Another Abortion Provider Targeted
 February 4, 2025 Greetings, Meteor readers, We want to kick off this Black History Month by shouting out our favorite Black-led, independent newsroom, Capital B News. One of the most important things to remember about Black history is that it isn’t just the past—it’s happening right now. So check them out! We already know you love newsletters, so it’s a perfect fit. In today’s newsletter, abortion telemedicine faces another major test, and Rebecca Carroll speaks with author Renée Watson about how we can all work through loss. Xoxo, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONThe fight over telemedicine: Margaret Carpenter, M.D., is once again in the crosshairs of anti-abortion lawmakers. In December of last year, the New York-based doctor was sued by the state of Texas for mailing abortion pills to a patient who lived there. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton brought a civil suit against Dr. Carpenter, arguing that she broke the law both by violating the state’s abortion ban and by practicing medicine in Texas without a license. But because Dr. Carpenter is based in New York, she had some protections under that state’s “shield law.” The Texas suit, advocates argue, was intended to attack shield laws—and now, a second attack has emerged as well. Last Friday, Dr. Carpenter was indicted in Louisiana for allegedly mailing abortion pills to a resident of the state, violating Louisiana’s abortion ban. Reportedly, the pills were sent to a minor whose mother was also indicted for her role in acquiring them. Complicating the case is the matter of which state’s law supersedes the other. New York Governor Kathy Hochul has already said she will not comply with any requests from Louisiana for the extradition of doctors, and just yesterday, she signed legislation strengthening protections for abortion medication prescribers. So who will prevail? “This might be an issue that ends up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court,” one legal expert told Reuters. And if that does happen, advocates worry that the current right-leaning court could end up limiting telemedicine in ways that go beyond abortion access. Meantime, two things are clear: First, abortion pills (and the telemedicine used to prescribe them) are widely used; over five million people have taken mifepristone in the last 20 years, and curtailing the method’s availability would even further limit pregnant people’s healthcare options. Second, medication abortion is safe. As one of the original researchers who worked on mifepristone told The Meteor’s Samhita Mukhopadhyay last year, “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.” AND:
 PROTESTERS IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Quick Meteor recommendation: For those of you who’d like to call your representatives (about the things you read about here, or any other issue) but feel overwhelmed or don’t know what to say, may I suggest 5calls.org? It’s a site that not only provides lawmakers’ numbers but also gives you a customizable script for each issue that can help distill anger into actionable demands. I used it yesterday when I was pissed about Elon Musk’s government takeover, but didn’t quite know what to ask for. 5Calls nicely filled in the gaps.  Three Questions About…Loss COURTESY OF RENÉE WATSON For more than a decade, award-winning author Renée Watson has written beloved young adult novels that capture the emotionally complex narratives of Black girls in America, including the New York Times bestseller Pieces of Me, and Ways to Make Sunshine. While her target audience is Black youth, the themes in her books are universal, and she has plenty of adult fans (including me). In All the Blues in the Sky, out today, the main character Sage loses her best friend on her 13th birthday, and readers go along with her as she navigates grief, fear, and loss. I sat down with Watson to talk about those things in the context of our socio-political landscape—and also to hear what her second mother, the late poet Nikki Giovanni, taught her about love. Rebecca Carroll: The book is about the personal grief of a young person, but for so many of us right now, it is a poignant time to be writing and talking about grief. When you wrote the book, did you imagine that it might reach an audience that is grappling with grief on such a broad generational scale? Renée Watson: Yes and no. I wrote the book shortly after we were out of quarantine, and people were getting back to their everyday lives. I thought about the loss, not just of people, but of our way of life and all the transitions that young people had to endure and go through—to not have their graduations or go to prom, to watch their parents be stressed. No one was talking to our young people about grief and how to move past that. But then our neighborhood community, our nation [went through] the Black Lives Matter movement, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor. And I feel like we still need to process all of that. But of course life is life, and so more things have happened. I’m glad that [the book] is timely, but it also makes me sad that it’s so timely, and that there’s just more and more grief on top of grief. Speaking of Black Lives Matter, in some ways I feel like Black folks are uniquely poised as a people to experience and process grief. Do you agree, and if so, do you think there is value to that? I do. One of the reasons why I wanted to write this book was because I am trying to encourage young Black girls to take up space and find their voices and be bold and brave, but I also want them to be okay with being quiet and being sad and sitting in that. I do think that we as a people have had to endure so much that we are familiar with grief. It is as familiar as a coat you always wear, or an old pair of shoes. It fits in a way that could make us angry, but I also think there’s something that brings peace about knowing, “I have survived other things, and I will survive this.” I think we also understand joy, and we understand that you can be going through the worst things and not let those things drown you—that you can still have happiness and love and laughter. I think of how our people would sing and dance through the worst atrocities and how even in these times now, my personal loss[es] that I’ve gone through in the last few years [her mother, several friends, and her “second mother” Nikki Giovanni], how my friends and my sisters have just come around me to love on me and hold me and have meals together and pray together and laugh and cry. There’s an emphasis in the book on the importance of practicing self-care, which Black folks have done collectively forever. Do you think we will continue to publicly practice self-care at a time when there’s real danger in being visibly vulnerable? I think it’s important to keep doing the practices inwardly. It doesn’t have to be outward things like posting [on social media] about self-care as a thing we do. But what are your everyday practices of taking care of self? How did our mothers and grandmothers do that? How did they show us in these really small, practical ways that they loved us and how do women especially come together and heal each other? By feeding us and asking us how we were doing, and leaving the night light on. I think about my mother and some of my aunts and all that they went through, and how they sat on the front porch and talked, and gave each other advice and listened and pushed each other to be their best selves, and to make some hard decisions about leaving that man, or getting new skills to get the job. … When my mother died, [poet and writer] Nikki [Giovanni] called me every day for the first 30 days. Every single day. She showed me that love is about what we do, not what we say. She taught me how to show up for my people.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
