“I know you spoke about Roe v. Wade being overturned at the last Q&A. But now that it has actually happened, how will it impact people with uteruses?”
But I will expand this to anyone who – so the overturning of Roe v. Wade affects everybody because even if you are not a person who can get pregnant or who may need an abortion at some point, the overturning of Roe v. Wade is a movement towards the reduction of bodily autonomy for everybody.
It is a way that there is a movement towards authoritarianism and towards a policing of bodies and how people treat their own bodies.
To be frank, as a transperson who has been screaming about the ways that a bunch of current laws against transpeople are about attacks on bodily autonomy, for me, seeing everybody gets super upset about Roe v. Wade is nice in some ways and also, deeply upsetting in others because again, for months, years, trans folks have been saying to cis people like, “Hey, maybe you should take a look at this because all these laws against transpeople are probably the first step towards the making laws against other ways of people asserting their bodily autonomy.
And now that it has finally happened and we were right like we didn’t want to be right but here we are.
So I think there is a way in which this is a really important moment for all of us to think about how authoritarianism and fascism is rising in the United States right now.
There was a thing I read.
I think it’s a fairly famous quote about the thing about fascism is that it starts out slow and then it moves very fast.
And if we look at all of the rulings that were released in the last couple of weeks from the Supreme Court, it is huge swings towards authoritarianism.
It is swings towards allowing the court to essentially say that the EPA cannot police air pollution levels so the regulatory state is being undone as we watch.
Movements against bodily autonomy through Roe v. Wade, movements against your ability to prove your own innocence in the criminal justice system, there is just – movements against tribal autonomy, there are all kinds of things happening right now that are step stones towards the ever-growing fascism in this country and that is – this is an emergency.
For people who can get pregnant, the overturning of Roe v. Wade creates a really big problem because a lot of states are now trying to enact laws saying that if you are pregnant, you are not allowed to leave the state to get an abortion.
And while that is absolutely unconstitutional, it actually doesn’t matter until it hits the Supreme Court.
They can still put you in jail.
The thing about a lot of these laws is that it doesn’t actually matter if a law itself is unconstitutional.
They can still put you in jail and arrest you and charge you for it until it makes its way through all of the court systems.
And even if a certain court stays the law or shuts it down, they can still do things in other ways.
If we look at the way that the Texas government started hunting down parents of trans kids to charge them with child abuse, they didn’t even pass a law.
They just issued a memo and told everyone to start doing it.
So when we look at how these kinds of rulings work and how they affect people, it is not just the ruling and what is in the law at that time, it is also about the way that it shows people who want to move towards authoritarianism and towards fascism that basically they have a green light to continue policing and imprisoning people and persecuting them because even if it does get appealed up to the highest court, probably it’s going to be fine.
They are going to be all right.
In addition, Clarence Thomas’ statement in support of the ruling explicitly said that they should be overturning Lawrence v. Kansas which was what allowed – which was what overturned sodomy laws.
Obergefell, which was gay marriage, and also what was it?
Casey?
Casey, which was birth control.
So Griswold?
Either Griswold or Casey, which is birth control.
So this is not just one thing.
If you are someone who wants to know what to do about the overturn of Roe v. Wade, please support abortion funds.
The best thing that you can do is support abortion funds.
And I don’t mean send them one big donation now.
The best thing you can do is set up a small recurring monthly donation to as many abortion funds as you can, particularly those in more embattled states or those that border states that have worst laws about abortion because a small recurring monthly donation allows them to set up budgets that they can then use to train staff, hire staff, get people travel, the things that they need to do.
Getting a huge influx of donations right after Roe v. Wade is overturned is a lot of times actually more harmful to a lot of these organizations because many of them don’t have enough staff and infrastructure to deal with that huge influx of money and it’s one pot that they run out of and don’t get replenished.
So the best thing you can do is set up small monthly donations to an abortion fund or contact your own local abortion fund.
Start volunteering with them.
There are a lot of people especially White folks who right now are trying to figure out how they can like champion this thing and like start a movement.
And what I have to tell you all is that like this is not the time for our White saviorism.
This is a time for us to join organizations that already exist and to learn from them and go in at the bottom and stay at the bottom while we learn and figure stuff out.
You do not need to reinvent the wheel.
The people who work at abortion funds and other reproductive justice advocacy groups have been expecting this ruling for a while.
They have known it was coming.
They already have systems set up in place to deal with these problems and these issues.
So, go work for them.
I think a lot of us especially those of us who are from more dominant groups are used to thinking of ourselves as the main character and want to be the CEO of whatever the movement is that we are joining.
But we are not.
We are interns.
We are new to this.
We are babies.
We don’t know what the fuck we are doing.
So like remember that.
Don’t go in expecting to be like the grand amazing leader who is going to have the movie about them Sunday.
You’re not the star here.
You’re the intern.
You do the copies.
You get the coffee.
You file the paperwork.
That’s your job, OK?
If you want to help, you have to be willing to do the grunt work because unless you’ve been doing this work for a long time, you don’t know how to do it.
So all of us who want to help out with this, swallow your pride, join in at the bottom, make recurring monthly donations to abortion funds, these are best ways that we can help folks right now.
If you are someone who can get pregnant, talk to your doctor about what options are available to you.
I have an IUD.
I like having an IUD.
IUDs don’t work well for some people.
If you have a doctor who is friendly, who can support you in getting a hysterectomy and a hysterectomy is something you want, maybe look towards that.
There are a lot of ways to address your own level of risk.
There are also, if you are someone who needs an abortion, there are websites through which you can get abortion pills mailed to your home.
We are no longer in the age of like you need to use a coat hanger.
That stuff is not the truth anymore.
You can get abortion pills mailed to your home.
If you are going to do that, I highly, highly recommend that you use DuckDuckGo for your browser because it doesn’t track any of your stuff so it’s not going to keep any of your data to be sold.
Be careful about how you pay for things.
Be careful about where you talk about plans about abortion or supporting abortion orgs.
Anything that you use that could be tracked by a larger entity could be sold to law enforcement.
So preference towards things like Signal or ProtonMail that are not tracked versus things like Google, Facebook, Twitter, all of those things are highly tracked.
And if you start talking about being someone who is going to get an abortion or support an abortion, that gives the police reason to investigate you and make your life hell.
So practice good OpSec.
There are a lot of guides online about practicing good OpSec.
And then also remember, unless you’ve been doing this work for a long time, you don’t know what you’re doing.
Start at the bottom.
Help from the bottom.
What we need right now is a whole lot of worker bees.
We don’t need a bunch of queens.
I mean except for like queens who are like gay queens because we are fabulous.
