This Is Our Fight to Win
Dear Leading Ladies,
We are not living in a democracy,” reproductive rights activist and women’s study professor Carrie Baker declared at the end of the Leading Ladies “Life After Roe v. Wade” Zoom event last Wednesday. “If you were ever going to get out and vote, this is the time,” she emphasized. Her strong statements capped an hour-and-a-half of some terrifying but elucidating information shared by Baker and the other panelists.
If you missed the Zoom event, we were privileged to have Prof. Carrie Baker from Smith College, Kristie Monast of HealthQ, and Sara Stanley of HAWC share their expertise about the repercussions we can expect in the coming months and years if women’s reproductive rights continue to be attacked. You can watch the recording here.
Indeed, our heads are still spinning from the information and insights these experts offered. While we can’t recap everything that was said, we do want to highlight some of what was new and disturbing to us, in the hope that it will prompt thought, discussion, and action amongst us all.
As Sara said at the beginning, the purpose of the evening was not to assuage or comfort, but rather to inform us about new logistic and legal realities. As we know, the Supreme Court’s June 24th decision overturning Roe v. Wade means that the legality of abortion is now up to individual states rather than being a federal matter. The prediction is that abortion will soon be illegal in half the states, affecting some 33 million women. We know that half the women currently seeking abortions live in poverty. We know that half already have children. The repercussions of forcing women to have children they cannot adequately care for are obvious.
What may be less apparent are the problems pregnant women face in traveling to states where abortions are legal. For example, before the ban, a woman in Alabama had to travel approximately 26 miles to undergo an abortion; now the closest facility is 327 miles away. A woman in Louisiana formerly had to travel 37 miles; she now has to go 666 miles — one way.
Add to this waiting period, required ultrasounds, childcare needs, and the barriers can become insurmountable. Even in New England, where abortion is legal, there are areas where there are no facilities and women have to drive for hours. For women needing post first trimester terminations, the problem is compounded. Luckily, the ability for physicians to diagnose and prescribe via telehealth, which became popular during the pandemic, has been legally extended. This helps overcome travel obstacles and allows pregnant women to receive medication abortions (Plan C) for little money and a short trip to the pharmacy. As we discussed in an earlier letter, Plan C is very affordable, considered safer than Tylenol, and can be dispensed legally by telemedicine in states where abortion is legal.
However, getting a Place C prescription in a state where abortion is illegal is fraught with difficulty. Anti-abortion groups are trying to make it illegal while pro-choice groups are trying to make it available. In Europe, according to Carrie, where Plan C is more readily available, 54% of abortions are by medication, cutting down on the obstacles of expense and travel and the need for later abortions. She believes the lack of access to Plan C in the US is by design so that women are forced to wait until it is too late to have abortions.
What’s a crisis health center?
The proliferation of “crisis health centers,”; which look like abortion clinics but are really anti-abortion facilities, is a frightening reality. Heavily funded by anti-abortion groups, they are committed to deceiving pregnant women seeking counsel and support. In Massachusetts, in fact, there are 29 of these crisis centers compared to 20 actual abortion clinics. Staff dress in white coats with stethoscopes around their necks impersonating medical professionals. They reportedly give false approximations of gestation time, use phony ultrasounds, and refer to fetuses as babies. The erroneous information about gestation time is intended to lead patients to believe they are either too far along to terminate their pregnancies or they have more time to decide than they really do. Because the staff is not medically trained, they are not constrained by HIPAA medical privacy laws and can share information patients may provide — including their parents’ contact names and numbers!
Another issue new to us concerns medical training. If abortion is illegal in half the states, what does training around abortion, contraception, sexual identity ( LGBTQ+), and sexually transmitted infections, look like in medical, nursing and para-professional programs in those states? For doctors, nurse practitioners, physician’s assistants, nurses, nursing assistants, medical technicians, and nurse’s aides? Are they being taught accurate and sensitive information? Will they deliver care that can support patients in making healthy decisions? Can they provide the best care for all their patients if their training is incomplete and biased?
So what’s coming?
The speakers agreed that post-Roe v. Wade won’t look like pre-Roe v. Wade. The internet and telemedicine have changed the landscape. As people communicate across boundaries, barriers and obstacles, they will devise workarounds that did not exist pre-Roe v. Wade. By the same token, many people remain uninformed. They receive their news from unreliable sources and may believe that abortion is illegal or unavailable to them when, in fact, it is. Our relatively new interconnectedness needs oversight so that accurate information outweighs pure fabrication, circulated to purposely disenfranchise and mislead.
In Massachusetts, a public awareness campaign has been launched to combat the misinformation problem, but it will remain an ongoing challenge.
Other victims of the new reality are women who choose to take their pregnancies to term. They are at great risk should they encounter difficulties such as miscarriage or in utero death later in their pregnancies. Laws against abortion may now prevent any intervention for the woman’s health so that serious suffering and even death may occur.
Make no mistake, the speakers emphasized, the current issue is not just about abortion access. It is about contraceptive care and gender affirming health care. It is about maintaining control over the rights and power of women in our society. The disparities between the haves and the have-nots will become larger, as Black and brown women and their children are disproportionately affected by health care inequities. The voices of the disenfranchised will not be heard unless the tide changes.
While Lindsay Graham claims he wants the Federal government to get out of the business of legislating about abortion, he is calling for a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks. He and others like him are committed to granting personhood to fetuses, giving them constitutional rights as “unborn human beings.”
What can we do?
The November elections are absolutely key, Carrie emphasized. We need to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act and in order to do that, the pro-Choice movement needs to pick up two seats in the Senate. The candidates to consider supporting are in Ohio (Tim Ryan), Wisconsin (Mandela Barnes), Florida (Val Demings), North Carolina (Cheri Lynn Beasley), and Pennsylvania (John Fetterman). In the House, pro-Choice candidates in Georgia, Arizona, New Hampshire, and Nevada need our support.
Kristie made an important point about supporting the people delivering what she called “stigmatized health care.” As she put it, “We in abortion care are stigmatized and attacked in ways the public doesn't recognize. The internet makes us public.”
This is not a complete synopsis of the “Life After Roe v. Wade”; event, but we wanted to give you information that was new to us, and perhaps new to you, too. Our speakers all shared some resources that you can access here also.
Raise your voices, open your pocketbooks, cast your votes. If we want a democracy, we need to fight for it. Thank you, Carrie, Kristie, and Sara, for motivating us to stand shoulder to shoulder with you.
Therese (she, her)
Judy (she, her)
Didi (she, her)
Mackenzie (she, her)
Leading Ladies Executive Team
Leadingladiesvote.org
ladies@leadingladiesvote.org
Click here for some Life After Roe v. Wade Resources