of the things that people made by hand or knitted—almost every day, I could wear an item of clothing, whether it's socks or gloves or a shirt or a scarf, or blankets, that people made. The simple thank you’s were beautiful in their own right—and then there were 10-page letters from people sharing what they had been through themselves. And also the offers! Like Otis from Texas, offering his truck for my family to move in, and people from all over the country saying, “You can come stay at our place. We have a cabin!” Like, who would open their door to a stranger? A lot of people, apparently. You’ve said that survivors in their 70s and 80s wrote you to say that they'd never talked about their own experiences before. What was it like to read those letters? I felt for them—and I felt like I could have easily been one of them and gone the rest of my life without really talking about this. I was on a different path once the Supreme Court was in play—I felt the value of that institution was more important than me. But those letters were really hard to read at the beginning. Then I adapted, and I feel like I have a new role, which is to be a recipient of those stories and to honor them. That’s also what happens to me any time I go out in public: People come up to me and want to tell me what happened to them. They’ve identified me as a safe person to speak to about their story. At first, that role was really overwhelming. And now, it's an honor. I'm honored to be that person.  DR. FORD SIGNING HER MEMOIR FOR A READER AT A GATHERING IN LOS ANGELES. (PHOTO BY MAYA JOAN) You and Anita Hill have a lot in common. And you talked about this when you were on the Because of Anita podcast two years ago, but part of your common experience is that in both of your cases, Congress failed to do a full investigation. And in your case, we later learned that the FBI had received 4,500 tips at the time of the hearing and shared them with the White House, at which point nothing happened. First of all, how have you let go of being, like, so damn angry about that? Because it's hard for me to even say those words aloud and not be pissed. That was really quite something. And the public didn't learn about [the failed investigation] until, like, two years after the testimony. But we sort of knew that right away. So it was, for me, bundled up in the grief immediately after the vote and the FBI not coming to interview me and my corroborators. And the logistics involved—where the executive branch is overseeing the FBI, so they're the ones deciding whether they want to look at those tips or not. The process was the most disappointing part about it. The outcome was less disappointing than the process. You write that you've moved into the phase of “radical acceptance,” but how would you like to see the process work for people who might come forward with information that should be heard in the future? I'm concerned that people won't come forward, given the process that they've witnessed. I think in the workplace and in other settings where you have H.R. and Title IX and other protections, it's maybe a little bit safer—a little bit more defined, at least. And in [most] workplaces, you're not allowed to retaliate. And so I think that, at minimum, we need to make sure that there's no retaliation against people for speaking up in a government setting. I think we're better than that. One of the most moving scenes in the book is during the summer of 2018 when you’re deciding how to come forward with what you know about [then-nominee Kavanaugh]. And your older kid is kind of intuiting what's happening but doesn't totally know…. He was noticing my behavior was a lot different at the beach that summer—I was talking to my friends excessively, and we were very serious and focused rather than relaxed. We were on a very tight timeline: The president had said that there was going to be a nominee selected in one week, and when Brett was on the shortlist that week, I was certainly just behaving differently. And kids pick up on these things, so he asked about it a few times. I kept it as simple as possible and said, “Someone that I know from high school who did something really bad to me is being considered for a really important job by the president, and I need to let him know.” When I first told him, he said, “Well, that's really nice.” He said it with a tad of confusion. And then, the next day, he came back to me and had thought about it, and he said he probably had an idea of what might have happened to me and that he was really sorry. What a loving response. That’s what you’d want to hear from anyone. He’s a great kid. I'm really lucky. And in my mind, it was like, “Oh, now I can go forward. He's okay with it.” What you went through in 2018 left such a long shadow over the last five years for you. And I'm curious: What are the moments where you feel like you can be liberated from thinking about all of that and just be you? Minimalism is now my new way of being, and I've just found that really helpful—to reduce the complexity of life, for now. That's where I feel like I can be myself: outside or in the ocean or just among a small group of friends. So not in the mosh pit at a Metallica concert? Oh, there, too. There too.  ABOUT CINDI LEIVECindi Leive is the co-founder of The Meteor, the former editor-in-chief of Glamour and Self, and the author or producer of best-selling books including Together We Rise. Her related listening recommendation: Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford, in conversation for the first time here.  ENJOY MORE OF THE METEOR Thanks for reading The Saturday Send. Got this from a friend? Sign up for your own copy and The Meteor’s flagship newsletter, sent on Tuesdays and Thursdays.     |
"I'm Here As Long As I Can Be"
"I'M HERE AS LONG AS I CAN BE"
Texas abortion provider Ghazaleh Moayedi, D.O., provides care for her neighbors—but she has to leave the state to do it
By Susan Rinkunas
After Ghazaleh Moayedi graduated college, she got a job working on the administrative side of Whole Woman’s Health, an abortion clinic in Austin, Texas. She respected the providers who chose the work—many of whom had witnessed illegal abortions before Roe v. Wade—but also thought the patients deserved doctors who looked like them. “I didn’t have the language for it at the time,” she says “But I noticed these doctors, older white men, didn’t reflect the people that we were taking care of. I knew that we needed new doctors.”
