So more and more of what we’re doing these days is helping someone fund their plane ride to D.C., or their $5,000 appointment that their insurance won’t pay for, or their flight home. Again, I’m in a very geographically privileged place when it comes to actual laws and restrictions, but there’s not a lot of access and there’s especially not a lot of access for folks who need later abortions. At my clinic, there’s a kind of numb acceptance of, All right, they’re going to keep coming after us, keep coming after us, keep coming after us, and we’re just going to keep showing up. I feel like many people just kind of assume that they’re going get in trouble, or that they’re doing what they have to do but it’s not going to necessarily be safe, which is a really big bummer, because generally, everything they’re doing is totally legal and safe and within their rights. There’s kind of been this numbness as we shift protocols, and patients ask if their appointments are going to be illegal and stuff like that.
Then I just honestly tweeted that I wanted write this book, and my incredible agent sent me a DM on Twitter and was like, “Hey, I would love to see a proposal.” We have to figure out how to spread that language around so that everyone has access to it and no one’s feeling like, oh, well, I just won’t talk about it because it’s too hard and complicated and will make people too uncomfortable. Everyone I was helping was, like, constantly apologizing and feeling like they were a burden or they were making me uncomfortable or they were embarrassed, and I was just like, Okay, we gotta cut this shit out.
Everyone I was supporting through their abortions felt so weird and alone and ashamed, because none of these things were being talked about in a normalizing way.
The conversations I’m having are usually not with folks who are in the repro movement or keeping up with the research and the weirdly hyper-specific laws and medical protocols. Hannah Matthews: I’ve worked for a clinic since 2017, but as I was working more and more outside of the clinic and doing more community abortion care, rather than clinic-based care, I was like, man, there are a lot of really cool online resource, but I feel like most of the books that are being published are very kind of factual, reported books-which are amazing and incredible, and we need them so much-but I want a book that feels more like a friend talking to me.
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