After the midterms (and still post-Dobbs) (11/09/22)

Yesterday many people across the country cast ballots for the midterm elections–in hope, with skepticism, in despair. You have heard it before, but it bears repeating (again, again, and again): voting alone cannot liberate abortion, nor bring us true reproductive justice. Election days hold valuable tension for those who can’t, for those who won’t, for those who do vote. Some things change immediately (often for the worse) via electoral politics, and some things never have (and never will). This election cycle brought undeniable threat to the immediate material reality of our helpline callers, and we thank everyone who exhausted avenues for this specific form of civic engagement over the last few weeks–especially if/when it felt particularly difficult and joyless. We are a multi-tendency organization comprising a small staff, a working Board, and around fifty active volunteers across North and South Carolina. We know abortion access (which has already been woefully inadequate and unfairly burdened since the earliest days of Roe) is not divisible from other struggles. We remain grateful to and humble students of the model of reproductive justice and the different approaches to bending that arc given to us by Sister Song. 

We know many voters had abortion on their minds: both those who remember the waves of pain that accompanied the Dobbs decision, and those who felt emboldened by the erosion of what meager abortion provisions remained of Roe pre-2022. We see the latter group of folks everyday: testifying inside of courts, outside of our clinics, screaming at and intimidating patients; and getting loud on social media. But we know when it comes down to the will of the people, legal restrictions on abortion are deeply unpopular. Kansas showed us this in August. Vermont, Michigan, and California affirmed this last night.

This morning, we woke in North Carolina to see that Governor Roy Cooper’s veto remains intact by a literal hair: a single seat. This morning, we woke in South Carolina to find lawmakers once again debating a total abortion ban. EVERYONE deserves care where they live. We deserve better than being asked to vote in panic every two years for bare-minimum access. The government cannot grant you bodily autonomy. It is yours for the taking. 

So what comes next? This is a question we field frequently–in every election cycle, yes, but also after the Dobbs leak, the final blow of the decision in June, and each time a state legislature brings a deeply harmful bill to the floor. We have been operating on Crisis Mode for a long time (we fielded almost 50 calls to our helpline on Monday, November 7th, alone), but as we have grown in staff and in community, we have been able to offer more in the way of curated action items, cross-pollination with our beloved community partners, and begin tentatively planning our future beyond the day ahead of us. We’re excited to begin offering a consolidated version of some of our long-standing projects (our Twitter-based Weekly Roundup, our weekly policy newsletter, our flying-by-the-seat-of-our-pants Instagram updates re: events) into one hub, to be housed on our website. We’re tentatively calling it the Interim Project. As in: how can you keep fighting to make abortion care accessible for those who want it in the interim; between elections, between months, between seasons, between states (both emotional and literal) between hope and apprehension…the list goes on. We remain grateful to be in this struggle with you. We remain humbled by the strength of our callers, and honored to support folks seeking abortion care in North and South Carolina.

Onward.