So, she went to med school and became an OB/GYN and complex family planning specialist in Dallas in 2018. Less than two years later, Texas lawmakers enacted abortion bans, first during the height of the pandemic, and then via the 2021 bounty hunter law known as Senate Bill 8. A few months later, Roe fell, and now Moayedi travels to Kansas to provide abortions—often to other Texans. I talked to her about what she’s doing to care for people after they return home, and her message for people living in Democratic-led states who think they’re safe from abortion bans.
Susan Rinkunas: When did you start traveling to provide abortion care?
Ghazaleh Moayedi: I started traveling to Oklahoma in 2020 [after] Gov. Greg Abbott shut down abortion care in our state under the guise of COVID restrictions. Abortion doctors traveling is common—but never from a state like Texas to somewhere else. That is the novel piece over the last few years. It’s always a doctor who lives on one of the coasts traveling to a restrictive state. That was a moment where I was like, ‘Oh, crap. In order to take care of Texans, I’m gonna have to start traveling.’ I started working at a couple of clinics there, in addition to the clinics I was working at in Dallas, and did that until Oklahoma shut down—it was about a month or so before Dobbs. Now, I am traveling to Kansas and working in a clinic there.
You’ve said it’s surreal to be a Texan leaving the state to care for other Texans leaving the state. Are you commiserating with patients? Do they know you’re from Texas?
I usually ask people when I make small talk when I’m doing an ultrasound. Like, “Where are you coming in from?” And people usually say Texas, then I ask where. “Oh, where in Dallas? I’m from Dallas, too, that’s why I’m asking.” I can just see people’s faces change. When I say, “Did you eat at that place? That place is really good,” I can see the light coming from people. It’s a moment for us both. We’re like, “Yeah, this is bullshit. It’s totally bullshit that we’re both here.” I had a patient who was like, “I wish you could have just done my abortion in the closet at this restaurant that we both knew.”
During a fall trip to Kansas, two of my patients were on the same flight I took. I’ve still been really processing that in and of itself, that we’re all on this flight together, how just stupid, pointless, [and] inhumane this is.
Are there certain patients you can’t stop thinking about?
I’ve had patients whose partners have lost their jobs because of the time they have to take to come and travel. There’s a ripple effect of harm that happens from people needing to travel to get abortions.
When someone does a medication abortion [as Dr. Moayedi sometimes does for Texas patients in Kansas], there are rare cases where it doesn’t work. If I’m seeing them in Texas for an ultrasound afterward but there’s still a continuing pregnancy, it’s like, “Shit, you’ve gotta go out of state again.” I can’t do anything for them, and it’s unconscionable. Before [Dobbs], someone would show up a week after their medication abortion, and I could be like, “Yep, everything looks good” or, “Nope, it didn’t work. Okay, I can do an aspiration right now for you.” Now, it’s a never-ending saga.
In other states [like Kansas], it’s “take your medication abortion, and then in five weeks, take a pregnancy test.” Some of these people are waiting five weeks to be able to fully confirm that their abortion is complete. Not only did they have probably several weeks of waiting to get an appointment, get out of state, then do their pills, then come back—but now they’re going to have to wait another month to know that it’s complete. This is like a two-month minimum cycle in someone’s life of just trying to end this pregnancy.
I’m definitely seeing people making that calculation [about medication abortion] in their mind of, “Wait, then I have to wait to know that it’s done?” They’re so stressed out—they had to do all this travel—that they’re like, “I’m just gonna do a procedure [instead] so I can leave here knowing.” You take good care of them, but states are taking people’s autonomy away, and they’re being forced to make decisions out of this insulting process.
And you’re providing ultrasounds in Texas now?
After a Dallas abortion clinic closed in spring 2023, I started a little ultrasound practice so that, at least for folks in my general area, people don’t have to wait five weeks [to find out if their pills worked]. They can get an ultrasound with a trusted provider who isn’t going to judge them and who has deep experience in abortion care.
People really need a community-based provider that they can turn to when they come back [from an out-of-state abortion], someone that they can trust and talk to. It sucks not being able to provide abortions [in Texas]. But it is this whole new chapter of my work. It feels really good to still be able to take care of people in the ways that I legally can.
