Evening, Meteor readers,

Tonight is the big showdown between vice presidential candidates J.D. keep-women-in-the-kitchen Vance and Tim I-support-trans-youth Walz. (What long middle names these guys have!) It’s sure to be an exciting war of words—and we can’t wait.

Speaking of, we are 34 days away from the election. Today, in partnership with several incredible outlets and organizations like Teen Vogue, Feminist, Betches, and more, we have helped launch a new voting initiative: Get Ready With Us (#GRWU).  The goal behind GRWU is to make sure women and LGBTQ+ voters have everything they need to hit the polls on election day. Voting early? We can help. Not sure if you’re registered at the correct address? We got you. Don’t remember where your polling place is? Babe, no worries. We’ll hold your hand through it all. The only thing you need to think about is what you’ll be wearing and whether or not it will clash with your I Voted sticker or the outfit of the friend you are dragging with you to the polls (I’m going with a dramatic all-black motif to mark the death of the Trump Reich.) Click the image below to learn more!

Getting ready,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

• Since we’re on the topic of voting, the state of Alabama recently removed the voting rights of hundreds of citizens while trying to target a group of “non-citizen voters,” a false-term used to demonize undocumented people and cast doubt on upcoming election results. (To be VERY clear, even the GOP knows that over the last 20 years, fewer than 100 non-citizens even attempted to vote in an American election.)

• Yesterday, a judge in Georgia struck down that state’s abortion ban on the grounds that it violated the Georgia constitution. The presiding judge wrote, “Liberty in Georgia includes….the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.” Put it on a t-shirt and send me 100,000.

• Dockworkers across the East Coast went on strike today, and that spells big trouble for consumers. This strike means that all of the items that ship overseas and come in through ports between Maine and Texas will not be received and processed—costing the American economy $5 billion (WITH A B) every day. But keep in mind: The dockworkers are rightfully fighting for pay increases and protections against automation. Friendly reminder that during this time, it is harmful to others to resource horde and buy more than what you need.

• Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing the city of Austin over its abortion fund. This year, the city allocated $40,000 of its budget to a fund that would reimburse patients who had to travel out of state for an abortion. (Increasing numbers of patients have to do so, especially since the state supreme court ruled against women who nearly died trying to get lifesaving abortion care.) The suit is demanding a temporary restraining order be placed on the fund while the case plays out in court but a judge has yet to grant the request. You can support me in my lifelong mission to keep Ken Paxton irate 24/7 by donating to Texas abortion funds here.

• Today, Claudia Sheinbaum took office as Mexico’s first woman president. During her campaign, Sheinbaum promised to launch an anti-femicide prosecutor’s office to respond to Mexico’s high rates of violence against women. Sheinbaum is also a climate scientist, but farmers in the region who have begun a resistance movement against transnational mega-farms are worried she won’t have enough power to protect local water sources which these companies have contaminated.

Three Questions About…Abortion

Authors Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone on “liberating” the history of this very common procedure

Despite everything we know about abortion, myths persist. So when our brilliant podcast collaborators Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone, announced that they were writing a book about the past, present, and future of abortion, it only made sense to slap that pre-order button faster than you can say dilation and curettage.

And today, that book is finally in our clutches! So we asked the authors three questions about how they set the record straight on the suppressed history of abortion in America.

Both of you are bona fide abortion experts, and one would assume you know pretty much everything there is to know about the subject. Was there anything you learned while researching the book that surprised you? Or anything that felt new to you? 

Renee Bracey Sherman: Ha! Well, I don’t know if we know everything, but we have really learned a lot….What surprised me most was how openly abortion pills were marketed in newspapers in the 1800s. We scoured digitized newspapers throughout the 1800s and found tons of ads for tansy and pennyroyal pills, “female beans,” “preventative powders,” “Portuguese female pills,” and Madam Restell’s powders and pills…They were available over the counter and via mail to anyone who wanted them. Today, abortion organizations constantly have to fight censorship from billboard companies [and] social media sites just to be able to post about abortion pills. And the idea of abortion pills being available over the counter is treated like a pipedream. But when we look back in history, we actually already did it. What is considered visionary was commonplace 200 years ago.

