Darling Meteor readers,

Recently I saw someone post, it’s getting really exhausting living through a historic event every six minutes. Never has that been more relatable than this week when an anonymous hero leaked a draft of the Supreme Court’s opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—the case that could overturn Roe v. Wade.

I want to say that this has thrown us into a state of crisis but that would imply that we’ve not been enduring crises for the last few years. So I’ll call it what it is: another problem that no one wanted.

I’m angry. You’re angry. Entire pockets of the country are angry. And outside of donating to abortion funds and primal screaming in the streets (yes to both), it feels like there is nothing we can do to stop SCOTUS from rolling us toward a dangerous and uncertain future for people who want to have control over their own bodies.

So it was only suitable that for this newsletter, author and Meteor editor-at-large Rebecca Carroll asked journalist Rebecca Traister the question on everyone’s mind. Where do we go from here?

We go forward.

In quiet rage,

Shannon Melero

(P.S. We know what day it is. May the fourth be with you all. We’re gonna need it!)

WTF

DR. AYANA ELIZABETH JOHNSON IN NEW YORK CITY (PHOTO BY GINNY SUSS)

• There’s a leak in this boat: Here’s the quick and dirty on the week’s big story: SCOTUS has confirmed that there will be an investigation into who leaked the draft opinion, a breach which Chief Justice John Roberts called a “betrayal.” Sir, Theresa Giudice spreading rumors about her friends’ marriages is a betrayal. Someone warning the country that we’re about to lose our reproductive rights? That’s God’s work. Give the leaker a medal.

• Rights Watch: If you’re not freaking out about this leak because you don’t have feelings about abortion (first of all, how?) then here’s something else to freak out about: birth control and same-sex marriages aren’t safe either. In one of the week’s best roundups, VICE interviewed several legal experts on what the imminent Roe rollback could mean for other basic rights, and the responses are bleak. One professor told the outlet, “If your rights have not been understood as automatic for the last 200 years, or if your rights are not explicitly stated in the Constitution, this court is basically saying you do not have those rights.”

AND OTHER THINGS GOING ON: 

• I didn’t really get the Met Gala theme this year but it’s nice to take a mental break and just look at some nice gowns. Blake Lively understood the assignment.

• An Apple store in Maryland is trying to unionize. Hell yeah!

• The U.S. has finally acknowledged that Brittney Griner is being wrongfully detained in Russia.

• It’s time for Joe Biden to decide once and for all if he’s the president of just the Catholics or if he’s the president of the entire United States. (More on that from Rebecca Traister below.)

• “Meet the Reddit ‘Aunties’ covertly helping people get abortions”

• California is looking to add abortion protection to its state constitution.

ABORTION AT RISK

“We Are Living In Minority Rule” 

Rebecca Traister on the future of abortion rights and what Democrats need to do now.

BY REBECCA CARROLL

THANK GOD FOR ABORTION! (PHOTO BY GINNY SUSS) 

You mad? I am. So when Politico published the leaked draft opinion on Monday, indicating that the Supreme Court was primed to overturn Roe V. Wade, rather than beat my head against the wall, I reached out to political writer and author Rebecca Traister, whose concise and provocative columns have covered this terrain and predicted this outcome for decades. Her 2019 bestselling book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, documents the historical arc of women’s rage and since there’s never been a better time for that—we zoomed about it.

Rebecca Carroll: When the news broke last night about the SCOTUS leak, you tweeted: “Intellectually I am unsurprised, mentally knew this was coming, have been writing about it for years, understand Roe has been insufficient for millions, etc etc. And yet: my teeth have been chattering uncontrollably for an hour. Bodies/minds are so weird.”

I felt that too—can you say more?

Rebecca Traister: I certainly understood that night that this was coming. But there have been all these distinct moments that I remember knocking the breath out of me, each and every one of them, but in which it was abundantly clear that this was what was going to happen. Like when I read the headline that Anthony Kennedy was retiring, the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, the night that Justice Ginsburg died, the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett.

I was ready for the breath to be knocked out of me at the end of June [when the SCOTUS opinion is expected to be officially delivered]. I certainly was not ready for the text message I got Monday night at 8:40. My eldest daughter was like, “Mom, are you okay?” She tried to put a blanket over me. And it was a visceral, physiological reaction. I guess it was like a shock, a physical shock reaction.

Part of the shock is that this is happening now. We won the 2020 election largely because of the women’s vote and, specifically, women of color. And yet even with Democrats in power because of us, here we are. How do we reconcile that? Or do we reconcile that?

Well, I don’t think there’s a neat reconciliation that’s possible. I think we have to hold multiple things in our heads at one time. One is elections do matter, actually. And the other is that Democrats have to be better and fight far more forcefully. And this is a critique that I’ve had for a long time. I hear a lot of resistance to that: Like, this is not the Democrats’ fault, this is right-wing. And, absolutely, this is decades’ worth of right-wing strategizing to exacerbate gendered, racial, and class inequalities.

But this has been the right-wing for 40 years. And it’s also about Democrats who have not effectively fought that party. Roe is about to be overturned. Voting rights were gutted in 2013. Labor protections have been gutted and environmental protections have been gutted and there’s a lot more that’s on the table coming up.