I mean, folks are going to crisis pregnancy centers for ultrasounds before and after abortions because they’re free. People are able to schedule appointments with me via Pegasus Health Justice Center. I have a cash rate that’s $250, but I’m working with abortion funds, and pretty much everyone is able to get funded.
Have you thought about leaving Texas?
There isn’t such a thing as a safe state. We are one country, and these types of tactics are coming to every state. This mentality isn’t concentrated here [in Texas]. It exists in states without abortion restrictions as well. But people have this false belief that they are safe in these bubbles, and even within states like California and New York, the [anti-abortion] mentality exists. This extreme right, fascist, white-power movement exists everywhere, and abortion restrictions are an extension of that—they’re not separate from it.
After the Dobbs decision, I was feeling really low, even though we knew it was coming. It was like, “What the hell am I gonna do?” I considered moving and told my friends. I started looking at Zillow everywhere, like, “What’s New Jersey like? What’s Michigan like?” I interviewed for a few jobs in other states, and that was a couple of months of pouting and wondering what I was going to do. But I’m not going to escape from white supremacy anywhere in this country. I can move somewhere else and have a little bit more leeway in my work, but until when? We might have a president that is literally presidenting from jail.
Right, there could be a national abortion ban in January 2025.
Exactly. The reality is, I could pick up and move my whole family, and we could go somewhere “safe” for a period of time—and then what? I’m here as long as I can be. I think the idea that this is concentrated [in Texas] is really short-sighted. Everyone has a role to play in combating white supremacy and fascism within their own communities.
There’s a ripple effect of harm that happens from people needing to travel to get abortions.
What do you think of the talk online where people urge doctors to defy hospital orders and perform abortions in health emergencies?
It makes me incredibly annoyed and pissed off. That’s not how hospitals work. It’s not like I can just waltz into an operating room and say, “I am ready to do a surgery now.” Even when any hospital I worked at allowed it, there were still often multiple hoops I would have to jump through. Sometimes, even though it met all of the policy guidelines, there was someone who delayed the case because they needed to talk to someone who needed to talk to someone.
Doctors don’t own the hospital. We don’t actually direct anything in the hospital or schedule cases. There are multiple layers of people that have to approve things and even once it is approved, financially and policy-wise, you can still show up on that day and your anesthesiologist refuses, the nurse refuses, the tech refuses. I can’t do it alone in a hospital. I
could go to jail. I could lose my medical license, and then who am I going to help?
And rather than suggesting medical providers flout state laws, there are people organizing community networks for abortion pills, like Red State Access.
What pill networks are doing—that’s envisioning the future and being the future that we want and doing the work that needs to be done at the community level. That is how we change culture. That is how we address people’s needs in the moment, and we live out the future that we want. We’re saying we don’t need the courts to let us live the free lives that we can have. We actually have autonomy over ourselves.
That is, on all these micro levels and within communities, what people need to be doing: envisioning and living within the just future that we all deserve.
The Abortion Pill on Trial
FEATURED STORY
One of its key researchers says Mifepristone was tested “with three times or more rigor” than other drugs.
BY SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY
Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the first abortion case to come before the court since it overturned Roe v. Wade. The case, brought by the extremist group Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM), is challenging the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—specifically the FDA’s 2016-2021 policies, which expanded access to the safe and effective abortion drug mifepristone, initially approved in 2000 and now the most common abortion method across the country. AHM’s main argument? That the FDA did not adequately study mifepristone’s safety risks. (We explain it more in-depth here.)
The implications of this decision could be disastrous. As Fatima Goss Graves, President and CEO at the National Women’s Law Center, told us, “Banning mifepristone would upend abortion care not just in the conservative states that have been racing to ban it—but in all 50 states, no matter their laws.”
But the case itself is farfetched, argues Dr. Lisa Haddad, the medical director for the Population Council’s Center for Biomedical Research, the nonprofit research center that led clinical testing on mifepristone more than two decades ago. In fact, she points out, over 5 million people have successfully used it since then.
With the case now before the court, we spoke to Dr. Haddad and Dr. Beverly Winikoff, who worked at the Population Council for 25 years, where she was Program Director for Reproductive Health and Senior Medical Associate at the Council, which was the team that led clinical trials on mifepristone overseas. Now she serves as president of Gynuity Health Projects.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay: You worked with the organization that facilitated the FDA approval of mifepristone—what are you feeling right now?
Dr. Beverly Winikoff: I feel like I’m charging into the skirmish. I’m getting girded up. Can’t these people ever go away? But it is very, very encouraging to see how everyday people understand that this is a highly political, not a scientific discussion.
