Excerpt: Really? Stories? That’s our strategy for moving forward in this hellscape?
In her most recent piece for New York magazine, Rebecca Traister writes about the importance of story-telling in the battle over abortion. Her friend Zoe had to fly out of the state for a third trimester abortion when she discovered that even a liberal state like New York would not allow the procedure: “As someone who always used to call myself pro-choice, and who now calls myself pro-abortion, I had somehow never heard the story of someone who needed a later abortion.”
Traister’s piece is a call for more abortion stories to highlight a range of reasons and experiences. She quotes Renee Bracey Sherman, the founder of We Testify, a group “dedicated to increasing the spectrum of abortion storytellers in the public sphere”: “Every time I saw abortion argued about on television, it was always some Catholic bishop. None of them were talking about race. They were talking about nothing that was relevant to 19-year-old me.” The argument here is that the more varied stories people hear about abortions and who gets them and why, the more the public, that amorphous entity we like to imagine as a sane and sensible body of people, will support the right to access abortion.1Edited July 29 2024, to correct Sherman’s name, previously recorded as Bracey Sherman.
Really? Stories? That’s our strategy for moving forward in this hellscape?
Abortion stories have in fact circulated in all kinds of ways and for as long as there have been births: within and outside families, in schoolyards and college campuses, inside homes and in the living rooms of kind neighbours and a million other places, long before abortion became “legal” with Roe. Traister’s social circle has had the privilege of being ignorant about abortion access: Zoe was shocked at the restriction she faced, but this has been the reality for so many, and for a long time. How were Traister and her friends able to remain so clueless? Because they simply didn’t have to care.
There have been plenty of stories about all this among people, for a long time: of missing work or losing jobs because of the waiting period restrictions, being unable to get to a clinic in time because it was too far away, not being able to keep a pregnancy or an abortion a secret from an abusive partner, and so on. In the moderately funny Hulu film Plan B (2021), a suburban teenager in South Dakota is denied the morning after pill by a local pharmacist who invokes the state’s “conscience clause.” Desperate and with an eye on the clock, she embarks on a road trip with her friend to find the pill and the two encounter every possible obstacle, including a shuttered Planned Parenthood clinic. Even five years ago, a film with this theme — the sheer inaccessiblity of abortion services — would have been hard to find but here we are, with something on Hulu, not exactly a streamer known for its cutting edge. So where, exactly, is there a dearth of stories? Traister (now quickly making up for lost time with a slew of pieces on abortion) and her pals have not known about such stories because they’ve been able to live in their comfortable cocoons and because these are not the stories they cared to hear. Not knowing is a choice.
Which is just one of the many reasons why storytelling about abortion is a worthless, pointless exercise, one that causes added pain and pressure for the most vulnerable: ultimately, the people who are forced to vomit out their stories, often retelling and reliving experiences they’d prefer to forget, are the ones who have had the worst time. Who will care to hear a happy and perfectly legitimate story about abortion: “I had one, and it freed up my life.” Instead, we’re about to create a voracious, nearly pornographic market for abortion stories as we lean forward, ghoulishly probing for more: Tell me, dearie, how bad did it get? Was it rape? Incest? Some horrible and terrible condition in the foetus? You can tell me everything.
Why have we ceded political power to an enterprise as suspect and broken and troubling as storytelling? When did we decide that the only way to get our rights to abortion access was to make people sympathise with us? Why do we need to access the sympathy and tears of strangers in order to get a medical procedure that could mean the difference between a life spent in penury and hardship and a life of freedom to move towards our goals and dreams?
Here is my abortion story: I have never had an abortion. Here is the crucial part of my story: I have never needed and will never need to have an abortion to know that abortions should always be free, on demand, and without apology. As I lumber with my cane towards my two hundred and fiftieth year on this planet, I know it’s highly unlikely that I will ever need one, even if someone’s seed should slip out and drift upwards into my extremely resistant and pissed off womb. And yet, surprise! I will always, always continue to agitate for everyone’s right to access abortions.
Here’s what else you should know about me: I have never been put to death and yet, bafflingly, I have always been against the death penalty and against prisons. I have never been in a warzone and yet, I loathe wars and the military industrial complex. I have never found myself in the middle of an angry sea in a boat escaping from tyranny and watching my child die of malnutrition and yet, I believe that refugees and asylees should be treated with dignity and respect without having to beg for food and put themselves in danger.
I could go on — and on, and on, and on — but you get my point. If you need to hear someone’s sad story, if you need to shed tears for them, if they have to metaphorically or otherwise fall on their bellies and crawl abjectly towards you weeping all the while to convince you that their plight is worth considering: you are a garbage human being. Those who think that stories are what we need on the abortion front are those who have given up the fight for abortion and, instead, wantonly and selfishly and greedily capitalise on the very people who suffer the most from a lack of access.