Regina Mahone: ​​One of my favorite conversations was with Dr. Jamila Perritt, the president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Health. We talked with Dr. Perritt about how OB-GYNs don’t talk to their patients about sex. And it’s so true. I can’t remember a single conversation with any of the many gynos I’ve had over the years where the conversation was about my sex life unrelated to a medical diagnosis. None of my doctors—and I’ve had two kids, a miscarriage, and an abortion—have asked, “How is your sex life going?” Of course, so much of that is rooted in this idea that we shouldn’t be having sex for pleasure, so we shouldn’t talk about sex or sexual health in a way that would encourage people engaging in those acts to learn more about their bodies to ensure they are developing healthy and satisfying experiences…That, to me, was super interesting and depressing but also kind of liberating. Because now, I will be asking my doctors about sex and their response will tell me whether I will continue being their patient.

One thing I feel I learned from this book is the degree to which Black women have historically led the charge in reproductive rights. But when I look at how the issue is positioned today, we mainly find white women and their stories at the center. How did we get from the reality to the perception of it sort of belonging to white women? 

RBS: This is the exact reason we wrote the book. We wanted to write ourselves back into history. We wanted to correct the record to show that we have been here, doing this, and we can do this for whatever is next. When I had my abortion, I saw abortion being debated on the news a lot, but it was always between white people, usually an older white woman and a white priest. I didn’t see myself as part of the conversation. But when I started learning about reproductive justice, a framework created by Black women to center the experiences of people of color and the intersections of our identities, I realized there was a whole world out there that I wasn’t being told. When we wrote the book, we found tons of brilliant Black and Brown people and their traditions who had been overlooked in favor of elevating the same few white heroines. This is an incorrect telling of history, but also it makes people feel like they don’t belong. In order to build a reproductive justice future and liberate abortion, we have to ensure everyone feels welcome and sees themselves reflected.

RM: Black women have been having and providing abortions since people have been getting pregnant, but our leadership on this issue was decimated in the late 19th century as a result of the American Medical Association’s racist crusade against abortion. AMA doctors labeled midwives, many of whom were Black and immigrant women during this period, barbaric and quacks and successfully pushed them out of the reproductive and maternal health fields in order for white male doctors at the AMA to “professionalize” the OB-GYN field—in other words, to make the field inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t a white man. Medical professionals were also experimenting on Black and Brown communities, which made folks rightfully skeptical of seeking any care. Even so, Black people have continued to provide abortions and advocate for deregulation, but their work is often erased from abortion histories or included as footnotes rather than being centered in the storytelling. There have been disparities in representation, funding, and systemic-level discrimination that have given people of color disadvantages when it comes to the optics of the movement.

The subtitle of the book includes the phrase  “reclaiming our history.” What do you mean by that?

RM: For far too long our stories have been overlooked or erased. Think about Jane, the network of volunteers working as part of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union before Roe to ensure women had access to safe abortion procedures. Abortion rights activists have been told the story of Jane over and over. But rarely do we hear about the Black women who organized and volunteered, or from their perspective, why they felt it was important to be part of the abortion rights movement. The problem with not telling that history is it suggests that Black people weren’t part of the movement for abortion liberation. Worse, it makes us—Black people—think that only white women have done this advocacy when Black women have been doing it. …We deserve to feel connected to the advocates who came before us.

RBS: This was one of the most important aspects of our book and our main motivation for writing it. When he wrote the Dobbs decision, Justice Alito wrote that abortion was not part of the tradition of this country, but that is a bald-faced lie. He rewrote history into the Supreme Court record to fit his own agenda. Abortion is deeply woven into this country’s history—the entire world’s. What’s the old adage? You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you come from. We wanted to put all of the history that we could find into one place together so we could see the connections between our peoples over thousands of years. It was so clear that abortion is ours. It has always been ours. It’s time we reclaim that—and now we have the stories and facts to prove it.

FOLLOW THE METEOR

Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? Subscribe using their share code or sign up for your own copy, sent Tuesdays and Thursdays.

[email protected]