The setting could not have been more incongruous. Inside a tony home decor store on Martha’s Vineyard, where soothing blues and beiges make one think of ocean breezes and cool martinis, the president of the National Institute of Reproductive Health was talking about the gritty reality facing women in the post Roe world. Before Andrea Miller’s talk, women of all ages milled around outside, dressed in stylish summer shifts, drinking Rose wine and nibbling on goat cheese and crackers. But inside Miller got right down to business. “The situation is horrible and it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” she said. And then she told the story of one woman, who had just found out that the baby she was carrying was dead at 15 weeks and she needed to abort it for her own well-being. But this woman lives in Florida, which had a ban on pregnancies after 15 weeks. So the independent clinic she went to flew her up to a hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, where the cut-off was 16 weeks and they began the two-day procedure, first enlarging her cervix so the fetus could be removed without harming her. But as she recovered from that procedure and was waiting for the next day when the fetus could be removed, a federal appeals court lifted a court injunction against Georgia’s ban on abortions and the hospital told her, sorry, we can’t finish the abortion. Miller’s organization had worked with the clinic to come up with creative solutions for just this kind of nightmare, and that evening, the woman, still in her hospital gown, was flown to a hospital in New Jersey, which has no ban on abortions, and where doctors were able to safely finish the procedure and remove the dead fetus from her womb.
When Andrea Miller told this story you could have heard a pin drop. I don’t know if this was what the affluent crowd expected to hear but Miller was past pulling punches. “The reason we’re in this situation is because we allowed ourselves to feel shame about having an abortion and we didn’t talk about our own experiences,” Miller said. “One in five women in this country have an abortion and the rate is going up. We should not be self-censoring ourselves any longer.”
She is so right. In my memoir, Brassy Broad: How one journalist helped pave the way to #MeToo, I wrote about how I was able to prevent a pregnancy by taking the morning after pill after being raped my junior year abroad in England. But the first time I actually wrote about having an abortion in my 20s was when the Supreme Court draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was leaked this spring. As I wrote in my blog, easy access to a legal abortion in Miami saved me from having an unwanted child, and it was a decision I have never regretted.
“But now, a few far-right justices, who never should have been appointed to the Supreme Court in the first place, are going to take that basic human right away from a younger generation of women who deserve the same right to choose how they live their lives as I had.”
So what do we do now? We support organizations like the National Institute of Reproductive Health, which are working on the state level to circumvent abortion bans and help women who live in the 12 states that have so far prohibited all abortions get the health care they so desperately need. I applaud the Edgartown store, Salte, and its sister store, Slate, for sponsoring Miller’s talk, and I sincerely hope that NIRH nets some robust donations from the well-heeled crowd at this event. But that’s not enough. As Miller said, we all need to call our elected representatives, on the state and federal level, repeatedly to let them know we are furious at the overturning of Roe v. Wade and we expect them to do something to safeguard the right of access to abortion on the state and federal level. We should let them know that we vote and we are not going away. We need to volunteer our services and our money to change this deplorable state of affairs, and we need to turn out in droves in November and make sure that Republicans who appointed the anti-women Supreme Court majority in the first place do not take either the House or the Senate in the mid-term elections. If that happens, she said, we could be looking at a national ban on abortions that outlaws them in every state of the nation.
As Miller noted, we have to be fiercer, louder and more cunning than the antiabortionists who brought us to this disastrous place in history. Drinking Rose on a gorgeous summer night and listening to an abortion rights advocate talk turkey should just be the beginning, not the end, of our activism.
This blog is also posted on medium.com.