If Zoe had thought about abortion as a political and economic matter, she would have known about and agitated against the kind of restriction that sent her hurtling out of state to get the procedure. If we all of thought about abortion not as a private matter of choice and autonomy but about economics, we wouldn’t be where we are, desperately scrounging up more sad stroies, more sad women to push onto the stages at events filled with celebrities screaming, to the sound of thunderous applause, about “a woman’s right to choose.” And yet, here we are. Suddenly, the pages of liberal outlets like the New Yorker, New York, and the New York Times (do we see a theme here?) are filling up with op-eds about the reality of abortion access, a reality that millions of women have faced for decades but never had time to recount as stories because they had to get what they could and then continue with their exhausted lives in the vast hinterlands outside New York.
Storytelling has been in vogue for a very long time. The American political landscape is strewn with abject failures in various arenas precisely because so many groups have focused on storytelling at the cost of any real effective change. If I asked you if you knew of any significant policy change brought about in immigration law by all these immigration “activists,” you wouldn’t be able to answer because there is no such thing (and, no, DACA is not law, it’s a DOA presidential executive order). But if I asked you if you knew some stories about sad and hardworking immigrants just trying to stay in this country, you would be able to rattle off any number of stories. Stories aren’t just useless: they serve as a numbing anaesthetic, letting us forget what the issues are in favour of a politics of meaningless affect. We feel, we feel, oh, we feel so very much, poor, sad us, and we substitute feelings for action.
We don’t need to “change minds” about abortion or “reach across the aisle” or “meet people where they’re at” or whatever other ludicrous, useless clichés we might conjure up to convince ourselves that change happens through story-telling. What we need is to start to say, in effect: Enough.
Enough.
We have spread our legs, stripped ourselves naked and wept copiously for decades and decades, and it has brought us nothing in this country, nothing at all: Roe was dead from its first day because it was based on the idea of privacy. Over the fifty years since then, that legal rationale has allowed for the erosion of the right to access to all but the most well-off, those who can afford private procedures. The burden has not been a lack of access to abortion: the burden has been Roe itself which swung over our heads like an axe held aloft by a threadbare string. Roe allowed groups like Planned Parenthood to fatten themselves on our collective fear: Imagine what will happen if Roe disappears! Give us money, or else. And now they tell us: See? It happened and it’s so terrible, give us more of your money.
Let me repeat: the problem has not been a lack of abortion access, the problem has always been Roe. Stories only distract us from that devastating political reality. What is the point of knowing the story of, say, why a a nineteen-year-old Black woman had to have an abortion or why a ten-year-old had to have an abortion or why a twelve-year-old Black girl had to have an abortion if we don’t have a system, an ideological framework that considers and disseminates the fact that abortion is not a private story between a person and their doctor but part of a larger system of economic inequality and exploitation?
Do we really and stupidly believe that more stories will change the minds of those who are against letting people have abortions? Whose minds are we trying to change and, more importantly, why?
In her piece, Traister writes of how, upon becoming pregnant, she felt the need to reach out to family members about their abortion stories and found plenty, from her grandmother, her mother, her aunts: “I was told about fear, risk, logistics; sadness and gratitude; husbands, bad boyfriends, kids; money, sex, and zero guilt.” Well, that’s nice and surely very enlightening for Traister but an abortion story is not a recipe for Aunt Lynda’s Best Peach Pie to be handed down across generations, and it’s not a touching story to be shared in the glow of the fireplace on a snowy Christmas morning. It’s an economic and political issue. Denying abortion to anyone is about denying them the ability to continue with their lives unhampered by children they may not want, for any reason at all, and that includes third trimester abortions because someone changes their mind. If we on the left can’t make that clear without resorting to more storytelling, we will continue to lose on this front.
Enough. No more stories.
For more on storytelling, see “The Politics Of Storytelling.”
For more on the failure of the Left and its lack of commitment to its own ideology, see “A Manifesto.”
For more on feminism and abortion, see:
“What Should We Do With Kansas?“
“Bourgeois Feminist Feminism.”
“Abortive Reasoning,” with Eugenia Williamson
“March As Feminists, Not As Women.”
“Bitches of Capitalism: My Speech on International Working Women’s Day, March 8.”
For more on my views on anything, see this whole website (browsing the Categories is a good way to start).
Age updated from ninety-five to two hundred and fifty, March 11, 2024
Image: Yasmin Nair, “Plan B,” July 2022.
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