How can I forget how many real lives were distressed, damaged, and altered irrevocably over the past three years?
This week's Supreme Court decision overturning abortion restrictions in Texas is the strongest victory for abortion rights since Roe v. Wade, because it claws out the eyes of the kinds of laws that have been dismantling abortion access for decades. In Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, the Court could not have been more clear in its acknowledgment and censure of Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) laws for exactly what they are — laws engineered to restrict access to abortion.
I have been deeply invested in the fight for reproductive justice for the past 12 years, and this is without doubt the sweetest moment of vindication and triumph I can remember. The state of Texas created a deliberate and grossly undue burden on women seeking abortion, and the Court said so. When I heard the news, I was overwhelmed by joy, relief, and hope, emotions I have honestly never felt when thinking about abortion rights in Texas. What I and so many others have felt, for years and years, is embattled. Attacked, beset, targeted, disrespected, humiliated. Outnumbered. We have been in a prolonged state of grief, of dire straits, of no way out.
So perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised at how quickly joy turned into a rage I haven't let myself feel, fully, until now.
I don't want to feel the rage. I want to bask and exult. But how can I, when the Court only gave back what should never have been taken away? How can I forget how many real lives were distressed, damaged, and altered irrevocably while this law was argued and enjoined and reinstated and appealed, for three years? You can't wait three years to end a pregnancy. You can't wait much longer than three months before it starts to become prohibitively expensive for most people, and not long after that it becomes impossible. Legally or logistically. House Bill 2, the omnibus abortion bill that was challenged in this case, has been a nightmare, a dragon that scorched abortion access in Texas, closing more than half our clinics. How can I not be infuriated that the people affected most by those closures — the poor, the young, people of color, people who don't live near a major city — are people who were already least able to absorb any additional hardship? Now that the sham has been laid bare, how can I suppress my hatred of Texas's lawmakers, who want only to control women's bodies?
In 2004, I helped establish a grassroots organization that works to remove barriers to abortion access in North Texas, the Texas Equal Access Fund. The other founding activists and I were responding to what we saw as a crisis: There was no public assistance for a woman who wanted an abortion and couldn't pay for it. We could not have imagined how much worse the situation would become. What we thought of as a disastrous climate in need of immediate remedy now seems, by comparison, like a paradise of abortion access.
So it is the clarion verdict in this case that sets it all ablaze in me, again, as if for the first time: You make us fight for birth control? You make us fight for sex ed? You make us fight for Planned Parenthood? You make us fight for planned parenthood? You make us fight, grovel, and beg for safe, affordable, dignified, and in all other ways fully accessible abortion care?
The TEA Fund and Texas' other abortion funds — Lilith Fund, West Fund, Fund Texas Choice, Cicada Collective, Clinic Access Support Network, Stigma Relief Fund — have carried Texans through these past three years. They have never stopped figuring out how to help a woman get an abortion in Texas, answering the phone, answering the questions, giving rides, finding ways to raise money and awareness. They have never stopped calling out the stigma and resisting it. They are, most of them, volunteers. Our government — the people we elect and pay to safeguard and, ideally, increase the vitality of our communities — should protect abortion access as part of basic health care. But it doesn't. So instead, all these people who understand how essential abortion access is have maxed themselves out trying to make up for our government. But there are more than 5 million women of reproductive age in Texas, living within a geographical area of about 260,000 square miles. The need has not been met.
The shuttered clinics will not reopen tomorrow. And if they did, a lot of people don't even realize you can still get an abortion in Texas. It guts me to admit how much ground we've lost. "Today is a win for bodily autonomy in so far as the law is concerned," Nan Little Kirkpatrick, TEA Fund's executive director, told me after the decision, "but when is our material reality going to catch up?
Three years ago, I stood in the Capitol building in Austin with my husband and 12-year-old daughter, surrounded by hundreds of people there to support Senator Wendy Davis's filibuster of H.B. 2. We stomped the marble floors of a four-story granite building hard enough to feel it shake. We chanted "Kill the bill!" so loudly for so long that we helped disrupt the possibility of a vote before midnight. In the aftermath, it wasn't clear if the Republican leadership would concede that a legitimate vote had not been taken, and ultimately, they pushed the bill through in a second special session a few weeks later. But that night, as we pulled into our driveway at 4 a.m., the first thing my daughter said when she woke up was "Did we win?"
So I can finally say, "Yes, we won." I just wish I could tell her it's for real, for good, for all time. I wish I could tell her no one can take it away, and I wish we couldn't imagine why anyone would ever want to.
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Fuente: www.cosmopolitan.com
