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Dear Reader,
As of 7:20 p.m. ET, after writing and deleting and rewriting this letter about a hundred times, I finally had a solid, albeit lukewarm, draft. But then I got off a post-election commiseration Zoom call with my writing group—a.k.a. four of the kindest, funniest, smartest women/non-binary people you could be lucky enough to meet—and realized I deserve better than that. We all do.
So here’s the real story behind “Post-Dobbs.”
When I was nineteen, I had this fantasy that I was going to marry a man, move into a big house somewhere in the countryside, and have three-to-five kids. That might sound inane now, but at the time I was back to living in my childhood home after being unexpectedly uprooted from the city where I was supposed to be starting my adult life. COVID-19 was a brand new existential threat, I was isolated from most of my friends and family, and—wouldn’t you know it—Trump was president. The future was uncertain, unstable. All I wanted was to be safe. Hence this maternal fantasy—after all, what’s more stable than a nuclear family?
What a joke.
But my imaginary three-to-five kids offered more than safety. They offered hope. The belief that there could be a brighter future even in the face of such terrible odds.1 They inspired me to take care of myself, go to therapy, unlearn my bad habits, etc., etc., all so that I could be a better mother to them. I couldn’t imagine a more challenging, more rewarding, or more important job than being someone’s mom.
And now, in a post-Dobbs, post- AND pre-Trump world, I can’t imagine a job more dangerous.
After Dobbs, my baby fever broke. It’s not hard for me to understand why. As abortion bans began to ruin and/or end the lives of women and girls across the country, it became immediately clear how dangerous it was to be pregnant in post-Roe America—to even be able to become pregnant in post-Roe America. I’m not sharing the statistics. I’m not writing the names. You know them already. By this point, I figure you either give a shit or you don’t.
In early October, my friend and I attended an abortion rights discussion at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn led by Jessica Valenti and Renee Bracey Sherman. What I heard that evening inspired me to write “Post-Dobbs,” finally putting into words an idea that that had been percolating in my head for ages: abortion bans as captivity, and the refusal to have children under such conditions.
Jessica Valenti is a long-time independent feminist journalist and Substacker. Her newsletter, Abortion, Every Day, demystifies and destigmatizes abortion by delivering timely updates and analyses on the state of reproductive rights in the U.S. In fact, stop reading this and go read what she wrote today. God knows she’s a lot more coherent than I am right now.
In her recently published book, Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win, Valenti writes,
“In the anti-abortion imagination, the most noble thing a pregnant woman can do is die so that a fetus can live. But it’s more than that. To the politicians pushing anti-choice laws, women dying isn’t collateral damage—it’s just our job.
It’s enshrined right there in abortion bans. They believe that if we were real mothers and real women, we’d give up anything for pregnancy: our education, our finances, our safety, our health, and even our lives.”2
That’s it. That’s the thing that I can’t stop thinking about. That’s what I’m trying to get at by way of some fun eel facts. For all their talk of loving mothers and protecting babies, the anti-abortion movement has made it unsafe to be a mother. They have made it unsafe to have children. They have made it unsafe to be pregnant, whether you want to be or not.
The fantasy of children has been taken from me. My imaginary three-to-five kids have been ripped from my arms. Because I am terrified by the idea of giving birth in a country that sees me not as a person, but as an empty vessel to deliver future generations. Or worse, as a sacrifice to be slaughtered for the sake of future generations. Well, fuck that future. I am alive right now. I matter right now. So I will live for myself. I will live for my writing group. I will live for the work of people like Valenti and Bracey Sherman.3 I will live for my dear friend back in Colorado: a mentor, a mother, and the first person who made me smile this morning. Heck, I’ll live for my cats if I have to. It’s all part of the tapestry that is my life. My life. My body. Mine. How dare you try to take it from me!4
I know that abortion rights aren’t the only thing Americans have to worry about. And even if they were, it’s not all bad news—both of my home states, along with five others, voted to enshrine abortion access in the constitution. Even so, I feel the walls closing in. I feel more and more like a caged animal. Trapped. Voiceless. Less than. So, in “Post-Dobbs,” I offer up a brave new fantasy for a brave new world. A fantasy of pleasure. Of privacy. Of shock and delight. Of complete transformation, skin to scales to whatever camouflage-slash-armor we need next. It’s a salty fantasy to be sure—and hopefully, one they’ll never see coming.
Thanks for reading.5
With love as deep as the Sargasso,
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and/or
The climate crisis, institutionalized racism, various wars, etc. etc.
Jessica Valenti, “They’re Not Stopping with Our Bodies,” Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win (New York, NY: Crown of Penguin Random House), 149.
I have focused more on Valenti in this letter only because I haven’t yet started Bracey Sherman’s book Liberating Abortion, which she wrote with Regina Mahone. But I’m going to go ahead and preemptively recommend it anyway, because hearing her speak on the subject of abortion was so inspiring.
That’s a wee Tiffany Aching reference for any Terry Pratchett fans out there.
I did not proofread this. If you see any grammatical/spelling errors, no you didn’t! I wrote this on my laptop with a broken L key at the end of the worst day in recent memory! I have no idea if this makes sense! Give me a break!