So lots of these things can exist at the same time. It is absolutely crucial that we elect Democrats. Sure. Yes. It is also crucial that Democrats themselves get better at waging this battle.

IT’S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS (PHOTO BY GINNY SUSS)

I want to understand better for myself, for the folks around me, for all of us: What is a right? What is a human right if it can be so freely stripped?

We are talking about everything [fought for] by early abolitionists and suffrage movements through emancipation, through labor movements often spearheaded by immigrants—to the 19th amendment, through the Voting Rights Act, through the Civil Rights Act, through Griswold and Loving. These rights have been pulled from the guts and marrow of this system that was designed to impede them. And here is where I see a failure over the past generation or two: to understand that once those rights were extracted, that didn’t mean we just got to relax our grip on them.

Politically, in terms of our leadership, there have always been people on the ground, at the grassroots who have been talking about how easily these things could be stripped from us, and those people have been called hysterics. That’s something [U.S. Sen.] Ben Sasse said specifically about abortion during the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. He said, I’ve seen these hearings and people are always yelling hysterically about how abortion’s going to be overturned and it’s never happened. It’s all [accusations of] hysteria, but it’s also the tacit message coming from Democrats who over my lifetime have fought for a big tent and said, We shouldn’t have litmus tests on things like abortion and have repeatedly called those who talked about abortion as single-issue voters who were impeding a broader progressive project.

The people who understood the intensity that this battle required even after having won were written off as radical, infantile, or overdramatic. Reproductive justice advocates have been pointing out over decades that [using] the language of “choice” never worked as morally compelling. It’s the “choose your choice” feminism where any choice that a woman makes then becomes feminist, which is not the case.

What reproductive justice advocates were correctly pointing out always is that the right to abortion goes hand in hand with the right to competent, accessible, affordable, and high-quality healthcare for all people— [and] as we know, Black maternal mortality rates are through the roof in this country and healthcare more broadly is unavailable. It goes hand in hand with affordable housing, quality education, safer gun laws, and things that better enable people, not just to be able to choose to end pregnancies but also to have children and to be able to raise them safely and with some economic stability.

But I would also say that 70% of Americans don’t think abortion should be illegal. The reason the right did its genius moves of taking over the judiciary is because they cannot win on this issue legislatively. The Electoral College overriding the will of the majority of voters has produced the majority of Supreme Court justices right now who are deciding against a majority of Americans.  What we’re living in right now is minority rule.

CROWDS IN NEW YORK SHOUTING THEIR SUPPORT OF ABORTION IN THE STREET (PHOTO BY GINNY SUSS)

When we first got on the phone, you were listening to the clip of Elizabeth Warren fuming. Why is that video so important? Because there are a lot of ways that can also be dismissed.

Sure. There are a million ways it can be dismissed. Fuck those ways. That clip shows blood, it shows feeling, and it shows urgency. I feel like the president and the leaders of this party need to get out of bed the night that it happens and tell people who need care that they can go get their appointments tomorrow. To explain it, to treat it with a big siren emoji, to get on TV, to get on the internet—do what you have to do, speak to the people you claim you want to lead into battle.

At the end of the statement he released [Tuesday] morning was the idea that everybody can vote for us in November. Okay. Tell me why Joe? Tell me why. Because until that statement, he hadn’t said the word abortion. He did include the word abortion in his statement this morning. Congratulations. It was like four paragraphs down. I’m glad.

What I keep trying to wrap my head around is it’s so clear to me why abortion matters—but how do we keep a new generation caring?

What we have not done is successfully transmitted the stories of not just what life was like pre-Roe, but about the degree and difficulty of these fights. We tell very neat stories about how everything from the civil rights movement to the gay rights movement to the women’s movement landed us with these sort of cheerful endpoints. And we don’t linger on how long it took and we don’t linger on how hard it was and we don’t linger on how many people suffered and died during the course of these fights. And we do that because it’s human to want to put that stuff behind us and to say, Look, we’re moving forward.

People might not feel hopeful right now. Why should they? 

It’s hard to feel hopeful. I can’t point to something that’s being like, well, the great thing is X. Nope. No great things. Okay? None. Zero great things. However, I have to say that as tempting as it is to give into despair or hopelessness, it is crucial to remember, again, that this is why it’s important that we learn more and better about the generations that came before us. Let me tell you, generations of people with far fewer resources and living in spaces of far greater systemic violence and injustice, found a way to fight for a better world. And if we can’t because we’re bummed out, which we are, then we have a major problem. So it’s not a question of, is there a reason to feel hope? Damn fucking straight there is because if we don’t, we stop moving. And if we stop moving, then we permit the harm, and that’s not possible.

ONE MORE THING

If this week’s SCOTUS draft left you wondering, what now, then make sure to register for The Meteor’s virtual event on May 9th, 22 for ’22: Visions For a Feminist Future, presented in partnership with Gucci’s CHIME FOR CHANGE.

You’ll hear from Colombian human rights lawyer Paula Avilla-Guillen on the state of reproductive freedom and what comes next. You won’t want to miss it! Click here and make sure to reserve the best seat on your couch for an emotional and inspiring evening.

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