Dr. Lisa Haddad: I feel very frustrated and a little bit beaten up. And while I’m inspired by some of the voices speaking up in support of mifepristone, I see this trend in reducing access for women, and I’m scared that the science and the excellent evidence that supports this as a way to improve health outcomes will be overlooked and minimized. It’s a slippery slope.
BW: I think in the end, it’ll be okay because of the politics—the FDA is there to do a job, and it has always done it quite well in protecting the public. And this is an attack on the FDA. When you look at it that way, there are many people who are on our side, including big pharma—because if this happens, they have no [incentive] to be able to put money into new drugs because somebody could come up and decide that they don’t like that drug and they can [sue to] override the FDA, and that would be chaotic in the pharmaceutical world. It’s not just abortion; it’s every drug that gets approved. I think the politics of it is much bigger than abortion.
That’s a good point. Can you walk us through what we need to know about the FDA approval of mifepristone? Was it the standard approval process or was it a long, hard-fought win?
BW: It was cover-your-ass time the whole way along by the FDA. That was it. That was the theme. So, every single thing was done with three times or more rigor than any other drug I’ve ever heard of. But that’s okay because the drug is very good and very safe. We also got the FDA staff to be very excited about it. People were really very interested in making sure it got through.
When we did the final studies, we had several thousand people, and it performed very, very well. We were very attached to this product because it seemed safer and more effective than you could expect. So people were very excited about it because it had the potential to be a workaround for some of the political stuff of having to go to a clinic. You were doing it at home.
Dr. Haddad, can you speak to the significance of Tuesday’s case? Depending on the decision, what could the implication be?
LH: An increasing number of individuals are getting access to abortion only through medication abortion. I’m in Georgia, where we have a 6-week abortion ban. Finding out that you’re pregnant, making an appointment, getting off of work, getting a way to get there, and all of that before six weeks is hard. But if people make it to the clinic, medication abortion at that very, very early gestational age is a potentially good option for individuals, and the addition of mifepristone [generally used with misoprostol] enhances the likelihood of success. Also, without mifepristone, the barriers to access are huge. It’ll make it even harder for more individuals to obtain care.
And what could this case mean for misoprostol?
BW: Well, one of the things that mifepristone does is soften the cervix. So that means that whatever’s coming out doesn’t have as hard a time. And there are a lot of pain fibers in the cervix, so it could be more painful to just use misoprostol. But you can do it for most people. It will work, but it’s not maybe as pleasant.
LH: An abortion with mifepristone is gentler on the body, it gives the person a little bit more control, and it’s more predictable in terms of how it’s going to go.
BW: What saves the day for some of these other drugs is that they have other uses. So methotrexate is also abortifacient, but nobody’s trying to take that off the market. Nor misoprostol, actually. [Methotrexate is used for cancer while misoprostol can be used to treat ulcers and to induce labor] And so I think one of the things is maybe to get drugs that have dual purposes.
LH: And there are opportunities for that. Mifepristone does have utility for other indications. There’s excellent evidence that it’s great for fibroids and that it can be used for contraception. There is evidence, and it’s used commonly as emergency contraception in many countries. It’s just not approved in the U.S., and so I wonder whether or not that would enhance its security.
BW: Yeah, somebody should put it in for approval.
LH: We’re actually trying to garner support to do that right now, Beverly. But again, the evidence in the [case] is ridiculous when you break it down. It’s challenging the ability of scientists to make a decision, but not on all issues, just an issue that bothers [the plaintiffs] morally. But it’s not based on science. It’s frustrating to see because just the fact that we’ve gotten this far—I mean, it shouldn’t have a foot to stand on, and yet it is at the Supreme Court.
BW: I think it’s a terrible thing for individuals—not just people wanting abortion, people who want to use drugs for anything.
LH: And even, I mean right now, the standard of care shows that the mifepristone regimen works better for miscarriage management. This focus on something that really shouldn’t even be questioned just highlights the [message] that women are not trusted, women need to suffer, and that doctors and scientists can’t be trusted. Also, on top of what Beverly said, I just want to highlight that it’s not just the FDA that says [mifepristone] is safe. All of the different medical agencies like ACOG and the Society of Maternal-Fetal Medicine, say that mifepristone is incredibly safe with very few adverse events. We know the risks are incredibly low, less than 0.3% of any sort of serious, major adverse events. The risk of death is almost non-existent, whereas if you compare that to forcing somebody to continue with a pregnancy, we know that those risks are.
Over 5 million people have used mifepristone for either medication abortion or miscarriage management. This is not something that is not well evaluated.
As of right now, medication abortion is still available. Learn more here.
